Striking Home
PHILIP TABOR

T h e . T e l e m a t i c . A s s a u l t . o n . I d e n t i t y

Home, as a subjective construct, is a metaphor and externsion of the self and body. But its conceptual envelope is expandable to include any appropriated zone, geographic or mental.

Invasions of the home, however home is defined, are experienced as threats to subjective identity; art depicting domestic architectural space invaded by new and alien influences suggests the resulting unease. Studies of the `telematic' invasion of home have stressed social consequences. But for designers in the telematic field the psychic, metaphorical implications may be more significant; telepresence and interactivity may evoke the Freudian uncanny -- intimations of automatism, omniscience and disembodiment as threats to personal identity. Responses to invasion are: (1) Lying back and enjoying it -- cyberpunk etc., (2) Strengthening the walls of home -- `cocooning', and (3) Letting the walls fall, but building new ones further out -- the Modernist project. Electronic utopianism, despite its nomadic rhetoric, follows strategy (3).

A view out is needed by every home, but not primarily for instrumental purposes. The medieval metaphysics of light suggests that we may overstress the importance of information-transfer in telematic experience.

Certain ideas seem to crystallise with particular and lasting intensity in certain countries. As far as the idea of home is concerned, the Netherlands are the home of the home -- which of course is why it is so appropriate to hold this conference here (1).

The crystallisation of the Dutch idea of home might be dated to the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century, when the Dutch Netherlands amassed an unprecedented and unrivalled accumulation of capital, and emptied their purses into domestic space. Simon Schama, whose thesis on the psychology of the Dutch Golden Age I borrow to introduce this talk, quotes a contemporary: `in Amsterdam, and in some of the great cities of that small province ... the generality of those that build there, lay out a greater proportion of their estates on the houses they dwell in than any people upon the earth' (2).

H o m e

A common post-Freudian speculation is that the infant is born unable to distinguish between itself and the world at large, and that its mental life is therefore non-spatial and decentred. But there comes a time, the so-called `mirror stage', when the child develops the view that fundamentally the world is divided into two categories: he or she is Number One, Number Two is the world out there. Subject is distinguished from object, the `self' from the `other'. Significantly, this self/other dualism is experienced as spatial -- indeed, as the simplest geometric relationship, enclosure.

Recent research casts doubt on the theory that a newborn infant cannot distinguish between itself and the outside world, or that its inner life is non-spatial (3). After all, it has just had the greatest topological shock it will ever suffer, having burst from the fetal sac into the glare of exteriority. But, whether the self/other distinction happens before or after birth, the idea remains that the personal world has a basic spatiality, centred on the self, and that it comprises (i) an interior, where the self resides, and (ii) an exterior.

Separating the inside from the outside is a conceptual boundary, a picture-frame, an envelope, a skin. The primary metaphor is that the self's interior is the human body. This conceptual membrane is elastic. It can expand to enclose within the metaphorical interior: clothing, a car, a room of one's own, a house, a country, or perhaps some non-physical zone of personal operation. A house identified as the self is called `home', a country identified as the self is called `homeland'. Home is a surrogate for, and extension of, the self and the body. A sense of home, however you define it, is as important to self-identity as the persistence of personal memory.

The idea of the building as a body has recurred in architectural theory since Roman times. Burglary of a home often causes more distress than the objective loss deserves, because it is experienced metaphorically as an assault on, a penetration of, the owner's body. A child draws his home: its windows are eyes, its door a mouth.

Unlike the house, in short, home is a subjective construct, a metaphor of the self and body. But its conceptual envelope is expandable to include any appropriated zone, geographical or mental. In the rest of this talk the word `home' always has this generic psychological meaning, although it may sometimes simultaneously refer also to the physical house or dwelling.

I n v a s i o n s

The economic explanation for the seventeenth-century domestic spending spree is that the Netherlands had no collective economic sink, such as a royal court or princely church, to absorb their inflow of capital: faced with this `embarrassment of riches', the Dutch poured their gold into their houses. But there is a psychological explanation which merits attention -- although I apologise in advance for its familiarity and possible offensiveness. It goes like this. The Netherlands, much of which lies below sea-level, has a perilously elastic envelope separating the homeland from sea, a condition which has impressed into the individual Dutch soul a paranoiac anxiety to defend an inhabited interior (the self) from a menacing exterior. I'm not saying this is true. But if it is, the literal house, as an emblem of inner personal tranquillity and security, would be well worth throwing money at.

