An excerpt from the Object Lessons book Spacecraft.
When spacecraft travel faster than light, they enter a realm we often call hyperspace. Fascinatingly hyperspace is definitely not an empty box. You would have thought that the hyper in the word meant that whatever space is, hyperspace is a lot more of it, just a bigger or grander empty box. But it turns out that hyperspace has a feel. Hyperspace is “space-feel” just like potato chips have “mouthfeel” in the PR business. (The word mouthfeel has really bad mouthfeel.) But there is a much simpler way of putting this:
Hyperspace is a place.
Not only that, it’s a really nice place. It should really be called hyperplace. This is a truly remarkable phenomenon. It means human beings are capable of rising above (hyper means “above” in Greek) the idea that space is a blank neutral container. Humans can come into sync with the developments in philosophy and physics that rocked the world around 1900. These developments are the discovery of spacetime by Einstein, and the discovery of phenomenology by Husserl. What do I mean? Ordinary people realize, in a visceral and experiential way, that we are not living in the Middle Ages anymore.
It’s not just about science, it’s about culture in general. Spacetime (general relativity theory) and phenomenology might be very much the same kinds of development, and turn-of-the-century art is an indication. Only consider Claude Monet’s water lily paintings, most vividly and accurately displayed in the Orangerie in Paris. The Orangerie is a pair of oval-shaped rooms in the Jardin des Tuileries. An oval is a circle that’s been squeezed, just like spacetime isn’t totally regular but is squeezed and stretched by gravity. An oval is also an egg, a vessel that is both a container and a living habitat for an embryo. The visitors are the embryos in the egg of the Orangerie, and Monet’s paintings are the yolk, a gorgeous, mauve-blue-green yolk. Floating in the yolk are little blobs, the water lilies. They appear not as objects in empty space, but as an intrinsic part of their habitat, the slowly rippling, smooth, transparent liquid of Monet’s pond at Giverny. The pond contains so much else—water weeds, shadows, the sky. The way Monet paints them, it is as if the lilies emerge out of this medium. They don’t just sit in it or on it, it is as if they are symptoms of the water itself, growing out of the mauve or blue or green liquid. Hyperspace is this basic stuff—hyper no longer in the sense of beyond, but in the sense of concentrated or condensed, like condensed milk or consommé.
Hyperspace is in a way regular old space, but imagined as a phenomenon à la Husserl—as a thing with specific characteristics, not just a blank slate. The way hyperspace is visualized as a kind of roaring blue and white pearlescent ocean is a wonderful sign of real political, intellectual and artistic progress. The creamy phenomenology of hyperspace means that space is palpable.
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Art by Lara Schaberg
