Anthropic Cyberspace Defining Electronic…

Anthropic Cyberspace Defining Electronic Space from First Principles

Here, I’d like to closely examine this following passage:

EXCERPT:
“An electronic drawing may be printed out physically, but, unlike a physical drawing, it may be simultane- ously accessed by a remote design team. Cyberspace offers a way-station between individual thought and the public world of physical artifacts. Since it is occupied solely by symbols, it lacks the immediacy of materiality. Yet, because of its symbolic nature, it helps us by retaining the artifacts and flexibility of the creative process” (Anders, 414).

But there are severe limitations to working in cyberspace. A computer monitor can only hold, at most, one or two sheets fully viewable of paper on the screen at a time. Though it may seem convenient, there is much lost in tangibility. Though most objects, large and small, can be accessed through cyberspace, they can usually only be seen in 2 dimensions. There was a paper written on this once. It concerned a number of archivists digitizing a late artist’s entire body of work into the computer. They felt they were compressing the resolution of the experience of the object as they did it. They felt it was insincere and not an accurate representation of the artist’s work.

And I must agree here. It is difficult to digitize an object without considering the interface in which is has been placed. There have been some digital successes in terms of placing photography online, but it is an entirely new architectural situation.

See Days With My Father: http://www.dayswithmyfather.com/

ource:
Anthropic Cyberspace: Defining Electronic Space from First Principles
Author(s): Peter Anders
Source: Leonardo, Vol. 34, No. 5, Ninth New York Digital Salon (2001), pp. 409-416
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1577233
Accessed: 03/09/2009 02:46