L’Europe vue par… · July 3rd, 2009
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On paradoxical recognition: déjà vu and alienation · June 17th, 2009
This post is another snippet from Memory, where Hunter describes the experience of déjà vu as an episode of illusory recognition involving two features which seem incompatible with each other: a present event is recognised as having been witnessed before, yet there is a certainty that this is impossible.
In this form of self-contradictory recognising, we believe that what we say, do or see has been done before in the same circumstances, and we feel that we know what will happen next, as if we remember something that hasn’t happened yet. The present moment is saturated with recollective familiarity as we experience an intense feeling that everything around us has happened in the same way before, and seems out of hand. The sensation of déjà vu, if not the result of a severe brain dysfunction, is usually short and infrequent, merely causing mild puzzlement over unaccountable familiarity.
The opposite situation is alienation, in which intimately known situations and persons are experienced as being strange and unfamiliar.
Déjà vu may be experienced when we are visiting some town for the first time: despite having never been there, the streets look strangely familiar, the scene we are witnessing is somehow not unexpected. A rational explanation could be that this place shares similar environmental characteristics with another place we remember.
Urban Earth: London · June 11th, 2009
URBAN EARTH is a project to (re)present our habitat by walking across some of Earth’s biggest urban areas.
Central to URBAN EARTH is (re)presenting cities to show what they are really like for the people who live there – a direct challenge to the media that distort the reality of the places in which most of us now live.
On the subjective nature of mapping · June 1st, 2009
While we may think of geographic maps as amongst the more objective graphics, Stephen Boyd David reminds us of the subjective nature of mapping in this essay published in Emotional Cartography (Ed. Christian Nold). There is always some degree of subjectivity in an image. The way we see the world is channelled by language (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), and linguistics have taught us that maps, like pictures and words, do not represent things, but shared ideas of things.
In contrast with the perspective, which needs a viewpoint, the map doesn’t need an onlooker – it is the first panopticon.
However maps do distort and select – because they are made for a purpose: they carry place-names, or indicate a hierarchy of importance. Whereas aerial photography shows the “raw stuff”, a well-made and usable map must be clear and legible, serving its purpose precisely through its selectivity. But some profound distortions go unnoticed because they are embedded in a shared cultural perspective: as the terrestrial globe is unwrapped on a flat surface, Europe is conveniently located in the middle of most Mercator projections. Yet even a globe, considered to be the most direct model of the Earth, has its northern hemisphere “up”, still dominating the under-developed world.
The first level of subjectivity arises from who we are and what we are trying to represent; on top of this is always overlaid our belonging to a wider cultural group: “dominant groups often assume that the shape of their world is the shape of the world.”
Oskar Karlin, Elephant & Castle-centred tube map.
Where you start a journey is sometimes as important as where you are: Time and space has already been compressed by ever faster mechanised travel, and increased ease of access makes the territory a different shape and size, experienced differently in different places. This is evidenced by Oskar Karlin’s time travel map, showing travel times from Elephant & Castle station, distorting Beck’s original underground map which is itself a heavily deformed representation of the topography giving much greater importance to the central area at the expense of the periphery. The emphasis on connections (or absence of them), the relative proximity of places is reminiscent of space syntax diagrams showing the connections between adjacent rooms in a building, rather than their relative layout as shown in a plan view.
Perspective is another way of prioritising and organising importance: The introduction of perspective in the BBC broadcast weather maps attracted much criticism, not least because it was thought to breach the corporation’s duty of impartiality. The same effect was exaggeratingly used by Saul Steinberg’s 1976 New Yorker’s view of the world to a humorous end.
Tom Carden’s Travel Time Tube Map expands on Karlin’s work by allowing any user to dynamically reorganise the map in order to represent travel times from any station:
Tom Carden, Travel Time Tube Map
A new generation of web-enabled interactive devices has enabled dynamic and on-demand maps to be produced, customised by users to fit their interests, altering the role of map-maker and opening up a map to new expressions, re-introducing objectivity into an object that has become more universal. Portable GPS technologies have further changed the stakes by adding the here and now, making maps inherently personal and embedded in the present.
