Introduction

Our sphere of influence is becoming significantly greater. Through the minimization of material infrastructures in favor of the development of virtual infrastructures it is clear that the means by which we construct, understand, and navigate our world is changing. No longer is the perceptual boundary of the visual horizon that which defines the limits of our experience, and thus, our place ¹ in the world. Specifically, developments in telematics and telerobotics ² are allowing us to reach beyond the horizon by collapsing the space of our world in on itself. This new 'geography' has been described as "transformational" and in a "constant state of becoming" (Sassen 1991). The traditional relationships between the defined domains of the city (e.g. downtown and suburb), and between cities themselves, are all but disappearing. In their place a ubiquitous new middle landscape is taking shape, a transitional zone at the intersection between the real and the virtual. However, the increasing developments of these technologies call into question the very concept and nature of a middle. For, this new middle does not reside statically on a map, nor does it exist constantly in time.

What then constitutes the middle landscape in a world in which physical boundaries no longer hold? What will constitute the form of the city of the instant, of the now, where proximities fluctuate from moment to moment? Has that which previously constituted the middle landscape superseded all other conditions, thus, reaching a state of singularity, or critical expanse ³?

Towards Critical Expanse

Since the nineteenth century our relationship with the visual horizon has been changing. It has been a gradual transition in which perceptual and physical boundaries have been slowly eroding. The nineteenth century witnessed the start of many technological revolutions that have lead to continued developments in optics (and by extension information exchange) and transportation - two areas critical to this discussion as both vision and duration play a significant role in the limit conditions of our experience. Architectural spectacles such as the Panorama were, in many respects, the virtual technologies of their time by allowing users to view/experience distant locals and events. Up until this time, the horizon was the boundary of the known world. Everything that was beyond its limit was new and unfamiliar, while everything contained by it was, by definition, familiar and known. Thus, the horizon also came to be a metaphor for hope and the liberation for the burgeoning middle-class of the period. To travel beyond one's own visual limits (the horizon) was to escape the tyranny of their everyday existence ⁴.

However, today what makes our condition different from that of the past is the seamless and ubiquitous nature of our connectivity to the world around us. This ever-increasing mobility, both physical and virtual, has broken down the barrier of physical space. The limit condition of the horizon has been replaced with the temporal limit condition of technological speed. Distance has been replaced by duration. The usefulness of the horizon, and thus, the perspectival cues that have aided us in our recognition of the here, has all but diminished.

Most illustrative of this point are the recent developments in the field of telerobotics, specifically two milestone events in planetary exploration and medical surgery - NASA's Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997 and the first major telesurgery performed in 2001.

The first event occurred on July 4, 1997. A small remotely controlled robotic lander began to transmit images and data from a distant world 119 million miles from earth. Pathfinder was made up of a landing module that served as a base of transmission, and a micro-rover named Sojourner. The rover was remotely as well as autonomously controlled. It received primary navigation commands from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and then had the ability to make autonomous navigation decisions based on immediate environmental conditions. While there was a perceptible lag-time due to transmission speed over such a large distance, human agency was projected to a physically remote location, extending via telepresence the boundaries of our habitable world. NASA scientists, as well as the viewing public, were experiencing, through mediated sensory data, a distant world well beyond the limits of our immediate physical space. As artist Eduardo Kac wrote after the first still images were published:

The second event occurred on September 19, 2001, in which the first major trans-oceanic telesurgery was performed. Although during the later part of the nineties there were a number of minor telesurgical procedures performed, all were routine in nature and over relatively short distances. The September 19th operation was groundbreaking in that telerobotic technology allowed two surgeons at New York's Mount Sinai Medical Center to successfully remove a diseased gall-bladder from a 68-year old women in Strasbourg, France over 4,000 miles away. The control console in New York was linked to a robot at Louis Pasteur University, via high-speed fiber-optic cables that run under the Atlantic. Unlike in the previous example, the issue of lag time was critical to this procedure, as it meant life or death for a human patient. Even with only a 160-millisecond gap (80 milliseconds each way for a transmitted signal), the doctors had to operate more slowly in order to insure safety. However, because of the high-resolution nature of the transmitted images they could be confident in what they were seeing (and doing), thus, were able to compensate for the delay. Dr. Michael Gagner, one of the surgeons who performed the operation said:

