mental space embodiments

çifel çifel

The concept of spatial context is often presented and visualized commonly through its relation to the built environment. Its significance predominantly plays a fundamental role in understanding the world and forming relations between various diverse experiences, and interpretations of reality. These influences, in which knowledge is produced and transformed by inhabiting the process of being seen, felt, and perceived, overlap where the notion of time unfolds intricate reflections of itself regarding happenings, entities, and physical elements. By exploring the spatial context in a non-linear timeline, it is possible to identify unique hidden dimensions that enrich the understanding of the totality that is related to spaces and their surroundings. This nonlinearity is achievable through the phenomenological understanding of lived spaces which brings mental, physical, and sensory, at the same time largely subjective realities to conceivable participation. With these guidelines, this research consists of an artistic exploration that aims to visually investigate artistic methods and processes of revealing extended visual qualities of mental space, and what type of connections are intertwined within its architectonic surroundings. My aim is to phenomenologically uncover hidden dimensions inherited within mental space. Therefore I destabilize conventional meanings of space by visually exploring and rendering the mental and emotional geographies that shape our lived experience, internalizing and revealing the constructedness of mental spatiality through an artistic process that reflects psychogeographic embodying. By challenging linear and objective representations of space by engaging in an artistic exploration of mental and emotional landscapes, I unfold non-linear timelines, subjective lived experiences, and the overlaps of perception and time, where memory and the present co-narrate within us.

m e n t a l s p a c e e m b o d i m e n t s

Lefebvre’s interdisciplinary approach constructs a very effective perspective to understand the totality of spatial context: “Nothing disappears completely ... In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows ... Pre-existing space underpins not only durable spatial arrangements but also representational spaces and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives.” (Lefebvre, 1991) By reconstructing these essentials into a visual exploration, our sense of space can have the possibility of extending itself within the context of mental space.

According to Tschumi, space and event are linked together and can not be emphasized by separation, at the same time, they shouldn’t be reduced to the recognition of functionality. The very heterogeneity of the definition of space, action, and movement makes it into that event, that place of shock, or that place of the invention of ourselves (Tschumi, 1996). When the steps that are taken in space are traced back by its users in physical and imaginative forms the possibility of unconventional realizations might occur. This process encourages the completeness of space to be as much revealed as its physical existence

As Merleu-Ponty states: Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it's caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. (Merleau-Ponty, 1974) This description encourages us to acknowledge the emotional and sensory dimensions that architecture offers. Then would it be possible to trace this back to mental space where the architecture of mental dimensions can reveal itself?

Architecturally embracing mental space and showcasing it as a shared liminal dimension is a process of encouraging us for reanimating this space again and again. By converting mental space into a character that breathes, pulses, and moves, I have hereby communicated through fluid spaces as if they are flaneurs of our minds. In order to construct these methodologies, I have collected all these previously suggested references and contextualized them by integrating their aspects into a virtual space-making process. As I refer to time as non-linear but relational, as it jumps in-between happenings and brings its qualities out as spatial components, during this research I accumulated a variety of different agencies in forms of textual and visual reflections. All of these components came together to accumulate power as journals, essays, diagrams, sketches, videos, and virtual environments by visualizing a non-visual component within the fabric of our consciousness.

Want to unfold mental space together with me? Reach out: cifel.huseyin@gmail.com

Multisensory integration of bodily-relevant inputs naturally happens within a limited space immediately surrounding the body, where external stimuli can have direct contact with the body, i.e., the peripersonal space (Serino, Noel, Mange, Canzoneri, Pellencin, Ruiz, Bernasconi, Blanke, Herbelin, 2018). This construct refers to the area of ambiguous space that immediately surrounds our bodies, typically within arm's reach. Exploring this invisible spatial dimension, which is mapped through the experience of interacting with surroundings constantly, can generate concepts of embodying a series of lived but unperceivable architectonic interactions.

“Humans have senses to communicate with their surroundings. Spaces have dimensions to communicate with their passers-by.”

All art forms aim at expressing the human condition, our being in the world. Thus, artistic meaning is always existential. As the artistic essence of architecture, especially in our time, tends to be lost under a (quasi-)rationality, utility, and manipulative aestheticization, the example of the arts is seminal for architecture. (Pallasmaa, -interview- 2018)

The elements of architecture are not visual units or gestalt; they are encounters, confrontations that interact with memory. (Pallasmaa, 2005)

readings:

fractals

readins:

mental space

Even though the nothingness of mental space creates a contradictory approach that might not intersect with physical space-making, it also holds a radical power to imagine beyond the reality surrounding us. Then can we discover uncharted territories of this concept while connecting with the self? As Bachelard suggests: Inhabited space transcends geometrical space. (Bachelard, 1994) To formulate an argument for this concept, we need to communicate the idea of tracing back our memories to encounter the complex nature of human cognition and social interaction.

The places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time. (Bachelard, 1994) As this suggests, a rich and evocative exploration of the poetic dimensions of memory can show its dimensionality while it is being considered as a private domain spatially.

Phenomenology is, in fact, a purely descriptive discipline, exploring the field of transcendentally pure consciousness by pure intuition (Husserl, 1982). Rethinking spatiality through phenomenology can help us manipulate time by speculating new confrontations toward removing it from a linear structure and implementing it into a relational reconstruction. This approach focuses on understanding the subjective experiences of entities as they engage with spatiality, rather than relying solely on measurable factors such as size or technical specifications.