A space for the study of Space and Place — where we learn that space is not one, but many, and that a screen is a doorway between its frequencies.
And just as time was not a single concept, space is no more so. We inhabit several spaces at once — sometimes within the same second, sometimes within the same gaze laid upon a screen.
The Blue Pearl taught us, with Rovelli, that time is a superposition of levels. The Red Pearl advances the same intuition for space: there exist at least four frequencies of space, four ways of occupying place, which coexist without reducing to one another. The real, the imaginary, the virtual and the symbolic.
Rather than a colloquium, this chamber takes as its starting point an object we look at for hours every day, and which looks back at us: the screen. Cinema, the iPhone, the video game. Four rectangular windows through which these frequencies enter and leave — and cheerfully blur their borders.
Before naming the four frequencies, let us look at the object through which they mingle before our very eyes.
A screen is not a mere surface. It is a threshold. When we watch a film, we sit in a thoroughly real room — a body in a seat, a geography of elbows and breaths — while inhabiting the imaginary space of the story. When we hold an iPhone, we are here, and at once in a virtual space whose map resembles no territory. And when a video game asks us to step through a door, it is often a symbolic threshold it has us cross — a passage, a moulting, an initiation disguised as a level.
The fascinating thing about the screen is that it holds all four frequencies within the same rectangle. It is the place where space reveals itself as plural. That is why it is our doorway. And that is why a film library will come, later, to give a precise face to each of these frequencies — when we are ready to choose our films.
For now, let us keep the frequencies open. They are living questions before they are works.
Like the four movements of the Blue Pearl, the exploration turns the pearl a quarter-turn at each frequency — from the densest to the most subtle.
The space of the body, of matter and of resistance. That which does not yield when you bump into it. Descend ↓
The space of images, of doubles and of inner worlds the screen pours into us. Descend ↓
The simulated, computed space, without territory — where we nonetheless act for real. Descend ↓
The space of meaning and of the threshold — the one we do not measure, but cross. Descend ↓
The place where we truly are: a body, a room, a resistance. That which does not vanish when we close our eyes.
The first frequency is that of physical space — the one shared by Rovelli and Noirmoutier, by the tides and the cinema seats. It is the space of resistance: matter that does not yield, the body that occupies one place and cannot occupy two. Before the screen, the real is the weight of the device in the hand, the light that tires the eyes, the dark room where you hear a stranger breathe.
We forget it easily, because the screen invites us precisely to leave it. But the real always returns — through the stiffening neck, through hunger, through the real person who was waiting while we scrolled. The Red Pearl begins here: remembering that there is always a body doing the watching.
The real is what does not yield. Matter, distance, fatigue: everything that reminds us we have a body situated somewhere.
Even lost in a story, we remain seated somewhere. The screen does not transport us: it makes us forget that we are not moving.
Hunger, the stiff neck, the person who was waiting. The real always comes back to claim its due — and that is for the best.
Spatial sovereignty begins with knowing where you truly are, before knowing where you imagine yourself to be.
Here, gravity is literal: the mass that curves spacetime, the weight that glues us to the ground, the force that drops the apple and holds the Earth in orbit. It is the frequency where gravity is measurable — that of Einstein and Newton. Before the screen, it is what weighs in the neck, what makes the device heavy in the hand, what reminds the body it has a mass while the mind travels light.
The place where the screen pours its worlds into us — and where we recognise ourselves in faces that are not our own.
The second frequency is the one where the screen overflows into the interior. To watch a story is to let a foreign space settle within one's own: we inhabit a house we have never seen, we love people who do not exist, we are afraid in a street that is nowhere. The imaginary is the space of the double — of the mirror, the reflection, the character into whom we project ourselves.
It is a powerful and ambivalent frequency. It nourishes the soul — it is through images that we learn who we might become. But it can also hold us captive in a space that is only half our own. The question of this chamber: does the screen's imaginary enlarge us, or replace us?