Download the book (Ed. Christian Nold) from Emotional Cartography.
Un:Place at the Jerwood · May 30th, 2009
Un: Place – A curation by Beatrice Jarvis, exhibition opens 3 June – 20 July at the Jerwood café
Alys Williams / Benjamin Bailey / Seecum Cheung / Ilona Sagar / Dana Macpherson / Inzajeano Latif
An exhibition of personal cartographies and urban responses
Six artists have each created a piece of work that responds directly to the landscape of Jerwood Space, an iconic building situated in the heart of bustling Bankside. This reclaimed area between London Bridge and Waterloo is steeped in fragmented traces of lingering history, where passages of time are lost in hidden corners and marked histories are glimpsed on decaying facades.
The city has and will always remain a myriad of inspiration, This exhibition explores the creative relationship between the city and the individual to develop unique personal cartographies ; relearning mapping as an intricate interaction of the imagination in a diversity of forms and media.
Jerwood Space
171 Union Street
London
SE1 OLN
Revisiting places · May 25th, 2009
In one of the last chapters of Memory, Ian Hunter describes a phenomenon often experienced when one revisits a place not seen since childhood: the place strangely fails to come up to our expectations, and appears to have “shrunk”. Assuming that the place hasn’t changed, why should there be a discrepency between the recall and the perception of a place? The writer gives a poignant account of his own experience (p.276):
“I was motoring through a town which I had last visited twenty-three years before at the age of four. On that previous occasion, I had been taken through a certain school in this town by a relative who was a teacher there. And on several occasions since, I had vividly recollected this tour of inspection, larely in terms of visual imagery. I had recalled the large cement-covered playground in front of the school, the high iron railings, the grey stone facade of the building itself, the class-room on the left of the vast main doorway, and the enormous gymnasium at the end of the lenghty corridor. I still recall being impressed, as a child, with the vastness of the whole building. On seeing the school again, it seemed to have shrunk to such an alarming extent that I had to be reassured by someone else that this was, in fact, the same school. The railings were small, the playground tiny, and the building itself, although moderately sized, diminutive compared with my recollection of it.”
One disappointingly obvious explanation lies in the difference in physical sizes of child and adult at the time of perceiving; the same building is likely to be perceived differently, appearing larger to a child because of their relative smallness, hence everything looking bigger, longer, higher, heavier than it is to an adult.
Another factor is the cumulative experience of similar objects against which perception occurs, forming a constantly altered frame of reference. A child probably has a much more limited experience of large buildings than an adult has had. For the writer, coming into contact with a school for the first time at the age of four, it must have appeared truly enormous compared to the domestic dwelling he has been used to so far.
On top of this can be added the influence of distorted recalling: When memorising, we abstract and retain the dominant characteristics of an object, and by repeated recalling, we are likely to accentuate any characteristics of this object which especially impressed us at the time of perceiving. If a building impressed us as a child by its size, we might over the years recall a progressively larger caricature of this building. Lastly, it seems that the conception of value plays some part in distorting a “treasured memory”, people tending to recall a highly valued object as being larger than it actually is.
Home is where the hangar is · May 24th, 2009
Narita Tarmac
“I suspect that the airport will be the true city of the 21st century. The great airports of the planet are already the suburbs of an invisible world capital, a virtual metropolis whose faubourgs are named Heathrow, Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Nagoya, a centriportal city whose population forever circles its notional centre, and will never need to gain access to its dark heart.”
J. G. Ballard
Home is where the hangar is on utne.com
What is memory? · May 17th, 2009
In his classic book Memory, first published in 1957 by Penguin Books, Ian M. L. Hunter made some interesting attempts at characterising the processes at work in memory and remembering. He defined and analysed them in those terms:
recalling: reproducing in the present some event from the past. While a person is recalling, they are essentially engaged in selectively constructing the salient characteristics of the original event. This highlights the constructive and selective nature of learning as an active process of registration, in which coordinating relationships are elaborated between old and new. These relationships play a role in subsequent recall.
recognizing: identifying some present event as being familiar from the past.
