Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics:
The Archival Text, Digital Narrative and the Limits of Memory

Carolyn G. Guertin
Senior McLuhan Fellow, UofT

Chapter 2. The Matrix: Information Overload
i. Temporal Perspectives on Information Culture

"History is a machine going nowhere." ~ Hasso Krull

"Technology so advanced it cuts time." ~ John Deere ad, 2002

Time has traditionally been viewed as an arrow that has a more or less linear trajectory. We progress or evolve from past to present to future. Where Newtonian time was absolute, composed of infinitely divisible intervals or spaces in time that were infinitely repeatable, quantum theory introduces the concept of 'reversible time.' Reversible time means that an equation can describe a body's motions bi-directionally, moving both backwards and forwards from the present moment. Peggy Phalen notes in the context of theatrical performance that absolute repetition is simply not possible and that reversible time as a result is a fraught concept (127). Representation can never perfectly reproduce the real, she argues; there is always a gap between them. Physicist Ilya Prigogine expanded the perspective of quantum mechanics in the same way, arguing that not only is time not reversible, but the repetition of an event--what he calls the 'second time' of an event--is always a new and unique occurrence (Phalen 127). We can return to the same moment, but it is always a re-visitation, and our experience is different because it is informed by our memory. A second time is not only, therefore, irreversible, but an additive structure. Phalen says:

It is this "additive" notion of time as opposed to an evolutionary model Prigogine and his colleagues believe may lead to a discovery of a "second time." If such a time were observable, then time may not be a neutral "constant" in the universe. Time itself may be a dissipating structure exhibiting significant fluctuations which correspond to a principle of order that is not entropic. (Phalen 127)

If time is evaporating as Prigogine believes then we, like the universe, may also be running down. But, there is another possibility as evidenced by our cultural fascination with temporal increments. We in our present moment and position in space may be the only constant in what Paul Virilio dubs a temporal point of view (1991a, 83). Time may be unfolding. Time may be expanding outward and in actuality be infinitely expandable like the intrinsic dimensions of the universe itself--or the networked text. The 'second time' of the digital text is the time of our passage and our re-turns in narrative space. The times of memory, re-membering, and forgetting--the record of our journey and the absence of any tangible signs of our presence--are far more circuitous than arrows of the past too and unfold in infinitesimal but not inconsequential increments in information space as well.

Time is a contested territory in the first few small moments of the new millennium. Where the 19th century sought to visualize it, to capture it in motion on film and the 20th century to spatialize it, to gridlock it, and measure it in the smallest increments possible, the 21st century, with its accelerated rate, is taking the project of spatializing the temporal to new depths as it completes its morph from simultaneity to instantaneity. Simultaneity was the timeframe of the shutter click; instantaneity is the temporal nano-measure of a hyperlinked mouse click. Theorist Michel de Certeau sees this latter quality as being inherent to spatial practices in 'place,' which he defines as a self-governing system composed of "an instantaneous configuration of positions" (117). Philip Auslander sees it as a component of performance or what he calls 'liveness'--the ability to occupy the present moment. Such is our contemporary place as we move around in the structural interiorities of the temporal dimension in business, in culture and in fictional space. Western society is merchandising small moments of time by attempting to turn them into commodities or commercialized objects. In the acceleration of the present moment that is our cultural trademark, downtime or idle time has become an enemy to be eradicated and an object to be sold. It is possible, for instance, to loan your unused computer cycles to SETI as additional computing power to help in the analysis of telescope data in the quest for extraterrestrial life. In England, Richard Wright's 'Bank of Time' will keep track of your idle computer minutes for you, saving them in its database. The Bank then revisualizes those minutes as screensaver plants (which grow via time lapsed photography), and ranks corporations according to the most time wasted by their employees. As all available time is now counted and accounted for and the space of the present moment continues to expand under deepening drifts of data, memory increasingly becomes a cultural obsession.

Information overload is a given in contemporary, technologized society where the cultural norm is the continuous long play of the feedback loop, reality programming and the obsessive all-seeing eye of surveillance cameras. Archives proliferate. Everything informational is stored. A totality of data is recorded and preserved for posterity as part of this entropic and bottlenecked data glut. Science and industry and surveillance cams callously record any available data as a symptom of what Paul Virilio calls "the endocolonization of a world without intimacy... a world which has become alien and obscene, entirely given over to information technologies and the over-exposure of detail" (Virilio, 2000, 57). Where is art in this swell of information? Lynda Morris argues that prior to the age of reproducible artworks, the function of art had always been as a mnemonic marker of the passage of time outside of the commercial sphere. The productive time of capitalism, on the other hand, she argues, erases memory and difference, driving us to buy ever newer and 'better' commodities (qtd in Fuller n.p.) Capitalism, as the harbinger of transitory taste, wants us to live fast and occupy a space of forgetfulness. The new digital technologies, while simultaneously being commodities themselves and buying into the grasping myth of the need for newer and bigger and better, are changing our relationship to both time and memory. Creating a space for documenting the ever-shifting nature of memory is becoming a more highly valued commodity than time itself (Fuller n.p.). The artworks of electronic culture reflect and address these concerns directly, particularly in terms of issues of mnemonic storage and information overload anxiety.

Where the avant-garde of the 20th century was most concerned with art as an object of study according to Jean-François Lyotard, Eric Kluitenberg believes that in the media age the new arts--called the Avant-Pop by Mark America--are most concerned with technology as a subject and with their own interface as a mnemonic form (Kluitenberg, 2002, n.p.). New technologies call for new structures and the shape of art interpolated by information is a radical re-envisioning of a matrix as the foundational form of the new age [1]. This shape is emergent in every area of study and every field. If one looks at ecology, immunology, astronomy or multinational capital, the matrix is the emergent paradigm, but it is only in the arts that the nature of this shape itself is being interrogated. The most apparent structural refiguration in this revolution by the new media arts is the birth of a new visual perspective necessary for navigating the deluge of information in the spatial networks of virtuality.

Perspective is a technology or tool for mapping an idealized relationship between our vision, our perception and an object in the distance. What too is memory if not an interior place in space with an ideal perspective on the temporal--past, present or future? Where traditional, linear perspective required a stationary viewer (as positioned by technologies like Alberti's window), the multiversal or quantum perspective of the network, like the quantum of action, assumes a spectator who looks everywhere at once, assumes a spectator both situated and in motion. This is, of course, a more realistic reading of our place and situation in the world than Quattrocentro perspective artists ever imagined. Even Maurice Merleau-Ponty observed in his opus Phenomenology of Perception that our perception of our world is dynamic, with change presupposing a situation, and time presupposing perspective (411). In the matrices of the archival text, time too has shifted to become part of spatialized perspective, foregrounding temporal structure and contingency as the defining qualities of the work. From their own unique viewpoints, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and Vilém Flusser have all documented the visual and discursive revolutions, the paradigm shift, that Western civilization is undergoing as a result of technological change. This shift is not just temporal, but technological as well. In another age, literacy and the printed book in particular marked a transition from oral to written culture that wholly transformed human consciousness. The book imposed temporality on the word, Ong argues, making it appear to be finite and making words seem to be authoritative. The author within such a technological framework of information dissemination became a monolithic authority, a construct, whose power was indisputable within the concrete space of the printed page. This shift away from orality led to the birth of history and the sciences, codification, classification, hierarchies and other linear methods of ordering knowledge. The electronic media, however, have changed these concerns emphatically. Birthing McLuhan's acoustic space, they have moved us out of a mindframe that contained our thoughts, have burst the bindings on the monolithic book and binary forms of thinking, and have come to allow us to experience a new structuring of our attention: a new kind of listening. This new attention is an embodiment of McLuhan's view of media as the 'extensions of man': an externalization of the senses--his uttering or outering of all of the senses at once--that the electronic media have wrought on us and on our bodies.

