10.54103/2036-461X/19463
Early Modern choir stalls are spaces within spaces, they separate spheres such as public and restricted, profane and holy, as well as open and closed. Members of the convents perform their daily devotions here and are assigned to respective seats. They are installed, according to the name of the place “stalla”. The inlaid decoration on each seat reiterates the specific spatial and religious formation. This article wants to explore how choir stalls immerse their users and viewers in pictorial and religious environments.
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Topologies of the Virtual. Spaces, Images, and Bodies in Early Modern Choir Stalls
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Maja-Lisa Müller
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Vavra, Elisabeth. 2005. “Vorwort” In: Virtuelle Räume. Raumwahrnehmung und Raumvorstellung im Mittelalter, edited by Elisabeth Vavra, IX–X. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
Topologies of the Virtual. Spaces, Images, and Bodies in Early Modern Choir Stalls
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                                                                                       Topologies of the Virtual.
                                                                                       Spaces, Images, and Bodies in Early
                                                                                       Modern Choir Stalls
                                                                                       Maja-Lisa Müller, Bielefeld University




                                                                                       Early Modern choir stalls are spaces within spaces, they separate spheres such as                  Keywords
                                                                                       public and restricted, profane and holy, as well as open and closed. Members of the        Media Archaeology
                                                                                       convents perform their daily devotions here and are assigned to respective seats.
                                                                                       They are installed, according to the name of the place “stalla”. The inlaid decoration
                                                                                                                                                                                    Early Modernity
                                                                                       on each seat reiterates the specific spatial and religious formation. This article wants          Topologies
                                                                                       to explore how choir stalls immerse their users and viewers in pictorial and religious          Trompe-l’œil
                                                                                       environments.                                                                                     Embedding
                                                                                                                                                                                               DOI
                                                                                                                                                                                   https://doi.org/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                                                                                                                   10.54103/2036-
                                                                                                                                                                                       461X/19463
                                                                                         Media archaeology of virtuality and immersion has traced the steps back
                                                                                       to early film, panoramas in the 19th century and the magic lantern in the 17th
                                                                                       century. Using an open notion of virtuality, especially in context with arts, the
                                                                                       historical connection can start in antiquity (Grau 2003). This article aims to build
                                                                                       on Oliver Grau’s notion and wants to consider inlaid Early Modern choir stalls
                                                                                       as environments for virtual experiences in the context of religious practices in
                                                                                       Early Modern Christianity. Having pictures that directly comment the spatial
                                                                                       relation of the choir stalls to architecture and symbolic spaces in churches and
                                                                                       cathedrals, virtual spaces shall in accordance with Vavra be understood

                                                                                                 as space that always emerges when real topographical elements
                                                                                                 of coordination and spatial formation are superimposed by
                                                                                                 constituents of other categories. Sensory perceptions, functionally
                                                                                                 or intentionally demanded spatial boundaries, or alternative
                                                                                                 perceptions, e.g. of a literary or pictorial nature, can lead to the
                                                                                                 superimposition of everyday spatial perception patterns with other
                                                                                                 ideas of space and thus situate a virtual space in real space. (Vavra
                                                                                                 2005, IX).

                                                                                         In the following, I want to explore the situations that are made possible by
                                                                                       wooden choir stalls on a social, spatial, and pictorial level. These objects create
                                                                                       spaces of hybridity that bind bodies, architectures, materialities, techniques,
                                                                                       senses, and lastly Christological presence. In the technique of inlaying, a


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 40 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                      57
     complicated spatial and pictorial relation of the virtual and the actual emerges,
     that could serve as a reference for Early Modern European views of the relations
     of seeing and space.



