The Ultimate Cathedral

paper

Ctheory: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=568

2006

Cyberspace has extended the range of the human body and consciousness to the final extremities of the speed of light, by means of electronic components, that connect man to the Universe. Man’s consciousness influences reality in his vicinity directly and immediately. The cyclic concept of time and space that dominated pre-historic culture, and was exchanged for logical, linear, Western concepts, returned to its starting point by the cyberspace closed loop of time and space.
The Universe became an ultimate cathedral linked to every internet surfer. Cyberspace electronically compresses and flattens the events in the Universe to singularity of the electronic cathedral. Man is situated in the center of that cathedral, a finger of his hand extended via the digital gadgets to touch the reality opposite him. The world has returned to Pythagoras’ form, where man on Earth is the center of a flat Universe, with planets and spheres circling him, and the whole enveloped in God’s embrace, as in the Medieval illustrations. The surfer's finger is trying to reach God’s finger. To his amazement the surfer discovers that the Heavenly embrace and the finger of God that is trying to reach, and almost touches, is not God’s finger, but his own.
It means that life is carried in an electronic Panopticon, in which the subject looking out from the center sees around him a flat world embraced by his own body extensions. The flat images which appear on the PDA, cell phone, TV and computer displays, are tiny segments of the digital data membranes which assemble the cyberspace and represents the higher dimensions of the physical space.