5 Stages of Grief: One Losing Their Sense of Orientation
Mina Gürsel TabanlıogluA Rambling History of London
I have the feeling. That we are getting , as the talk goes on nowhere. and that is a pleasure to be where one is It is to be somewhere else. Here we are now beginning of this talk Of the eleventh unit of the we have the feeling . nowhere
, - Cage, John. ”Lecture on Nothing”, 1961.- The experiment conducted with ‘The Altered Domain’ device, consisting of a half an hour walk (the average commute to work in London), informs the context of this essay.
- The walk starts at the Architectural Association (36 Bedford Square) and ends at New North Street (complete coincidence).
- The text is read preferably from left to right and back to left again, on the left an academic exploration and on the right an internal dialogue based off related research and subjective experience.
And most importantly:
Recognizing error is a cognitive act that disrupts familiarity and enables the exploration of the unknown. To be lost is a conscious project.
‘- all places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is when you are in no place.’
Rem Koolhas informs us that “The joint is no longer a problem, an intellectual issue: transitional moments are defined by stapling and taping…2” to underline the decrease of time, thought and discussion put in to the inbetween. The transition becoming something that must be sealed, an error in need of repair. Transitional places, spaces, and moments ; have a common tendency of being seen as gaps in time and space. Fragments that fill the void like the mortar in brick walls. Though necessary, they are perceived as the in-between and not the destination itself. These spaces of destination (the A to B) also have a lot in common as they are generally secure, climate controlled and relate somehow or another to the culture of capitalism.
The in-between is a wilderness full of all types of people, wearing a variety of things, behaving in a multitude of ways. It’s the collision course of lives, an opportunity of escape, though most of the time we don’t notice as our eyes are glazed over with the reflection of google maps, the blue dot impersonating our every step, the fastest route to the desired destination being calculated…
Head west then turn left. You get a sudden urge, an urge to go the other way, challenging the automated female voice coming from your phone you turn right, a sudden sense of tranquility has swept over you, you’re feeling as courageous as Ferris Bueller3 and you’re ready to take the day off, walk aimlessly, go to the cinema watch a movie you normally would see as a waste of time, hop on a plane go anywhere in the world. Just call in sick… Or take that annual leave you had forgotten. You’ve defied a small rule and in front of you now are endless possibilities… You think of where you would go, but have a hard time imagining. You type in your phone “Top 10 Holiday Destinations” About 245,000,000 results (0.50 seconds)4You click on the first link. Not even realizing that you yourself have not lifted your head up from your phone for the past twenty minutes of your so called freedom. You scroll down a bit more Costa Rica, Greece, Thailand... you begin to smile imagining the sun and the sand… Suddenly a briefcase hits you on the leg, you lift your head up to to curse at the stranger who has already disappeared into the crowd where there are many men and many women with many briefcases pacing the streets with determined looks on there faces. Just then you feel the weight of your own briefcase in your hand, slightly frazzled you look at the time. It’s 10.10. You’re late. You quickly tap on Google Maps. Your route is quickly reconfigured. The automated female voice speaks soothingly. Turn left on to Lime street. You’re nearly there. In your mind your excuse is ready. There was a tube strike. The in-between is a state that is hard to inhabit. The city and life is programmed as a void filler. Schedules, routines, systems and modern technology are designed precisely to maintain optimized outcomes. Meeting deadlines are crucial. Being late is unacceptable. The flaneur is an outcast. Orientation is reasurrance. Searching for a loophole is a tiresome pursuit.
As you find ourselves once again typing in a search bar ‘How to be a flaneur?’ About 843,000 results (0.45 seconds)5
The magnetic compass invented by the Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD), undertook the job of geographical positioning and navigation, replacing the identification and mapping of landmarks and celestial bodies which enabled the further investigation of new land and sea trade. This particular invention was the foundation of a technology that developed through centuries and geographies eventually becoming an app accessible on nearly every mobile phone, in the form of Google Maps: a god’s eye perspective, and calculative knowledge to navigate almost anywhere in the world. Though the compass was invented, it was not quite perfected. By the 15th century, explorers recognized the ‘north’ ensured by these devices were not quite accurate according to Earth’s actual geographic north. Much like Gerardus Mercator’s initial map6 where he had extracted the image of the world from the globe and positioned it on a flat grid system, the further it got from the equator, the margin of error grew. While the mariners and pilots called this variation, land navigators named it magnetic declination. Given that the titles given did not explicitly indicate error and instead used a symphathetic approach to deviation, it’s plausible to say that there perception was quite radical.
