Juul Ida (van der) Zandt

Visual Essay

Self Tracing part of Sense of Space (S.O.S.)

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"To know how to write, you must know how to read, and to know how to read, you must know how to live" (Debord, 1998)

Wandering: expanding your sense of freedom in a place where the ordinary is displaced (Zandt, 2022).

Imagine you are going on an adventure to explore the unknown, without any digital devices you can potentially use. Which direction are you going to take?

You are about to enter an anonymous urban landscape. A smoking city that features spacious streets, grey architecture and plenty of commotion from whizzing sirens are passing by. The people, young and elderly, who are walking across the streets, seem to be in a hurry. The beautiful contradictions in the city, stimulates your sense of space within your physical surroundings. It is the smell of a baker who is taking fresh bread out of the oven, hungry rats who are looking for tasty leftovers, and the smell of roasted coffee beans wafting down the street. You notice a long line of cyclists, waiting for the green light on their way to work, you wonder.

These urban scenes are familiar to you. While growing up, you did not gain lots of experience by walking through nature. As long as you can remember, you have been walking more frequently past shops, instead of walking through the greenery. Since having a car in the city is a form of luxury, you tend to either use public transportation, your bicycle or you decide to go by foot. You dream of the most efficient shortcuts and from the top of your head, you know the exact timetable you have to use within public transportation. In spite of these daily scenes, there is a curiosity rising in you, for the unknown in a city.

You identify yourself as a curious and adventurous person. Your curiosity is triggered and framed within the possibilities of social algorithms and contemporary technologies. You are finding yourself in the digital era, where a life without a smartphone and the internet is hard to imagine.

On a daily base you mobilise in this own created familiar bubble. Within this routine, only a few things caught your attention. You focus on the practical and physical motion. The familiar. Unlike today, your sense of space is being tested. Despite your urban knowledge and skills for the most efficient shortcuts, you feel alienated to your surroundings.

Today is a grey winter day, but mentally it feels like a wet autumn day. You wonder if other people can not use their phones and the internet too. You put your phone away and think about how people used to plan their routes back in the days. As a child, you remember your summer holidays, when people still used physical road maps (Fig. la and lb). These maps were regularly turned, tilted and later placed on the handlebars of the car. It had something adventurous about it. Endlessly, exploring the map for your desired location, determining the direction, then missing a turn, sighing, and later ending up in a nice spot, at least, that is what you have hoped. As soon as you succeeded, it boosted an extra good feeling.

Fig. 1a Old Mercator Map

Fig. 1b New Mercator Map

Despite the sense of freedom, the route that you follow moves towards a certain objective. You move from place A to B as short and as fast as possible. Again, typically of the era in which you live; time is precious, so the navigation system always calculates the shortest possible route for you. In the time of the Ancient Greeks, routes were constructed exactly as the opposite. They did not just focus on the shortest route, they drew observations based on explorers and made mathematical calculations (Fig. 2). "Wonder is the beginning of wisdom" (Socrates, z.d.).

Fig. 2 Babylonian Map

You let yourself move through the flows of the wind. As today you can not count on Google Maps, which adjusts, rotates and connects the physical surroundings for you, this is the moment when the navigating positions are twisted. You are assigned to be the receiver who adjusts and rotates, while the city is positioned as the sender of data. “As you have seen depending on where you are on Earth, you do not always look at the same maps. We do not represent the world ourselves in it in the same way: a question of scale geopolitical ambition, and respect for international law” (Mapping the World [ARTE], 2021). The common data of a city is adapted in a language that you do not understand at first: an alienation of recognition points. Words combined with blank signs make you feel disoriented. You get confused and wonder where you are. Every step you take, the environment seems to become richer in imagination, without any logic. "Through the Unknown, we will find the New" (Baudelaire, z.d.). Strolling down the city, you continue your route. You realise that there is nothing left to do, so you surrender yourself in this absurd environment. "To forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss" (Solnit, 2017).

