I found the article "A Brief History of Wayfinding", to be very informative as well as interesting being that many people often overlook the process which allows them to understand where they are and be able to move from one destination to another and back again.Many people are so busy being distracted with their daily routines that they do not realize they are constantly on the move. After working on the psychogeographic drifting project I felt that this article was a great follow-up to that assignment. In fact when the article started to discuss how honey-bees and ants use Geocentric and egocentric navigation to find their way back to their nest I could visually see parts of many of the videos in our class where myself as well as my classmates took moving video of the ground they had walked by on Easton Ave. Overall I found this article to be highly relevant to drifting assignment and a great follow up.
The second article "Signal to Noise", was about the anti-music artist of the Fluxus movement, John Cage. John Cage is known for his groundbreaking work within the sound world. Perhaps his most famous piece, "4'33'' is a piece composed of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. In all honesty, not the most exciting art you will ever see or hear, but the theory behind it is what makes his work revolutionary. The whole concept behind Cage's work is the idea that things can be made by chance. Whether it be cutting up many clips and throwing them all back together randomly or composing a piece made entirely of silence Cage's work expressed the idea of making art through chance. In theory, by making everything by chance, the experience is different every time.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
Video III: Readings and colective points
I found Yi-Fu Tuan's article "Space and Place" to be very interesting because it presented some very valuable points about the relationship between space and place. First I enjoyed that the writer broke down each definition of space and place in order to avoid any confusion later on. Tuan writes that "The ideas 'space' and 'place' require each other for definition". In other words, the two seem to work as antonyms for each other. While place is normally associated with security and shelter, space is associated with freedom and openness. Tuan further elaborates on his definition by making the comparison that if space allows movement than place serves as a pause for this movement. This makes more sense when you think about space and place from a visual aspect, space is white and place is anything in between the white.
What sparked my interest in this article even more was that Tuan pointed out the fact that no single person has the same experience in a place. Granted it is quite possible that two people could share a similar experience in the same place at the same time, or even share the same emotions in the same place at the same time, however, even when this happens these two people still do not have an identical experience. With this thought process, it is physically impossible for two people to share the exact same experience within a place. I know I may be digging into a very detailed argument here but this part of the article really sparked my interest and I found this to be a fascinating point. My question is how exactly how much of an impact does this have on an experience one shares with another? Does it have any at all? If two people are in a particular place staring at one another and having a conversation where they both feel the same emotions at the same time does ones pinpoint location within a space change his/her experience from the other?
The second article "Body Movement" by Robert J. Yudell further complicates this idea of relationship between one's location and the places and spaces around it by stating that places are a stimulus for movement. One example Yudell uses is a child playing a game where he or she is jumping over every crack they find in the ground. By playing this game the child is not dictating the movement but the place and location that child is at is dictating this. What's fascinating about this is that most of these places were man-made while others were created by nature. Although it is understood that we are in control of our own actions it is true that sometimes we may be unaware of the fact that a place is dictating these actions for us. One aspect of this subject that I feel was not addressed is the fact that for every action there is a reaction. What I mean by this is that we have all ran into a wall at one time or another, therefore we all know that once we hit the wall we will feel pain. In response to this, I feel that maybe Yudell is giving space more credit than is really due. If anything consequence should receive at least partial credit for the movements which people create based on the places they are in.
The third article "A Brief History of Wayfinding", is an article on exactly that. The writer discusses the natural process of how one uses way-finding to navigate from their first destination to the next and in the process find the fastest route to getting there. The article gets very in depth with this process discussing not only humanistic tendencies for finding one's way, but also other animals and the various abilities they use in order to get from point A to point B and back. For some living things, this task is easier than it is for others. One example used in the article how ants can seem to wander far from their nest but use different landmarks as signs in order to find their way back home. This article was interesting because it starts to navigate away from the humanistic aspect of things. To make matters even more complicated, we have already read in Tuan's article that no two people can occupy the exact same place at the exact same time. I think this last article expands on the topic nicely taking thing past what we as humans know and bringing the topic into an entirely different realm which forces us to think outside of our natural habitats as well as bodies.
What sparked my interest in this article even more was that Tuan pointed out the fact that no single person has the same experience in a place. Granted it is quite possible that two people could share a similar experience in the same place at the same time, or even share the same emotions in the same place at the same time, however, even when this happens these two people still do not have an identical experience. With this thought process, it is physically impossible for two people to share the exact same experience within a place. I know I may be digging into a very detailed argument here but this part of the article really sparked my interest and I found this to be a fascinating point. My question is how exactly how much of an impact does this have on an experience one shares with another? Does it have any at all? If two people are in a particular place staring at one another and having a conversation where they both feel the same emotions at the same time does ones pinpoint location within a space change his/her experience from the other?
The second article "Body Movement" by Robert J. Yudell further complicates this idea of relationship between one's location and the places and spaces around it by stating that places are a stimulus for movement. One example Yudell uses is a child playing a game where he or she is jumping over every crack they find in the ground. By playing this game the child is not dictating the movement but the place and location that child is at is dictating this. What's fascinating about this is that most of these places were man-made while others were created by nature. Although it is understood that we are in control of our own actions it is true that sometimes we may be unaware of the fact that a place is dictating these actions for us. One aspect of this subject that I feel was not addressed is the fact that for every action there is a reaction. What I mean by this is that we have all ran into a wall at one time or another, therefore we all know that once we hit the wall we will feel pain. In response to this, I feel that maybe Yudell is giving space more credit than is really due. If anything consequence should receive at least partial credit for the movements which people create based on the places they are in.
The third article "A Brief History of Wayfinding", is an article on exactly that. The writer discusses the natural process of how one uses way-finding to navigate from their first destination to the next and in the process find the fastest route to getting there. The article gets very in depth with this process discussing not only humanistic tendencies for finding one's way, but also other animals and the various abilities they use in order to get from point A to point B and back. For some living things, this task is easier than it is for others. One example used in the article how ants can seem to wander far from their nest but use different landmarks as signs in order to find their way back home. This article was interesting because it starts to navigate away from the humanistic aspect of things. To make matters even more complicated, we have already read in Tuan's article that no two people can occupy the exact same place at the exact same time. I think this last article expands on the topic nicely taking thing past what we as humans know and bringing the topic into an entirely different realm which forces us to think outside of our natural habitats as well as bodies.
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