Non-Places
101/110frwy The Blurred In-Between
While being in transit I know that I am inhabiting a non-place because my location is not fixed. I don’t relate to the surroundings besides the temporary occupation of travel. The city infrastructure is not specific to me and therefore has little influence on my associations with it. If I travel the same stretch my relationship to travel is also different because the people who’s paths I am converging with have no relationship to me other the temporary neighboring that driving instigates. We might develop similar patterns that traveling the same stretch at the same time requires. This makes me think of what other similarities we have in common that lead up to our faceless, speechless, unaware relationship to one another and the environment we temporarily share. What are our similarities that aid in our temporary neighboring and non-relationships of the road? Are we traversing the non-road to a non-place? If so, how can these non-roads be reconfigured to connect multiple non-places simultaneously?
I preformed a series of media studies that involved the use of footage I collected traveling the 101/ 110 Freeways and its comparison to the imagery provided by Google. This experience of traveling through the guise of a camera lens layered with the digital representation of the same space made me think that Goggles fragmented imagery and the fragmentation of the collective experience of space might have some similarities. Maybe the glitches and artifacts of this type of representation can explain the multidimensional relationship of the collective non-place traveler?
Using these video/media sketches I gained insight to the spaces mediated through captured imagery and the public’s access to Google. Through Google a collective audience can travel the space at the same time regardless of when they woke up or where they are. So, to think about how the electro/digital/computing experience of a non-space can be experienced collectively might have more influence of those associating a virtual non place as a place.
