4 From Description To Performing
Wittgenstein's discussion of rule-following is a good starting point to talk about a public space that is constructed on the fly by its participants. By shifting attention from representation to performance, we shift the focus of design from technologies of static representation (e.g. snap-shot database schemas with data from forms), to technologies of creation and performance. Of course, the social forms that we mentioned earlier all have rules and conventions, some of which are followed pretty strictly even if they are tacit. However we think of these rules not as chains or shells encasing our activity, but rather as collective agreements arising after the fact, emerging as conventions in the course of play. We think of rules as constructed by newcomers to the game, for the newcomers' benefit, as a way to summarize history. And we think of rules as scaffolding to enable the players to improvise against a provisional framework, and reach beyond the scope of their past activity if they desire.

Christopher Alexander, in his book, The Timeless Way of Building, viewed each space as alive with events that were scaffolded by the geometry of that space. Schematizing Alexander's description, the geometry of a place gives a shape to the imagination of the inhabitant, the imagination inspires the behavior, and the behaviors build the event. What sorts of repetition and variety emerging in play can we expect in cyberspace?

5 Malleable Spaces
How can we construct alternate forms of public social action in our contemporary mixed architectures built out of computation, digital media and steel? What are some "techniques" that we might invent appropriate to such hybrid architecture?

Translation and Allergy
In our globalized society, communities that used to be comfortably bounded and closed are exposed to exogenous and even alien language. If language is the appropriate medium of public activity, then translation becomes all-important. Translation, the "Holy-Grail" of artificial intelligence is a living process. Could translation become an organism living inside the cyber-public space alongside more automatic processes?

When thinking about the immunological aspect of autopoeitic systems, students of living and techno-scientific entities saw that the Internet could not be transparent any more than an organism could live without skins. Under the impact of plague messages, ISP's grew spam filters and firewalls like skin to protect their members. But perhaps now we can build a more subtle form of immune system, that lives in the interstitial fluid inside and outside our hybrid bodies. An immune system that doesn't simply destroy or eject alien objects, but modifies the habits of the body in order to accommodate the presence of other living processes.

Static Space to Elastic Space to Responsive Space
The society has long ago started moving away from an aesthetic for a "built" environment that assumes the neat separation of modernist design -- so masterfully epitomized by Eames -- between user and object. There are no clear rules or boundaries, no definitely resolved conflicts (Stuart Hampshire) and no eternally fixed resolution of interests (Chantal Mouffe & Ernesto Laclau) in a truly democratic realm. Given this, we argue that public space should be created as heterogeneous domains and remain polyphonic, that its totality cannot be grasped in any one schema.

The inhabitants of a medieval market could make sense of their environment despite the lack of fixed total schema. Braudel remarked that in 14c Paris, servants gauged when to rush out into the market not by watching clocks (which didn't exist) but by attending to the varying quality of the mixed roar of vendors and hawkers voices as they entered the streets of the city. How can we achieve such collective intuition and pliability in today's public spaces? What is the stuff, the fabric of society that we wish to make elastic? This includes the communication networks, the flow of information, systems of identification, systems of access to credit. What elasticity means must be worked out in the course of playing the games of communicating, identifying, buying and borrowing, but we want to point out only that designing elasticity into public domain applies to the computational as well as the physical.

This places the emphasis on transformation, rather than object. In the modern era, much information and social technology is devoted to testing for when an object is of type X. Now we are creating technologies that transform an object from type X to type Y. Some of these technologies will be computational, but other will be social conventions. It is essential that we carry the design of public space not as a purely cybernetic, computational design, but as a design of material, built, inhabited environment, which is partially augmented by computational processes.

Such environments will become not only elastic but responsive spaces.

6 Examples
If we, the inhabitants of these elastic, responsive, computationally augmented public spaces wish to take responsibility for the shape and the behavior of these environments, we will have to engage in experiments in real-time and in life. We will have to take these spaces apart and reconstruct them many times and across multiple cultural contexts.

Sponge and FOAM associations are dedicated to constructing public experiments along these lines as a way to rapidly develop a feel for inhabiting such hybrid spaces, through experiments such as:

• Construction of live spaces from the detritus of a "dead" public space;



• Turning parking lots into parks using digital means;



• Working with heat as pliable media;



• Transforming clothing into dance-writing;



• Building a media sauna in which people sweat out the toxic icons, dead metaphors and routinized lingo that have been embossed into our bodies;



• Constructing an alchemical field in which the participants instigate processes of transformation and transmutation;
  


• Developing a network of public gardens and inhabiting them not only with the local bio-diversity, but with global arts and media, by organizing an itinerant festival taking place in the gardens instead of in convention centers;



• Taking the media out of the computer and into the physical world, inflating the two-dimensionality of the digital media into real life, allowing a continuous, natural interaction between the physical and the virtual.