«solo-show»

SPACE THAT ISDIFFICULT TO CHART

Sarah Juryand Tilly Fowler

Places I have traveled to in my frontal lobe most recently: Sally O’Reilly’s Red Wine radio play for ICA, Ben Woodsons solo show at Sunday Painter, John Lathem’s The Government of theThirteenth Chair. Interview questions for Maria Lund, Interview questions for Marther Rosler about The Martha Rosler Library. The quarry in Fountainhead screenplay by Ayn Rand Directedby King Vidor. Traversing London under the clear spring dawn. In dreams: a friends black sports car. On TV: the Congo, Niger basin, Death Row in an Texis State Penitentiary. Vertual space: Facebook, google docs, Soundwalk.net, tenstakonsthall.se, guardian.co.uk

This isn’t a chart, it’s a list. It covers some of the places that I have traveled in my head-space in the last day.

The scull is like the spaceship, the brain is the internal contents of the space ship and the world around it is matter; the material that the brain spaceship is exploring, testing, gathering. Select-ing what matter from space is brought in for investigation is what drives the direction of our limbs.

I keep thinking about the idea of the self as a flexible,slippery, elusive concept, something that changes inrelation to context- in place and in time and relations.Our discussions of places have centred around the causeand effect of factors in these environments on the self.

I think this might somehow have a correlation with the idea that you can’t perceive anything for what it is beyond your own consciousness. You cannot apprehend a thing without seeing it thorough the filter of your mind, which is a malleable processing and storing machine that changes over time, with age, hormone levels, memories/ associations etc.

For most of us, when we try to imagine Outer Space and its limits this becomes an exercise in the limits of our perception/comprehension/ understanding/ imagination. This is slightlydifferent for people who believe in religious stories that offer an explanation for ‘what lies beyond’, but is still a demonstration of the human mind comprehending things within the limits of itself.It is also something that will remain imaginary for most of the population. The images of space on NASA’s website seem socliche and unreal, like fantasy genre paintings. Psychadelic, swirling glaxies. The view of Earth from space. It feels soHollywood, so familiar, artificial. Anyway, I digress.

On Wednesday night we spoke a lot about spaces, at EFES pool bar between 1-2 am, that wasn’t the premise of the conversation but it’s what it became - starting with spaces where it’s acceptable to be partially naked - the fields around the ladies ponds but not the other side of the trees. Our mutual experiences of different geographical locations in India, which have different interpretations of faith structures and so have a different expectation of how you can behave and dress.

The different spaces that your mind works in at different ages- the self reflective teenage years where we are a fac-tor of our surroundings rather than when we get a bit older and more aware that we are compliant in the social cultures around us. The council filled social housing in London and the Bow Arts Trust filled social housing and the privatized and remodeled social housing buildings like Z Apartments, Pepys Estate, Leiwisham.

I think these things we spoke about are about invisible boundaries and coded spaces. Institutions- as in learnt/ agreed sets of understandings or rules or value systems. Travelling through temporarily formed ‘publics’. Our sta-tus changes in different spaces, or our order of priority of statuses. We have different permissions. We can talk about different things, sit in

2 Something about the space of a conversation: do we try to inhabit each

others thoughts or are we only bouncing our ideas off each other? There’s a Blanchot quote about this...

a dialogue happens “when two people speak together, they speak not together, but each in turn: one says something, then stops, the other something else (or the same thing), then stops. The coherent discourse they carry on is composed of sequences that are interrupted when the conversation moves from partner to partner […] The fact that speech needs to pass from one interlocutor to another in order to be confirmed, contra-dicted, or developed shows the necessity of interval.” Blanchot.

I think we do at least try to inhabit each others thoughts. In a good conver-sation, with a healthy interplay of speaking, listening and responding, you both attempt to inhabit one another thoughts and, if you agree, incorporate them into your own. Or reconfigure your own thoughts when challenged by another.

Are you asking should we - in this process here- try to embody each others thoughts - or in general life, does one inhabit each others thoughts?

I don’t know yet. I suppose I’m thinking more about the space of a con-versation as something that is difficult to chart- where two selves meet, or not. I think we definitely shouldn’t delete anything from here on in. And we should try and film this simultaneous writing process. Right now, I’m kind of talking over you as you write. Because I could see that you were writing but I wasn’t listening/ reading (because I realised what the time was and that I have to leave)

Yes, who’s territory you are in, is it balanced between.

Here, we can just write over each other constantly, unlike a vocal conver-sation where you loose each others words if you talk over each other and don’t listen - we could type over each other continuously and it would be fine because whenever we do stop, we can go back and see what the other has written. This is about time not space.I was looking for how the idea of a transparent writing process could be relevant to the theme of mapping space, this is it. We are insiders, this document is shared between only us. The reader at the time of reading will be outside this. (“Hello reader of the future!”)

particular ways, look at people with different gazes, con-ceal or reveal certain physical or psychological aspects of ourselves.

