ON SOME COMMON PLACES Gianni Romano SU ALCUNI LUOGHI COMUNI

In a recent special issue of a popular architecture magazine that was devoted to Milan, two expensive shops in the city's center were listed-without any embarrassment or perplexity-as indicators of the city's liveability. In reality, to paint Milanese liveability in such a pandering way is a perfect example of the loss of identity of a place while it seems to be labouring to hold in due consideration the identities that compose it. More and more, Milan resembles one of those condominiums imagined by J.G. Ballard. By now it has become commonplace to say that the metropolis causes alienation and fragmentation; evidently, the places where meaningful aggregation and communication are still possible are elsewhere. More than a social space, the city has become a Net of cells which don't meet, without center and without margins. According to some, the need for virtual places emerges from this lack, not because of a demand for simulation, but due to the need for communication. The virtual develops as a reaction to a world that has no other physical realities to develop. Extraterritoriality The space that invites activity is the space that contains the present. It is not the case, therefore, that in a society still sceptical of contemporaneity (and of art, its illegitimate daughter), a virtual space has been created, though it's fundamentally extraterritorial. Inside this space, ways and places find space inside those interstitial areas which usually deny them access because they don't conform. Yet, it is exactly in these middle areas that meanings barter to ransom content from conformism and banality. These are the places that give the signal of a diffused metropolis, a dilated space, a place that is no longer possible to circumscribe within the limits urban space: a gigantic, extraterritorial metropolis. Transition, exportation, and communication are possible here. The boundary between the observer who interprets, classifies, and orders, and the spectator who is confined to receiving in a contemplative manner, is definitely weakened here. What I augur, however, is certainly not used diffusely in technology by artists as a healthy cohabitation, the awareness of still wanting to investigate contemporaneity as a space of endless invention-I always hope that technology will help to bring imagination beyond the pure mimesis of a reality that's more and more difficult to represent. Space as container Perhaps this is only one of the symptoms of the landscape's change, which is no longer our material territory, but the area to where communication has moved. The passage from "landscape" to "mediascape" involves a change our perceptive rather than communicative modalities, and it is the media landscape-the decentralized place par excellence-that appears to us all the more as a non-place of communication. From the very beginning, new communicative technologies privileged spontaneous aggregations: BBS, community groups, or concepts like MUD (Multi-User Domains = areas of multiple frequentations), which tried to establish community dialogues based on common themes and ideas. In these cases, the space is constituted by those people who frequent it. The position of these areas of discourse inside a virtual space has opened new roads for the complex architecture of communication, represented today by the Net. It appears quite evident that if single spatial unity becomes increasingly meaningless for us, we will no longer be able to place and define it as a living/meeting place; the tendency is to widen the context because it develops (or cultivates) an awareness of place. Place, in general, is the true space for the transmission of content. It's happening in the new media landscape, but is it not absurd that this place is revealed through the windows of those small boxes called computers? The Net thrives on these incongruities, it is an unbelievable mixture of public and private. Think of the use of the word "home page," which covers the site of a single person or a big firm. The home page vindicates the personalization of the message, the singularity of private space made available to the endless communicative potentiality of the Net. Whereas in our cities, every culture of difference is waning, the Net forces us to consider them. In this new space, the two symbolic places between which the contents expand are, please note, the home page and the World Wide Web. Which is to say, your own house and the whole world, local and global. In this uneasy, but extremely dense context of meanings, it has become necessary to open the right perceptive co-ordinates, to cross what seems like the true contemporary metropolis: a place that pushes the subject to rediscuss every stabilized or normative boundary. In this place, where you can no longer distinguish between inside and outside, fragmentation is the model best adjusted to face reality, forcing us to see again the traditional way of observing, living, and criticizing the connection between space and communication. Here and now, values and styles, plans and visions, encounter one another in untraditional forms. Here is a possibility to negotiate identity through the manifold territories in which differences cohabit. Above all, it is in this situation of virtuality-which is very near the virtuality of art-that everything remains to be built. For a poetic of Habitation "To inhabit, it seems, is attained only through building. This ultimate, to construct, has that, that is to inhabit, as its end. But not all constructions are of residences." Martin Heidegger We exist contemporaneously in different places: physical and virtual, mental and emotional... But there is one place that is usually ignored-and in effect it is small (at least mine is)-perhaps precisely because it's right in front of our eyes. According to Gaston Bachelard "all inhabited spaces communicate the concept of house, a feeling that furnishes not only a sense of protection and shelter, but also an environment with perceptible limits...". He is dealing with limits that are remade to our innate attitudes towards centrality and to our natural inclinations towards privacy. In many works by Italian artists-that refer to the image ("...not all constructions are of residences")-the house is considered the central reference point in our relationship to space; which is then the space that we inhabit, or the inhabitable space. The house as container from which flow images of passion and obsession, images of empty, alienating, overflowing, or extremely brilliant rooms. Rooms in which, like rooms figured in the memory, artists create an intimate architecture of experience and reflection. I speak about rooms not to point out the easy icon of a closed, circumscribed place, but as a metaphoric place inside of which there are no physical barriers, only experiences of relationships between oneself and the world, rooms in which a simple object might remind us of an image from infancy, or at times refer to the "Bel Paese", other times to the typical, which no longer typifies, an empty referent testifying only to the loss of identity. The house is certainly a cell in traditional architectural terms, but in many works it symbolizes a unity of place that springs out of the meeting between traditional architecture and the visionary one of communication, which is in turn composed from various arts, but is based above all on our desire to contribute and share. The idea of "house" and the concept of "habitation" seem somewhat inadequate in an epoch in which many are turning towards cyberspace and crossing over appears more meaningful than any permanent hypothesis. Even wanting to stand behind the most enthusiastic, we are forced to acknowledge that it is at home that we have our "personal" computer and that the computer itself-once torn asunder for the pleasure of our children-reveals to us an image not very distant from what the Romans imagined as the series of rooms in which we distribute our memory. Answering machines and our electronic mail terminal testify to our presence even if we are physically absent. We are available even if we are not there, and this doesn't seem to provoke in us any serious identity problems. The house seems, therefore, to replace our memory: we are everywhere, it is the place of eternal return. The language "html" and the figured language in use in the Net have by now made the use of the term "home page" common. From here, one departs to travel along new roads; to here one returns to close the connection or go on toward another "home page." Our houses have become ambivalent; on the one hand, they confirm the idea of shelter; from another point of view, the invasion of home technology has made them mere switchboards that can carry us anywhere, mentally. If multimedia machines carry us in continuous movement toward a virtual physicality, it is also true that people have not been invited here to meet with a new world of fantastic objects, but to discover the expansion of their own communicative abilities within these objects, and, perhaps, to rediscover some places to share. Gianni Romano