By Crispin Sartwell

I think it is worth asking whether there is any such thing as digital space and, if so, what it is in relation to other versions of space, or other places in space, or other spaces. Different sorts of media deploy different spaces, or bring us into space in different ways, and bear different relations to what we think of as "real" space: the sort of space that's in this room. So, for example, there is the "picture space" of photography. If I took a snapshot of this room right now, one feature of it would be that it depicts a three-dimensional space in two dimensions: it translates or transfers or simplifies or collapses world-space into flat pictorial space. Sculpture models three-dimensional space by occupying three-dimensional space, though the space depicted in a sculpture is not necessarily the space it occupies. If one sculpts a mythological scene, for example, the space the sculpture depicts is as mythological as the Hercules inserted into it. And then we ourselves, since in some sense we also inhabit the same space (a room, for example) as the sculpture, could be construed as entering into its mythological space. That, however, would be a decision. We could choose to regard a sculpture very much as we regard a painting, by separating in our imaginations the mythological space of the sculpture from the space we occupy and hence from the space it occupies in our world. We could put this another way by saying that a sculpture occupies both literal and virtual space.

Theater gives rise to many different sorts of spaces and relations to space. A proscenium frames a pictorial space, or almost gives rise to the illusion of two dimensions created with three. A theater in the round is something else again, and in various sorts of "experimental" theater various relations of the work and the audience to space, or various spaces, are set up or compromised.

Photography occupies two dimensions, and hence is virtual with regard to three-dimensional space and to time. That is, a photo is a two-dimensional object that depicts three dimensional space and events in time. We might put it down as a rule that a representational work is virtual with regard to any of the four dimensions that it does not depict (qua representation). Sculpture occupies three dimensions and is virtual (qua representation) in respect to time. Of course the sculpture does change with time, but the events it depicts take place in the virtual time of which the sculpture captures a moment.

Now film is, like sculpture, a three-dimensional art. It is virtual with respect to the third dimension of space, however, rather than with respect to time. In that respect it resembles painting and photography more than it does sculpture.

But aside from physical dimensionality, media possess what we might term phenomenological space: the actual or fictional space that we enter into in the medium. Sculpture appears to us in real, three-dimensional space. Painting, photography and film are fictive in relation to the third dimension: we read them as depicting three-dimensional objects. The great advance here is the discovery of vanishing point perspective. In almost every picture we read the fictional third dimension, though some painters, such as Kenneth Noland or Mondrian or Morris Louis, try to bring our gaze to the picture plain itself. But even Kandinsky's abstracts provide a phenomenological third dimension. The way film is displayed - in a darkened theater - serves to make you forget your presence or your position and hence to lure you into the film's fictive third dimension.

Now with regard to real space (the notion of "real" is of course up for grabs these days: but what I mean is the sort of space that separates Ollivier and me here in the room) computer space is exactly like the space of film, at least for most part: it is deployed in two-dimensional space, but has the potential to make you experience three dimensions, as can be seen, for example, in computer animations like Toy Story. Here and for many other purposes the objects could "actually" rotate, so that the illusion of a third dimension is especially intense.

Even if, through holography or other means digital spacer entered an actual third dimension, it would not be spatially distinct from any sculpture that can move: for example a Calder mobile. It would be no different as regards real space than an automaton.

But at the phenomenological level there is a distinction between the traditional movie and digital space: we can fictionally enter into the fictional digital space generated visually. My kids like to play a game called Grand Theft Auto 2, in which you can explore a city, shoot policemen, hire a hooker, and so on. I suppose the buzz word would be "interactivity." In an interactive digital space you would ideally be able to explore and also to use objects within the scenario, and so on. We are certainly close that right now in many games designed for the most recent generation of games systems: Game Cube, X-Box, PS2.

So we've reached the point where we had better try to answer some very fundamental ethical questions. Grand Theft Auto 2 seems a harmless place to kill policemen, since no one actually dies. Well, could there be right and wrong in digital space? Could digital space itself become wrong in relation to real space: if we abandon the space we occupy for a pure phenomenon (a la the Matrix or many cyber-pulp novels), have we done something wrong? Could we reach the point at which nothing you can do in the only reality you know is wrong? Or in which the only thing to say about "evil" is that it's fun? Could reality become tiresome and finally obsolete as we migrate into environments that consist without remainder of information?