This paranoia, if such it was, was distilled into cultural form by the stupendous pictures of domestic interiors of the time: one thinks especially of Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer. It is certainly astonishing how interior these interiors are. Much, perhaps most, painting had placed the action comfortably in the frame, leaving the viewer some distance outside the picture space, looking in. But these Dutch interiors extend to the frame like a photograph, drawing us into their intimacy and security (4).

In these interiors, too, generous windows admit a light as clear and clean as the domestic space they wash. But they offer us little glimpse, if any, of the world outside. It is almost as if the paintings on the wall had supplanted windows in their role as eyes looking out into the external world.

These paintings on the walls might be interior scenes themselves, homely conversational groups, or still-lives of earthenware pots and pewter platters. But some were very strange indeed: I refer to those extravagantly labour-intensive still-lives by such as Pieter Claesz or Willem Kalf (5). These might show a vase of riotous flora, say, or the remnants of a feast -- jugs, goblets half-full with wine, a creased tablecloth, a china plate of uneaten food, a spiral of lemon peel.

I have to admit these give me the creeps. They have the gloss, the high production values, and the lascivious exposure of studio pornography. Their close-up gaze, their in-your-face intimacy, insists that we stroke the silk, taste the meat, smell the flowers -- enjoy them bodily as possessions. They resemble television in their close-up intrusiveness, internal luminosity and shallow spatial depth. They also have an immersive vividness which electronic virtual reality only aspires to.

This simile is not too far-fetched. The still-life was then a new medium. It hung on the domestic wall like a screen and, as a phenomenon, related to previous, that is scenic, painting as television does to film. The type of glossy still-life I refer to was indeed literally tele-vision in that it depicted not home products but porcelain, glassware, fabrics and exotic botanical species newly imported from afar -- from the Levant, say, the East Indies or China. Such still-lives were also a sort of shopping channel, in that the cost of the things depicted, their exchange value, was an important part of the picture's message: the painting transformed objects into commodities.

No actual home has all the attributes which define the ideal, the Platonic, Home. But home as an idea is the place of being, not doing -- of ends, not the means to ends. It is a place of familial and moral value -- not of monetary value. It is no place for the instrumental mentality, commerce or business (that is, masculine work). It is, moreover, a place of unmediated authenticity (`home truths' are truths bluntly and directly told) and therefore perhaps a country uncolonised by the `empire of signs' (6). At home we can be true to ourselves: there is no need for show.

So these glossy still-lives represent a forced opening of a window, a puncturing of the skin protecting home from the outside world, an infection, a pollution of purity by danger, and an assault on homeliness by worldliness. Like the naval maps which also figure in the painted interiors, they represent an invasive penetration of a protected, largely feminine, domain by the external world of men and adventure (7). And, by representing monetary value and, by extension, the instrumental mentality, they symbolise the piping into the Faraday cage of home an untamed and threatening foreign energy.

They are symptoms, in short, of the volatile imbalance, chronicled by Schama, in what he calls the seventeenth-century `moral geography of the Dutch mind' (8): a psychic unease, a blurring of self-identity, caused by a rocketting increase in available information and power.

The parallel between the seventeenth-century experience and our own is obvious. The second half of our century has seen, in the advanced economies, a huge and quite sudden enlargement of personal access to information and power. Starting with the phone, electronic media have cracked the dykes of home and admitted into it all that was traditionally excluded: impurity, worldiness, business, disrespect and instrumentality. Joshua Meyrowitz, for instance, has recorded in detail how the media, especially television, has changed American home life by breaching former barriers between community and privacy, subservience and authority, male and female, childhood and adulthood, leisure and work, and so on (9).

Meyrovitz's study concentrated on the social effects. But quite as significant are the subjective inner responses, perhaps unconscious, to electronic media. Jean Baudrillard sees the media as an invasive virus, robbing life and meaning from the mental home constructed by humanity. `[T]his electronic encephalization,' he asserts, `this miniaturization of circuits and of energy, this transistorization of the environment condemn to futility, to obsolescence and almost to obscenity, all that once constituted the stage of our lives.... [T]he presence of television', he continues, `transforms our habitat into a kind of archaic, closed-off cell, into a vestige of human relations whose survival is highly questionable' (10).

At the common sense level this apocalyptic rhetoric seems unjustified and hysterical: we should be able to take a few electronic gizmos into our homes without blubbing about it. But deeper within our collective wetware, which software designers ignore at their cost, it is not all sunshine, even in Silicon Valley. Today, as in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, an informational wave beats against the hull and causes the cargo to shift uneasily below decks.

