Have you ever had an idea? A thought that you just knew? You didn’t have to think about it because you knew it. It was something that had been going through your head for a while, and you didn’t have to name it, you didn’t have to define it, you didn’t have to qualify it with anything, you just knew it. Like gravity, or a treadmill machine, it just all made sense without needing to be explained how it worked or the processes that were shaped together to make it work. Have you ever had one of those?
Then, one day, you’re reading a book, and out of the blue you find out that the idea that you had, the one that you didn’t have to think about at all, the one that was so easy and simple that you thought everyone knew why it worked, it had a name. Someone had studied it, defined it, showed all the reasons for and against it, and based their entire academic career describing something that you just knew. I just found one of those, and the term is Hypermodernity.
The basic idea around hypermodernity is that it’s a way of understanding or looking at society that is based on a belief in humanity’s ability to understand, control, and manipulate every aspect of human experience by a commitment to science and knowledge by using new technologies. It says that we have more ability to improve our individual choices and freedoms by informing ourselves with all the possible information at our disposal (including knowledge gained from technologies such as the internet and wireless capabilities). It pretty much sounds like everyone who critiques contemporary culture’s relationship to the digital world.
It also says that things are changing so quickly (enter technology, interwebs, wifi, iPhones, etc) that history is not a reliable guide anymore. If you can gain so much knowledge with your phone today, how can you trust someone who had to actually write their thoughts down on a piece of paper and mail it to their friends. The individual itself becomes the one who decides the history based upon the information that they are able to glean using the technologies at hand. And they are able to take this information that they have gathered, synthesize however they need to, and put it back into the world however they want (enter personal or daily blogs) in order to allow others to use their information to instruct the histories of others.
What this leads to is a an excess of meaningless events caused by an acceleration of history. It is argued that this excess of historical significance, rather than leaving us secure and agreeable, makes us even more passionate for meaning. An excess of ideas and artifacts from the past clutter the cultural landscape but are selected and reused to create an even greater excess of ideas from which we are able to understand even less about the world than we did before we started. Redundancy and duplication saturate the psyche and start to hold sway to perceptions.
The first thing that comes to my mind is the personal and interconnected series of blogs and posts that proliferate the internet (this blog excluded, of course). I know many friends with blogs, and I know a few friends with many blogs, some personal and some public. This proliferation of the need to express and display to anyone personal thoughts is at the very heart of this idea of hypermodernity. And, it is argued, that this proliferation of knowledge and place, the shrinking of space into a hand held device, leads to a soulless homogeneity.
But the better way to describe the idea of hypermodernity and some of the pitfalls of the concept, I believe, is to talk about some of the basic ideas using apps from my iPhone. This ubiquitous piece of hardware has become, to some, a salvation, a bastion of everything that is good and right in the world. I’ll admit, I would be a little more lost in this world if I didn’t have the crutch of my iPhone. But I’ll also admit that the very presence of the device owns and kills a possibility for the unforeseen, imagination, and the unknown, which are qualities that are akin to magic and the chance, two qualities that should never be abandoned. There are times when a lack of information actually leads to much more rich and vibrant conversations about whatever topic is being discussed, and having information at ones fingertips destroys the chance for these dynamic experience.
Not to continually knock Facebook, but need we say more when it comes to the proliferation of useless information disguised as personal data? This social networking device allows for the appearance of a personal uniqueness and the semblance of a connectedness with “friends” who can read and be kept aware of your every post and position. Images can be added and links to information can be posted as a way of informing your friends about your personal, social, artistic, or metaphysical views. But they are also links to this increased knowledge base that is is grounded upon creating information and knowledge that is entirely self referential or redundant via a platform that appears to be personal but is entirely homogeneous and uniform. This application, and others that are similar, are used to increase the amount of information that proliferates through the internet, information that anyone can create and which few regulate.
There are many applications on the phone that accentuate the proliferation of videos that expand the perception of what is out there in the world, including YouTube and multiple video surveillance applications, but the one that I believe approaches the realm of hypermodernity the most is HowCast. The app is basically a catalog of videos that explain how to do things. Topics range from making a grilled cheese sandwich to making a citizens arrest to writing a haiku, and are explained in sometimes comical two to four minute stylized videos. Again, this increases the amount of subjective information that becomes injected into the internet and the world, where the video maker becomes the expert in explaining how the world, or at least the topic of the video, works.
Another aspect of hypermodernity that is created by this abundance of technological and spatial awareness is the expansion and contraction of the perception of space and the experience within it, and this idea is best exemplified with the GoogleEarth app. This technological breakthrough allows for visual representation of anywhere in the world (or as much as the governments want the world to see). It allows for a hyper-increase in the idea of knowledge of the geography of a place. But it also adds to the shrinking effect of hypermodernity by creating an entire world that can be observed, some would believe experienced, all through satellite imagery. It is the epitome of the idea that hypermodernity compresses space and changes the scale of things so that the world can fit onto one’s phone. But this compression looses the experience of the real that happens when a place is actually realized.
Added to this compression of space into your phone, certain apps compress the urban landscape and locations around it into a database, linked with maps, to help the individual navigate themselves through the world. Using the GPS coordinates from your phone, Yelp locates and links you to places that are close to you, including categories for food, gas stations, movie theaters, bars, coffee and tea houses, and banks. It then maps all the closest places from those categories and links you to a Yelp site that includes business hours, reviews, and contact information. All the information that you would need to decide where to go is included at your fingertips. These social sites intend to connect the iPhone user with all the information needed to make an informed decision about where to go with their lives, but in doing so they compress the space of the real world into the space of the phone and give real ownership in regards to decision making up to a select few people who choose to engage with the technology.
