Another Relation to Place and Space

While it may seem obvious that "landscape" is different from mapmaking, I think that the contrast between Western mapmaking, which tries to represent space in its accuracy, and Chinese landscape painting points to a key instruction. In this sense, I think that the electrate instruction is closer to the Chinese conception of "place" rather than "thing," as Ulmer lays it out in his Two Epistemologies diagram. In Heuretics, Ulmer also speaks of two different ways of considering place: Greek topos and Greek chora. "Chora" has an element of memory there rather than simply an attempt at representing the space for navigational purposes. Topos can be understood as space in the abstract: landmarks are noted, roads, etc. but the mood of the area is left to the traveler to experience him or herself once they arrive. Topos is literate because it desires a "true" representation; chora shows that within any given space, there are many places saturated with history.

Julien writes that space (and he does space rather than place) "an hence any landscape, was also conceived by the Chinese as a perpetual setup which puts to work the original vitality of nature" (93). Landscapes are like the world in "miniature" and so distance actually serves to connect the microcosm and the macrocosm. Julien cites Zong Bing, "a three-inch long vertical stroke is the equivalent of a height of a thousand paces; ink spread horizontally over a few feet gives body to a distance of a hundred leagues" (95).

Julien explicitly distinguishes between the map and the landscape: "for a map reduces scale merely for practical ends, whereas the process of reduction undertaken in painting has a richly symbolic purpose" such that it is "closer to writing," particularly "the series of hexagrams that were sufficient to account for the whole mystery of becoming" (96).

Such perception is an aesthetic perception. While Julien argues that the Chinese were looking to the "vital breath of nature," we are less concerned with what might be called "nature" (to be explored in another post). Our target is the internet. So how do we form a landscape from the internet?

Julien once again contrasts cartography and landscape painting (associated with 'geomancy'): "Unlike the cartographic reduction of space, which is proportioned in a pedestrian manner, the aesthetic perception strives to apprehend space, whether pictorial or poetic through the tension expressed by its life lines" (103-104).

As mentioned in my previous post, Julien also makes analogies between the landscape and the human body. Even though the landscapes themselves lack human beings in their representational capacity, landscapes are conceived of in terms of human posture (100-101). Julien concludes:

"The painter must be inspired, must possess a particularly sensitive consciousness, so that he can 'unite in spirit' with this landscape and, by exposing himself to it and communicating with it, grasp in a stroke how the whole scene functions in its powerfully general and delicately detailed way" (101).

I think we can derive an instruction from this:  We have to find the lifelines of the internet. We are not seeking to represent the internet through data visualization, but finding the lines of force that connect memory, place, and the body. Create a microcosmic landscape of the internet.