not from map, but from memory
The drawings that I am working on from my Cambridge tours (October 2011) were made from memory, not from the map, as I thought I would do. As a result the proto-geometric* shapes appearing and developing with a certain sequence do have a certail quality because they do not derive from an actual tangible place, but a place which is in my mind, and that I reconstruct from memory onto paper.
* “...a protogeometry that addresses vague, in other words vagabond or nomadic, morphological …Protogeometry, the science dealing with them is itself vague, in the etymological sense of ‘vagabond’, it
is neither inexact like sensible things, nor exact like sensible things, nor exact like ideal essences, but an exact, yet rigorous… A theorematic figure is a fixed essence, but transformations, distortions, ablations, and argumentations all of its variations form problematic figures, that are vague yet rigorous ‘lens shaped’, ‘umbelliform’, or ‘ideated’ … nomad science is made out to be a ‘prescientific’ or ‘parascientific’ or ‘subscientific’ agency…”
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guittary, ‘Nomadology: The War Machine’, transl. B. Massumi, Foreign Agents Series, p.27
maps drawings, dilemma
as I start drawing our tours from memory, I realise how all the planning about what the drawings would have looked like does not quite work.
When I planned it out I had a map as reference and happily joined the dots representing the places I was given by participants. Now that it come to actually making the drawings, what I started to do was very different. To draw from memory the tours means I find myself thinking at the physical activity of going through streets to get there, therefore the drawing comes out as not geometric at all. The dilemma now is about the choice between the two or the juxtaposition or what?… to be continued
relationship between places and memory
Conversations between Elena Cologni and Lisa Saksida, (October 2011) part of the project ROCKFLUID, ‘relationship between places and memory”
Question relating to the use of drawing as interface between artist and scientist to investigate: Reprensenting memory or memory as representation.
Thinking process, more than anything.
As it happens, I was going to bed a couple of nights ago and thought about a link between a particular element of the project and another issue, but forgotten to make a note… or post something on a blog. It was na eureka moment I lost forever. For now I can say that there are a number of burning issues which I define as studio pinboard fragments and through working in practice they gradually make sense. I guess the fluid nature of the blog will allow me to make the following points relevant to my practice and form a context a bit more specific.
Psycho-geography
By definition, psychogeography combines subjective and objective knowledge and studies. Debord struggled to stipulate the finer points of this theoretical paradox, ultimately producing “Theory of the Dérive” in 1958, a document which essentially serves as an instruction manual for the psychogeographic procedure, executed through the act of dérive (“drift”). Psycho-geography was expressed through an activity, for me the activity happens and maps are used as ways of representing the reality and what has happened, they are drawn in the past, through long term, short term or sensory memory…
Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur
“a person who walks the city in order to experience it”. (continued)
“Travelling as a way to produce forms” (physically, temporarily and psychologically…)
(Altermodernism Bourriaud) Starting from the obvious observation that there is a time distance between the now of perception and the after of the recollection, and a space distance between where we start from and where we return. How do we cruise around our cities and map them according to our experience and memory?
How to join the ‘points’, what is the method?
Systems: graph theory, Hamiltonian Path, logical paradoxes In the mathematical field of graph theory, a Hamiltonian path (or traceable path) is a path in an undirected graph that visits each vertex exactly once. (continued)
The travelling salesman problem (TSP)
is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization studied in operations research and theoretical computer science. Given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, the task is to find a shortest possible tour that visits each city exactly once.
Memory : presence body in space
‘our bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge; it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object, with a Praktognosia, which has to be recognised as original and perhaps as primary.’ Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). The phenomenology of Perception (C. Smith, Trans.). London: Routledge/Kegan Paul, p 140 (continued)
From a psychological viewpoint,
this notion of time in relation to artist-audience interchange and reception of work, I investigated before by experimenting with time delays (MP) and laps (workshop) and aimed at enhancing artist’s and audience’s awareness of psychological time. (continued)
Art practice as Research methodology:
Sullivan suggests that the debate on arts practice as research and consciousness is open and not very well investigated . ‘It is within a notion of art practice as research that the full potential of cognition and creativity as informing human capacities can be realized. (continued)