Sunday, September 9, 2007

Language for gestures

Honestly, I cannot understand what he talk about comparison of pedestrian process to linguistic formation. Reading twice was not working at all at my language level.
Things I can catch are comments about relationship of street and walking. He mentions us as a voyeur and walker. All we, not only planners but also dwellers, could be both voyeur and walker. Now, we have many tools to look down city where we live not just when we are on the 42 floor of sky scraper. Looking at or zooming in and out the city, for instance, searching places and directions is almost everyday life. Then, the poem of the ordinary place where we practiced as a walker becomes legend at some point. I fully agree with walking is the process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian. And, if it does, a bold idea coming in mind is every level of city we can walk makes us possible to experience various cities which might be literally different cities just linked with memories.

Also, I totally agree with urbanists and architects have looked at the city in the level of ‘the drifting of “figurative language”.’ I think it’s because we didn’t have language to defining the city as ‘forests of gestures’ and ‘wandering of the semantic.’ We are not familiar with the language for describing movement. For photographers, motion was substance they can catch in moment but for architects, motion was just motion which is difficult to be visualized. Some architect tried to involve it, but most of them were crystallized one.

If people’s motion and their waste product can liberated space - ‘linking acts and footsteps, opening meaning and directions become liberated spaces that can be occupied.’p105-, what would be a software for architect of those liberated spaces other than act of walking? I know this is our assignment but I am still in nebulousness even though I really want to find the ways.
Mapping might be the demonstratives he mentioned, a tool indicating the invisible identities of the visible. Recently, I deeply feel meaningful mapping containing motion and cognition matter, requires both high intelligence as a detective and sensibility as a rover of the city. It looks like meandering between the role of geographer, sementicist and photographer.


Graphical Excellence includes veracity of data

‘Induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than about methodology, graphic design, the technology of graphic production, or something else.’ is clear and helpful direction to me because I think I confused the potentials of mapping as a data and design material.
Like the case of the cancer map, it’s easy to have crucial flaw- ‘wrongly equating the visual importance of each county with its geographic area rather than with the number of people living in the county’- in the graphic presentation. Map authors would struggle with the paradox of powerful visual effect and veracity of data sometimes.

‘An ill-specific or preposterous model or a puny data set cannot be rescued by a graphic.’-p15 Importance thing in the process of mapping might be building up authentic theory without a premature scenario.

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