PAUL J LORENZ

SPECULATIVE TOPOGRAPHIES

MA Thesis Installation
Thesis Advisor: Meg Mitchell

Any real-place is weighed against non-place. Any real-place loses; being profoundly and necessarily overly-defined, brittle. Non-place resists ossification by resisting the possibility of completion. Any articulation of non-place keeps within itself an infinite capacity to expand in detail, scope, and scale. The myriad failings and contradictions within non-place must hide in the endless space that falls through the loose sieve of its articulated cartography; never to be defined and consequently never to exist. Cartography of non-place is a generative process. In a non-place, no detail exists before its articulation. Every line is an original string of fiction. What emerges in its mapping is all that will ever exist of a non-place. It may be accepted, provisionally and by degrees, through its expressed detail; validated, legitimized, ready for re-mapping.

This work is an investigation into the cartography of non-place. Rationally based principles of mapping are typically applied to extant forms to produce reductive representations. Here, these same principles are used generatively to create an emergent form. This generative system imparts the work with a nebulous sense of a type of place, without representing any real-place. It is this fecund vagueness that attracts me to the modeling of a non-place or a place typology.

Each engraved line is an outcome of this generative system. Each instantiates a part of the non-place, forcing it out of the abstraction of a purely abstract system and into a permanent and specific form. For me, each line emerges as a new possibility for withdrawal from real-place into a non-place terrain that is left unburdened by the possibility of real inhabitation. In its physical trace across the work’s surface, each line holds an obvious real scale, but within the brackets of modeled non-space, the line exists without scale. This lack of measurable existence denies the possibility of completion, and permanently forestalls finality and absolute definition.

Essay on Non-Place

When I was designing the formal elements of this work, I wanted the viewer to move through a specific type of experience: to engage with the work in successive layers as they move closer to the work’s surface. I attempted this by controlling the position of the work in the gallery, the point of access to the gallery space, the lighting, and the immediate physical surroundings. Following is an ideal scenario: upon first entering the gallery, the viewer notices a marked difference in the lighting compared to the adjacent space. The entry is a narrow three-foot wide space; this, combined with the change in lighting, creates a high degree of separation. The viewer notices that most of the gallery’s walls are left empty. There is only one subject of their gaze: a slate-colored surface that almost entirely covers one wall of the gallery. The object is much taller and much wider than viewer’s body. Its size controls the space of the gallery, and demands all of the perceptual space of the viewer. The viewer sees large, irregularly shaped bright marks moving diagonally across the surface, vaguely evoking a geological pattern. Most of the visual space of the surface seems to be left in dark gray blankness.

Since there is only one work in the gallery, the viewer approaches it directly, without any distractions. As the viewer moves toward the work, the geological suggestions of the large marks are confirmed and clarified. The diagonal lines form an image of a valley surrounded to the left and right by rolling slopes. The marks reveal some of their detail. Most contain one crisply defined edge and one diffused, blurred edge. Curious about how these unusual marks might be constructed, the viewer constantly moves closer to the work, trying to visually resolve layers of detail that continue to open themselves to the eye.

The viewer finally sees that the large marks are made of myriad small engraved lines, piling up in dense spaces and spreading out in spaces that were previously understood to be blank slate. The viewer recognizes this type of line work from the maps they have observed earlier in their life. At this moment, they understand that the entire surface is covered with engraved lines that are all derived from a single system, in the same way that the lines on a topography map come from a unified method for abstracting a landscape. By the time the viewer is close enough to see this level of detail, the twenty-four foot wide object has taken up their entire visual field. They are surrounded by a surface whose every square inch contains a unique set of details, but is also united to the whole large-scale work through the systematic way that detail was created.

This density of detail offers an invitation for the viewer to track their close gaze across the surface, perhaps for hours at a time while always engaging with new details. In this way, the object seduces the gaze and encourages obsessive observation. The work not only invites obsession, but also is itself the product of my own machinic obsession. This obsession may be communicated to the viewer, who sees by this time that each of the 2.5 million engraved line segments has its own precise position, orientation, and scale. Although the work’s accompanying text makes no mention of technology, the viewer is likely to infer that this amount of precise detail was not created entirely ‘by hand’, but was mechanically fabricated.

My past work shares this interest in mechanical precision and machinic obsession. However, while my other bodies of work use the machined product more or less as a way of communicating external information, this work creates its own, isolated and non-real information, as denoted in the title of the show - and by extension the title of the piece: non-place // parallel translation. This work uses a simulated place as its superficial subject.

