~ Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace ~
by Marcos Novak

Introduction

What is cyberspace?

Here is one composite definition:

Cyberspace is a completely spatialized visualization of all information in global information processing systems, along pathways provided by present and future communications networks, enabling full copresence and interaction of multiple users, allowing input and output from and to the full human sensorium, permitting simulations of real and virtual realities, remote data collection and control through telepresence, and total integration and intercommunication with a full range of intelligent products and environments in real space.

[Bruce Sterling has recently collected five: Gibsonian cyberspace, Barlovian cyberspace, Virtual Reality, Simulation, and Telepresence. The definition above is a concactenation of all five plus a sixth, set forth in "Making Reality a Cyberspace" by Wendy Kellog and others in this volume.]

Cyberspace involves a reversal of the current mode of interaction with computerized information. At present such information is external to us. The idea of cyberspace subverts that relation; we are now within information. In order to do so we ourselves must be reduced to bits, represented in the system, and in the process become information anew.

Cyberspace offers the opportunity of maximizing the benefits of separating data, information, and form, a separation made possible by digital technology. By reducing selves, objects, and processes to the same underlying ground-zero representation as binary streams, cyberspace permits us to uncover previously invisible relations simply by modifying the normal mapping from data to representation.

To the composite definition above I add the following: Cyberspace is a habitat for the imagination. Our interaction with computers so far has primarily been one of clear, linear thinking. Poetic thinking is of an entirely different order. To locate the difference in terms related to computers: poetic thinking is to linear thinking as random access memory is to sequential access memory. Everything that can be stored one way can be the other; but in the case of sequential storage the time required for retrieval makes all but the most predictable strategies for extracting information prohibitively expensive.

Cyberspace is a habitat of the imagination, a habitat for the imagination. Cyberspace is a place where conscious dreaming meets subconscious dreaming, a landscape of rational magic, of mystical reason, the locus and triumph of poetry over poverty, of "it-can-be-so" over "it-should-be-so."

The greater task will not be to impose science on poetry, but to restore poetry to science.

This chapter is an investigation of the issues that arise when we consider cyberspace as an inevitable development in the interaction of humans with computers. To the extent that this development inverts the present relationship of human to information, placing the human within the information space, it is an architectural problem; but, beyond this, cyberspace has an architecture of its own and, furthermore, can contain architecture. To repeat: cyberspace is architecture; cyberspace has an architecture; and cyberspace contains architecture.

Cyberspace relies on a mix of technologies, some available, some still imaginary. This chapter will not dwell on technology. Still, one brief comment is appropriate here. A great number of devices are being developed and tested that promise to allow us to enter cyberspace with our bodies. As intriguing as this may sound, it flies in the face of the most ancient dream of all: magic, or the desire to will the world into action. Cyberspace will no doubt have physical aspects; the visceral has genuine power over us. And though one of the major themes of this essay has to do with the increasing recognition of the physicality of the mind, I find it unlikely that once inside we will tolerate such heavy devices for long. Gloves and helmets and suits and vehicles are all mechanocybernetic inventions that still rely on the major motor systems of the body, and therefore on coarse motor coordination, and more importantly, low nerve ending density. The course of invention has been to follow the course of desire, with its access to the parts of our bodies that have the most nerve endings. When we enter cyberspace we will expect to feel the mass of our bodies, the reluctance of our skeleton; but we will choose to control with our eyes, fingertips, lips, and tongues, even genitals.

The trajectory of Western thought has been one moving from the concrete to the abstract, from the body to the mind; recent thought, however, has been pressing upon us the frailty of that Cartesian distinction. The mind is a property of the body, and lives and dies with it. Everywhere we turn we see signs of this recognition, and cyberspace, in its literal placement of the body in spaces invented entirely by the mind, is located directly upon this blurring boundary, this fault.

At the same time as we are becoming convinced of the embodiment of the mind, we are witnessing the acknowledgment of the inseparability of the two in another way: the mind affects what we perceive as real. Objective reality itself seems to be a construct of our mind, and thus becomes subjective.

The "reality" that remains seems to be the reality of fiction. This is the reality of what can be expressed, of how meaning emerges. The trajectory of thought seems to be from concrete to abstract to concrete again, but the new concreteness is not that of Truth, but of embodied fiction.

