Post-walls architecture: the everyday experience of opening windows

Abstract

We started a conversation with Ivana Bentes. Director and professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro's School of Communication, coordinator of the Pontão de Cultura Digital at the same school, she is a researcher on communication, aesthetics, digital culture, contemporary thought, social imagination, among others.

She is also a researcher who is not confined to the academy grounds, who does not remain within a comfortable distance of what happens around her. Transposing limits, passing an intense way through the different places where important features are outlined in this cultural scenery.

In this interview, through GTalk, we started an infinite and open conversation with Ivana Bentes. We share with the readers of V!RUS this pleasurable moment, inviting them to participate too!

V!RUS: Ivana, thanks for accepting our invitation! The theme of this issue is "Places of Living: Revisited". We want to talk to you about the role of communications in changing or even creating these places.

The first question refers to social networks and their interfaces as a place to live. May we see these digital environments as expanded places of living?

Ivana Bentes: Undoubtedly, the theorists' initial idea and even the common sense that we should think a distinction between real and virtual proved to be unsustainable. The networks are, today, cognitive and affective territories, in which we want to be in more and more. They’re places of flows and increasingly intense exchanges increasingly intense. In that sense this course are new places, highly stimulating hybrids of presence/absence highly stimulating.

The idea of expansion, in the manifestation episode in Spain, for example, finished ended with the division: territory versus networks. What we saw was a collapse of the real/virtual distinction. I stayed three days, almost whole, following the Puerta del Sol virtual , live broadcast of the camp in Madrid, and was an intense experience. While there was a territorial occupation, the networks mobilization was decisive.

V!RUS: This idea of "wanting to be more and more" may have a parallel with the notion of "oasis" or "refuge", often attributed to the living for people?

Ivana Bentes: It is a well-populated oasis. Nobody wants to be "alone", it is like being alone among many, a new way to share time and space. No doubt it is a refuge, but rather "lively". Today, I see many people "alone" in public places in the company of a mobile phone, or other connecting devices, immersed in "being" simultaneously whithin the territory and the network.

V!RUS: In this case, the idea of oasis gets a feature of a place from which we retreat ourselves, from an almost ideological point of view, or at least marked by a clear convergence of interests... Would it be an illustration of the Manuel Castells’ concept of networked individualism ?

Ivana Bentes: I like the idea of a singularity in flow. Yes, the networked individualism or the concept of "multitude" of Antonio Negri , which joins the most singular and the common, the collective.

V!RUS: How would you introduce, in this conversation, the concept of co-presence?

Ivana Bentes: Being here and there at the same time, this idea fascinates me and delights many. Not as a matter of "omnipresence", neither superpowers, but as an experience more and more daily in which we can open "windows" between spaces, making spaces communicate: through a web-cam, a Skype call, a GTalk continuously open. These are possibilities of living in co-presence. I have been doing experiments like these in the network. Endless conversations that never "end". They are simply "open".

V!RUS: It would mean to dwell in what we call hybrid spatialities, in which more and more people transit daily, often without realizing it completely.

Ivana Bentes: This idea of spaces connecting us instantly with others... We may think about a post-walls architecture. Which can work as open media-windows in a continuous flow, in co-presence with other cognitive, affective environments …

Endless conversations, no need to say good morning or goodbye :)

V!RUS: No need to go back home too?

Ivana Bentes: Not going back home supposes a radical nomadism!!! Whenever I travel I just feel "at home" when I enter my Gmail and meet all people I know, all affections and problems of my emotional continent. It's magic! It's my "home" that accompanies me. But still there are many territorialized experiences that mark and call... we can not virtualize them so much…

Having a "home", somewhere, to return back! That's comforting. I think this is what you define as hybrid spaces, both mental/territorial. This is a great topic. I have studied some poetic concepts of space and found a wonderful one from Lygia Pape , which comes from the seventies, the idea of "magnetized spaces".

She was fascinated with these clusters rising at a market, in the middle of the street, in a square. Suddenly, a space gets "magnetized", created by a temporary interest. A small community then arises, in the middle of the street, among anonymous people. I find this idea brilliant. The space built as in the network, a chat or an exchange of messages on Facebook, can create other magnetized spaces, provisional but intense ones.

Still about this relationship between collective and singular, between territory and network, I was in the March of Freedom in São Paulo, with the presence of bodies, conversations, face to face interaction, a classic manifestation of multitudes, there were hundreds of people tweeting, taking pictures, posting them and playing in the network, intensely. Again, the two dimensions. There is no incompatibility between network and territories. Space and time are short-circuiting. We enter the flow.

V!RUS: The classic analytic categories of "public" and "private" would still be sufficient to understand (or explain) this notion of living?

Ivana Bentes: We can no longer completely separate the public sphere from the private one. In fact this separation has always been "artificial", historical, perhaps they are no longer useful to understand other types of culture and of being in the world.

But we have to go slowly... because other boundaries arise, new boundaries... A way for people to create the so called oasis is "unplugging", a luxury for a few people today. Who can afford to be disconnected a full day? "Out of coverage area"... We are more intolerant with the other's "absence".

V!RUS: Models of living simultaneously networked and in territories extend to digital media solidary ways of living, already present in their physical space, as it is the case of Fora do Eixo Circuit . Their references are Marxist, implemented via telematic networks.

Ivana Bentes: Fora do Eixo is an experimental and brilliant circuit. The more I know, the more I get involved and impressed by what they are experiencing. I think it is a new "communism", post-hippie, techno-odara , networks’ communism. I think they are responding and creating new questions for a difficult issue: how to live together?