/ / / / / /LetUs
Space
Fractals AND Walking AND Folding
Whilst engaging in some mild cyber-‘flaneury’– I stumbled across this post on Larval Subjects. The quote below refers to the notoriously difficult work of Lacan, and in particular– his heavily loaded aphorisms. Some of the more extreme examples are described as:
‘fractal instantiations of his thought in extremely condensed form, articulating the whole of some element of his topology from a particular vantage.’
This is the idea that a fragment or torn segment of map can somehow speak for a whole territory, the rent in the canvas that reveals a universe. The macro understood through the micro, fractal as synecdoche. Poetic images that skip and jump– for instance, where ‘sails’ replace ‘ships’, and a fleet is understood as a ‘1000 sails’. Information is purposefully withheld for effect, and loss becomes a vernacular.
This is why I love the dissonant ‘assemblage’ of: fractals, walking and folding. They operate like synecdoche’s, disrupting and short-circuiting their respective contexts, there always seems to be some sort of gap, disappearance or omission (…).
To some degree, fractals already contain the DNA of their parent– the shard that refracts a universe. As already illustrated, ‘fractal thinking’ only invokes the whole it does not spell it out. Essential arguments become implicit as the fragments serve as hyperlinks or portals to a larger territory.
Walking has regularly been associated with editing. The Situationists rewrote their environs through ‘drifting’ and Michel de Certeau linked speech to walking through his ‘Walking rhetorics’. The movement from ‘A’ to ‘B’ will always involve some sort of waste, elision or loss and ‘every walk constantly leaps’ (de Certeau). Thus the grammar of the gait serves as metaphor and practice, a beautiful image and a primary tactic in the battle to edit of our spaces.
The fold is a wonderful agent of confusion and destabilisation. With a simple surface, it has the ability to bring together two distant territories– the juxtaposition of geographical spaces, crumpling the Atlantic and positioning New York just outside the M25, Heathrow-as-fold. It acts as a synecdoche, missing out information and bringing together potentially disparate locations.
So what’s my point? For me, fractals, folding and walking reek of loss, they are powerful metaphors in their own write. And because ‘Christianity was founded upon the loss of a body’ (de Certeau) and to all intense and purpose co-terminus with ‘lack’; it makes sense to investigate new expressions of loss. In terms of design, fractals, folding and walking have long been assimilated into the design project; this is the very thing that designates them ‘haunted geography’. So in my tragically ‘agglutinating’ mind: ‘to fold’ is to already speak of Christ.
Brothers and sisters: ‘Let us space’.
A Dense Read, but resonating in at least 5 dimensions...
Posted by: nic | 2007.05.07 at 10:03 PM