Other statuses: citizen, consumer, member of the electorate/ voter, protestor, spectator, competitor, employee, passenger etc. What we can do, what we can access, how we behave, is determined by our status in particular spaces.

As we move from place to place we consciously and sub-consciously pick up on cues in the environment that pre-scribe or suggest the (conventional) behaviour in that space; the recent semi-pedestrianised street environments that cars can drive through, where there’s no curb. Pedestrians perceive a continuous pavement, I think with the intention of slowing down traffic as people stray into the ‘road’ space more frequently. I’m thinking about public sculptures, they have the dual purpose of being aesthetic/memorial and also a climbing frame. But in a gallery you would never think of getting up and climbing on a big bronze. We have to teach children that you can’t. Some of the permissions that have been mentioned have to be taught- others are subconscious or kinaesthetic, those are the more interesting ones; they come from malipulative spaces. Textured pavements also play a role in indicating when you need to change a behaviour, like at road crossings. These are for blind people but I think they also affect people with sight too.physiological/ kinaesthetic knowledge.

These clues/ cues/ codes might include sound, texture, ar-chitectural proportion (including width of path, narrowness of entrance), smell? availability of light. Sound? -The anti social behaviour sound beacons that Newsagents put outside their shops to ward of the young troublemakers with high-pitched sounds that an adults audio spectrum no longer includes. They’re called mosquitos! http://www.movingsoundtech.com/ you can have different frequencies for different age groups.

So is part of what is happening in authoritarian spaces (churches, airports, some public squares) a compression of the self? Depending on inhibitions and a sense of your own size in proportion to the size of the place you’re in? Is this why some people are claustrophobic and some are agoraphobic? I think of claustrophobia as a feeling of being trapped and restricted, as if the space around you is shrinking and constricting (forcing you into less space- compressing). I’ve heard of agoraphobia being related to vertigo, a sense of the landscape that you see stretching out away from you, exerting a destabilising force on you. I suppose they’re quite atavistic responses. Claustrophobia/ agoraphobia = no way to escape/ nowhere to hide.

Then there’s virtual social space. Fora and chatrooms. Some are advertisements for the self, others are opportunities for anonymity- lifting many of the inhibitions and conventions that operate in situations where you are honest about your authorship. There are conventions as to what to share, what to say and how to say it.

Sometimes I don’t like people on Twitter who I do like on Facebook.Sometimes I don’t like people on Twitter who I do like on Facebook.The internet isn’t a space . The way that we know that the internet isn’t a real space is because there is no public space there. The internet is a dimension, not a space. We know this because it’s so connected to time not to location.

This makes so much sense. Its interesting that we need to perceive it as a space though. The idea that we cancommune in a dimension rather than a space is strange. What has this done

3 compress verb (used with object) 1. to press together; force into less space.

4

I know sometimes I have to be in an open space, I have to be outside, as though I need the physical area to be able to unfurl and breath, without any external controlling factors effecting me (smokers have an excuse to do this at any time).

5 I heard James Brindle saying this.

to us and our realtionship to space? What about people who play virtual reality games online with people in other countries? They get married and have virtual personas and completely imaginary spaces that are really only codes con-verted by computer machines and perceived and interpreted by brain machines. Wuuuuh, it’s all going a bit ‘The Matrix’.

The codes that you have mentioned authenticating our per-missions - street architecture, ritual, these ‘clues’ tell us if we are to act as a consumer, employee, employer etc. are on the internet too, internet architects call it code space, there is the same scenario were coding tells us how to behave; can we comment, can we share, where we can buy.

Yes! And these internet programming codes are also being used to transmit these coded marketing instruments- logo’s, design targeted at specific groups etc. And you find them online via a navigation of a semantic web- you enter words into a search engine and it finds all these things you might be interested in because the words are related to other words in this web of language and other people on the web have also searched for these related things and its wildly complex and dizzying and its enough to make you feel ago-raphobic!

You seem distant.I was miles away.I need some space.

‘great things are done when men and mountains meet, that is not done by jostling in the street’

William Blake.

So untouched, unpopulated space is the only non-manip-ulative space - non-coded space. Walking up a mountain without even a path in view to follow. The antithesis would be the Barbican, where every centi-meter of space has been ergonomically designed to make you walk in specific direction, or at a certain pace. The first time I was there I had an overbearing feeling that I was being watched, that the whole thing was a human behav-iour experiment. Saying this, it feels so cosy - that’s how conditioned I am - when I’m there, I feel like I have want of nothing, my every need is fulfilled. When did Utopia start referring to a built environment and not a natural one?

