Cityspace, Cyberspace, and the Spatiology of Information By Dr. Michael L. Benedikt,

Cityspace, Cyberspace, and the Spatiology of Information
By Dr. Michael L. Benedikt

"The continuity of these two kinds of space, I will argue, is that they are both ultimately constituted by information, information spread through space and seeking, almost of itself, to maximize its own complexity and organization. The most basic discontinuity between cityspace and cyberspace exists because cityspace is bound up with the principle of least action, with energetics, with friction, gravity, occlusion, and mechanical contact. Cyberspace and what happens there is all but free of these constraints. Of particular interest to me, however, is this fact: because each space can—indeed must—be experienced at some level spatiotemporally,cyberspace, like cityspace, can be inhabited, explored, and designed. Indeed, I am going to argue
that community, economy, art, design, commerce, recreation, and other urban amenities are possible in both worlds, in the real and the virtual, in cityspace and in cyberspace" (....)

"We are in cyberspace every time we are “on the phone,”every time we use a cash machine or log into a networked computer. We are there every time we drift through a magazine, go to a movie, listen to the radio, or watch television. Indeed, virtual
worlds in the form of communities of interest and of the imaginal lives of institutions like corporations and religions have long captivated our attention as fully as has the real and“unmediated” world." (page 3)

about definitions of space

"For Plato, space was the totality of geometric relations possible, i.e. the totality of numerical facts applicable to distances and directions, and vice versa; in short, proportion. The attention to proportion that characterizes classical architecture to this day, as well as the link that still exists between ratio as a comparison of two quantities and ratio- as the prefix to words denoting reasons itself, derive from this Platonic definition. For Aristotle, space was nothing other than place, or the generalized sum and place of all places.

If Plato’s definition was geometrical, Aristotle’s was more topological: (the) place (of something), he said, was the inner surface of the first stable, environing container. The place of a chair is the room it is in, the place of a river is the riverbed, the place of the moon is the next outward celestial sphere. The Medieval period saw these views commingled; but a new and spiritual element was added. Space was light, or Spirit, or God Himself. Whence, and why else, the apparent infinitude, insubstantiality, immanence, and permanence of space? (Henderson, 1983)

By the time Descartes put his mind to the problem, space per se had become an impossibly mystical notion. Descartes brought back to it a dynamic and mechanical aspect. In classifying space and everything physical as “extension” and by opposing this to “thought,” Descartes reasoned that space was simply that which permitted mechanical motion. One atom impinged upon the other directly, like so many ball bearings but without any empty space between them. Vacuum, void, was impossible; space was full of atoms-in-contact.

Rather than specify what space is, he specified what it did: space allowed motion. Dissatisfied with only mechanical terms, Leibniz was to extend this kind of operational definition further. Space, he argued, was that which permitted not only atoms and motion but the very existence of identity and simultaneity as such. Without space, he argued, things could be neither unique nor countable. Everything would be collapsed to a single “point,” to one thing,
which is to say, to no-thing, since there would be no room for an-other thing to distinguish itself from the first.

Moreover, in order to introduce change, such as motion, and in order for there to be more than one object in motion, not only simultaneity, but also an object-identity-thatsurvives- motion is required so that the motion can be said to have happened at all. With his principle of the “Identity of Indiscernibles”—as this doctrine is called, and which we will discuss presently—Leibniz probably came closest to what we could call an information-theoretical view
of space.

Newtown, for his part, thought of space as pure vacuum, Absolute and unmoved, a plenum of nothing but positions—points—continuous and empty in every direction. This view remained largely intact for a hundred years. But by the twentieth century, space could no longer be thought of without time.
After Einstein in particular, the project enlarged to understand spacetime as the four-dimensional, fundamental “unified field” providing both the totality of all cosmic frames of reference in relative motion as well as the “substance” of reality itself as the ultimate weaving of light with gravity." (page 5)

Relationship between space and information

"The question naturally begins to arise: is information in space, or is space in information? I submit that this is a pivotal question. In fact, we are ready to take the next step, which is to explore the more radical idea that space and information are one and the same “thing.”" (page 7)

"With our modest thought experiment we found ourselves engaged in increasing the
amount of space (or time) available in order to lose no data to limited intrinsic dimensions. To the extent that each N-dimensional data-point was unique—if only by one numerical value on one dimension—we sought to maximize the display of its uniqueness. If the conservation of information necessitates the conservation of space, then the production of new information in addition necessitates the production of new space" (page 9)

about which elements gives form to space

"Space itself can have no shape of course; light scattering objects and surfaces can, and certainly this is what is really involved when architects and urban designers work so hard “to shape a space.” Walls and ceilings, buildings and trees, are positioned in such a way as to modulate experience: not just the experience of those very walls and ceilings (and buildings and trees), but the experience of the people and signs, images and machines, and so on, that move about and populate the room or cityscape. In other words, the disposition of enclosures, screens, and plays of elevation and light, etc., do more than make architectural spaces, they regulate the
presentation of the rest of the world’s contents to its inhabitants, pacing it, segmenting it, ordering it in importance, controlling its density. Any “grammar of forms” that would hope to help designers do their job would have to be one that took into account both of these functionalities: space as form(ed) qua space, and space as a medium of information transmission, where that information is itself sedimented in space in a way that tells of its sources-where they are, what they are, and even why" (page 12)