In Poetic Space I examine the confluence of poetry, architecture, and cyberspace. As Marcos Novak illustrates in Liquid Architecture in Cyberspace, there is a great overlapping of these three seemingly disparate categories:

The transition from real space to cyberspace, from prose to poetry, from fact to fiction, from static to dynamic, from passive to active, from the fixed in all its forms to the fluid in its ever changing countenance is best understood by examining that human effort that combines science and art, the worldly and the spiritual, the contingent and the permanent: architecture.
In defining liquid architecture, Novak states, "I use the liquid to mean animistic, animated, metamorphic, as well as crossing categorical boundaries, applying the cognitively supercharged operations of poetic thinking... a liquid architecture in cyberspace is clearly a dematerialized architecture."

Poetic Space negates product, and instead speaks to process: "Cyberspace is poetry inhabited...poetry is liquid language...poetic language is language in the process of making." Such a poetic space is destabilized, shifting, irresolute. The words inhabit the space as the space inhabits the words. No longer is it writing on a page, but writing in a page. And the page is no longer a page, but a space, a space that is dematerialized. This dematerialized space, this cyberspace, is a space of simultaneity, a space where specifictity is both heightened and collapsed. In this space of superimposition, words and images collide, meanings multiply and divide. Novak highlights cyberspace as the embodiment of architecture, or conversely, architecture as the embodiment of cyberspace, as the embodiment of potential, "Cyberspace is architecture, cyberspace has an architecture; and cyerspace contains architecture."

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Vivian Rosenthal '98, English 111, Brown University


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