<nettime> Virilio and Architecture

[Wim Nijenhuis <glocaal@worldonline.nl> via brian carroll]

(forwarded with author's permission- published in upfront magazine)

Dwelling in Cyberspace
Wim Nijenhuis
glocaal@worldonline.nl

In 1853 the American Matt F. Ward wrote in his travel journal:  The
fabulous beauties of England should be as fleeting as visions from a
dream. They are most attractive when we rush through them at forty miles
an hour. The route does not require any attention or meditative
contemplation.  Although the neighbouring objects seem to fly by as swift
as arrows, the faraway fields and trees do not withdraw themselves from
perception; they stay in sight long enough to leave a stable impression.
Everything is so quiet, so fresh, just like at home; there are hardly any
particular objects that catch the eye or divert the attention from the
fascinating whole. I dream myself through these soft beauties as if Iím
floating through the sky, quick as if Iím riding on a tornado. 

Still today, Wardís description of train travel covers our possibilities
to describe dwelling in cyberspace. Most of the images used derive from
religious discourse on heaven. At first there is the sense of being
displaced, of being disconnected from daily surroundings, which are now
offered to the gaze as a set of images. Then there is something like an
identification with the sight of an angel, and its ability to float. In
addition, there is a quality of detachment, not only in a spatial sense -
a physical distance between the spectator and the surroundings - but also
in the sense of a certain indifference that allows one to view an
undisturbed whole, to see the totality - a privilege theoretically
reserved for the eye of God. And finally, the entire quotation expresses a
tendency towards immateriality by means of the metaphors of the dream -
the floating, the silence and the freshness; it expresses that one can not
be touched, least of all by dirty things. Collectively these qualities of
existence - displacement, detachment, floating, the view of the whole, the
immateriality and the softness of the environment - could be described as
heavenly.

	This way to experience the train surfaced in the literature of the
nineteenth century in exaggerated form, but if we look at current
statements and films about cyberspace, like Lawnmower Man, where people
have to be installed in gyroscopes in order to simulate the free-floating
movements of their bodies, or at William Shatnerís Tekwar (1994), where we
see people floating through soft spaces at high speed, where many
appearances are so transparent that they allow a kind of hyperwholeness of
perception by means of superimposed images, and where the actors can step
through walls and are always burdened with the question: is the
environment an illusion or is it real? Then we witness that the dream of
immateriality increasingly becomes a technological possibility.  This
space-type completely opposes the traditional space of architecture and
urban design. For thousands of years, the space of the city has been based
on material construction; the house and the city constitute hard,
immobile, stable spaces, in which our material bodies move about.

To estimate the likelihood of a certain techno-social development, and its
influence upon the form of the city, we must investigate within which play
of power and within which value system it possibly could happen. So I will
step back in history in order to find a trend that can be extrapolated
into the future.

 In the past the form of the city has been determined by two major values,
both dependent upon military technological developments: safety and
wealth.  In the era of the fortified town that lasted until about 1800,
the city was essentially a territory - not in the sense that it was the
property of a community, but in the sense that it was a guarded field, a
spatial extension, surrounded by fortresses. This field was controlled and
defended by military power, but offered its inhabitants safety and
therefore the possibility of wealth. So the value and the seductive power
of the city derived from the security it offered, and its wealth was
generated by the passing flux of trade. The flux of traffic was the
excluded from the city.  This floating component of society had to be
controlled because it was seen as a carrier of violence. All economical
and military energy of the city therefore was concentrated at the
city-gate, the point of exchange with the floating environment which was
simultaneously a threat and a source of welfare. This dual character gave
the gate the quality of city-edge, where all types of marginality were
concentrated. 

	The properties of this city were the hardness of its materials,
the protection offered by its fortresses, and the exactitude of its
geometry.  By means of Euclidean geometry such a city could be represented
in maps and scale-models that were considered to be true representations
of its reality. These exact maps were used for the constitution of the
nations in the nineteenth century. Think of the land registry, that in a
juridical sense determines what is private and public property; think of
the definition of a territory in which a law is valid and all the
political and juridical institutions that depend upon the exactitude of
territorial representations. The representation in maps and its isomorphic
relation to a stable reality provided the citizen with secure means of
orientation, also in the sense of the clear distinction between the
important and the unimportant, the here and the there, the near and the
far.

