This chapter explores my second research question, RQ2, how metaphors support the relations between physical and virtual space, and my third question, RQ3, how a common place for the physical and virtual can be formed. I start from the higher levels of abstraction, by discussing the relations between space and place and then connect metaphor to space and place. From there, I move to the intermediate levels of abstraction, when focusing on the concepts of theatre and the particular stage metaphor.
Space and Place
Space and place are two fundamental concepts in Geography, as well as in our everyday descriptions of the world. Our planet exists in space, there is enough space in our house for guests, the town square is spacious, and so on. Space is generally used to describe the structure, dimension and location of something. Place is more used for personal experience and human interactions, as in “there is no place like home” or “the town square is a place to meet”.
Chinese geographer Yi-Fu Tuan puts forward an experience-based perspective on these concepts in his book Place and Space (Tuan, 1977). He considers the ways in which people feel and think about space, how they form attachments to home, neighbourhood, and beyond, and how feelings about space and place are affected by the sense of time. He generally proposes that place is about security and space is about freedom: we are attached to one and long for the other. His ambition is to both describe the concepts of space and place and also suggest how scientists and architects, like urban planners, can make use of these concepts in order to design a more human habitat. This approach is in line with the ambition of this thesis, looking at relations between different spaces with the ambition to contribute to the practices of architecture and interaction design. The interesting aspects of Tuan’s ideas in relation to my analysis is how he shows that ‘space’ is described in abstract and objective terms while ‘place’ is more concrete and subjective. Basically, for a place to exist, there is need for a space and a human being attached to it.
As discussed in the previous chapter, physical space and virtual space are entities that exist in reality as subsets of the wider entity of space. The hierarchy of physical space and virtual space is equal, so one is not a subset of the other. The co-existence of physical and virtual space makes it possible to experience both physical and virtual space, even simultaneously, creating a physical-virtual space in a phenomenological sense.
In virtual space, as well as in physical space, there are places to inhabit and attach personal thoughts and feelings to. Using Tuan’s analysis, your home in a Sims game is your place in the world, while the whole game world is the space of possibilities. Even though Tuan emphasized tangibility and physicality in his definition of place some four decades ago, we should now accept the multimodal and interactive experience of virtual space as sufficient conditions for creating a place. Also, place is less about sensory input and more about the thoughts and feelings that are attached to it. As mentioned before in his thesis, “Real events happen in real places in virtual spaces” (Kolb, 2006). It is the human actions in and human connections to a space that define it as a place, regardless of the materiality of the space.
The hierarchy of space and place is also not given. At first glance, one assumes that a place would necessarily be part of a space, with certain requirements fulfilled, such as a neighbourhood being part of a city. However, the opposite can also apply. The most obvious example is the home that is a place that consists of a number of spaces, for example kitchen, bedroom, garden, and so on. The conceptual difference between space and place is not about size, but rather about personal attachment, human interaction, and experience. I use ‘place’ as a term for a space, or a set of spaces, where emotional and intellectual agreements are made
between actors/users and the space. Later in this thesis I will give examples of places that consist of both physical and virtual spaces. To extend the concept of place, I will introduce the ‘stage’ metaphor.
Spaces are here seen as structures that can be defined both by objective measures and subjective perception. This concerns both physical and virtual spaces on equal terms. It is then by human connection, emotional and intellectual, that spaces become places. Using conceptual metaphors, these places can become for example “homes” or “neighbourhoods” that are used as agreements on how to negotiate and interact in different situations. More specifically, this thesis introduces the Stage metaphor as a unifying concept for physical-virtual spaces that are to be understood as meaningful places for human interaction and experience. In a simplified model this can be analysed as:
SPACE → Human Connection → PLACE → Agreements and Metaphors → STAGE
Using this model, all stages are places and all places are spaces, but not the opposite. Moreover, ‘place’ is the concept that connects ‘space’ with ‘stage’. A more thorough presentation of the Stage metaphor, and how it can be of importance and use, follows in the next chapter.
A specific type of Place that is studied in this thesis is the Stage. The idea is that a stage is a place for staging, that is presentation of a scene, a drama, or a performance. As discussed in the famous book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman, 1956) all human interaction can be seen as staging of a scene with roles, using the analogy of theatre: an actor performs on a setting which is constructed of a stage and a backstage, the props in both settings direct his action, he is being watched by an audience, but at the same time he is an audience for his viewers' play.
In this thesis, I will focus on scenes that are intentionally staged for interaction in and with physical-virtual spaces. It could for example be a science center or a museum, where physical and virtual spaces co-exist in order to show certain environments, scenes, or events. The idea is to highlight the need for a unifying concept for both creating and using these spaces. Stage is here used metaphorically, with the intention to open up the physical-virtual space for a way of seeing users as actors, the space as a stage, the limitations as a set, events as part of a drama, clothes as costumes, and so forth.
