Are We There Yet?
Recently in the NY Times there was a story about space. It focuses on the work of two Norwegian neuroscientists who have been working on how we know where we are— actually how rats know where they are. It turns out rats have grid cells that fire relative to a space. The cells track the rat’s movement, and over time the firings form a grid, and so a map of space is created.
It is now clear that the grid cells, in combination with cells that sense head direction and others that sense borders or boundaries — both originally identified in other parts of the brain by other labs — form a kind of dead-reckoning navigation system in the brain that maps movement. (May-Britt Moser and Edvard I Moser paper on the NIH site.)
The questions that first came to mind
What happens to this/my grid when I move from our (my family’s) kitchen to a seat on a plane? Or, from our kitchen to a kitchen in a house on a gridded street in Jolo, Philippines? Or, because my grid cells are firing in relation to other cells in me, what happens in relation to value judgements: “I like this room,” or, when I’m drawn to spatial design considerations like “Danish Modern” or feng shui?
Entorhinal grid cell
By adding visual cues to the grid, if I were Blaise Pascal viewing Georges de La Tour’s The Fortune Teller in the 1600's would I be more positioned by actual points in space through my firing grid cells, or by the absolute relationship between where I stand and the position of the artwork on the wall? When viewing the painting, would I adopt the point of view of the duped, or would I identify more with the class status of the ‘fortune teller’? Or, would I find greater pleasure in following the conversation of identities, perspectives and eyes around the painting? Instead, what if I, now, today, were looking at a Pollock or at the grid of an Agnes Martin?
Agnes Martin Painting (1963)
I think these sorts of questions don’t result in vertigo but in grounding. According to my interpretation of Pascal, points in space reference both subject and object and the space around them, as well as values and ethical relationships. When viewed this way, value judgements, space-data and our grid cells contextualize fluid grids— between senses of place, what is occurring within them and how (best) to communicate it.
What I’m getting at is: okay, fine, our brains map space. Good. Now what? The fluidity of the grid, of space, is how it maps to value and is never abstracted from the what, how and when.
Fluid grids effect horizon, distance, direction both physically and conceptually… In this way, “1000 Fifth Avenue, please” becomes a real location, a effective request to go to a particular place, and a poem.
“Our Proximity” is the working title of a book I am writing here. When it is complete, I will publish it as a collection of essays, images, video,interviews, and code. Love to know what you think here or @artsandideas
