IsayUsaySsay

Name   : Henk Ellerman
Time   : 19:30 - 21:00 (Balie Theatre)
Subject: From Cyberspace To Neurospace
Date   : Friday 19 January 1996

If we actually meet in Cyberspace, then we have to leave the world. But do we have to meet somewhere?

Back in the old days, when Gibson wrote his novels, Cyberspace was a consensual hallucination and therefore not too different from drug-induced experiences, or other trances reached by whatever method. It was, in fact, a virtual reality. Cyberspace here, is an environment, but not, surely not, the same one in which your body moved, became sick or got hurt. You had to move to enter it. In order to meet the other, the body had to be left behind.

The same concept, Cyberspace, was also used by Barlow, but his use of the term is different from Gibson's use in a very important sense. He used it, and he was probably the first one to do so, to describe a part of the real world: the Internet. An artificial part of it, but real nevertheless. With his equation of the hallucination with the real, he accomplished two important things. First, the events on the internet were liberated from the then prevailing narrow conceptualization of the Internet as a mere medium for communication. In stead of the channel linking two or more people, the Internet became an environment in which people could meet. Secondly, by binding Cyberspace to this earth, real human bodies kept their natural place . Real people now met real people, with bodies and all: no shadows of them. By eluding the question of where it is that people meet, real people entered into the picture.

Barlow's Cyberspace is an environment and allows us to understand that people stay where they are while meeting. He does this by eluding the question of where it is that people meet. The Cyberspatial equivalent of Heisenberg's uncertaintly relation is that you cannot simultaneously determine the position of the body and the location the meeting point. By sacrificing the latter, the the bodies keep their place. With the bodies in place, the mind is also located.

It is Barlow's interpretation that makes the Internet a tool of this world, a real member of the class of tactical media. But Gibson's Cyberspace is not necessarily lost. We may still focus on where were it is we meet. The space of the unreal, with all its fascination for dreamers, artists and philosophers.

Henk Ellerman