And to take the idea of compression of space one step further, there is an app called iStar. Using your iPhone’s GPS tracking system, iStar tracks your coordinates and phone positioning to show you the planetary map of wherever you point your camera lens. This compresses the night sky, the galaxy, even the universe. All within one app, everything that exists becomes compressed into a phone. Don’t drop that phone when that app is on, we could all be sucked into the largest black hole the universe has ever known. Kinda scary, actually, if this compression worked in the physical sense, but just because physical compression doesn’t really happen to the universe it doesn’t mean that our idea about the places that we assign a value towards won’t become altered in some way.
And these are just the most obvious of the applications that lead to the proliferation of hypermodernity. Web sites, of course, do the same thing, and blogs help to create the white noise that is information along the information superhighway. And the more ways that we can spit in the ocean the more digital glitter falls from the sky.
But the main point about hypermodernity that keeps coming back to me with every example is this: the accumulation of knowledge, and knowledge gained by either subjective or technological means like the ones mentioned before, only distances the individual from the actual experience of a place and of the knowledge and information that could be gained from direct, visceral contact. All the increases in technology, all the advances in the way that we gather information and display it is, in the end, creating an idea within the mind, a notion. And if there is too much information flying around all at once, there comes a point where it all threatens to become merely noise. Void of contact and more than anyone would want to siphon through, the increased amount of sheer data, without a means to make it valid and important to an individuals life, will become the exact opposite of it’s intention. It will make experience and existence become saturated and eventually inert.
This is what I hope my art will counteract, this growing distance between individuals and the projected and extracted history that ties them a sense of place. The trick is to take all these tools, all these amazing ways of being able to communicate and understand each other, and use them in ways that actually facilitates a connection and communion among the users. The challenge is to use future developments in ways that actually make a lasting and deep effect on the understanding of others that may be different than what was done before. This is the purpose of a tool. And the goal of a creator.
6.27.2010
The Art of the Nomad Tribe
I'm the type of guy that likes to roam around
I'm never in one place I roam from town to town....
'Cause I'm a wanderer yeah a wanderer
I roam around around around...
It seems that I have joined a tribe. Or at least that’s how the definitions seem to portray the migration that I and many others like me have done recently. Apparently the mere mention of a group of people without a fix place of residence conjures up visions of tribes, bands of merry men (or women), wandering, homeless and without a stake in the world. All definitions that I have found for the word Nomad have had the term tribe in them, so by my mere migration from one part of the country 1800 miles, uprooted from the structure and networks that were created by time and presence, I have become a nomad, and therefore belong to a tribe.
But by the newest interpretations of the term, it is a tribe without a structure, it is a group without hierarchy, floating above and between the fixed and rooted. But this transitory nature is bound to American culture as much as any other unifying trait. We as Americans are migrants.
Historically, this country was based upon movement. Barring native tribes (and many of them were migratory as well) everyone who is on this hemisphere of the Americas has migrant in his blood. My parents moved from Evansville, Indiana to Indianapolis in the 1960’s, but stories of movement generally go back much, much farther. My fraternal grandparents families migrated to Evansville from Germany and met in the interwar period of the 1930’s. They came from the same town in Germany at different times (my grandmother was actually born in Jasper, Indiana) and moved into houses next to each other. My maternal grandparents come from a long line of Kentuckians, actually (my grandfather crossed the Ohio River to Indiana “as soon as he heard about it”, as the story goes), but their history goes back to the founding of Baltimore city, crossing the Atlantic with Lord Baltimore himself.
And if we all look at our own family histories, we all have these sorts of stories. It was a concept made popular by Manifest Destiny, but it’s lineage goes back to whatever motivated people to leave their homeland to find another set of opportunities here. French fur trappers. Migrants. Religious freedom seekers. Migrants. Indentured servants. Migrants. African slaves. Forced Migrants. Before the term Manifest Destiny was coined to describe the rapid movement across the continent by individuals seeking their stake in the world, this country and continent was built by people moving from their homeland to here for a myriad of reasons. And since the 1850’s the migrants have expanded to include Chinese and Japanese, Spanish and Mexican and Latino, and eventually Eastern European countries in the early 1900’s. By now the migration comes from all across the world, but all are doing the same thing, all are subscribing to the same tribe. All are becoming nomads. American nomads.
This movement, this transitory attitude that drives the individual to migration, has begun to be analyzed and questioned, pondered and written about. Beginning with the tradition that had started with Rimbaud in Paris and France of wandering and writing about the experience of being placeless, American writers have cornered the market on the practice of writing about movement. Gospel songs about the Underground Railroad sparked folk songs written by Woody Guthrie about the Populist movement. Some of the most important books of our country have been about migration and movement, written by authors like Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Roughing It, Following the Equator), John Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath, Travels with Charlie), and Jack Kerouac (On the Road) describe how, at different times in our country’s history, migration for the sake of sanity or security has been necessary.
Certainly after World War II, with the boom in manufacturing and a decentralization of the work force across the breadth of our geography, migration for work became more mandatory, and now movement for the purpose of employment is almost necessary. It is true that this migration is much more severe and more often than previous generations, but I believe that this nation, by the definition of it’s migration, has rabbit in the blood, and historically has had a hard time with sitting still, a hard time staying in the same place, and a hard time therefore with playing nice with its neighbors. “Good fences make good neighbors” as an ethos only leads to more fences and less gates between them.
