Chris Speed

chriss@soc.plym.ac.uk

STAR (Science, Technology, Arts Research), University of Plymouth

The articulation of space and time as processional dimensions 1D, 2D, 3D to 4D is under massive stress from the application of new technologies that are dissolving the linear expressions of how we see the world. Since the oratorial nature of communication that defined the destination of language and text, humans have sought to express much of what they see and conceive of in a linear manner. Space and time became the casualties of a Cartesian panacea that dealt with temporality as if it were a body to be divided up and analysed separately. The trajectory of many Western teleology's seduces us in to projecting our aspirations into the form of a future, and demands us to conceive of time as a highway, with capitalism constantly promising us that with the 'appliance of science' we will get us there. However, our total integration in to networks has provided us with a consciousness of simultaneity and complexity, that delivers us back to the present and demands us to question our ways of seeing and the way that we describe where we are, what we are and when we are.

This paper explores the definition of alternative states of dimension and questions the classical hierarchical means of expression that underpins the modern way of seeing the world. The paper references spatial cognitive science, mobile phone billing systems and the language that distinguishes one view of the world to the next. In particular the author presents a piece of work manufactured for an exhbition. that explored the alternative issues of space between traditional architecture and the new digital. "Tools for the Post-Cartesian City" is used to introduce the proposal that we live in an age when the language of time and space weigh hinder our opportunity to conceive of a more dynamic present.

The procession of Dimensions

The development in articulating relations of point and planes in free space known as dimensions inevitably must present problems because of the order and procession of their growth. From the first dimension of a single point along an axis we can establish location along a line and answer in a manner of distance "How far away is a point?". The second dimension provides us with a plane and the manifestation of the traditional map with its grid of lines enabling us to locate points across a landscape. The third dimension enables us to reference a point’s height providing us with a language for free space; up or down, forward or backward and from one side to another. However this processional system to bring us to ‘reality’, as time is introduced as a fourth dimension to reference movement through free space, represents a teleology that distorts our assumptions upon how we understand ourselves.

To conceive of a fourth dimensional space is to consider ourselves in an environment similar or relative to actuality. It proposes a means of thinking about space that is powerful because of its presumption to have mapped all dimensions of space. To see in three dimensions infers an understanding from all sides, including the birds eye that suggests the conquerors map. To see such a projection with the addition of time suggests the ability to make change and foresee a future.

The cultural and political seat from which one can see in four dimensions assumes the position of ultimate power, that of height and distance, time; past and future; the seat of god in "The Ancient of Days" by William Blake (fig.1). From trajectory, horizon, field, territory¹ and through to air-space, the development of technology has quickly provided us with an interpretation of reality that suits our positions of power. In reaching the teleological destiny that the dimensions of space and time promised us, Global Information Systems² represent the final eyes through which to control a reality.

How difficult for the powers that be then, as artists, scientists and technologists begin utilising alternative languages for describing aspects of realities and systems of interaction that contravene the rules of dimensional space. Fourth dimensional geometry’s for cyberspace^3, the complex system’s model of organising spatio-temporal systems as resolutions⁴ and the spatial cognition revelations that the mental maps that we use to navigate and interpret actuality are far from an all seeing eye of many dimensions.

This belief and embodiment of an interpretation of seeing reality and the onset of alternative and contradictive expressions of temporality have left us with a difficult language that is increasingly coming under more and more stress but one that is difficult to shed.

Fig 1. "The Ancient of Days" by William Blake

Whilst many pioneers of new technologies would relish the prospect of a describing how we are entering a new era of interpreting reality as the boundaries for time and space are exploded in cyberspace, the language of dimensions represents an inertia that is difficult to escape.

Spatial cognition has established a number of tensions with how we understand spatial problems such as navigation and orientation, and despite the hopes of many that we perhaps do have one model of reality that is interrogated like an all knowing database of space, in fact we have a multiple number of ways of dealing with space. Our understandings of landscape and place are based upon cognitive maps; organised systems that represent aspects of spatial environments. By cognitive mapping "we generate mental images and models of the environment, which are present again, which we can conjure up and think about almost at will" (Downs, 1977, p.7). What we use to build up these maps varies from points in the landscape, stories, experiences, maps to a host of images and symbols that we may use to represent a pattern to recall in order to navigate through space.

