Carlos Miguel Gonçalves

ALT+R-HOTKEY and the subversion of public space in web 2.0

Master dissertation defense, Lisbon, Portugal

Individuals are more and more connected with the online world in order to find informations about social life and follow artistical developments; therefore it is of crucial importance that this new public “spaces” should consider the empirical discoveries of the scientifical investigation towards the public, considering this space has become common. After looking deep into a special notion from the point of view of web 2.0 within the actual panorama, this study project analyses those that are considered the main search results of private and public within the online environment and its implications in the XXI century society. Special emphasis is given to the subversion introduced by the navigational mechanisms of the web 2.0, to the storage nature of its contents produced by cybernauts and the potential impact of the web 2.0 in the public space and citizen´s rights towards their own privacity. Web 2.0 is to innovate its notion of public space if it wants to keep its characteristics of common asset as software of the public Internet network. ALT+R+Hotkey has in itself the power to configured as an artistical practice that analyses the subversion of the public space on WEB 2.0. In 1990 the Internet Protocol Suite appears capable of reducing geographical, political, economic and artistical distances; a public space as a publically shaped place. ALT+R+Hotkey has the potential to bring in to the publical debate on web 2.0, establishing comparisons through its own network of concepts and connections: Umwelt em Jakob von Uexküll, The New Public Space in Daniel Innerarity, Low Fidelity space in Jaron Lanier and Ethnoscape in Arjun Appadurai, comparing to Alt+R+hotkey and crossing it with Public Dominion in Richard Sennett, Camuflage in Abbott Thayer as a means of a strategy of special subversion. Finally Alt+R+Hotkey is confronted with the aforementioned concepts, hence the artistical practice of this study

1. Towards an Operative Definition of Space
Space is indiscernible, said Leibniz (Leibniz apud Lefebvre, 2000, 137). Many philosophers have enshrined at once, space as absolute: it contains figures, relations, proportions and numbers. A kind of imagination where images rain inside, according to Calvin. An imagination of space, probably, made scientific in Uexküll, through the study of animal behaviour. For Uexküll, that absolute space is part of the ecological system subdivided in two: Umwelt - a subjective world-self -, and Umgebung, in absolute opposition. For Innerarity the public space is an absolutely new one; for Lanier, a low-fidelity objective self-world that transformed the particularity of musical instruments and musicians into generic and tasteless sounds; in Appadurai an escape from public space to what he calls ethnoscapes: imagined by natives on the move. In Lefebvre, that absolute space of Leibniz is occupied by bodies that indicate directions through coordinates, in gestures that mark and orient space. Lefebvre, supported by Leibniz's ideas, reaffirms that space is absolutely relative, it is endowed with abstraction that characterises it mathematically by original of concrete character, because it is in it that bodies manifest the materialism of their existence. As a way of operatively defining space from the web 2.0 point of view, this first chapter begins by distinguishing the spatial ecology in Uexküll, placing it in relation to the New Public Space in Innerarity. On the one hand, Uexküll, offers the zoological notion of Umwelt, where bodies relate through the senses, through action-marking (Merkmalträger). On the other hand, the new public space of Innerarity reveals that such Merkmalträger on the new urbanity, change the idea of democratic community, much due to the media. This big mind that transforms bodies into binary codes and consequently reconfigures them into an objective world-self in low-fidelity matter, has the capacity to model the whole society through its manipulation by means of software and data storage of its users. Finally, through Appadurai's definition of ethnoscapes, an attempt is made to clarify the notion of subversion of the order of spaces, attributing to the Alt+R-hotkey piece the character of a native in movement in an objective world. Consequently, the movement of a nativity (homing) that completely destroys the idea of social community, expelling individuals from the command of their subjective self-world, giving way to the totalitarianism of the companies operating in the digital space. Solid bodies become transparent digital workers, in a city that urgently needs to be rescued from private command.

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