/ / / / / /RealAnd
Imagined
I’ve been wrestling with Lefebvre again, but this time as an agent of recuperation, as a ‘spatial Judas’. I’m working on a virtual environments project, creating a document (atoms not bits) that will hopefully lead to a more nuanced engagement with digital space. However, selling the idea that space is ‘more’ than an empty stage is never simple. It’s not a blank canvas upon which the social and historical are written. Rather, it is a very real and active component of human affairs, a third category that simultaneously makes and is made. We produce space and space produces us. It is a principle that applies to all species of space.
The project centres on two intimately connected ideas, how we perceive and conceive space and how we perceive and conceive our bodies. We tend to forget that our bodies are already located ‘spaces’; ‘leaky’ envelopes of connected spaces, regularly defined by that most consensual of hallucinations, skin. As William Mitchell says: ‘skulls and skins do not bound mental systems, and through computer networking these systems can now extend indefinitely’. Nowadays, we are super dynamic, highly permeable, nested spaces— networked selves and networked spaces.
This is why Lefebvre is so interesting; his slippery ‘materialist idealism’ is well suited to digital environments. Although most of his thought still leaves me baffled, some of his ‘approximations’ do stick— particularly the idea of a ‘collectively created spatiality’, an open-ended liturgy where ‘people make places and places make people’. Also there is Lefebvre’s own unique ‘geographical imagination’, a border condition that ‘could not comprehend the philosophical separation of subject and object, the body and the world’. It’s a deregulation of reality that could easily be applied to today’s spatial practice. Virtual worlds and their hybrids are creating a ‘denser now’. Whether it’s a MUVEs, MMOPRGs, Mirror-Worlds or ARGs, all require this Lefebvreian sensibility, the ability to embrace AWS (alternative world syndrome) and feel at home with the ‘real-and-imagined’.
I find Virtual Worlds incredibly exciting and can’t wait for them to iron out some of their teething problems— the World Wide Sim is coming. A user-friendly ‘genesis’ kit would be my big wish, the ability to publish and network worlds from my laptop or phone. MIT are developing ‘Scratch’, a programming language (aimed at 8 year olds) to create interactive stories. Little Big World on the PlayStation 3 looks fantastic and I’ve applied for an ‘alpha’ copy of ‘Metaplace’.
These Hyperstitional worlds have incredible potential, DIY speculative narrative-scapes that play across the circuits of the ‘real-and-imagined’.
