I'm spending a luxurious Sunday afternoon lolling around in my office, having walked over here from my house filled with ambitious intentions of preparing classes, writing papers, working on some magazine pitches, and even moving around some lab equipment. My head, still slightly hazy from having seen out this year's Oktoberfest with a big bunch of good friends last night, is not quite up to that level of engagement today, so I've had to content myself with something a bit different -- I'm just letting go of things a bit and letting my mind wander where it may, hoping it picks up some inspiring fuel for the days ahead when my full wits return to me.
I've been thinking a lot more about how our engagement with place seems to have this melancholy double edge to it, where we both revel in our freedom from geometry by embracing space-crushing technology, while at the same time nurturing these wistful cravings for an attachment to real places that such technology seems to steal from us.
A great example of this is Yellow Arrow, described as a massively authored artistic publication. The concept is simple enough -- members purchase yellow arrow stickers, attach them to places that mean something to them, and then phone in a caption to an electronic depot using SMS messaging. Someone discovering the arrow can dial up a code and retrieve the caption. It's an interesting example of an attempt to recapture the authentic granularity of space. The one who attaches the sticker lays claim to a piece of space using a short string of narrative -- he connnects his life to a place. The one who finds the sticker, dials up the code, and reads the message links herself with the original author through a vector that attaches both parties to a very precise view of a small slice of the world. Except that this is being done by beaming signals off of satellites orbiting the planet, it's a bit like an Inuit tracker reading the social history of a clump of snow by examining sled tracks and bootprints.
It's a lovely idea -- we subvert technologies that were designed to free us from space by using them to bind us back to it again. A mental Möbius strip.
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