An older couple walks towards your direction. It is a lady, dressed in a red coat, leather shoes and dyed brown hair, probably to mask her grey hair. The man next to her, probably her partner, in sporty shoes, wearing a cap and holding an umbrella. They chat and laugh the whole time, and refuse to let their current mood be affected by the bad weather. The moment when you start speaking to them, you experience the difficulties of a language barrier. You recognise the words, but the sentence structure makes you feel confused. While asking for directions, you make hand gestures to try and make yourself understandable. The couple looks at each other, thinks, and both say something else. The lady points to the left and directs you towards the shape of a triangle. The man laughs in silence, and points to the exact other way, while advising you to follow the colour red. Despite the different routes they assign you to, there is no disagreement. They both bring the direction across in a pleasant and inviting way. "It does not matter if the message is clear. It matters how is the message said" (Fig. 3) (Prouvost, 2019). Which direction do you decide to follow?

Fig. 3 Laure Prouvost

You make your decision to not follow either one of them and meander on. Meanwhile, the metres start rising, you see suspiciously many triangular shapes and red elements. Unconsciously, these two elements have influenced your route. You walk towards the park and decide to take a break on the bench located by the oak tree. A blue supermarket bag blows your way. Every single minute that is passing by, the park is getting more crowded with people who are making music and dance together. Different groups mingle, and several circles emerge with different musical styles; a guy who beat-boxes, another man who puts his drum kit on a trailer and a woman who sings a song with complete conviction.

"The crowd is its element, like the air is to the bird and the water to the fish. To become one with the crowd, that is his passion and his profession. For the perfect flâneur, the passionate observer, it is an immense pleasure to be in the crowd, in the undulation, the movement, the fleeting and infinite. To be out of doors and yet feel at home everywhere; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world and yet remain hidden from the world" (Baudelaire, z.d.).

A petite blonde woman, around thirty years old, whom you had noticed earlier with the drumming man, hops into your direction. Just before she stands in front of you, she makes a big smash. She hoists herself up and reach out to her colorful pencils that she is pointing to you. Surprisingly, she asks you to colour along and on her. First, she starts coloring her own arms, followed by the bench on which you are sitting, and later on, she tries to colour the sand. You decide to draw the fallen leaves from the tree by coloring lines. As the blonde woman can not stand still for more than two seconds, she shakes and hops again. It reminds you of the American installation and video artist Aitken Dough, who tells in his video Electric Earth (2016): “A lot of times I dance so fast that I become what is around me" (Fig. 4). You smile and get up to leave the park. Do you decide to walk through the crowd to reach the other side of the park, or do you decide to go through the gate which is located on your left?

Fig. 4 Aitken Dough

You decide to walk through the crowd, pass the woman who sings the one song that you have heard before. After minutes of wandering, it starts to drizzle softly. Faster than you have eventually hoped, you become moody due to the changing weather circumstances.

The streets turn dramatically grey which affect your positivity. You become impatient and you can not wait to reach your final destination. Mentally, the massive buildings seem to become more dominant in your visual surroundings. The people who are passing by, are again in such a rush. You take over their hurry, and start to think that you recognise a supermarket by the end of the street. You, only, do not remember whether you have passed by it before, or you think you recognise it by its blue colour. You feel restless and the urge to walk faster and faster. The only thing that goes through your mind is, keep on going, fast and faster, until you are almost running. Sweat is dripping from the top of your forehead.

After a few intense minutes, you realise that you are moving within circles. "Lost is a cognitive state. Your internal map has become detached from the external world, and nothing in your spatial memory matches what you see. But at its core, it is an emotional state. It delivers a psychic double whammy: Not only are you stricken with fear, you also lose your ability to reason. You suffer what neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls a hostile takeover of consciousness by emotion" (Bond, 2020). Besides ancient mythologies and modern fairy tales where children get lost in a forest, in reality you also face the unpleasant events within such a journey. According to Canadian writer Susanna Moodie: "Getting lost was one of the most common causes of death among the children of European settlers in the North American wilderness in the 18th and 19th centuries" (Bond, 2020). Fortunately, you are no longer a child anymore so you are trying to consciously control your panic attack and your way of breathing. You take the time to observe your surroundings another time, over and over again. Down the streets, you see a group of people taking the stairs. Do you decide to follow them or do you decide to walk towards the same direction as the man with the white shepherd?

