Maya:reading Time Square Dead or Alive?

M. Christine Boyer. Time Square Dead or Alive? Daidalos 68,1998
(Picture taken by Maya Cochrane in New York 2006)
(Image 1 taken in New York by Maya Cochrane)
(image 2 of Time Square found at www.legeros.com 02/06/07)

Time square is both a “place-name” and a “representational space.” This statement begins to continue the questions of authenticity, simulation and the effects of “electronic visualization” on our ability to experience our built environment. Traditionally a public gathering space its sense of meaning tended to change with time potentially becoming a “non-space.” When I think of non-space, I think of a place that we do not physically inhabit or a place that has lost its sense of identity. Before going to Time Square we are able to experience it on the television screen, which formulates a series of impressions and assumptions about what this space is. After going to Time Square I realized that it was an extremely temporal space that people and cars move through when they have received enough commercial stimulation to make them forget about a gathering space and move then onto the next shopping center.
This article is written with a tone of nostalgia, but my question is how do we move past this new cultural condition? Daidalos suggests that the answer lies “in our ability to perceive and apprehend the world in which we live.” If we begin to let virtual and electronic images control our “playful re-membering” then our concept of inhabited space truly lies in in the realm of “non-space.” If we can be content with the difference between real and not real will not matter any more. Authenticity would not exist. How then you we judge our own measure of existence?