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Collage,
recombination, and continual reinvention become the
norm and the mediating technologies that these cultures
use to talk to themselves adapt by creating a virtual
place, an ephemeral location, a metaphorical home, that
is equally shifting and continually open to renegotiation
(Smith). This idea of an
adaptive metaphorical home that is a commercial and
social nexus point where the physical and virtual can
interact is precisely what Benjamin
noticed in the Parisian arcades at the turn of the century.
What he saw in those arcades was a carnival of free
association, of ongoing cultural recombination and collage
that created a sense of coherence through the physicality
of proximity—the architectural construct of the
arcade, the alleyway, the thoroughfare, provided a channel
along which participants could be led from one visual,
textual, and textural non-sequitor to the next (Richter).
The only consistency of the
experience, the only cohesive narrative for what happened
in that arcade was the reliability of the physical frame
of the arcade itself, the knowledge that the walls around
the participant were not going to suddenly expand, and
that the alleyway itself did indeed have a terminus,
the experience would eventually come to an end, the
shops would close, the visitors would go home.
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