The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.... Neuromancer.1984

1.0 THE SUBJECT IN THE POSTNOCTURNAL CITYSCAPE.The novel condition that the human visual system was forced

to negotiate with, as a result of the development of the modern city in the becoming of the 20th century; would only

be the preface of a violent proliferation of imagery, designated to forge and organize the visual territory of the postmodern milieu, inflating the bandwidth amidst the subject

and the object. ''If we think of light it has no image, yet it creates images'' (Virillio1994:9)

2.0 OUR EYES ARE WINDOWS OF THE WORLD. In order to see, a light source is required, without light everything is black. Light emits photons which reach the eye, and bounce-off

objects enabling us to see. The human ocular system has been subject to change and particularly challenged in the last 60 years.

What are the consequences of the ramification of electric light and visual imagery in all aspects of human life? Vision, the most sophisticated of the human senses, provides us with decisive

information regarding the existing world.— Visual perception is dependent on the stimulus the eye receives.

3.0 IT IS THE FAMILIARITY OF THE WORLD THAT BLINDS US.Mediation of visual data in the postmodern spatial array of the

postnocturnal cityscape can primarily be divided into two types: Emitting light and reflecting light, the combination of which bring into being the postnocturnal infoscape or visual

reality that we are all accustomed to.

4.0 THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE. For Marshall McLuhan in understanding media, what has premise is not

the message ''per se'' but the medium, i.e. ''the medium is the message.'' In other words, the information delivered through the medium is

peripheral, what matters instead is the way the medium transforms us, alters the way we think and interferes with our nervous system, altering in essence human nature. Thus the real message of any

medium or technology is the change it evokes into human life. ''The message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affair'' (Mc Luhan 1964: 24)

4.1 ELECTRIC LIGHT IS PURE INFORMATION.

McLuhan in fact makes direct reference to electric light in Understanding Media (1964). ''Electric light is pure

information '' he says. ''The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no content […] For it is not till the electric is used to spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a medium''(Mc Luhan1964:

25)

4.2 THE FORDHAM EXPERIMENT.The value of the division of the postnocturnal infoscape in reflecting and emitting lit surfaces, could be better understood if one brings to mind the difference between the nature of the movie theater and the television

screen. Cinema puts the viewer in accord with the perspective of the camera eye, in other words you have the same point of view with the camera. YOU ARE THE CAMERA. Television on the other hand places the viewer in

opposition with the screen, the image is thence ''tattooed''* on the face of the viewer prompting an ''inner trip.''* In other words YOU ARE THE SCREEN.

5.0 WESTERN CULTURE IS PRIMARILY OCULARCENTRIC. Neil Postman author of Amusing ourselves to death (1985),was

once asked on a television show what cyberspace was. Cyberspace he said, is the metaphorical idea for where your consciousness is

supposed to be when you are using computer technology, like the internet for example[...] The most interesting thing for me is that it made me think about where ones consciousness is located when interacting with other kinds of media; for example when you are

reading a book, where are you?Which is the space your consciousness is located? When watching television, where are you

? Who are you?

5.1 LIT-FO-FLANEUR. ''What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says — but the fiery pool reflecting in the asphalt.'' (Benjamin 1996:476 )—Which is the space one's

consciousness is located when enveloped within the postnocturnal infoscape? Where are we? Who are we?

6.0 THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY. We are consumers of images, icons, signs, of the

simulated reality that takes hold of the city at night—there is no more night —the postnocturnal

mapping of the city is a simulation of its diurnal territory. Our consciousness is thus thrown into a

simulation of reality. Alfred Korzybski propagated that ''the map is not the territory,'' suggesting that people

have the tendency to confuse maps with territories or models of reality with reality itself. (Korzybski

1933:750)7.0 LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS.

In Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Robert Venturi, Scott Brown and Steven Izenor critically reviewed the modernists

for having turned the international style into ''dead duck'' architecture. Nevertheless what they mistook for the ''hoi

polloi'' vernacular building, was clearly NOT the case. (Las Vegas was a city build by gangsters, to rob people of their

money). Yet Venturi's ideas have always revolved around the significance of the sign, and in the case of Las Vegas the illuminated sign, which he saw as a masterpiece worthy to

study and learn from.

7.1 ARCHITECTURE AS COMMUNICATION OVER SPACE.Learning from Las Vegas, the team proposed a re-turn to a

more iconographic-symbolic architecture, that would use surface as a communicator of ideas and information, preparing

hence the way for today's media facade, media architecture and urban screen enthusiasts. One of Venturi's most

compelling arguments, was that this means of mediation was far from new, and like other stained glass artists communicating

the word of God in Gothic temples; media façadists should be considered contemporary carriers of an ''ancient tradition ''

expressed via iconography in architecture.

7.2 GOD ARGUMENT. Either God exists or God does not exist.

a) In the case God exists, today He has been replaced by another god altogether; who is this new god?

b)In the case God does not exist, we as our forefathers in the past have been mislead into believing a hoax.

8.0 VISUAL AD.[…] now a visual ad was forming; he winced, closed his eyes, but it did no good.

The pressure, applied directly to the audio-visual regions of his brain, had faded below spark point. He groaned and shook his head to clear it.

All around him the vague half-defined echoes of ads glittered and gibbered, like ghosts of distant video-stations. Ads waited on all sides; he steered a careful course, dexterity born of animal desperation, but not all could be avoided. (Dick 1997:176-177)

9.0 CENOPHOBIA. "All spaces have been colonized; not just all geographical spaces but all mental ones too" (Baudrillard 2003:74).The frantic civic habitation of electric light along with the mechano-digital proliferation of visual imagery in the city has led to the implosion of the 24-hour circle. Most evident in the technologically advanced societies, the visual labor demanded by still and moving images embedded in the architecture, public and private space, gadgetry, the marketplace and means of public transportation; allied with the capacity that electric light has to reveal, frame and figure what is, has led to the collective construction of another order, an order which structures our sense of space-time and mapping of the postnocturnal city. It is this multi-mediated visual rhetoric which is radically and utterly shaping our way of understanding, remodeling ultimately our perception of reality.

7.3 ICONOGRAPHIC ARCHITECTURE. Venturi's most ludicrous, latter-day proposal

articulates the idea of architecture as an iconographic representation, emitting electronic imagery from its

surfaces day and night. (Venturi 1998:5)

9.1 HYPERCITY.In order to function within a new reality, one must first repress his old notion of the real. Postmodern society, drawing from culture and media has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, generating a simulation of the real, rather than reality itself a simulacra. This simulacra, although expected to represent something, has instead created the reality it seemingly refers to, thus has passed to the order of the hyperreal.''the generation by models of a real without origin or reality'' (Baudrillard 1994: 1), or the simulation of a reality