     MEDIA THEORY AND THE SACRED
       Religious spaces in Early Modern Times were one of the major places of image
     production. Religions also have, as has been pointed out by various scholars of
     media and religion, a specific affiliation to things, objects, materials, practices
     and rituals. Religious scholar Robert M. Geraci describes religions as “both
     natural and social artifacts; they exist as a consequence of the people, places,
     and communities that compose them and, increasingly, the technologies through
     which they are mediated” (Geraci 2013, 324). In being produced and hybrid,
     religions share a common denominator with the Virtual, as he argues further:
     “Virtual worlds are, of course, also assemblages of the natural and the social”
     (Geraci 2013, 324). Media scholars Friedrich Balke, Bernhard Siegert and Joseph
     Vogl describe the relation between media theory and sacredness on a semiotic
     level. They attest media theory in the following of Marshall McLuhans famous
     dictum “The Medium is the Message” a (productive) conflation of information
     and its channel: “Those who confuse meaning with the fact, information with
     matter, light with conduction, are going down the paths of media theory, but also
     those of the sacred. Whoever thinks noise for a message places themselves in
     the tradition of the mystics.” (my translation, Balke, Siegert, and Vogl 2015, 8).
     In media theory, they propose, media reinscribe themselves into the message
     in a way that makes it unfeasible to separate the two. The other way around,
     the message is always shaped by the medium and its materialities, actors and
     environments.
       Following this understanding of sacredness and media theory, I want to take
     a closer look at the way objects such as choir stalls shape liturgic rituals and
     create hybrid spaces between the actual and the virtual. A connection to Early
     Modern image theory might be drawn via the technique of inlaying that was
     prominent in Northern Italy in the 15th and 16th century. Not coincidentally this is
     also the place of formative events for Renaissance imagery and the development
     of the central perspective method. In the following, I will shortly outline the
     connection of the new type of pictorial paradigm, that was established with the
     technique of central perspective and relate it to the artistic technique of inlaying
     or intarsia.



     CENTRAL PERSPECTIVE AND INLAYING
       In the early 15th century, Florentine architect and artist Filippo Brunelleschi
     conducted two experiments, that are often construed to be the origin of a
     systematic method of central perspective with Brunelleschi as their ingenious
     creator. While correct implementation of central perspective guidelines can



58                                                      Müller, Topologies of the Virtual
be found sporadically before, Brunelleschi is thought to be the first to use a
repeatable and systematic method. In his first experiment, Brunelleschi painted
the Baptistery San Giovanni on a panel with a conical hole in it. Placed on a
certain spot in front of the Baptistery, one could verify the accurate depiction of
the building by holding the panel in front of one’s face, picture side facing away
from the head, and a mirror in the other hand. Looking through the hole in the
panel, one saw the reflection of the painting in the mirror; by taking the mirror
away, one could check if the picture aligned with the real, three-dimensional
building. A disturbance in the static depiction proved to be the moving clouds
in the sky over the baptistery. Brunelleschi confronted this disturbance by
applying silver foil in the picture where the sky would be. The real clouds were
mirrored by the silver foil (and then again in the mirror).
   The second experiment used a panel with a depiction of the Palazzo della
Signoria (today Palazzo Vecchio), which was cut to suit the form of the Palazzo.
If the viewer positioned themself at a specific point in front of the building, one
could again verify the accuracy by alternating holding the panel in front of the
building and removing it. Brunelleschi’s tavolae and with them the following
central perspective drawings and paintings were henceforth examples of
an abstract and schematic method of constructing pictures, especially of
architectural spaces. The abstract view of the central perspective objectifies
vision and binds it to a body, that is single-eyed and male coded (Randolph
2014, 85–88). But Brunelleschi’s experiments also point to a very much situated
vision, since the tavolae only develop their effect from a very specific standpoint.
   Brunelleschi’s experiments are often placed in a direct relation to Leon Battista
Alberti, who elaborated on central perspective as a method in his 1435/1436
treatise De Pictura. With it comes the famous quote, to imagine the painting
as an “open window”. Alberti describes the process as an instruction for other
painters: “First I trace as large a quadrangle as I wish, with right angles, on
the surface to be painted; in this place, it certainly functions for me as an open
window through which the historia is observed” (Alberti 2011, I, 19). Art historian
Friedrich Teja Bach offers a different understanding of the connection between
Brunelleschi’s experiments and the paradigm of the central perspective image.
To him, the used metaphor of the “open window” symbolizes an exclusion and
separation of the image, that cannot be uphold given the way, how Brunelleschi’s
experiments very much interplay with their surroundings, the bodies executing
them and the used materials. Teja Bach proposes to understand Brunelleschi’s
pictorial experiments as inlays themselves. He supports this claim with a
different story that is delivered about Brunelleschi in the Novella del Grasso
by his biographer Antonio Manetti. One day, Brunelleschi was duped by his
friend, intarsia carver Manetto Ammanatini. Brunelleschi decides to play a trick
on him by making him believe that he is not Manetto anymore, but a shady
character with the name of Matteo. Since many people are involved, the trick is
indeed successful, leading to an incarceration of Manetto/Matteo and a serious
uncertainty about his own identity. Only after a couple of days and many further
entanglements, the trick is resolved and the ashamed Manetto leaves Florence
to work at the Hungarian royal court.


Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 40 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                      59
       As cruel as this episode may be, it serves Teja Bach as a third experiment
     of Brunelleschi and an example for a different pictorial paradigm, since it also
     plays with perspective and the relation of virtuality and actuality and connects
     them to the technique of inlaying: “The concern of both panels as well as of
     the Novella is to inlay artificial, simulated reality into actual reality.” (Teja Bach
     2007, 163). Central perspective with Brunelleschi is not meant to separate the
     spheres of depicting and depicted, but rather to link them. Teja Bach therefore
     sees it as no coincidence, that Manetto is a carver and maker of intarsia. In
     a metonymic shift, the body—and the life—of Manetto become an inlay: “he
     himself, the intarsia specialist, becomes intarsia” (Teja Bach 2007, 163).
       Teja Bach critiques the interpretation of art history of the central perspective
     image as a window, which includes notions of separation, objectivity, and
     distance. This critique is backed by art historian Adrian Randolph, who includes
     not only the usual image panels of the Renaissance in his analyses but also
     furniture such as “boxes, chests and trays” which according to him “offer
     accounts of renaissance space that are quite different from the dominant trope
     of the Albertian window” (Randolph 2014, 71). Furniture opens up a connection
     to a Renaissance material and visual culture, that is more characterized by
     privacy and intimacy, the sense of touch and female-coded spaces. Furniture
     was still seen as defiant in the 20th century by sociologist Georg Simmel: “In the
     case of the piece of furniture, we make contact with it constantly, it intervenes in
     our life and thus has no right to exist for itself.” (Simmel 1994, 14). Choirs stalls
     as furniture make no exception, they come in touch with the bodies several
     times a day, they intervene, intrude and impose. Seating furniture especially
     forms and structures the body in a way, that by no means can be understood as
     natural but has been subject to historical, cultural and geographical influences.
     In the following I want to point out the role sitting and the according furniture
     has played in the role of everyday life but especially religious practices to lastly
     establish choir stalls as a multisensorial, hybrid space at the intersection of
     virtuality and actuality.



     SITUATION AND INSTALLATION.
     CHOIR STALLS IN EARLY MODERN
     RELIGIOUS PRACTICE
       Sitting is, like many other activities, described by the sociologist Marcel Mauss
     as a technique of the body (Mauss 1973), and therefore shaped by factors such
     as geography, culture as well as gender. Cultural historian Hajo Eickhoff has
     worked through these factors and could show that sitting in history has not
     always been an everyday practice for everyone, but rather a privilege of the few
     and either associated with the ruling class or the clergy: “Sitting on chairs […]
     has two roots: the real throning of the king and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ”
     (my translation, Eickhoff 1993, 93). The crucifixion and subsequent ascension of