In and of themselves, these are isolated achievements. However, when considered together we can see that the experiential boundaries of proximity, physical distance, and time being made ever more fluid. The here can now be here and there simultaneously without regard to the distance or duration between, creating a state of telepresence. It will not be long before these technologies call into question the very primacy of physical space as a main qualifier of our world making and we reach a state of critical expanse, where any and all previous limit conditions on expansion have been eliminated. It is in this new condition that the new middle landscape will take shape.

The (New) Middle Landscape

The middle landscape has come to embody both reality and ideal in our thinking about the city. It is a concept intricately wrapped up in the history of the United States and it's impulse towards (westward) expansion, representing the search for a pastoral ideal that Leo Marx described as the "green hollow", situated between the chaos of both the city and the countryside (Marx 1964). We have labored to create an environment that exists between civilization and wilderness. It is, in many ways, what has characterized the history of urban form in the U.S. more than any other ideal. However, the middle landscape, while the product of pastoral idealism, can also be seen as the residual condition which results from the prioritizing of other destinations. It is the 'stretch of urbanity' between the downtown and the suburb 'foregrounding urban process over form' (Lerup 2000). It is characterized by the background conditions of light industry, manufacturing, and transportation. Simultaneously subordinate and liberated, it is always allowing for changing interpretations, ever in a state of transformation.

Common to both the ideal and the reality of the middle landscape is its inherent relationship with technological development and infrastructure. The middle landscape of the pastoral ideal is represented by a hybridized context of 'raw' open land and technology. In Marx's account of Thomas Jefferson's vision for a pre-industrialized United States, he writes:

The middle landscape becomes the resulting transformational condition between what were once distinct and separate domains, the city and countryside now superimposed by technological advancement. While in its reality, the middle landscape of the (contemporary) city is the residual territory given over to its necessary infrastructure. It must, by definition, be indeterminate and able to form where needed. Not a territory transformed, but rather a transformational territory - a third domain.

In both cases the middle landscape is seen as the mediating condition, the transitional zone between two distinct and different domains. It is in this consensus between these two notions that we can conceptualize the intersection between the real and the virtual that characterizes our current condition. It is the new middle landscape where the materiality of place intersects with 'the technologies and organizational forms that neutralize place and materiality' (Sassen 1998). We are quickly positioning ourselves in a state of critical expanse, Jefferson's vision of a 'society of the middle landscape' realized. However, in this new conception the wilderness is the trans-territorial spacelessness created by virtual technologies.

Proximity and World Making

The story of technology is largely one of a renunciation of distance and time. For a large part, the formation of cities has been to facilitate communication. The early industrial city was dependent upon physical movement of people, goods and services. Proximity was a critical condition. Travel times had to be minimized in order to facilitate the development of economic and social interaction. Over time, as the means of communication (and by extension transportation) have increased so has the expansion of the city. Today, cities within the global economy act as command points in the organization of the world economy and market places. It should then be argued that the key element, historically speaking, to the restructuring of urban form has been the development of technologies that have increased the means, quality, and availability of social and economic connectivity.

Distance, proximity, and connectivity have been epistemological cornerstones of western thinking. Only that which has been immediately 'within-our-world' helped constitute 'being-in-the-world' (Heidegger 1962). Soon we will need to absolve ourselves from this association of distance with fiction. To some degree all knowledge of the world comes with some mediation, or distance. However, in the case of telematics and telerobotics we not only acquire a representation of reality but we are able to have agency within that representation. The state of telepresence these technologies afford is a reciprocal condition that involves both the observer and the observed. At this point it does not matter what is mediated or actual, because all becomes the same. They become equal partners in the process of our world making. Whether or not the actual environment remains unchanged is insignificant. Versions of the world rather than the world itself are what are important. As Nelson Goodman writes, "World making begins with one version and ends with another" (Goodman 1978).