All of these models--from Ong's to McLuhan's to Ulmer's--unfortunately embody an innate flaw. These theories all use literacies --from oral to print to media--as their governing paradigm and, as a result, all have an inherent print bias built into them. By definition therefore, they cannot span the full complexity of embodied human communications. Our communications networks, f2f and virtual alike, are clearly interfaces that we use to navigate a matrix of gestures, signs, words, images and electronic signals. A German communications theorist and member of the Frankfurt School, Vilèm Flusser puts forward a different model that will be more useful to us here. He sees the primary media--that is our first mode of communication--not as a less evolved form of communication like orality [2], but instead sees the foundational form as gesture. To apprehend is to seize or to grasp--etymologically it means literally to lay hold of--and so this act of grasping and abstracting information is central in Flusser's thinking to how we make sense of the world. To my mind though, this is still an incomplete model. For one thing, writing in all cultures was born of the need to keep inventories, accountings and genealogies. Numeracy, therefore, must have an integral place in this model that has never been addressed. As well, the photograph in the 19th century enacted a transformation on how we comprehend the world that was as earthshaking and as transformative as the alphabet in its day. To speak of visual literacy, however, is semantically nonsensical and again demotes another form to a lower rung on the literacy ladder. Images are best understood in terms of semiotics or more exactly visual semiosis. The electronic media have wrought another transformation on how we communicate and once more about numbers. The need to crunch numbers and store information gives birth to the computer. It is the addition of mathematics to the model though--conceptual modeling--that births yet another new visual interface of communication: gestural semiosis or interactivity. Flusser identifies this latest paradigm shift as the 'end' of history. More tempered in his views than McLuhan, Flusser believes that, as children of the digital age, we are entering an era of what he calls 'post-history'--for, history as a science was born of writing. This new visual--and highly self-conscious--form of history is what he calls 'unimaginable' in 1983 and what we might call 'multimedia' or 'interactive' or 'multiversal' or 'spatialized' or 'informational' two decades later.

Living in the shadow of the Information Age (as Marshall McLuhan dubbed our current era) memory gets stored spatially rather than being written, and information, like time, is largely invisible to us--it has acquired a kind of transparency. Like language or sight, information is both a given and an undifferentiated force whose presence is rarely problematized or scrutinized. What is information? First, it might be useful at the outset to re-examine two words that are often erroneously used interchangeably with information: knowledge and data. Knowledge is information that we have learned, skills or facts we know and can apply. Knowledge is application. Data is quite different; it is the machine language we use to talk to computers, and the language with which they talk to themselves and each other. Any data they produce must be interpreted and transcoded--or processed--into information [3]. Claude Shannon, an engineer working for Bell Labs in the 1940s, originally construed information, unlike knowledge and data, as something that was transparent and meaningless. It was literally a separation of meaning and message. Information is a social matrix or network incorporating all perspectives and linking, in essence, all subjectivities; it is how we communicate with each other in an age of broad-sweeping technological mediation, and how we move through information space as subjects is what defines the environment's shape. In "A White Paper on Information," Matt Kirschenbaum argues that, despite Shannon's original formula, information has in fact come to acquire meaning. Even Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, argued that information was a 'pattern of organization' and Kirschenbaum says that information has become aestheticized and has assumed a recognizable form. Data is now visualized in identifiable structures and shapes: "at precisely the moment data becomes invested with visual form as information, so too does it assume a cloak of representational artifice, thus taking its place in the multifaceted media array that has defined the popular contexts of the Information Age" (Kirschenbaum I). Furthermore, Kirschenbaum believes that information has come to be embodied as contemporary culture: advertising, television, film, the WWW and the digital arts (II). Clearly the new electronic forms like hypertext and hypermedia are shouldering a large portion of the paradigm of cultural representation and can help us gain perspective on the breakneck change and crushing burden of information that is piling up around us.

How we move through information space, particularly in the network of the electronic novel, is what defines its meanings, connections and dimensions, for, connectivity and context are what make information valuable once it fulfills its role as a medium of exchange and is applied as (embodied) knowledge, or transcoded into data. It is especially significant how radically our conception of information alters once it becomes something that we can visualize, something aestheticized, something that we can move through and navigate via links in electronic spaces, rather than something whose arrival we passively await. Shannon's (and later Weaver's) idea of information was an attempt to quantify a scientific theory and lay the foundation for a new technology of communication. He defined 'information' as "a function of probability" by defining it in relational terms (Hayles, 1987, 24). Sidestepping the complexities of quantifying information through its internal differences to other possible messages, rather than through its external context, he worked from the assumption that the information content was constant (Hayles, 1987, 25): "Thus the first, and perhaps the most crucial, move in the information revolution was to separate text from context. Without this stratagem, information technology as we know it could not have come into being" (Hayles, 1987, 25). Shannon separated text from context (and from all ties to situatedness or historicity) by defining it as a probability function, and over time information has come to be measured in bits. A bit is like a particle: it is the smallest unit of information possible--even its name is foreshortened, from binary digit--and the mode of its storage. Nicholas Negroponte describes it as without colour, dimension or mass, and moving at light speed: "It is the smallest atomic element in the DNA of information. It is a state of being: on or off, true or false, up or down, in or out, black or white. For practical purposes we consider a bit to be a 1 or a 0. The meaning of the 1 or the 0 is a separate matter" (14). While the speedy bit's ontology may always be in a state of flux, its instantaneous transmission is independent of the content of the message. This separation of meaning and content in the informational landscape is the trademark of the latest information revolution. I say latest because each time a technology or new media has transformed Western society it has wrought a paradigm shift of immense proportions.

According to media theorist Derrick de Kerckhove in Connected Intelligence, this last revolution is the fifth Western culture has undergone. The first--alphabetic writing--marked the separation of speech from print. The second was the invention of the printing press with its moveable type--the first assembly line of sorts; it was the first use of automation in the production of culture. The third revolution came about with the advent of the mass media--radio and television--in the wake of an urban population shift. The fourth revolution, de Kerckhove says, came with the computer. The fifth--the emergence of the Information Age--is underway now: the rise of interactive media in an ongoing transition from an analog to an object-oriented, image-mapped network. It brings with it the concept of choice. It generates personalized media: faxes, cell phones, email, chat, home shopping and pay-per-view TV, the internet, net.art, the World Wide Web, multi- and hypermedia, web.art, teleconferencing, and virtual and augmented realities.

With the fifth revolution, information and the media are becoming increasingly fragmented, modular and dense, and the information/content divide continues to widen. In The Mathematical Theory of Communication published by Shannon and Warren Weaver in 1949, information is designated wholly devoid of content and entirely dependent on the individual receiver as a transcoder of meaning. This situates information firmly within the frame of subjectivity--subject to interpretation. The denser the information--what we think of as a continuum from 'no information' moving toward 'information overload'--the lesser the ability to communicate. This excess density is what we call noise or unintelligible information instead of communication. Being bombarded by information in the guise of J.G. Ballard's "invisible literature" [4]--what he calls "the paper trail of the Information Age," annual reports, magazines, ads, journals, interoffice memos, sex manuals, textbooks, etc. (qtd in Dery, n.p.)--means we must sift through increasing levels of redundancy in order to successfully locate meaning in the wealth of material. Too much redundancy--too much noise--and we are no longer able to understand, while the greater the information content, the more successful the communication. Similarly, noise is subjective: one person's noise is another's music [5]. Jargon and cultural affiliation can render meaning (even in our mother tongue) either transparent or opaque. Communication is a complicated web of networked relations. In conversation, most of what we communicate is nonverbal. Similarly, in the new media most information is dynamic, sensory, extra-textual and visual. This shift to an increasingly visual culture and visual mode of speaking is a part of the transformation apparent in the matrices of literatures of virtuality.