Although published in 1919, a much-studied essay by Freud throws light on our current situation (11). Its title, translated into English, is The Uncanny: the uneasy dread evoked by undefined and unlocated menace. In the original German it is Das Unheimliche, literally `the unhomely'.

One example of the uncanny/unhomely which Freud cites are `doubts whether an apparently animate object is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object [like an automaton] might not be in fact animate' (12). Machines threaten the home because, as we have seen, the home is about ends themselves, not means to ends -- whereas technology is by definition instrumental. In our electronic era, moreover, it is clear that the machines with which we crowd today's habitat are indeed lifeless but, growing ever more responsive and interactive, increasingly resemble pets -- beasts which are domesticated (significant verb) into a category half-human, half-object (13). And just as mechanical devices increasingly seem to be extensions of our body, so our mental attention seems increasingly monopolised and penetrated by media, particularly interactive media. Our collective imagination is haunted or exhilarated by the notion that in our home we copulate with machines, are becoming cyborgs, half-meat, half-metal: Blade Runner, The Terminator, Robocop (14).

Freud also instances as typically uncanny the feeling that your self is divided, when you meet your double say -- or, conversely, when two selves appear oddly unified, as in cases of apparent telepathy (15). The uncanny emerges, too, when statistical probability is violated, when for example everything repeatedly goes right for you so that the causal barrier, which normally divides the external world from inner thoughts and desires, threatens to disappear (16). In our electronic era, again, those who spend a large proportion of their conscious life on the Net or navigating informatic space may be prey, if only fleetingly and unconsciously, to feelings that barriers of identity are dissolving between selfhood and otherhood; that the mechanisms of resistance and causality, which had assured us we were separate from the outside world, no longer operate; that we float in a space outside the self.

According to Freud, then, some experiences (in our case, electronically-induced) evoke feelings of omniscience, omnipotence, disembodiment and decentredness which, at their most extreme, are forms of clinical madness. Involuntarily and unconsciously they revive that infantile mental state before the inner and external worlds could be distinguished (17). What was long suppressed knocks like a risen corpse at the door of adult consciousness. The uncanny, the Unheimliche, erupts into our mental home and our self is sucked out through the breach to dissolve itself into the outside world.

Even if we discount the general Freudian thesis that the child is father to the man, and that suppression breeds disease, we can still recognise in this essay the syndrome of what might be called the `telematic uncanny'. Electronic media have partly eroded not only social boundaries which previously divided individuals and families from society as a whole, but also some boundaries of the self which previously defined individual identity. Films are a good guide to collective angst, and several, TRON and Poltergeist for instance, depict people being sucked through a monitor or TV screen into a world in where they are no longer `at home' (18).

R e s p o n s e s . t o . i n v a s i o n

How, then, do we respond to the telematic invasion of our literal or inner homes? There are three possible strategies, and they apply to all forms of invasion or attempted seduction.

The first strategy is to lie back and enjoy it. We see this in the popular arts of recent times. An entropic dystopia is envisioned, an American homeland fouled by technological detritus, haunted by robots and cyborgs. Every interior is exposed to the exterior world, its commerce and its sign-system. Spotlights from an airship advertising emigration to the Off-World pierce through the skylight of the Bradbury Building. There is no safe home: a replicant may suddenly smash his head through the wall at you: `Time to die' (19).

Techno-despair is fun. Alienation has a glamorous new uniform, and everybody is wearing it: sci-fi movies, cyberpunk fiction, funky philosophers, and computer magazines with attitude. It confirms the view that the purpose of art is to reconcile us to the inevitable by accustoming us to the intolerable.

The second strategy against the home's invasion is to strengthen the walls, reinforce the dyke, lock up your daughters. Market researchers call it `cocooning'. An extreme instance would be the Amish, the Pennsylvanian Anabaptists, who in 1909 banned the phone from the home -- as they have since banned radio and TV, as well as new technology like electricity and the internal combustion engine: this protects the home from external spiritual pollutants and reinforces the sacred separate identity of the community (20). Usually, however, new technology is slily admitted, like a whore, but only if heavily disguised. A particularly British form of technophobic kitsch hides the phone inside a duck, which quacks rather than rings, and forces the TV to ply its shameful trade behind the shutters of a mock-antique cabinet.

Although early Apple users showed an ominous taste for bizarre letter fonts, computer hardware has largely escaped kitsch. But software constantly presents itself as metaphor -- appears, that is, in disguise. The metaphor of the physical home is conjured to reassure the user. `No matter what other cards and stacks you have', says the Hypercard instruction book, `you always have home' (21). And of course the new Magic-Cap and eWorld on-line systems use as their operating metaphor the toytown topography deplored by John Thackara (22).