You decide to follow the people who are taking down the stairs. It is a bustling place, filled with all kinds of living creatures. You pass the people on your left and right. In front of your feet, rats and mice are running over each other onto a bulging rubbish bin that is located at the end of the cube. Despite this dark and musty underground place which is lit by fluorescent tubes, you become calmer. You are moving forward, even though you are not physically moving. Because you do not have to consciously focus on your physical movement, you notice many different sense of spaces in just a few square metres; you are surrounded with a place filled with many small square tiles, an old man who is probably with his grandson, a girl who is playing the violin, and in front of you, someone who is reading the book Absurd Abundance by Micheal Foley. Although you know it is temporary, you feel connected with the people that surround you. The French anthropologist Marc Augé named this place after a `Non-place' (2009): “An anthropological space of transience where people remain anonymous, and which does not have enough meaning to be considered places' in its anthropological definition". According to Augé, an anthropological ‘place’, which describes the opposite of a 'non-place', reinforces your identity and increases a sense of belonging. This non-place gives you a pleasant feeling of anonymity. You do not have to worry what others might think of you. At the same time, there is little attention for one and other, that also makes you feel a bit lonely. You decide to get off at the next stop.

You walk up the stairs, towards the open air. The air turned bright again, and the smell of rubbish and smog has subsided. Even though, you do not know exactly where you are, you feel comfortable in your surroundings and continue your journey while focussing on colour, shape and direction. According to the French cartographer and theorist Jacques Bertin (1967), these three elements are part of a, in total six terms, which visualises information as clearly as possible (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5 Semiology of Graphics

You walk straight ahead, along the pavement towards a green brick wall. The crane, with its triangular shapes, draws your attention and you decide to move forward into that direction. A leaf which blows through the direction by the wind, makes you wanting to following it to the left. You start seeing the weirdness of what surrounds you, but in this period of time, you are more aware of your own observations. According to philosophy of Taoism: "The things around you, everything you perceive, all ideas and concepts are distorted by our own interpretations and are reflections of what you feel. The aim of the study of Taoism is to remove those influences" (Door het hart van China in de klas [NPO], 2018). Incorporating this philosophy in your mind, you try to wander around the city and time as objectively as possible. You are almost moving and dancing within a choreography which represents the feeling of being mentally and physically lost.

Time flies and you realise you are lost in time. "Your mind that normally is always busy with reflections, chaotic thoughts, incoherent musings, alternates with meditative moments. Daydreams. These are then interrupted or postponed by the attention demanded by the surroundings, the city" (De Kuyper, z.d.).This back to basic reset, where you experienced a different sense of freedom through wandering, has brought more positive than you initially would have thought. You have been able to expand your limits, without putting too much effort into it. By stimulating different triggers in your brain, you have connected the routes to a certain memory. By creating those memories, you noticed the beauty of the non-digital world. You became aware of your position in your physical surrounding, which boosts excitement and fear, at the same time. The contrast of emotions makes you feel alive, and enables you to reflect on your own personal experience and the external influence of your surroundings.

Wandering through your sense of space, you have create a more open mind, filled with new experiences, that made the ordinary feel unfamiliar again. Instead of focussing on the pavement, you are focussing on your surroundings. Along the cozy houses down the streets, made from brick and wood, you smell the prevailing smell of fresh bread and coffee beans. You have experienced another perception on losing yourself in a physical and mental way. Beside a clear mind, your mind is filled with inspiration, and you are about to continue your day.

So dear wanderer, which direction do you decide to take?

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