We sometimes become aware of our attempts at characterising and constructing a framework for remembering past events, using devices like associations of sounds, rhythm, or the context of encounter. By constructing a historical context for the event, we can also localise it in our personal past.
Recollecting constitutes a particularly rich form of recalling, when the warm intimacy of past personal experience is suddenly brought to the surface of the present – see Proust’s madeleine and the idea of involontary memory.
Imaging: experiencing sensory qualities in the absence of appropriate sensory stimulation. Much of our remembering takes the form of imaging, i.e. re-living past complex experiences in vivid sensory terms. We recall the past by reconstructing its sensory characteristics, thus giving us the illusion of going back in time.
The cumulative effects of past experience
The Bartlett experiments1 have highlighted the gradual and ongoing process of filtering / transformation / degradation occuring with memorised events. The retained effects of past experience form an organised system, progressively elaborated into inter-related systems and sub-systems, where events are selected / re-ordered according to their mutual relevance, which in turn informs the way present circumstances are perceived. A person’s memory is a permanently self-modifying system, their cumulative past constantly enriched and updated by the present.
1 Frederic Bartlett was a british psychologist famous for his experiments related to the formation of memory. He conducted a series of studies where subjects were told a story, then asked to recall it after various intervals of time.
Par la fenêtre du train : esthétique du voyageur – spectateur · May 4th, 2009
La fenêtre du train comme appareil de vision en mouvement
Chemin de fer et photographie sont deux inventions pratiquement iso-chroniques, qui semblent intrinsèquement liées : Le train, véritable machine à voir le spectacle du monde en mouvement, pourrait s’inscrire dans la lignée des dispositifs optiques qui se sont succès jusqu’à la naissance du cinéma. Il est pour ainsi dire un instrument de vision plutôt que de locomotion1 ; La fenêtre du train encadre et délimite le champ de vision ; Le déplacement rapide entraîne une nouvelle appréhension de la profondeur de champ, où la vitesse crée un étagement hiérarchisé du paysage. L’obstruction possible du paysage donne lieu a une vision fragmentaire, instantanée.
Le compartiment du wagon et la chambre noire ont la même capacité à isoler l’observateur dans un espace de vision cloisonné2 où seule la vue est sollicitée. Le voyageur agit comme le photographe : le regard vif et encadré, il attend que « les plus riches scènes du paysage viennent se photographier sur la vitre du wagon » (Benjamin Gastineau)3.
Les modifications de perspective, la mobilité glissante du point de vue annoncent la vision dynamique d’un travelling et l’essence cinématique du voyage. Les premiers films étaient d’ailleurs souvent caractérisés par de longues prises de vues ininterrompues de l’espace, réalisées depuis des véhicules en mouvement.4
Dès 1898, le catalogue des frères Lumière comportaient ainsi une trentaine de films tournés depuis des véhicules en mouvement, donnant naissance au panoramique, ou travelling, techniques devenues aujourd’hui tellement communes qu’elles en sont invisible.
Le paysage vu par la fenêtre du train, ainsi soumis au temps et au mouvement, est transformé : L’oeil reconstruit le rapport fuyant entre choses fixes dans une perspective anamorphosée. La notion de perspective unique a été profondément modifiée par l’irruption du chemin de fer et la mobilité du point de vue.5
Premiers voyages, premières peurs
Tout comme les premières projections de films (Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat), les premiers voyages en train laissèrent une forte impression sur l’imaginaire populaire: des peurs irrationnelles causées par le passage dans les tunnels à la transition soudaine de l’obscurité à la lumière – Les guides touristiques de l’époque recommandaient aux voyageurs de « fermer les yeux aussitôt qu’ils commencent à voir de la lumière, et de ne les ouvrir que très progressivement après en être ressorti. »6
Le déplacement mécanisé permet de se déplacer à des vitesses jusqu’alors inégalées, à laquelle la vue a du mal à s’accommoder : « Tous les objets disparaissent avant qu’on ait pu les fixer ». En premier lieu, si l’on était pas déjà mort dans l’explosion d’une locomotive ou écrasé par un wagon, on craignait que regarder le paysage défiler à de telles vitesses pouvait endommager la vue. Ces premières inquiétudes dissipées,
on se mit à apprécier le paysage qui, en défilant, se résume a des larges bandes colorées. On pensait alors qu’en allant encore plus vite, on obtiendrait du blanc selon le principe du disque de Newton7.