The problem with using a familiar metaphor to represent unfamiliar situations, as the Modern Movement designers and their nineteenth-century precursors realized, is that it is at least partly a lie (23). And the practical (rather than moral) defect of a lie is that, when situations change, new lies must be added to sustain the illusion. But the greater the number of lies, the more difficult it is to make them cohere. In a rapidly changing environment, then, the disguise or metaphor eventually collapses through incoherence.

This introduces the third and last strategic response to the invasion of the home: to let the walls fall, but build new ones further out, and learn to feel `at home' in a broader world. Like Mother, early architectural Modernism argued that in the long run it is wiser to tell the truth. It believed that the twentieth-century home and city, the technology which builds them, and the lifestyles they accommodate, change constantly and irresistably. So it is better to dump the old classical language of structural form, based on stone construction, as well as the hierachical patterns of bourgeois living, and to devise a totally new and flexible language whose forms neither conceals nor arbitrarily represents each new condition, but inherently reflects it.

A central element of this Modernist project seemed to be war against the home: Le Corbusier famously defined the house as a `machine for living in' (24). The home was to be destroyed because collective lifestyles, being tested in revolutionary Russia, and the new technologies of electricity and glass, would together soon evict man from it. But home was not to be abolished, only replaced by a new `Home of Man' (25) which would welcome the machine. Plate-glass architecture would not dissolve the dualisms which formerly separated private from public, inside from out, selfhood from otherhood. But it would redrew them more lightly, and further out. Man would inhabit a wider, windswept, more transparent home.

This is echoed in the current dream of the universal networked community. The rhetoric of electronic utopianism is arcadian, and derives from Shakespeare filtered through Jefferson, Thoreau and Twain (26). It uses terms which glorify rootlessness: `the informatic badlands', `cybercowboys', `telematic nomads' and so on. But settlement is never far behind: Howard Rheingold's book, The Virtual Community, is subtitled Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (27).

T h e . V i e w . O u t

What shall we see when look through the open windows of our electronic homestead? Most predictions are that we shall see luminous representations of data -- however sophisticated and complex. This view even informs imaginative fiction: William Gibson's Neuromancer famously defines cyberspace as `a consensual hallucination ... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system' [my italics] (28). This definition reflects a widespread view that mental activity is primarily about the reception, decoding, evaluation, transformation and output of information, and that the main purpose of new electronic technologies is to make information-handling more powerful, efficient, vivid, sexy, and so on. I think this view is mistaken.

An episode of architectural history may show what I mean. The architecture critic Martin Pawley recently described the Gothic cathedral as an archetype of `information architecture' (29). Its structural system relieves the building's external skin of load-bearing duties, which allows the walls to take on an informational function: most of the cathedral's skin can comprise vast (and vastly expensive) backlit glass screens. The screens -- mosaics of coloured glass pixels -- display images, icons and alphabetic strings, which together the user `reads' to learn the complex codes and narratives of Christian cosmology. Pawley calls Gothic cathedrals the `predecessors of the paperless office and the electronic dealing room' (30), implying that the windows communicate data -- albeit of an elevated, spiritual kind. His thesis is thus an update of the traditional view that the Gothic cathedral is `the poor man's bible'.

This thesis, though true, tells the least important part of the story. For we know from contemporary writings that Gothic ecclesiastical architecture was explicity invented and designed to carry into built form the vigorous blend of theology and philosophy, Scholasticsm, particularly associated with St Bonaventure and St Thomas Aquinas (31). Scholastic metaphysics classified light as a substance, an `embodied spirit', which distributes divinity to all God's creation (32). God is present in all things, argued Bonaventure, because light emanates from even the humblest material: glass is made from sand and ashes, fire comes from coal, you rub a stone and it shines (33). Scholasticism was far from philistine or iconoclastic, but it had a strong subjective aspect which valued communion more highly than the reading of words and images: revelation more highly than information (34). And light was the main vehicle of revelation: St Bernard of Clairvaux described union with God as `immersion in the infinite ocean of eternal light and luminous eternity' (35).

Such luminous revelation was no vague psychedelic dazzle. For medieval thinkers agreed with modern psychologists that the senses are not just passive receptors of stimuli but have an active and immediate rationality of their own (36). Light could communicate directly to the intellect. The sanctuary door at the abbey of St. Denis, for example, shone in gilded bronze, and its inscription urged the pilgrim `to let its luminous brightness illuminate the mind so that it might ascend `to the true light to which Christ is the door' (37).