I have officially became a part of this migratory tribe, then, this America that uproots itself for the promise of a different history. But it is an invisible tribe, one without real rules of engagement or even membership privileges. Membership can even be fluid, not everyone expects to move for work in the future or desires to transplant themselves into another town, state, or region only to move again a year or two later. But the knowledge that this can happen alters our attitudes about engagement and commitment. Who wants to become completely invested into a neighborhood or a town when they may be forced to move in the not too distant future?
Writer Miwon Kwon writes about this phenomenon in her book One Place After Another: “ The more we travel for work, the more we are called upon to provide institutions in other parts of the country and the world with our presence and services, the more we give in to the logic of nomadism, one could say, the more we are made to feel wanted, needed, validated, and relevant. Our very sense of self-worth seems predicated more and more on our suffering through the inconveniences and psychic destabilizations of ungrounded transience, of not being at home (or not having a home), of always traveling through elsewheres.... We are out of place all too often. Or, perhaps more accurately, the distinction between home and elsewhere, between "right" and "wrong" places, seems less and less relevant in the constitution of the self.” I would argue, though, that we as an American culture are built upon this destabilizations and transience, they have just been accelerated in the past few generations to become more necessary.
Nomadism, as Kwon names it, has effects on our psyche, and in how we perceive place and our connection to it. Kwon writes “Place, according to [Lucy] Lippard, is "a portion of land/town/cityscape seen from the inside, the resonance of a specific location that is know and familiar... "the external world mediated through human subjective experience'". Lippard contends that since our sense of identity is fundamentally tied to our relationship to places and the histories they embody, the uprooting of our lives from specific local cultures and places--through voluntary migrations or forced displacements--has contributed to the waning of our abilities to locate ourselves. Consequently, a sense of place remains remote to most of us.” This leads to a difficulty in understanding how we fit into the ever transient world which happens more frequently than generations before, even within a historical context of a generationally migratory culture.
Kwon describes Lippard again, “More specifically, she believes that the rapacious growth and transformation of capitalism have subsumed the distinctions of local difference and cultures, and that the particularity of places is continually being homogenized, genericized, and commodified to better accommodate the expansion of capitalism via abstraction of space (or creation of "nonplaces", as some sociologists prefer). These processes, in turn, exasperate the senses of placelessness in contemporary life.” So, we’re screwed... especially if you’ve moved at some point in your life. It seems a bit of a pessimistic viewpoint that Lippard has chosen to advocate, and the optimist in me seems to think that there is a way for the individual to seek out a history for themselves in these nonplaces, even if it is strikingly similar to what was there before.
Kwon also points out that “Often we are comforted by the thought that a place is ours, that we belong to it, even come from it, and therefore are tied to it in some fundamental way. Such places ("right" places?) are thought to reaffirm our sense of self, reflecting back to us an unthreatening picture of a grounded identity. This kind of continuous relationship between a place and a person is what many critics declare to be lost, and needed, in contemporary society. In contrast the "wrong" place is generally thought of as a place where one feels one does not belong--unfamiliar, disorienting, destabilizing, even threatening. This kind of stressful relationship to a place is, in turn, thought to be detrimental to a subject's capacity to constitute a coherent sense of self and the world.” So what is needed is to find the “right” places, correct? To find the places that connect to us and the world. The places that make the most sense. But how do we know what those places are? This is the fundamental American question, the curiosity to ask “how do I know that over there will not be better than what I have here”?
I think this motif is the basis of Kwon’s statement “An analogous double mediation in site-specific art practice might mean finding a terrain between mobilization and specificity--to be out of place with punctuality and precision. Homi Bhabha has said,"The globe shrinks for those who own it; for the displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers."” What Bhabha is admitting to is a curiosity prevalent in the migration, the awesomeness of answering the question of “what is over there”. But doesn’t this become just as much a part of the individual’s sense of place, this curiosity about the other, as a connectedness through history?
This curiosity, this need to feed questions about how others fit into the puzzle as a way of describing how the individual fits into the same riddle, I believe is completely valid and useful, maybe more useful than social scientists give credence to. And it is this investigation that is paramount to many relational and community based artists’ process.
We live in a transitory and fluid world, built on migration and fostered by technology’s ability to take us to every place imaginable as often as possible, but at some point, we are all going to need a rock, a foundation. We are building our histories as we breathe, day by day and city by city the present is becoming our story, the migratory story of how we came to be, here, and now. The trick is to leave some sort of footprint on the earth as we float from place to place, to make some sort of mark and leave some sort of statement that says that this place was important in the making of me. At least for a time. This, I am beginning to understand, is at the core of the art that I hope to create, the Art of the Nomad Tribe.
I'm never in one place I roam from town to town....
'Cause I'm a wanderer yeah a wanderer
I roam around around around...
It seems that I have joined a tribe. Or at least that’s how the definitions seem to portray the migration that I and many others like me have done recently. Apparently the mere mention of a group of people without a fix place of residence conjures up visions of tribes, bands of merry men (or women), wandering, homeless and without a stake in the world. All definitions that I have found for the word Nomad have had the term tribe in them, so by my mere migration from one part of the country 1800 miles, uprooted from the structure and networks that were created by time and presence, I have become a nomad, and therefore belong to a tribe.
But by the newest interpretations of the term, it is a tribe without a structure, it is a group without hierarchy, floating above and between the fixed and rooted. But this transitory nature is bound to American culture as much as any other unifying trait. We as Americans are migrants.
