TAZ Project: Friday & Reflecting
I visited again on Friday, took some more photographs, quite a lot of this one guy who was going through a lot of the books and writing down something from each of them. I really wish I had approached him now to find out what he was doing. I had a chat with one of the book sellers about the market, which was quite interesting. I wrote some notes which are below, which may nor may not be legible:
On the train on the way back, I was reading from de Certau's Practice of Everyday Life, in particular his Walking in the City essay, and came across this really beautiful quote in a section called "the chorus of idle footsteps" :
"It is true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. The operation of walking, wandering or "window shopping." that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map. They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it had the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substitued for the practice. It exhibitis the (voracious) property that the geographical system had of being able to transform actions into legibility, but in doing so causes a way of being in the world to be foregotten."
and also this, which follows just after, in the "Pedistrian speech acts" section:
"A comparison with the speech act will allow us to go further and not limit ourselves to the crituqe of graphic representations alone, looking from the shores of legibility towards an inaccessible beyond. The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to the language or to the statements uttered. At the most elementary level, it has the triple "enunciative" function: it is a process of appropriation of the topo-graphical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the langauge); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language): and it implies relations among differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic "contracts" in the form of movements (just as verbal enuciation is an "allocution," "posits another opposite" the speaker and puts contracts between interlocutors into action). It thus seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation."
I don't really know how i'm going to apply this to my space yet, but what he was saying really clicked, and from that I'm going to take my mapping into different directions and look at the ways in which we experience spaces and ways to record that. So today and tomorrow is going to involve evaluating what I have so far, what I need to do and any ideas that are starting to come up.
On the train on the way back, I was reading from de Certau's Practice of Everyday Life, in particular his Walking in the City essay, and came across this really beautiful quote in a section called "the chorus of idle footsteps" :
"It is true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. The operation of walking, wandering or "window shopping." that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map. They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it had the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substitued for the practice. It exhibitis the (voracious) property that the geographical system had of being able to transform actions into legibility, but in doing so causes a way of being in the world to be foregotten."
and also this, which follows just after, in the "Pedistrian speech acts" section:
"A comparison with the speech act will allow us to go further and not limit ourselves to the crituqe of graphic representations alone, looking from the shores of legibility towards an inaccessible beyond. The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to the language or to the statements uttered. At the most elementary level, it has the triple "enunciative" function: it is a process of appropriation of the topo-graphical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the langauge); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language): and it implies relations among differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic "contracts" in the form of movements (just as verbal enuciation is an "allocution," "posits another opposite" the speaker and puts contracts between interlocutors into action). It thus seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation."
I don't really know how i'm going to apply this to my space yet, but what he was saying really clicked, and from that I'm going to take my mapping into different directions and look at the ways in which we experience spaces and ways to record that. So today and tomorrow is going to involve evaluating what I have so far, what I need to do and any ideas that are starting to come up.
TAZ Project: Thursday
Went to the space again on Thursday, the book market was back and I got hold a decent camera from the department, so I took a lot of photos. I also look at the various approaches to the space, and ways to view it and did another stream of conciousness type observation. I definitely need to do more, try and get more engaged.
TAZ Project: Monday
I went back to the space on Monday, found that the book market wasn't on, probably because it was a grey day. I took some photos, did a bit of mapping of the way people move through the space and wrote down some observations, similar to a stream of conciousness. It's a very different place on days like this, with people just passing through, it's rare that anyone really stops. unless it's to meet someone, and then they move on, further down the South Bank, but sometimes to the theatre.
TAZ Project: In more relevant news..
I spent some time at my space, the South Bank book market and surrounding area. I wandered around, took some photos [bad quality because of the no camera issue] and did some sketching. It was really cold, I have no idea how the book sellers stay there all day. I noticed while I was sketching that it's a very transitory space, a lot of people moving through and going to other places as there are quite a few over-lapping areas and functions. Markets that have been around for a long time are interesting, because there is always the contrast of temporal and enduring. So I have the beginning of some thoughts I need to build on by doing more intensive mapping and investigations.
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