So the Gothic cathedral was designed to be literally divine, as immaterial and as luminous as possible. Architecture was to be as ethereal as electronic phenomena. Through the stained-glass windows Divinity radiated more through light as essence than through the images depicted on the windows. Light's primary role was performative. The medium was the message (38).

Marshall McLuhan claimed of course that electronic media are returning us to a medieval, pre-Gutenberg mentality. Much recent art, design, movies and fiction, certainly, has the poetic and abstract qualities associated with medieval culture: sublimeness, grotesqueness, and artificiality. Like the medieval mind we are fascinated by fragmentation, complexity, translucency, layering -- and things which, jewel-like, glitter and glow (39). We are all Gothic now.

The point I want to make is that every home needs windows -- perhaps electronic windows -- into the world. But we look though those windows or screens neither just to take in or give out information, nor just for instrumental motives. Everybody needs to keep an eye, a window, on the world to reassure the self that it differs from the world and thus to reinforce the self's identity. Prisoners or patients permanently confined indoors want to know what the weather's doing, though this knowledge is of no practical use at all. Similarly, the amount of hard data broadcast by TV news programmes is remarkably small, and what little there is seldom affects our actions, but we seem to need at least twice-daily fixes of it. So when the monitor pours light over us like the pearly light of Vermeer's interiors or the jewelled radiance of the Gothic cathedrals, we are not just reading data: we are `communing' with what we see.

Modern culture has for a long time believed that information is best communicated through words and numerals. Lately have we accepted, rather grudgingly, that visual images might transmit data equally powerfully. But if a large part of what is transmitted and absorbed is not information at all, but light as an essence, triggering some mental alteration, we may need to downgrade the importance we have only recently conferred on images and icons. Perhaps, for example, the search for virtual reality overemphasises the need for figurativeness, indeed for reality at all. To become so fixated on image-borne data as a vehicle for purposive communication might lead us to forget the potential of the computing media to communicate directly through abstract light, colour and sensory immersion generally. We need to revisit the tradition of transcendent abstraction epitomised by Mark Rothko and continued by light-sculptors such as James Turrell.

The English phrase `at home' means to be at ease with oneself, secure and enclosed. But the phrase `at home' also means to be ready to welcome visitors into the home. Home wards off agoraphobia but needs windows to ward off claustrophobia. Electronic windows might admit the light of the `telematic sublime'.

N o t e s

(1) This talk was given on 4 November 1994 at the `Doors of Perception 2 @ Home' conference in Amsterdam, organized by the Netherlands Design Institute and Mediamatic.

(2) Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bee; or Private Vices, Public Benefits, D. Garman ed. (London: Wishart, 1934), pp. 148-9. Quoted in Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London: Fontana, 1988), p. 297, and in Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion, 1990), p. 103, in his discussion, to which I am indebted, of Dutch art and `oversupply'.

(3) Colwyn Trevarthen, `Infancy, Mind in' in Richard L. Gregory ed., The Oxford Companion to the Mind (Oxford, New York: OUP, 1987), p. 363: `Recent research with infants [suggests that they] do not, at any stage, confuse themselves with objects `outside' nor do they fail to recognize that other persons are separate sources of motives and emotions'.

(4) Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Univ. of California Press, 1994), discusses (pp. 60-2) Svetlana Alpers' contrast between the interority of Dutch painting and the perspectival `distance' of `southern' art, and notes (p. 132) the link made by Anne Hollander between the increased interest in photography in the 1860s and the simultaneous resurrection of interest in Vermeer and his contemporaries. See Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), and Anne Hollander, `Moving Pictures' in Raritan, 5, 3 (Winter 1986), p. 100.

(5) Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, discusses (pp. 108-9) the contemporary cost of making and buying Dutch flower paintings, and (pp. 127-8) the disturbingly `proximal', price-laden and exotic nature of the `banquet-pieces'. Roland Barthes, `The World as Object', in Norman Bryson ed., Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France (Cambridge: CUP, 1988), pp. 107-8, suggests that the `sheen' of the still-lives is `to lubricate man's gaze amid his domain, to facilitate his daily business among objects whose riddle is dissolved'.

(6) Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), p. 107, claims that in Japan `everything is habitat'. I (ab)use his title to describe the opposite condition.

(7) Though not in these terms, Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, p. 389, discusses the Dutch tension between home and global commerce, and the allegorical virtues of housewifehood.