Sociologist Christopher Jenks has observed that vision is both a social and a cultural process, and technology--from microscopes to telescopes, spectacles to specula, cameras to computers--has long helped mediate the way we see. Where Simonides and Aristotle saw the importance of powers of visualization in how we shape our world and our memories, now we can understand that what we see and how we see are part of an interconnected system of a 'discourse network', the linguistic frame of our mediated age. Discourse network is a term coined by German communications theorist Friedrich Kittler to describe the connective structure of a technological society. Derived from poststructuralist thought, it is a map of the technology of culture, an intricate system of rules and codes that govern an historical epoch. This noisy matrix is also the defining parameter for the limits of everything that can be said and thought--and remembered--within a particular time period. Our vision, as much as our belief system, is formed by our historical perspective, our concepts of knowledge, our political structures of power and our systems of desire (Jenks "frontispiece" i) Where the vision of modernity sought to unify parts into whole systems, postmodernity finds its meaning in the sightlines between the quantized fragments and gaps of a networked system, in the converging trajectories of noise. Under postmodernism the system no longer means, but in the digital realm the wealth of connections between the gaps speak volumes.

Vision embodies a particularly insidious and virulent bias of Western culture. From Pharaoh's all-seeing eye positioned at the top of the pyramid to Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault's unblinking panopticons, the owner of the gaze has historically been the purveyor of power in the political system (Jenks 15; Walker and Chaplin 19) [6]. Martin Jay in Downcast Eyes argues that the foremost conception of vision in the west has been as a purveyor of knowledge: knowledge calls for "an immaterial vision, understood not as sight of the eyeballs but rather 'as the allegedly pure sight of perfect and immobile forms with 'the eye of the mind'" (qtd in Wysocki, "Monitoring Order" 3). Ann Wysocki argues that academic and philosophical tracts arose from the 'seeing-through' vision Jay posited; however, it was the alphabet that initially made room for immaterial vision. Literacy and aesthetic appeal are antithetical, but there is a one to one correlation between the simplicity of an alphabet and its effectiveness as a means of dominant enculturation. This tension between aesthetics and content, and information and knowledge is what contemporary visual culture is exploring and exploiting. According to Wysocki, "the first kind of seeing and what it is meant to see--a 'pure sight of perfect and immobile forms' as [Martin] Jay put it...--thus connects with a writing, and eventually a printing and book pages, that are to be as invisible, as transparent, as possible" (Wysocki n.p.) This raises the question that if aesthetics interfere with meaning, then how does the aestheticization of information and its spaces alter the messages being conveyed and the memories that we retain like after-images on our retinas?

In medieval terms and in Gutenberg's time, the printing press sought to translate the visual knowledge of the ars memoria into a reproducible form (McLuhan, 1962, 159) and the advancement of logic toward the digital age preference for "quantification mean[t] the translation of non-visual relations and realities into visual terms, a procedure inherent in the phonetic alphabet" (McLuhan, 1962, 160). The alphabet thereby became a means for transcoding the predominant visual culture, for translating speech into a visual code so easily transported that its wide dissemination seems, in retrospect, almost inevitable (160), but it was the advent of information in its time and turn that freed text from context, rendering it in its own visual terms. The uniformity of the alphabet both breeds and silences dissent, becoming the chief weapon of religion, empire and cultural domination, and the germ for the (allegedly) monolithic subject inherent in the cult of authorship.

Of course, we have come full circle now in an information age and, as in the era predating the printing press, the eye and the image are once again privileged above the word. Advertising, the primary disseminator of information in our time, is "designed to arrest the gaze and capture attention" (Virilio, 2000, 44). The monolithic subject, unary perspective and authoritative authorial gaze, harshly critiqued, are losing their primacy. Feminist film theorists are one group who have challenged the gaze as a patriarchal weapon that enacts women's (and other outsider groups') objectification and oppression. Laura Mulvey argues that the male gaze structures the psychology of mainstream Hollywood cinema and that the angle of the camera genders the gaze to create visual pleasure. In other words, films have traditionally been created for male viewers, for male audiences. Viewers cannot see what they want to see--instead the gaze is directed or prescribed by the camera itself. A narrative follows the fate of the hero, forcing us to see everything through his eyes, and transforming the act of looking into the violation of voyeurism. Like visual perspective, the cinematic gaze is an idealized point of view, seen from a fixed point by a god-like, detached observer (Hughes, 1991, 17).

Scientific technology has also frozen the gaze into a state of clinical detachment, and the look of both the artist and scientist have been entirely co-opted, according to Virilio, by the technologies of capitalist blindness, a legacy of "the combined industrialization of perception and information" (Virilio, 2000, 57). The resulting 'cold perception' of the scientific gaze has been aestheticized, normalized and peddled as a commodity in its own right (Virilio, 2000, 57) and the detachment of the camera is being revealed in a whole new light as soldiers' souvenir snaps emerge from Abu Ghraib. The power of the gaze derives from looking at an objectified being who is unaware of the scrutiny, and women within the visual medium are thereby reduced to objects to be looked at, translated into fetish objects. To combat the translation of female subject into object, feminist radicals among others strove to create a 'visibility politics' in the 1970s and 80s (Phalen 6). Inscribing gender, class, race and queerness as markers of difference, they wore their chosen identity, or identifiers at least, as a statement of their right to political power. Such a performative stance, what Peggy Phalen calls 'an ideology of the visible,' not only erases ambiguity, difference and imposes a new kind of limited subjectivity in place of the all-seeing eye of surveillance (Phalen 7), but it also fails to garner representational or economic power. As Phalen has observed, "If representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked young white women would be running Western culture" (10).

An alternate model that reclaims vision for its owner is the flâneur (who I will transgender female for our purposes here). Charles Baudelaire's flâneur is by definition male. As with the masculine-only gaze engendered by Hollywood cinema, a flâneuse would have been inconceivable (and for a woman to assume a male gaze, to turn the lens back on herself, has implications for her seeing her own body and self as an objectified image). Doreen Massey says:

the notion of a flâneuse is impossible precisely because of the one-way-ness and the directionality of the gaze. Flâneurs observed others; they were not observed themselves. And, for reasons which link together the debate on perspective and the spatial organization of painting, and most women's exclusion from the public sphere, the modern gaze belonged (belongs?) to men (Massey 234).

Similar to the browser, the female flâneur begins to shift her own balance of power, reappropriating the gaze for personal (and urban) space, subjective time and private narrative. In cyberfeminist space, the gaze belongs to the browser and it is she who is in control of her own movement, direction and shifting orientation in space and time [7]. Similarly, just as the browser reclaims vision for the feminist flâneur, so the subaltern reclaims voice for the oppressed. The only audible means for the subjugated subaltern--by definition voiceless--to achieve consciousness and make herself heard is through transgression or an act of defiance (Das 312-313). Again, it is difficult not to draw parallels with the treatment of prisoners in Iraq. Under such a system, speaking out becomes an obscenity. In other words, it is only possible for the subaltern to assume a subject position through the agency of the obscene. Hélène Cixous has observed that for writers such a transgressive act involves "relinquishing all the lies that have helped us live" (37). The archival narratives of the feminist electronic novel seek to reclaim voice like vision in just such a way, allowing what was once unspeakable and invisible in its own place and time to become audible and visible.