Conclusion

The technologies of telematics and telerobotics operate more or less independently of physical place, terrain, geography, and the built landscape. It is because of the primacy of vision in our culture that the developments of these new technologies will have such a profound effect. Our ocularcentrism coincides with our philosophical conflation of being with objects ⁵. Generally speaking, our visual input has until recently corresponded directly to our physical surroundings. Now a stereoscopic spatial condition has developed which calls into question the mitigating ability of our traditional visual based thinking. In this condition mediated reality can actually supersede actual reality. What is then the condition that is replacing the traditional paradigm of the city, what does this landscape look like? Will it be characterized by local centralities or global nodality?

What this discussion reveals is the critical transformation that is occurring with respect to the city. The city, traditionally constituted of distinct domains, is ceasing to be developed as a thing and beginning to be developed as a condition (Michitaka and Chihiro 1998). This may seem to be a crisis to some. Artist and theorist Francis Dyson has written that space implies certain possibilities, "immersion, habitation, being-there, phenomenal plentitude, unmediated presence." She goes as far as to say that, "Without space there can be no concept of presence within an environment, nor, more importantly, can there be the possibility for authenticity that 'being-in-the-world' allows" (Dyson 1998). However, within the spacelessness of the new geography we may find liberation.

Notes

1	By place, I mean to suggest the condition described by J. Nicholas Entrinkin. He writes: It is difficult to imagine the existence of an active subject in a world that contains no "here." In order to create room for such a subject we require two irreducible parts to the concept of place: place as the relative location of objects in the world, and place as the meaningful context of human action (Entrinkin 1991).
2	Telematics refers to the technologies and services using both information technologies and telecommunication technologies for collecting, storing, processing, and communicating information. Telerobotics refers the technology that allows a robot to accept instructions from a distance, generally a trained human operator. The human operator can thus, perform live actions in a distant environment and through sensors gauge the effects. (See Goldberg 2000).
3	This conception of a new, or expanded, middle landscape is greatly informed by Ray Kurzweil's notion of technological singularity and Paul Virilio's notion of critical expanse, they write: Progress will keep accelerating to a point in which the rate of change becomes infinite, a singularity. (Boutin 2001) And yet critical space, and critical expanse, are now everywhere, due to the acceleration of communications tools that obliterate the Atlantic (Concorde), reduce France to a square one and a half hours across (Airbus) or gain time over time with the TGV, the various advertising slogans signaling perfectly the shrinking of geophysical space…(Virilio 1997)
4	This conception of the world lead to the invention of the Panorama, along with its offshoots such as the Diorama and the Stereopticon. By all accounts the Panorama in particular provided a spectacular, and in some cases destabilizing, experience. It was a building whose planning drew in visitors off the street through a darkened corridor and then onto a raised viewing platform. From this platform the visitor was presented with a 360 degree pictorial representation of some far away locale, historical event, or some other such view. Given the sensibilities of the period the effect was dramatic. These spectacles in many ways foreshadowed the condition of instantaneous telepresence that exists today. (See Oettermann 1997). Alexander von Humbolt's account of the Panorama described it as a 'substitute for traveling through distant regions.' He writes: Panoramas are more productive of effect than scenic decorations, since the spectator, inclosed, as it were, within a magical circle, and wholly removed from all disturbing influences from reality, may the more easily fancy that he is actually surrounded by a foreign scene (Humbolt 1850).
5	Frances Dyson writes, "…of all the attributes of objects, visibility and extension are primary, thus vision and occupation of spaces are deeply implicated in the constitution of existence." (Dyson 1998).

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