Automatic update, changed: las.quotes.cities.md

pages/las.quotes.cities.md

@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@
 >   The Internet, which I think of as a sort of meta-city, has made it possible for people who don't live in cities to master areas of expertise that previously required residence in a city, but I think it's still a faith in concentrated choice that drives migration to cities.
 
 ## Polis - Patocka
-![[patocka.polis.png.annotations]]
+![[patocka.polis.png.annotations]]/[[patocka.polis.png.annotations]]
 
 
 ## Mundaneum
@@ -35,8 +35,34 @@
 
 
 ## [[people.VilemFlusser]]
-- city as wave thru...
-- [[flusser.odsubjektukprojektu]]
+### City as wave through
+> When it comes to cities, we should learn to think topographically rather
+than geographically and see the city not as a geographical place, but rather
+as a flection in a field. This is not a comfortable undertaking, as it involves one of those notorious paradigm shifts. When we were forced to see geography as the surface of a globe rather than as the description of a flat area, we ran into problems: Do the occupants of the southern hemisphere stand on their heads?
+
+> The three spaces of the city intermingle with one another today like fuzzy sets. The public space pushes into the private thanks to cable (as in the case of television). Private space pushes into public thanks to machines (like cars). The city really no longer contains distinct private and public spaces, and the theoretical space is so thoroughly integrated into both that it is no longer recognizable because it has changed so much. Theory means contemplativeness, and it is sacred because it rises above the flow of commerce. From this we get the weekend, vacation, retirement, and unemployment.
+
+> We are those who are individuals who come together in the city. The old
+image of the city rests upon this image of humanity. This image of humanity
+has become unsuitable. Everything is divisible, and there can be no
+individual. Not only can atoms be split into particles but so can all mental
+objects; actions become “aktomes,” decisions become “dezidemes,” per-
+ceptions become stimulations, representations become pixels.
+
+> A striking aspect of this image of the city, when one has mobilized the
+necessary imagination for it, is its immateriality. In this image there are
+neither houses nor squares nor temples that are recognizable, rather only a
+network of wires, a confusion of cables.
+
+> We must stop wanting to recognize ourselves and others and instead seek
+to recognize others and to find ourselves in them again. We must break out
+of the capsule of the self and draw ourselves into concrete intersubjectivity.
+We must become projects out of subjects. The new city would be a projec-
+tion of projects among human beings. That sounds utopic, which it cer-
+tainly is, because the new city is not geographically locatable; on the
+contrary, it is everywhere where humans open up to one another. But pre-
+cisely because it sounds utopic it is realistic.
+### [[flusser.odsubjektukprojektu]]
 
