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navigating the narrative in space: gender and spatiality in virtual worlds
Art Journal, Fall, 2000 by Mary Flanagan
Technology allows us an alternate space within which we can invent unique methods of telling stories, forming identities, and remembering. As a media maker, I value the ability to use digital tools and to work comfortably within computer-generated spaces. I can combine tools, images, and multiple voices to create three-dimensional computer worlds. I am particularly interested in exploring online space in the third dimension to create "navigable narratives." Beyond a hypertext, where digital text is linked to other texts over the Internet, these narratives--self-maneuvered stories--are created in a virtual space along X, Y, and Z planes and woven with both moving and stationary images, spatialized sounds, and coded messengers. Through motion and point of view, text can also be spatialized and sculpted, and the user can both interpret and experience the story differently with each telling, with each performance.
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The culture surrounding computer technology, as well as the shape of the technology itself, is infused with imagery, semantics, classification systems, and ordering structures that implicate computer experiences and products from the interior. These structures have great influence, especially in the context of gender study. Cyberspace has been described and referred to in a number of ways. Coined in 1986 by William Gibson, the word cyberspace comes from the 1948 term cybernetics, the root word of which means "piloting" or "governing." The implications of movement and gender in virtual space raise questions about the possibility for using online space in three dimensions to create alternate, spatialized narratives. Guiding questions concern both the act of navigating--or performing--the digital space, as well as the implications of spatial paradigms and how to work with them if they are implicitly engendered through their context, creation, and representation. To understand the construction of virtual bodies and space, it is necessary to examine connections between gender and these sites of manifestation, especially the ways that gendered concepts are embedded in the construction of online worlds. This navigable narrative form offers possibilities to help address--and perhaps overcome--virtual reality's (VR's) political specificity.
Women's Places and Spaces
There have been several attempts by feminists to characterize cyberspace. In their article "The Place of the Letter: An Epistolary Exchange," Angelika Bammer, Minrose Gwin, Cindi Katz, and Elizabeth Meese compare cyberspace to literary space: "The page of a book, like the computer screen, is a frontier through which we enter a nonspace space, the space that isn't 'really' there. It is a safe space, which the actual, material spaces in which many people live is not." [1] The literary metaphor is inadequate here because it does not account for real-world consequences realized in cyberspace. In the one-dimensional space of a book's text, for example, the reader cannot physically interact with the text or "enact" through the text. In cyberspace and in real space, however, actions taking place in networks have very real impacts on human beings through multi-user interaction and even, say, e-commerce. Many people can lurk and/or interact online, and harassment frequently occurs when users identify themselves as fem ale. A host of other violent acts are discussed or threatened. [2] Thus, the idea of cyberspace as a safe haven for women equal to that of the book has not been realized. [3] In online worlds, sites can be navigated in many directions and orders, breaking the prescripted order and scalable world of the book. These essential differences help define cyberspace apart from literature as a "nonspace space," and also go beyond early forms of electronic hypertext in the multidirectional and multi-user aspects. Elizabeth Grosz has also explored the philosophical and ethical attributes of the space of cyberspace. In her assessment of concepts of space in discourse and their possible relationship to architecture and other "texts," she notes that texts could "be read, used, as modes of effectivity and action which, at their best, scatter thoughts and images into different linkages or new alignments without necessarily destroying their materiality." [4] To apply this line of thinking to cyberspace, one must think of digi tally rendered space as distinct from Western conceptions of space as geographic, as gravity-bound.
One cannot seem to avoid using metaphors of space to describe computer activities. Even the term cyberspace renders an absolute connection, associating digital experiences with spatial descriptors. And more broadly, in daily life as well as in feminist discourse, there has been an adoption of such spatial metaphors in language. [5] Examples include "working at the margins" at the "site" of one, singular point, and suggesting that "recentering" is a way to critique status quo tropes; these refer to space as a place for strategic and political action, Furthermore, even programming languages suggest spatialization as an operating mode within code. For example, we ask in the Basic language for the computer to "run" (not process); other commands include "goto" and "get" or, in Lingo, "put" or "place" (rather than compute, display, or calculate input). Such descriptions using the language of geography must be carefully considered given linguistic ties to a historic use of geography as a site of male power. Women i n the sciences and in the arts investigate space in different ways using categories that may vary from the traditions in their fields. This is problematic in the examination of VR in several ways: first, women haven't historically been privileged to define fields such as geography or architecture; and second, women have not been the primary designers of the computational architecture of virtual spaces.