The difference between embodied fiction and Truth is that we are authors of fiction. Fiction is there to serve our purposes, serious or playful, and to the extent that our purposes change as we change, its embodiment also changes. Thus, while we reassert the body, we grant it the freedom to change at whim, to become liquid.

It is in this spirit that the term liquid architecture is offered. Liquid architecture of cyberspace; liquid architecture in cyberspace.

Part One: Cyberspace

Poetics and Cyberspace

Well then, before reading poems aloud to so many people, the first thing one must do is invoke the duende. This is the only way all of you will succeed at the hard task of understanding metaphors as soon as they arise, without depending on intelligence or the critical apparatus, and be able to capture, as fast as it is read, the rhythmic design of the poem. For the quality of a poem can never be judged on just one reading, especially not poems like these which are full of what I call 'poetic facts' that respond to a purely poetic logic and follow the constructs of emotion and of poetic architecture. Poems like these are not likely to be understood without the cordial help of the duende.

                                                                              - Federico Garcia Lorca, Poet in New York

The duende is a spirit, a demon, invoked to make comprehensible a "poetic fact," an "hecho poetico." An "hecho poetico," in turn, is a poetic image that is not based on analogy and bears no direct, logical explanation (Lorca 1989). This freeing of language from one-to-one correspondence, and the parallel invocation of a "demon" that permits access to meanings that are beyond ordinary language permits Lorca to produce some of the most powerful and surprising poetry ever written. It is this power that we need to harness in order to be able to contend with what William Gibson called the "unimaginable complexity" of cyberspace.

How does this poetry operate?

Concepts, like subatomic particles, can be thought to have world lines in space-time. We can draw Feynman diagrams for everything that we can name, tracing the trajectories from our first encounter with an idea to its latest incarnation. In the realm of prose, the world lines of similar concepts are not permitted to overlap, as that would imply that during that time we would be unable to distinguish one concept from another. In poetry, however, as in the realm of quantum mechanics, world lines may overlap, split, divide, blink out of existence, and spontaneously reemerge. [Thomas Kuhn discussed the notion of world lines with respect to scientific concepts in a talk on untranslatability between different intellectual frameworks (Kuhn 1990).] Meanings overlap, but in doing so call forth associations inaccessible to prose. Metaphor moves mountains. Visualization reconciles contradiction by a surreal and permissive blending of the disparate and far removed. Everything can modify everything: "Green, I want you green / green wind, green boughs," writes Lorca, "Over the green night / the arrows / leave tracks of warm / lilies / / The keel of the moon / breaks purple clouds / and the quivers / fill with dew" (Lorca 1989).

If cyberspace holds an immense fascination, it is not simply the fascination of the new. Cyberspace stands to thought as flight stands to crawling. The root of this fascination is the promise of control over the world by the power of the will. In other words, it is the ancient dream of magic that finally nears awakening into some kind of reality. But since it is technology that promises to deliver this dream, the question of "how" must be confronted. Simply stated, the question is, What is the technology of magic? For the answer we must turn not only to computer science but to the most ancient of arts, perhaps the only art: poetry. It is in poetry that we find a developed understanding of the workings of magic, and not only that, but a wise and powerful knowledge of its purposes and potentials. Cyberspace is poetry inhabited, and to navigate through it is to become a leaf on the wind of a dream.

Tools of poets: image and rhythm, meter and accent, alliteration and rhyme, tautology, simile, analogy, metaphor, strophe and antistrophe, antithesis, balance and caesura, enjambment and closure, assonance and consonance, elision and inflection, hyperbole, lift, onomatopoeia, prosody, trope, tension, ellipsis . . . poetic devices that allow an inflection of language to produce an inflection of meaning. By push and pull applied to both syntax and symbol, we navigate through a space of meaning that is sensitive to the most minute variations in articulation. Poetry is liquid language.

As difficult as it may sound, it is with operations such as these that we need to contend in cyberspace. Nothing less can suffice.

