Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Different understandings of space, both real and cyber-, must be kept in dialectical relation with each other if we are to understand how space and time operate in human affairs (see Harvey 2009). This argument, plus explorations of space-time, are currently affecting many disciplines across humanities and post-humanities. This has not always been the case. First, the spatial parameter emerged relatively late and is still spreading. Second, links between the content of experience on the one hand, and mental realms on the other, were not always in place, even in the case of philosophers of space like Whitehead.

This paper examines, in interdisciplinary manner, specific instances of ancient space-times from Homer onwards. Exploring their occurrence in poetry, art, architecture and visual communication, the paper highlights such space-times as an expression of a steady, and yet swift, humanizing process. This process prioritized the collective through a compassionate, participatory outlook upon society and space. Through these space-times the ancient Greek world probed multiple bonds between humanity, the divine, nature, and cosmos in highly refined ways which necessitated, and advanced, the combination of thought-sensitiveness. The paper then briefly focuses on present space-times to show unexpected similarities but also radical differences from the ancient Greek worldview.

The argument in this paper runs as follows:

The importance of classical poetry as harbinger and bearer of notions of spacetime is examined in conjunction with some important philosophical ideas that paralleled or followed the emergence of poetry.
Second, classical Greek art and architecture will be surveyed from the point of view of space-time.
Thereafter, similarities and differences will be examined between ancient spatio-temporalities and present cyberspatialities, in order to contemplate on some important current issues, moral as well as aesthetic.