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Author of information space.
Basic assumptions
Virtual space.
The accessibility of stored information depends to a large
extent on the structure it has been given. We use indexes, classifications, search engines and the like as a means to locate relevant information. With growing amounts of data - stored in memory, archives 0r databases - the probability of loss and forgetting increases if their location is not exactly defined.
To prevent such losses, a connection between place and information has to be made. The representation of information in discrete places within a certain space is an idea that has already been used in ancient mnemotechnics.
The specificity of new media consists less in their way of representing information (film and TV are "multi-media", too), but rather in that they are interactive. The need to "navigate" the enormous amounts of data that have become accessible via computers, has lead to different attempts of visualizing them, from the development of visual computer interfaces to recent projects that focus on associations rather than categories.
Authors in new media will have to consider spatial models of data representation without forgetting about the specifities of information space and its incongruency with physical space.
Memory space.These spatializations of information have their
ancestral heritage in the ancient Greeks, "art of memory"*. An idea of visualizing and ordering data (things or words by placing striking images, in an appropiate order into a building, that served as a "file" for the things associated with it. To recover the information, it was simply a case of having to walk through the building and pick up the information connected to the images in their original sequence. The memory images could also be active, emotionally striking figures had the advantage that they would stick in the mind much better than passive objects.
The renaissance saw the transformation of "artifcial" memory space into physical space, taking the form of a Memory Theatre. This was a construction of the architect Giulio Camillo that had become necessary, because the growing amounts of data and hence memory places lead to confusion, asking for new structures.
While mnemotechnics soon after were completely replaced by exterior storage media, the question of information structure encounters similar problems nowadays: in which ways could the accessibilty of information be organized while taking the specific, interactive character of digital media into account? In which way has the personal and the collective to be negotiated in terms of space?
* see Frances Yates, The Art of Memory
Dramatic space.Brenda Laurel's famous book "Computers as
Theatre" takes Greek tragedy as a model for human-computer interactions that according to her, should be understood as dramatic wholes. Understanding human participation in actions as specific for computers rather than the representation of knowledge she demands the invisibility of the computer as agents in order to gain the wholeness of a dramatic experience. The "multisensory" immersion in drama in contrast to narrative structures is based on the enactment that involves sensing and cognition, an intensification of emotion and the unity of action.
The author might not only figure as a dramatist, though. While the idea of "multisensory representation" insists on more sensory input to create a feeling of immersion, the renaissance memory theatre as a dramatic space works only because it is presented as theatre. Places and images are not intended to fascinate, but to evoke interpretations and associations. As active images, they ask for action rather than leaving people to look at and navigate among them. In a reversal of the theatrical situation, the "user" has been placed on the stage, with an audience consisting of (memory) images. The hallucination of an infinitely expanded space of information, all the knowledge of the world, always only a few links further, gets broken by the fact that the human actor is placed on the stage; a part of the play rather than in (visual) control of the whole.
Narrative space.With the invention of hypertext, a new and
computer-specific genre of writing emerged, that, based on the possibility of more or less associative linking, offers the chance to develop new narrative structures. While paper-based texts have to be arranged in a linear fashion hypermedia allows a multi-linearity of narratives that do not need to rely on a linear structure. Between beginning and end(s) extends the ungraspable dimension of virtual space, which might be imagined as line(s), matrix, rhizome or whatever you can think of. Narrative elements can be organized and become reorganized or different stories might be transversed to generate one possibility out of a potentially unlimited number, depending on the "readers" input. The author of hypertexts has to take into account that the elements might not remain in the chronological order they have been written in, which affects causal and (psycho)logical structures.
Cartographic space.The question of the chicken and the egg has
its geographic variation with the concept of maps. What was there first, the map or the territory? The restructuring of physical space through reconfiguring imaginations of a whole that can never be actually seen as such stands in contrast to individual perceptions of the mapped areas or locations.
The principle of first knowing and then acting that keeps cartographic business running is obviously not valid for cyberspace, where both coincide in the act of exploring. Observable patterns can nevertheless be visualized in a number of different ways, while the dream of the map as a simulation of the real world has stopped for the same reasons that the VR-hype faltered. Maps can always give only partial analyses of space because they have to take a certain fixed point of view. In the wider sense is being an author in new media always also about mapping conceptual space, but interactivity shakes the notion of the territory.
Historical space.To use the model of a memory-theatre to visualize
the collective memory of history offers the possibility to think of an interaction between historical "facts" and the human actor. With historical events in the audience rather than on stage -looking at the actor - this model stresses a multiplication of viewpoints. As it is not only the human who "sees", but is "being seen" by those things that especially concern him/her, history merges with individual memories. A representation of historical events in new media can therefore be conceived and created in a multi-linear and interactive way.
Landscapes are another way of imagining historical space, as their shape signifies human occupation based on unstructured but site-specific"nature". Landscapes have traditionally served as surfaces for the projection of myths, memories and obsessions*. The planning of landscapes is a writing of maps with natural objects; the conception of historical projects in new media asks the author's awareness of virtual landscapes, because that is what becomes manipulated.
* Simon Schama, Landscape & Memory
Acoustic space.The space of sound has very different extensions and
surely more dimensions than could be secured in length, width and depth. Rhythm can create heterogenous musical spaces that no architecture could imagine, simply because sound is not transferable to the visual.
Sound extends space, exceeding the visible in its independency of linear extension. As sound gives no fixed point, but rather orientates toward the edge of perception, even low noises can call for attention, where nothing comes to the eye.
Stereo, quadrophonia or dolby-surround systems are extra-musical technologies to place ears at certain spots and arrest the bodies, but still there is no way to make musical space cubical. Repetitive sound structures often define orientation points or memory places, but because music depends on time in a sequential way, these memory places will be part of a whole rather than discrete places. As digital media can integrate sound, text and images, the acoustic information space should not be considered as additional, but in its own right.
Mathematical space.Mathematics does not limit us to three
dimensions in space, and there have been a number of attempts to conceive of a spatial multi-dimensionality. Typically, this is considered in terms of curved or curled spaces and parallel universes. As these kinds of imaginary spaces are quite hard to visualize, it seems that spatial dimensionality depends on the observer rather than on physical reality. It might thus lead to a completely different notion of multi-dimensionality if dimensions are understood in a slightly divergent way. Like, for instance, Buckminster Fuller's conception of dimensionailty, a part of his idea about the "geometry of thinking" (http://www.teleport.com/~pdx4d/terms.html).
"There is no dimension without time. Dimension is experiential; it is of time; ergo, must be physical; ergo, must be energetic(...)Dimensions may be expressed only in magnitudes of time, energy, frequency concentrations, and angular modulations. What we call "length" is a "duration" of experience and is always measured in time."
Apart from "buckyballs", "geodesic domes", "dymaxion world maps" and other geometric by-products, this model also show that our conception of space does not necessarily have to be based on the three dimensions of a cube. Information has to be located, but the space of its representation gives it also a direction, a timeliness (consider a point, a line, a surface, a cube, a sphere, a polyhedron etc).
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