This very invisibility of women's viewpoints has been extended to the groundless claim that there have been no great women artists. Where women's perspectives are devalued or unvalued, her art and alternative points of view in that art have also been erased from traditional histories. It is in the excavations of the sediments of amnesia that her artworks have been rediscovered, and her different perspectives etched. Stories of the women who were barred from creating art, who went mad at the inability to do so, or who, like the sculptor Camille Claudel, chose to destroy their work, rather than remain unacknowledged for it, abound in the annals of the art world. The right to possess her own gaze would not arrive for women in the realm of the visual arts until much later, but in the 19th century she came into her own in the memory spaces of the novel, for it was in print that mnemotechnics first acquired a feminist aesthetic. The novel is a machinery of memory that invites in conflicting voices and perspectives. The realist novel strove to create a simulated version of reality where we might enter into a scene as into a room. Immersing ourselves in a narrator's perspective, however, looms dangerously close to being directed by the all-seeing gaze of the camera. It is in explorations of memory, subjectivity and the present moment that this unary viewpoint becomes fractured--becomes fractal--within the borders of the landscape of contemporary art and literature. Perspective must first be shattered before a feminist flâneur and a mnemotechnics can arise in the new media and be understood in context.

While "ocular-centrism" (Walker and Chaplin 15) is a trademark trait of the Western world, it also is a telling watermark for measuring major shifts in thought over time. Over the centuries, perspective in art has undergone a transition from the representation of medieval thought to the scientific presentation of the world in accurate detail to the simulation of multiple worlds in simultaneous times in virtual environments. In the 19th century, a new scientific perspective was born of the lens of an impartial eye which started to extend the sense of sight technologically through the use of optics, particularly photography, to extend the limits of the body through the technologies of speed, science and medicine, and started to gain an awareness of the dynamic nature of the temporal. In that century, the growing privileging of historical context in vision and in photographs produced a new awareness of time-in-space and connection, bringing dynamics, transformation, structure and totality to the fore (Lowe 11). This new 'dimension-in-time' meant that photography came to be viewed as an objective form capable of capturing 'truths.' Still photography exposed a new dimension to perspective that had previously been barely perceptible on canvas or in life to the human eye: time.

James Gleick notes in Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything that in the latter half of the 19th century simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic the now famous still photos of movement--in America, Eadweard Muybridge's horses in motion and, in France, Jules-Étienne Marey's shots of the human gait--froze time for scientific study and exposed a whole new world. Where space is something that is easily recognized, explored and understood, time is an artificial measure of our sensory realm. It is imperceptible, lacking a "dedicated sense," as Theodor Adorno observed, and is invisible to the human eye (Walker and Chaplin 27). Photography showed that the measure of a moment was every bit as complex as the depth of field revealed by the microscope and the telescope (Gleick 60) [8]. With the revelation of such complexity in the instant of a shutter click, perspective in art began to shift to incorporate time-as-space into the newest cultural shape, into what will become the network.

The 20th century, ruled by multinational capital and shaped by electronic culture's new interfaces, had an expanded vision and new dimensions of industrial and informational noise. In The History of Bourgeois Perception, Donald Lowe states that in the modern era time and space lose their status as absolutes and, becoming subjective, reveal a new epistemic order that is systemic and synchronic (Lowe 11). I would argue that during this period space and time begin to merge on a perceptual level, as the temporal becomes spatialized, systematized and a/synchronous, and space becomes temporalized, digital and dynamic. This is where presentation loses its footing to a new way of looking (rather than gazing)--to the practice of simulation [9]. Theorist Ferdinand de Saussure also saw an arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, and the union of space-time readily embraces such illegitimate connections, including entropy and chaos, pattern and randomness, signal and noise. This 'perceptual revolution' was the result of the fracturing of perspective into multiple viewing points in the early years of the 20th century. It creates a "new perceptual field" that is "'multiperspectival and environmental'" (Lowe 14) and where linear perspective comes to be replaced by the disorientation of navigation in simulated and multidimensional space. It creates a new way of looking appropriate to the speed, shape and space of the network as it exists in the instantaneousness of now time. By uniting space and time within the framework of vision, it also takes the onus off the 'female' as the guilty chaotic element within a binary, devalued (by the patriarchy) spatial system. And, in fact, rather than privileging the temporal aspects of the system, Doreen Massey argues that time is an emergent property of a network's spatial dimensions (268).

The most dramatic transformation in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century and on into the 21st is clearly this new awareness of time. In his monumental work Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Friedrich Kittler has identified time in 1800 as something that was fixed and immobile, unchanging, whereas by 1900 it had acquired the fluid properties of a subjectivity: "a fluctuating and expanding force that altered shape according to each situation" (Heumann n.p.). In Matter and Memory (1895), French philosopher Henri Bergson also saw the shift, objecting to how the scientific world isolated time from living, and instead proposed that the duration of experience, durée, should be kept distinct from clock time. For him, duration was the movement of memory, combined with consciousness and freedom, with memory being an archival gesture: "the conservation and preservation of the past in the present" (qtd in Deleuze, 1990, 51). Almost a century after Bergson, Gilles Deleuze in Bergsonism argues that the present moment is the only time--everything else is only memory. History might well be a machine going nowhere, but for Bergson (as in the Derridean archive) the present moment is always already divided in two directions and movements: forward-looking to the future and backward-looking to the past (Deleuze, 1990, 52). (For Deleuze, time will become a rhizomatic multiplicity or a multiverse of singularities in motion existing simultaneously across many times.)

In the transition from modernism to postmodernism and beyond, there is a further stage in the transformation of space-time perspectives with an even greater emphasis on the spatial construction of a present tense temporalized form, with shifts to simulated immersive spaces, to multiperspectival constructs, to fractured structures, to fragmentation, to form as the pre-eminent concern over content. Yet it is under modernism, Malraux argues, that form as pure function becomes the value of art itself: "every great artist is a transformer of forms; the new fact was that the modern artist became aware of this, and whoever was aware of it formerly is modern in some way" (qtd in Frank 144). It is Malraux's contention that modernism's self-awareness was the product of the 19th century's newborn museum and the intellectualization of art that came with the advent of this new archival space: the museum sought to simulate the fluid structures of memory invested in cultural objects. As the 20th century schools of art (especially Cubism) exploded human figures out in many directions to capture the motion of perspective--surely as revolutionary a perspective as Giotto's introduction of a single ideal viewpoint on the tidal edge of the Renaissance--they united a montage of visual styles. In the desire to compress and interrogate time and space, Cubism depicted multiple perspectives, an assemblage of interior and exterior angles, simultaneously. As other art forms and media developed--modernism began to dismantle the novel and film arrived, notably first known as the motion picture)--representation itself entered a crisis of its own, beginning to transform into mere presentation (Lowe 113) as the picture began to be replaced by the commodified image and the cold eye of technology. Painting experienced another shift, unhinging representation from content (now better simulated by the photograph), and expanded into a disorienting absence of perspective altogether. Abstract Expressionists chose to favour noise over pattern, rejecting representative art outright--just as Gertrude Stein had already done in her abstract writings. As the temporal media came into being, they also reworked perspective to incorporate the newest dimension, the continuous present moment (something Stein advocates for in her essay, "What are Masterpieces?"), or the spatialized dimension of time.

In 1895, the same year that the Lumière brothers first transferred motion to film, British writer H.G. Wells (1866-1946) identified time as a dimension with his novel The Time Machine , and proposed that time was a space we might learn to navigate and travel through (Gleick 53). In the decade following, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) devised his special theory of relativity, further complicating our conception of time by exploring it as a dimension subject to physical forces and having its own properties. French poet Paul Valéry (1871-1945) saw the first twitches of the temporal and spatial paradigm shift from linear, print-based constructs of art to multi-faceted aesthetic engagements with form and structure complete with all of the accompanying implications for altering the creative process through interactions with different technologies [10]. The novel too became increasingly preoccupied with the nature of time, from Gertrude Stein's (1874-1946) Cubist experiments dating from 1909, to May Sinclair (1863-1946), Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957) and Virginia Woolf's (1882-1941) stream-of-consciousness novels, Marcel Proust's (1871-1922) epic in subjectivity A la recherché du temps perdu, and James Joyce's Ulysses (1882-1941) . Almost a hundred years later, we might be able to reread these texts--especially Ulysses, divided as it is into the hours of a single day, Stein's hypnotic repetitions, series and lists, and Woolf's poetic impressionist moments of duration--as explorations of not simply the continuous present moment and its sensory effects, but as studies of a precursor to 'real time'. 'Real time' is a foregrounding and spatialization of the present moment where it becomes a situated player in its own right with its own subjectivity in a work of art.  