I am in cyberspace. I once again resort to a freer writing, a writing more fluid and random. I need to purge a mountain of brown thoughts whose decay blocks my way. I seek the color of being in a place where information flies and glitters, connections hiss and rattle, my thought is my arrow. I combine words and occupy places that are the consequence of those words. Every medium has its own words, every mixture of words has a potential for meaning. Poets have always known this. Now I can mix the words of different media and watch the meanings become navigable, enter it, watch magic and music merge.

Cyberspace Navigation, Synthesis, and Rendition

Some initial definitions are necessary before we proceed: cyberspace navigation refers to the traversal of information spaces; cyberspace synthesis refers to the reconciliation of different kinds of information into a coherent image; cyberspace rendition refers to the production of high-quality graphic presentation of that image. These are separate tasks.

The Hypermedia Navigator

Navigation through cyberspace is achieved by interacting with a hypermedia navigator, a virtual control device that follows the user and always remains within arm's reach. It is possible for the user to circumvent the cyberspace synthesizer and enter and traverse the space of the navigator, riding the links, as it were.

Every paragraph an idea, every idea an image, every image an index, indices strung together along dimensions of my choosing, and I travel through them, sometimes with them, sometimes across them. I produce new sense, nonsense, and nuisance by combination and variation, and I follow the scent of a quality through sand dunes of information. Hints of an attribute attach themselves to my sensors and guide me past the irrelevant, into the company of the important; or I choose to browse the unfamiliar and tumble through volumes and volumes of knowledge still in the making. Sometimes I linger on a pattern for the sake of its strangeness, and as it becomes familiar, I grow into another self. I wonder how much richer the patterns I can recognize can become, and surprise myself by scanning vaster and vaster regions in times shorter and shorter. Like a bird of prey my acuity allows me to glide high above the planes of information, seeking jewels among the grains, seeking knowledge.

Just as hypertext allows any word in a normal text to explode into volumes of other words, so a hypergraph allows any point in a graph to expand to include other graphs, nested and linked to any required depth. We may, of course, extend this idea to other media to arrive upon corresponding hypermedia. We can now make some futher distinctions: static and dynamic, passive and active, pure and hybrid. A static hypermedium is one in which the links are fixed and can only be changed manually; a dynamic one is one where the links are in some way variable. While the distinction of static/dynamic applies to the links of a hypermedium, the distinction of passive/active applies to the nodes between the links. A passive hypermedium is one in which the information nodes themselves remain stable though the links may vary dynamically; in an active hypermedium the information nodes themselves can changed. Pure hypermedia remain within the confines of a single medium, hybrid ones roam freely. The hypermedia navigator, or navigator for short, is a virtual device for traversing vast hybrid hypermedia spaces that have both active links and dynamic nodes.

Sometimes I wander out of my world into the larger spaces. I travel along pathways mostly empty. The passages I traverse are not still, however. Along their boundaries processes sparkle, information flows like water on a moist wall, schools of data swim around me curiously, and lattices of fact and fiction tangle and untangle. The ones I touch open out into texts and images and places.

Every node in a hypermedium has a dimensionality. Hypertext, for example, occurs in a one-dimensional space, but we can easily envision hypermedia with higher dimensions. While the dimensionality of a node is fixed, the dimensionality between nodes need not be: a word in a text can open to a hologram, a point within the hologram can open to an animation, a frame in the animation can return to a text.

Every node in a hypermedium is therefore an information space, a space of potential information, and the "text" of the node is the actual information within that space. In an active hypermedium the information within the information space, as well as the links among spaces, may change according to internal or external conditions. These conditions may be user-controlled or user-independent. The processes within which these conditions are embedded may be defined explicitly by the user or may be autonomous.

My point in space is given by my navigator. Its forms can vary but the idea remains the same: I control a point in an n-dimensional space, say a cube. I assign meaning to each of the axes, and to any rotational parameters, material parameters, shape parameters, color and transparency parameters, and so on, that describe the "reality" of my icon. By moving my icon in this abstract space I alter the cyberspace I occupy. My navigator follows me at all times, and my position within it is fixed while I move within the cyberspace I have defined. Should I decide to search through a slightly different "reality" all I need to do is reach out for my navigator and alter a parameter. Otherwise, for more drastic navigation, I can alter a dimension, or even the number of dimensions. Finally, I may choose an entirely different coordinate system. In every case my deck is responsible for synthesizing the requested information in a new cyberspace.

