Dis-oriented ?

Here are some questions that we could relate to the tracing issues we talked about yesterday…

How do we communicate? 1/part

This question involves communication with other humans, but also with our surrounding environment. Which means also to consider how we orient ourselves in our environment. We talked yesterday about how autistic children seem to feel natural phenomenon such as magnetism and water, which could mean that they somehow communicate with their environment through the perception of signs or feeling that we don’t necessarily perceive. Yet, and this is very much obvious while we visit foreign countries, and especially, for western people, countries like china or Japan, where you can’t understand most of the urban signs and sometimes the urban structures, which capacities are involved, which signs are being read, recognized, interpreted, how is urban environment read? And how are people getting the resources to orient themselves? How do they communicate with surrounding environment, with signs, with humans, with maps? And also, how do the learn to cope with the feelings that disorientation creates?

I certainly feel that the capacity of observing, guessing, reading the urban environment has been strongly developed during my trips in china. It’s a very simple example, but when I was in Istanbul and Italy with my friends, I could feel the difference between us by the way I could easily find what I was looking for, by constantly reading the signs, etc. This capacity of keeping my eyes open comes essentially from chinese experiences.

Are we allowed to get lost? 迷路了吗 ?

Yet, the question is what is going to happen with GPS becoming popular? Are we paradoxically going to lose completely our capacity to orient ourselves? Because we’ll become lazy, will we lose this capacity to read our environment? And will we lose also these unexpected encounters, the serendipity that is somehow allowed by disorientation and that constitutes the core of urban life? Disorientation isn’t a way to keep out of routine, a way of looking at things in a pretty different way? Getting a fresh look on things and allow us to be surprised. Maybe the possibility // the ability to get lost is the difference between traces and maps.

mobility to identity? 高灵和逗号动到黑也累… images by Ling & Comma, July 2008

这是我的北京，这是我的最后的北京 This is my Beijing, my last Beijing. When we look at Chinese cities, we are fascinated by their restlessness, their plastic materiality where stones appear to have lost their resistance. Becoming urban, though, is not only about being in the city. It is also appropriating urbanity through its objects, ideas and moods. It is creating our imaginaire, our Beijing.

突然一阵剧烈的抖动 and what if that tremblement of the train is precisely one of those special moments when the city becomes my city? Richard Sennett told us that cities have the potential to make us more complex human beings. A city is a place where people can learn to live with strangers and enter into the experiences and interests of unfamiliar lives. However, when searching urban life, one encounters a major issue: How do the complexities and diversities of a city interact?

In Western cities, we have allowed public spaces assume this particular task. These are places where people meet, observe, socialize or pass through. This is where we think ourselves as a society. In China, public space doesn’t exist in the same way. Traditional cities were introverted, reproducing a conception of public and private that differs from the one we are familiar with. While anonymity is central in our way of living public spaces and interacting – or not – with strangers, Chinese public interactions are based on the concept of face. It is the community, instead of society, that characterized Mao’s danwei, where residents could avoid unnecessary contacts with unfamiliar situations. Conversely, contemporary urban life multiplies the occasions where one must face anonymity – in the crowd, in the supermarket, while seating on the bus – and these moments often raise hostility. However, urbanity also offers opportunities for faceless encounters, where identities can be negotiated in new ways.

This project explores the subtle lines dividing the private and public notions. These tremblements allow us to appropriate the city but also to share our experiences. These are special times and spaces, encounters and disjunctures, allowing us to be part – or not – of our urban environment. These are the lines where we define our social and individual identity. Using photos and videos, we would like to create disturbing situations where norms and practices must be questioned. Our project is a conversation, whether between ourselves and the public, or between Geneva and Beijing, about what makes our cities a bit more urban; a bit more ours.