Historically, this country was based upon movement. Barring native tribes (and many of them were migratory as well) everyone who is on this hemisphere of the Americas has migrant in his blood. My parents moved from Evansville, Indiana to Indianapolis in the 1960’s, but stories of movement generally go back much, much farther. My fraternal grandparents families migrated to Evansville from Germany and met in the interwar period of the 1930’s. They came from the same town in Germany at different times (my grandmother was actually born in Jasper, Indiana) and moved into houses next to each other. My maternal grandparents come from a long line of Kentuckians, actually (my grandfather crossed the Ohio River to Indiana “as soon as he heard about it”, as the story goes), but their history goes back to the founding of Baltimore city, crossing the Atlantic with Lord Baltimore himself.
And if we all look at our own family histories, we all have these sorts of stories. It was a concept made popular by Manifest Destiny, but it’s lineage goes back to whatever motivated people to leave their homeland to find another set of opportunities here. French fur trappers. Migrants. Religious freedom seekers. Migrants. Indentured servants. Migrants. African slaves. Forced Migrants. Before the term Manifest Destiny was coined to describe the rapid movement across the continent by individuals seeking their stake in the world, this country and continent was built by people moving from their homeland to here for a myriad of reasons. And since the 1850’s the migrants have expanded to include Chinese and Japanese, Spanish and Mexican and Latino, and eventually Eastern European countries in the early 1900’s. By now the migration comes from all across the world, but all are doing the same thing, all are subscribing to the same tribe. All are becoming nomads. American nomads.
This movement, this transitory attitude that drives the individual to migration, has begun to be analyzed and questioned, pondered and written about. Beginning with the tradition that had started with Rimbaud in Paris and France of wandering and writing about the experience of being placeless, American writers have cornered the market on the practice of writing about movement. Gospel songs about the Underground Railroad sparked folk songs written by Woody Guthrie about the Populist movement. Some of the most important books of our country have been about migration and movement, written by authors like Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Roughing It, Following the Equator), John Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath, Travels with Charlie), and Jack Kerouac (On the Road) describe how, at different times in our country’s history, migration for the sake of sanity or security has been necessary.
Certainly after World War II, with the boom in manufacturing and a decentralization of the work force across the breadth of our geography, migration for work became more mandatory, and now movement for the purpose of employment is almost necessary. It is true that this migration is much more severe and more often than previous generations, but I believe that this nation, by the definition of it’s migration, has rabbit in the blood, and historically has had a hard time with sitting still, a hard time staying in the same place, and a hard time therefore with playing nice with its neighbors. “Good fences make good neighbors” as an ethos only leads to more fences and less gates between them.
I have officially became a part of this migratory tribe, then, this America that uproots itself for the promise of a different history. But it is an invisible tribe, one without real rules of engagement or even membership privileges. Membership can even be fluid, not everyone expects to move for work in the future or desires to transplant themselves into another town, state, or region only to move again a year or two later. But the knowledge that this can happen alters our attitudes about engagement and commitment. Who wants to become completely invested into a neighborhood or a town when they may be forced to move in the not too distant future?
Writer Miwon Kwon writes about this phenomenon in her book One Place After Another: “ The more we travel for work, the more we are called upon to provide institutions in other parts of the country and the world with our presence and services, the more we give in to the logic of nomadism, one could say, the more we are made to feel wanted, needed, validated, and relevant. Our very sense of self-worth seems predicated more and more on our suffering through the inconveniences and psychic destabilizations of ungrounded transience, of not being at home (or not having a home), of always traveling through elsewheres.... We are out of place all too often. Or, perhaps more accurately, the distinction between home and elsewhere, between "right" and "wrong" places, seems less and less relevant in the constitution of the self.” I would argue, though, that we as an American culture are built upon this destabilizations and transience, they have just been accelerated in the past few generations to become more necessary.
Nomadism, as Kwon names it, has effects on our psyche, and in how we perceive place and our connection to it. Kwon writes “Place, according to [Lucy] Lippard, is "a portion of land/town/cityscape seen from the inside, the resonance of a specific location that is know and familiar... "the external world mediated through human subjective experience'". Lippard contends that since our sense of identity is fundamentally tied to our relationship to places and the histories they embody, the uprooting of our lives from specific local cultures and places--through voluntary migrations or forced displacements--has contributed to the waning of our abilities to locate ourselves. Consequently, a sense of place remains remote to most of us.” This leads to a difficulty in understanding how we fit into the ever transient world which happens more frequently than generations before, even within a historical context of a generationally migratory culture.
Kwon describes Lippard again, “More specifically, she believes that the rapacious growth and transformation of capitalism have subsumed the distinctions of local difference and cultures, and that the particularity of places is continually being homogenized, genericized, and commodified to better accommodate the expansion of capitalism via abstraction of space (or creation of "nonplaces", as some sociologists prefer). These processes, in turn, exasperate the senses of placelessness in contemporary life.” So, we’re screwed... especially if you’ve moved at some point in your life. It seems a bit of a pessimistic viewpoint that Lippard has chosen to advocate, and the optimist in me seems to think that there is a way for the individual to seek out a history for themselves in these nonplaces, even if it is strikingly similar to what was there before.
Kwon also points out that “Often we are comforted by the thought that a place is ours, that we belong to it, even come from it, and therefore are tied to it in some fundamental way. Such places ("right" places?) are thought to reaffirm our sense of self, reflecting back to us an unthreatening picture of a grounded identity. This kind of continuous relationship between a place and a person is what many critics declare to be lost, and needed, in contemporary society. In contrast the "wrong" place is generally thought of as a place where one feels one does not belong--unfamiliar, disorienting, destabilizing, even threatening. This kind of stressful relationship to a place is, in turn, thought to be detrimental to a subject's capacity to constitute a coherent sense of self and the world.” So what is needed is to find the “right” places, correct? To find the places that connect to us and the world. The places that make the most sense. But how do we know what those places are? This is the fundamental American question, the curiosity to ask “how do I know that over there will not be better than what I have here”?
