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001/2009: Maps of Dalston (LDN) and Kent Ridge (SG)
Summary: Two maps drawn of four places where i have previously lived, sketched from memory without reference to real maps.
Description: Two maps drawn of four places where i have previously lived. Eusoff Hall and Kuok were both in the same campus, and Lordship Road and Shacklewell Lane were both in walking distance with each other. Staying in the same area for considerable amounts of time allowed me to get to know a small and specific area very well.
Kent Ridge, 2007
Dalston, 2008
This exercise was inspired by Debord's Naked City:
Notably subtitled plaques tournantes en psychogeographique, or "turntables" of psychogeography, Naked City's fragments are linked by arrows, but these are fragments which are linked to each other in different orientations (almost as if they could all be manipulated or turned to any direction or orientation at their own will (plaques tournantes refer to things like the railway turntable or a big plate which enables one to switch the direction of the path by simply turning this plate). the fragments do not include all of paris and the distance of the gaps between fragments do not illustrate the real distance between fragments. the arrows, while facilitating the egress of our imaginary psychogeographical wanderer, also seems to put spatial distance between the fragments, creating the gap, which is like what Michel de Certeau (from "Walking in the City" in The Practice of Everyday Life) describes as a procedure of "Asyndeton", or "opening gaps in the spatial continuum" and "retaining only selected parts of it that amount almost to relics".
i note that my walking maps (which documented the roads which were accessible to me by foot - involving manageable distances which i'd have usually walked and would rarely have considered taking a bus in lieu of walking) of dalston and kent ridge were full of peculiar gaps or wrinkles in the spatial continuum. spaces between intended destinations or interesting landmarks, spaces which we deliberately gloss over in the process. Certeau also smartly connects the idea of these deliberate gaps or spaces to walking, a "pedestrian rhetoric". "in walking it selects and fragments the space traversed; it skips over links and whole parts that it omits. From this point of view, every walk constantly leaps, or skips like a child, hopping on one foot. It practices the ellipsis of conjunctive loci..."
from there Certeau goes on to expound on those figures (synedoche, asyndeton) from which "moving trees/forests of gestures" sprout from, which transform any scene but arent fixed in any certain place by images [fleeting, like a haunting?]. They can't be captured in the form of image, nor their meanings of their movments "circumscribed in a text". He writes that it constitutes a “wandering of the semantic" produced by masses that make some parts of the city disappear and exaggerate others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it from its immobile order…"
after reading all this it seems even more apt now that i call it a dream syntax. syntax as rules and the rules in most syntax being the spaces between words, those little invisible bridges that form the glue of language, yet keep the constituent words apart (wouldn't there also be a way for us to relate this "glue" to the very walls of our little pigeon holes here? the houses which keep us rooted here, the houses glued together into HDB blocks which the govt might fancy could be envisioned as communities when still its just separate boxes glued together). even the real space travelled between destinations is often ignored or overestimated, folded up like an accordian or in other cases peculiarly elastic and bendy. so what more the dreams, made of even more fractured fragments, and for us to attempt to read the dream syntax?
- Eusoff Hall, Kent Ridge, Singapore
- Kuok Foundation House, Kent Ridge, Singapore
- Lordship Road, Stoke Newington, London, UK
- Shacklewell Lane, Dalston, London, UK
Kent Ridge, 2007
Dalston, 2008
This exercise was inspired by Debord's Naked City:
Notably subtitled plaques tournantes en psychogeographique, or "turntables" of psychogeography, Naked City's fragments are linked by arrows, but these are fragments which are linked to each other in different orientations (almost as if they could all be manipulated or turned to any direction or orientation at their own will (plaques tournantes refer to things like the railway turntable or a big plate which enables one to switch the direction of the path by simply turning this plate). the fragments do not include all of paris and the distance of the gaps between fragments do not illustrate the real distance between fragments. the arrows, while facilitating the egress of our imaginary psychogeographical wanderer, also seems to put spatial distance between the fragments, creating the gap, which is like what Michel de Certeau (from "Walking in the City" in The Practice of Everyday Life) describes as a procedure of "Asyndeton", or "opening gaps in the spatial continuum" and "retaining only selected parts of it that amount almost to relics".
From Tom McDonough, "Situationist Space": "Debord's map images a fragmented city that is both the result of multiple restructurings of a capitalist society and the very form of a radical critique of this society. Its figuration of a type of inhabiting is simultaneously related to and distinct from Fredric Jameson's "aesthetic of cognitive mapping", a concept most succinctly described in his classic article "Post-modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." Jameson concludes that fragmentations of urban spaces and the social body create the need for maps that would "enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of the city's structure as a whole."
i note that my walking maps (which documented the roads which were accessible to me by foot - involving manageable distances which i'd have usually walked and would rarely have considered taking a bus in lieu of walking) of dalston and kent ridge were full of peculiar gaps or wrinkles in the spatial continuum. spaces between intended destinations or interesting landmarks, spaces which we deliberately gloss over in the process. Certeau also smartly connects the idea of these deliberate gaps or spaces to walking, a "pedestrian rhetoric". "in walking it selects and fragments the space traversed; it skips over links and whole parts that it omits. From this point of view, every walk constantly leaps, or skips like a child, hopping on one foot. It practices the ellipsis of conjunctive loci..."
"Synecdoche makes more dense: it amplifies the detail and miniaturizes the whole. Asyndeton cuts out: it undoes continuity and undercuts it plausibility. A space treated in this way and shaped by practices is transformed into enlarged singularities and seperate islands. Through these swellings, shrinkings, and fragmentations, that is, through these rhetorical operations a spatial phrasing of an analogical (composed of juxtaposed citations) and ellipitcal (made of gaps, lapses and allusions) type is created. For the technological system of a coherent and totalizing space that is "linked" and simultaneous, the figures of pedestrian rhetoric subsitutes trajectories that have a mythical structure, at least if one understands by "myth" a discourse relative to the place/nowhere (or origin) of concrete existence, a story jerry-built out of elements taken from common sayings, an allusive and fragmentary story whose gaps mesh with the social practices it symbolises."
from there Certeau goes on to expound on those figures (synedoche, asyndeton) from which "moving trees/forests of gestures" sprout from, which transform any scene but arent fixed in any certain place by images [fleeting, like a haunting?]. They can't be captured in the form of image, nor their meanings of their movments "circumscribed in a text". He writes that it constitutes a “wandering of the semantic" produced by masses that make some parts of the city disappear and exaggerate others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it from its immobile order…"
after reading all this it seems even more apt now that i call it a dream syntax. syntax as rules and the rules in most syntax being the spaces between words, those little invisible bridges that form the glue of language, yet keep the constituent words apart (wouldn't there also be a way for us to relate this "glue" to the very walls of our little pigeon holes here? the houses which keep us rooted here, the houses glued together into HDB blocks which the govt might fancy could be envisioned as communities when still its just separate boxes glued together). even the real space travelled between destinations is often ignored or overestimated, folded up like an accordian or in other cases peculiarly elastic and bendy. so what more the dreams, made of even more fractured fragments, and for us to attempt to read the dream syntax?
- Synecdoche: using a word in a sense which is part of another meaning of the same word / expands spatial element in order to make it play the role of a "more" and eventually take its place (eg: window = neighbourhood, crown = king)
- Asyndeton: supression of linking words such as conjuntions and adverbs (eg: from Conrad's Heart of Darkness: "An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was thick, warm, heavy, sluggish)"
© Debbie Ding 2009