futureacademy

Deleuze points to really interesting questions about technology. For example, his writings on virtuality have a certain resonsance with the field of architecture, which is interested not just in technological incorporation but also in the openness of building to futurity or virtuality. Not simple virtual technologies, but virtual buildings...This work may involve focusing on Deleuze's reading of Bergson's conception of virtuality. The possible is an already preformed version of the real. The transition from the possible to the real is a predictable one, not involving anything new or unexpected. The relationship between the virtual and the actual is one of surprise, for the virtual promises something different to the actual that it produces and always contains in it the potential for something other than the actual. Bergson is in effect a theorist of virtuality, of the openness of the future to what befalls it. This idea could be highly productive for architecture, a discipline primarily concerned with space. Architecture considers time as historical time, or past time, but it has never really thought a c concept of futurity....The virtual encompasses much more than the technological: indeed, it is the condition of the possibility of technology. It is the very condition of life, and historical development, the very milieu of technological development.

While some think of cyberspace as a world of their own, which is the fantasy of autogenesis, a sort of Frankenstein fantasy of building a body or an entire world, many women working in cyberspace - producing art or writing - have never had that fantasy. What they see instead is that computer technology provides a space, an opportunity, a promise, of the possibility of working and producing differently. It is an incredibly effective tool - something that speeds everything up, makes it look shiny, gives it a polished look, yet it also transforms how we can work. This is quite different from (and considerably more modest than) the idea of its producing another world, or the simulation of this world....Much of the appeal that cyberspace holds fur those of us outside the field of fiction is simply practical: the technology enables just o do interesting things quickly and simply.

This [cyberspace] can't be your only space. This computerized or virtual space is always housed in side another space - the space of bodily dwelling. You can't be in a computer space unless you're also in another space [but for how long?]. This is why it's always only augmentational.