I think this motif is the basis of Kwon’s statement “An analogous double mediation in site-specific art practice might mean finding a terrain between mobilization and specificity--to be out of place with punctuality and precision. Homi Bhabha has said,"The globe shrinks for those who own it; for the displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers."” What Bhabha is admitting to is a curiosity prevalent in the migration, the awesomeness of answering the question of “what is over there”. But doesn’t this become just as much a part of the individual’s sense of place, this curiosity about the other, as a connectedness through history?
This curiosity, this need to feed questions about how others fit into the puzzle as a way of describing how the individual fits into the same riddle, I believe is completely valid and useful, maybe more useful than social scientists give credence to. And it is this investigation that is paramount to many relational and community based artists’ process.
We live in a transitory and fluid world, built on migration and fostered by technology’s ability to take us to every place imaginable as often as possible, but at some point, we are all going to need a rock, a foundation. We are building our histories as we breathe, day by day and city by city the present is becoming our story, the migratory story of how we came to be, here, and now. The trick is to leave some sort of footprint on the earth as we float from place to place, to make some sort of mark and leave some sort of statement that says that this place was important in the making of me. At least for a time. This, I am beginning to understand, is at the core of the art that I hope to create, the Art of the Nomad Tribe.
6.21.2010
The Myth of Stuckey's
I was recently reading a few writers, social scientists and the like, who were writing about things that, by their very nomenclature, should be diametrically opposed. Place and Non-Place. The subject seemed like the difference between Matter and Anti-Matter. Yin and Yang. The Force and the Dark Side. But the more I sat down with these things, the more saw them as shades of the same gray, or at least I began to see how they help to validate the same understanding.
Yi-Fu Tuan, a Geographer from the University of Minnesota, wrote a seminal work titled Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience in which he describes the ways in which people feel and think about their space, linking attachments to home with experience and the sense of time.
As a way of defining the difference between place and space, he states "Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other." This difference that happens to a space over time is essential to our understanding of a sense of place. Tuan claims that a change happens, one that is personal and unique dependent on our own set of factors. “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.... The ideas "space" and "place" require each other for definition.” So we fill in the gaps of a space with our own values, our own memories or attitudes about the space. We fill in the paint-by-numbers of a space with our own colors dependent on how we feel about and the history we have with that space. We are the mediators of how that place becomes created, and it lives in our own vidid colors in our mind.
Since I have been alive, my parents have never moved from their house. This means that the house that I grew up in is the only home that I have associated with that word. I have lived other places, of course, and all of those places have their own merit and value to me as I grow and navigate this world, but none of them are the same as that first, original home. I have painted that house with colors and shades of memory that no other space can have. I have dropped down upon that address all the sentimentality, all the cliche, all the memories and all the history of me as I became me, upon that two story building in Indianapolis, Indiana. And that place to me is colored with different hues and shades, tones and tints than my brothers and parents have colored that house because of the value that I, personally, have added to that home. No one can change the palette, and no one can make that place of mine their place.
Tuan also states that “Experience is a cover-all term for the various modes through which a person knows and constructs a reality.” So, he says that we construct our reality based upon the experiences that we gain, and we gain those experiences through how our bodies interpret and organize data obtained from our senses. He states “Human feeling is not a succession of discrete sensations; rather memory and anticipation are able to wield sensory impacts into a shifting stream of experience so that we many speak of a life of feeling as we do a life of thought.” Our bodies take all the various stimuli, from our sight, touch, taste, smell, and create bundles of memories out of them, and these memories become this experience whenever they are recalled through the mind. Our minds create our experience, and our experience dictates how we perceive place.
Another writer that I have been reading, the French author Marc Auge, has written a book titled Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity in which he argues that some places, such as shopping malls, motorways, and airport lounges, are both everywhere and nowhere, which he calls Non-Space. He believes that, as a culture, we collectively assign this value, this place making, and that we can therefore collectively have spaces that are void of a collective value. Places that are generic, uniform, homogeneous regardless of culture and history become the same regardless of their geographic location because they create this same sensory experience regardless of whether you’re in Bangkok or Boston. Therefore, these spaces are a Non-Space.
Auge also speaks of how, because of increases in technology and information gathering, places live within our minds as much as they live within our experiential memory. “Certain places exist only through the words that evoke them, and in the sense they are non-places, or rather, imaginary places: banal utopias, cliches.” Ahh, Paris in the springtime. Or Central Park in the fall. Whether one has experienced these places in time or not, this collective memory exists in us even though we have not experienced the geography of the place. And this lack of experience creates a myth of exoticism and perfection. A collective idea of perfection.
Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, my parents, siblings and I would pack into a car and drive three and a half hours south of Indianapolis to Evansville, Indiana, These treks became epic in the lore of our family. Yellow and then blue station wagons, then yellow and then blue trucks, and finally a blue sedan contained all the excitement, anxiety, internal family struggles and external personality differences of a family of, at times, six as we sped down first interstate highways then state highways on our way to see our extended family again. And the one concession that my father made was the only pit stop along the trip, a convenient store just south of the town of Terre Haute, Indiana called Stuckeys. It was about equidistant from the two cities, and past the hustle and bustle of Terre Haute, but it became kinda like magic.
