Flying through Code/Space: The Real Virtuality of Air Travel

Abstract

Commercial air travel is a key global industry facilitating the complex daily movements of planes, people, goods, and services across the world. In this paper we analyse contemporary air travel through the conceptualisation of a culture of real virtuality. We contend that air travel now consists of passage through ‘code/space’. Such code/space includes travel websites, check-in, security checkpoints, flight decks, air-traffic control, immigration, and customs checkpoints, which together form assemblages that define the practices and experiences of air travel. Code/space is qualitatively different to coded space, in which software influences the production of space, in that code and space are mutually constituted—produced through one another. This mutual constitution is dyadic so that if either the code or space ‘fail’, the production of space ‘fails’. Our formulation of code/space is non-deterministic and nonuniversal, and how code/space operates and is experienced is embodied through the performances and interactions of the people within the space (between people, and between people and code). In this sense, code/space is constantly in a state of becoming. We illustrate the nature of code/space, and the discursive regimes that support its production, and demonstrate how the code/spaces of an air travel are simultaneously local and global and induce Castells' notions of ‘space of flows’ and ‘timeless time’.