One of the great transformations in the field of visual arts in the first half of the twentieth century was the introduction of the temporal dimension as dynamic process into artistic technique. Where Modernist art lacked the 'movement' of "narrative" and ideas implicit in conceptual art (Walker and Chaplin 27), in the 1940s Jackson Pollock experimented with Action Painting, with process performed in real time. Privileging spontaneity and the aleatory nature of the creative act , it is this introduction of movement in real time in the 1940s and 1950s by Pollock, Lucio Fontana (in Argentina who slashed his canvas), Shozo Shimamoto (in Japan who punctured his) and others that helped pave the way for other dynamic forms like Happenings, Installations, Events, process art, (Yoko Ono's) participatory events, interactive media and network culture. These forms incorporate the assumption of a 'second time' or shifting perspective into their dynamic shapes. (Marshall McLuhan too connected action painting to the changing nature of the work of art in the information age where it becomes a means of exploring new environments.) From monocular Romanticism to Victorianism to Modernism to Postmodernism to Network Culture, there has been an increased splintering of the self and of subjective perspective(s). Art critic Clement Greenberg believes that Pollock's method was a way of introducing new visual vectors into oil on canvas: Pollock's goal was "to rotate his work out of the dimension of the pictorial object altogether and, by placing his canvases on the floor, to transform the whole project of art from making objects, in their increasingly reified form, to articulating the vectors that connect objects to subjects" (Krauss 26). In short, Pollock was drawing the viewer into his frame, was forging a connection between the eye and object being looked at. Greenberg also saw the potential in the new method for opening painting to a view "'beyond'" the frame, to a place beyond where it is possible to see within the work of art (Krauss 58) and into the matrix of the infinite. Modernist art critic Herbert Read sees non-objective art as " the creation of a 'new order of reality'" and "a crucial expression of the modern psyche" (Frank 173). Psychology, like science, the museum, visual art, and technology, has to have had a tremendous impact on how we see ourselves and our world. Contemporary physics, Read argues, informs the "concrete representation of the elements of space and time" (Frank 175), just as art and subjectivities do.

Where the 19th century had given rise to the museum as a mnemonic contextualization of objet d'art in space and time, in the 20th century the museum and the gallery came to be seen as antithetical to the living practice of art as a dynamic process. Both show spaces were designed for the preservation of art as a static thing and tended to privilege hermetically-sealed mindsets that saw the work of art as fixed. By precluding time and movement, the gallery not only re-imposed the monolithic gaze of a singular subject, but also made the museum-goer a "silent witness" to the atrocities and desecrations of the cultural plunders of imperialism (Virilio, 2000, 46). In the 60s and 70s where political protest came to the fore in all areas of society, art like life came to demand live bodies and active participation rather than passive spectatorship. Arising out of their desire to experiment with objects in space (rather than from a desire to liberate the audience from the work of art or frame of spectatorship), Allan Kaprow (b. 1927), Claes Oldenburg (b.1929) and Jim Dine (b. 1935) set out to create Environments and Happenings for the practice of art in real time. In an article on Jackson Pollock's legacy written in 1956, Kaprow argued that "the arena created by American action painting led artists first to [create] assemblages and ultimately to three-dimensional spaces, or Environments" (qtd in Reiss 8). Assemblages were generally small in scale and used objects that were intended to be handled; Environments incorporated the spectator's body in space in the present moment as a dynamic component of the work. His works are pioneering experiments in interactivity, even if they incorporate the interactor more as a component of the work rather than by freeing the user to interact independently (Dinkla 282). In fact, Kaprow called for the outright elimination of the audience so that it could be modeled as material (Kaprow 313). As the subjective experience of art as a (scripted, at this point in time) praxis of engagement became more and more important, so the transitory nature of experience that survived only in a participant's memory (Reiss 34) was privileged over the archivability of the Environment itself. Kaprow, Oldenburg and Dine all used ' junk aesthetics' too, with disposable or perishable materials that were not salvageable after a showing (Reiss 21), underlining the short-term nature of the work.

As Kaprow's work developed, his Environments continued to privilege participatory interaction and gradually acquired theatrical elements. Not to be confused with theatre or performance art, these Happenings were improvised in the moment like children's imaginative play (Reiss 27) while following the parameters of a predefined script. (Not insignificantly, Janet Murray in Hamlet on the Holodeck posits an ideal model for the new forms of interactive narrative that is also based on child's play.) More important to the realm of art was the very intangibility, or virtual nature, of a Happening. It cannot be purchased, collected or archived for posterity (Reiss 28). Events persist only in the interiors of a viewer's memory like our experience of browsing an electronic text. Dick Higgins has defined Happenings as one of the 'intermedia' along with Conceptual Art, Mail Art, Fluxus (objects + cinema + performance), and Concrete Poetry, among others (Higgins). These are media that traverse boundaries between forms, including image and text and creator and interactor, and that as a result of embodying an ongoing principle of flux or movement are difficult to define or pin down. In just such a fashion, Kaprow's Environments were modular--particularly Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hoffman --and traveled like components in a do-it-yourself kit. Push and Pull was composed of a sequence of instructions assembled according to the whims of the viewer. The visitor was supposed to rearrange the furniture to their liking and each exhibitor was supposed to figure out how to put it the exhibit as a whole together based on his directives. The hope was that each would do it differently. He told each curator:

Each exhibitor has the right to set up the Environment-Happening or disregard it. Either he may do it himself or appoint some person to do it for him. ... I am most interested in the handshake between the artist and others. The museum or gallery director can now be instrumental in bringing this about (qtd in Reiss 31).

The museum's failure to embrace this aesthetic is evident in the fact that none of the museums that exhibited this work chose to construct an Environment from its component parts (Reiss 31). Not insignificantly, with the rise of the Internet, the handshake also becomes the means of communication between networked computers rather than people.

Other parallels between Happenings and interactive fiction are apparent in their emphasis on the multiplicities of personalized subjective engagement. Environments privilege an emotional response and require a narrative reaction (Reiss 33), but only in the browser's memory is a record of the event in space and time retained. Environments, Happenings and interactive fiction also foreground spatialized time as a player. Passive looking must be abandoned for active and engaged playing in the present moment. Situation art is by definition temporal and it was inevitable that it soon moved out of gallery space altogether to become installed in natural environments. Rosalind Krauss states: "sculpture lived in a play of perspectives...where abstract geometries are constantly submitted to the definition of a sited vision.' The notion of a sited vision places emphasis on the beholders and their experience, or perspective, that is 'the activity of the viewer's relationship to his world'" (qtd in Reiss 62). Within such a shifting realm of multiple perspectives, ultimately the spectator becomes both performer and audience (Reiss 63). This underlines the experience of the artwork as a subjective and metatextual one within the framework of organic or disposable art--where preservation by definition kills it, destroying the works' interactive components. The rooms of a museum are an antithetical show space for minimalist sculpture and situation-based art in real time, and, in these works, space becomes an "active ingredient, not simply to be represented but to be shaped and characterized by the artist and capable of involving and merging the view and art in a situation of greater scope and scale" (Reiss 96). According to Julie Reiss, Environments gradually grew into Happenings and Happenings morphed into site-specific Installations where "one now enters the interior space of the work of art" and "a set of conditions" becomes the artwork "rather than a finite object" (Reiss 96). This was the beginning of a shift in perspective on the nature of art, but to define these different forms as an evolution is intensely problematic.

