Assignments for chapter 5: time and space

Reading Assignment: The Scent of Time

McLuhan, M., 1964, Understanding Media. A classical work, of which we will read chapter 15: Clocks, the scent of time (pp.157-169).

Info

This text is easily findable on the internet; I've provided a pdf for easy reference (Pdf, 92kB).

From horizontal to vertical

Please watch the small documentary I made about Göbekli Tepe. It is about how technological innovation at the end of the Paleolithic led to a change in metaphysical thought, which in turn induced the shift to farming. In it, we discuss the differences between the cave paintings found at Lascaux and the T-shaped pillars found at Göbekli Tepe.

Questions

1. One of the main aspects in which religions or cultures are defined is in terms of the iconography. That goes for the historical cultures as well as our own time, e.g. people who are using certain types of tools or people who like a specific kind of style. Can you define the culture you are part of (or the culture you find yourself part of) in terms of its specific iconography? How does this iconography help to create a community (facilitate communication, understanding, bonding, ...)?

2. In archaeology, there is a school of thought that state that the shift to farming is a result (rather than the cause) of the changes in human metaphysic thought (see esp. Cauvin, 1995). In the view of the article you have read and the video you have seen, can you describe what change in human thought has led to the shift to farming and the role of 'art' and 'technology' in this change?

Super Mario Clouds

Please have a look at the work Super Mario Clouds by Cory Arcangel. This work is a modification of a classic Super Mario, in which everything is removed but the clouds.

Attack of the Pixels

Look at this nice little animation made by video-artist Patrick Jean.

Questions

1. Espen Aarseth, head of the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen, states that computer games “are essentially concerned with spatial representation and negotiation". One could argue that In Super Mario Clouds there is still a 'spatial representation' in the clouds that move over the screen. However, it seems as though the 'negotiation' has gone. How does that relate to Heidegger's notion of dwelling and his thoughts of 'locale' Can you relate this idea to Heracleitos' observation about the impossibility of bathing in the same river twice, that we talked about in the session on identity?

2. You could argue that Attack of the pixels is kind of the same process in reverse. Where Super Mario Clouds removes the narrative from a game, Attack of the Pixels introduces a narrative using computer game iconography that has no or little narrative of its own. Would you say that the introduction of digital artefacts in the real world (such as this example, or think about Pokemon Go) changes the meaning of that reality?

New Babylon

During the 1960's, the Dutch architect and artist Constant Nieuwenhuys worked on the design of a new type of city: anti-capitalistic, post-revolutionary and aimed at individual freedom. Have a look at the explanation of this work by curator Laura Stamps.

Question

1. In the article by media philosopher Marshall McLuhan that you have read, he states:

From our division of time into uniform, visualizable units comes our sense of duration and our impatience when we cannot endure the delay between events. Such a sense of impatience, of time as duration, is unknown among non literate cultures. Just as work began with the division of labor, duration begins with the division of time, and especially with those subdivisions by which mechanical clocks impose uniform succession on the time sense. (pp.1-2)

Would you say that the style put forth by Nieuwenhuys (of which we will see a similar manifestation when we talk about the futuristic movement) increases the felt sense of time that McLuhan is talking about?

Practical Assignment

In this session, we talked at length about the phenomenon of places. We have used the analysis of Heidegger to explicate the difference between places and dwellings: just any place that is not differentiated from any other place, and the dwelling that has imporance, meaning and history for you. According to Heidegger, being human means living in a dwelling on the world:

DeutchEnglish

Die Art, wie du bist und ich bin, die Weise, nach der wir Menschen auf der Erde sind, ist das Buan, das Wohnen. Mensch sein heißt: als Sterblicher auf der Erde sein, heißt: wohnen.

The way in which you are and I am, the way we are on the earth is building. Being human means: being a mortal on the earth, means dwelling. [trans: BB]

– Heidegger, GA1.7; p.149

From this point, we saw how contemporary science, mass transportation and mass tourism put some stress at this distinction. With the rationalism of the Revolution, the world became an isotrope and isochrone whole: so what is the reason to differentiate any place from any other?

Using this terminology, we next looked at the analysis of non-places by Zygmunt Bauman in his Liquid Modernity. He came up with four types of non-places:

name	example	time-sense
the inhospitable	the office tower	vacate quickly
the non-interacting	the gym	fixed duration
the no-where	the airport	being on time
the empty	the suburb	no time

In this assignment, you were asked to choose a (real, existing) building that you thought was one of those four types of non-places. You needed to make clear why you thought it was that kind of non-place and come up with changes or additions to that building so that it became a place – or even a dwelling.