(8) Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, p. 609.

(9) Joshua Meyrovitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York, Oxford: OUP, 1986).

(10) Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (Brooklyn NY: Autonomedia Semiotext(e), 1988), pp. 17-8.

(11) Sigmund Freud, `The Uncanny', in James Strachey, Albert Dickson eds., The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 14: Art and Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 336-76. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge MA, London: MIT, 1992) exposes the philosopically uncanny aspects of Modern and subsequent architecture and urbanism.

(12) Ernst Jentsch, `Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen', Psychiat.-neurol. Wschr. (8, 1906), p. 195; quoted in Freud, `The Uncanny', p. 347.

(13) Jean Baudrillard, `Subjective Discourse or The Non-Functional System of Objects', in The Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and its Destiny, 1968-1983 (London, Concord MA: Pluto, 1990), p. 46: `Pets are a species intermediary between beings and objects'.

(14) Films: Ridley Scott dir., Blade Runner (Warner, Ladd, Blade Runner Partnership, 1982); James Cameron dir., The Terminator (Orion, Hemdale, Western Pacific, 1984); Paul Verhoeven dir., Robocop (Rank, Orion, 1987).

(15) Freud, `The Uncanny', p. 356.

(16) Freud, `The Uncanny', pp. 359-60, 362.

(17) Freud, `The Uncanny', p. 358.

(18) Films: Steven Lisberger dir., TRON (Walt Disney, Lisberger-Kushner, 1982); Steven Spielberg dir., Poltergeist (MGM, SLM, 1982).

(19) All references to Ridley Scott, Blade Runner.

(20) Diane Zimmerman Umble, `The Amish and the Telephone: Resistance and Reconstruction', in Roger Silverstone, Eric Hirsch eds., Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces (London, New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 193-4.

(21) Apple Computer Inc., Macintosh Hypercard User's Guide (Cupertino CA, 1987), p. 48.

(22) On-line data services: General Magic Inc., Magic-Cap (Mountainview CA, 1994); Apple Computer Inc., eWorld (Bridgeton MO, 1994). John Thackara, Conference Themes and Issues, paper given at `Doors of Perception 2 @ Home' conference (Amsterdam: Netherlands Design Institute, 4 November 1994), pp. 3-4: `If I'd known the digital superhighway led to toytown I'd never have left home'.

(23) I can only caricature here the historical arguments for structural, constructional and functional `honesty' in architecture. For fuller but ideologically contrasting accounts see Peter Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture 1750-1950 (London: Faber, 1965), esp. chs. 18-9, and David Watkin, Morality in Architecture: The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977).

(24) Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London: Rodker, 1927), p. 10.

(25) Le Corbusier, François Pierrefeu, The Home of Man (London: Architectural Press, 1940).

(26) Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: OUP, 1964) traces the arcadian theme through American literary history. Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham, London: Duke UP, 1993), p. 145, briefly reports its link with `hyper-technologized space'.

(27) Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993).

(28) William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: Grafton, 1986), p. 67.

(29) Martin Pawley, Theory and Design in the Second Machine Age (Oxford, Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1990), p. 115.

(30) Pawley, Theory and Design, p. 114.

(31) The thought and architecture of a period as long and heterogeneous as the Middle Ages cannot be distilled in this brief summary. Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (Latrobe PA: Archabbey, 1951) and Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984) document the varied and complex pilosophical foundations of the Gothic style.

(32) Von Simson, Gothic Cathedral, p. 51: `For a thinker like [Robert] Grosseteste, light is actually the mediator between bodiless and bodily substances, a spiritual body, an embodied spirit, as he calls it'.

(33) Von Simson, Gothic Cathedral, pp. 51-2.

(34) Panofsky, Gothic Architecture, pp. 12-5, discusses the subjectivism of late Scholasticism. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962) quotes Panofsky and Von Simson to assert the non-textual, revelatory aspects of pre-typographic `light through, not light on'

(35) Quoted in Von Simson, Gothic Cathedral, p. 123.

(36) Panofsky, Gothic Architecture, pp. 37-8, quotes Thomas Aquinas on the `rationality' of the senses and likens this view to Gestalt theory.

(37) Von Simson, Gothic Cathedral, p. 114: clearly history's first `door of perception'.

(38) The title of ch. 1 of Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: New American Library), pp. 23-35.

(39) A minor but striking example is the pictorial similarity between the medieval illuminated manuscript -- combining text and jewel-like, many-scaled images and icons -- and the multi-media screen.