I’m struck by the parallels between the current state of new technology and the beginnings of cinema. In the earliest decades of film, and well into the 50’s, there was a constant debate around what film was meant to do. No one could ignore the power of cinema to manipulate the emotions of its audience. The combination of images and sound over time presented a plethora of new possibilities. The divide lay between two major opinions. Realism, headed by Andrew Bazin, believed that film is a mirror that reflects our reality back to us in a way that reveals its meaning, one that is otherwise unseen by us when we encounter it in the context of our day-to-day routine. Bazin talks about the duty of film to preserve time and space as it is, and that in doing so we can hope to reveal its “immanence.” The other side of the divide, roughly grouped under the umbrella of formalists, believed that the formal properties of film were unique from all other mediums and that its full potential lay in pushing these aesthetic manipulations to the forefront of the practice. Eisenstein was keen on the idea of collision montage, Melies in fantasy and magic, even the dadists agreed that the sheer power of film lay in its ability to defy reality, rather than capture it in its natural state.
The division between these schools of thought springs from the idea that the medium is a conduit to a powerful experience that can alter thought and/or behavior. Its potential power is its greatest danger, and also its greatest promise. Is it controlling us, or are controlling it? Can the space of the cinema screen be both a window and a cage?
Space itself presents a duality of purpose and use. Space is highly controlled, and yet there are very few ways to control how it is used. You can zone building sites, but you can’t stop a bum from pissing on it. Technology suffers from the same paradox. You can build a tool meant for a particular use, and it can very easily be used for something completely different, even contradictory to its intended use. There is very little control over how this happens – and yet control is the heart of the issue. Who has the poer to deploy a technology? To manipulate it?
With these tensions at play – control vs. intended use – we cannot assume that there is a single potential to realize in new technologies. As with cinema, there is no single answer. Art is part of our reality and cinema can project both. It can become both. Technology is at once a window and a cage.
I know this wanders a bit far from the comparison of spacial literacy to textual literacy, but the grammatics of powerful mediums – text, image, space – determines how they are used and what functions they can serve. More to the point, the symbols that make up the most basic utterances of these grammatics are largely agnostic. Their recitation, the inflection of their prose, the manipulation of their poetry – this is where the tensions of control arise. In all cases, the trajectory of the medium is tied to the battle of control over its use.
We are dealing with the same issues in new spacial technologies that we have existed previously within all other mediums. Who controls it and how it is appropriated is a matter of control, not intent. From that perspective, the job of a designer is to engage in these tensions, revealing the pitfalls and potential of the technology’s application.