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

positioned by electronic gadgets, the anonymous cyber-flâneur motionlessly witnesses digital
data bases through their natural propensity for omni spatiotemporal presence within the
boundaries of cyberspace.
The evolution from being an artist-flâneur in a slow world to a cyber-flâneur is a
daily occurrence for most of us. For example, experiencing a series of paintings along the
platform wall in a London Underground station, from a stationary train, has its banal
outcome. The train passenger looking out of the window notices a single discrete frame of the
series, and analyzes it according to traditional fixed semiotics. When the accelerating train
leaves the platform, the series of frames advances, creating a “durée” of a filmstrip with a
varied meaning. The impact of the Doppler Effect is noticed as in Turner‟s paintings. While
the passenger looks at his cellular phone display, or his Palm held computer, his sight and
mind quantum jumps to a global superposition, via the singularity of net hubs.
The speed of the train leaving the platform released the passenger from the attraction
of the old, slow discrete world dominated by a dichotomy between objects and subjects. The
process of acceleration of the subject‟s consciousness increased through radio and television
broadcasts, and in our time has reached its peak in cyberspace where it propagates at the finite
speed of light. This fact has led to the dramatic turning-point of the disappearance of the
traditional author, the discrete artistic object, and the art consumer, and the birth of the cyberaura
witnessed by the cyber-flâneur. The interpretation of cyber art and its cyber-aura
according to traditional iconological and iconographical tools has become irrelevant. It is now
valued according to a system of fuzzy logic, dealing with the concept of partial truth with
values ranging between “completely true” and “completely false”. The cyber-flâneur
embedded with digital gadgets can render the chaotic data of cyberspace meaningful, from a
traditional to a holistic point of view, while carrying out electronic reading mediated the by
the central hub. That ability is similar to the physical phenomenon of the Bose-Einstein
condensate of atoms of a substance uniting, at near-absolute zero temperature, to a unique
“super atom” that sustains super-fluidity and acts in symbiotic harmony, while ignoring
gravity and friction. The passenger/surfer is witnessing cyberspace as Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin‟s “noosphere“, the “sphere of human thought” as it grows towards a greater
integration and unification, culminating in the Omega Point – the maximum level of
complexity and consciousness to which the universe seems to be evolving. 6
Cyberspace demonstrates Heidegger‟s “thrownness”, and his Dasein being, when
one always finds oneself already in a certain historically conditioned spiritual and material
environment (data-sphere), in the extended world, in which the space and time of possibilities
is always unlimited. The cyber data noosphere is the domain of ephemeral8‟s Bits of My Llife
(BML 2008) video blog – Impressions of a data Flâneur”. Ephemeral8 systematically employs
his cell phone to create a video documentation “backup” of his daily life occurrences.