Aesthetics of the Virtual

5 Metaphors of the Virtual

69 5 Metaphors of the Virtual Note oN SPACe First of all virtual space, like time, or time-space if we want concretely to determine a field of experience, can be said in many ways, depending on the type of virtuality to be examined. The first movement of reflection affirms that virtual space is a field of qualitative and quantitative individuation, and thus is related to the ontology of “objects ” that inhabit it. A second reflexive movement will notice that the distinction between virtual space and its objects is abstract, and thus that space should be understood as event. So, if for the sake of simplicity we assign to virtual space the value of place of action, then the value of action, and therefore, of place, will be relative to a typology of events. This then opens up a metaphorics of space that is particularly pervasive with regard to the virtual, almost as if the character of event-body [corpo­evento], in different forms and degrees, that belongs to virtual objects were to make use of the language of localization in order to institute itself, to “take up shape” or meaning. Virtual space is in this case first of all an informative, communicative, and connective space in which “proximity and distance are concepts that free themselves from their material conditions, empty themselves of their formal aspect, in order to bring out their communicative content.”1 According to McFadden, on a preliminary basis we can consider virtual pre-space or quasi-space an informational space with the following properties: 1) is con­ nected by a network of information channels such that, if the 70 Aesthetics of the Virtual information is partly available to a receiver, then it is so completely , 2) there are agents that can change the information and well-known protocols for exchanging information between them. This is the “consensual” part of the original definition. Agents can also be part of the information space and thus be subject to change.2 Such a pre-virtual space, which can be exemplified by computer networks , is for Pierre Lévy the space of cyberculture, “the communication space made accessible through the global interconnection of computers and computer memories,”3 a visualized form of information streams (in which it can be said with characteristic approximation that “the objects . . . are neither physical objects, nor, necessarily, representations of objects, but rather in form and substance, constructed of data, of pure information”),4 or “spatialized visualization of information in global systems of information processing,”5 which allows actions of control, collection, data exploration, and intercommunication among users. An analysis of these virtual quasi-spaces, that is, an analysis that reflects the specificity of technologies and their uses, is clearly of interest at different levels—psychological, anthropological, sociological—at least because as inhabited, above all emotionally, space is transformed into place (the spatiality and temporality of e-mail, forums, chat, hypertext, Web, are different as well as similar, and produce peculiar perceptual, emotional, and cognitive situations).6 This is not a question that I can consider here, but it is worth mentioning that these spatialities can be understood in a generically “cultural” way: Semantic, metaphorical space . . . is that in which cyberculture takes shape and is nourished and developed, in which the physical body has a role as symbolic, virtual image . . . The immediacy and universality of a communication that is proposed as a process of “deterritorialization,” of the loss of boundaries, of the possibility of living in cyberspace, of the power to go “beyond the sense of place.”7 This improper level of spatiality has actually given origin to a problem that is quite interesting from the theoretical point of view. Metaphors of the Virtual 71 SIDe ReMARKS: tHe CoMMUNItY Thanks, in fact, to the spread of computer networks, a new idea of community has been established, defined by its theorists as “virtual community,” “collective intelligence,”8 or “global brain.”9 It is a type of community that turns its being ephemeral and open into its fundamental element. A descriptive approach will have to become aware of the types of community that have really been established online, of how communication functions in them in relation to the new possibilities offered by the medium, and so forth. From the theoretical point of view, though, the new models of community imply a coherent redefinition of the very concepts of individual and community. These issues, of which I...