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Commissioned by Proboscis for 'Species of Spaces', published on their imprint, 'Diffusion', March 2003. http://www.diffusion.org.uk/quick_diffusion.html

FLY

The Page, slammed together, tight shut, crushes the wings, squashes the body flat; The Bed, home to the related Order of Phthiraptera feeding on specks of skin-dust, threatens to entrap with its loose folds; The Bedroom, the cruel glare from the windows precipitating a head-on with the brittle pane; Even at the scale of the Apartment, the walls still close in, the space defined physically impermeable. The Street or Neighbourhood, while offering apparent freedom of movement, still enclose with their rigid definition. Town, Countryside, Country, Europe, The World, Space. There is no escape from encapsulation.

Not only is it destined to be eaten by the many species of living thing defined by the great Zoologists, the Fly is also more likely, due to its small size, to be engulfed by any number of the spaces intimately detailed by George Perec. 1

As with the systematic classifications developed by Lineaus and others, this nested 'Species of Spaces' defines a clear, hierarchical structure that contains ever y object that can be named. From such slight means, every space is suggested.

These taxonomies as information systems, have a compulsion to reach their ideal state. Obser ve, describe and analyze. Conforming every space into to a position allocated within their bifurcating structure, defining the possible scope of knowledge.

SPIDER

In effect, in motion, objects do not sit neatly in their place: once in the world, while bearing some relation to their elders and siblings, they have a tendency to form new relationships, crossing blood-lines. 2

In 'Time and the Hunter', Calvino 3 narrates the driver being chased through the streets, constantly monitoring the position between his vehicle and that of his adversary, it is of no consequence where they are within the road system that defines their absolute position. All that matters is the relationship between objects: the car encloses the driver; the car/driver monsters bred of interspecies coupling, have a relationship to each other.

They become vectors, enamoured only with their immediate mutual associate.

BIRD

For Michael R. Curry 4, these are raster and vector spaces respectively: pixels on a screen, or points arranged relative to each other: Newtonian and Alexandrian spaces 5.

However dissimilar these approaches may appear, these are both primarily mathematical spaces 6 and bear a strong and reciprocal relationship to the software applications used in the planning and definition of our urban spaces. Their status bolstered by Geographical Information Systems, where objects are defined primarily as a means to construct a geometrical space, they determine and are determined by the imposition of their spatiality over and above any idea of place. From now on, spaces can never be unique or singular for those who inhabit them. The town planner makes every effort to reduce the historical and anthropological richness 7 to a coordinate 8, erasing place through their use of new technologies, imposing a 'space of flows' into the former 'space of places.' 9

CAT

Some cities afford a view of this apparently absolute Newtonian space: stand on any of the hilltops that give Edinburgh its distinct topographical characteristic and there you are, high above the granite streets; seduced, as had De Certeau once been by the view from the twin towers of the WTC 10. The hand that populates the system with objects, with species, with entries into the database, is also that which constructs the system. In doing so, it describes an absolute space, suggesting a domain conquered in advance of experience. This is a space that is perfectly visible: nothing is hidden; it can be imagined with ease: ideal, neat, logical. This is a system determined from outside and above: space as management.

On other occasions, it's the approach to the city that opens this vista: in amongst. Wolfgang Tilmans' chic post-heroin, pre-Millennium snapshots, gathered in 'View from Above' 11, several views from airplane windows project the traveller down into the throng. At this moment, at the end of our journey, knowing is confused with understanding. While buildings are no longer pattern and people not yet discernable, we are there but we are not yet there.

Sometimes it is as if, (and as according to Kevin Lynch 12) we're compelled to gain a view of an absolute space before we believe that we fully understand our urban environment: being in the city, being familiar with a single place is a kind of infantile stage; understanding the routes between places just an awkward adolescence we all have to go through before acquiring a mature view of the world. Ultimately we can form our 'Image of the City' only when we can imagine the city from above. Mapped: objects positioned on a plane, logged as coordinates in an absolute space. Wim Wenders 13 reminds us of this desire to see everything, to climb out of the smog: having passed the lone but all-seeing, shouting-man on the road-bridge, hurling spite and vengeance onto the stream of traffic below, Travis makes his way to the top of the billboard, from where it all becomes clear: decisions can be made, freed from all obscuring detail. Only with distance can we get the picture. Our expectation is for nothing less than the sublime 14.

DOG

It's easy to imagine why there are so many public art and TV creative development projects that promote the use of Global Positioning Systems right now: within the parameters of a Geographical Information System, the aim is to populate a system with coordinates, whether absolute or relative; these projects exist to log position above all else and so, activities that are social or private, that make space into place 15 are denied. It cannot conform. In actuality, it confounds.

