Virtualization of our daily tasks, as well as of communication processes, social activity, production, economics, and media consumption probably have more impact on our temporal and spatial awareness and sensorial processes than we tend to believe. This project attempts to focus more on our altered perception of space and time, as a consequence of our frequent use of new (digital) media. Expanding on Munster’s book (2006), in particular on her chapter on digitality, where she discuss the idea of a global digital time and refers to the 24 hours economy, we would like to discuss multiple layers of our distorted perception of time and space, which are produced by our frequent use of digital media.We want to argue that this new distorted perception of the space and time of production, and relative changes in our idea of location, presence and distance, alienate us from the physical space and time in various ways, some more subtle than others. First of all, we are barely aware of the technical infrastructure that is needed to support our daily virtual activities and the costs of its maintenance (in money, energy power, physical space for servers, employment in developing countries). We tend then to lose sight on the impact that our virtual activities have on economics and on the environment.

On another level, increase of virtual activities has great impact on our private lives as well. Our exploration of reality becomes progressively mediated, abstracted from physical space, confined to few actual locations and simultaneously multiplied in new experiences we gain virtual access to. This results in a colonization of our time by activities whose relevance and value are arguable (Virilio, 1997) (surfing the web, jumping from one website to another, from one chat or SNS to another, literally sucked into a vortex of connectivity). Since time and space perception are strictly related to each other (Munster, 2006), our new uses of time and its relation to the space that we occupy while performing different activities, shapes a new concept of the world , based on shortened distances, virtual locations and the absence of the journey despite the increasing importance of the destination. Arguably, time becomes deformed, because it is no longer shaped only by our proximity (daily activities in the actual realm, like work and free time, meals and so on), but by our persistent online actions and interactions that almost never stop.

An extra layer of perception, clearly related to the others, is the extent to which our body and its movements and perceptions adapt to the new machines that we have to cooperate with and the new reality that is being shaped by these machines. In other words, while we produce new technology we also need to learn to use it, and our body adapts to the new environment almost imperceptibly. However, the learning process might dig much deeper in our conscience than we realize, and by doing so it might influence our relation to space, objects and other people also outside the context of media use. To explore this area, we built on Massumi’s philosophy of perception and tried to relate it to new media technology. Also Kubler’s description of the shape of time and history (1962) has been taken into account to better understand how we human organize time and relate to past and present. With our project, we aim to expose the regimes of perception that virtuality engraves in our sensorial system. Therefore, we explored bodily perception, the relation between bodily perceived space and time and new digitally created space/ time parameters with a theory study, and analyzed other works of art that have been dealing with the same topics, before we tried to produce a direct experience of these collisions between the physical and virtually perceived space with our performance.