Human beings must learn to anew to recognize the pattern of the Earth from the perspective of the air.
The perception of orientation is a peculiar one. It’s innate, intangible and quite diverse. Though it is calculable in many ways, the components vary between humans, non-humans and from culture to culture, sometimes it is much more complicated than the duplication of units. The quantifiable, is not always revelant and being ‘off the grid’ may be complimentary when searching for new methods of narration.
A few days ago I met a woman who had tattoos reading left and right on her arms, but they were reversed. She had told me that she had difficulty setting them apart. I suppose she was quite amused with the situation herself because instead of imbedding marks as guidelines on her body in order to correct herself, she had chosen to embrace her sense of disorientation and tattoo a representation.
Adolf Loos argued that the ornament-maker did not earn the equilavant to a ‘modern manual worker’ and the effort and time put in esentially was irrelevant because adornment hadn’t maintained it’s previous significance, implying that the values in capital systems had drastically changed7. The removal of ornament introduced a brand new, shiny thought process in to architecture brimming with precision, specification and standardization. This obsession over precision, the plausible results of industrilization, the thriving child of modernism, disrupted the intimate dialogue of centuries, resulting in the negotiation between human and material to change radically. The machine no longer was a tool that amplified but an ever present third party that dominated the result. As a example of this shift in dynamics, the innate precision of processed steel, created a sense of trust as it represented the legible, the calculated and the perfected. Fast and easy to construct, safe to pass through, to live in and even have lunch midair8. Material, together with the manifacturing cycle became even more a means to an end as it distanced human from the it’s behavior therefore opening up a no-mans land of how the interaction between the two could facilitate.
“We have met a superior civilisation and have had to surrender to it, and we have had to leave a road we have followed for thousands of years.”
Francesa Hughes in Error and Architecture questions9 ‘‘How might we engage with the possibilities that the new configurations of error suggests?’’, in respose I aim to speculate how does error or deviation itself become an agent of a narrative?
You’re done for the day. You check your watch to see how late you would be having dinner. 7pm Not that bad you think. If you were to walk to station in 10 minutes reach the platform in 96 steps ,the train would come in 1 minute. 2.5 stops, an escalator, a 4 minute walk and 10 flights of steps later you would be boiling hot water for instant noodles and wolfing it down in 5 mouthfulls. You would be able to get in bed at 9pm read 30 pages of the book on your bedside and be up the latest at 6am the next morning. As you leave the building you tap your card, the machine unlike usual doesn’t beep. You look around slightly confused, though you can leave the building you won’t be officially signed out. As the security guard is nowhere to be seen, you get frustrated. The beep that doesn’t sound, disables you from calling it a day. Your evening is ruined 10
- Tanizaki, Jun’ichiro. In Praise of Shadows. Vintage Classics. London, England: Vintage Classics. 2001. p.16 7 Loos, Adolf. ‘‘Ornament and Crime’’ Thoughts on Design and Material, translated by Shaun Whiteside, Penguin Books, 2019. 8 11 ironworkers enacting in a publicity stunt by sitting on a large piece of processed steel as they have lunch mid-air, on September 20, 1932 at 41st Street in Manhattan. ‘‘Lunch Atop a Skyscraper’’ Photographer Unkown. 9 Hughes, Francesca. The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure and the Misadventures of Precision, Cambridge, Massachussets. London,England. The MIT Press. 2014 10 This format of this text was highly influenced by Georges Perec’s approach of employing fragmentation techniques to emphasize and acknowledge the everyday and “banal” conduct in relation to time and space, particularly from the chapter ‘The Apartment’ from the book ‘‘Species of Spaces and Other Pieces’’.“Regulation is chasing down the seconds!”
With the “Naked City”11 map, Debord challenges Haussmann’s vision for the city of Paris, the planning that transformed the hectic yet harmonized urban landscape in to a machine of surveillance. From the beginning of his engagement, Haussmann’s desire for accuracy was clear, since he had identified the inaccuracy in the pre-existing maps and had timber towers built in specific locations for surveyors to plot and measure with an uninterrupted field of vision12. For him, proper planning needed error free calculation. However, alternative approaches to mapping; behavioural and emotional, would be more evident methods for an urban wanderer leading to the perception of measurement differing from Haussmann’s. Although certain constraints were still present how they would be designated would open up the possibility for a capacious discussion. Both Debord’s ‘Naked City’ and Jadorowskys ‘Poetic Act’13 had a precise rule to follow in the attempt of getting lost. While Debord’s was a a psychogeographic14 mapping of Paris which would result in most probably anyone getting lost, Jadorowsky’s was to follow a straight line even if that meant climbing over a tree. While rules usually accompany precision, utilizing these tools in the favor of the error or the flaneur in this case may enable the reconfiguration of system from within. Do these atypical approaches fit the “norms” of measuring and mapping in an urban context?