La mémoire du voyage comme expérience cinématique
Par son rythme, le chemin de fer en appelle constamment à la mémoire des espaces parcourus. Il produit une superposition, une stratification des paysages entrevus. Chaque trajet multiplie les perspectives, re-dessine le paysage, à la fois original et procèdant des précédents. Le voyage, comme le cinématographe, lie irrémédiablement l’espace et le temps dans un continuum.
” D’innombrables images séparées, saisies pendant des heures de contemplation, se sont fondues et rejointes dans mon esprit pour former, dans ma mémoire, comme une seule unité. “
Aldous Huxley, Le monde en passant. Journal de voyage [1926], Paris, Vernal-Ph.
Voici ce qu’il reste a posteriori d’un voyage en train : des bribes de paysage, des impression fugitives qui viennent s’enfiler a la suite la unes des autres en une synthèse qui combine les fragments d’autres trajets précèdents. Séquence panoramique : juxtaposition côte à côte d’images prises a des instants différents, plus a même d’exprimer le mouvement, en adéquation avec la nature du déplacement en train.
Cette représentation emblèmatique et schématique du voyage ressemblerait au panorama de la gare de Lyon, qui juxtapose de façon continue les villes les plus significatives du parcours du PLM, chacune représentée par leur monument. Ces points de vue qui sont normalement échelonnés dans l’espace et le temps y sont condensés, annonçant comme la synthsèe d’un voyage qui n’a pas encore été effectué.
La recomposition de l’espace du voyage
Le chemin de fer agit sur le temps et le paysage en les condensant. Ce que recherchait les peintures de panoramas, décomposant le paysage en fragments significatifs pour le recomposer en un tout cohérent.
Les moving panoramas étaient d’ailleurs tout simplement sensés simuler l’expérience d’un voyage en train, au moyen d’une longue toile peinte qui défilait latéralement entre deux rouleaux de part et d’autre de la scène8. Les spectateurs étaient parfois repartis dans des wagons factices. Le dernier grand panorama (le Transsibérien, qui présentait sur un décor défilant a quatre profondeurs défilant plus ou moins rapidement selon leur degré d’éloignement les étapes de Moscou à Pékin) fut installé pour l’exposition universelle de 1900, victime du succès du cinématographe.
1 Clément Chéroux, ” Vues du train “, études photographiques, 1 | Novembre 1996, [En ligne], mis en ligne le 18 novembre 2002. URL : http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/index101.html. Consulté le 26 décembre 2008.
2 à ce sujet, voir le texte Naval et Carcéral, de Michel de Certeau
3 La vie en chemin de fer, Paris, Dentu, 1861, p.35.
4 Why Did Early Films Move? Discussion au British Film Institute, Samedi 1er Décembre 2007.
5 René Thom, ” Par les fenêtres du train : la notion de référentiel appliquée a l’art de voyager par le train “, François Beguin, ” Paysages vus du train : littérature et géographie “, Revue d’histoire des chemins de fer, n 10-11, printemps-automne 1994, p.19-33 et p.34-38.
6 Christian Barman, Early British Railways, Penguin Books, 1950.
7 Voir Claude Pichois, Vitesse et vision du monde, Neuchâtel, La Baconniere, 1973, p. 56
8 Bernard Comment, Le Moving Panorama, Le XIXe siecle des panoramas, Paris, Adam Biro, 1993, p.34-37.