It might be more useful at this point to draw a distinction between participatory, interactive and responsive environments. Other influences beyond the artistic are legion in the development of the computer arts, and a key one here is the thinking of computer scientist and artist Myron Krueger. The father of virtual reality, Krueger defined response as a medium in its own right in interactive environments, where the computer has its own sensory interface and responses that the interactor is aware of, and where the sonic and visual systems convey a plethora of conceptual relationships (Krueger 107). And response is something that science (particularly the biological sciences) has explored for a long time. Krueger's responsive environment moves aesthetic space beyond the realm of the visual, and introduces a new kind of sensory orientation. (Responsive electronic fiction is something that we have not yet seen except in virtual reality environments, more fiction than fact so far, but responsive artistic environments have been around since the late 1960s when Krueger and Robert Rauschenberg began to experiment independently with these principles.)

If one is immersed in the work of art in the present moment, this raises the question whether it is possible to actually have a perspective on it. We might be trapped like a wasp in the surface skin on a bucket of paint. One can have a perspective on an interior space perhaps, but not on the work as a whole. Vilém Flusser said that prior to the digital network all images were surfaces--and continue to be so (70). Critic Clement Greenberg proposed a different view. He argued that a minimalist work (painting in particular) could never be truly two-dimensional because the first brushstroke created an 'optical third dimension' that introduced depth (Krauss 29). His opticality was an abstracted version of the age-old connection between aesthetic object and audience; it "now transcends the real parameters of measurable, physical space to express the purely projective powers of a preobjective level of sight: 'vision itself'" (Krauss 29). Once the gaze became measurable in infinitesimal increments, it also added movement in time to the work of art itself, creating "a perspectival rush of surfaces" that introduced the illusion of speed (Krauss 29). The look, the act of looking and the work of art thereby start to blend, and the opticality of the piece becomes inseparable from the visual and physical engagement of the browser. It might even become, as Krauss argues, a medium in its own right (30).

Issues of foresight were being addressed not just on a material level in the art world. The 1960s saw attempts by museums to be more responsive to cultural memory and to its participants in order to shake themselves free of accusations of cultural imperialism and capitalist collusion. As a result in 1968 the Museum of Modern Art first opened its space to an interactive Installation by Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925) with a voice- and sound-activated piece called Soundings. Their press release read: "Rauschenberg's requirement that the viewer participate in the creation of the work of art is a radical departure from the traditional relation between artist and audience... In Soundings , he insists that the viewer become his collaborator; without him the work does not exist" (qtd in Reiss 80). Dubbed a 'reactive environment' by Rauschenberg (Dinkla 286), it was the first responsive artwork. Without the participant's sounds to generate images, the piece remained an inert display of dull-finished, plexiglass panels. While we might equally say that an electronic novel does not exist without an interactor, in Rauschenberg's Installation a whole cluster of concepts--including performer and audience, sound and noise, surface and volume, medium and non- or post-medium, perspective and viewing space--is challenged. For, as a collaborator, the space our body occupies in real time and the Installation, which is composed of this full space in time, come together. As curator Alan Heiss put it, "many artists today do not make self-contained masterpieces; do not want to and do not try to. Nor, are they for the most part interested in neutral spaces. Rather, their work includes the space it's in; embraces it, uses it. Viewing space becomes not frame but material" (qtd in Reiss 126). This charged space, the embodied architecture of the medium-that-is-not-one, is also the Environment of the minimalist.

The term minimalism was first applied to these kinds of works in 1965 by Richard Wollheim to identify the unformed content and the interaction of the 'beholder,' as the participant was dubbed. It has two main attributes: minimalism creates an architectural environment that privileges the space surrounding the components, and it requires audience interaction (Reiss 51). Sculpture in this style was celebrated for creating a Situation rather than a theatrical space, a Situation that demanded a response by the interactor in space and time. This is the utilization of a Baroque aesthetic that we see in Installation art, and in the electronic novel, and the dynamic nature of the artwork as the browser moves inside it is a trademark of minimalism. Site-specific art is by definition situated [11] or placed. While the art object occupies space and the browser enacts spatial practices, the place is, according to de Certeau, the structured and structuring system that is engendered by the interplay of spatial practices (Kaye 3): space "occurs as the effect produced by the operations [of the body] that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programmes" (de Certeau 117). Space is in flux. It is always changing and "different and incompatible spaces may realize various possibilities of a single place"; however, "a single 'place' will be realized in successive, multiple and even irreconcilable spaces" (Kaye 5).

The paradoxical and dynamic nature of the experience of minimalism in the present moment troubles perspective or opticality in complicated ways. According to Donald Crimp, the site-specificity of the work displaces the "viewer's attention" toward the space "both she and the art occupy" (Kaye 2). In doing this, the minimalist work creates a meta-perspective, "a self-conscious perception in which the viewer confronts her own effort 'to locate, to place' the work and so her own acting out of the gallery's function as the place for viewing" (Kaye 2). The electronic text also performs precisely this effect in real time in virtual space--hence the hue and cry by its critics about the so-called confusing nature of the form [12]. Crimp argues that the truly radical effect of minimalism was not contained in its displacement of the subject as such, but in wedding the artwork to its environment (Kaye 2). This is a function of its overloaded collage attributes. Alternately, critic Michael Fried situates minimalism's importance closer to that of Happenings. He finds its key attributes in its ability to join situated objects with the beholder in space-time. The electronic text cannot exist without its browser either, but the new media arts take this attribute further. This coupling is literalized in the present moment in the electronic medium as the art, environment and browser become interwoven and interdependent components in virtual space. Minimalist art "questions its status as both sculpture and performance" (Kaye 3), just as the electronic text is not literature, art, Installation, sculpture or performance but some hybrid of all these things. Furthermore, not only is perspective situated in a self-reflexive context, in the ironic gap, but minimalism actually reflects and reverses the gaze of the browser, according to de Certeau, turning it back on the interactor herself in the here and now, and creating a mnemonic state of sensory overload (Kaye 7). In the site-specific artwork, either real or virtual, the work of art cannot be separated from the act of looking or the act of looking from the artwork because the encounter always must take place in real time (Kaye 30). Minimalist Robert Morris explains, "Our encounter with objects in space forces us to reflect on our selves, which can never become 'other,' which can never become objects for our external examination. In the domain of real space the subject-object dilemma can never be resolved" (qtd in Kaye 30). The more fractal our subjectivity, the more situated we are and the more attached we are to our sense of self in time.

Minimalism was not the only approach to audience-artist perspectives at this time. Where Stella and Kaprow reintroduced the materiality of the world back into their art, Rauschenberg moved from the production of art into the realm of its reproduction through hybrid forms of printing, as has been documented by Douglas Crimp (53). Similar to the rejection of art as a commodity under realism and with the seemingly infinite multiplication and quantisation of the ideal perspective by Andy Warhol and others, perspective becomes redundant as subjectivity further fractures and form supercedes content altogether. The viewing space is once again material for the view. Dynamic fragmentation born of machine technology was also plainly evident to Marshall McLuhan in the1960s, fifteen years before the first PC graced anyone's desktop (1964, 23). Breaking up the linear structures that had derived from print, digital technologies encourage a shattering of space into networked configurations (McLuhan, 1964, 27). Our increasingly fractal sense of time has become more spatial as the increments we can measure get further subdivided. The sense of progress and direction that previously arrived with time's arrow has erupted like a fireworks display, exploding into an experience of sensory disorientation and a present tense immersion in a constellated spatial environment. This trend is apparent in artistic experiments which break out of the frame of the painting--from Jasper Johns's (b. 1930) mixed media flags and targets that preceded Pop Art, to Roy Lichtenstein's (1923-1997) cartoon-inspired sculptures to Robert Rauschenberg's assemblages or 'combines', mergings of painting and sculpture, text and image--and in artist's books which break the bindings of print. In the1980s as painting re-emerged as the result of a booming art market (Reiss 132), Frank Stella reintroduced spatial perspective and dynamic concepts to his Minimalist works, in an effort to reclaim the lost depth of abstraction: "'the colors turn around and there are a lot of parts moving. So it's about action and motion--... ' 'By and large, the paintings are actually static. It is the artist who sets it up so you can have the experience of motion and action, space and light, in the painting'" (qtd in Wolfson). These paintings exist in multidimensional space as a state of information overload, extending out from the wall and requiring the viewer to step into the perspectival space of the work [13] just as the virtual spaces of the new media do. While the drama in Stella's works remains in the abstract bombarding the senses from every direction, he uses multidimensionality to create immersive environments for the practice of real time navigation by his viewers. This is multiplicity made flesh.