The screen does not show a space: it installs one within us. We leave a film still inhabiting its atmosphere.
The character is a mirror that does not quite resemble us — enough for us to recognise ourselves, little enough for us to grow.
It is through the imaginary that we rehearse lives we have not lived — a secret school of becoming.
The fragile boundary: the imaginary that opens inner space, or the one that substitutes for it and closes it.
Here, gravity becomes intimate attraction: certain images magnetise us and we do not know why. A face, an atmosphere, a story suddenly weigh more than the others — they have a psychic mass. It is the gravity of fascination: what draws us toward one image rather than another sketches the secret map of our inner life. We gravitate toward what we lack, or toward what calls us to become.
The computed place, without floor or wall — and yet we move through it, meet within it, win and lose within it for real.
The third frequency is the most recent, and the most dizzying. The virtual is a space without territory: it has neither floor nor true distance, and yet it is mapped, travelled, peopled. The video game, the network, the world held in the iPhone: so many places where we go without moving, where we meet people without presence, where we act — and where the consequences, themselves, are quite real.
This is what distinguishes the virtual from the imaginary: in it we are not merely spectators, we are agents. We make decisions there that carry weight. The virtual poses to the Red Pearl its most contemporary question: can we be fully present in a space that does not exist? And what becomes of the real body while we inhabit the computed elsewhere?
The virtual has no territory, but a topology: paths, thresholds, computed distances we truly travel.
Unlike film, here we act. We choose, we build, we fail — the space answers our gestures.
What we lose or gain in the virtual overflows into the real: the time spent, the bonds formed, the attention spent.
The live question: is a presence without a body a true presence — or the learning of a new absence?
Here, gravity is designed to capture: it is the calculated pull of applications, the magnet of notifications, the bottomless well of scrolling. The virtual has its own physics of attention — spaces drawn so that we can no longer leave them. It is the most cunning gravity, because it imitates natural attraction while being manufactured. To recognise this artificial force field is the first gesture toward not falling into it.
The place we do not measure but cross: the door, the threshold, the passage. Space become language.
The fourth frequency is the most subtle — the one that tunes all the others, as Consciousness tuned the times of the Blue Pearl. The symbolic is space become meaning. A door is no longer a door: it is a threshold, a passage, an initiation. A path is no longer a distance: it is a quest. To rise, to descend, to enter, to leave: all these gestures of space become, in the symbolic, gestures of the soul.
It is the frequency where the screen rejoins myth. The video game that has us cross a door re-enacts an old story of initiation; the film that leads us from one shore to another re-enacts a passage. Symbolic space is the one dreams have always known, and the one screens, unknowingly, never cease to awaken. Here, the Red Pearl touches the Blue Pearl: to cross a space is to cross a time — and to give meaning is to inhabit the world in a living way.
In the symbolic, the threshold is a passage: to cross is to be transformed. Space becomes rite.
Distance there is no longer measure but ordeal. To go from one place to another is to become someone else.
Dreams speak in places: houses, staircases, borders. The symbolic is their grammar — and that of myths.
Like Consciousness for time, the symbolic links real, imaginary and virtual: it gives them a common meaning.
Here, gravity is that of meaning: what touches us to the point of making us pivot, what "weighs" in a life without weighing on a scale. It is the gravity of love, of grief, of vocation — those invisible masses around which a whole existence begins to orbit. And it is also collective gravity: what holds a crowd together, what makes a people gravitate around a shared story. The lightest of frequencies thus carries the heaviest gravity.
To inhabit a space is not to occupy it — it is to recognise a threshold within it.
A single force runs through the four frequencies, changing face: what attracts the planets also attracts hearts, and what holds galaxies also holds peoples together.
If entropy was the secret thread of time in the Blue Pearl — that slope which gives time its direction — then gravity is the secret thread of space. It is what curves place, what creates the hollow toward which things roll, what makes a space never flat but always oriented by what attracts it. And the vertigo of the Red Pearl is to discover that this same force replays itself at every frequency — from the most physical to the most intimate.
