POST 14: Individual Documents on 'Spaces & Exchanges' Notion


To deal with the notion of Spaces and Exchanges, I'll start by giving a definition of both terms. First of all, a space is a geographical and symbolic area that all societies occupy and exchanges could be the interactions between men and different societies.

Virtual Spaces

In the first document I'm going to talk about the movie "Matrix" released in 1999 and directed by The Wachowski brothers. The film followsThomas A. Anderson, a young informatician known in the world of hacking under the pseudonym of Neo, one day he's contacted on his computer by people that he thinks are hackers. They make him discover that the world where he lives, is just a virtual world name the Matrix in which one the humans are keep under control and slaved by the machine. Morpheus, the captain of the ship Nebuchadnezzar, contact Neo because he thinks that he is the chosen one who can liberate the human from the power of the machined take control of the Matrix.
The movie has been praised by the critic and the public, introducing special effect never seen before like "bullet time" and other impressive action scene technics. It also introduce the cyberpunk science fiction genre. 

Real Spaces

"US-Mexico border has pipeline problem" by Koterda

I think that this cartoon represents very well the notion of spaces and exchanges because it represents in a humorist way the asymmetrical exchanges between United States and Mexico, between North and South. This cartoon is dated of October 2th 2011, when Canada and United States had open a pipeline that cross  their borders, which alouded a better circulation of gaz and oil between the two countries. But in this cartoon, the cartoonist insists on the fact that meanwhile trading is increasing in the North, in the South "a different sort of pipeline" is working, an illegal one. Indeed, the USA-Mexico border is permanently cross by a unofficial sort of pipeline, illegal guns from the United States in exchange to drugs from Mexico. However this pipeline is a sort of metaphor of the cartoonist who wants to emphasize the fact that the Southern border of the United States is a place of a great illegal trade that is completely ignore by the rest of opinion or the media. To put in a nutshell we can say that spaces and exchanges can be official and legal, like the pipeline at the canadian border, or unofficial and illegal, like the illegal exchanges at the mexican border.