 ### [[1000p]] subplot
 ![[Pasted image 20211211235108.png]]
@@ -48,7 +74,36 @@
 - http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/2
 - http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/87
 - Formulary for a New Urbanism !!!
-		
+
+### theory of derive
+> In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
+
+>Today the different unities of atmosphere and of dwellings are not precisely marked off, but are surrounded by more or less extended and indistinct bordering regions. The most general change that dérive experience leads to proposing is the constant diminution of these border regions, up to the point of their complete suppression. 
+>
+> Within architecture itself, the taste for dériving tends to promote all sorts of new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction. Thus in March 1955 the press reported the construction in New York of a building in which one can see the first signs of an opportunity to dérive inside an apartment: 
+>
+> “The apartments of the helicoidal building will be shaped like slices of cake. One will be able to enlarge or reduce them by shifting movable partitions. The half-floor gradations avoid limiting the number of rooms, since the tenant can request the use of the adjacent section on either upper or lower levels. With this setup three four-room apartments can be transformed into one twelve-room apartment in less than six hours.”
+
+### Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography
+>  The word _psychogeography,_ suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for the phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953, is not too inappropriate. It does not contradict the materialist perspective of the conditioning of life and thought by objective nature. Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. _Psychogeography_ could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The adjective _psychogeographical,_ retaining a rather pleasing vagueness, can thus be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and even more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery.
+
+>   But from any standpoint other than that of police control, Haussmann's Paris is a city built by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Today urbanism's main problem is ensuring the smooth circulation of a rapidly increasing quantity of motor vehicles. We might be justified in thinking that a future urbanism will also apply itself to no less utilitarian projects that will give the greatest consideration to psychogeographical possibilities.
+
+>  The revolutionary transformation of the world, of all aspects of the world, will confirm all the dreams of abundance. The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places--all this seems to be neglected. In any case it is never envisaged as depending on causes that can be uncovered by careful analysis turned to account. People are quite aware that some neighborhoods are sad and others pleasant. But they generally simply assume elegant streets cause a feeling of satisfaction and that poor street are depressing, and let it go at that. In fact, the variety of possible combinations of ambiances, analogous to the blending of pure chemicals in an infinite number of mixtures, gives rise to feelings as differentiated and complex as any other form of spectacle can evoke. The slightest demystified investigation reveals that the qualitatively or quantitatively different influences of diverse urban decors cannot be determined solely on the basis of the era or architectural style, much less on the basis of housing conditions.
+
+> Certain of Chirico's paintings, which are clearly provoked by architecturally originated sensations, exert in turn an effect on their objective base to the point of transforming it: they tend themselves to become blueprints or models. Disquieting neighborhoods of arcades could one day carry on and fulfill the allure of these works. 
+>
+> I scarcely know of anything but those two harbors at dusk painted by Claude Lorrain--which are at the Louvre and which juxtapose extremely dissimilar urban ambiances--that can rival in beauty the Paris metro maps. It will be understood that in speaking here of beauty I don't have in mind plastic beauty--the new beauty can only be beauty of situation--but simply the particularly moving presentation, in both cases, of a _sum of possibilities._
+
+> For example, in the preceding issue of this journal Marien proposed that when global resources have ceased to be squandered on the irrational enterprises that are imposed on us today, all the equestrian statues of all the cities of the world be assembled in a single desert. This would offer to the passersby--the future belongs to them--the spectacle of an artificial cavalry charge, which could even be dedicated to the memory of the greatest massacrers of history, from Tamerlane to Ridgway. Here we see reappear one of the main demands of this generation: educative value. 
+
+### Formulary for a New Urbanism
+
+>  All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a _closed_ landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain _shifting_ angles, certain _receding_ perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.
+
+>  Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning; night and summer are losing their charm and dawn is disappearing. The man of the cities thinks he has escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of his dream life. The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it.
+
+>   Architecture is the simplest means of _articulating_ time and space, of _modulating_ reality, of engendering dreams. It is a matter not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in realizing them.
 ## [[people.WalterBenjamin]]	
 
 ### arcade project
@@ -70,6 +125,11 @@
 
 ### [[people.ClaudeBragdon]]
 
+### flatline constructs
+
+> 72. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 28 Compare this passage from Abstraction and Empathy. “In the Ionic temple and the architectural development ensuing upon it the purely constructional skeleton, which is based solely the laws of matter […] was guided over into the more friendly and agreeable life of the organic, and purely mechanical functions became organic in their effect. The criterion of the organic is always the harmonious, always the balanced, the inwardly calm into whose movement and rhythm we can without difficulty flow with the vital sensation of our organisms. In absolute antithesis to the Greek idea of architecture, we have the, on the other hand, the Egyptian pyramid, which calls a halt to our empathy impulse and presents itself to us as a purely crystalline substance. A third possibility now confronts us in the Gothic cathedral, which indeed operates with abstract values, but nonetheless directs an extremely strong and forcible appeal to our capacity for empathy.
+Here, however, constructional relations are not illumined by a feeling for the organic, as is the process in Greek temple building, but purely mechanical relationships of forces are brought to view per se, and in addition these relationships of forces are intensified to the maximum in their tendency to movement and in their content by a power of empathy that extends to the abstract. It is not the life of an organism which we see before us, but that of mechanism. No organic harmony surrounds the feeling of reverence toward the world, but an ever growing and self-intensifying restless striving without deliverance sweeps the inwardly disharmonious psyche away with it in an extravagant ecstasy, into fervent excelsior.” (115
+
 ## Adjacent
 - [[concepts.map]]
 - [[concepts.topology]]