When I was born I inhabited space. At first it was mine, Soon it became populated. It was surreal. It was strange. I wondered.
László Moholy-Nagy / Sil I / 1933 / oil and incised lines on silbert (a type of aluminum)
In the first few years I watched. I watched and watched. No words, just pictures that I stored in my brain for later. The spaces I lived in with people were strange still.
Mayur Bhola’s photo
In which spaces did I feel at home? The spaces others had imagined. Many people watched the same spaces. So they were public right? Or were they in my head? We shared the spaces but I felt they were mine.
I learned about spaces that had existed in a different age.
It was difficult to imagine people there. In the art books there were never people. I imagined these like Plato’s theory of forms. Do they exist in a public space?
How do you feel in public spaces? See, this one
is in the same city as this one
I know which one I feel at home in. And you?
In my mind I mix up the public spaces by pulling in images from dreams, photographs, memories, stories.
Are they still public?
What people do with space. I mean, what people do with space. How do they do that? Are they changing the space? I mean, I don’t understand the science of it but I think they do.
Do you ever wish our public spaces, as we perceive them as adults, were as wondrous as they were when we were children?
Am I resisting public space? What kind of energy is that? Here I’m pretending the digital space is a private space and ignoring the public that may or may not come in. Fly away Peter, fly away Paul. Come back Peter, come back Paul.
One book: Christopher Alexander et al, A Pattern Language:https://archive.org/details/APatternLanguage, especially Ch 18, Network of Learning.
Okay. Thanks.
I totally and completely want fantasy spaces. I dream of living in a treehouse. What a fantastic post. Made me wistful.
When I remember myself from the inside (or try to) as a child, I did feel disoriented. It actually was surreal. For example, I remember wondering why we were doing things in early primary school. What was the point? Everyone else seemed to look comfortable with the games we were playing eg Tic Tac Toe. I didn’t get it.