	All these qualities of the city-field, with its well-arranged
parcels, were deconstructed, step by step, by the railroad - the so-called
first industrialisation of space and time during the nineteenth century.
The most significant change was in the perception of distance, due to the
influence of the accelerated speed of transport and its increased comfort.
No longer the dayís walk; no longer the fatigue of man and animal that
limited the journey; no longer the thunderous violence of horses dragging
coaches along bumpy roads, over hilly landscapes, causing tremendous
involvement in the act of travelling itself, as we can read in the
testimonies of Goethe, Ruskin, and Flaubert. 

	The train allowed the journey to continue day and night. It
introduced the comfort of travelling, of moving smoothly and steadily in
contrast to the bumpy galloping of horses. And because it moved over hard,
smooth rails that were placed on levelled ground, the train eliminated the
experience of the surface of the earth. As a result, as many
nineteenth-century authors noted, the train disconnected the passenger
from the environment. Ruskin felt so disconnected that he slept, or pulled
a blanket over himself, during the journey. This attitude expresses that
one experienced the journey as a kind of non-time, as an absence of
consciousness. The journey was a void between the points of departure and
arrival, an elimination of the space in-between. To the traveller, this
represented a short circuit in space, a direct connection between the
place of departure and the goal of the journey. Mentally this meant the
implosion of space. Points that were formerly far away from each other,
were suddenly lumped together in one overlapping juncture. 

	The first reaction to this new perception of distance was mental
retreat, like that of Ruskin. But a next generation developed a new
perspective. They looked further away, but in doing so they oriented
themselves on the whole, on the overview, rather than giving special
attention to details or particular objects. We could call this type of
view panoramic. In a literal sense this view also implied a growing
indifference of the spectator. 

	The perception in perspective, that was based on the depth of the
impression/representation, became a flattened-out orientation, a view of
the surface, as nineteenth-century panoramas. This flattened mode of
perception then was followed by the transient view. The totality was no
longer a matter of the scale of the perspective, but was the result of a
series of intervals viewed from the side window of the train through the
intermitting rhythm of the telegraph posts. This mode of perception
conditioned the public for the cinema to come, but it also inaugurated the
idea that the static representation of the surrounding world by means of
maps, paintings, drawings, and photographs did not correspond with
reality.  In the efforts to adapt the mode of representation to the
experience, the landscape and the city entered the realm of soft
representation. They were caught in an order of the quick change of
images. The environment became fluid and vague; it lost its static
character. The exact measures, sizes, and locations of nearby objects got
lost in the whirlings and turbulences of a speed that was intensively
experienced. 

	After the fortress had become obsolete due to the increased power
of the guns that could bombard a city by firing over the walls, it was the
attack not of the enemy, but of the train that caused the definitive
collapse of the fortified city-field. To be absolutely secure, defensive
systems had to be of enormous sizes and thus had become prohibitively
expensive. War moved over to the mobile strategies in the field, as did
Napoleon. And at the same time, the strategy for prosperity changed with
the rise of capitalism and the ideal of free trade. Even before the
invention of the railroad, the entire system that supported an economy of
the delay - toll-barriers, guilds, territorial rights, bad roads, flooded
lands, city-gates, and so on - was rapidly removed in favour of
measurements that would stimulate the free flow of goods, labour forces,
information, and productivity in general. So, prosperity no longer derived
from the power to delay flux, but from the power to stimulate it. 

	In this light, the city was no longer conceived as a territory, a
defendable field outside the flux of traffic, but as a kind of station
that had to give free way to traffic. The characteristics of the
well-designed place were exchanged for the concept of the system, or the
network. The city had become a set of dispersed points that had to be
connected. One oriented on the most important points and the quickest
connections between them. 

The city-network, or the city-system, is ruled by the calculation of
movement. Accurately speaking, the city became a space-time. Town
planning, from that moment on, was a split activity: on one hand it tried
to organise the network of traffic with its logistic dimensions, and on
the other hand it continuously raised the problem of the territory with
its geometric dimensions. 

	Baron Haussmanís plans for Paris, conceived and executed between
1853 and 1869, are exemplary of the way the traditional territory was
destroyed in favour of a dynamic network. His boulevards, which were cut
out of the existing building structure, can be seen as a continuation and
metamorphosis of the railway trajectory. Their rectilinearity mirrors the
railway trajectory; their width corresponds not only with traffic needs,
but also with the panoramic view; the uniformity of the faÁades
corresponds with the undifferentiated perception. On the boulevard, one
travelled not on foot, but, as we can read in the works of Šmile Zola,
mounted in a coach, in order to see and be seen. 

