limit, map, displacement, non-site
Rather than agonizing over my perpetual confusion about the room and the universe, I am trying to define what is it exactly I'm trying to get out of the idea of a limit and here are some of the reference I've been looking at...
Limit vs.Territory
Containment as graft (from Bucky's dome over Manhattan)
or
Displaced containment (from Synecdoche New York)
And the cyclical fate of a map as limit:
"'Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.' Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictions."
--- Jose Louis Borges
A map of the warehouse with a stage set of a warehouse that contains a set of a warehouse that houses 1:1 parts of New York City. Example of nested limits:
Map that gives territory (situations and physical experience) a confinement within which relational spaces are synthesised.
Since the city is already a mutable, superposed and diffuse and not always physical entity, and it cannot be understood from the classic perspective, perhaps through a confinement (of a format) one can begin to construct its elusive inhabitations.
"We have the tools, we make the map, tattoo the city. Everything is the same operation. A singular operation about the construction of the city and the interpretation of worlds." Jose Morales
Can map be a room from which territory is constructed - and not the other way around?
From Robert Smithson's 'Mapping Dislocations', 1967
Smithson's use of topographic maps from that project led him to develop a small but focused body of works based on his notions of mapping as fictive sites that pre-figured his sculptures called nonsites.
So here we go, I'm back to the wonderful world of NON-SITE that I brought upon myself through Cabaret Voltaire and its NO-BOX!