In two of my previous works, titled record of being there and in information study #4, the external data came from self-surveillance. I used the visual language of the precisely made, machined object to borrow from the culturally-understood meaning of rationalism and machine-like thinking in order to reveal the shortfalls of this mode of reasoning. In these works, as well as in information study #6: emails from laurel and stochastic topophilia, I purposefully left out any key while simultaneously co-opting the formal and tectonic language of information visualization. The absence of a key would leave the viewer with the sense that these objects contained hidden information. The objects were informed but unintelligible. The primary thesis of these works was to question the culturally encoded hegemony that rationalism has over meaningful thought.

A quiet subtext that ran throughout these works was our culture’s desire to know: to trust rational systems simply and completely. While these earlier works addressed the deficiencies of purely rational modes of communication, non-place // parallel translation addresses the first, implicit part of the formula: the desire to use rational systems in order to fully knows something.

Any real-place is weighed against non-place. Any real-place loses; being profoundly and necessarily overly defined, brittle. Non-place resists ossification by resisting the possibility of completion. Any articulation of non-place keeps within itself an infinite capacity to expand in detail, scope, and scale. The myriad failings and contradictions within non-place must hide in the endless space that falls through the loose sieve of its articulated cartography; never to be defined and consequently never to exist. Cartography of non-place is a generative process. In a non-place, no detail exists before its articulation. Every line is an original string of fiction. What emerges in its mapping is all that will ever exist of a non-place. It may be accepted, provisionally and by degrees, through its expressed detail; validated, legitimized, ready for re-mapping.

The work in this gallery is an investigation into the cartography of non-place. Rationally based principles of mapping are typically applied to extant forms to produce reductive representations. Here, these same principles are used generatively to create an emergent form. This generative system imparts the work with a nebulous sense of a type of place, without representing any real-place. It is this fecund vagueness that attracts me to the modeling of a non-place or a place typology.

Each engraved line is an outcome of this generative system. Each instantiates a part of the non-place, forcing it out of the abstraction of a purely abstract system and into a permanent and specific form. For me, each line emerges as a new possibility for withdrawal from real-place into a non-place terrain that is left unburdened by the possibility of real inhabitation. In its physical trace across the work’s surface, each line holds an obvious real scale, but within the brackets of modeled non-space, the line exists without scale. This lack of measurable existence denies the possibility of completion, and permanently forestalls finality and absolute definition.

Italo Calvino wrote about this preference for the abstract over the real in describing his fictional character, the devastatingly socially incompetent Mr. Palomar, who believes that “In a well-made model, in fact, every detail must be conditioned by the others, so that everything holds together in absolute coherence, as in a mechanism where if one gear jams, everything jams. A model is by definition that in which nothing has to be changed, that which works perfectly; whereas reality, as we can see clearly, does not work and constantly falls to pieces: so we must force it, more or less roughly, to assume the form of the model.” Mr. Palomar deeply desired to understand his overwhelmingly complex surroundings by relying on abstract generalizations, but these generalizations often lost their connection to reality, which must then be abandoned in order to continue to exist in the abstraction-as-fantasy (“Mr. Palomar”, 97-98). We constantly desire to form abstract models out of realities that are always too complex to understand in their full form. The Finnish architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa has argued that “Perception, memory and imagination are in constant interaction; the domain of presence fuses into images of memory and fantasy. We keep constructing an immense city of evocation and remembrance, and all the cities we have visited are precincts in this metropolis of the mind” (67-68). Calvino addressed this place-as-memory as a city that “Does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls” (“Invisible Cities”, 11). In this mode of perception, connections among various spatial experiences can never come together directly, but are always mediated by the presence of this imagined “metropolis of the mind” which is a form of what I call non-place.

Several writers and artists have addressed similar conceptions of non-real spatial thinking. An array of terms have been used to describe the subject, each distinct but related to the rest and also related to my own conception of non-place: place, space, non-place, non-site, geometrical space, anthropological space.

The phenomenologist M. Merleau-Ponty defines geometrical space as a way of understanding a physical context through Cartesian coordinates. A geometrical space is not itself real space, but is a way of conceiving of real space in abstract numerical terms. The process of transforming any real space into geometrical space necessarily uses a reductivist strategy. Nothing can be mapped entirely. In any map that uses geometrical space as a mimetic proxy for real space, only the smallest fraction of real space’s information can find a corresponding mark. In popular conception, geometrical space is assumed to be equivalent to real space, since it uses the authority of rationally based methods of translation. Merleau-Ponty proposes that anthropological space works in parallel to geometric space. This is the space that is created by social interactions, activated by human inhabitation. Anthropological space is the container for the organic development of society in all its complexity and is also the result of that complexity (273).