However these maps certainly have constraints and parameters that are informed massively by language and our means of interpreting actuality to generate them. In her paper "Distortions in Cognitive Maps" Barbara Tversky describes the problems that results in building cognitive maps in common hierarchical and linear organisational manner that we of all face as we ‘read’ the world.

She goes on to describe the consequences of our methods of translation from what we experience into hierarchical, perspective led and linear organisations that upon later interrogation fail us from as the we recall the ‘map’ from in a different time and space.

A popular example of such a problem is the ‘Postcard to Northen Ireland’⁵ problem; it simply describes the dilemma that face people who live in Northern Eire, close to Northern Ireland but most definitely part of Eire. The problem describes how due the hierarchical division of the countries involved, a postcard sent from Northern Eire will travel to Dublin first, then to England before being forwarded to Northern Ireland. A bizarre turn of events that if true, is due to a hierarchical addressing system, that is followed in a strict order, perhaps;

UK

Northern Ireland

Small Town

Smaller Street.

Maps, projections, images and spheres are frameworks for the articulation of one object that has become many ideas. The World, Earth, Planet, Globe and Gaiia are all iterations of one thing, however in each has a meaning that frames the subject in an entirely different context. World presented as map becomes political, Earth as image from space becomes astronomical, Planet as illustration becomes ecological, Globe as sphere held at its axis becomes geographical and Gaiia as a concept becomes a system. Rarely do they synthesise to become one meaning, the political maps of Europe have little do with a Nasa image of the same space. Like Tversky’s hierarchical cognitive maps it is difficult to associate one organised framework with another, particularly if you do not need to phenomenologically. However, in an age when information that comes from far away, apparently from the other side of the globe (or floor), we are increasingly being asked to make decisions or respond to proposals that demand we interface our models to modify our behaviours or beliefs. ‘Think Globally, Act Locally presents exactly that conundrum, and judging from the trajectory of the Western lifestyle it is something that doesn’t quite work.

In constructing computer systems that emulate the brain’s mapping process, scientists have been surprised when computers that had a thorough three dimensional model of space within their memory, struggled when humans used a visual language to ask the computer to manipulate the scene. Upon asking the computer to move a tree ‘in front’ of a particular building the computer failed to understand the nature of the question because of its ‘perspective led’ origin⁶.

The image, linear and language bias that informs our interpretation of space is important to appreciate the split in the description of temporality in the form of time and space. In ‘The Order of Things’ Foucault describes the emergence of representation as the gap that opened up between "words" and "things", prior to this "the world was known through a ramifying network of signatures, each one providing a glimpse into the design of the perfect whole" (Gregory 1994, p.21). As the world became defined and documented in the Enlightenment’s effort to describe the machine of nature, time and space were split and alternative measuring systems were used to delineate between their dimensions. It became easy to manage people as they became cogs within the industrial age and a consciousness of clock time was cemented.

In describing actuality, our consciousness is split as research experiments by Davi Bugmann suggests as she asked subjects to describe how far away particular destinations were. She found that two types of people emerged who answered in two different ways; either a time based answer; "10 minutes away", or an estimate of distance; "nearly a mile away"⁷. The close expression of reality through the separate measurements of time and space are adequate and do have presented problems in the past, they simply become useful dimensions to articulate aspects of the same thing. However as cyberspace flexes the relationship between these dimensions our reliance upon their consistency is beginning to suffer.

