Salman Khalid

     This project seeks to understand our modern relationship to space. It places the topic with in a chronology of evolving transportation technology. The train expanded our sense of location. What was once incomprehensibly distant became peripheral. Space however, was not expanded, but instead altered; divided into two categories: destination space and travel space. Due to the necessary entwinement of space and time the notion of travel time also emerged as a necessary byproduct.

     Areas rendered as travel space lost their significance, they were no longer experienced; reduced to a means for further ends, and so Newtonian objectivity gave way to Einsteinian relativity.

     The invention of the car furthered the project of the train by rendering the travel, destination dynamic on a more microscopic encounter. Our towns and cities were reduced, both physically by the monumentality of road and highway infrastructure and experientially by giving a select few locations - home, work - primacy; the rest were rendered as commute and so lost. The internet then is the final outcome of the project incited by the train. The information super highway allows one to travel to any time-place dynamic with impossible immediacy. With the flick of one’s fingers one can be "at" the set of a Hollywood production in the making, made 10 years ago and then an ordinary kitchen in Egypt.

     However, one must not forget the crucial relationship between travel time and travel space. If there is no traversal, there can be no destination. The phenomenology of the internet then is not one of space, but un-space and un-time. The globe has condensed and collapsed; as though a black hole.