	On several levels the boulevard continued a process that in a more
general sense started with the train. It installed a relative
disconnection not only in the space, but also between the people of a
social totality.  This second type of disconnection can be demonstrated by
the relationship between a group of people sitting in a passing train and
the inhabitants of the village it passes through. For a moment the
passengers and the inhabitants share a place, but are they one social
group? This phenomenon of disconnection had all kinds of implications for
the social community of a city. In painting and in literature, the modern
phenomena of departure and separation became regular themes that were
described with a beautiful melancholic sentiment. The impressionists tried
to fade the images in the play of light and focused on the theme of
loneliness; the futurists tried to express the whirling and the vagueness,
the fading of reality in their paintings. In my opinion, the car and the
highway did not add much to this in an essential way. It was themes like
these - the boulevard, the station, the passing, the shrinking of space,
and the logistical organisation of movement - that concerned architects
like Sorio y Mata, the Russian Disurbanists, Mies van der Rohe, Le
Corbusier, and many others in their explorations of the cityís
transformation into a network-like totality. 

With electronics, the transmission speed of messages and images is
increased to lightspeed, and the characteristics I formerly described -
the disconnection from the everyday environment and the interconnection of
places - are no longer experienced by means of literary exaggeration, but
belong to the reality of everyday. High-speed communication tools like the
telegraph, the telephone, and the radio, had existed for some time, but
their influence on urban design was minimal because they did not intervene
in its specific domain: the visual representation of a place. This
intervention came about, however, with the introduction of television,
video, and the computer. 

	 I will concentrate on the medium of video. The train revealed a
culture of the short circuit, the connection, the sticking together of
places. It did not represent these phenomena, but produced them. In this
sense, the train can be seen as a revelation machine that made visible and
invisible that which was already present in the material world. It
revealed a broken morphology and an imploded space. The video is also a
revelation machine that reveals a mutual penetration, a fusion of one
place with another, and it does so in real time, which is the consequence
of the transmission of the image at the speed of light. 

	We can imagine the mutual penetration of spaces if we consider a
situation that has become a common daily reality: the placement of a
camera at the front door of a building that is connected to a monitor - a
television screen - somewhere inside. What happens here is the
metamorphosis of the traditional view of an environment. In that sense the
(surveillance) video replaces the window. Thanks to its transparency,
permitting the visual contiguity of inside and outside, the window offered
a direct view on the surroundings. Through the window we had contact with
the adjacent environment, and this fact has been of tremendous importance
for the architecture of houses and their positioning in the city. But does
the video operate by means of transparency? Does it offer a view on an
adjacent space? If we imagine two persons who have a conversation by means
of the video apparatus, they donít share the space, the spaces are not
even adjacent as is the case with the window; they only share the time -
the real time. Space has been divided because the video has been placed
in-between. This in-between is not transparent, but a machine which
converts the light reflections of a place into waves, sends these waves
through cables, or the air, and converts them again into a luminous image
of a place. For this system, the contiguity of spaces, the transparency of
the view, and the distance are theoretically of no importance. 

	The video adds to the light of day and the light of lamps, a new
kind of light that electronically shines upon a surface and makes this
surface reappear on another spot at an indiscriminate distance. In this
sense, the video inaugurates the indirect illumination of the environment. 
Contrary to television, video at first does not inform us about events, or
sequences of actions, but about places. It provides the spectator with the
immediate view of a place. Video does not represent space in the way a
map, or a drawing, or the theatre does, but shows its reality. It presents
a place. 

	The place of the spectator now is redefined. The video constitutes
immediately, and in an interactive way, a place and a time-space that has
nothing to do with traditional topography and the whole of geographical
and geometrical distances. By nature video installs a kind of
tele-topographic localisation, of which local television could be the
model.  Through the conversion of light into energy, video is an apparatus
that presents appearances of surfaces. The apparatus offers the
possibility to connect these appearances over more or less great distances
and to revert them. The connection and the reciprocity of the reception
and transmission that manifests itself on the screen of the recipient is
the expression of the mutation and the commutation of the distances, which
in their elasticity could be understood by means of topological geometry.
But because the images are transformed in energy in order to be
transmitted, we cannot describe this system as a kind of relativistic
perception, as I described in regards to the train. Perhaps we should
reserve for the geometry of the video the term: tele-topology. 

	The square, the theatre, and the cinema - the places of
performance and representation - have been replaced by the image of the
place.  Essentially the city has been defined as a unity of place. The
transmutation of places by the video replaces this classical unity of
place with the unity of time. Within this system, the size of the screens
is of no importance; neither are the dimensions of the objects. What we
view on the screen is a place at a distance, that before our eyes appears
as an illuminating energy. 

