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The term "cyberspace," first coined by William Gibson in
his 1984 science fiction novel Neuromancer, has today
almost reached the level of common language, if not
common acceptance for its place as a legitimate
architectural construct.
"Cyber," taken here to
mean "computer processed," conjoins the suffix "space,"
and in doing so propagates the idea of digitally
represented realms, at once both realistic and
paradoxically elusive. To the observer, these realms may
be perceived as tangible (real) or exotically intangible
(virtual). They might, in themselves, be fluid or they
might be quite static, apparently realistic but
realizable only with the greatest difficulty.
Whether in flux or quite
still, digital landscapes, architectural environments,
and even worlds, conjure up ideas of new movements —
architectural, philosophical, and spatial. Of course it
is the sense of spatiality that is the core ingredient
of cyberspace, but how new is cyberspace in terms of its
meaning?
The Oxford English
Dictionary includes in its definition of cyberspace:
"space perceived as such by an observer but generated by
a computer system and having no real existence."
In contrast, its
progenitor Gibson declares it rather more lyrically to
be "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by
billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by
children being taught mathematical concepts... a graphic
representation of data abstracted from the banks of
every computer in the human system. Unthinkable
complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the
mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city
lights, receding..."
If we remove the
"computer" from Gibson's own rhetoric, his "consensual
hallucination" can be taken as having been achieved
through other media prior to the digital age, not least
through the written word, film, and theater.
In some ways we need to
establish the credentials of cyberspace beyond the
technology of its execution and communication in order
to establish its legitimacy as both an intellectual and
sensational stimulant.
Cyberspace is more than
"for its own sake" and provides fertile opportunities
for representations as diverse as those of future
building projects, or of ideas about building form and
arrangements, the spatial visualization of data, and
speculations on the formal properties of ideas.
Cyberspace may already
seem familiar, despite its relatively recent genesis,
through our memory of film sets that predate
Neuromancer by some decades. In fact, looking back
at certain animation and title sequences, we can see a
legacy of artistic and otherworldly intentions worthy of
comparison with those of the latter-day, hi-tech
thoroughbreds.
There are profound
questions concerning the relationships between media,
definitions of the role and skill of the cyber
architect, and qualitative arguments of the value of the
many and varied routes to cyber craft. These indicate
that we are still in the pioneering stages.
The tangible intangibility
of cyberspace and all the new environments and
applications being spawned from it are the most
alienating factors to those most wedded to bolstering
traditional definitions of architecture and the built
environment.
They also represent yet
one more challenge to a beleaguered architectural
profession, for if cyberspace becomes widely accepted
within a broader definition of architecture, what is
there in contemporary architectural education programs
that presumes the architect to be a professional master
of cyberspace?
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