Editorial

When the opportunity to reincarnate Mark/Space came along, I had just spent four years researching cyberpunk science fiction. My attraction to this subject was through it's reflections. Many of my own personal thoughts and much of my past research was echoed in the ideas raised by these books and films.

The idea to fuse this work within a new communication medium began to form in my head. What we're dealing with here is our immediate future. And the future of our descendents. How to present it? How to illustrate the next century?

Is the future going to be a badly dilapidated version of our own time? With its destructuring economy, its outmoded fundamentalism, its selfish heart? Or is there a possibility that we could start afresh?

We are now tampering with the very basis of life (genetic engineering) and the actual foundations of reality (nanotechnology). For the very first time in modern history we are capable of radically altering evolution (and with it our identity of ourselves). But an evolution into what?

We have now moved one stage beyond mere human potential, we are now becoming posthuman. Able to bend DNA to our will, creating parallel universes, transforming the nature of matter, seeding silicon life, shaping the very fabric of our future. This is the stuff of gods. And madness. Which path are we going to pursue?

"We are as gods and might as well get good at it". --Stewart Brand.

Mark/Space is a process. Scratchings on stone... ink on paper... evolving into dots of light dancing in space and time.

Mark/Space is a living document of our times. An alternative social history of the 20th and 21st centuries. A post-terminal catalog of rapid archeological excavation. An encyclopedia of the future.

Mark/Space is a memory extension. The mind/machine symbiosis. Co-dependent, co-evolutionary, and cooperative. Wired into the collective unconscious. Hungry for input.

We are currently building a brand new universe next door. It is the universe of cyberspace and virtual reality. This capability to construct artificial worlds is having a profound significance on how we relate to the 'real' world. Left in the wrong hands this could be quite frightening. Shouldn't we have more say in its design?

Mark/Space exists to provide a platform for new ideas, and a matrix for giving them form. We welcome and encourage experimentation. New buildings with new activities, fresh reports, new presentations, better response, etc.

Mark/Space on the Internet is an ongoing report and example of what we envision as the fully-functional, walkthrough (and teleport), interactive 3D data environment. We eventually plan on issuing CD-ROM versions of the magazine containing all the visual presentation routines and completely rendered environments.

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