Time - space compression in cyberspace art - Signal & Image ...

most disparate data and images into one compressed new reality of annihilated in-between
spaces, and finds its highest expression in the viewer-accelerated consciousness. When timespace
is no longer experienced in Euclidian manner, the gap between original and
reproduction vanishes, as everything rolls past the train‟s coach window randomly. At the
turn of the 20th century Paul Valéry predicted: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought
into our houses from far off to satisfy our need in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be
supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple
movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.” 3
This compression effect was intensified during the 20th century by the electronic
media technology. Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media” (1964), described how the
global compression effected by the new communications reality was shaping a “global
village”:
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and
mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the
mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more
than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central
nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time
as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of
the extensions of man-the technological simulation of consciousness,
when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately
extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already
extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.
Pop culture and Pop art are reflections of the global spatiotemporal compression.
Andy Warhol, in his art, addressed typical mass-produced commodities: soups, bottles of
Coca Cola, and shoes, as well as icons of common consciousness that flood the media
channels, such as the electric chair, Marilyn Monroe, Golda Meir, dollar bills, and more.
Madonna‟s, Jeff Koons‟ and Warhol‟s lifestyle and art promoted them as products of the
global media and as celebrities. Art became an intangible object of information and symbols
consumed globally by “one-dimensional” subjects of a “one-dimensional” global culture. The
global culture consumption act is performed at commercial centers such as malls, amusement
parks and air terminals linked to the global network of production, data and knowledge. The
global net lifestyle is an imperative to grow new organs, to expand the human sensorium and
body to some new, as yet unimaginable, and perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions. The
reflections of the traditional three-dimensional global space are converted into electronic
digital information, displayed in real time on flat television and computer screens in homes,
control rooms, and huge outdoor electronic displays like those in New York‟s Times Square
or London‟s Piccadilly Circus. Our vision, accelerated to the finite speed of light, guided by
our consciousness, controls the happenings of the real world via electronic equipment, by
making an instant “short circuit” between action and reaction. The three-dimensional linear