Egham to Windsor Castle via Windsor Great Park (by bicycle)

Old Street to Holborn via Postman's Park and Sir John Soane's Museum

The View from Above

A plug for another very interesting book.

MIT press link to book and image

So far, from what I've read, this book is the perfect companion to Close Up At A Distance, which I recently blogged about.  The View from Above is much more influenced by French theory, especially Lefebvre, but it contains the following quote that gives some idea of what is to come:

"...the view from an airplane was crucial for connecting the 'social' with the 'spatial.'  Yet...Henri Lefebvre...expressed much suspicion of the aerial perspective, calling it the 'space of state control.'  In contrast to qualitative research methods, such as personal interviews with residents, quantitative methods such as cartography and aerial photography only served to 'flatten' the complexity of social life."

As we have come to know in GG3090 there is no neat way to separate qualitative and quantitative methods.  They are best used in conjunction with each other as another way of triangulating.  With qualitative GIS coming online, this book will take that 'final' step, the sensitive one of beginning to allow the quantitative into critical social theory.  Aerial photographs, with their aesthetic properties and immanently measurable qualities, might be just the way to go.

MSc PSD presentation day

Story on the Royal Holloway University of London site

Thanks to everyone for a fun day of presentations.  It was great to see everyone's hard work coming together in one place.  Dorothea Kleine (bottom right) and Katie Willis (directly above Dorothea in the photo) coordinated an energetic and positive experience with plenty of room for critical and constructive commentary from all participants.

"it was Jarry's idea to substitute the map for the territory"

Alfred Jarry at MIT Press

"Pataphysics would indeed assume subtly different meanings.  Initially, however, in his first conception, it may be seen as an unusually systematic mapping of the realm of poetic imagination, a symbolic cartography that was both representation and idealization.  It included previously neglected regions that were ripe for exploration, and it was Jarry's idea to substitute the map for the territory."

-from Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life by Alastair Brotchie

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Yesterday's wander through the east end was very rewarding, not least because I found this book.  And I found this book in a wonderful bookstore, bookartbookshop.  

Jarry has always been there in the background (the Jarry metro in Montreal is a different Jarry, I think), behind Surrealism and Situationism and Psychogeograpy, at the least the parts I liked about them.

What Alastair Brotchie has done in this book has helped me see precisely the role of this 'peasant' from the provinces in systematizing and spatializing poetic practices and processes.  

What sprung from that seed in the ensuing century was a set of tools for exploring landscape, urbanity and humanity in ways that elude dualism and reductionist positivism.

Stratford to Old Spitalfields Market (exit Old Street)