Global networks  like the internet form a social, cultural, economic and political space for acting and interacting. The network, the whole of connected computers and humans, has multiple entrances for interventions, acting and production. It is a constant intersecting, merging and spliting of multiplicity of forces which are active in the network. One of the topics in the V2_practice is researching the possibilities of intervening and acting in distributed  and networked environments through digital interfaces. It is on the one hand about developing tools (or hypothetical tools), but it surely is also about events - social, cultural, artistic - in translocal networked environments like the Internet and the forms of agency and interaction artists are developing for this. Notions like hyperspace and topology are useful for understanding how from interaction in distributed global networks social, cultural and artistic forms and variations are emerging.

I became interested in ‘thinking topologically’ while researching the movements of global cultural products.  I wanted a way of thinking about movements of objects in space that was able to address how these objects moved and transformed but stayed the same, and a conception of space that was dynamic.  And some of the reading I was doing made me think topology might be helpful.  I’ll give a brief presentation outlining how I came to describe the ‘biographies’ of these objects, and then go on to say something about the kinds of issues this way of thinking raises for me. Topology seems useful to me not only or as well as a source of metaphors and a repertoire of applications, but as a site of conceptual development and reflexive thinking about models.