In my childhood memory it was dressed as a carnival, like the colors of fair rides, a wonder bread bag of a building. It was bright white with red and yellow stripes, bold and exciting, and it seemed as new to the world as I was. Slick and clean along this rural highway 41, to me it possessed everything that the countryside was not. Now, it could be that it was just too similar to my world of the city, and this familiarity helped me to accept it more, but we would not and could not stop at any other convenient store along the way.
Maybe it was because I was eight, maybe it was because I had two older brothers exaggerating the experience with me, maybe it was because my parents just wanted us to sit still and quiet for another half hour trapped in the back of a station wagon, but Stuckeys took on a life of its own. Mystique was created, possibly due to repetition of it’s reputation, possibly due to the fact that they had candies and sweets that were different and unobtainable where I was from. But quickly Stuckey’s became the other, an exotic place visited only on those trips. It was anticipation and promise, and often an indicator of distance and time, but it took on a special meaning to my brothers and I because of this attraction. It became an all together different place than any other gas station or convenient store, and our memory treated it as such.
Over time, as all things do, Stuckey’s changed. Different owners, new coats of paint, and construction on a new entrance and exits all evolved with our yearly trips, but the mystique remained pretty constant. But like most things, we didn’t notice all the little changes until they all became the large changes, and soon Stuckey’s had become someplace all together different. I first noticed it when the place didn’t look as shiny and new anymore. Graffiti scratched in the bathroom door, water stains on the floor by the cooler, chips and divots in the counter top all began to show the age of the place, and in some respects to me as well. This place was new like I was, and now it was becoming aged.
What it was really becoming was what it always was, a place that belonged both to that community as well as to the transit that passed by highway 41 from Chicago to Evansville. About this phenomenon, Auge says “...but they may pass by again, every summer or several times a year, so that an abstract space, one they have regular occasion to read rather than see, can become strangely familiar to them over time, much as other, richer people get used to the orchid-seller at Bangkok Airport, or the duty-free shop at Roissy I.” And Auge sees this as a detriment to that place, he sees it as a way to make that place a non-place, and that seems to be entirely contradictory.
If we look at Tuan, who says that a space becomes a place when value is added to it, me and my family have added a value to Stuckey’s that few people probably have. And to us it has a place, for us it is more than just a convenient store that one stops by on the way to Vincennes. It has a value placed on it by us, we have given it significance. Auge argues that there needs to be a universal declaration of and definition of a place, dictated by those who live there and are most invested. But what Auge ignores is that there are times when a place has value assigned to it, and it becomes more than non place to an individual who is not continuously ingrained in the place.
Auge admits that not all places are non, and these places can coexist. “In the concrete reality of today's world, places and spaces, places and non-places intertwine and tangle together.” But also, places can oscillate between place and non place depending on whether someone has added that value to the space, just as we assign different values and feelings to different people in our lives. About this intention, Auge admits “In Western societies, at least, the individual wants to be a world in himself; he intends to interpret the information delivered to him by himself and for himself.” This seems to be an integral component to the basis of Auge’s Supermodernity or Hypermodernity, that the individual can manipulate their aspect of their experience. But that will have to wait for another post.
It really comes down to a classic tale of collective versus individual assignment and memory. But in the end doesn’t the collective derive itself, at least in the beginning, from an individuals assessment and proliferation of an idea or belief? And this proliferation, this creation of a notion, becomes the basis for an idea of what a place is. The myth of Stuckey’s becomes created, and eventually becomes place, created by individuals passing through a non place along Highway 41.
Yi-Fu Tuan, a Geographer from the University of Minnesota, wrote a seminal work titled Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience in which he describes the ways in which people feel and think about their space, linking attachments to home with experience and the sense of time.
As a way of defining the difference between place and space, he states "Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other." This difference that happens to a space over time is essential to our understanding of a sense of place. Tuan claims that a change happens, one that is personal and unique dependent on our own set of factors. “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.... The ideas "space" and "place" require each other for definition.” So we fill in the gaps of a space with our own values, our own memories or attitudes about the space. We fill in the paint-by-numbers of a space with our own colors dependent on how we feel about and the history we have with that space. We are the mediators of how that place becomes created, and it lives in our own vidid colors in our mind.
Since I have been alive, my parents have never moved from their house. This means that the house that I grew up in is the only home that I have associated with that word. I have lived other places, of course, and all of those places have their own merit and value to me as I grow and navigate this world, but none of them are the same as that first, original home. I have painted that house with colors and shades of memory that no other space can have. I have dropped down upon that address all the sentimentality, all the cliche, all the memories and all the history of me as I became me, upon that two story building in Indianapolis, Indiana. And that place to me is colored with different hues and shades, tones and tints than my brothers and parents have colored that house because of the value that I, personally, have added to that home. No one can change the palette, and no one can make that place of mine their place.
Tuan also states that “Experience is a cover-all term for the various modes through which a person knows and constructs a reality.” So, he says that we construct our reality based upon the experiences that we gain, and we gain those experiences through how our bodies interpret and organize data obtained from our senses. He states “Human feeling is not a succession of discrete sensations; rather memory and anticipation are able to wield sensory impacts into a shifting stream of experience so that we many speak of a life of feeling as we do a life of thought.” Our bodies take all the various stimuli, from our sight, touch, taste, smell, and create bundles of memories out of them, and these memories become this experience whenever they are recalled through the mind. Our minds create our experience, and our experience dictates how we perceive place.
