More on space vs. place. Have just about finished Speaking Into The Air, which I won’t do the injustice of a quick summary — read it, it’s beautiful. And relevent, in some way, to what we’ve been discussing here. Amongst other threads, Peters seems to balance the value of empathy and an awareness of the singleness of singleness against the romantic notion of ‘communication’ as a meeting of souls, calling for

…a softening of the heart, an admission of the inefficacy of our glassy essence against the awe of strangeness (p. 259)

He doesn’t talk directly about the phenomenology of place and space, but I think there’s something in the idea of a place having as one of its characteristics that it makes manifest the impossibility of such a meeting of souls, while being yet maleable enough that it may show the marks (patina?) of our endlessly failing attempts — a place is that whereby (amongst other things) loneliness (or oneliness) is possible to be made manifest.

A nice walk through the East End last night to DorkBot London in Limehouse. The highlights: Peter Cusack’s LF magentic audioscapes of Highbury and Islington underground station (south-bound platform, I think), and The Institute of Applied Autonomy’s fine collection of DARPA website scrapings and repurposing of military technology and aesthetics for urban activism. Crucial performance requirement for their GraffitiWriter robot: it has to move faster than a cop. Very good stuff. Cheap beer, too.

It’s Friday afternoon, with a hangover. Today the best thing on the Internet is The Catalogue of UK Entrances to Hell. Lovely. Oh and it’s raining as well…

From a letter to Milena, quoted in Speaking Into The Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, by John Durham Peters:

Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on their way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity sees this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it’s no longer any help, these are evidently inventions made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the wireless. The spirits won’t starve, but we will perish.

Haven’t read much of Speaking Into The Air yet, but it looks interesting.

I’ve been reading Paul Dourish’s Where The Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, a good introduction to issues and perspectives of designing with embodied action in mind, although he doesn’t really get very far with actual guidelines. Favourite quote (which opens the section on ‘Wittgenstein and the Meaning of Language’):

Like Elvis Presley, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) had a professional career that fell into two distinct phases.

Vegas Wittgenstein? Maybe.

Nothing radically new in the book, but a decent overview of the field, with a nicely phenomenological slant (no mention of Bachelard though). For me, the most interesting discussion was of places versus spaces — something I’ve discussed here, briefly. Dourish and his colleagues seem to have similar views:

..the difference between space and place is an analytic one; space refers to the physical and mechanical aspects of the environment, whereas place refers to the ways in which space becomes vested with social meaning through the emergence of mutually consituted practices and behavioral norms when that space is populated…In fact there are many examples of such social practices developing in environments or media that do not base themselves on “real-world” models…There are places that succeed without an underlying model of space to build upon. “Space” is only a means to an end.