Sky Is No Limit
Digital Pseudo-Places and the Algorithmized Global Village
by Markus Oberndorfer
In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan coined the term ”Global Village” to describe the profound impact of electronic media on the structures of time, space, and communication. For McLuhan, transformation of media did not merely accelerate information flows—it fundamentally reshaped social experience, producing a new form of collective perception.
Today, in the age of 3D modeling, CGI, and generative AI, these dynamics have not just continued—they have intensified in unprecedented ways. Information flows are no longer simply boundless and fast; they are hyper-personalized, algorithmically filtered, and increasingly machine-generated. What was once a relatively “homogeneous” public sphere of mass-media has fractured into countless micro-publics — each governed by recommender systems and AI models. The “global village” has evolved into a fragmented mesh of individually curated slices of reality, fiction, and simulation — dispersed in a fluid, opaque stream of algorithmically optimized data fragments.
Markus Oberndorfer’s algorithmized “Global Village” captures and reflects these contemporary conditions through a deliberately stylized, non-illusionistic space: a model-like assemblage of environments of meaning, oscillating between fragment, backdrop, and stage. Instead of attempting to simulate realism, Oberndorfer creates an open stage set, where different “locations” are placed next to — and on top of — each other, presented like loose narrative fragments of scenes. Objects, images, and videos are distributed like props within a navigable spatial grid, untethered from realistic topography and instead defined by medial presence—polygon mesh structures, algorithmic textures, video projections, a space-time tunnel, or even voids and the absence of things.
The work weaves together three interconnected thematic strands. The first engages with remnants of the Atlantic Wall on Cap Ferret through 3D scans and fragments of a contemporary witness interview. Here, historical sites/ objects are digitally preserved while simultaneously stripped of their indexical anchoring. The second explores generated visual worlds and forms of algorithmic imagination. AI-generated objects, simulated panoramas, palm trees that Oberndorfer 3D modeled using Ed Ruscha’s ”A Few Palm Trees“ as drafts condense culturally coded notions of “exoticism” and “escapism”. The third connects urban topographies with media-reflexive narrative forms—most notably through a space-time collage representing the rhythm of drive along the Sunset Strip in 2016, referencing both lived space and its digital and cultural representations. (For example Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip or Oberndorfer’s 360° VR experience of it in REVISITED and his GTA V computer game collages of Eclipse Boulevard).
Central to the experience of this virtual (micro-)village is a bodily — or interaction- and clickwork triggered — mediality: content such as videos or sound is activated only through proximity. The contemporary witness Henri Lavrillat begins to speak on posters; glimpses into the interior of a bunker ”from the inside looking out“ or into the sky open up, and so on. These moments create variable, individual dramaturgies, depending on the movement, gaze, and position of the viewer. Media elements behave like virtual actors or NPCs. They only perform when “addressed” and reveal —through proximity, presence, or attention. This form of interaction creates a particular tension between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, surface and depth.
While the virtual visual materials—3D and especially AI-generated imagery—elude traditional referentiality, they represent cultural codes: a condensed visions of “bunker-likeness,” “isolation,” “threat,” or conversely, “distance,” “desire,” ”palm-likeness“ and “escape.” These image-worlds forge pseudo-places with pseudo-cultural memories, uncoupled from physical relics but rich in associative resonance. They exist in a threshold space where the real, symbolic, and simulated merge.
A pseudo-heterotopia in the Foucaultian sense: they evade site-specific definitions due to their lack of concrete referents, yet simultaneously open new medial spaces of culturally shaped imagination. As algorithmically produced narratives of the digital age, they can be understood—following Barthes—as “myths of everyday life”: as visual surfaces which, despite their ontological emptiness, convey associative, culturally coded meanings and are affectively-involving and can produce profound real-world effects.
In this configuration, Oberndorfer‘s “Global Village” becomes a speculative architecture of memory, projection, and culturally shaped imagination. A pseudo-heterotopia, as it evades site-specific definition. The pressing question it raises is not only what counts as “experience” or “memory” in the digital age, but also how these are shaped by the technical, algorithmic, and aesthetic logics of contemporary media environments and conditions of their production.
Where McLuhan once claimed that “the medium is the message” — and, due to a printing error, also the “massage” — we must now, in the context of the algorithmized global village, expand this insight: the medium remains both message and massage, yet the message itself has grown increasingly disembodied — an echo, affectively potent, yet spatially and temporally decoupled from the rhythms of lived, bodily experience.
Notes:
This essay was written for “Sky Is No Limit”.It accompanies the virtually navigable space and has been published in German and English. // Note: See also Palm Trees Are Noise in which I discuss this issue in detail. Especially “/Remember? The trace and its detachment from the referent”.