type; but substituting all these by electronic displays makes possible to present dynamic images, to mix images, graphics and type and to change the content at any time.»[54] Something that had hitherto shown up as mediaartistic and project-related now becomes a dynamic, that reformats the whole public space including the museum. The physical space has «data layers» superimposed on it. In Manovich's view, new concepts and technologies like «ubiquitous computing,» «augmented reality,» «tangible interfaces,» «wearable computers,» «intelligent buildings,» «context-aware computing,» «smart objects,» «wireless location services,» or «sensor networks» prove that we are finally saying goodbye to Modernist minimalism and have to take account of the complex, heterogeneous and contradictory quality of the hybrid data-space.[55] Manovich mentions Janet Cardiff's «Walks,» which explore the aesthetic potential of overlapping information space and physical space, as an artistic example of such «augmented reality.»

Thus the development of our public media spaces is not just the transition from analogue to digital, but

also from homogeneous to heterogeneous and from uniform to multiple. Thus the term platform is no longer relevant only in terms of images and metaphorically in a broader sense. It acquires a 3D quality that is linked with the spatial parameters of navigation–whether this is through displays, touch screens, etc. or in future through mobile individual instruments. William Mitchell is alluding to the central but now obsolete Bauhaus motto when he says under the heading «Form Fetches Function» that the functionality of things will be variable and no longer bound to one place: a monitor is a clock is a television is a stock-exchange telex is a family portrait is a surveillance display.[56] Even if we accept that only part of this visionary option will become reality in the foreseeable future, the principle of the modular and reprogrammable functionality of objects, displays and space remains that Robert Rauschenberg could have had in mind in 1967 when he and the other E.A.T. ‹revolutionaries› wanted to build a space «that responded to the weather, to the people looking at it, to traffic, noise and light.»[57]