User:Mania/Personal Reader

Research questions

What do you want to investigate?

It's such a human thing to want to remember, discover, explore the unknown, and document, and I’m fascinated by sharing those subjective interpretations. Whether it’s through a workshop, a walk, or collective zine making, we can learn about aspects of culture, knowledge, or places not included in the dominant narrative. Collective practices can rename things and unlearn existing hierarchies. We can draw maps that tell hidden stories, showing reality from other perspectives. I'm fascinated by neighborhoods and eager to explore them as learning environments through playful methods.

I'm also inspired by a concept that a city can be read and I would like to investigate it more.

What are you trying to find out?

The focus on urban space as the space for various (un)learning practices, is strongly connected with my fascination.

During the third trimester, I engaged with a concept that an urban environment can be read, analyzed, and criticized as a text. Following this thought, if the city can be read it can also be annotated. Posters, graffiti, and performances in public squares serve as annotations carrying diverse comments. Those observations of public spaces made it very explicit who and what is not present and made me strongly interested in the emancipatory potential of cities and narratives that differentiate from the dominant norm.

How is something becoming a norm? And who decides on that? How people are expected to behave? In cities where those who are refusing are even furtherer left behind, I feel a strong need to experiment with various unlearning practices to activate different modes of knowing and being together.

What we take for granted is the result of all kinds of power structures, political decisions, planning processes, design choices, and advertisements contributing to the perfect image, where social problems are successfully hidden. I’m willing to actively practice to unlearn these mechanisms and embrace friction, encounter random chances, and actually talk to strangers. I am willing to unlearn together to intervene according to one’s own ideas and desires and leave our traces.

I'm interested in collective resistance against efficiency, consumption, and success at all costs. In cracks, seen as spaces collectively organized, shifting towards infrastructures for care, generosity, and attention rather than efficiency and perfection. Maybe a sense of humor and unlearning practices can help mobilize us collectively, embrace differences, and celebrate our individuality.

Therefore I see unlearning as a process that brings into question the norms but also questions how we learn and from whom.

What tickles your curiosity in the topics you are currently investigating? I'm curious what can be done through text. This simple and raw aesthetics inspires me. I'm inspired by uncreative writing where words are shared, reused, recycled, stolen, quoted, duplicated, gifted, appropriated, mimicked…

What else tickles my curiosity:

• Language of subway maps
• Detourment
• Disinfographics
• Maps to get lost
• Graphic collages
• Text in space
• A spatial poem
• A three dimensional manifesto
• Ongoing search for cracks
• Residents unfullfilled dreams, or not yet fullfilled
• Scripted city; city constantly offering guidance and instructions, directions, prohibitions
• Dialogue between a city and a passer-by
• Children's drawings
• Chalk drawing on pavements
• Space for play
• Furniture left in public space
• Paper paper paper ( I love print! but I'm also interested how to bring digital experience to a physical world)
• Engineering paper ( paper circuits)
• talents of ordinary things ( everything is programmable somehow)
• sketchbooks
• children's books

Uncreative writing

Words shared, riffed, culled, reused, recycled, swiped, stolen, quoted, lifted, duplicated, gifted, appropriated, mimicked

V-Street

One street, many different characters

Different narrative depending on the character

Different objects, words, observations revealed

Different context

Many scripts and actors

Continuosly overwriting many parts of this street

One street

Super structures

City as a platform for language

How does text manifest itself?

Urban environment to be read , analyzed and criticized as a text ( through daily routine of aimless drifting)

Roland Barthes and Michel de Certeau characterised the specific relationship between the city and the wanderer as a dialogue a discourse, or a form of speech

• Street are meant to be read

• Visualizing a subjective view of the city

• An attempt to collectively rewrite the city

• Revise the urban text to produce possible unsmooth spaces

• Scripted city ; city constantly signifying, offering guidance and instructions, directions, prohibitions

• Footnotes telling alternate stories

Applied utipianism

Magazines distributed in the streets Posters Performances in public squares Repetead mantra

• If the city was seen as the main text, it means that it could also be annotated .

(slogans, graffitis, subversive postres, clothes filled with slogans)

Platform to distribute language

Device for communication?

Footnotes reimagined as device for communication

Symphony ( soundscapes)

Reality becomes a graphic collage, a manifesto of dreams unfullfilled, or not yet fullfilled

Language of subway maps

Detourment Disinfographics Labirynts Maps to get lost Subversive cartography

New Babilon project, Constant nieuwehuis, (1956 - 1974)

Struggle for utopia

(para-architectural structures; newspaper kiosks, typographic pavilions, pop activist billboards, speakers tribunes

The city as language machine

A spatial poem A three dimensional manifesto

A constant source of graphic agitation and propaganda

Changes performed in the streets

Parades with slogans performed in tghe streets

Walk

Talk

Walk

Talk

Letters Gestures Newspapers

Naming exaclty what I see (list making)

Posters Garffittis Scripts

To humanize the city is to write it anew

Weaving another possible form of urban life

Scripted city

constantly signifying, navigating, prohibiting... dictating what kind of activities are allowed what is expected

Deviating from the script of the smooth city will, in many cases, cause some forms of social discomfort, from judgmental looks to police enforcement

As a result, practically nothing that deviates from the scripts of smooth city is granted the oppurtunity to develop in its own way or in its own pace, so things are reduced to sameness

~Rene Boer

UNSMOOTH / script open for interpretations

In the ‘Smooth City’, complexities are deliberately erased. Spaces and narratives are simplified to form a streamlined version of urban life. The city, with its highly scripted and predictable spaces, becomes easy to use and thus remains unquestioned. The opposite of smoothness, unsmoothness, does not necessarily equate to unscriptedness. Like a theatre script that results in a different play according to a different director and actors, the ‘Unsmooth City’ enables a variety of narratives and interpretations. As such, smoothness and unsmoothness can coexist and even enhance each other. ~Rene Boer

Scattered words

Words and concept to recycle, to see where I want to take the self-directed research

Value experiments and play

Have fun with the reader and use it to your own advantage

• The game of being a pedestrian - movement in public urban space.