This text is available as a google document. Anyone with this link can add to the text

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XhvZy1J5cA16Ju29Pc20k8qKjQanAnUpcRoPx__LBKo/edit

6 I don’t like working at home until I’m fully absorbed and then I’m some-where else. I’m in my work or my book. In an imaginary space that feels like it isn’t in my head. Why can’t I get there sometimes? Why can I sometimes very easily leave my head and at other times I’m consumed by the things around me or the events that precede or will follow my work session?

REFLECTIONSONWATER

Steven Ball

A TOYOTA HASBECOME IN YOUR LIVING ROOM AND NOW EVERYTHING PRESENTS ITSELF AS SMASHED UP.

Lea Provenzano

WHYTHENIGHTISDARK?

Michael Mulvihill

Darkness has spanned the consciousness of every culture of every civilisation on Earth. It is a metaphor for deep despair, or the realm of ghouls and demons, in Matthew 8:12 it is the place of “weeping and gnashing teeth” While in Chinese Taoism the feminine portion of the Taijitu represents the night which through Jungian psychology becomes equated with our hidden unconscious. The psychology of darkness isillustrated in Edgar Allen Poe’s the Raven that tells of avisitation by a talking Raven to a distraught lover as he dips into madness. However it would be in his essay Eureka that Poe would suggest a scientifically plausible description of darkness and a solution to Olbers Paradox.

Olbers Paradox, or the dark night sky paradox, is named after the German Astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers who first described the paradox in 1823. It proposes that if the Universe has, as was understood at the time, an infinite number of stars and is static, then there should be an infinite quantity of light throughout the sky even at night.But the night sky is dark? Even if clouds of dust in spaceobscured the light, the clouds would absorb energy, heat up, and re-radiate light.

It would be the combination of Albert Eisenstein’s General Theory of Relativity and Edward Hubble’s observations that the Universe is expanding at the speed of light that would uncover the mechanics of a solution. However sixty years prior Poe posited a solution in the essay Eureka:

Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us a uniformluminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy – sincethere could be absolutely no point, in all that background,at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore,in which, under such a state of affairs, we couldcomprehend the voids which our telescopes find ininnumerable directions, would be by supposing thedistance of the invisible background so immense thatno ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.

Poe, Edgar Allan (1848). “Eureka: A Prose Poem”

This solution presents a space so enormous that light has not yet crossed the vast distance to reach earth. But there is a finite amount of matter in the Universe. Everything in the universe originated in an event called the Big Bang. Einstein had predicted an expanding universe in the equation of the General Theory of Relativity, yet he thought this was aridiculous notion and introduced a cosmological constant to keep the universe static. He was forced to abandon the notion in 1929 when Edwin Hubble observed galaxies moving away from each other at the speed of light. Einstein concluded the cosmological constant was his worst error he ever made.

had the notion of treating the Universe we observe as the remnants of a nuclear explosion. Hoyle disagreed, thinking that the Universe was perpetually replenished atom by atom in a theory known as the Steady State model. Yet Gamow postulated that the light from that original explosion should be seen all over the sky as waves of light distended into microwaves. Gamow was wrong about all the chemical elements being made together at the moment of creation. As the Universe expands it also cools, and it was not hot long enough for primordial Nucleosynthesis to make any elements beyond hydrogen. Hoyle’s proposal that the elements are made in Stars through Stella Nucleosynthesis, where there is lots of heat and time for chemical formation was correct, but he was wrong about the origins of the Universe. In 1964 two research students Arno Penzias and Robert working with the Bell Horn Radio Antenna in New Jersey would win a nobel prize for discovering the microwave radiation predicted by Gamow, proving the Big Bang model of creation.

The Cosmic Microwave Background stumbles Poe’s solu-tion: everything that exists in the Universe has always existed in the Universe but not necessarily in the same state. At the beginning of time the whole of space existed at the same point and rapidly expanded. In the early universe the sky would have been opaque, brilliantly light, and hot. Over time space expands and the Universe cools until the once brilliant light is stretched out into microwaves that are invisible to the human eye, but still detectable on detuned radios and TVs. So the night sky is still bright except the light is stretched beyond human senses.

Until recently it was thought that gravity would halt the expansion of space but observation shows that it continues to expand and cool under the hypotentical force of Dark Energy. The ultimate fate may be a point known as the Heat Death of the Universe, when entropy reaches a level when energy is no longer able to do work such as power stars, galaxies, or black holes. At this point the universe will be filled with nothing but a gas made of photons and leptons. With energy levels in the Universe at equalibrium time be-comes meaningless and the whole of the sky will be a dark and infinite night.