In physics, multiplicity goes by the name of quantisation. It is a condition where the quantities of an observed substance do not exist continuously, but instead come in discrete packets or lumps known as quanta. In the hypertextual spaces of the literature of the new media, we see this kind of molecular structure in textual interfaces. Our navigational tools in the architecture of these texts are particularized in organizational formats conducive to accessing large quantities of information like the phrenological map in Jackson's Patchwork Girl or the mandala in Coverley's Califia . These are texts that are said to change every time you read them for there is no or little predetermined order of engagement beyond the interface structure. This privileges multiplicity and the state of duration [14]. In the Patchwork Girl 's retelling of Frankenstein from the perspective of the unborn female monster, there are many narrative voices besides her own. The monster is also narrated from fractal perspectives, in pieces, by her own viewpoints on alternate plotlines, by the owners of her original body parts, and by voices from other sources and from other books who pop in to speak for themselves. The chorus of voices becomes molecular or quantized with each node--each screen, the electronic equivalent of a page--broken into dynamic and bite-sized pieces. In Bergsonism, Deleuze says that memory and subjectivities are composed of clusters of irreducible elements, "the One is already multiple" (43-44) [15], what we might think of as quanta in this context, and this trend is, of course, happening in all media. Films too have been remediated by the defining feature of the new media and are more frequently using split screens and introducing multiple perspectives or timelines, as in Memento or Run Lola Run or The Pillow Book.

If we apply this molecular structural model of quantisation to a literary text, we get the acknowledgement that each speaker's beliefs and experiences are not composed of isolated incidents, but instead that they come in discrete units that are interconnected as a part of a paradoxically subjective matrix. Each linkage is a rupture or disruption, and situatedness is realized through mouse clicking gestures of dislocation. Let me clarify this paradox. In the new media, we navigate from node to node via links. Each link we take produces connection through dislocation in perspective; it propels us outward, or onward at least, in space and time. The labyrinthine universe of the quantum feminist text might, therefore, be seen as a web representing, like Indra's net, the connectedness of all things. Like the universe, the nodes of the networked text always exist connected in time and multidimensional space, starting into wakefulness when we activate a link and engage with the material in the present. Each node in space can therefore also represent a particular subjectivity--in short, a unique perspective or point of view--and thereby birth fractal subjectivities within the text. It is this union of node as both perspective and place (in de Certeau's sense) that engenders situated knowledges for a self-reflexive browser of the networked text. Constantly in motion as she moves from place to place and in flux with perspective perpetually changing, a browser practicing situated knowledges is not an oppositional thinker, but "rather one that views discourse as a positive, multilayered network of power relations" with power thereby becoming "the name for a complex set of interconnections" (Braidotti 76). Each browser in such a textual space becomes a member of the collective of the text (and its audience) while also occupying a gradient position as a unique individual, and each step through the textual space garners her power over and self-awareness of her own perspective. This conglomerate of unique viewpoints is multiplied exponentially by the fractal vision of the browser at each place she makes a choice in the matrix: she is always looking in multiple places while always only occupying a single point in time. What could dissolve into the panic of information overload instead has the potential to become informed positioning or what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call "molecular politics" (279) or "becoming-molecular" (277), a state of being rooted in intensity. Intensity, like the senses, can only exist in an embodied state in the immersion of the present moment. Being molecular is being multiple in 'now' time.

Time-as-space, in the aesthetic dimension of the Information Age, becomes something visual that we move through. It is narrative space, the space of our cartographic impulses, the accounting of our journey. Time in memory, in the electronic text and in information space, like in outer space, follows vectors and flows and revisited places rather than linear lines, that is trajectories, since 'forward' and 'backward' have no meaning when the only constant point of reference, the only situated perspective is one's self. Narrative itself is by definition a movement in space (as in Nicole Brossard's four narratological movements). Without motion, there is no story, no passage of time, and no spatial dimension. Lev Manovich also sees dataspace navigation--the act of browsing or reading in the new media--as dynamic, being comprised of seven structural actions: link, search, sequence, hierarchize, compare, map, guide and assume agency (2001, 272). These are also the gestures of storytelling and interactive fictions are story spaces that we move through. For Jean Baudrillard, the modernist shift in perspective was first and foremost about movement: "'The work of art ... becomes a projectile. It plunges in on the spectator.' ... The images fragment perception into successive sequences, into stimuli toward which there can be only instantaneous response, yes or no" (1983, 119). It might be more revealing at this point to freeze-frame our gaze in order to consider the visual arts for some further direction. Japanese designer Yuichiro Kojiro, for instance, defines the forms of Japanese art by plotting them as coordinates along axes of climate and space, and history and time. These forms share four properties--materials, techne (what Kojiro calls 'hand'), purpose or use-value, and the conceptual framework of its design, its idea (15). Within that framework of shared goals, four different forms emerge: Forms of Unity (comprised of continuation, union, collection, arrangement, enclosure), Forms of Force (what we might call plot or architecture: support and curve), Forms of Adaptation (fluidity and naturalness) and Forms of Change (reduction, twisting, severing, transfiguration) or what we might call agency (19). All four of these forms embody not just temporal and spatial elements, but the quality of movement as well. This is not surprising given Japanese conceptualization of space as ma, something that is full of tangled and conflicting forces, something that cannot be empty, something constructed in time. Ma is a cluster of temporal networks "perceived behind everything as an undefinable musical chord, a sense of the precise interval eliciting the fullest and finest resonance" (de Kerckhove, 1995, 166).

In the Western tradition, space has generally been characterized as 'female' and therefore an empty, devalued dimension, a lesser dimension than time with its master historical narratives (Massey 259). Doreen Massey argues against the revaluation of space over time, since this inversion simply reasserts the problem of binary valuation in inverse order. All dualisms are interconnected and she advocates a relational social network and a dynamic blending between the two (260-1). Peggy Phalen calls for a politics of the unmarked performance that practices invisibility politics:

The unmarked is not spatial; nor is it temporal; it is not metaphorical; nor is it literal. It is a configuration of subjectivity which exceeds, even while informing, both the gaze and language. In the riots of sound language produces, the unmarked can be heard as silence. In the plenitude of pleasure produced by photographic vision, the unmarked can be seen as a negative (Phalen 27).

The unmarked is not empty space, but embodied silence. Similarly, science sees this emptiness as charged, as measured space, and as a full volume. In quantum physics, like in the Japanese conception, space is always structured and never empty; it is both container and component of a host of electromagnetic and gravitational fields. This "quantum ether" (Virilio, 1991b, 137) known as a field is outside of dimensional space because its fluctuating and polarized network is a unified measure of a discursive system (Virilio, 1991b, 136). Wholly relational and subject to probability, a field is an important concept in physics. It is a dynamic space where every point is in flux and has a quantifiable measure of force, energy and information [16].  

