The heady lure of these mystical works is based on their elaborate continuities of human and fictive space. . . . They pair techniques involving the creation of a dreamscape, and the provision of [human] figures for identification that call the viewer to enter fictive space, changing with their movements, inviting their co-authorship. They are fundamentally navigable... ‘spaces of persuasion’.
the history of electronic communication is less the evolution of technical efficiencies in communication than a series of arenas for negotiating issues crucial to the conduct of social life; among them, who is inside and outside, who may speak, who may not, and who has authority and may be believed.
The pyschological, museum and archeological metaphors by which the past is conceived.... tend to transform the temporal into the spatial and are intensely visual. Layers are excavated, veils lifted, screens removed. As such the recall of socially and effectively charged events involve a social organisation of a present space (struc- tured encounters with a site, even tours or processions), with specified stopping-places and actions (ablutions, obsequities, gestures and readings) and time (seasonal ceremonies), as well as an historical space and time (Kirmayer 1989). Memory is reconstructed anew each time through secular rituals of for example the systematic, often guided, tour in which the site is ‘framed’ by discourse. The position of the viewer may be left in question or explicitly positioned, but there is always a space, a distance, between the spectator and her memory.
From The Virtual by Rob Shields
