Folding the Inside to the Outside

e-space lab

The e-space lab project has multiple aims. Common interests lie in collaborative work, and work that has a concern with people, places, spaces, identity, history and change, and we are focusing our research on the potential of streaming video and other virtual spatial situations, seen as an aspect of a performative art process. This includes exploring new types of space for new forms of public art in a sort of hybrid territory where the electronic and virtual aspects of the art event modulate a view of “real” spaces.

The e-space lab operates as a “place” for the creation of work and also looking at the role of the visual in the exploration of urban and social fabrics (Liverpool-Shanghai-Gdansk-Damascus), at the moment considering these places as places of change. Part of our work therefore is about opening up a virtual laboratory to artists, to individuals, groups and institutions, in order to create work around the questions that arise in the context of ongoing change, and using international exchange as way to help see what is happening at local levels in a global context. The project also allows us to experiment with how a trans-national model of practice might grow. So, e-space lab is first and foremost a research environment for artists exploring how new electronic and digital forms generate new perceptions of specific localities.

Past projects, future projects and current projects are best understood as works in progress, with each event, or phase, consciously and methodically set up as an experiment within a programme that looks as far ahead as possible. The laboratory is the space we make available for the interaction of art makers in different places. The places and spaces we work with, are regarded as real, especially including the virtual spaces that are created in the project.

Many of the ideas of Paul Virilio have been a constant irritant in the theoretical struggles that are part of these activities. Obviously this of great benefit to spaces devoted to activities of mapping, of dialogue and debate.

“The time of the finite world is coming to an end” says Virilio (p 8) in The Information Bomb.

“How are we to conceive the change wrought by computerization if we remain tied to an ideological approach”, 
the ideology of globalization, that is, 
“when the urgent need is in fact for a new geostrategic approach to discover the scale of the phenomenon that is upon us?” 

We need to “come back to the Earth”, 
he says, 
“to its dimensions and to the coming loss of those dimensions in the acceleration not now of history (which, with the loss of local time, has just lost its concrete foundations), but of reality itself, with the new-found importance of this world time, a time whose instantaneity definitively cancels the reality of distances – the reality of those geographical intervals which only yesterday still organized the politics of nations “. (p8) 
 
The abolition or dissolution of the geophysical space by a quasi-instantaneous global communication system means the continents themselves have been supplanted by tele-continents. In the context of this meta-geophysics, national frontiers dissolve, or are snatched away, as is the history of societies previously separated by 
“communications distances and time-lags”. (p9)

This meta-geophysical phenomenon is, he says, is of 
“transpolitical importance”. 

We are not seeing 
‘an end of history’, 

he says, but we are seeing the end of geography, and we are also witnessing a strange reversal in the meaning of the global and the local.

He refers to the view the Pentagon developed in the 1990’s that 
“geostrategy is turning the globe inside out like a glove”. (p10) 
According to this weird military perspective 
the global is the interior of a finite world, and the local is the exterior “the periphery, if not indeed the ‘outer suburbs’ of the world”. 

Perhaps an example of this inside-out world is found in Virilio’s book, City of Panic, where the mayor of Philadelphia is quoted as saying, following the USA’s urban riots of the 1960’s, 
“From now on, a state’s borders run inside the cities.” (p15)

 
“There lies the great globalitarian transformation, the transformation which extraverts localness – all localness – and which does not now deport persons, or entire populations, as in the past, but deports their living space, the place where they subsist economically. A global de-localization which affects the very nature not merely of ‘national’, but of ‘social’ identity, throwing into question not so much the nation-state, but the city, the geopolitics of nations.”

“The real city, which is situated in a precise place and which gave its name to the politics of nations, is giving way to the virtual city”, the site of “metropolitics.” (Virilio,1998, p10-11). The Meta-city.

With globalization, Virilio thinks that the city “is foregrounded once more”, and it is probably the case that the intensity of the city as experienced through its visible fabric is more pronounced now than ever. Half a century ago McLuhan pointed to the contemporary experience of great cities in terms of the electronic communication environment that surrounds them and functions as an all encompassing medium, whilst the cities themselves are merely the content of this medium.