Later in this text I will introduce the Stage as a metaphor for a space where this interplay between reality and virtuality can happen, and also as a space for the connection of physical and virtual space. In order to introduce the Stage metaphor, I first describe how I use the idea of conceptual metaphors that can work as foundation for further agreements and interpretations, in the use of more metaphors. The idea is that when the Stage metaphor is introduced, other concepts such as roles, scene, actors, and audience, will be used and understood from the Stage as ruling concept. Then I present how a stage is constituted and how it works in the context of theatre. The purpose is to show the many dimensions of the concept, both structurally and artistically, in order to give a wide spectrum of connotations for the Stage metaphor. This description includes both classical and modern theatre, and the different practices and theories that are connected to these different forms of theatre.
Metaphor
A metaphor (Greek metaphero “carry over” or “transfer”) works as an analogy between two objects or concepts. An object can be a word, an image, a 3-dimensional shape, a gesture, a musical chord or any other form of representation. The typical example is the word “rose” which is used as metaphor in for example the sentence “you are a rose”, implying that the other person is loved, special, fragile and so forth. Taking the analogy more concretely, “rose” could also mean “has a wonderful scent” or even “has thorns”, making “rose” a metonym (a substitution of signifiers based on understood association). The word “rose” has of course also religious and other meanings that can be understood from the discourse and the context of the sentence. The general view is that metaphors are poetic in their function and have the capacity to enhance or ‘give life’ to the language.
Cognitive linguist George Lakoff explains that metaphorical expressions are essentially not in language, but in thought: “They are general mappings across conceptual domains. In short, the locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualise one mental domain in terms of another” (Lakoff, 1993). The general theory of metaphor is therefore, according to Lakoff, given by characterizing such cross-domain mappings. And in that process, everyday abstract concepts like space, time, states, change, causation, and purpose also turn out to be metaphorical. Empirical results (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) show that everyday metaphor is characterised by a huge system of thousands of cross- domain mappings, and the word metaphor has come to mean a cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system. The term metaphorical expression refers to a linguistic expression (a word, phrase, or sentence) that is the surface realization of such a cross-domain mapping. Lakoff explains how conceptual metaphors have the power to make us understand one concept in terms of another. To exemplify this concept, we could look at everyday metaphors like “way” or “road” that are used to describe events and choices over time: “I am on my way to change job”, “I am standing at a crossroad”, and “this is the road to success”. The interesting aspect of these metaphors is not that “crossroad” is an analogy for “choice” (the surface realization according to Lakoff) but rather that they all together show that “journey” is a metaphor for “life”. We understand these metaphors because we understand the reference to the general idea, the conceptual domain. Through these metaphors, we understand life as a spatial concept, a path through a landscape of “ups and downs” and events or people that “cross our path”. Once we have learnt this idea, it is impossible to un-learn it and we bear this association with us, so that we connect the two concepts together.
Wittgenstein discussed the concept “seeing as” in order to describe how we interpret images and language (Wittgenstein, 1953). In the well-known example with the “duckrabbit” picture (Jastrow, 1899), drawn by psychologist Joseph Jastrow, there is a double meaning and two ways to read the image, so that it is impossible to see both interpretations at the same time. It is possible to change from one interpretation to the other, but at a given moment one can only see a duck or a rabbit. What Wittgenstein points out is that this internal change has an impact on the external world. In other words, changing the way that we see the world changes the world. This phenomenon is also the case when it comes to creation and interpretation of different types of spaces. Since the theme of this text is the relation between physical and virtual spaces, reality and virtuality, I will pursue this conceptual dialectic, even though there are many other ways to classify spaces. In this text I discuss and exemplify how we see spaces as physical or virtual, the duck being physical and the rabbit virtual. This means that we have different models for the understanding of a physical space than what we have for a virtual. When we are confronted with a physical-virtual environment we are not able to understand it as one space, but rather as a set of different spaces.
Figure 32. Duckrabbit (Jastrow, 1899)
Since the emergence of virtual space we have used different metaphors for the physical and the virtual, so that physical and virtual space are essentially two different conceptual domains, using Lakoff’s term. That means, that the unification of the physical and virtual space cannot take place in a hermeneutic sense. We do not understand spaces as just space, but rather as different conceptual domains.