The anthropologist Marc Augé defines his use of the term non-place in opposition to Merleau-Ponty’s organically developed anthropological space. Augé proposes that non-place exists primarily as “space formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure)” that, instead of developing organically within the context of a culture’s complete complexity, exist through almost litigious means that “create solitary contractuality.” In Augé’s non-place, social interaction is for the most part limited to giving the grocer money (in the non-place of the supermarket) or telling the flight attendant that you would be delighted to have the pasta dish, and orange juice with no ice. The range of acceptable behavior in any one of Augé non-places is narrowed by that non-place’s stated function. These non-places are also real places. Augé broadened his definition of non-place to include iconically known words such as The Bahamas or Tahiti. These non-places are related to real physical places, but “exist only through the words that evoke them.” They are “imaginary places: banal utopias, clichés” (95). These non-places are in “closed universes where everything is a sign; collections of codes to which only some hold the key but whose existence everyone accepts; totalities which are partially fictional but effective” (33). In this way, Augé’s concept of non-place moves closer to my own use of the term. However, while Augé insists that his non-places either exist in reality or have direct (but distorted) relationships to specific places, my non-place is only connected to a sense of a place. It can never refer to an actual place and can never contain any real human activity. While Augé positions his non-place in opposition to Merleau-Ponty’s anthropological space, my non-place can be seen in contrast to Michel de Certeau’s conception of place. For Certeau, “space is a practiced place” (116). A place exists when it has the potential for something to happen in it. Once people arrive and something happens, space is formed out of that happening. My non-place cuts this process short. It is a place-typology that does not exist outside its own abstract model. It can never create space as a “practiced place” because it resists the possibility of inhabitation, and by extension, resists the possibility of specific narrative action.

I see a relationship between the work of Hamish Fulton and Michel de Certeau’s definition of space as practiced place, or “A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables ... actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it” (Certeau, 117). Fulton’s practice involves journeys across specific landscapes that often last for several weeks and cross hundreds of miles. From the experiences of these journeys, Fulton systematically constructed what appear to be rule-based systems that communicated an extremely limited perspective of the journey. Within Certeau’s conception of space and place, Fulton was creating space during his journeys, and when that journey was communicated and remembered in Fulton’s gallery installations. I would argue that my work shares some strategies with Fulton, but to a radically different end. Both our works use highly reductive methods to communicate an extremely limited amount of information. However, Futon constructed narratives that stretch across real places and I construct non-places that resist the possibility of narrative (Tufnell et. al.).

Robert Smithson used the gallery as a machine for the abstraction of space and place in his non-site works. Like Fulton, Smithson always referred to real landscapes in his works. Unlike Fulton, Smithson used actual material from the landscape (or the site) to create a direct reference to something outside of the gallery. Smithson seemed to want to erode the separation between the messy reality of the real landscape (the site) and the pristine space of the gallery. He transformed material from the site into an abstracted version of itself, the non-site. In this purified and bracketed state, the site could be inserted into the already abstracted space of the gallery. By reifying a small part of the landscape, Smithson created “a central focus point which is the non-site; the site is the unfocused fringe where your mind loses its boundaries and a sense of oceanic pervades…the non-site is the center of the system, and the site itself is the fringe or the edge” (Smithson, 249). Perhaps Smithson wanted to diminish this “sense of the oceanic” by heavy-handedly applying absolute control over a small, knowable piece of the site. Like Smithson’s non-site works, my non-place is the result of an abstraction. However, Smithson’s non-sites refer explicitly to real sites while my non-place does not refer to any specific real place.

While these texts and artworks have some commonalities with my own practice, I see Michel Foucault's idea of the heterotopia as a closer conceptual background for non-place // parallel translation. Foucault's heterotopias are places wherein their cultural and symbolic aspects radically outweigh their physical realities. In this respect they are quite similar to Augé’s use of the term non-place. The heterotopia is far more removed from normative space than Augé’s non-place. These are places that exhibit an almost sacred level of detachment from everyday life. This detachment, coupled with a significant degree of idealization, is what link Foucault's heterotopia to my non-place. I see Mr. Palomar's mental constructions of abstracted societies, and Pallasmaa's imagined and remembered conglomerate city as types of heterotopias: escapist places wherein everything makes sense. Foucault may define this escapist aspect of non-place as a heterotopia of crisis, “privileged or sacred or forbidden places reserved for individuals who are in a state of crisis with respect to society and the human milieu in which they live” (179-180). Jean Baudrillard describes a similar mental phenomenon as a 'hypothetical machine' in which “each person sees himself at the controls … isolated in a position of perfect and remote sovereignty, at an infinite distance from his universe of origin” ("The Ecstasy of Communication”, 147). Abstraction of a place makes it understandable, knowable, and controllable. Borrowing from Foucault's heterotopia, my non-place is “as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is disorganized, badly arranged, and muddled” (184). It replaces real places with fictions - necessarily empty, impossible. My non-place is an articulation of a stubborn desire for this impossibility.