60                                                        Müller, Topologies of the Virtual
Jesus Christ is described by Eickhoff as the institution of Christ on God’s judicial
throne (Eickhoff 1993, 12). Sitting in medieval Christian practice is therefore an
approximation to Christ and as such reserved for the clergy only. Especially
in the order of the Benedictines, the service included a decided sequence of
standing, sitting, and kneeling: “The realization of the alternation of standing,
sitting and kneeling called for in his [Benedict’s] rule requires a special device,
the choir stall, which was born in the monastery church in the 11th century.” (my
translation, Eickhoff 1993, 108). Choir stalls were placed in the choir, the holiest
place in Early Modern churches and cathedrals and were conceptualized as a
connected bench with separated seats. To accommodate the constant changes
in body positions, the seating boards were foldable.1 Folded up seating bords
often had a wider edge, called misericordiae, to provide the namesake mercy
and relief for monks and nuns to lean on while long standing parts of the service.
Standing was also believed as standing upright in front of God, therefore these
misericodiae were hybrid places, often decorated with mythic creatures, demons
and devils to remind the clerics of their illicit behavior (Eickhoff 1993, 114).
  The stalls were mostly U-shaped and opened up to the east. They therefore
also enclosed the space of the choir and marked a space they themselves do not
occupy. Sitting, standing and praying in it was a highly ritualized practice that
combined bodily, social, and Christological aspects. Each choir stall had as many
seats as members and each new member of the chapter was assigned a certain
seat, a stalla: “Everyone who was admitted to the order or to the community of
canons was assigned a place in the choir stall. With this assignment (in-stallatio)
they received seat and vote in the chapter” (my translation, Urban 1953). Sitting
in one’s place in the choir stall is therefore a material and bodily as well as a
symbolic practice. In choir stalls with two rows, the higher ranked persons were
situated on the outer and higher rows; bishops, abbots, and abbesses were
placed at the turnpoint of the U, directly opposite to the altar.
  Topologically as well as symbolically, architecturally as well as socially,
the structure of the choir stalls forms an included exclusion, since the parish
did not have access to the choir as well as the privilege of sitting. Choir stalls
also include a space within a space, playing with the topologies of opened and
closed, public and private spheres. The space of the choir informed Christian
architecture significantly, leading to a special focus on the choir and the altar:
“Not the abstract opposition of two spaces becomes the characteristic of
Christian construction, but the extreme tension of opposition with simultaneous
unity, which the table of the Eucharist establishes as the cultic center of both”
(my translation, Eickhoff 1993, 94). Choir stalls are structures that emerge at
the cross section of the spatial connection of the architecture and the bodily
techniques of Benedictine worship.


1         Eickhoff relates this seating arrangement to today’s theater seats or lecture
hall stairs and therefore different kind of spectacles, cf. Eickhoff 1993, 10 and 101. While
service, a dramatic play or a lecture are different settings, they share spatial and visual
similarities such as the division of a crowd and a mostly single actor, the according dis-
tribution of seeing and been seen and the centering of the furniture (and therefore the
bodies of the viewers) around a visual focal point.



Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 40 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                              61
                                This interlaced and complicated relation is mirrored by the inlaid decoration
                             that were often attached to the back walls of the outer rows, the dorsals. Many
                             inlaid choir stalls were made in Northern Italy in the 15th and 16th century and
                             many showed a similar pictorial program, that directly referred to the structure
                             of the choir stalls themselves and therefore an interplay of openings and
                             closings.
                                Most inlaid furniture shows images, that differ greatly from the religiously
                             informed pictorial program of other artistic media of the time such as paintings,
                             frescoes, stained glass and so on. Instead of biblical narratives and depictions
                             of Saints, intarsia are more prone to depictions of seemingly lifeless objects; a
                             property they share with depictions that focus the central perspective method.
                             The choir stall of the Olivetan (a subgroup of the Benedictans) convent of Monte
                             Oliveto Maggiore shows images that can be found throughout many North
                             Italian choir stalls [Fig. 1]. Only two out of the 48 intarsiated dorsals made by
                             the Olivetan monk Fra Giovanni da Verona and his workshop show religiously
                             informed imagery, two Saints flank the beginning and end of the choir stall.
                             The other pictures show alternating insights into cupboards and cabinets and
                             outlooks onto cities, landscapes and architectures. What was later separated
                             in the theory of painting as two different genres, still life and landscape, with
                             associated different positions in the pictorial hierarchy, shows its similarities
                             in the medium of intarsia: they appear as mediated and layered depictions of
                             space. The view is always divided into fore-, middle-, and background, leaving
                             it to the middle section, either opened cupboard doors or framing architectural
                             round arches, to present the enclosed objects. The image composition is not
                             displayed in a way that aims at disguising the conditions of their mediality, as
                             it is often associated with Alberti’s paradigm of the open window and has been
                             coined with the term “transparency”, in concordance with the window-paradigm.
                             Rather, these conditions, here the framing devices, are amplified by appearing




Fig. 1
Fra Giovanni da Verona
and Workshop, Choir Stall,
1503-05, Monte Oliveto
Maggiore, image courtesy
of Ruth Hauer-Buchholz.



