*More of a “podium liberation manifesto,” but…
THE SPACE LIBERATION MANIFESTO
SPACE is a contested site in our world.
The physical space we live in has been divided, partitioned and sold to the highest bidder, leaving precious little that is truly a public commons. The privatization of physical space brings with it deep social, cultural, legal and ethical implications. Private ownership of physical space creates zones of access and trespass, participation and exclusion. Private use of physical space becomes an appropriation of our visual space, through architecture, so-called landscape design, and ubiquitous advertising whose goal is to be seen well beyond the boundaries of privately owned property. Simultaneously, private space becomes the preferred canvas for street artists, graffiti writers and other cultural insurgents whose works seek the reclaimation of our visual space, the repurposing of private political and commercial space for their alternative cultural messages.
The nature of SPACE is changing. In the past, space primarily meant physical space — the three dimensional cartesian world of people and places and things. Networked digital computing brought us the notion of cyberspace — an ephemeral “consensual hallucination” that nonetheless appeared to have an almost physical sense of place, a separate and parallel universe alongside the physical world. Today, as computing and connectivity become pervasive and embedded into the world and digital information infuses nearly every aspect of the physical environment, space has become an enmeshed combination of physical and digital — a ‘blended reality’. Cyberspace has everted; reality is enspirited.
This new physical+digital SPACE brings new characteristics, new affordances, new implications for culture. Its physical dimensions are finite, measurable, subject to ownership and control, but its digital dimensions are essentially infinite, subjective, and resistant to centralized control or governance. The new SPACE opens tremendous opportunities for access, expression and participation, but also for commercialism, propaganda, and crushing banality.
Our efforts are directed at making this new SPACE a free space: an open, participatory, collaborative commons. We believe in space as a public resource, a global platform for freedom of expression. We believe each person has the right to create, augment and modify the media environment that reaches their senses. We draw inspiration from the Lettrists, the Situationists, psychogeographers and the hacker community; from street artists and culture jammers and game designers. We claim the digital dimension of SPACE as freespace, on behalf of all world citizens.
No comments:
Post a Comment