For Paul Virilio, depth of field in cinema is paralleled by a similarly complex "depth of time" in the new media (Virilio, 1991b, 31, 34). In film, depth of field is the measure of the lines of light, of the focal distance for a background shot. Similarly, for electronic media, we can limit the depth of our search: "we can decide how far back we want to go, how deep in time, just as we can decide how defined, how prepackaged or open-ended, that information should be" (de Kerckhove, 1997, 84). For Gilles Deleuze, depth of field is a rendition of mnemonic space: "depth of field creates a certain type of direct time-image that can be defined by memory, virtual regions of past..." (1989, 109). This is virtual, not actual, space: "This would be less a function of reality," Deleuze continues, "than a function of remembering, of temporalization; not exactly a recollection, but 'an invitation to recollect'" (1989, 109). In virtual space where entropy rules, the dynamic nature of the temporal becomes experiential and fractal, continually changing direction or, as the McLuhans argue, time becomes spatialized where "time itself has become an additional fourth dimension of space in which all events, 'past,' 'present' and 'future'" are "juxtaposed" (qtd in McLuhan and McLuhan 47).

Cultural memory, like time, is particularly difficult to see because it invests its narrative in places perceived through our sensorium--in objects, language, music and the media:

The objects belonging to a cultural heritage of a given society are never isolated bodies in a decontextualized hyperspace, nor are they self-contained objects in a post-historical era. Their symbolic significance is not contained so much in their artistic or aesthetic qualities as such, but rather in the degree to which they are part of a convincing narrative that binds the object and the viewer together in a shared system of beliefs. What the object and the audience tell each other is that their inalienable connection testifies to a continuity, which transcends the limitations of the merely individual in time (history) as well as in space (a people) (Kluitenberg, 1999, n.p.)

The media are a primary container for structuring cultural memory--becoming "its principle 'location'"-- because what they are most adept at is creating "collective narratives" (Kluitenberg, 1999, n.p.). Binding the subject with the object in a specific place in time produces contextualized narrative and situated knowledges. In fact, collective memory may be the original information space. These collective narratives give us ways of structuring our past in relation to our present and our future (and thereby endow us with strategies for living), ways of creating the 'situation awareness' air traffic controllers practice, or ways of mapping our temporal coordinates in space like the mediated information network all around us.

Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen call this information space 'the mediatrix':

Infinitely permeable and completely iterable, the mediatrix spatializes and temporalizes without being either place-bound or time-bound. Its place is anywhere, which is neither everywhere nor nowhere; its time is anytime, which is neither ephemeral nor eternal. While the space-time of the grid is a representation of the typographic space of the book, the space-time of the network is the reinscription of the spacing of the hypertext ("Netropolis" 7).

To say that the space-time of the network is the space-time of hypertext is a somewhat redundant perspective, but as Friedrich Kittler has observed, after Gertrude Stein, 'A network is a network is a network.'   The network as cultural icon is both the emergent paradigm of our time and a metaphor that feminist writers and theorists [17] have been working with for a long time. Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl tells the history of an immortal life--"a non-life without time in the aftermath of time" ("what shape")--that is interwoven with many lives, past and present. M.D. Coverley's novel Califia tells the history of a family and its myriad interconnections with the land of Southern California. Diana Reed Slattery's The Maze Game tells the history of the future and of the many lives that are plugged into the history of the Game. The spokes of the mediatrix in these networked texts are created in the act of reaching back and forth through time and space, while always occupying the present moment of our navigation, even as we retrace our steps. It is the very redundancy of the network that makes its mapping necessary. We must continue to follow our trail of breadcrumbs, hunting for forgotten memories and revisited sites, in order to make meaning.

Notes:

[1] As Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have noted, this remediation is reciprocal: old structures and media are altered by the presence of the new as well.

[2] By design under the literacy models orality is always already a poor relation of print culture.

[3] Where Ezra Pound and John Cage would have added 'understanding' to this tryptich, I assume that 'embodied knowledge' (à la Hayles) is the final element in this quartet.

[4] In A User's Guide to the Millennium (New York: Picador USA, 1996), J.G. Ballard observes that "one day in the near future, anthologies of 20th century inter-office memos" will be "as treasured as the correspondence of Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot (76)" (qtd in Dery, n.p.).

[5] Noise is a territory that has frequently been explored by the musical avant-garde, from the Futurists to John Cage to contemporary Japanese noise music. See Paul Hegarty's "Full With Noise" for an in-depth exploration of its parameters and theoretical concerns. Hegarty also argues, after Theodor Adorno, that noise is by its very nature 'unnatural' or mechanical, literally existing outside of nature, and cultural, falling outside of the accepted and expected parameters for music. Noise as music is immersive: it "becomes ambience not as you learn how to listen, or when you accept its refusal to settle, but when you are not longer in a position to accept or deny" (Hegarty n.p.). Like the new quantum perspectives, noise requires us to hear in all directions at once.

[6] In Slattery's novel The Maze Game being subjected to the Gaze is literally a fate worse than death:

Being put Under the Gaze was the ultimate punishment. Every Lifer on every level was given access to you and could watch your every move. Your scorecard told you how many were gazing you at any given moment. You heard their comments. Felt their eyes. It caused a madness incurable by the I-Virus. The final stage was a catatonic trance--total withdrawal inward. (i. 3.6-7).

[7] Doreen Massey in her work Space, Place and Gender explores how the gaze was altered and resituated in paintings by women. Drawing away from the cold eye of authority, they tended to try to pull the viewer into the space of the picture and emphasized senses beyond the visual (235-6). We might read these as early explorations of the concepts we find later in Baroque art and immersive environments.

[8] André Malraux argues that photography itself in its first100 years underwent an evolution equivalent to the transformation in perspective in Western art from Giotto to the Baroque (Frank 156-157).

[9] Jean Baudrillard's concept of simulation will be explored in the next section of this chapter.

[10] Walter Benjamin quotes Valéry in his essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction":

For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. -Paul Valéry, Pièces Sur L'Art, "La Conquete de l'ubiquité," Paris (qtd in Benjamin 217).

[11] New media artwork is an ecosystem (as I explored in the opening chapter), and systems thinking is always already situated or "contextual" (Capra 30).

[12] These fears are also manifested in the film Johnny Mnemonic where half the world's population is afflicted with a plague called NSA or the black shakes. It is caused by information overload and exposure to technology.

[13] In 1986, Jason Kaufman commented on the historical context of Stella's new practice. Stella:

describes this innovation as parallel to the advance made by Baroque painters such as Caravaggio over their Renaissance predecessors. Whereas Renaissance perspective had receded from the picture plane back toward a distant vanishing point, Baroque space penetrated the picture plane and projected outward, in front of the painting, into the viewer's space, creating gripping, environmental effects. For the first time, the spectator could feel as though he bodily joined the disciples sitting beside Christ at Emmaus, or as though he, too, stood in the royal chamber watching Velasquez paint his enormous canvas. By actually extending into the viewer's space, Stella's relief paintings invite one into their pictorial drama (Kaufman n.p.)

[14] Gilles Deleuze says that the condition of duration is the result of the fact that we always already inhabit a continuous state of multiplicity that is a meta-awareness of ourselves in time and space--pasts, presents, futures (Keller 3.1).

[15] Deleuze may also be referring to Giordano Bruno's concept of the One-Multiple.

[16] Another kind of dynamic space that is in quantum flux is intervallic space (from the root 'interval'), the space of strange attractors--and of wanderlust in the new media, a concept I will explore in Chapter 4. These are two- or three-dimensional spaces whose axes are time-encoded, being temporally out of phase with normal chronological time (Benedikt 149). We might consider this to be the quantised space of memory or of Bakhtin's chronotope, the spatialized temporal dimension of fictional worlds. Cyberspace is likewise a dynamic information field or intervallic space.

[17] The theorists include Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Sadie Plant and Sandy Stone.

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