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

L’acte de marcher est à l’espace ce que l’énonciation est à la langue: par cette affirmation, de Certeau a attribué à la marche une triple fonction « énonciative » :

• un procès d’appropriation du système topographique par le piéton,
• une réalisation spatiale du lieu, de même que parler est une réalisation sonore de la langue,
• et l’implication de relations entres positions différenciées, des contrats, de même que l’énonciation verbale est « allocution » et « implante l’autre en face ».

« La marche dessine un espace d’énonciation ; elle affirme, suspecte, hasarde, transgresse les trajectoires qu’elle « parle », par les types de relation qu’elle entretient avec les parcours en leur affectant une valeur de vérité, de connaissance ou de devoir-faire. Toutes les modalités y jouent, changeantes de pas en pas, et réparties dans des proportions, en des successions et avec des intensités qui varient selon les moments, les parcours, les marcheurs. » ¹

Alors que pour Bailly, la marche semble être un acte qui mêle le matériel au mental:

« Marcher dans la ville, c’est aller avec sa pensée à l’intérieur d’un réseau qui a lui-même la complexité et la vie d’une pensée : […] ou tout […] est traversé par une mémoire flottante dont nous ne faisons que pressentir les lois. »

Jean-Christophe Bailly, La Clairière, p.76

Ce qui « fait marcher »

« Marcher, c’est manquer de lieu. » Car le sens de la marche suit souvent le sens des mots, dans un jeu sur et avec les noms « propres ».

« La marche obéit à des tropismes sémantiques : elle est attirée ou repoussée par des nominations aux sens obscurs, des vocations ou appels qui tournent ou détournent l’itinéraire en lui donnant des sens (ou directions) jusque-là imprévisibles. Les noms propres y creusent des réserves de signification cachées et familières. Ce sont des mots qui perdent peu a peu leur valeur gravée, s’offrant aux polysémies dont les affectent les passants. Ils se détachent des endroits qu’ils étaient censés définir et servent de rendez-vous imaginaires à des voyages. étrange toponymie, décollée des lieux, planant au-dessus de la ville comme une géographie nuageuse de sens en attente. Ces mots opèrent au titre même d’un évidement et d’une usure de leur affectation première. Ils en deviennent des espaces libérés, occupables. » ²

¹ Michel de Certeau, Récits d’espace, in L’invention du quotidien, Tome 1 : arts de faire, Gallimard, 1990, p.171.

² ibid. p. 155

Sur la démarche créatrice du marcheur, voir Thierry Davila: Marcher, Créer. Déplacements, flâneries, dérives dans l’art de la fin du XXe siecle, Editions du Regard, 2002. Résumé à venir dans une note prochaine.

A couple of years ago, the French National Railways Network (SNCF) ran this ad campaign ironically subtitled “luckily, we give you more options than just the train”, to publicise the lesser-known range of travel services they were offering and mock the dusty and tarnished image often carried by the state transport operator.

In these pictures, the frenchisised phonetics of faraway place-names (Los Angeles, New York, Cancun, Singapore) humourously collide with the humble road sign more typically found at the entrance of the average sleepy village, deep in the Gallic countryside…

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

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.

A new Turbulence commission by Jeff Crouse, Andrew Mahon, and Steve Lambert.

http://turbulence.org/works/absml/

From Turbulence.org:

“ABSML is a new markup language that enables the creation of complex sentence formulas for 21st century automatic writing. ABSML tags replace parts of speech and sentence components using sophisticated semantic analysis, regular expressions, and web-based resources. In the right combination, the tags create prose that — while based on formulas and code — do not appear formulaic. ABSML is free and open for others to use, both through an online editor and an API (application programming interface).

“ABSML” is a 2008 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.”

BIOGRAPHIES

JEFF CROUSE creates software and installations that highlight the absurdity of technology in culture. Jeff’s previous works include YouThreebe, a YouTube triptych creator; Invisible Threads, a virtual jeans factory in Second Life; and James Chimpton, a robotic monkey that interviewed the artists of the 2008 Whitney Biennial. He is currently developing BoozBot, a bar tending robot/puppet; and DeleteCity, a Wordpress plug-in that finds and republishes content that has been removed from sites such as Flickr and YouTube. His work has been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, the Futuresonic festival in Manchester, UK, the DC FilmFest, and the Come Out and Play Festival in Amsterdam. Jeff received his MS from the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech in 2006 and then joined Eyebeam as a production fellow in 2007. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam, an adjunct professor at the IMA program at Hunter College, and a freelance programmer.

STEVE LAMBERT recently made international news with the The New York Times “Special Edition,” a replica of the grey lady announcing the end of the war and other good news. A Senior Fellow at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York, Lambert also teaches at Parsons/The New School and Hunter College. While he never graduated from high school, Steve went on to study sociology and film before receiving a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000 and a MFA at UC Davis in 2006. He founded the Budget Gallery, an outdoor guerilla art gallery, in 1999 and the Anti-Advertising Agency in 2004 and has collaborated with numerous artists including the Graffiti Research Lab, and the Yes Men. Steve?s projects and art works have won awards from Rhizome/The New Museum, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, the California Arts Council, and others. His work has been shown at galleries, art spaces, and museums both nationally and internationally, and was recentl!
y collected by the Library of Congress. Lambert has appeared live on NPR, the BBC, and CNN, and been reported on in multiple outlets including Associated Press, the New York Times, the Guardian, Punk Planet, and Newsweek.

ANDREW MAHON is currently an undergraduate student at Parsons School of Design studying Design + Technology. His interests lie in the architecture of virtual space. Andrew has worked on numerous projects at Eyebeam since 2007, many with Jeff Crouse, including Invisible Threads, a virtual sweatshop, and You3b, a YouTube Triptych maker. Andrew has also worked with Natalie Jeremijenko at the Environmental Health Clinic, creating visualizations of threatened ecosystems. Over the summer of 2008, Andrew participated in Interactivos@Eyebeam, where his interactive installation was later show. Andrew is currently working on algorithmic music visualizations, freelance web programming, and has recently started interning at Area/Code, helping to develop compelling game situations using GPS tracking.

Curieuse apparition: les nouvelles plaques qui ornent les angles de chaque ruelle de village arborent des noms tout aussi vides de sens que d’histoire; Sans doute le fruit de la dernière directive europèenne relative au fichage technologique de l’espace, mesuré, ratissé et discrétisé par la navigation satellite. Cette nouvelle standardisation typonimique officialiserait-elle la fin des lieux-dits?

Ah… rien ne vaut un sacro-saint panneau Michelin!

http://turbulence.org/works/garden

[meme.garden] is an Internet service that blends software art and search tool to visualize participants’ interests in prevalent streams of information, encouraging browsing and interaction between users in real time, through time. Utilizing the WordNet lexical reference system from Princeton University, [meme.garden] introduces concepts of temporality, space, and empathy into a network-oriented search tool. Participants search for words which expand contextually through the use of a lexical database. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into floating synonym “seeds,” each representing one underlying lexical concept. When participants “plant” their interests, each becomes a tree that “grows” over time. Each organism’s leaves are linked to related streaming RSS feeds, and by interacting with their own and other participants’ trees, participants create a contextual timescape in which interests can be seen growing and changing within an environment that endures.

The [meme.garden] software was created by an eclectic team of artists and scientists: Mary Flanagan, Daniel Howe, Chris Egert, Junming Mei, and Kay Chang.

[meme.garden] is a 2005 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support from the PSC-CUNY research fund.