Stratified Spaces in Spring Sunshine

 

All Images: South Leicester, March 2025

“The kind of difference that defines every place is not on the order of a juxta-position but other takes the form of imbricated strata. The elements spread out on the same surface can be enumerated; they are available for analysis; they form a manageable surface. Every urban ‘renovation’ nonetheless prefers a tabula rasa on which to write in cement the composition created in the laboratory on the basis of discrete ‘needs’ to which functional responses are to be made. The system also produces need, the primary ‘substance’ of this composition, by isolating it. This unit is as neat and clean (propre) as digits are. Moreover, the lack of satisfaction that defines each need calls for and justifies in advance the construction that combines it with other needs. This is the logic of production: ever since the eighteenth century, it has engendered its own discursive and practical space, on the basis of points of concentration - the office, the factory, the city. It rejects the relevance of places it does not create.

“However, beneath the fabricating and universal writing of technology, opaque and stubborn places remain. The revolutions of history, economic mutations, demographic mixtures lie in layers within it, and remain there, hidden in customs, rites, and spatial practices. The legible discourses that formerly articulated them have disappeared, or left only fragments in language. This place, on its surface, seems to be a collage. In reality, in its depth it is ubiquitous. A piling-up of heterogeneous places. Each one, like a deteriorating page of a book, refers to a different mode of territorial unity, of socioeconomic distribution, of political conflicts and identifying symbolism" [1.].

[1.]:  Michel de Certeau, ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’, (Trans. Steven F. Randall), Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1984 

Completed Painting: 'space_time_07 [Wave Function]'

 

'space_time_07 [Wave Function]', Acrylics, Paper Collage, Ball Point Pen & Paint Pen on Panel,
300 mm x 300 mm, 2024

Here's the latest of my 'space_time' panels. As is often the case, anyone needing an explanation may find certain clues below...

"Conceptually, the Schrödinger equation is the quantum counterpart of Newton's second law in classical mechanics. Given a set of known initial conditions, Newton's second law makes a mathematical prediction as to what path a given physical system will take over time. The Schrödinger equation gives the evolution over time of a wave function, the quantum-mechanical characterization of an isolated physical system. The equation was postulated by Schrödinger based on a postulate of Louis de Broglie that all matter has an associated matter wave. The equation predicted bound states of the atom in agreement with experimental observations" [1.].

"Schrödinger himself suggested in 1952 that the different terms of a superposition evolving under the Schrödinger equation are 'not alternatives but all really happen simultaneously'. This has been interpreted as an early version of Everett's many-worlds interpretation. This interpretation, formulated independently in 1956, holds that all the possibilities described by quantum theory simultaneously occur in a multiverse composed of mostly independent parallel universes" [2.].

“In order to give an account of these practices [of everyday life], I have resorted to the category of ‘trajectory’. It was intended to suggest a temporal movement through space, that is, the unity of a diachronic succession of points through which it passes, and not the figure that these points form on a space that is supposed to be synchronic or achronic. Indeed, this ‘representation’ is insufficient, precisely because a trajectory is drawn, and time and movement are thus reduced to a line that can be seized as a whole by the eye and read in a single moment, as one projects onto a map the path taken by someone walking through a city. However useful this ‘flattening out’ may be, it transforms the temporal articulation of places into a spatial sequence of points. A graph takes the place of an operation. A reversible sign (one that can be read in both directions, once it is projected onto a map) is substituted for a practice indissociable from particular moments and ‘opportunities’, and thus irreversible (one cannot cannot go backwards in time, or have another chance at missed opportunities). It is thus a mark in place of acts, a relic in place of performances: it is only their remainder, the sign of their erasure. Such a projection postulates that it is possible to take the one (the mark) for the other (operations articulated on occasions). This is a quid pro quo typical of the reductions which a functionalist administration of space must make in order to be effective [3.].

West Leicester, January 2024

[1.] & [2.]: Wikipedia, 'Shrodinger Equation'.

[3.]: Michel de Certeau, 'The Practice of Everyday Life', Berkeley/L.A./London, University of California Press, 1984/1988.