Articulating electronic space for interaction

Abstract

The author has been working on communications with and without technology, and was guest-editor of the Ekistics special issue with the same title (October 1983). His Edinburgh University 1974 Ph.D was on Space Networks, considering space as a network. Born into a family of sailors, he grew up on ocean-going boats, and for three years was a Naval Intelligence officer. He was active in the 1968-and-after period in Northern European universities. He has acted as consultant to national/international bodies and, being invited to look into Europe as-a-whole, or into the Aegean Sea, or into the Mediterranean, he has formulated proposals to change policy (although cannot claim being successful in trying). Having combined behavioral sciences with visual arts, he has contributed to the art-science-technology field two on-going series of projects and project-proposals: the video communications installations Face-to-Face, and geopolitical art. He has concentrated on islands both for observations of communications issues and using telecommunications for quality development, and also for the ongoing series of minimal constructions on coastal remote sites. As a student he was invited to the Delos 1969 Symposion on Networks, and is a member of the World Society for Ekistics - for which society he has also acted as vice-president. He has not sailed through the Pacific. The text that follows is a slightly edited version of a paper presented by the author at the international symposion on "Globalization and Local Identity, " organized jointly by the World Society for Ekistics and the University of Shiga Prefecture in Hikone, Japan, 19-24 September, 2005.