Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with 500 men
and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific
Ocean of one's being alone” (Thoreau
1992
).
Choragraphy as ontological mapping takes up this question of coordinating
material and spiritual wayfinding, exploring the shifting borders and thresholds
between inner and outer well-being.
Thoreau's passage is emblematic because it uses global exploration and mapping
as a metaphor for self-knowledge. The challenge of EPS choragraphy is that the
space-time for which it is responsible is a second-order construction, figurative
rather than literal, emerging through aesthetic formal manipulation of media. But
the promise of ubimage is to create an interface convergence of literal and figurative
dimensions of human experience.
Clive James gives an idea of the nature of figuration that renders intelligible
the nonphenomenal dimension absent from all maps. “Any poem that does not just
slide past us like all those thousands of others usually has an ignition point for
our attention. To take the most startling possible example, think of “Spring,” by
Gerard Manley Hopkins. Everyone knows the first line because everyone knows
the poem. “Nothing is so beautiful as Spring” is a line that hundreds of poets
could have written, and was probably designed to sound that way. Only two lines
further on, however, we get “Thrush's eggs look little low heavens” and we are
electrified. Eventually we see that the complete poem is fitting in its every part,
for its task of living up to the standards of thought and perception set by that
single flash of illumination. But we wouldn't even be checking up if we had not
been put on the alert by a lightning strike of an idea that goes beyond thought and
perception and into the area of metaphorical transformation that a poem demands.
A poem
is dependent on this ability to project you into a reality so drastically
rearranged that it makes your hair fizz even when it looks exactly like itself”
(James
2008
).
Poetry is a guide for how to introduce an ignition point into public space.
Two aspects of James's description are worth noting in our context: the figure of
electrification and the lightning strike of an image, resonant with electracy and
flash reason; that the version of reality made receivable through aesthetic indirection
is - like Plato's metaphysical dimension of chora, the interface between Being and
Becoming - beyond both thought and perception.
Tiananmen SquARed
, shown in Fig.
3.6
, is a two part augmented reality public
art project and memorial, dedicated human rights and democracy worldwide. The
project includes virtual replicas of the Goddess of Democracy and Tank Man from
the 1989 student uprising in Tiananmen Square. Both augmentations have been
placed in Beijing at the precise GPS coordinates where the original incidents took
place. The Goddess of Democracy was a 33-foot tall statue, constructed in only
4 days out of foam and papier-mâché over a metal armature. Students from an
art institute created the statue, placing it to face toward a huge picture of the late
Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong. Tanks later flattened the statue when
China's military crushed the protest. Tank Man was an anonymous man who stood
in front of a column of Chinese Type 59 tanks the morning after the Chinese military
:::