If we take it as given that you can capture either position or movement, but never both, with this desire to gather positional data above all else, we must necessarily preclude any experience of motion.

On a train from Brussels to Amsterdam: outside, in the Countryside, the snow falls whether Belgique or Nederland. My body sedentary, reflected in the mirrored glass by the parlour lighting of the Thalys. I see myself, still, in the landscape 16. My movement through space is confirmed only when three armed Netherlands Police ask me for my passport. My body, in motion activates this space between.

COBRA

S TDC
DK TDC
S Vodaphone
Orange

Proximus
Base
B MobiStar

Orange NL

Once, not so very long ago, it was possible for a group of artists 17, in their collaboration across borders, to redefine City, Region and Nation State with one simple acronym. Now it's the telecommunication companies that are doing the advanced-thinking for us, battling-it-out on your handset, jostling each other for command of your communications on their mobile phone networks.

COW

The bells of Notre Dame du Finistere on Rue Neuve, Brussels, strike on the quarter-hour. In the mornings the smell of the brioche finds its way up to my apartment from the cafe next door. One night, the sound of a lone Flemish voice singing a slurred 'Happy Birthday'. A landmark, a moment of recognition, and an orientation provided by something familiar 18.

From these everyday things I can imagine a world outside from, in the street, in the neighbourhood.

Lifting my eyes from the small screen of my PDA, swinging my legs from the Bed to the floor know that I am in the room. I apprehend it. I understand what it is to be here and to operate on this space. In search of the apartment, I loose sight of the apartment. I make sense of it not with my body but with reliance on the knowledge that I was once in another room. There being more than one room, without having opened the door onto the hallway, I know that I'm enclosed by the walls that define the apartment. But already I 'm making believe. I no longer sense the whole space. Rather, I now understand the space as a sequence of movements as my body moves in-between spaces. At this moment of realization, the further, more expansive enclosing spaces loose their meaning. All I know is the sensation of being in motion.

HORSE

From central Brussels to the Gare du Midi, an immense array of paving types lay before us. From smooth, marbled Mall-paving in light-tones, we sense the legions of pan-European clothing stores who will buy leases here. Slippery when wet, our safe havens will be in the foyers and aisles of Zara and Hennes and Diesel and Benetton.

Out of the central zone, across the Opera Place: small, rough granite sets arranged in intersecting arches. The same can be found in Amsterdam, in Copenhagen, in Cardiff, in every Euro Capital, wherever regeneration is aimed primarily at luring the tourist trade into formally disquieting quarters. Then, blank, assured, subtly scored average blocks lining the pavements which run alongside the specialist food shops. Quality. When this runs out, the broken tiles, and wild, undulating stable paving reveals seismic shifts in use of the tired hotel district as it runs towards the railway station. Now meeting place for Arabic tradesmen and a makeshift parking lot, the piss-stains and sunken, broken paving tell of hastily reinstated boulevards, literally with no foundation; a knee-jerk reliance on the faked grandeur of the straight-track driven through a Medieval city. Walking down any street: feel the pinch across the instep, toes spreading as your full weight is transmitted through to the pavement beneath your feet.

The grip at your heel lessens, increasing the strain at your ankle. You are situated, grounded, in the moment. Walking without privilege, as an everyday practice 19, the body inherently part of perception. It is both object and subject, there's no room for distance or for the abstraction of this inhabited 'anthropological' space into 'geometrical' 20 space. Places, as they are produced 21, reveal to us their stories, as we tell ours.

OLD LADY

The children's rhyme 'I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly' 22, in its description of the ruthless logic of the food-chain, suggests an entire system of classification: listing only Orders, it is for us to imagine particular Species and the interactions between and across them. Not only is an absolute space described, but also one of relationships. In effect, in our specialized, speciated version of the tale, we describe a network of interactions between particular objects across a hierarchy. Ultimately, it is the Old Lady that is most richly linked to other objects. Her propensity to devour multiple Zoological Orders makes her the hub of activity. In effect, the network turns hierarchy at this point: all species bow to her voracious eating habits. From this abstract model that describes the interaction of structure and agency, there's the possibility that the seemingly inert and over-determining hierarchical structure can be re-imagined, made useful, (even if only to produce 'monsters' 23).

Space becomes mutable, maleable. The rigid space of the box is superceded by those that fold: this is 'the logic of sacks' 24 and of spaces that can mutually enclose and be enclosed, their properties fuzzy and far from dialogic 25. With the high risk of precipitating 'the fear of leaking' 26 these theories of space and place are unlikely to be bedtime reading at your local council planning office 27.

