Core Post 2 -- Revelation and Flow

Throughout the readings this week there was a preoccupation with notions of space and visibility. Bolter and Grusin described the logic of immediacy as being defined by its transparency and charted a brief genealogy of Western modes of seeing and attendant notions of the “real,” while Stone thought through the cyberspace of early BBSs and VR as an imagined community and a “consensual [group] hallucination,” respectively. Even Gómez-Peña used the spatial metaphors of borders and barrios to think through the digital divide and how discourses of race and technology clash.

Whether you’re thinking of space architecturally, in terms of Albertian perspective, or even in terms of urban planning, it seems to me that space is created according to a dual-logic of revelation and flow. What I mean by revelation that is that in order for one space to be defined, some other space must be hidden, and thus the positive creation of a space is a process of obscuring and revealing. By flow I mean space can also be define as a horizon of possible flows of movement, whether that be of the eye in the case of the Albertian window, of bodies through an architectural space, or traffic through a city.

I doubt that these are new insights, but thinking of space as revelation to me is helpful because it calls attention to some of the assumptions that are commonly held about space, namely that that it is natural or “real” and that it is invisible in much the way that Bolter and Grusin conceptualize transparency—whether a wall, a street, an interface window, or the bounded frame of a painting, film, or television, their effect is to erase themselves “so that the user [or viewer, or resident] is no longer aware of confronting a medium, but instead stands in an immediate relationship to the contents of that medium” (24). While this transparency is never total in the sense that one is always subconsciously aware of the bounds of the medium, navigating a space requires that one—if only for a moment—accept the illusion and give in to the flows that it dictates. And thus, for that moment, the revelation becomes naturalized or real.

It was through this lens that I thought about Stone’s anecdote about the breakdown of the CommuniTree space brought on by the prepubescent hackers and trolls. The smooth functioning of the BBS required ever-increasing levels of control, or from another perspective, every-increasing sophistication of the “walls” that define its space. So the Gibsonian notion of “consensual hallucination” that defines cyberspace seems to me to adhere to the same rules and norms of meatspace (my favorite cyberpunk term for “the real”) and therefore cyberspace only reveals the consensual hallucination that defines all space but has become so naturalized as to be largely invisible. To me these observations are useful because they point to the political in that the have important implications for how (bio)power functions. Unfortunately I don’t have the space to work out those thoughts here.