Seeing in the Global Jungle.

Roberto Bottazzi, Dott. Arch., MASA Royal College of Art, Research Co-ordinator, Master Tutor

This text is intended to act as an introduction to the workshop we ran in Finchen in former East Germany last year. Participants included students from: Royal College of Art (London, UK), University of Dortmund (Germany), Kansas University (Kansas City, USA).

Brief description: Everything moves. Every single element on this planet is in a dynamic condition. Be it a natural phenomenon like clouds or a more immaterial one such as your feelings for another person, nothing is stable enough to remain unaltered forever. It may not appear that way to you perhaps because the speed of change might be very slow think that glass is actually a liquid or because what you are experiencing could be the result of forces that are invisible to your eyes. The recent transformations that the urban environment has been undergoing do exactly belong to this latter category. The scale and magnitude of the evolution of contemporary cities even those that are too small to the part of the so-called global elites is such that there is no longer a vantage point from which to see their mutations. For a certain period, architects thought that in order to see more of the contemporary city they could literally zoom out to create the false illusion to dominate it in one single gaze. Even today this tendency is still very much part of the way some architects think; amazingly powerful tools such as Google Earth are still fuelling this hopeless thought. Perhaps, it is about time architects stop pretending to control the urban environment. They were never really good at it anyway. With that we could also let go the ambition to understand cities from the aerial view and zoom much closer to the objects, people, and natural phenomena that make up what we call urban space. Though paradoxical at first, this might be a more viable way of seeing in the contemporary city. In fact, because of the raising importance of global flow of goods and people across the surface of the earth, every single urban fact be it a manmade object or a natural one always contains more than itself; every object ends up being part of a network of other objects or people whose presence is probably not visible to your eyes. How to see in this global jungle? Perhaps, we need a mix of intuition and discipline. More than a century ago Henry Bergson brilliantly explained that intuition too had its own methodology, implicitly dismissing any romanticism about the creative act. Mapping has become to the tool of choice to learn how to see in these environments. Since the 80s philosophers such as Frederic Jameson have been indicating cognitive mapping as the most appropriate tool to investigate the present cultural condition. Maps too require a mix of freedom and control. They are not realistic representations of territories, they are always distortions based on ones decision about what to represent and how. Far from being a limitation, the fact that maps are edited versions of reality allows us to speculate about two interconnected elements: on the one hand, we can begin to think

about ways in which the invisible layer of the urban experience can be manifested, and, on the other, utilise them as paradigms that will adapt our outdated cognitive tools. The issue of how to recollect, narrate, investigate, and speculate cannot ignore the presence and power of digital tools in compiling large sets of data and networking them one another. Again intuition and freedom need to be negotiated between the hand and the mouse: the digital and bodily craftsmanship. The aim of this workshop is to utilise the natural surrounding around Fincken to not only to test the methods to record natural dynamics with both digital and analogical tools, but also to demonstrate that urban dynamics are at work anywhere, even where we do not see them.