Video:

Travels in Outer Place

In less than five years, in Internet venues ranging from Google Earth to Yahoo Placemaker, a technological leap into our apprehension of physical landscape has occurred that both advances the kinds of spatial/temporal dislocations and alienations of the industrial age and takes us ›virtually‹ back to a time when we could relate deeply to a single given place. For this talk, I’d like to discuss how new on-line iterations of place are amalgamating pre-modern and modern modes of perception: pre-modern community where people communicated and derived meaning through intensive, full-sensory encounters with their locale; modern society where the sources and venues of information and communication exploded and yet where individuals favored centralized, advertised and mediatized attractions over the ordinary environment. Contemporary on-line civilization is even further distanced from in-place encounters, yet becoming individual producer/consumers of dense, open-source information targeted anyplace.