Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, by Robert Smithson

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In September 1967, land artist Robert Smithson took a tour over Passaic in new Jersey* and created a short photo-essay to report his journey, entitled “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” later published in “Artforum” magazine, December edition. Interestingly, he names profane objects such as pipes and derelict spaces as monuments:

The bus passed over the first monument. I pulled the buzzer-cord and got off at the corner of Union Avenue and River Drive. The monument was a bridge that connected Bergen County with Passaic County (…) Along the Passaic River banks were many minor monuments such as concrete abutments that supported the shoulders of a new highway in the process of being built (…) As I walked north along what was left of River Drive, I saw a monument in the middle of the river—it was a pumping derrick with a long pipe attached to it (…) Nearby, on the river bank, was an artificial crater that contained a pale limpid pond of water, and from the side of the crater protruded six large pipes that gushed the water of the pond into the river. This constituted a monumental fountain that suggested six horizontal smokestacks that seemed to be flooding the river with liquid smoke (…) The last monument was a sand box or model desert.

Read the full Smithson article here

Smithson, says Maarten Overdijk in his ‘Monuments and Mental Maps‘ article in OASE 98, rejected conventional ideas about perception and cognition precisely because they did no justice to his experience and offered him no method to analyze or describe it. Instead, he had a preoccupation with space and the changing relations of place, location and map. In his ‘literary’ narrative of the Passaic, continues Overdijk, Smithson attempts a montage of descriptions; observations and reflections while shifting between different layers of time: “the psychological time of the individual, the social time of culture and its symbols, and the time of geological change.”

* Ellen Mara De Wachter revisited the locations captured in the photo-essay through a short film

Social Cartography

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Leonardo da Vinci, Town plan of Imola (first ever use of planar view instead of perspective), image available here

Social Maps Definition/History: maps whose purpose is to represent specific aspects of society at a given time and place, (usually statistical data put on a map)/ they emphasize the power of space in shaping society over time/ in its earliest incarnation, the social map was concerned with epidemic disease, particularly cholera/ later in the nineteenth century the perceived problem of mass migration to the growing cities led to the application of segregation as a political device to separate disparate populations/ the use of mapping as a tool of social investigation reached its peak with the emergence of a science of social investigation in the 1880s/ maps shifted from having a symbolic power to having a descriptive (arguably scientific) power/ they used dots and circles or cloropleth maps of different shades/ these helped hypothesize on the actual causes of diseases or crime and poverty/ London was forefront to cartographic innovation due to mass urbanization and the need to manage a diverse, densely crowded population

Maps are social constructions, whose integrity as scientific objects is limited to how precise they are when taking account of their scale and similar measurable parameters. As soon as decisions start to be made on selection of data and the way in which those data are to be presented on maps, the social and political context in which they were created will start to influence how they are read. Once this fact is recognized, one can get beyond the traditional criticism of maps and start to consider what they are in reality: objects laden with meaning, which reflect the context of their creation. Yet maps continue to be incredibly useful for capturing data as well as for providing a starting point for analyzing those data statistically.

Inherent weaknesses: stat errors/ positioning can affect how the world is viewed/ they are influenced by the social and political context they are created in/ their study in rapidly changing populations impose a false appearance of stability/ as records it is essential to take into account the historical time they were created in/ iconographic: color can carry powerful moral connotations, it can also be used for propaganda/ by drawing boundaries around people other from themselves, European powers defined the separation of the center from the periphery/ the complex use of space belies the normal approach to interpreting segregated social space, which tends to focus on the residential location of a minority group, overlooking their opportunities for movement across the city, throughout the day and the week/ not all spatial arrangements are a direct reflection of the societies: more complex societies are normally comprised of a structured non-correspondence

Notes and excerpt from Laura Vaughan’s: “Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography,” UCL Press, 2018

Parangolés

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Parangoles concept and form were introduced by Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980)  in an attempt to expose the chaotic web of relations of being-in-the-world. Oiticica worked to transform the “spectator” into a “participant. The colorful, improvised capes/cloaks encourage unpredictable movement that in turn signals the transition from the art-object to the body-subject:

we must be willing to get out of our comfort zones in order to reclaim the physical and symbolic spaces produced by hegemonic forces that attempt to confine relations between our own bodies and the bodies of others

For more on Parangoles click here, here and here

Storm King Art Center

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I just heard of this today on a tv documentary, I wish I could visit. The centre covers a vast rural area one hour north of Manhattan. It was established in 1960 by Ralph E. Ogden and its collection has been growing ever since. The image above, belongs to one of the most prominent works -in my opinion- of Menashe Kadishman and his 1977 collection “Suspended”:

With no visible evidence of the engineering holding the sculpture up, Suspended prompts contemplation of the relationship between its two conjoined, towering masses, coupled with questions about what lies below ground. Rich and rusted, the patina of the weathered steel wraps the stark geometric shapes in a skin-like sheath.

Excerpt from The Storm King Art Center webpage

The center also accommodates many of the works of Mark di Suvero, among which “Mother Peace” (image below), a work completed just before Di Suvero left the US to protest against the war in Vietnam.

