place
Pointing
"Originally I marked these places, quite literally. I laid a small concrete block flush to the ground at the place where I was standing and stretched a stainless steel piano wire out toward the horizon. It might go off a mile; it simply pointed in a direction. And that was the piece."
The ritualized use of a place
The association of comfort with people and place are reinforced by the ritualized use of a place. Using a place at a set time and in a specific manner creates a constancy as dependable as the place itself. It establishes, in time and behavior, a definition of place as strong as any architectural spatial definition, such as an aedicula, might be. Ritualized use can do more than reinforce the affection for a place. Through ritual, a place becomes an essential element in the customs of a people.
Touring SoHo
SoHo has, however, become part of a tourist archipelago where the definition of place falls into a set of increasingly generic categories. The act of touring devolves less on the particulars of geography than on the consumption of a set of prepackaged lifestyles, defined by a fixed array of goods and services. Almost every city in America now boasts a SoHo equivalent.
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness
Places I will never go
There are places I will never go. Due to laziness or boredom, or premature fatigue. But there are also landscapes or buildings I should have visited a long time ago. This text reviews those possible places. All of them are part of my story, and they are places I am familiar with in one way or another.
To become completely lost
To become completely lost is perhaps a rather rare experience for most people in the modern city. We are supported by the presence of others and by special way-finding devices: maps, street numbers, route signs, bus placards. But let the mishap of disorientation once occur, and the sense of anxiety and even terror that accompanies it reveals to us how closely it is linked to our sense of balance and well-being. The very word "lost" in our language means much more than simple geographical uncertainty; it carries overtones of utter disaster.
On the edge of something else
The most common response to the question of symbolism was nothing in the city at all, but rather the sight of the New York City skyline across the river. Much of the characteristic feeling for Jersey City seemed to be that it was a place on the edge of something else.
Introverts and extroverts
Some regions are introvert, turned in upon themselves with little reference to the city outside them, such as Boston's North End or Chinatown. Others may be extrovert, turned outward and connected to surrounding elements. The common visibly touches neighboring regions, despite its inner path confusions.
The Image of the City
A Book by Kevin Lynch- To become completely lost
- Apparency
- On the edge of something else
- Nothing there, after all
- Paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks
The Third Way
An Article by Kevin KellyBut all the civilized cities of the world were also filled with third places that people loved. Not quite private, not quite public, these third places were intimate but open to anyone. Like settling down at a table at a cafe. It felt like your space, but you were not the landlord. They were public, open spaces that you could “own” for a while.
…We need a new third category of work — something between “employee” and “not an employee”—that encompasses digital gig laborers. AirBnB is neither a hotel, nor a private resident. It is a third thing, and we need to create a new category to deal with it…This is the era of the third way.
On Memory Palaces & Visual Computation
An Essay by Taulant SulkoI now use Are.na as a Memory Palace, separating my channels into rooms. For example, I have a channel that I call the Computation Room. It’s pretty generic and includes any type of block that relates to computation.
If I notice a pattern in the computation room I create a more specific channel in that room. I think of that more specific topic as an object within the room.
Then there are the adjacent topics that I often find even more exciting to focus on. For those, I choose a name that corresponds with the nature of a room and also its size. For example I have a channel called the Visual Computing Observatory. In my head I am imagining an actual observatory where I am looking and observing and studying a given topic.
The Method of Loci
An ArticleFrom the time we learn to walk, we start building up spatial memories—recollections of the layouts of physical spaces and their relationships to the objects in them. These memories tend to form fast and stick around for a long time.
The method of loci hijacks our innate aptitude for remembering physical spaces, using it to help us remember other kinds of information with greater ease.
Not Just a New Feature; a New Compact
A Fragment by Jorge ArangoMy sense is that Slack’s teams think of themselves as adding ‘features’ to a ‘product,’ instead of as stewards of a place where people work.
A Reflection of the Truth
The need to record
With collecting comes the need to record. A specimen without a label is simply a (sometimes) pretty object. Without its associated data it is scientifically worthless.
Mental infrastructure
The diary provides the mental infrastructure that stimulates the mind to remember.
Scientific writing
What Mick Southern taught me was both the imperative to and the means of writing scientific prose—“if it’s not published it’s not done,” as a later adviser put it. Mock showed me that the rather dry technical requirements of scientific writing did not necessarily mean that elegance, humor, and even wit need be excluded from the scientists’ products.
A three-layered process of documentation
A three-layered process of documentation:
(1) First, there is the field notebook. This is where the actual numbers are recorded, together with passing observations relevant to the interpretation of these numbers.
Paper is still proving more durable than electronic data.
(2) The journal is a parallel record to that of the notebook—a daily account of events, thoughts, and observations.
(3) Last of the three strata, then, are the publications. Traditionally, in science, these are articles in academic journals leavened with chapters in books. To be successful, a young scientist need aspire to no more than these two forms of output together with their oral versions at interminable conferences and meetings of learned societies.
There came a time in my scientific development, however, when other forms of publication became important: magazines articles, and writing books.
Incidental details
In these journals lay the incidental details by which a book can be differentiated from a set of scientific articles. Such incidental details can become ends in themselves.
Memory prompts
Journals are memory prompts and perhaps capture exquisite (and not so exquisite) moments of experience.