• Meet Guy Debord, Michel de Certeau, and Roland Barthes

• Field of experimentation

• Going nowhere

• Wandering without any apparent purpose

• Performative encounter

• My body and the city

• Psychogeography

• Streets that hold my stories

• What is public, communal and private space

• How my neighbourhood has changed over time?

• Body as a vital tool

• Walking - an easy act to perform or to invite others to perform with you
• The story of front doors…..

• Doors to my house - a portal between a private and public space

• Its size, color, sound, a letterbox flap keys

• Behind the door

• Doors holding personal stories of people behind and all of them connecting to the street

• Inhabitants are members of a public space

• Inbetween spaces

• Stepping out through the front door

• Connectedness to a place

• corners and edgges that are not filled

• How public is our public space and whose body has the right of way to exist in thee zones, and whose does not

• Joy, fear, danger, freedom, grief, violence,
• Slowing down

• Openings for change

• Learning to unlearn with others

• Change the condition of learning
• Imagine ways to unlearn what has been codified

• In Barcelona tourism has afected entire areas of the city

• Critical position against a globalized and gentrified world

• Obsession for calculation
• Statistics
• Monitoring
• Progressive evaluation
• Control
• Self evaluation

• Monetization of experience

• Erased distinction between:

Private and public Work and leisure Spaces of production and home

/

• Higly competitive
• Making quantifiable ?

/

• Outside quatitative logic
• Outside of intrest
• Direct contact
• Marginality
• Unpredictability
• Failure
• Idleness
• Deliberate

• resistance against the myth of:

Efficiency Consumption Success

• Space for experimentation
• Space for care
• Space for being oneself
• Space for leisure
• Space for play
• Space for feeling safe
• Space for trust
• Space for extension of home

• A bench to look at each other
• Maps to get lost

annotated bibliography

Books and references and why they are important to me:

1. "Going Out - Walking, listening, soundmaking " " …engaging with shifting public spaces, natural environments, and the social and political sphere. Walking redefines notions of composer, performer, public, and music itself, while opening new modes of perception and action. ‘Going Out’ addresses these developments by exploring the relationship between walking, listening, and soundmaking in the arts—from the first soundwalks and itinerant performances in the 1960s to today’s manifold ambulatory projects…."

Its relevant for me to refer to this book because it touch on different ways to relate to our surroundings. By walking, observing, and listening, we shift into a particular mode of openness to space, and challenge our perception of the space.

2. In the coherence, we weep, Kameelah Rasheed Im very intrested what can be done with text. Therefore this reference is a crucial inspiration. Rasheed’s methodology explore possibilities of annotation as well as blurring and layering of knowledge and learning. I include this reference because it encourages me to write freely, without the expectation that it has to be final. In the Rasheed's work the exhibition and publication were integral parts. The exhibition was a way to perform the book. It showes me how writing and making go hand in hand.

3. John Cage's Song Books Vol 1 (1970)

https://monoskop.org/images/0/03/Cage_John_Song_Books_Volume_1.pdf This example serves as an inspiration for the format. It encourages me to continue with various experiments with typography and playing with words, scattering words and looking for connections… Additionaly it touch on an important aspect; a joy of making and spontaneos creation.

4. Rights of way , the body as witness in public space Being witnesses and activators of our cities./

Act of witnessing as an important component in providing meaning to our cities.

Combining interviews, essays, and photographs, the book touches on what is private and what is public, and who has the right to the public space.

5. Learning and Unlearning

6. Smooth City, Rene Boer "In the ‘Smooth City’, complexities are deliberately erased. Spaces and narratives are simplified to form a streamlined version of urban life. The city, with its highly scripted and predictable spaces, becomes easy to use and thus remains unquestioned. The opposite of smoothness, unsmoothness, does not necessarily equate to unscriptedness. Like a theatre script that results in a different play according to a different director and actors, the ‘Unsmooth City’ enables a variety of narratives and interpretations. As such, smoothness and unsmoothness can coexist and even enhance each other. " Rene Boer

This quote touches on exactly what I want to do this semester. I want to connect text work with urbanity and being in public space. I'm curious how the system of commands and prohibitions affects our behavior in the city. Power dynamics, design choices, fences, and cones affect how we move around the city and what is expected from us. How commands and scripts can be open to different interpretations and allow us to experience the city differently than usual, taking on a different role and relating to our surroundings from a different perspective.

7. Uncreative Writing (Kenneth Goldsmith)

8. Experimental Jetset - Superstructures (Notes on Experimental Jetset/ Vol. 2) This book explores the role of the city as a linguistic infrastructure, analyzed through the perspectives of four key movements: Constructivism, Situationist International, Provo, and Post-Punk. By delving into the interplay between urban environments and these influential movements, "Experimental Jetset - Superstructures" speaks about understanding of the city's role in shaping social and cultural narratives, and linguistic significance of urban spaces.

9. Przewodnik dla dryfjących a collection of situationist texts about the city edited by Mateusz Kwaterko and Paweł Krzaczkowski

This book is particularly relevant to my research as it delves into the foundational theories and practices of psychogeography and situationist urbanism, offering insights into how early psychogeographers of the Lettrist and Situationist Internationals reshaped our understanding of urban spaces.

From the initial explorations (and modifications) of urban spaces to revolutionary critiques of urban planning, this guide encapsulates the spirit and methodology of drifting through the city.

10. Common ground, Zuza Golińska