A bizarre but relevant example of this is the articulation of the mobile telephone billing system that is measured in economies of time and money. Time has always had a close relationship with money, and since the Cartesian split, time has been constantly accountable to money as capitalism emerged as the dominant organisational system. Fordism and Taylorism providing working models as precursors to the ‘clocking in and clocking out’ mentality and hourly pay systems that govern business today. "Under capitalism, after all, it is socailly necessary labor time that forms the substance of value, surplus labor time that lies at the origin of profit" (Harvey 1996 p.605). However there has always been a clarity in the time over money equation, if you work x many hours a week you will receive x times y (your hourly rate) as your income. Mobile Phone billing systems aim to dislocate this relationship to displace the owners idea of the present and their personal credit status. A monthly rate that is charged provides users with free ‘talk-time’ in the form of monetary credits. This money is credited to the account monthly depending upon how much isn’t used. However the user is provided discounts on specific telephone numbers which depending upon when they are used alter in value but are only credited after every three months. So if a user saves up their free units they are charged at the standard rate and only refunded on the month following the three months. A complex a confusing method that leaves the user constantly waiting to receive their credits due to them, a metaphorical dangling carrot that teases the users into staying with the service and never being able to compare their credit/debit status with other services. By processing time in a complex manner, we find that the user’s present is destroyed and replaced with an economic continuum.

In a further exposition of the systems within Time and Space that prevent us from leaving the Cartesian frameworks behind, the author presents a piece of artwork. ‘Tools for a Post-Cartesian City’⁸ are two re-constructions of tools used to quantify time and space; the clock and the steel ruler (Fig.2). However in the art work, the chosen clock who’s face comfortably fits a one metre in circumference dial, is replaced with the markings of one hundred centimetres precisely taken from a steel ruler, with the manufactures graphic (Stanley) also. Accordingly the steel rule hanging to the right is etched with the increments and numbers from the face of the clock, spaced out to take up a metre’s worth of its length.

The simple transposition of the two measuring systems suggests the relationship that we are increasingly beginning to forget as the speed of downloads from web ‘spaces’ around the world becomes more and more extraordinary.

The art piece becomes cynically valuable in the current climate as time and space are exchangeable as currencies and the reality of survival at the end of the twentieth century. Time and space are intrinsically linked but become export goods outside of temporality.

Fig. 2 Tools for a Post Cartesian

Fig. 5 Tools for a Post Cartesian City, E.A. Combs Steel Rule

The scenarios that are laid out above present some of the difficulties in presuming the ease in developing new articulations of space and illustrate the absolute complexity that our language and processes of engaging with the world leave us with. It suggests that we are lost, but persistent in continuing forward in search of a modern clarity, with tools and systems that are becoming extremely old. Dimensions remain a useful and efficient method to articulate the scale and relations with spaces but is wholly riddled with a mindset that does not connect with our everyday experience of the world. However such methods are still employed by architects and planners on extraordinarily different scales to transform our street level experience. Linearity is more of a part of our temporal environment more than ever, as economics forms the structure for surviving and apparently the means to move forward.

Consequently this can only be described as a Post Cartesian climate, the opportunities for the multiple dimensional, non-gravitational, light speed properties of the internet have yet to escape the colonisation and conversion of cyberspace into the slow broadcast medium where inert web sites store information ready for retrieval. Perhaps as the new wave of software that acknowledges the network as a non-hierarchical framework for organising our experiences, will enable us to interface our ‘maps’ of the world to re-invent the present and prevent us from getting lost.

Notes:

1. Foucault’s expressions from Power Knowledge (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980) of the geographical metaphors that suggest the power relations behind the language of space.
2. A phrase borrowed from Stan Openshaw who’s paper entitled A View on the GIS Crisis in Geography featured in Human Geography (edited by John Agnew, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) reveals the tensions in the use of advanced technologies in geography.
3. Marcos Novak’s Liquid Architectures in virtual reality that use four dimensional geometry to generate spaces.
4. Complex systems term "resolution" to describe the levels with which it is possible to think about systems; bee, swarm of bees, hive of bees is a popular example.

7. Davi Bugmann is a PhD student at the University of Plymouth, and has yet to publish her thesis and findings. Comments were made during conversation.
8. Tools for the Post-Cartesian City was exhibited in With Out Walls — Redefining the City, Plymouth Arts Centre, 4^th June — 11^th July 1999.

References:

Downs, R. (1977) Maps in Minds: Reflections on Cognitive Mapping Harper and Row, New York.

Gregory, D. (1994) Geographical Imaginations Blackwell, London.

Harvey, D. (1996) The Geography of Capital Accumulation in Human Geography edited by Agnew, J. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996

Tversky, B. (1992) Distortions in Cognitive Maps Geoforum Vol.23, 2.