	Between a certain amount of perceptible surfaces, to which the
video reduces all space-surfaces, arises a new kind of centre, a new place
of staying, or dwelling, that we could name a tele-bridge. Thanks to this
tele-bridge, the environment changes into an opto-electronical
tele-reality, that consists of the tele-presence of places and for which
the real-time is the unifying concept. Distance is of no importance, the
difference between far and near canít be distinguished any more by means
of the system itself. To the experience of the tele-dweller the
video-surrounding is distanceless and global. By means of the manipulation
of the switch, one environment can be relieved by the other at random and
the value of the place is not dictated anymore by its situation within the
urban system, but by the duration, the amount of time people choose to
spend watching it. 

We see that the video redefines almost all of our classical terms and
concepts for describing and understanding the city. The opposition is so
strong that the nostalgic concepts of the city constitute an obstacle to
viewing and describing the reality of the video. Cyberspace will add to
this fluid geometry of the electronic environment the three-dimensional
experience and the possibility to mix it with numerically generated images
that exist nowhere in reality. Next it opens up the possibility to combine
cameras with vehicles to give us a fleeting glimpse of places, like that
which we can experience from cameras mounted on Formula One racing cars. 
The transparency of the transient view then merges with the appearance of
the video-image. For this kind of view - this combination of the
metamorphosis of the window and the windscreen of the car - I propose the
term: trans-apparent view. The transparent view will change dwelling in
travelling; it will create a new entity in which dwelling and travelling
are indistinguishably fused. When combined, the video and the computer can
produce an opto-electronical and trans-apparent environment that will be
global. This global environment will have its impact on our psychology and
our behaviour, it will probably cause re-evaluations of the everyday
environment that at least will become a relative phenomenon.  The telecity
will emerge when it suits the demands of safety and wealth. In Los
Angeles, when offices couldnít function because of earthquakes, companies
rapidly installed fragments of the tele-city in the form of tele-work. We
all know the role video plays in surveillance which is linked to safety,
and it is very likely that companies will try to commercialise the
networks, as is now the experience of internet and the digital-city
project in Amsterdam. 

	The city is not only a phenomenon whose geometries are
deconstructed by the electronic media; it is also a social and political
entity. The ideal form of the city in our culture has been long defined by
the ancient Greek polis. From Athens to Renaissance cities like Sienna and
Florence, existed the image of the city-state, the polis, with its
conjunction of a given territory, a given urban community, and a
democratic political representation. 

	In regard to the future of the territorially defined community, I
have already mentioned the processes of disconnection and fragmentation
that derived from the different time-zones installed by the train. It is
not difficult to see that the electronic media disconnect people from
their surroundings in an even more intense way, also in the social sense,
and absorb them into a placelessness and instantaneous community of
abstract communication. In many cases this will be experienced as a
liberation from the limits of the geographical accessibility, just as in
the past many people liberated themselves from the village by moving to
the city. 

	But most important is the change in the nature of politics. The
politics of the polis is concerned with the ground. This illustrates the
close relationship there has been between city-planning and government. We
could call this type of politics geo-politics. Its main object of concern
is the cityís public space, its communal element, where its community can
express itself. This domain constitutes the stage for public life with its
spectacles and its spectators. But every scene depends upon the light that
enlightens it. No light, no scene. In the 1920s the public drama extended
into the evening and night by means of electric light. This light
contributed in a considerable way to the perceptibility and the experience
of the city-centre. It revealed the places of the urban spectacle. Because
it operates with a new kind of light, the video, and in a broader sense
the television, competes with the traditional site of the urban spectacle.
The video brings into discussion the public and illuminated city-square in
relation to the idea of geo-politics. We know that because of television,
the realm of politics is no longer public space, but our own homes. Yet
still, the historical relationship between politics and public space - the
occupation, the public presence - remains. 

	In 1989, television allowed the whole world to witness the student
occupation of the Square of Heavenly Peace in Beijing. The students were
well aware of this. But in China, nothing of this event was broadcast. Of
course the students demanded it, but the authorities refused. The only
thing left for them was to speculate on ëthe rest of the world,í on the
tele-spectator. We, in ëthe rest of the worldí were able to view
accurately the surface where the event took place, but we have seen
nothing of the environment. At the same time in Hong Kong they installed
gigantic screens in a stadium, where anyone interested could follow the
events collectively.  This constellation of fusion, confinement, and
exclusion of spaces could be called tele-topical, a tele-square. The lack
of contiguity between the real places has been replaced by the continuity
of the real-time. For a while there was a close connection between a
community in Hong Kong and one in Beijing, but only in terms of the
real-time. Within this tele-topical situation, the real-time was the issue
of the political conflict. Instead of broadcasting the events live, as the
students demanded, Chinese television waited until after the defeat of the
students to broadcast images of street riots, that were recorded by
surveillance cameras that had been placed in the streets adjacent to the
square. The authorities tempered the public effects of the demonstration
by delaying the time of the replay. 

