Communication Arts for a New Spatial Sensibility

One of the unanticipated effects of computer technologies that reached the general public during the 1980s was to bring us back to earth after the heady mood of the sixties. Televisions entered every home. Computers got married to the telephone and created networks all over the planet. The race to the moon reflected and promoted a 'space age' mentality. But what we learned most from the moon was how to look at the earth. It is no surprise that the 'esthetics of communication' began officially in the early eighties [1] without much attention being paid to 'space art'. That is to say that 'spatial sensibility' entails not necessarily considerations about outer space, but a radical reevaluation of how we deal with our immediate and distant environments.