Space Regimes

Abstract:Based on a general model of interaction, the present analysis attempts to account for the diversity of the ways space may be apprehended in lived experience. It leads to the definition of four configurations that correspond to as many regimes of relation with the environing world. The conventional space of the circulation of values takes the archetypical shape of the net (incarnated today by Internet). The operational space is that of our dealing with objects within a material environment seen as a tissue of stable and intelligible relations. The experienced space of bodies' movement, to which one may give as an emblem the spiral, expresses the dynamics of sensitive relationships between the self and the other. The existential space is that of our presence in a universe without boundaries, which no one can properly represent oneself but that nonetheless haunts art and thought: its figure is the abyss.