Virtual? What is it :/?
Space and Place: Thinking about the virtual and actual this week made me think about relationships. I have been spending a lot of time defining these terms separately. I am now trying to think through them as relational. Space exists before there is a place. I thought about space as freedom this week, but we can only understand this freedom once we make it a place. Space is freedom because it exists but it has meaning because of the story it is filled with. Wit this story space becomes place. Overall, I want to work out the relationship between space and place.
1. I think we spend a lot of time concentrating on the dialectic. The virtual and the actual tend to be viewed as separate. What about the in-between space? Instead of an either or model can we have an “and”? This may be what the Rajchman reading is raising about possibility, but I am unsure.
2. Thinking about this in-between space made me think about the De Souza e Silva article where she discusses the virtual as an extension us. But she describes this understanding as heavily contested. Is it contested because we do not have a way of talking about an in-between space? For instance, what does it mean for a transnational subject to be in Barbados but talking to someone via skype in the New York? I would argue that they are having a dual experience. What would this experience mean for belonging if they were one U.S. residents? Although the person on the other side of the computer is a representation of the real they are still experiencing it through their interaction with that space.
3. My last question is simple, what are the embodied experiences with in the virtual? I am just trying to move the virtual from the abstract. I struggled with understanding the theorizing of the virtual. Does it only exist theoretical?