On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

NB: Studio - Londons Kerning (2007)

Un nom, le nom d’une ville sur la terre, suffit à ouvrir le jeu qui commença sur les atlas de l’enfance. Ce nom, avant d’être un ici, est un là-bas : un motif de rêverie, un buisson d’idées qu’on se fait, d’images mentales relayées par la littérature, les représentations. Puis arrive un jour ou l’on s’y rend et tout le buissonnement confus du « là-bas » s’évapore. L’apprentissage commence : On se rend compte que ce nom, ce qui a fait venir, ce qui a fait rêver, s’il recouvre bien toute la ville, n’en désigne vraiment que le noyau originel. Chaque ville est un ensemble de possibles, prêt à se décomposer en fragments distincts à l’arrivée de chaque nouveau visiteur.

On ne connaît une ville et on ne se l’approprie qu’en la pratiquant – telle une langue. Pour en maîtriser la topographie, la disposition de ses quartiers, il faut plonger dans sa densité kaléidoscopique et entrer dans sa matière. La syntaxe lentement découverte laisse entrevoir sa structure ; Le lexique y prend forme en des phrasés multiples qui se superposent et s’entrecroisent, de façon à la fois réglée et aléatoire, en une forme déchiffrable ou complexe, le long de la grammaire du plan. La ponctuation laisse respirer ses grandes phrases amorphes comme ses éclats lumineux ; Un amas de collages, de parenthèses ouvertes remplies de visions, d’odeurs, d’instants, qui laisse filtrer du sens, ce sursaut d’intensité.

La ville est ainsi une réserve de sens en jachère, de signes que chacun articule, anime, « locute », occulte à sa façon en la parcourant. Une somme d’agencements réalisés, et dans chaque parcours, la réalisation d’un nouvel agencement, d’une nouvelle phrase. La ville, « ionisée » par la démarche qui la traverse en l’explorant, s’éclaire de l’intérieur.
On y forme des suites de mots, des phrases, on établit des repères. Les villes, « pelotes d’histoires », nous exposent à un buissonnement permanent de traces et d’indices enchevêtrés. Chaque ville parle son propre argot secret dont le flâneur reconstitue la trame, le tissu, avec ses moirés et ses accrocs, à la fois achevé et à tisser encore. Cette inextricable complexité de la ville est rendue lisible par l’ascension de l’observateur, qui peut dès lors déchiffrer le texte écrit par ses habitants-marcheurs (Wandersmänner)¹, sans qu’eux mêmes puissent le lire.

Le texte ci-dessus est en partie inspiré/condensé de trois essais de Jean Christophe Bailly publiés dans La Ville à l’œuvre, paru aux Editions de l’Imprimeur en 2001 :
La grammaire générative des jambes, p.21 – 34
Le propre des villes, p.81 – 84
La Clairière, p.73 – 79

¹ Michel de Certeau, L’invention du Quotidien, Tome 1, p.139

Dans la vie sociale urbaine, la rue a ses fonctions; elle est un important émetteur d’informations, perpétuellement et régulièrement renouvelées dans le changement incessant des gens, des aspects, des objets et des heures. La rue est un “texte social” qui mêle signaux (simples, systèmes binaires), signes (complexes, systèmes ouverts) et symboles (stables et porteurs de sens inépuisables) en des proportions équilibrées et dans des combinaisons infiniment variées, créant richesse, banalité ou ennui. « Un bon texte social est lisible et informatif : il surprend, mais pas trop ; il apprend sans accabler. »
La rue offre publiquement ce qui est ailleurs caché, et elle le réalise sur la scène d’un théâtre, presque spontané: « La rue offre un spectacle et n’est que spectacle : celui qui se dépêche, pressé d’aller au travail, ne voit pas ce spectacle ; il y figure. »

Henri Lefevbre, Introduction a la psycho-sociologie de la vie quotidienne, Du Rural à L’Urbain (1970) Ed. Anthropos, p. 89-98

Implicitly, we think about the years of our lives in a linear fashion, e.g. in terms of decades: our twenties, thirties, etc. In this linear view, all our years are equal and time moves at a uniform pace.
This simple picture, however, doesn’t quite fit with our perceptions as we age: Where are the long, leisurely summers we knew as children? If it seemed forever to get through the fifth grade, what happened to last year?