	This example demonstrates that one of the most important
components of urban culture, the political spectacle in public space, the
demonstrative presence on the urban stage, has been replaced by a politics
of time. 

	All this could cause architect Rem Koolhaas to declare in his book
S, M, L, XL, that the city no longer exists and that we are left to cope
with the phantom pain we experience in relation to the lost city. 

	The form of the city depends upon our mode of perception. We can
distinguish three modes of perception: first, the perspective mode from a
fixed viewpoint; second the sequential and linear perception of an
environment from a viewpoint moving at relatively high speed, and third
the telematic perception from a fixed place, but where the fixed viewpoint
has been replaced by the moving camera. I have explained some effects of
this last mode on the experience of urban geometry. Telematic
communication, on the other hand, will probably take place between people
who are located in interiors. If you can broadcast your image to another
interior or receive the image of someone else in your interior, it means
not only the metamorphosis of the window, but also the relative
elimination of the door.  With the door disappears the threshold, and
without the threshold it becomes impossible to distinguish between inside
and outside. We can just as well say that if we canít distinguish between
interior and exterior, the threshold is everywhere. Through this type of
communication we will witness the rise of a kind of twisted threshold that
will be the main characteristic of the habitat of the future. This twisted
threshold will be the interface, the place where the electronic network
connects with the human body and its senses. Like the transformation
caused by the fall of the city fortress, whereby the house became directly
accessible from the road, and the front door became the new city-gate, the
interface will become our new front door, or our new city-gate. It will
put an end to travel as we know it, and will install a new kind of
domestication.  Architects like Peter Eisenman think this condition of
linked interiors should be expressed in the building by questioning the
status of the faÁade and giving preference to the section. 

	The form of the city of the future will be determined not only by
autonomous trends and technological possibilities, but also by all kinds
of cultural and architectonic strategies. In their book The Invisible in
Architecture Ole Bouwman and Roemer van Toorn distinguish roughly three
architectural strategies: the archaic, the faÁadic and the fascinistic. 
The archaic strategy wants to mobilise the unrepresentable. It wants to
recall a memory, even if it is broken. For this strategy, the city bears a
mystical element that is related to hope, desire, faith, and immortality. 
The architect should not only be involved in technology and marketing but
should take the place of the fool and the poet. The building should
express what canít be said, its meaning should derive from the unsaid and
the unspeakable residue. The archaic strategy wants to save the status of
the place by reinstalling the holy characteristics it had in the past in a
new way. 

	The faÁadic strategy wants to increase the meaning of a building
by means of its radiation power. FaÁadism acknowledges the crisis of the
public space as a cultural dimension. It acknowledges as well the crisis
of the modern architecture which emphasised the organisation of the
groundplan in order to render the use of the built environment
comfortable. Comfort wipes the place off the consciousness. It can
therefore only be saved, as Aldo Rossi believed through the power of the
architectural image and its relation to the narrative structures of our
culture. Architecture is seen then as a public medium. The radiating
building transfers its identity to a place, and thus positions it in a
network. This is the Eiffel Tower strategy. 

	The fascinistic strategy plays on the strangeness in order to
establish a confrontation with the form. It therefore seeks a semiotic
alienation of the sign from its content. For instance, it borrows the
identity of its forms from the world of the machine, as in the work of
Norman Forster. It views the identity of a place in its relation to the
vehicular. The vehicle is treated as a kind of place. There is a
fascination for the non-place, as in the work of Peter Wilson, who treats
his buildings as solids in a flux, and makes use of the forms of the ship. 
Against the fullness of the world of mediated images, the fascinistic
strategy wants to produce a certain emptiness and provide us with means to
distance ourselves. The place is not something to identify with or where
one can get involved in some action, but is more a kind of theatre. 

	The fascinistic strategy states the end of history, disputes the
possibility of an avant-garde, and seeks new referents for design, which
are mostly found in the present world of images, be they real or
imaginative. It denies the difference in status between reality and the
world of the media. In that sense, the fascinistic strategy is the most
appropriate for our time; it starts from a world view that does not
postulate the sovereignty of man, but the sovereignty of the combined
systems of man and machine. 

Wim Nijenhuis, 28 November 1994


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