Dis-oriented ?

Here are some questions that we could relate to the tracing issues we talked about yesterday…

How do we communicate? 1/part

This question involves communication with other humans, but also with our surrounding environment. Which means also to consider how we orient ourselves in our environment. We talked yesterday about how autistic children seem to feel natural phenomenon such as magnetism and water, which could mean that they somehow communicate with their environment through the perception of signs or feeling that we don’t necessarily perceive. Yet, and this is very much obvious while we visit foreign countries, and especially, for western people, countries like china or Japan, where you can’t understand most of the urban signs and sometimes the urban structures, which capacities are involved, which signs are being read, recognized, interpreted, how is urban environment read? And how are people getting the resources to orient themselves? How do they communicate with surrounding environment, with signs, with humans, with maps? And also, how do the learn to cope with the feelings that disorientation creates?

I certainly feel that the capacity of observing, guessing, reading the urban environment has been strongly developed during my trips in china. It’s a very simple example, but when I was in Istanbul and Italy with my friends, I could feel the difference between us by the way I could easily find what I was looking for, by constantly reading the signs, etc. This capacity of keeping my eyes open comes essentially from chinese experiences.

Are we allowed to get lost? 迷路了吗 ?

Yet, the question is what is going to happen with GPS becoming popular? Are we paradoxically going to lose completely our capacity to orient ourselves? Because we’ll become lazy, will we lose this capacity to read our environment? And will we lose also these unexpected encounters, the serendipity that is somehow allowed by disorientation and that constitutes the core of urban life? Disorientation isn’t a way to keep out of routine, a way of looking at things in a pretty different way? Getting a fresh look on things and allow us to be surprised. Maybe the possibility // the ability to get lost is the difference between traces and maps.

2008年8月11日，14:17-14:28.

“The lines developed in space are sometimes translated on the map as coloured patches, surfaces, erasures and signs. Tracing is ‘a language’ which can be shared by those that can speak and those that only know ‘silence’; some trace with their hands, others with their bodies. The lines that trace the courses are supplemented with signs that indicate movements or tools, like a choreographic notation.” (Doina Petrescu, “The Indeterminate Mapping of the Common“)

“过来跟我打球。”

“你真不会打求！”

from fotini’s obsession during grad school:

As far as the postmodern urban environment is concerned, Jameson claims that the mutation in built space and the new hyperspace that has been created has not yet been accompanied by the necessary transformations in the human subject in order for it to be able to perceive and grasp this space. This has led to the inability of the individual subject to locate itself in reference to its surroundings and to cognitively map its position in the world. There is an analogous experience on a sociopolitical level in the inability of the individual subject to map the global multinational world in which it is located. Toward the end of the essay Jameson introduces the concept of cognitive mapping that can “enable a situational representation of the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of the city’s structure as a whole.” Through this practice the individual can resist the otherwise totally homogenizing space of global multinationalism, and at the same time conceive the connections between the intimate local dimensions of subjective experience and the abstract and impersonal forces of the global system.

…

In this sense cognitive mapping is a postmodern practice. We could actually go on and claim that there can be no cognitive map as a product of this practice, since what is important is the process of mapping itself and not its outcome. Both Jameson and the Situationists have promoted through their mappings a political understanding of space and made evident their intention to construct new social relations. The practice of cognitive mapping can help us coordinate the discontinuous realities in which we find ourselves and give us a sense of orientation. Even if we can never actually produce a cognitive map, our attempt to do so can prove to be a first step in the restructuring of our world and of our position in it and will definitely influence our relations to each other and to the urban environment. As Jameson concludes at the end of his essay on cognitive mapping “even if we cannot imagine the productions of such an aesthetic, there may, nonetheless, as with the very idea of Utopia itself, be something positive in the attempt to keep alive the possibility of imagining such a thing.”