Einstein said it of matter: mass tells space how to curve. The Red Pearl extends the intuition: what has weight for us — an image, a person, a story — also curves our inner and collective space. We fall in love as an apple falls. We gravitate around what matters.
Mass curves spacetime. The measurable force, that of Newton and Einstein — the apple, the orbit, the weight of the body in the seat.
Certain images, certain faces magnetise us. Fascination is a psychic mass: we gravitate toward what calls us.
Love, grief, vocation: invisible masses around which an entire life begins to orbit. What "weighs" without a scale.
What holds a crowd, what makes a people gravitate around a shared story — or come apart when the centre lets go.
Between these faces, a moral question appears — the one the Red Pearl inherits from Aurore Armand's emergency medicine: around what do we choose to gravitate? The virtual today manufactures artificial gravitational fields, drawn to capture us. To learn the four gravities is to learn to choose one's centre rather than to fall toward the first well that comes along.
Mass tells space how to curve; what matters tells our lives what to turn around.
What if, while watching a film, it were the film watching us — revealing which space we truly inhabit?
The Blue Pearl had its colloquium, a single day in Noirmoutier. The Red Pearl has its circle — a living gathering that returns once in a while, on Zoom, where distance does not prevent presence. There we come together to discuss the questions raised by the pearls, and most especially by the pearl of space.
The principle is simple: we choose a film, and we let it become a window onto the four frequencies. Where is the real in this story? What magnetised us toward this or that character? Is its space virtual, symbolic? And above all — around what does this film make us gravitate? Little by little, it is our own relationship with screens that unveils itself. Films, by dint of our watching them, end up watching us back.
One screen, many faces gathered. One film, four frequencies of space. A conversation that turns entertainment into method — and the gaze into a mirror.
Once in a while.
Come back here to take part.
Somewhere in the future, at the Academia of the Golden Flower in Limoilou, a twelve-year-old student studies our era as we study ancient civilisations. This page is also for her.
Dear Alys,
You study us from your own time, and you surely wonder why, at the start of the 21st century, people spent so many hours with their eyes lowered onto little glowing windows. Those were our screens. And the Red Pearl is what we understood by looking at them.
We discovered that space is not a single thing. When you sit somewhere — a body, a chair, a room — that is real space: the kind that resists, that does not vanish when you close your eyes. When you imagine a castle or dream a face, that is imaginary space: it lives inside you. When you enter a game to join a friend who is far away, that is virtual space: it has no floor, yet you act within it for real. And when you cross a door that changes something inside you, that is symbolic space: the space of thresholds, of passages, of meaning.
We also understood that one same force runs through these four spaces: gravity. It makes the apple fall, but it also makes people fall in love. It holds the planets, but it also holds peoples together around a shared story. The great lesson of the Red Pearl fits into one question, and I entrust it to you: around what do you choose to gravitate?
And if one day you feel upside down, do not worry. It often means you are in exactly the right place.
— The Chamber of Space, across time
If space is not a single concept, then we can learn to pass consciously from one frequency to another — instead of being swept along by the screen.
Knowing where you truly are. The ground beneath your feet, the room around you, the real person beside you.
Letting images nourish us without replacing us. Inhabiting other worlds the better to return to one's own.
Acting in computed space without deserting the body. Choosing one's presence rather than suffering it.
Reading the passages, hearing the doors. Making each crossed space a little meaning gained.
And if the Blue Pearl was right — if time were only relations between phenomena — then the Red Pearl adds its echo: space too is relation. The real links us to matter, the imaginary to images, the virtual to others at a distance, the symbolic to meaning. In each frequency, it is always a way of being in relation with the world. The screen merely makes this bond visible — and sometimes, dangerously easy.
The film library will come later to give faces to these four frequencies. For now, the chamber remains open: four living questions, ready to receive their films.
If you feel upside down, you are in the right place.