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Vito Acconci: Public Space in a Private Time
Time is fast, and space is slow. Space is an attempt to place time and understand time; space is a need to have something to see and solid ground to stand on; space is a desire to follow the course of events and to believe in cause and effect. The electronic age obliterates space and overlaps places.
Public space, in an electronic age, is space on the run. Public space is not space in the city but the city itself. Not nodes but circulation routes; not buildings and plazas but roads and bridges. Public space is leaving home and giving up all the comforts of the cluster-places that substitute for the home. Space on the run is life on the loose. There’s no time to talk;there’s no need for talk, since you have all the information you need on the radio you carry with you. There’s no need for a person-to-person relationship,since you already have multiple relation- ships with voices on your radio, with images of persons in store windows and on billboards. There’s no time to stop and have a relationship, which would be a denial of all those other bodies you’re side-by-side with on t