You Are Here *

26 May 2009

Dance Party

However: Thursday or Friday? Vote for the day that works best for y'all on the poll to the right. Also comment on this post if you want to help out in some way (printing out literature, outreach, setting up, tearing down, playlist input, visual stimulation input, suggestions, etc.).

Here's some info from the last dance party that still applies:

Classrooms - pretty overdetermined spaces, right? Especially lecture halls. Partitioned off rows, a big whiteboard/screen with the professor ("he who knows") filling your mind like an empty vessel.

Well, now is your chance to challenge the hegemony of classroom space. We will be experiencing the various ways feelings, emotions, ideas, movement, and sound circulate within spaces that are built to repress, separate, quiet and isolate.

Please remember that OSU is alcohol and drug-free. This event is meant to be potentially trangressive but not illegal or against the student code of conduct.

This event will explore the intersection of the built environment, over-determined spaces, and the audio-visual affective circulation of techno music. The text we will use to inform our analysis is Michel Gaillot's "Techno: Multiple Meaning, An Artistic and Political Laboratory of the Present" [http://openlibrary.org/b/OL9010128M/Techno]

Location:
Hagerty Hall 180 -- might have to use the back doors near the loading dock.
Street:
1775 College Rd

This event is sponsored by the Comparative Studies Undergraduate Group on paper and You Are Here Columbus.

where we are

'a disposable neighborhood'

25 May 2009

Yooouuutuuube -- Fixie Tricks

Sweet Bike Video!

Rethinking Topology and Topography

Hidden Landscapes Image by Chris Thompson.

‘Geographical Methodology as Spatialization and Topology’ (Part of “Theorizing Place: Interdisciplinary Trajectories” A Panel Discussion at the Canadian Association of Geographers Meeting, Carleton University, May 27):

This presentation focuses on the virtuality of place, an object of study which resists specification in material or topographic terms. In effect, place exceeds the boundaries of topography. It cannot be adequately mapped. This raises a methodological conundrum for geography which has only be solved via interdisciplinary innovation, leading geographers into the study of social and cultural categorization, and statistical analysis of spatial data. What is a geographer to do? A relational approach to ‘place’ foregrounds the tissue of geographical space and the multiple flows and passages through it. Multiple passages suggests that geography explore a multiple, n-dimensional topology as a paradigmatic shift out of Cartesian space.

Maybe geographical information systems already work in n-space, but my sense is no, and geographers think of cartography as a 3d and 2d endeavour. Any thoughts? This is a step toward a paper on topology as method for social science in the 21st century, part of my belief that at university level we should teach methodology as something evolving, to think past mastering a particular program and ask ourselves what is it for? And, how do our chosen methods guide how and what we see in our studies?

via space and culture