EDITORIAL


Beam me up is an Internet publication with scientific and artistic essays for our present-day idea of space.

Beam me up makes inquiries about our present-day appreciation of space, as expanded by the media. What is being called cyberspace and virtual reality opens up the vague idea of a space, thought of only as symbolical, which eventually also becomes a place of real presence and action. Beam me up, Scotty – this call, having become popular with the science-fiction series Star Trek contains as poetical charm the idea of transcendence between the most different space qualities. Indeed, physicists, today show for quantum mechanics’ bizarre world, the possibility of teleportation of photons, while cultural sciences stand up for a term like spatial turns. The change of direction toward a topical approach, toward spaces as a stage for historical and cultural events is being postulated. In comparison political Utopias (Gk not a place) seem to have no more room in the globalized society. Space gives rise to worry, Michel Foucault stated in 1964: We live in an age of simultaneousness, of stringing together, of the close and the far, of juxtaposition, and the scattered. Decades later, hungry Americans order their next-door-pizza by telephone via connections of call-centers operating from India, without becoming aware of their trip around the world by telephone.

There’s not only Newton’s space in this world – this uniform, nowhere marked, into each direction of equal value but sensory not perceivable being apart from each other. The space of our corporeal presence is different from the one of its visual presentation, and state borders divide other spaces than the gateway to the hereafter. There’s a multitude of spatial concepts and technologies to overcome distances and borders. According to Martin Heidegger we might find what’s peculiar about space by trying to listen to language. What does it speak of in the word space? In there speaks the clearing away. This means: to root out, to empty wilderness. The clearing away yields the open air, the open for a settling and living of man. Clearing away is the release of places. Archaic discoverer’s metaphors have also been marked for the WWW net’s space experience. In the WWW the navigational space of seafarers, surfers, pirates, and logbook writers presents itself to us, an astonishingly slowed down and clear world, when you think that already the early railroad with its unhurried transport velocity has made fundamental ideas of time and space sway. Heinrich Heine: Space is being killed by the railroad, and nothing but time is left. The Web’s virtual space can be traveled through, traveled across, and conquered like the first reality’s old space. Paul Virilio talks about an audio-visual vehicle one is using for this kind of travel. Movement on the spot, the advent of a last generation of vehicles, of means for long-haul traffic, as if the conquest of space eventually turned out to be the mere conquest of pictures of space.

The project beam me up develops its treatise on the space topic in the worldwide as well as space-negating medium Internet, the technology of which is based on flat, framed picture displays. Hence, the artists cannot draw up space-consuming installations, sculptures and architectures for their contribution to the project, but are medially tied back to texts, sounds and the central-perspective picture space as are the scientific authors. Which kind of expanded possibilities the artists will find in the net-medium we’ll see in the course of our project. Hence, the publication Beam me up offers a polyphonic reflection within the medium of a still young and global communication channel accessible to many people.

The publication form of an Internet magazine with specifically produced art contributions is hardly known yet, so far. Actually, our Internet magazine integrates all qualities of the digital and networked media technology. Among these are the worldwide participation of authors – from China and India via Europe and America -, the private access at one’s home computer for the audience and the application of different multimedia formats which reminds one, with Beam me up, of a virtual art exhibition, a TV channel or an electronic magazine, according to the contribution.

For Beam me up we collaborate with guest curators. Art experts from different countries and continents get the invitation to entrust artists, scientists and art scholars with contributions on the project’s topic and to attend to them as curators. Through their collaboration we hope for an opening of the thematic discourse, an expansion of the international spectrum of contributors and, in the future, also a widening of the project’s public.

Over the next months Beam me up magazine will regularly be enlarged by new contributions. With that, the authors and artists invited will have the possibility to shape and link their own contributions with the help of our data bank’s tools. Since the richness of material will grow rapidly, we invite our guest curators in a next phase to put together a limited selection of existing contributions as subjective chapters or as Guided Tours. This offer is meant to make an overall view of Beam me up easier for visitors.

Beam me up is a new online production by xcult.org. Since 1995 we organize and curate Internet-based art and text projects which deal with questions of our understanding of reality and our use of the media.

Reinhard Storz