volume 5
maps are always made from a certain viewpoint and are therefore subjective by nature. [...] every map is a reflection of social relations of the territory it aims to represent.
-- caps lock: how capitalism took hold of graphic design, and how to escape from it
- ruben pater
editorial
volume 5 - space(s)
To open on a note of honesty, I have been struggling to write this editorial for a few weeks now. Not because the writing is hard, but because I have found the idea of space to be a very hard concept to define. In theory, it is simple, being an area, a room, the final frontier. In actuality, I keep running across ever more definitions of the term that apply to my understanding of the world. Thus, I will do what humanity has always done well, and I will draw borders around the concept. I will take a ruler and set an artificial boundary to existence. This is my artificial space, though. Feel free to take an eraser to it and draw your own borders around it. I have drawn my map in pencil, for this exact purpose.
If I harken back to childhood, my bedroom was my haven, with its shelves full of books, computer full of games and videos, floor littered with instruments, record player, playthings. For others, it was a dungeon filled with unsurmountable amounts of dust, chaos, and opportunities to clean. My space has always been a very dear thing to me, something I have guarded closely and cherished, lashing out when intruded upon, occasionally sharing it with a select few. It is my own private space, my personality and inner thoughts; it represents my room, my bed, the room I have to be myself in. In my own space, I can just be.
But my space goes deeper than just a physical room. It encompasses all the metaphysical layers of space, the space of my imagination, of the stories and worlds inside of my books, my TV series, my mangas, my videogames. It encompasses my inner world, my thoughts, doubts, feelings of happiness and sadness, my goals and aspirations, my disappointments and failures. My friends and family add little islands of space, sometimes whole continents, to the ground area of my conscience. Some of these things expand my personal space, others surround it, border it, define it. The more I think about it, the more I also think about all the other spaces, and thus, my map of space expands outside of myself.
The fact that I have my own space implies that everyone and everything else also has its own space. This space is mostly unknown to me. How do other people define their personal space? Am I at any point intruding upon it? Do our spaces overlap? Do we share spaces? What are my rights pertaining to this spatial division of the world? In a way, by expanding my own horizons, I am mapping out existence for myself, filling in the blank sections of my own map. Very colonial of me. Could this be a problem?
To define my own space, by definition, I have to define the "not my own space". We (humanity) have always thrived to map out the world, to define ourselves in contrast to the other, often to the detriment of the other, following a "us versus them" line of reasoning. Oftentimes this also overlapped a yearning for the other space, to absorb it into our own space, to make it our own. We must seek new (to us) lands, and plant our flags in it, and whoever stands in our way must be removed. This has led us down some very dark paths in the past, and, as world events constantly remind us, still does.
The unknown scares us, it is like the abyss looking back at us. But contextualising it, putting it into a neat little box and labeling it "Abyss-chan", makes it less scary, more manageable, understandable, even if only on a theoretical level. We take art and put labels on it like Romanticism, Classical, Expressionist, Modern, Post-Modern. We label music and books and movies according to genres, so we can say "I like action, but I hate comics". We label people according to nationality, religion, the colour of our skins. We take spaces, be they physical, digital, conceptual, and we create guidelines, laws, rules, in order to force them into neat little gridlines of information, pie-charts and trend-graphs. And we do all of this in order to define the other, so that we can define ourselves.
Space is context, it is personality, it is security, it is grounds for conflict, it is a frontier, it is a home. Space defines who we are , and it defines what we want, what we need, what we aspire to. It is a hard concept to precisely define, for everything exists in a space, and at the same time, defines a space. Space is the blank to be filled and the previously blank, now drawn in. Space is existence.
-- o. maag
playlist
After failing to come up with a conceptual through-line, this playlist came into existence as a search-curated sampling of my music library. This starting point is also the end point of curation: the result is an eight-track hodgepodge of my favourite “space”-songs that encapsulates the many-directional and multi-interpretative theme of this month’s edition.
Enjoy!
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space(s),
2019
–
2025
House facades become stages for fleeting moments. In each work, a video spans one or more rooms, creating a striking contrast in movement, color, and time of day against the static architecture. Drawn from a personal archive collected since 2019, the collages transform familiar settings into spaces that feel both ordinary and strangely surreal.
Digital collages with embedded video.
untitled
Being, today, has come to feel like a contradiction in terms. The sheer volume of knowing cannot be married to the possibilities of doing that exist at our fingertips. All this makes disjunction and disunity appear as the red threads of existence. The underlying conflict, as techno-theorist Franco Berardi muses, is one between infinite cyberspace and the limitations of time that are locked in an impossible struggle:
Cyberspace, the virtual dimension of info-productive interaction between agents of communication, can be infinitely expanded. On the contrary cybertime, “living” time, and attention in time cannot be expanded beyond a certain point, as it is limited by an organic temporality, and by an emotional and cultural temporality which belongs to human consciousness and sensibility. That is, this emotional and cultural elaboration of stimuli happens in time, and the time for psychological and bodily elaboration cannot be shortened beyond a certain point.
The more information demanding our attention grows, the less attention time is available for elaboration. This conflict – or incompatibility – between cyberspace and cybertime is a distinguishing paradox of our society, and in the sphere of capitalist exploitation it produces pathological effects.
From: Berardi, Franco. “Out of Joint. Then What?” Berlin Works: The Noologist’s Handbook and Other Art Experiments, by Warren Neidich, Archive Books, pp. 281–87.
