The other day a conversation turned towards the notions of "online" and "digital" and the question whether the Internet is a space or not. The person I was speaking to did not believe the Internet can be perceived spatially, while I took the opposing side. We often forget that the internet is not a purely virtual entity - there are physical spaces as well as networks that actually power this online "universe". To get a better idea, check out the visualization in the video below, when Sergey Brin, here speaking alongside Larry Page, co-founders of Google, presents a mapping of Google usage and networks in real time, which they actually use in  Google's offices. Brin points out that fibre optic networks and satellites are absolutely necessary in facilitating the transmission of data between places.

His 2006 work, We Feel Fine (2006), was an applet Harris created with Sep Kamvar. An applet that has been harvesting human emotions on the internet since 2006, it then organizes these harvested emotions via various interfaces. When you connect to the applet (shown below),  a swarm of dots in various colours each represent different emotions. Below was a search for "all emotions" in February 2012. Clicking on one dot, the below quote came up.

The visualization of individual utterances of people connected by feelings makes We Feel Fine, as Harris notes, an art project created by "everybody" and the coding to create the applet is available on the project website under the Creative Commons. S

Somehow, We Feel Fine visualizes bodies in space, virtualized, but representative of bodies nonetheless. Of course, that would be most true in a search created specifically for the month and year you are searching, as you then exclude those "bodies" that no longer exist, either in the virtual or the physical world. The deceased, in other words, who are becoming a real pertinent issue in the debate surrounding the Internet realm.  In fact, this month, new legislation that deals with what to do with the online accounts and profiles after someone dies has been tabled in Nebraska. This new legislation is an interesting one in that it proposes to include Facebook accounts into the deceased's estate plans - technically, their Facebook profile would then be rendered "property" . Would that then confirm that the Internet is being treated in "spatial" terms? Think about Second Life!

In the end, the question still stands: is the Internet  a Space? And saying that, what is the difference between "online" and "digital"? Looking at Harris's work, We Feel Fine touches on the distinction between "online" and "digital" in that "online" might be posited to be the virtual milleu -  the format or the space - within which digital matter exists as form?

It seems society has a preoccupation with squares. From Malevich's squares to Mondrian's, to Yuri Pattison's re-framing of the traditional aesthetic "square" of the picture frame, the cuboid museum vitrine and shipping crate as parallel to the digital "square" - the photographic image, the computer screen - all framed by the sharp edges of right angles, to the literal town squares, the plateias or piazzas, traditionally centres for community-led discourse and interaction, it seems we humans always operate within "squares".

In some ways, this is what Jenny Marketou was getting at in her recent project, Red Eyed Skywalkers, Silver Series (2011), staged at the Kumu Museum in Estonia in an exhibition exploring networked cultures. Marketou installed silver metallic balloons both inside and outside of the museum space, each with tiny camera's attached to them and connected to nine screens displayed inside the museum. On the screens, images taken from the balloon feeds were then intermingled with found footage the artist had sourced from various web-portals - from youtube.com to wikileaks.com, depicting the wave of revolutions - namely, the Arab Spring - that had staged themselves in city squares.

Marketou acknowledges that it was not only the physical square that had facilitated revolution - the square screens of mobile telephones, of youtube clips, of computer and television screens had also played a major role in the shaping of these political movements. In these movements, from Tunisia to Egypt, the "public square", that age-old community focal point had transitioned from the physical world into the virtual world in a fundamental way. One might call it a paradigm shift. Soon after, movements cropped up in Spain, with the Los Indignados movement that triggered a similar action in Greece, in which protestors took to their squares, and stayed there. Via the Internet, the two movements were in close contact with each other.

The movements in Greece and Spain started much earlier than the Zucotti Park movement that gave rise to Occupy - but in the end, the impetus for Occupy most likely came from the Arab world, passed into the Mediterranean, and through into the "mainstream" West. The format had been viral. From the "tent city" in Tahrir, to the tent cities everywhere, all facilitated - and operated - largely by online media. Nowadays, revolution is no longer national, but global.

But how successful might such movements be may very well depend on how well  those squares designated as public are defended. And while protestors have been "lawfully" removed from such physical "squares", for example, with the St.Paul's occupation finally coming to an end, the internet is now becoming the territory upon which both political movements and the political forces currently in control are to stake their claim. As we have seen with SOPA and ACTA, and Anonymous's response to the increasing drive towards increased internet legislation, the battle for the public square has firmly gone virtual.

Installation shot of Redeyed Skywalkers courtesy of Kalevkevad at Flickr