Another writer that I have been reading, the French author Marc Auge, has written a book titled Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity in which he argues that some places, such as shopping malls, motorways, and airport lounges, are both everywhere and nowhere, which he calls Non-Space. He believes that, as a culture, we collectively assign this value, this place making, and that we can therefore collectively have spaces that are void of a collective value. Places that are generic, uniform, homogeneous regardless of culture and history become the same regardless of their geographic location because they create this same sensory experience regardless of whether you’re in Bangkok or Boston. Therefore, these spaces are a Non-Space.
Auge also speaks of how, because of increases in technology and information gathering, places live within our minds as much as they live within our experiential memory. “Certain places exist only through the words that evoke them, and in the sense they are non-places, or rather, imaginary places: banal utopias, cliches.” Ahh, Paris in the springtime. Or Central Park in the fall. Whether one has experienced these places in time or not, this collective memory exists in us even though we have not experienced the geography of the place. And this lack of experience creates a myth of exoticism and perfection. A collective idea of perfection.
Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, my parents, siblings and I would pack into a car and drive three and a half hours south of Indianapolis to Evansville, Indiana, These treks became epic in the lore of our family. Yellow and then blue station wagons, then yellow and then blue trucks, and finally a blue sedan contained all the excitement, anxiety, internal family struggles and external personality differences of a family of, at times, six as we sped down first interstate highways then state highways on our way to see our extended family again. And the one concession that my father made was the only pit stop along the trip, a convenient store just south of the town of Terre Haute, Indiana called Stuckeys. It was about equidistant from the two cities, and past the hustle and bustle of Terre Haute, but it became kinda like magic.
In my childhood memory it was dressed as a carnival, like the colors of fair rides, a wonder bread bag of a building. It was bright white with red and yellow stripes, bold and exciting, and it seemed as new to the world as I was. Slick and clean along this rural highway 41, to me it possessed everything that the countryside was not. Now, it could be that it was just too similar to my world of the city, and this familiarity helped me to accept it more, but we would not and could not stop at any other convenient store along the way.
Maybe it was because I was eight, maybe it was because I had two older brothers exaggerating the experience with me, maybe it was because my parents just wanted us to sit still and quiet for another half hour trapped in the back of a station wagon, but Stuckeys took on a life of its own. Mystique was created, possibly due to repetition of it’s reputation, possibly due to the fact that they had candies and sweets that were different and unobtainable where I was from. But quickly Stuckey’s became the other, an exotic place visited only on those trips. It was anticipation and promise, and often an indicator of distance and time, but it took on a special meaning to my brothers and I because of this attraction. It became an all together different place than any other gas station or convenient store, and our memory treated it as such.
Over time, as all things do, Stuckey’s changed. Different owners, new coats of paint, and construction on a new entrance and exits all evolved with our yearly trips, but the mystique remained pretty constant. But like most things, we didn’t notice all the little changes until they all became the large changes, and soon Stuckey’s had become someplace all together different. I first noticed it when the place didn’t look as shiny and new anymore. Graffiti scratched in the bathroom door, water stains on the floor by the cooler, chips and divots in the counter top all began to show the age of the place, and in some respects to me as well. This place was new like I was, and now it was becoming aged.
What it was really becoming was what it always was, a place that belonged both to that community as well as to the transit that passed by highway 41 from Chicago to Evansville. About this phenomenon, Auge says “...but they may pass by again, every summer or several times a year, so that an abstract space, one they have regular occasion to read rather than see, can become strangely familiar to them over time, much as other, richer people get used to the orchid-seller at Bangkok Airport, or the duty-free shop at Roissy I.” And Auge sees this as a detriment to that place, he sees it as a way to make that place a non-place, and that seems to be entirely contradictory.
If we look at Tuan, who says that a space becomes a place when value is added to it, me and my family have added a value to Stuckey’s that few people probably have. And to us it has a place, for us it is more than just a convenient store that one stops by on the way to Vincennes. It has a value placed on it by us, we have given it significance. Auge argues that there needs to be a universal declaration of and definition of a place, dictated by those who live there and are most invested. But what Auge ignores is that there are times when a place has value assigned to it, and it becomes more than non place to an individual who is not continuously ingrained in the place.
Auge admits that not all places are non, and these places can coexist. “In the concrete reality of today's world, places and spaces, places and non-places intertwine and tangle together.” But also, places can oscillate between place and non place depending on whether someone has added that value to the space, just as we assign different values and feelings to different people in our lives. About this intention, Auge admits “In Western societies, at least, the individual wants to be a world in himself; he intends to interpret the information delivered to him by himself and for himself.” This seems to be an integral component to the basis of Auge’s Supermodernity or Hypermodernity, that the individual can manipulate their aspect of their experience. But that will have to wait for another post.
It really comes down to a classic tale of collective versus individual assignment and memory. But in the end doesn’t the collective derive itself, at least in the beginning, from an individuals assessment and proliferation of an idea or belief? And this proliferation, this creation of a notion, becomes the basis for an idea of what a place is. The myth of Stuckey’s becomes created, and eventually becomes place, created by individuals passing through a non place along Highway 41.
6.06.2010
Two truths and a lie
When I worked in the restaurant industry, there was quite a bit of turn around. New people coming in, filling spaces of other people revolving out (or promoting themselves to guest as it was sometimes said). With this ever changing group of people coming and going, learning about the new people and trying to find connections became an important way for the older staff to feel comfortable with the new, and vice versa. The game that we played most often, when sitting around a large table at our shift meetings before the nights mayhem began, was called Two Truths and a Lie. Basically, the new person would have to tell two fantastical yet true thing about themselves, and one lie. The rest of the table would have to decipher which fact was actually not true. Inventiveness was important, as well as remembering strange and fascinating things that one has done with their life, but in the end it spurred conversations about history, personal narratives, and quirky sub cultures.