The ‘logtime’ hypothesis is that we use our age to estimate the passage of time, resulting in a perceived shrinking of our years as we grow older, and giving a subjective scale of life very different from that of the calendar: In this view, the older we become, the faster we seem to age or, conversely, the shorter the years seem to be. Mathematically, this relationship is said to be either logarithmic or exponential, depending on which variable is used as the reference.

Starting with the premise that the human mind judges the length of a long period of time by comparing it with current age, the logarithmic nature subjective human temporal experiences can be easily rationalized: Hence a year adds 10% to the life of a ten-year-old, but only 5% to that of a twenty-year-old. For the twenty-year-old, two years are required to add 10%.
A consequence of the logarithmic function is that it is the ratio of the years defining an interval of time that we use to judge the duration of that interval, not the absolute magnitudes of those years. For example, the years from ages 10 to 20 seem to pass at the same rate as the years from 20 to 40, or 40 to 80 – they are all of equal subjective duration.

A logarithmic scale: stretched out at the low end and compressed at the high end.

However, the changing nature of our lives when we are young tends to obscure the shrinking years: the twenty-year-old rarely thinks about how life was at age 10; life at 20 is filled with different activities and concerns, and it is the future that dominates reverie.
It is only after life becomes more settled and routine that we become more retrospective, and only then do we have an easier basis for comparing the years.
This sense of elapsed time, narrowly dependent on memory, is also heavily reliant on psychological factors: Intervals of time may be judged differently in retrospect than while being experienced; they may seem longer if you feel you have accomplished much or had a memorable experience.
In great part at least, the foreshortening of the years as we grow older is due to the monotony of memory’s content and the consequent simplification of the backward-glancing view. In youth, new experiences are pretty common and regular, apprehension is vivid, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.

William James (1890): The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt.

Link to the original article on Logtime by James Main Kenney

“Old traps vanish, new ones take their place; the old safe places become impassable, and the route can either be plain and easy, or impossibly confusing.”

Andreï Tarkovski, Stalker

As illustrated by Tarkovski’s Zone, the conception of place seems to be constantly evolving, ever-adapting to the circumstances of one-self.
Bergson sees place as “space in which the process of remembrance continues to activate the past as something which is lived and acted, rather than represented”.
Indeed, the notion of place couldn’t exist without memory – or perhaps even outside memory: when we leave a place, we take with us our own constructed and fantasised version of it: for instance, “home is absolutely an imagined or fictiously remembered place that people want to exist, but it exists almost entirely in memory” (Simon Schama). The tension between memory and present experience is epitomized by the feeling of Nostalgia (from the Greek word nostos meaning returning home, and algos meaning pain), which was once recognised as a clinical condition known to have once rendered Russian soldiers incapable of fighting.

In his street-walking itinerancies, Bojan Sarcevic has seeked to highlight the relationships going on between different forms of experience of a place, from tourist to inhabitant: from alienation, to strangeness, to familiarity. The remote and exotic place offers something ‘other’ to those who go there; but the tourists are themselves also ‘other’ to the city’s inhabitant…
On tourism, the sociologist John Urry wrote: “Like the pilgrim the tourist moves from a familiar place to a far place and then returns to the familiar place. At the far place both the pilgrim and the tourist engage in ‘worship’ of shrines, which are sacred, albeit in different ways, and as a result gain some kind of uplifting experience.”
For Erik Cohen, “Pilgrimage is defined by a movement from the ‘profane periphery’ to the ‘sacred centre’”.

Place (Tacita Dean & Jeremy Millar) is released in the Artworks collection, Thames & Hudson.

Sans commentaire…

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 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.

http://www.urbanearth.co.uk/london/

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.