Metaspace futures

In Roy Ascott’s 1983 La Plissure du Texte (The Pleating of the Text) (Ascott and Shanken 2003), we saw the first flicker of digitally enabled, distributed authorship. Collapsing time and space through interactivity produced a layering of semantics that translated into unimagined, new narratives. Metaspace Futures documents our use of distributed authorship in telematic practice, to create a visual and embodied commentary on increasingly compact living spaces. Supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project 3×4 exploring metaspace platforms for inclusive future cities builds on the established creative practice of interactive media artist Paul Sermon by merging a 3×4 metre room installation at KhÅ•j International Artists’ Association in Delhi with an identical space at the Southbank Centre in London. These dimensions reflect the plot size provided in some resettlement colonies such as Savda Ghevda in Delhi – a government initiative that relocates people from informal settlements within the city, commonly known as slums, to vacant land usually on the periphery.