Spaces between places

There’s quite a lot of interest in abandoned places across the internet. I originally came across Subterranea Britannica on usenet when I was researching the history of capsule pipelines in London (back in the 1990s). And all manner of “urban explorers” now publish their adventures on the web. Frankly trips to places like Pripyat are altogether safer via YouTube.

I guess there are a few motivations:

Exploration, tinged with danger and escapism.
Archaeological desire to understand forgotten communities through the places they left behind. Including connecting with a fear of what society might have become.
In some cases also a reconnection with primative fears, such as being underground (Victorian culture exemplifies that best).

Some of the most interesting groups are those that seek to re-imagine these broken places artistically. There was a good example in the old Bishopsgate good yard (just outside London’s Liverpool Street), where an old concrete signal box was painted and filled with props, such that it resembled a little cottage. Completely at odds with what was a rather run down corner of London. With a strange juxtaposition to the desires of many of the commuters escaping the city to rural Essex (a paradox in itself, since so much of Essex is full of non-descript peri-urban sprawl, masquerading as the countryside).

I suspect interest in these spaces is not common to all humanity. And as such they appeal to people like you and me, who are a little bit adrift from the mainstream (in the nicest possible way).

The tendency for this stuff to show up on the internet really early hints at the bias:

In the virtual sphere, we know that the exploration archetype (from Bartle) is popular among early adopters, but alien to most, more mainstream “players”. So as much as old-skool designers think exploration is important, it isn’t. In fact it just creates demand for guide-writers! It follows that the explorers of abandoned places are similarly marginal relative to wider society.

The virtual parallels are easier to demonstrate by looking at what could be done. For example, variations on the Penrose objects (popularised by Esher) are possible, as is the reuse of space dependant on how close you are to it. Yet those occur only as software quirks – popular immersive worlds are all remarkably life-like.

The reason is probably linked Masahiro Mori’s “Uncanny Valley”, which dicates that things that trigger positive emotions are either life-like or so alien as to be unrecognisably similar to (in his original case) humans. In-between states trigger highly negative reactions.

So far I’ve observed that the people that spend the most time engaged with virtual worlds (from a thinking angle, rather than a purely addictive angle), also seem to be the most philosophical. You’re confirming the pattern :) .

Logically, that’s because their understanding of “place” and “things” is more likely to be tested. It follows that as these worlds become more popular, eventually everyone would be drawn into that way of thinking. And so the biggest single long-term impact of these worlds on society more generally would be philosophical: Potentially challenging established religions, and so on.

However, it’s also possible that only the explorers will ever need to turn to philosophy. Other people would seamlessly move between very familiar worlds, without ever considering that change more widely. Perhaps that’s essential? I suspect that not everyone could understand it, and consequently fear it. I don’t believe I understand it, and I think about it quite a lot…

As an aside, there are a few people (like Michael Shanks at Stanford) seriously looking at the issues involved in preserving virtual spaces. The parallel to abandoned spaces is perfect, because while it would be possible to store a geography of a virtual world, the thing that really made it live – the interactions between the people – cannot be recreated so easily. There’s an irony that our lives are now so well documented in the now-term, that everything is so disposable, and so we’re not creating the type of record that survives for hundreds of years.

That may be temporary: Data storage is still to expensive (and often imposes to much of a technical overhead) to write down and store absolutely everything. That will happen eventually, assuming current trends continue: The growth in internet bandwidth (Nielsen’s law) is slower than hardware (Moore’s law), so eventually you’d reach a point where the main design constrain was bandwidth, and absolutely anything you could communicate, you could also cheaply store.

(I should write more on these themes myself. Some time. Your post caused me to merge a few separate ideas that had been floating round in my head for a while…)

August 29, 2009 @ 12:44 am