floating worlds: the role of place and setting in virtual geography

What is Ukiyo?  During Japan’s Edo period, Ukiyo referred to a particular set of sensory experiences or a pleasure-driven urban lifestyle in the city that would come to be called Tokyo.  This particular set of experiences, while partially connected with physical locations (like red light districts) was largely a transient, ephemeral reality, almost transposed upon, or side-loaded against, or fluxing in relation to a perceived stable ordinary urban life.

Ukiyo roughly translates to “floating worlds.”  

Ukiyo offers our 21st century artists, philosophers, designers, developers and other culture producers an effective construct for thinking about the floating, digital worlds and populations we all currently inhabit.  Ukiyo can change the way we think of setting, as an identified place where things occur. 

Now, the economic reach of a particular place has always extended far beyond its own borders.  Economic geography is always vast.  We’re talking about revisiting the social and sensory geography of place in a similar way.

Is this a perfect one-to-one analogy for virtual experiences? No, but the notion that particular sets of actions, dispositions, shifting infrastructures, and social associations can belong to a floating, digital 21st century virtual urbanism seems like an apt way to approach emergent social and sensory geographies of the day.

Yeah, I said virtual urbanism.  We can no longer accept at face value, that a digital world that references a physical place by name actually belongs to that place.   

Here’s the wild claim - You need to start thinking about the virtual New York as being a different place with a different populace and set of rules than the actual, physical New York.  

Let’s use my former physical residence of Beijing as an example.  Am I in Beijing any longer? No.  Does digital infrastructure allow me to “participate in” or “associate with” Beijing as if I were there?  Yes, I can communicate with and observe Floating Beijing constantly.  So, where is Beijing and how does it relate to its floating counterpart? 21st settings are weird, man.

Floating worlds associate with place, they invoke but are not place.  Ukiyo Beijing exists in association with its physical referent, but it is not directly connected to place. 

Setting is about interaction and association, not location.  Residence, membership, participation and other seemingly stable concepts now merely need to invoke a place, not “be” in a place - these all need to be reinterpreted.  Residence in what setting?  Participation in what environment?  Membership as tied what criteria for “belonging”?  To what, when or whom?

If you’re not sold yet, I’m sure you can agree that an experience of a place can be had in interacting with the cultural products of a place - music, art, literature, film, theatre, food traditions, language, etc.  The experience of a place can be had in interactions with people deemed to be “of” a place be they virtual or physical, vocal or textual.  This has always been true.  Digital environments have just extended these experiences into new terrain.

Urban populations congregated, associated with place but ill-defined and unmoored - drifting in a vast digital global nowhere.  Coalescing and disintegrating constantly.  Ukiyo - the floating, virtual sensoria of the contemporary moment.