Wednesday 26 November 2014

THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY (AGAIN)

The geography of Huế, in common with many cities, is strongly connected to the river that runs through it. The Perfume River, Sông Hương is therefore an excellent starting point for future explorations of the psychogeographic currents that flow through the urban environment. Here follows a preliminary study using photography, montage, drawing and mapping. Derive and detournement are employed in the creation of the series of psychocarts published below.


The strong geometry of the city's ancient citadel, represented in this US ordnance map over-emphasise the dominance of the Forbidden City upon its outlying territories. Whilst it is over forty years-old (pre Tet offensive) and thus represents a city somewhat different than the one experienced today, the impression that the cartographer's hand was drawn to the citadel's regularity when it drafted the above plan is nonetheless hard to shake. By night a far more noticeable presence along the banks of the river are the monuments to Vietnam's contemporary rulers: namely Mammon, whose neon altars infuse the sky with magenta, violet and electric blue. 



Drifting along the river, long exposures grant an impressionistic take on the unsettling ambience. Electric light, by turns romantic and horrifying, burns itself onto the retina. The boat rocks steadily, trailbacks tracing the journey like a seismograph. 


Several exposures, overlaid atop one another, brought out a hitherto unseen iridescence, reflecting the lipid substances floating on the water's surface.



Crudely rendered in watercolour, the cones of light stretch across the river from bank to bank, interspersed with imaginary possibility fields, pencil lines tracing currents and torrents, the resultant image- a spectral grid- was ripe for superimposition,



Crudely, the image below represents one interpretative snapshot of Huế, 2014, on top of another western interpretation, circa 1968. Seemingly random spectral cones, erupting from each bank, are intersected by two orthogonal grids: the first is Cartesian, providing grid references for ordnance drops and troop movements... the other is extruded from the Forbidden City's own geometry and extends into the immediate suburban street layout. It dates from the late 18th Century but is indebted to an older cosmological system.



In an effort to uncover the design logic behind the Forbidden City's orientation I needed to look no further than a panel in the citadel's exhibition centre. As a UNESCO world heritage site, the Forbidden City provides  an abundance of historical information, particularly concerning its structure and layout. Thus far I have not bothered to decipher the precise meaning of the site's geomancy, though this presents one interesting avenue of research, a sign post for another tangential derive. Suffice it to say, it is informed by Chinese feng shui and is particularly concerned with the citadel's relationship to the Perfume River, as the intriguing site plan indicates below:


The final step in this crude mashing of psychocarts was to overlay the geomantic plan onto the previous psychocart using Photoshop. A little bit of artistic layer blending was employed to get the required mix of clarity and obfuscation:



Thus we witness the birth of the strategic map, the psychocarte, for further psychogeographic investigation. Below is a sequential frieze showing the interplay of the four grids:

L-R: cartesian ordnance grid plus orthogonal site architecture; overlaid w. spectral grid; geomantic plan; final psychocart
Next steps are tricky considering the cost of site access, though continued ranging of the perimeter (whilst considering the supplantation of imperial untouchability with tourist exclusivity) should prove productive. The human element is integral, and the simplest narrative thread goes something like this: byzantine court rites, colonisation, civil war, post war austerity (and decay) followed by economic and tourist development. Of course, seeing as it is fun to celebrate my international derive with clichéd gap-year re-evaluations of occidental cosmologies I should start thinking that time is a bit more like a spiral or something... hence final image... 



Tuesday 25 November 2014

DELIRIUM

Interior Hue College of Education
People dream of the tropics. After some time here, sickness has granted a thick edge to my dreaming. Like a blunt knife it's torn through the veil, crudely, and brought a fresh madness to my wakeful hours. 

...map/diagram/landscape
sketch: arch over dross-channel
So instead of lesson planning or thinking about my future I'm doodling inanely, convincing myself that a new landscape aesthetic might also successfully synthesise Marx and Adam Smith, thus ending one of the feuds (one! one of feuds! hehehehe!) currently preventing us (us!) from achieving (achieving!) utopia (-).

....ultimately it boils down to land-value tax...

Landscape in a sketchbook panel
It's a relief, in a way, to experience wild delusions again. Always the finer part of psychosis. Caught in the usual neurotic fuzz I have been inert, fretting, afraid to commit. The dashboard of this Blogger account is littered with drafts (like corpses in charnel houses...)


...something about groundlines


writing about rhizomes induces a desire to draw complete graphs

The important thing is to continue production, creation preventing stagnation. The most dangerous delusion of all being that this has to mean something, that what is produced has to withstand some kind of academic or aesthetic critique... from where is that likely to arrive? Whose criticism is capable of causing me any injury?

on the left, heteronymous heresy; the right, nonsense



Cybernetic humans are not the next step in human evolution, they are the first step in cyborg evolution, we are their parasites, not the other way round.
And so, with renewed vigour, into the abyss I descend. 

Again.

30 second exposure in shadow of citadel wall, long enough for me to get in the photograph twice.






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