« Span of management | Home | The microprocessing »
Space as Process
By admin | June 18, 2009
The space that we experience as living space is space of action, orientation, and
communication. Space is not something finished, but something that devel— ops in form and content always anew. It happens through action. Space is an endless series of events that take place in their respective present and are never completed. We are confronted by the problems associated with the space that we perceive, that we appropriate, that we exploit as a resource, and that we use for social interaction and communication. For us, space is urban space, landscape space, public and private space, and space that is constantly transformed by our use of it; space that we either overcome as distance or eliminate by means of communication; space that we imagine in our minds and that we simulate and generate as virtual space.
The sensory perception of space is physiologically limited. From this point of view, our living space appears to be a curved layer wrapped around the earth. If we include the atmosphere, aeronautics, and satellite technology, the height of this might amount to a few kilometers. If we take into consideration only what is directly connected to the earth’s surface, namely our action space above and—to an extent—below ground, this layer is at most only a few hundred meters thick, and normally only ten to fifteen meters thick, The space of an individual’s direct field of action and range of vision is usually limited in height to less than four meters and in depth to extremely short distances. Despite being such fundamental categories for the normal understanding of space or geometry, distance and size are scarcely of importance for the transmission of information today.
Topics: reference |