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Sherrie Rabinowitz talks about telematic networks as environmental design:
"The way in which you design a room determines what happens to the information contained inside. Information environments can be as uplifting as cathedrals (computer networks) or as dirty and inhuman as ghettos (the mass media). Just as one says of buildings that they are either democratic or repressive, so the architecture of the electronic realm determines the potential relationships between people. (...) The membrane is not as physical as that of a building. The difference is that in an electronic room, the information turns into the environment. (290) Kit Galloway calls experimental situations that allow us - like astronauts in space - to survive in this new environment, to exist in the electronic realm: Playing, experimenting with objects, dawdling without time pressure - and suddenly the discoveries happen."
Most telecommunication projects are over-rationalized. There is a lot of pressure to justify them because the electronic realm is very expensive property. But there has to be a Central Park. If we rationalize our use exclusively as art or commerce it will be difficult to cultivate alternative models.
Youngblood, Gene: Der virtuelle Raum. Die elektronischen Umfelder von Mobile Image, in: Ars Electronica. Festival für Kunst und Gesellschaft, Linz 1986, p. 291)