Performative Technique

November 17, 2006

Performative Technique
(Sorry, am in kind of a rush at the moment and didn't have time to add the footnotes to the blog entry)

Topography, a word used to describe the human understanding of the shape of the world, stems from topos, meaning place, and graphein, meaning to write, which charges its definition with the idea that to be understood, a place must be marked. Yet upon marking, topography becomes landscape: place overlaid by the moments and events of human occupation. Ann Whiston Spirn writes:

“The language of landscape is our native language. Landscape was the original dwelling…landscapes were the first human texts, read before the invention of other signs and symbols…verbal language reflects landscape. Up and down, in and out – the most basic metaphors of verbal language—stem from experience of landscape, like bodily movement through landscape.”

Thus as language comes from the experience of the landscape, one can conclude that thought does as well, and in that, in addition to physical experience, landscape is understood through projection of memories of many places onto the present moment, the opens to creative thought. (Clearer in context of the précis.)

The process of creating architecture from the experience of landscape begins with The Act of Walking (referred to in the précis), which one learns about place through visceral experience that synaesthetically blends physical senses with memory. This is well alluded to by Peter Zumthor who writes, “When I concentrate on a specific site…I try to plumb its depths, its form, its history, and its sensuous qualities images of other places start to invade this process of precise observation: images of places I know and that once impressed me.” From there, writing, drawing, and photography are employed as a means to document the sensations experienced during The Walk as a “memory map,” an analytical collage drawing that means to qualify experiences in a way that they can inform the creation of architecture through the discovery of new spatial possibilities found in the overlap of physical senses and memories.
In the urban landscape of New York City, the pedestrian Act of Walking extends into the experience of riding the subway. One walks to the station, down the stairs to the platform, travels, largely detached from the city above, through time and space to another part of the city, and then walks from the subway to the final destination. Arguably, riding the subway is essential to a contemporary understanding of everyday life in the city and proves itself as a particularly rich site for the execution of the “memory map” technique. As the sense of sight is greatly reduced in the dark realm of the subway system, the other senses are heightened in order to understand place. In the example of a familiar commute, the body knows the route by the number of times it feels the resistance of the train’s brakes. As an “in between experience,” the utilitarian experience of riding the subway happens between seemingly more significant events in life, which opens it to the possibility of becoming a time for reflection upon the events previous to the ride and the projection memories forward to create expectations of what will occur at the end of the ride. This synaesthesia of physical sensation and memory in the subway propose an experiential realm of near-fiction, or “daydreaming” as Bachelard would describe it.

As a performative technique, the “memory map” of the subway examines a specific itinerary through the subway with particular attention to the physical sensations felt during the itinerary and maps each category of sensation (touch, sound, smell, etc) as a layer of the overall time-based notation. Simultaneously, a similar examination of the Walk to the station, or the Walk to the final destination is overlaid upon the “memory map.” Considering each moment of the subway ride as the present, when sensations in the subway are found to resemble situations experienced before or after the ride, the experience becomes infused with memory. Synaesthesia occurs and the qualities of the two spaces overlap and penetrate each other, the daydream surfaces in the consciousness as a new image, and in its newness, as Bachelard proposes, one finds poeticism.

Clearly, the “memory map” of the subway ride can become the analog for creating architecture in New York City. As the notation of an essential aspect of life in the city, it reveals spatial conditions that, while not necessarily yet realized, are characteristic of the city and the understanding of it as a landscape, making this sense of place accessible and even welcoming (?) to its dwellers. As Peter Zumthor writes to this idea:

Architecture has its own realm. It has a special physical relationship with life. I do not think of it primarily as either a message or a symbol, but as an envelope and background for life, which goes on in and around it, a sensitive container for the rhythm of footsteps on the floor, for the concentration of work, for the silence of sleep.

The “memory map” proposes that in recording the Act of Walking (and riding) the spatial characteristics need to create these realms can be found.



Above: An early experimentation with the technique of “Memory Mapping” a subway itinerary from Inwood Hill Park to Pratt Institute. November 2006.