the true problem of virtual reality is that orientation is no longer possible; we have lost our points of reference to orient ourselves; that de-realized man is a disoriented man (sic)(Virilio 1995)
the true problem of virtual reality is that orientation is no longer possible; we have lost our points of reference to orient ourselves; that de-realized man is a disoriented man (sic)(Virilio 1995)
substitutability is the key to popular acceptance of the new
user friendliness as a criteria for design can be limiting (aesthetically & conceptually) and revealing (engages an emotionally charged discourse: domesticity)
telematics destabilise our bodily experiences of the world
virtual home = a structure that is both there, yet not there, in the same way that 'cyber'space is both 'everywhere and nowhere'
virtual domestic subject = not expressly a domestic subject, but one in terms of power, force and effect
what the theorists say
Adilkno (1995): in telematics, domestic subjects are constructed in either of two ways:
the tele-obsessed and the teleputer will form a 'therapeutic' relationship
human/object relations go beyond the cognitive to the emotional, and beyond the conscious to the unconscious
in the light of the above
it can be argued that the effects of our transposition and dispersal as data echo the dilemma of the migrant worker
interface signified (the desire for a heart(hearth)land expresses the repressed other
interface uses sign system of the dominant culture's (non-neutral) spatial constructs
leads us to question computing science's claim to objectivity
those seeking change see an opportunity to reformulate identities, create new relations of power (or merely replicate old orders)
Web sites can be read as cultural artefacts:
Terra Vista [HREF 4] a virtual city. 
Annie Sprinkle's Public Cervix [HREF 5] , the Home Page of a self-defined 'post post-porn modernist' feminist performance artist
at first glance: binary oppositions public/rational (Terra Vista) and private/irrational (Sprinkle)
back to the theorists:
(Sofia's 1993:91 table "A Semiotics and psychoanalysis of Ihde's genres of technics")
Both sites can't be contained within public/private binary opposition
so Probyn's (1990:183) three-part analytical construct is useful here
"Locale" = place
"Local" = temporality
"Location" = theoretical positioning
applying this discursive arrangement we can read these sites as locations of 'cyber-civics' in cyberspace locale (civic buildings, civic service); where localised gendered operations take place (ie events over time)
Terra Vista: irrational fears of cultural incivility
Sprinkle: signs and indexes are scrambled, and boundaries transgressed.
historical relationship between culture & civility
irony: 'culture' in the form of the 'high arts' was perceived by the state to serve a useful purpose as a civilising influence
women, as mothers and nurturers, 'domesticate' or 'taming' influence
responses to the social transformations that are occurring in RL are replicated in the discursive formations of cyberspace
Terra Vista=the desire for a return to order and rationality in cyberspace
civic buildings: Post Office, Library, Courthouse (to deal with vandalism and other unruly, 'uncivilised' behaviour by virtual tourists)
architects' concern to protect their (private yet nominally public) virtual property: surveillance and punishment. (Perhaps the next building will be the virtual jail!)
disembodied city; a rejection or disavowal of the knowns of the terrestrial/maternal axis
repressed body returns in form of narrative v-City 1.0's public enemy (virtual pornography)
examination of the relationship between the body and the city finds two pervasive models of interrelation:
Foucault (1988:417) Relating to oneself as an object is a diving practice which involves the means by which a human being turns himself (sic) into a subject: how men have learned to recognise themselves as subjects of sexuality.
alongside the mapping of virtual worlds is the mapping of virtual identities
'High' 'Low' culture representations like Sprinkle's ironically simulate the cultural forms they critique
Sprinkle's Home Page deconstructs pornography at the boundaries of public and private; proclaims a new un-civil civic role for the private across the interface
highlights paradox
CONCLUSIONS Feminism's project is to continue work around limiting polarisations, always returning to bodily experiences and the socio historical
Grosz (1995:112) draws attention to Derrida's interest in Plato's concept of 'chora' for the purposes of his project of deconstruction in relation to architecture because "it has an acknowledged role at the very foundations of the concept of spatiality, place and placing: it signifies, at its most literal level, notions of 'place,' 'location,' 'site,' 'region,' 'locale,' 'country'; but it also contains an irreducible, yet often overlooked connection with the function of femininity recognized by Sprinkle as associated with a series of sexually-coded terms - 'mother,' 'nurse,' 'receptacle,' and 'imprint-bearer.'
Women's attitutes towards the domestic have been influenced by the experience of containment within dwellings that were neither built for us or built by us, so that containment within these dwellings can only amount to a homelessness within the very home itself. The home is the space of tedious, unrewarded and unrecognised duty for women constructed as domestic subjects, but "the space of the affirmation and replenishment of others at the expense and erasure of the self, the space of domestic violence and abuse, the space that harms as much as it isolates women" (Grosz 1955:122).
The work of constructing preferred futures toward which we can move, which has occupied the feminist intellectual, demands that cartographies are constantly redrafted. As an intellectual style, Braidotti's nomadism is not so much about being homeless but about "a refusal to settle, not into a habitat, but into socially coded modes of thought and behaviour ... the nomadic state is defined by the subversion of set conventions rather than the literal act of travelling" (1994:5)
Our @ homeness, as a statement of our will to virtuality, locates us within a set of power relations and among a range of forces which produce certain effects. An analysis of the discourses of cyberspace which include economic, social, and cultural discourses, reveals the constructed nature of virtual subjectivities around notions of @ homeness, or @ homelessness, and among relations of power which effect those subjectivities. As a site, or location, the Home Page is both illusion and object. Its illusory features are the interconnecting symbolic elements which enable us to recognise functional correspondence in computing operations. They are also the features through which we might formulate knowledge about our existential condition of substitutability, that is, our condition of being @ home, not necessarily actually, but @ home in simulation, at home in terms of the relations power, force or effect
public and private spheres of industrial capitalism could be recognised as the sites where performances of masculinity or feminity took place.
we can view this construction of virtual domesticity as a feminisation of events
there is a certain irony for women as we witness the turning inside-out of old notions of domesticity, and the creation of a new homeless 'other'
The new homeless of the digital age, according to MIT Media Lab's Negroponte, are the world's elite - the decision makers aged between thirty and fifty' who are running the country (the US) - but whose 'appalling computer illiteracy and lack of real socio-technological vision' is 'jamming the true potential of cyberspace.' (McIntosh 1996:25)
Those @ home with the technology of digital culture can be seen to hold positions of power - Negroponte himself holds an elite position as 'cyberspace's most radical guru' (McIntosh 1996:25)- but these positions are only as nodes in the networked relations of power underlying the networked systems of new media communications.
To dwell in cyberspace is to assume a virtual domesticity cleared of the constraints of the historical coincidence between 'place' and 'time' we have merely replaced the post-code with the url (universal resource locator) code, and the street directory with the Global Positioning System, which, through the spatio-temporal coordinates provided by the satellite, can record the relationship of the computer's room to the rest of the world. Domesticity now can be perceived as the unfolding story of a life being lived. Virtual domesticity as the actual traces of life being lived suggests that, in some sense, virtual can be actual. The "Netscape" Home Page, complete with its sinister/homey 'cookie' container, ultimately, is expressive of the doubled sense of freedom and degeneration that is our experience of the expanding functions of digital technology.
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