Image retrieved here

The Soft Atlas of Amsterdam, Jan Rothuizen

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ROTHUISEN

From the WeMakeTheCity Festival website:

Jan Rothuizen loves to map his surroundings, drawing more than streets and buildings: he shows how people experience the city and visualises the atmosphere and the diversity of the population. He also includes economic and social changes of neighbourhoods. Amsterdam is a wonderful playground, as the city changes every day, on a large and small scale. Rothuizen witnesses and documents these changes with his very personal wit and enthusiasm.

 

ZARCH Publication now available!

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I am very pleased to see our article ‘Pedagogical approaches to embodied topography: a workshop that unravels the hidden and imaginary landscapes of Elaionas,‘ get published in ZARCH Journal and I am also very happy to share this with you. It is based on a collaborative project that began in 2015 with Prof. Nelly Marda and Christos Kakalis from the University of Newcastle along with the students of our postgraduate course in NTUA.

The article highlights the importance of mapping in urban design and uses the concept of embodied topography to describe how activating the human body through a series of sensory motor tasks can help individuals immerse themselves in the landscape to acquire a better understanding of the urban phenomena. This process is presented here as a tool of mapping and managing the complexity of the urban landscape as it enables the individuals to recover the more hidden or even imaginary aspects of the city and their own relation to it.

As this is an ongoing research I hope that there will be plenty of opportunities to discuss what we are doing with more people involved in this kind of research in urban design. So, feel free to comment and write back your own experiences on the matter.

ZARCH: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Architecture and Urbanism, Num. 8, image available here

Embodied Action & Enaction

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ENACTION

  • embodied action

embodied: cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities and that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological and cultural context/ action: sensory and motor processes, perception and action, are fundamentally inseparable in lived cognition.

  • enaction

it consists of two points: a. perception consists in perceptually guided action (how the perceiver can can guide his actions in his local situation) and b. cognitive structures emerge from the recurrent sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided (since the situations an individual is found in constantly change, the reference point for understanding perception is no longer a pregiven, but the sensorimotor structure of the perceiver-the way in which the nervous system links sensory and motor surfaces). The overall concern for the enactive approach to perception is to determine the common principles or lawful linkages between sensory and motor systems.

Merleau-Ponty:

The properties of the object and the intentions of the subject . . . are not only intermingled; they also constitute a new whole (…) Since all the movements of the organism are always conditioned by external influences, one can, if one wishes, readily treat behavior as an effect of the milieu. But in the same way, since all the stimulations which the organism receives have in tum been possible only by its preceding movements which have culminated in exposing the receptor organ to external influences, one could also say that behavior is the first cause of all the stimulations.

Piaget:

The laws of cognitive gevelopment, even at the sensorimotor stage, are an assimilation of and an accommodation to that pregiven world.

One of the most fundamental cognitive activities that all organisms perform is categorization. By this means the uniqueness of each experience is transformed into the more limited set of learned, meaningful categories to which humans and other organisms respond (…) In the enactive view, although mind and world arise together in enaction, their manner of arising in any particular situation is not arbitrary (…) The basic level of categorization appears to be the point at which cognition and environment become simultaneously enacted.

Johnson:

kinesthetic image schemas: for example, the container schema, the part-whole schema, and the source-path-goal schema

 

References

Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, 1993. The embodied mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, MIT Press, pp. 172-180

Image available here

The Walkshops

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Many of the routines and standard practices of academic life do little to actively explore and experiment with the structure of working environments, spaces and relationships thus the social and ethical aspects of modern science. They do even less to address the importance of contextual and embodied dimensions of thinking (…) Through walkshops, we have spent several days walking together with our colleagues and students in open outdoor spaces, keeping a sustained intellectual discussion on ethical aspects of science, technology and innovation while moving through these landscapes (…) The value of both using the outdoors and walking as a way to stimulate reflective thinking have been appreciated and documented in various fields: Aristotle/Rousseau/ Heidegger/Human Geographers/ etc (…) What the move from the indoors to the outdoors or from the campus to the mountains offers for us is rather an altered nature/culture dynamic, different materialities, and a change in degree, going from a relatively static, controlled, secure environment to a more varied, dynamic and challenging terrain (…) More concretely, the value that we have experienced using this approach includes: the ability to use the materiality of a landscape as a tool for facilitating reflection, the capacity to productively alter social dynamics through enabling embodied encounters and challenging existing hierarchies, and the power to alter established patterns of thought through the combination of unmediated outdoor experiences with different social dynamics.

 

References

Fern Wickson, Roger Strand, Kamilla Lein Kjolberg, 2015. The Walkshop Approach to Science and Technology Ethics. In Sci Eng Ethics (2015) 21:241–264, DOI 10.1007/s11948-014-9526-z

Image taken form the walkshop implemented in June 2016 for NTUA postgraduate course ‘Methodological Tools of Analysis for Creating Strategies of Integral Urban Interventions’ in collaboration to the Urban Emptiness Network.