Networks on a global scale offer a really unique structure for me. humanity has reached a point where I can talk to someone face to face on a device that fits into my pocket, half way across the world. We can construct the planet from a series of photographs taken from space, as illustrated in “Representation and the necessity of Interpretation.” This to me offers the most interesting aspects to global networks because we can now see the world from a different point of view. We can construct every corner of the planet from a birdseye view. However, experiencing the space first hand offers a more developed knowledge than from space.

I think thats where are global systems begin to disconnect. We experience a space through the lens of a computer screen, yet we never really experience the space first hand. I think this becomes a buffer for people to neglect exploration. It creates a false identity for architecture today because the experience of space directly relates to the inhabitant.

Capturing the space for what is can produce beautiful images and photography, but the experience will always be lost. And because there is no curiosity, there is no desire to want to experience a space. Why should there be, when you can just Google it?

Networks make up a majority of our  lives and a majority of the world by now. We are all a part of this complex interwoven series of networks that connect us to almost everything possible. Close Up at a  Distance by Laura Kurgan discusses how fundamental it is for us to start experiencing the space around us and to discover the new connections that are presented to us through this research of space and the world. We are given and thrown into a world where these advancing technologies have the abilities to map out the world, a big sphere that houses more than 7 billion people. Unfortunately, these kinds of world mappings made by satellite technologies and their information rarely ever gets shared, it is usually made for commercial, facility, or military uses. How can we utilize these sorts of data to our advantage and establish an attitude toward social issues that conveys power, influence and passion through images, diagrams, projects, concepts, etc.

A Network Megastructure (world). There’s a very telling point in Bratton’s text, where transoceanic network cables and explicitly compared to Superstudios Continuous Movement. While Superstudio agglomerated all parts of society in a singular envelope spanning on for seemingly eternity, the network cable connects one set of networks to another. If our life is lived inside a network, and if our lives continually move in the direction that they have been, does the physical environment at some point become engulfed by the digital environment. Does architecture survive in a future society where the physical aspect of the human and thus the space it occupies becomes so irrelevant that it simply does not matter. You’re born, you’re inserted into the network and its what you occupy and know, bio-mechanisms all taken care of if only to support your continued existence in the network.  

The film ‘Powers of Ten’ can be easily put as a summation for essays by Laura Kurgan, Benjamin Bratton’s Cloud Megastructures and Platform Utopia ‘edited by Jordon Geiger, the essays – Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft, Niagora and lastly Rem Koolhaas’s Bigness. Infact, although the film was made way back in 1977 by the Eames, it aptly points out the worldly scale and the network that seemingly links all the layers that constitute this big world. The movie illustrates the ideology of stitching various technologies together in order to interpret the relative terminology of scale with exploration of Universe and Space. The comprehension of scale of technologies on a global paradigm is elucidated through planetary computing in the readings. The articles are further linked with space and media which are global phenomenon.

The author in Representations and the Necessity of Interpretation principally talks about the satellite networks which help generate imagery of our planet earth. Moreover she also explains that this data delivered to the public is filtered by experts for surveillance and the delivered data need not be rightly interpreted by the users. This is when she also highlights the representations of this data should be supported with certain kind of toolsets which help user interpret the data in a better manner. Resonating the same data network which is primarily derived, listed, counted and linked to our physical and digital address potentially then becomes the spatial data which mapped. Bratton interprets this data on an even wider phenomenon and puts it as cloud megastructures which is an agglomeration of our physical and technological world. Cities are embedded with technologies and these layers of cities form stack or the cloud network. The cloud network in the physical when contained create dystopian platform cities. The scale of technologies hovers over the world form cloud megastructures.

In the article, ‘Representation and the necessity of Interpretation’, Laura talks about the images of Earth collected from various satellites, the technology involved in it. Laura refers Charles and Ray Eames’s film – ‘Powers of Ten.’ With the constant time unit, unchanging center point and a steady photographic move, the film aims to show the effect of adding another zero to any number. Laura also refers to ‘Google Earth’, the application with easy interface that allows almost anyone to look at almost anything on earth. However, it is important to note that the date or images we see are not the actual taken photographs from any satellite. Any image taken from the satellite goes under various filters like military, political and economic stakes. The image came out of all the filters in left with a minimal data and then it is made available to the public use. Laura frames the public availability of these maps or satellite images as ‘growing global transparency.’ Also in the reading I observed that the interpretation of the data gathered from ‘satellite’ images is not necessarily the correct as we do not get the full and exact information from them. As Laura states, No satellite image presents a simple, unambiguous picture of the Earth, and a visit to the site itself can often raise more questions than it answers, reaffirming rather than reducing the openness of the image to interpretation. Also in some of the cases the maps or images challenge us to think whether they are the piece of art or architecture.

The other article regarding cloud mega-structure in also closely related with the concepts explained in this article. The electronic network has become a part of our daily lives. The information that is generated from every individual creates the packages of information that float around us and creates cloud mega-structure. Then these packages or small clouds connects on global scale forms a pattern and make the information available for easy access from anywhere.

When analyzing situated technologies on the scale of the planet, the ideology of free trade or foreign trading zones can been seen as a cybernetic network on the scale of the world. Extended beyond governments, political boundaries, socioeconomic systems, and cultural divides, free trade zones are an intersection of infrastructural urbanism and communication zones. In the article, Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft by Keller Easterling, he begins the examination of Free Trading Zones stating “Today urban space has become a mobile, monetized technology, and some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in the spatial information of infrastructure, architecture and urbanism.”

The text is subdivided into three portions calling attention to three eras of the evolution of zones; the 16th century to 1930’s free trading ports, 1950-1970 foreign export zones that focused on manufacturing, and the third is after the 1970’s of mutated free zones covering scientific and national centers. Free zones started as European ports that were the median between two destinations were good and services were transferred or refined. Due to serving multiple municipalities and countries, these ports and surrounding urban spaces often evaded power and jurisdiction of powerful monarchies or nations. However into the 20th century due to new technologies of consumerism transportation, cities of trade zones presently are not limited to shipping ports. There is a plethora of new centers of trade dispersed around the world using foreign or free trading zones as a legal and economic tool to revitalize areas and to establish dominance in the global market. Specifically, Easterling describes Free Zones as an economic tool by providing economic sources from large corporations to be concentrated on a particular region or urban center. These zones can be economically more appealing due to separation of these zones from laws and regulations including labor restrictions, sanitation requirements, and / or environment impact. It is a political tool for corporations which bring in funds due to lack of regulation and ability for businesses to negotiate better business terms with adjacent government

Currently, free trading zones have permeated outside the boundaries of a particular site evolving from being purely business centers to become areas that are deployed around universities, museums, residential neighborhoods or tourist areas. As examples in the text “operating as it does in a frictionless realm of legal and economic exemptions, the zone, as it merges with other urban formats, perhaps most naturally adopts the scripts — the aura of fantasy — of the vacation resort and theme park. Taken together business travelers, itinerant workers and tourists create temporary populations which, like temporary agreements and shifting identities, are good for business.” This good for business mentality as progressed into a new frontier presently involving the entire city as a trading zone and in turn becoming a rapid urban center seemingly overnight. The speed of this growth, however, can even be considered to be out of control and potentially not sustainable as seen in the Shenzhen providence in China which has developed almost exclusively in the past 10 years. Using the freedoms and connections of the global trading zone, the city quickly became a extremely complex and vast urban area which serves as a model for speed and spectacle in the urban condition around the world in the 21st century.