In physical spaces we prefer metaphors in architecture that refer to nature and culture, such as “the Sydney Opera House is a seashell”. This particular example of metaphorical expression carries over not only the resemblance of a seashell but also that seashells have to do with listening to music, along with the interpretants of tranquility, life-containing, and protecting. The Sydney Opera House tells us that we understand music as an experience of nature, not just culture. Metaphors from the world of architecture are also used in theories in science and philosophy, such as “this concept is the foundation” or “a framework for this theory” and so forth. The cross-domain links that these metaphors create work both ways, so that architecture is considered as a formation of ideas and knowledge. Historically, metaphors came into play as an important part in the creation and interpretation of architecture in the Post-Modern era. In 1972 architect Robert Venturi coined the concepts “duck” and “decorated shed” as two models of how metaphors can work in urban space (Fig. 33), elaborated further in his most well-known work Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi et al., 1977). The duck and the decorated shed embody symbolism/iconography in architecture in two distinct ways, which is an analysis that has formed the way we read physical spaces today. However, this does not mean that architecture did not work on a metaphorical level before 1970, just that metaphors have been more focused on since then.
Figure 33. Duck and Decorated shed (Venturi, 1972)
Virtual spaces, on the other hand, lean on a set of metaphors that relate to a different context, sprung from the early ages of cyberspace and virtual reality. We see metaphors like “diving into the virtual environment” and symbolic images of grids, flashes and lights as signifiers for spatial properties like distance and atmosphere.36 In our everyday life we “explore” and
“navigate” on the Internet, words that are viable for interaction in physical space as well but then concerning outer space travel or other adventures, not for just everyday physical
interaction like buying tickets or socialising with friends. Another use of metaphors in virtual space is when images of analogue objects like old telephones, trashcans and folders represent communication, deletion and organization. These images were introduced as icons some thirty years ago when a telephone actually had that appearance and function, but they survive now only as pictorial analogies in digital representations.
One could argue that we already do use the same metaphors in both physical and virtual spaces, such as “this environment is a nightmare”. These are general metaphorical expressions where “environment” can be replaced with “X” and do not relate particularly to spatial aspects. Another similarity between metaphors in contemporary virtual and physical spaces exists in the notion of identity. Companies and organizations of today strive to integrate their identity (soul, core value etc) in both their physical and virtual environments as a strategy of “branding”. This identity is represented consciously in metaphors that are used both physically and virtually. Also on a private level, people use similar symbols and analogies to create or strengthen their own identity both physically (for example in clothing and home decoration) and digitally (in facebook profiles, iphone apps etc). This connects to the notion of a digital subject, a human or non-human entity represented or existing in the digital realm (Windley, 2005). Still, by branding our personal physical-virtual identity we merely “decorate” our subjects with metaphors on an object-level. We do not conceptualise one mental domain in terms of another.
What is then the importance of metaphors? Paul Ricoeur analyses the metaphor in three points of view: the form of metaphor as a shape or figure of speech, the sense of metaphor as an origin of semantic meaning, but most importantly the reference of the metaphorical statement as “the power to redescribe reality” (Ricoeur, 1977). This analysis shows a transition from semiotics to semantics to hermeneutics, that is, from sign relations to interpretation and understanding of the world. It means that every metaphor has a reference to a discourse, and that the intention of this discourse cannot be reduced to a semiotic analysis of the signifier and the signified. In my reading, Ricoeur wants to say something about the world, not only about sign relations. He goes beyond the classic ‘semiotic versus semantic’ viewpoint and states that “the sign owes its very meaning as a sign to its usage in discourse” (p. 5), showing his interest to apply the abstract world of semiotics to things, spaces and situations. Furthermore, his view extends the linguistic context so that metaphors do not only involve written language but all forms of representation. According to Ricoeur metaphors creatively transform language, language here being understood in a broader sense, i.e. “the language of architecture” or “the language of music”. Metaphors are mainly talked about as used in text, but when Ricoeur talks about text he means the “production of discourse as a work” (p. 259-261). To analyse this concept further he categorises the production of discourse as a work into three categories: firstly the composition or arrangement of the parts, secondly the codification of the work that tells what genre the work belongs to, and at last the result of the production as a singular piece of work that has a particular style. In all three categories, the metaphorical statement can work actively with the arrangement, the genre and the style of the work. Ricoeur then uses the idea that the structure of the work can be seen as its sense and the world of the work as its reference. We can then regard hermeneutics as a theory that deals with the transition from the structure of the work to the world of the work. Metaphors come into play here in an interesting way, since they are in essence vehicles of meaning and point at the relationship between what is displayed and what is suspended.
Reading the notions of Ricoeur and Lakoff together, metaphors are not merely rhetorical ornaments but they have genuine cognitive import in their own right. In this line of thought I see metaphors as a method of invention and creation. By finding metaphors in the relations between the physical and the virtual that can combine and include both reality and virtuality we can move towards the unification of physical and virtual space, in a hermeneutic sense.
The Case on Stage
“The theatre is dark and silent. There is just the soft sound of the audience’s breath and whisper, a cough and a coat being folded. Then a sound of wind and rain is heard, first vaguely as if from