Download files
Abstract
Under the title “Emerging Topologies”, this thesis draws together theories conceptualising space (Michel de Certeau's tactical and strategic) and theories spatialisating concepts (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's machinic assemblages) in order to examine our contemporary experiences of the city 'augmented' by digital technology.
This thesis explores how developments in- and public adoption of- mapping, navigation, and documentation technology are leading to the emergence of new topological connections between people, technology, and environment, resulting in an everyday spatial practice that increasingly inhabits digital, virtual space.
Virtual space has been characterised variously as oppressive, emancipating, or degrees of both (Grozs, Shields, Haraway). This thesis argues that virtual space is a 'real' space in its own right (politically, socially, phenomenologically) and that despite its rigid organisation, propositional logic, and digital representation, it provides a strategic territory just as open to tactical inhabitation as the conventional built environment.
Building on the author's training as a computer scientist and artist, software was developed to map, scan, and visualise physical space, and virtual environments were created and explored as potential sites for both poetic, creative expression and rationalisation, digitising, and ordering of space.
The emerging topologies of body-technology-environment, as formations of new machinic assemblages, can dramatically disrupt the landscape around them but – as this thesis demonstrates – they may not remain 'in flight' for long. Tours solidify into maps.
Early experiments into mapping tactical spatial practices offered valuable insight into the ease with which virtual space can be reterritorialised: my first attempt at an engagement with local graffiti practice (authoring a public, real-time map of graffiti using Google Maps) became mobilised against it, facilitating the logistical work of council clean-up crews. However, occasionally practices can remain temporarily autonomous from strategic control, tracing alternative, speculative spaces. I demonstrate that while the tactical practices of everyday life are being increasingly mapped, it is always possible to make poetic journeys across the mapped territory, whether city, virtual environment, or text.