It is in moving through the city, walking, talking, putting bodies and words in motion, that activates the mutability of urban space. It liberates overplanned, over-bearing places from their fateful stasis. Places open up to new possibilities. The rigid logic of consumption yields to play, conflict, love...

As Perec 28 himself proclaims, it is life that is lived between these spaces.

org chart with coffee cup stain

Notes & References

1. George Perec, Species of Spaces and other pieces, (London: Penguin, 1997)
2. There has recently (February/March 2003) been a strong lobby against the Ruddy Duck, a species that
often mates with 'native' species. See Britain Declares Open Season on the Ruddy Duck (Online
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=2316332 , March 3rd 2003)
3. Italo Calvino, Time and the Hunter, (London: Picador, 1969)
4. Michel R. Curry, Digital Earth, Convergence, And The Discursive Foundations Of Geographic Information
Systems, (Los Angeles: University of California, 2000)
5. see Curry (2000) for expansive discussion of the different forms mathematical spaces described by both
Isaac Newton and Christopher Alexander.
6. "...a traditional formula" according to Lefebvre. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell Ltd.,1991)
7. Marc AugŽ, Non-Places: an Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, (London & New York:
Verso, 1995)
8. Horkheimer and Adorno cited in Michel R. Curry, Discursive Displacement And The Seminal Ambiguity Of
Space And Place, in The Handbook of New Media, Leah, Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone (eds.). (London:
Sage Publications, 2002.) In which Curry also details the slippery concepts of space and place, noting how
they are often used imprecisely and often as synonymously. (I tried, but take this text as a case in point.)
9. Manuel Castells, The Infomational City (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1989)
10. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkely & Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1884)
11. See the video-interview with the artist that accompanies Wolfgang Tilmans' touring exhibition, View From
Above, (Copenhagen, February 2003)
12. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge & London: The MIT Press, 1960)
13. Wim Wnders, (dir) Paris, Texas (Berlin & Paris: Road Movies Filmproduktion & Argos Films, 1984)
14. Alain De Botton, The Art of Travel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002) p157 On the Sublime.
15. I'm here adopting De Certeau's notion of space and place: see Michel De Certeau, The Practice of
Everyday Life (Berkely & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1884)
16. Marc AugŽ, Ibid.
17. See (for example) Blazwick, An Endless Adventure... An Endless Passion... (London: Verso, 1989)
18. Marc AugŽ, Ibid.
19. see Ian Buchanan Michel De Certeau: Cultural Theorist, (London: SAGE, 2000) p.113 for an De
Certeau's account of the everyday practice of walking in relation to that of Baudlaire and Benjamin's Flanur.
20. Merleau-Ponty cited in De Certeau, 1984
21. Henri Lefebvre, Ibid.
22. Nadine Bernard Westcott, I Know an old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly, (Little, Brown & Co., 1988). see
http://www.thenamelocator.com/r049.html for transcription.
23. Italo Calvino, Time and the Hunter, (London: Picador, 1969)
24. Yve Lomax, The Point Is Not So Simple Nor The Line For Pure Nor The Space So Unified: Susan
Trangmar's Installations and Reading Michel Serres' Rome (London: Dash Gallery, 1994)
25. Yve Lomax Ibid.
26. Anonymous, (let me know if you know who you are!), Intimate Technologies: conference proceedings,
2002. Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada.
27. If they are bedtime reading, then sleep tight.
28. Perec, Ibid.
SPECIES OF SPACES
OUT OF OUR TREE
Simon Pope
www.diffusion.org.uk
Series Editors: Giles Lane & Alice Angus
(c) Proboscis & Simon Pope
First published by Proboscis in 2003.
All rights reserved. Free
ISBN: 1 901540 34 0
British Library Catalaloguing-in-publication data:
a catalogue record for this publication is available
at the British Library
DIFFUSION eBook design by:
Nima Falatoori (www.NMoDesign.co.uk)
Paul Farrington (www.tonne.org.uk)
This publication is one of a series of essays commissioned by Proboscis for the series SPECIES OF SPACES
- inspired by and in homage to Georges Perec's eponymous book. The series contemplates how we, in the
contemporary world of the twenty-first century, occupy space - the virtual and physical, emotional and social
- what Perec called the "infra-ordinary". SPECIES OF SPACES aims to radically question the trajectory of
contemporary urban existence, intervening in current debates on how the virtual and the physical relate to
each other, and how technological advances affect cultural and social structures.
Supported by Arts Council England, London.
This publication is designed to be freely available to download and print out. Under no circumstances should
any version of this publication, whether print or electronic, be sold by any third party without prior permission
in writing from the publisher.