Perhaps, the flaneur derived from the difference in perception is an outcast to goal oriented commute. The flaneur is the gap, hack or loophole in the urban system. The void in which one enables themself to create a micro-system of temporary liberation. Where the transition is no longer a commute but a dérive, rendering the transitional space obsolete.
11 Debord, Guy. ‘‘The Naked City’’, 1957
12 Chapman, Brian. ‘‘Baron Haussmann and the Planning of Paris’’ in The Town Planning Review Vol.24 pp. 177-192. Liverpool University Press, 1953.
13 Jadorowsky, Alejandro. ‘‘Manual of Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy’’ Inner TraditionsBear Company Vermont, 2010.
14 Debord, Guy. ‘‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’’in Les Levres Nues #6, translated by Ken Knabb, 1955.4
-Tanpinar, Ahmet Hamdi. The Time Regulation Institute, translated by Alexander Dawe. London, Penguin Books, 2014.The Altered Domain, is a compass that is mutated with a magnet which is affixed around a ring (made from zinc). The field of force is disrupted as the user moves the magnet attached to a pole from the top around the ring.
Starting Point
Some stalking may take place.
Spaces may be inaccessible.
Police might stroll by.
Screenshots from ‘‘ The Altered Domain’’ film, documentation of walk with the mutated compass.
Ending Point
WARNING: A MUTATED COMPASS MAY LEAD TO UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTERS.
Much like Wittgenstein’s Ruler suggests15, as the compass strays off It’s target, rendering It’s initial navigational function obsolete, the device starts revealing It’s own internal dynamics. The mutated compass becomes an agent of storytelling, as an attempt of a new type of technology, hindering a dérive. Unexpected encounters with moments, structures, paths, humans and non-humans open up. A new relationship between the user and the device is conceived as one does not lead and the other does not follow16. Both have achieved disorientation. The tension between the machine and the human is neutralized. (for now) The device is still present, but now as a fellow traveller of the flaneur.
15 Miller, Elis. Wittgenstein’s Proposition as a Ruler. Academia.edu, 2019
16 A thought-provoking relationship between human and the device can be seen between Reyner Banham and Baede-Kar (a fictional visitor guidance system) in ‘‘ Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles’’ (1972) where the two cruise around L.A. as they engage in a vivid dialogue about the urban fabric.
Due to traffic laws, your walk might need to occasionally stop. Surveillance cameras may be present in certain spaces. A photo shoot might be seen and require photobombing.
Goals - Fitness App Screenshot of the Map Walk with the Mutated Compass
Google Maps Screenshot of Direct Walkway Between 36 Bedford Square & New North St.
Bibliography
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Hughes, Francesca. The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure and the Misadventures of Precision, Architectural Association School of Architecture, 15 January 2015. https://youtu.be/HhEb5Fz9T2E
Hughes, Francesca. The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure and the Misadventures of Precision, Cambridge, Massachussets. London,England. The MIT Press. 2014
Hughes, John, Director. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. 1986. Paramount Pictures, 1986. 103 minutes.
Jadorowsky, Alejandro. ‘‘Manual of Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy’’ Inner TraditionsBear Company Vermont, 2010.
Koolhas, Rem. ‘‘Junkspace’’ October Vol. 100, Obsolescence, Spring, pp. 175-190. The MIT Press. 2002
Loos, Adolf. ‘‘Ornament and Crime’’ Thoughts on Design and Material, translated by Shaun Whiteside, Penguin Books, 2019.
Mercator, Gerardus. “Nova et Aucta Orbis Terrae Descriptio ad Usum Navigantium Emendate Accommodata,” 1569.
Miller, Elis. Wittgenstein’s Proposition as a Ruler. Academia.edu, 2019
https://www.academia.edu/10021001/Wittgensteins_Proposition_as_a_Ruler
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Perec, Georges. ‘‘Species of Spaces and other Pieces’’ edited and translated by John Sturrock. Penguin Books, 1997.
Photographer, Unkown. ‘‘Lunch Atop a Skyscraper’’ September 20, 1932.
Tanizaki, Jun’ichiro. In Praise of Shadows. Vintage Classics. London, England: Vintage Classics.2001.
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