With this idea in mind, here are two truths and a lie... in no particular order.
1) I like to drive around trying to get lost.
2) I don't really believe that most places have an importance.
3) Maps are the only real way to understand the world outside us.
Basically, this structure just gives me a forum to describe and discuss topics that I find interesting and worthy of further space. With that being said...
One of the things that I love the most is getting lost. Actually, the thing that I love the most is getting myself un-lost. For some time I had a Jeep Wrangler, and I would love to take it out on the roads of southern Indiana. Two lane roads that swooped and curved, dipped and dragged through fields of corn and soybeans, the way the grasses grew high, thick and green between the paved road and the drainage ditch running parallel to the blue highways, the distinctive color of the pavement and earth in Indiana, and forever trying to drop myself into a part of the state that I had never been just to find how exactly I could get myself out: these were how some of my best days were spent.
I would play a game of finger pointing. I would take a map of Indiana, close my eyes, and point to the directory that listed all the cities, towns, and villages. Budda, Indiana. That's today's destination. A quick glance at the quickest way to get there aside, and I was on the road. I would often take Interstate Highways to get to the destination the quickest way possible so that I could meander my way into the thicket and grasses that were the highway system of southern Indiana. Counting the WPA irrigation ditches and train bridges were just part of the games that I would play.
Always keeping a close internal compass, I would mark every slight movement southwest or northeast so that I knew exactly which direction I was traveling. This helped when coming to intersections with other highways, checking for odd or even numbers to confirm the direction that I wished to be eventually traveling. And sometimes I went out of my way on purpose, dragging myself deeper and deeper into the the Lost, mostly because I knew the next town away and I didn't want the game to end so soon, or end so easily. I may have been trying to be lost, but I had my bearings so I was never far from found.
Funny thing happened. I drove around so much that I had a hard time getting lost anymore. It became harder and harder to trick myself into the game. And I just knew that if I continued down this road, I would hit 45 or 46, which would lead me to 135, which I followed to the 252, then back to the 135 all the way to Meridian street and Indianapolis. And I didn't want to be found sometimes, even if it was myself that was finding it. I even tried going north once, but my time spent in Muncie, Indiana at Ball State reminded me of the grids and roads that spanned that part of the state and I was soon in the same situation. Found. And that is no place to be if you want to be Lost.
So I've been reading a bit recently about this idea of a Sense of Place. Lucy Lippard, Yi-Fu Tuan, Marc Auge, Miwon Kwon sort of stuff. Ya know, the good stuff. And what I'm beginning to understand is that this Sense of Place (or SOP) is subjective, just as memory, history, mapping, and a billion different other things including your favorite flavor of Kool Aid and your mother’s cooking is entirely subjective.
Kwon argues, at least as much as I’m beginning to understand, that we need to create stronger ties to a place, we need to be deeper, we need to spend time and experience and history into a place in order for it to resonate within us, and therefore create a SOP. It’s time and investment. And creating something that ties an individual, the place, and the memory together. This is becoming more and more difficult in a time when humans are more and more inclined to move than stay.
Added to this mess is the detachment that individuals now have with place. Movement and mobility have created such a separation from a place that it is difficult for any of us to really have any connection to the places that we reside anymore. People shuttle from one town to another, butterflying in for a few years here before moving to a similarly saccharine neighborhood there. And soon, times and lives have been spent not creating a unifying relationship between an individual and the place that they reside, but a universal disconnect between the individual and any place that they may reside in the future. Why is this house or this parcel of land important to someone if they are merely going to move away in a year or three? Why assign importance to a place that will be replaced soon anyway.
And this is why I don’t really believe that any place has a significant importance. At least not to me. There are places, I know, that have importance. The house that I grew up in and still return to when I visit, my grandparents home in Evansville where we spent Christmases and Thanksgivings crammed in the basement lining up for one, huge communal feast among family. But mostly I remember and cherish events and motions, trips and newness, times trapped in a car and the relationships that were bonded in those spaces. Truck rides to obscure fishing holes with my dad, road trips to New Orleans with college buddies, trekking around the country camping and watching, observing the whole world lay flat in front of me, trying to walk along the bricks of the Berlin Wall as it crossed the busy streets near the Brandenberg Gates, bicycling along rice patties in rural southern China. These are the moments with places that are of importance. But almost if not all of these moments are in transit, and all of them are fleeting, and all of them I cannot, in any way, recapture, I can only recreate.
The place has marched past me, the dirt has gone, the earth has moved. Or I have not stayed enough to lay track to it. And therefore it has no real, visceral, actual importance to me. Maybe that will change, but as I am addicted to motion and the road going under my feet, my sense of place is constantly flowing past in a flurry of dust and concrete, grass and sky. I know I will have to lay claim at some point, but when I do I hope it's not too far from the road...
And this whole business with maps? They just lie, man. They don’t tell you about the colors, they don’t describe the smells, they don’t allow you to see the world moving past you in fluid streaks of greens and blues. They are stuck in time. They are the past. They are subjective. They reek of last week's satellite imagery and not this week's experiences. They are old, man. They are done. A constant and ever-present reminder that what was decided to be important to you today was last year's importance. Or last months. Or last weeks. They emphasize the visual over any other sense. But it's a visual that is averaged, cliched, and based down to it's lowest common denominator. Maps don't show sunsets. You can't watch the wind shimmer and whisper through a grove of saguaro on a map, only by the real experience of the desert. There are things that you must only learn alone, when you get yourself lost and try to find your way out. On your own and without a guide.
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