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Bachelard’s Poetics of Space & the Umwelt of Cyberspace
My book ‘Hello World: travels in virtuality’ was published in 2004
That is an aeon ago in the history of digital culture. But I’m dipping into it 18 years later and finding a curious synergy with the preoccupations of the novel I’m writing now. ‘Hello World’ is not fiction, however, but a travel memoir telling the story of my early experiences in cyberspace. I was very obsessed.
The Umwelt
The most striking thing I’ve noticed is how closely the experiences described in ‘Hello World’ entwine with the novel I’m currently writing. ‘The Fault in Reality’ explores the concept of ‘umwelt’, adopted in 1909 by the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll. He noticed that although we often share the same physical spaces, we read them in very different ways, picking up varieties of environmental signals according to our needs and sensory arrangements.
In German, ‘Umwelt’ is a general term for ‘environment’ or ‘surroundings’, but von Uexküll used it to denote the unique sensory world of any living organism. He studied the inner worlds of ticks, flies, bees, birds, sea urchins and other animals, and deduced that different organisms experience different umwelten depending on their individual encounters with their environments.