If a point in one cyberspace is an entry into another cyberspace, then a new navigator is spontaneously created and pushed onto my stack of navigators. I can now maneuver in the new system without losing my place in the old one. Since the stack of navigators constitutes a pathway, I can be reached by anyone who encounters one of my icons, opens a channel, and sends me a message.

There are no hallways in cyberspace, only chambers, small or vast.

Chambers are represented as nodes within my navigator. The topology of their connections is established by the settings and nesting of the coordinate systems of cyberspaces within my navigator. Chambers allow different users to share the same background, as well as encounter and interact with the same objects.

Motion <<>> There are two kinds of motion: motion within my navigator, and motion within the cyberspace pointed to by my navigator. If my place in my navigator is fixed, the reality I experience is also stable, though I can move in it and interact with the entities that inhabit it. If, however, I concurrently change places within my navigator, then the reality I experience is no longer stable., but fluctuating. As my location within the navigator changes, new, perhaps distant, realities are brought forth to replace the old ones. Entities, landmarks, and landscapes appear and disappear, time and space become discontinuous, and the increment of my motion changes from one scale to another to fit the current reality.

Others <<>> Initially, a user has a personally configured cyberspace, and maneuvers through it by manipulating the navigator. If this cyberspace is configured to accept signals from other users, or simply Others, that is, if communications ports have been defined and enabled, then an appropriate indication is made within the cyberspace that another uuser is hailing. At that point the users must agree on a manner of interaction, ranging from simple text to full interpresence. For full cyberspace interaction the coordinate systems of all interacting users' navigators must be configured along identical orderings. Partial coincidence will result in hiding of information.

This world of mine has ports: through them I gather and give. This world has windows: through them I can see and be seen. Through ports other worlds are accesible; through windows other worlds are simply visible. I can open and close my ports and windows, naturally, and I can also have curtains and filters that only permit some information to enter or escape. Sometimes the information itself controls which aperturess are open, how much, and how.

Within my navigator traces of light move from node to node, indicating the presence of others in the chambers of cyberspace; outside my navigator, in the chamber I am currently occupying, I encounter some of them directly.

Interaction with others depends on the degree to which they share information coordinate axes and orderings. If users wish to coexist fully in the same virtual space, they must set their navigators to the same settings. Communications established between users sharing information axes partially will result in "ghosting," that is, inexplicable and unpredictable "appearances" and "disappearances" as aspects of the cyberspace of one user engage and disengage aspects of the cyberspace of the other. In this respect cyberspaces are "consensual," since any complete exchange requires a sharing of settings of the participants' navigators.

Using my deck, I enter the cyberspace. At first the world is dark, but not because of an absence of light, but because I have not requested an environment yet. I request my default environment, my personal database. From it I choose my homebase, or workbase, or playbase. I am in my personal cyberspace, and I am not yet in contact with others. This is my palace, and it is fortified. Only guests can visit my "fortress of solitude," and in here I can be Superman to the Clark Kent of my real-space self. Sometimes I organize my information around my armchair and navigate through it at a glance, extracting what I need by effortless exercises of will; other times, for the sake of exercise or play, I scatter it around my globe and fly across immense distances to recover minute recollections with the most strenuous "physical" effort. Sometimes I use a single surrogate, other times I divide into a legion.

I sense the presence of others. I see the traces of passage, the flares of trajectories of other searches. Those who share my interests visit the spaces around me often enough for me to recognize the signature of their search sequences, the outlines of their icons. I open channels and request communication. They blossom into identities that flow in liquid metamorposis. Layers of armor are dropped to reveal more intimate selves; otherwise, more and more colorful and terrifying personifications are built up in defense; but true danger is gray.

The world opens and others flood in. Now there is congestion and noise, interference, but also excitement, risk, and challenge. I travel with the constellation of my possessions, and barter and trade information. I can scan the horizon and avoid what is busy, enjoy what is free.
[...]


   increment of my motion changes from one scale to another to fit the current rea
Arial   en and close my ports and windows, naturally, and I can also have curtains and filters that only permit some inform
[...] corrupted phile

end of phile
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