Without starting point, without termination or goal, a description of the infinite. Ramified surface extension, limitless plain. The rhizome, surface over surface over surface, without depth, "flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriority." Fragmentary paths. The journey without destination. A goal in itself? Or a mode of manipulation?
The Hacker Tourist (Mother Earth Mother Board) traces the laying of FLAG, a multinational enterprise to re_wire the England_Japan route in glass fibre without traversing the Americas - perhaps the largest single engineering feat to date, and by far the longest cable ever laid. Neal Stephenson examines the history of the wired earth, from the difficulties of early telegraph lines, through the varying successes of trans_Atlantic phone lines, to satellite and glass fibre networks. The world is networked near the surface of its crust, in varying degrees of density and effectiveness, with many different lines of power. Roads, cables, magnetic radiation and fields, ley lines, the tattoos of crop circles, tectonic plate lines, fences, geopolitical boundaries, rivers, coastlines, alpine ranges. Territories and seasonal migrations of animals and fish, lines of flight, navigational routes. The electronic layer has similarly fluctuating densities, varying degrees of connectivity. Major cities are focal points for the convergence of many of these lines (appearing on a global scale as nodes or points, rather than dense areas), and most often lie on the nexes of other types of networks, ancient and modern, natural and man_made. The San Andreas Fault [San Fransisco], the Silk Road [Istanbul], the Opium/Tea Triangle [HongKong], the E_Line [Uluru, the Cerne Abbas Giant]. Office blocks [contemporarily] are [macro] nodes on these data lines, and [micro] networks of airconditioning, data/phone lines, well_beaten paths to the coffee machine, social groups. At junctions and terminus lie machines and people, terminals. Destination, but more likely switching boxes. The global internet seems superficially the connection between the terminal [individual] and the original [multiple] where in actuality, the route travelled by data from one to another traverses many times more machines than these discrete end points. These junctions or switches simply route data onto the next in a rhizomatic field of machines. None of these links are fixed, and fluctuate in a pool of possible, none of them rely on any particular 'next' in order to function. If the flow is broken in this indefinite number of machines, the route is detoured through alternate lines.
A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines, a feature ultimately deriving from its roots in the old ARPANET, which was deliberately given a distributed, redundant structure so that it could survive partial nuclear destruction and the knockout of military headquarters.
Language, society and consciousness are born a hotpool of human reliance and proximity. Community. Techniques are developed to spread that community. New communities develop locally. Techniques are developed that remove face2face interaction between members. New communities develop at range, virtually. Neal Stephenson describes the breakdown of nation_states as a function of global media networks. Once commerce became decentralised as goods and services could be purchased more easily and rapidly over such a network, state power was quickly eroded as taxes and levies generated by local purchase declined. National borders dissolve after a period of new_frontierism. In place of states, phyles spring up, smaller than their predecessors and not reliant on locale for existence. Much like the franchised burb_claves of SnowCrash, phyles are essentially self_governing suburbs that each have a distinct culture and manifest in diverse geographic locations.
Families or tribes who joined together because the shared the same religious beliefs, social organisation, form of government, and modes of production created civitas - a community that was not necessarily related to any particular place or construction .... also the local mechanisms of pack, bands, groups of the rhizomic type, margins minorities, which continue to affirm the rights of segmentary societies in opposition to the organs of state power.
Opposed to urbs which are constrained/constructed given geography, extruded into smooth_becoming_striated space, generating the vertical coastline and the defence departments prohibition of the electronic export of privacy software (encryption software is classified as weapons technology) across the virtual coastline within the internet.
Architecture is most often thought of as restricted by its functionality and constructibility, and primarily defined by its function of containment; people, goods. Does the human psyche require enclosed space? "Bounded by the skin and possessing a distinct inside and outside, the body is considered a central point of reference in its relationship to the environment." However in lands of uncertainty and seeming lack of structure or rule, buildings become free of these restrictions. A percussor to the surrealists, Georgio de Chirico developed an imaginary landscape of the psychologic - of uncertain, distorted perspective, these are what he termed metaphysical paintings. Under soviet rule, the architects of the former USSR developed paper architecture, a landscape of the mind freed from the restrictions/constrictions of polit_state architecture, as well as physics and economics. In Japan, the threat of earthquake and fire has evolved another architecture of paper, buildings so weightless that they can withstand such geologic pressure, and so simply built as to be reconstructed within days. The CAD architect [for example, Herman Finsterlin] translates the fantasies of the mind and allows the machine to apply the physics to the form. Though, "to build them would require the most devious methods, which [would]utterly betray[ ] their form, beginning with careful dissection, separated molding of each part, and inglorious bolting to re_arrive at the whole..." For the architect of a future cyberspace, constructions become landmarks or icons for abstracted digital transactions, simply triggers for our visually and spatially aware conscious minds. Sites of transition, these architectures are transitory, are in transit. These virtual structures may morph dependent upon the volume, kind and how the data is being trans_acted.
Richard Serra's work (Afangar, Iceland 1991) directly references monoliths, milestones and wayfinders as landmarks, which function in the same way as do icons; simplified visual metaphors to let the cogniscent know that they are upon the sweet track. Earth and Site works use the sign_like quality of landmarks and stoneage monuments as the mimetic launch_pad for their work. "In sum, the electronic space has the fell of ancient geometric space." The work of Kasimir Malevich and El Lizzitsky is similarly iconographic, working towards irreducibles of the heptic and visible. Monumental architecture also denotes similar connotations, for example the Forbidden City, an unknown space to the larger population of China and the world for most of its lifetime, it became a symbol of power and mystery. Richard Long's work from South America in 1972, are reduced right down to iconographical drawings, symbols of works that were only ever symbols. When William Gibson described the Matrix, the first cyberspace, filled it with representations of commerce and information, simple shapes [icons]denoting place and function.
Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
Smooth space is vectorial, projective, heptic, topologic, abstract. It is moved through and experienced, not arrived at or inhabited. The rhizome at macroscopic, as an organ, as skin, is smooth, as is chaosmos at macro, infinite complexity becoming homogeneous at scale. Striated space is constructed/construed space, "..where lines or trajectories tend to be subordinated to points.." were destination is preferred over route/root, chaosmos microcosm, complexity, heterogeneity. Is the default for space, smooth? Without language, is space coded? Fluctuating space states, continual ebb and flow, coded, de_coded, re_coded, smooth_striation, striated smoothness. The internet in its primitive form, is pure code, text_ual interface over textual code. The Unix platform, text root directories. The first wave, striated. The second wave is the WorldWideWeb, graphical, moving, responding. The GUI (GraphicalUserInterface) of the radicle[radical] Macintosh desktop, iconic space, becoming seamless, becoming smooth. The third wave, currently primitive[tribal] is cyberspace Proper. Virtual reality, VRML, multiple_user, broad_band, real_time. The Rhizomatic. Smooth. Very, very smooth.