Differently Functional Spaces

Heterotopias are simultaneously physical and cerebral spaces. Relatedly, Mcluhan contended that new media environments are as invisible to their inhabitants as water is unthinkable to fish. This is because one is so enveloped in au currant media that it's impossible to find an outside space from which to reflect. Residual, or differently functional media environments are otherwise invisible. Invisibled by means of underexposure and/or marketing ploys that steer desire towards tech-utopia atop the growing mound of media that have been buried alive.

Living dead media. "When there's no more room in hell, the dead shall walk the earth," reads the poster for George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, a zombie-laden critique of consumption. Another Mcluhanism: "Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance." Obsolescence is often enough an arbitrary label external to actual usefulness of a thing. There is then an excess of accessible technologies glimpsed in liminal spaces, if all too quickly damned by the powers that be. The strategies of planned obsolescence are like a dark art, but the psychological sort centered around fashionability is most abominable---more so than any snow man. Residual, or, differently functional media environments are not so much about inevitable invisibility, but anti-environments that exist in contradiction to the enforced laws of time, space and mind. Neurobiologically speaking, heterotopias are "collections of normal neurons in abnormal locations...caused by an arrest of migration of the neurons to the cerebral cortex." (Medcyclopedia ) They are bad news, often leading to seizures or developmental anomalies. Re-contextualized they do provide, as Foucault describes, a means of contesting the "no place" of Utopias with real, if dangerous, "other spaces."