Since the emergence of Big Data and machine learning methods developed to tackle it, the modelling of reality has undergone a significant change. While the immersive experience of the digital realm, facilitated through environments such as Metaverse spaces, is heading towards a unity between the real and the digital, the interconnectivity of the two systems - the human and the machine - remains turbulent. The contemporary cyberspace is increasingly complex and despite its many new interfaces, remains unattainable. Within its infinite territory, its "abstract space of an augmented mind",1 vast amounts of data are interpreted, empowering decision-making algorithms that manage the very fabric of our reality.
"Constructing for virtual interfaces." ©Gosia Starzyńska, 2014.
Production of Big Data or, as Antoinette Rouvroy and Bernard Stiegler refer to it, "raw data", became a process of "cancelling out any meaning"2 in an attempt to single out the contents from its context. Here, the physical world became reduced to its seemingly objective representation; the physical environment modelled into its statistics, human behaviour into patterns and data points. These processes are not simply supported by the mathematisation and rationality of decision-making but, instead, they become amplified within the structures of cyberspace.
With the emergence of the Metaverse, representation of cyberspace now provides a fully immersive experience expanded by the AR and VR technologies, catering to virtual collaboration in work, play and pleasure.
"Full automation means that human agency can be almost completely designed out of decision-making processes – even though the extent to which this happens varies in practice."3
The world becomes its calculable representation. Marc Schuilenburg and Rik Peeters (2020) as well as Antoinette Rouvroy and Bernard Stiegler (2016) argue that, by creating an external sense of objectivity, humans have slowly become superfluous in the ruling of the organisational and administrative procedures. In the process where the paradigm of truth has leapt from a human-centric use of mathematical models to machine-deduced patterns of relations, cyberspace has risen as an interface between data and the truth that it embodies. In this cleaned, isolated reality, the knowledge is no longer produced but discovered.4 Through its governing powers, cyberspace does not simply mimic reality nor holds its multiple representations of the physical space.5 Instead, it is a territory in its own right, a virtual model that influences the physical world via its tangible impact; it is a product of relations that it facilitates.
"Constructing for virtual interfaces", detail. ©Gosia Starzyńska, 2014.
In the realm that lies beyond a typical space and time experience, processing information that transcends boundaries set by the physical geographies means navigating an ever-expanding datascape.
With the emergence of the Metaverse, representation of cyberspace now provides a fully immersive experience expanded by the AR and VR technologies, catering to virtual collaboration in work, play and pleasure.6 We can look at cyberspace through its multiple windows - visual and numerical aids that arrange pure data into familiar images - but it is impossible to experience its processes in their actuality. In the realm that lies beyond a typical space and time experience, processing information that transcends boundaries set by the physical geographies means navigating an ever-expanding datascape. With its scale, volume and velocity, these cognitive acts escape human abilities. The only hope to gain any agency within the processes of cyberspace is to understand what constitutes those intricate relationships.
Cyberspace's "liquid architecture" is a form that escapes laws of physics, the geographical spatiality and its permanence.
"Hello, World. Interaction Through Code". Basic “hello word” script run in Command Prompt. ©Gosia Starzyńska, 2022.
Over two decades ago Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin in their book titled Mapping Cyberspace (2000) argued that space, both physical and cyber, is a product of interactions that happen within it. Space, or rather spatiality, results from relations and interactions between objects and their context.7 Today, when the building blocks are Big Data and algorithms, those relations are constantly in flux. Dodge and Kitchin recalled Novak's poetic description of cyberspace's "liquid architecture", a form that escapes laws of physics, the geographical spatiality and its permanence. Today, as each of its limitless dimensions strives for infinity, cyberspace still remains unattainable, arguably even more so. It is simultaneously a territory and a map of itself; a map of interactive spatiality designed to be navigated through a part of itself; its links, references and code.8
We try to make sense of the map of cyberspace through new technologies or by creating virtual environments such as the Metaverse, yet the ability to truly understand its territory escapes us.
"Mapping non-human vision." Visualising activations of convolutional neural network. ©Gosia Starzyńska, 2020.
The way to control cyberspace is not through increasingly more immersive representations of its contents, but through the architecture of its processes.9 To construct and curate within it is to control the mechanisms of data analysis and information flow. Manipulating cyberspace cannot be achieved through just the data or code but rather through the design of the methods that feed the former through the latter. In this act lies the agency that allows for sculpting, even if only small fragments, within the infinite walls of the cyberspace's landscape.
In one of his interviews American physicist Leonard Suskind pointed out that our neurological architecture limits us from ever imagining four-dimensional space in the same way that we are not able to visualise two-dimensional planes if not suspended in a three-dimensional context.10 The same is true for cyberspace. As it has never been designed for human experience our neural architecture limits us from genuinely comprehending its spatiality. We will only ever be an observer, merely a spectator, watching this space through its multiple representations, never actually experiencing any of its many processes in a form other than through its outputs. We try to make sense of the map of cyberspace through new technologies or by creating virtual environments such as the Metaverse, yet the ability to truly understand its territory escapes us. Nevertheless, we should continue with our mapping efforts, even if only to have an illusion of control.
Read the entire "Architecture of Machine Dreams" column by Gosia Starzyńska.
Bio
Gosia Starzyńska is an architect, an educator and a current researcher at the Laboratory for Design & Machine Learning at the Royal College of Art in London. She is also an associate lecturer at Oxford Brookes University where she leads machine learning and data-driven design teaching curriculum for the Architecture Master’s degree apprenticeship course. In her research work and teaching practice, Gosia explores the transdisciplinary advancement in AI and applications of machine learning in architectural theory and practice.
Notes
1 Matteo Pasquinelli, “Anomaly Detection: The Mathematization of the Abnormal in the Metadata Society”, accessed 26 June 2022. shorturl.at/amoq2
2 Antoinette Rouvroy and Bernard Stiegler, “The Digital Regime of Truth. From the Algorithmic Governmentality to a New Rule of Law”, La Deluziana, Life And Number, no.3 (14 November 2016): 6–29, http://www.ladeleuziana.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Rouvroy-Stiegler_eng.pdf.
3 Marc Schuilenburg and Rik Peeters, eds., The Algorithmic Society: Technology, Power, and Knowledge (London ; New York: Routledge, 2020), 2.
4 Rouvroy and Stiegler, ‘The Digital Regime’, 9.
5 Cyberspace is described as an extension of physical reality by several writers. John H. Frazer refers to it as an extra dimension that allows us “to extend our mode of operation in the physical world.” (1995, 76). In Martin (2000,189) “interactions within cyberspace, whether it involves altering records, conducting business or monitoring the city, have consequences on people in real space.”
6 Lik-Hang Lee et al., “What Is the Metaverse? An Immersive Cyberspace and Open Challenges” (arXiv, 7 June 2022), https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2206.03018.
7 Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, Mapping Cyberspace, 1st edition (London ; New York: Routledge, 2000), 28.
8 Dodge and Kitchin, Mapping Cyberspace, 70-71.
9 John H. Frazer, ‘The Architectural Relevance of Cyberspace’, in Architects in Cyberspace (Wiley, 1995), 76-77.
10 Leonard Susskind, in a 2013 interview for The Economist. ‘Using Maths to Explain the Universe’, The Economist, accessed 5 July 2022, https://www.economist.com/prospero/2013/07/02/using-maths-to-explain-the-universe.
Bibliography
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