62                                                                            Müller, Topologies of the Virtual
in every picture as a metapictorial reference to the operation of showing itself.
  The abundant use of trompe-l’œil-motives further accentuates the meta-
pictorial reference. Either as hanging or protruding objects, these motives
challenge the notion of clearly divided spaces by transgressing them. In case
of the half-opened lattice doors, this transgression even seems to reach into
the space before the picture and therefore of the viewers, connecting the
virtual space of the image and the actual space of the viewer. Philosopher and
media theorist Jean Baudrillard views the trompe-l’œil as the place of “anti-
representation” (Baudrillard 1988, 54) when it comes to painting. In the case of
trompe-l’œil the painted objects do not refer to any real objects in an indexical
way, nor do they invoke any narrative or historia: “there is no fable, no narrative.
No ‘set’, no theatre, neither plot nor characters” (Baudrillard 1988, 53). They
are striking in their absence of human depiction—or anything alive for that
matter. Trompe-l’œil-objects appear to be cut off and isolated from interaction:
“These are objects, that have already endured: time here has already been,
space has already taken place. The only relief is that of anachrony, that is to
say an involutive figure of time and space” (Baudrillard 1988, 55). The isolation
of the trompe-l’œil imagery in the dorsals directly reflects the isolation of each
individual seat. Here, objects are put in niches the same way the bodies are
placed into their individual nooks. To Baudrillard, the game with reality is the
true essence of the trompe-l’œil:

          In trompe-l’œil it is never a matter of confusion with the real: what
          is important is the production of a simulacrum in full consciousness
          of the game and of the artifice by miming the third dimension,
          throwing doubt on the reality of that third dimension in mining
          and outdoing the effect of the real, throwing radical doubt on the
          principle of reality (Baudrillard 1988, 58)

  Images, especially trompe-l’œils, are not solely a representation of reality but
a part of it. It is not images who imitate reality, but reality is approximating the
realm of images. As such, Baudrillard assigns even political power to images,
such in the case of the small, isolated (and inlayed) studioli:

         Even the space of politics falls under the influence of trompe-
         l’œil; for instance, the studiolos of the Duke of Urbino, Federigo da
         Montefeltre, in the ducal palace in Urbino and Gubbio: miniscule
         sanctuaries, all done in trompe-l’œil, set at the very heart of the
         immense space of the palace. The whole palace is the achievement
         of a scholarly architectural perspective, the triumph of space
         disposed according to the rules. The studiolo is the inverse
         microcosm: cut off from the rest of the palace, without windows,
         without space to speak of, here space is perpetrated by simulation.
         (Baudrillard 1988, 59–60).

  Siegert relates the trompe-l’œil not to the order of representation but to the
order of the figural, with reference to the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard. The
order of representation emerged at the end of the fifteenth century and assumes


Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 40 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                      63
                          a separation of “sign and sign carrier, figure and ground” (Siegert 2015, 190). The
                          order of the figural on the other hand, allows for a copresence of representation
                          and represented: “the sign carrier—the materiality and dimensionality of the
                          medium—cannot be separated from the sign itself” (Siegert 2015, 190). As such,
                          trompe-l’œils act as “figures of self-reference” (Siegert 2015, passim), they
                          allow for the signifier to coincide with the signified. This self-reference turns out
                          to be even more evident in the inlaid choir stalls, given the circumstance, that
                          the depicted object and the depicting medium are often the same in the material
                          of wood. Wood in Early Modern symbolics is also closely connected to Christ.
                          It was perceived as a humble yet anthropomorphized material. Wood grows,
                          lives, works and dies; it has individual drawings and changes depending on
                          the environment and season (cf. Pastoureau 1993, 26). In this liveliness, wood
                          exhibits strongly anthropomorphized features. Processed, it is also a lifeless
                          material and was therefore closely connected to the belief of Christ being on the
                          border of death and life as well. Further, as archaeologist Thomas Kühtreiber
                          and art historian Heike Schlie have pointed out, wood was also thought to be
                          a passage, a medium so to speak, between the virtuality of the pictures and
                          the actuality of the viewer: “The depiction of grained wood surfaces in interior
                          representations or on individual pieces of furniture may have intended the
                          purpose of affective inclusion of, for example, biblical narratives in the present
                          time of late medieval recipients.” (my translation, Kühtreiber and Schlie 2017,
                          9). Viewers could connect the depiction of wood, i.e. in devotional books or on
                          altar paintings with the ubiquitous wooden furniture that was either placed in
                          their private rooms or in the churches and therefore incorporate the narratives
                          into their own lives. This “affective inclusion” was mediated especially by books
                          of hours and therefore devotional objects that are highly valued, carried close
                          to the body and interacted with on a daily level. The miniature paintings in the
                          books of hours were able to reference certain materials, such as wood. Choir
                          stalls on the other hand are able to simultaneously show and reference the
                          material wood. The depicted objects are mostly made from wood themselves,
                          such as writing tools, musical instruments or the ubiquitous lattice doors that
                          seem to open up into the space of the viewers. Another motif of self-reference
                          can be found in the omnipresent framing of the inlaid images, which can be
                          real, i.e. three-dimensional, or part of the flat images and thus two-dimensional.
                          The difference cannot be experienced merely visually (and even harder when it
                          comes to photographic reproductions), but rather includes other senses such
                          as touch and therefore an experience that involves the entire bodies of the
                          viewers.
                             While the examples of frames make it visible, that inlaid pictures are self-
                          referential in that way, it is a different panel, again made by Fra Giovanni,
                          that connects religious practice with spatial relations and questions of
Fig. 2 (next page)        copresence. This panel [Fig. 2] is located in the sacristy of Santa Maria in
Fra Giovanni da Verona    Organo in Verona and shows the already transubstantiated host inside of a
and Workshop, Sacristy,
                          monstrance. In a typical trompe-l’œil manner, the monstrance is placed inside
1519-23, Santa Maria in
Organo.                   a niche and slightly protrudes over the border, encompassed by a decorated



64                                                                            Müller, Topologies of the Virtual
Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 40 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X   65
     (two-dimensional) frame. Many more pictorial elements such as the curtain,
     the niche, the vitrified host and the shadow-double of the monstrance, refer
     to a dialectical understanding of showing/seeing and hiding, the same way,
     the choir is simultaneously exposed and hidden. The desire of pre-reformist
     Christian practice oscillates between hiding and de-monstranting the most
     holy places and objects, made evident by the monstrance which is to be carried
     around at the procession of Corpus Christi. The host testifies to the copresence,
     that was evoked with the order of the figural, on a religious level, being the
     wafer and the body of Christ at the same time. In its isolation in the niche, the
     monstrance does not demonstrate religiosity in a way, that a depiction of a
     biblical narrative would. Rather, it refers to the practical and operative function,
     that it itself as an object has and to the visual regime, a desire of seeing, that was
     established in medieval Christianity. Since the most holy, similar to the choir,
     cannot be accessed just like that, the host has to be put into the monstrance
     which itself is put into a niche and behind a curtain, which itself is enclosed by a
     two-dimensional frame which itself is surrounded by a three-dimensional frame
     and so on… Withdrawal—on a spatial and visual level—is here connected to a
     simultaneous excess of deictic devices. As room in a room, the panel showcases
     that space is not thought as distinct and clearly separable areas but rather as
     recursive and therefore topological. Lastly this recursion can be traced back to
     a technical and material level, since intarsia themselves are made up of pieces
     that are embedded into each other. With inlaid images, technique, motifs and
     the furniture themselves correspond to each other in terms of spatial relations
     and of connecting virtual to actual spheres.
       Inlaid choir stalls are objects, that interlace virtual and actual spaces on many
     levels: as furniture, they shape and organize bodies along social hierarchies;
     as objects they encompass spaces they themselves do not occupy; as part of
     religious ceremonies they make us aware, that godly presence is not simply
     given, but has to be actively produced by acts of the clergy and the parish
     together with the devotional objects and furniture; lastly the inlaid pictures
     demonstrate a semiotic (and religious) copresence of virtual and actual. As
     pictures that are made from wood and show wooden objects, they blur the
     distinction of real space and pictorial space and directly refer to the host, which
     is bread and the body of Christ at the same time. In inlaid furniture, spatial,
     architectural, pictorial, material, religious and semiotic spheres correlate to
     create hybrid enviroments.




66                                                        Müller, Topologies of the Virtual
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