Non-place illuminates the model's abstract withdrawal. Translating the real into the hypothetical model is always a reductionist exercise, in which a vast majority of information is neglected. The type of information that is included in my non-place model relates exclusively to these aspects of a real place that can be directly transformed into numerical relationships, ready to be run through mathematical algorithms. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has admitted that cartography's “treatment, even of place, tends toward the abstract, that is, toward the place’s spatial characteristics, its mappable externalities” ("Cartography and Humanism"). In my work, non-place marks the absence of anything that resists numerical analysis. The only aspects of place that occur in this non-place are topographic contours and simulated patterns of erosion.

In spite of, or perhaps because of all of its failings, there is still a great desire to exist within these tidy abstractions. However to exist in or even to prefer the model over the real makes "the real itself [appear] as a large useless body" (Baudrillard, "The Ecstasy of Communication, 148) that disrupts and annoys with all of its requirements and complications. For me, the model's power resides in its vagueness, its barren incompleteness.

"Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know…there is no language without deceit" (Calvino, "Invisible Cities," 48). Modeled on what seems to be Calvino's version of semiotic deconstruction, an earlier series of my work titled Crime, Wealth, Education, Commute Time, Real-estate Value combined two languages in a way that asked the viewer to question the veracity that is implicit in the visual language of rational media. The work directly appropriated United States Geographical Survey maps, those paragons of objective cartography, next to what appeared to be a corresponding three-dimensional data visualization. The title asked the viewer to imagine which aspect of mapped reality occurred in each data visualization. In fact, no part of the title was actually mapped. Instead, the data visualizations referred to my own arbitrarily assigned value for particular corresponding points in the U.S.G.S. maps. These graphs simply displayed how interested I was in visiting a given place. In another series, titled stochastic topophilia, I investigated subjectivity and chance and their effect on cartography. In this work, I contrasted a standard method for articulating space (namely, the architectural topography model) with an absolutely idiosyncratic method (articulated in the work by the 3D-printed objects). These 3D printed objects were the result of an absurd attempt to use rational, numerically based methods to map the degree to which I was drawn to any particular mapped place within the context of a backpacking journey I had recently returned from. The resulting form contained a limited set of information that did not effectively communicate its own intention. In stochastic topophilia, the 3D-printed object was used as a signifier for the mathematical, the machined, and the rational. Within the work, the rational was framed as a debilitation of communication, a violation of its promise to illuminate truths.

I looked further into profoundly non-communicative rational systems in later the serial works titled information study #4 and information study #6: emails from laurel. Compared to earlier works involving information, I see these two series as more directly querying the semiotic systems found within the field of data visualization. information study #4 involved two distortions to the standard form of the three dimensional bar graph. In this series, I created five objects that graphed five aspects of my own domestic life. These observations determined certain parameters of five small-scaled 3D-printed objects. Distortions applied to the objected muddied the legibility of these data-rich objects, producing a sort of scrim that denied a direct reading of the objects' content. Further, a lack of a meaningful key complicates any attempt to demand information from the work. In the place of a normal key, a digitally projected image presented the viewer with seventy possibilities of what was being mapped. This kind of mysterious revelation confirmed to the viewer that the objects did contain rationally derived information, but its presentation was coded and remained private.

In information study #6 I attempted a system that would almost allegorically epitomize data visualization itself. Within this system, any numerical data could be visualized as a three-dimensional object whose every dimension is parametrically controlled by a piece of information. This system coldly ignored all possible subjective meanings within a body of information, and only parsed and presented those aspects of the content that could be numerically processed. The system focused on machinism: machinic reasoning, a machined aesthetic form, and an overall lack of human readability. The title alludes to the personally meaningful content of the work: the first emails received from my wife, Laurel. The viewer’s knowledge of this content highlighted the cold, absolute dispassion of the system used to create these data visualization objects by focusing on the profound disconnect between the content and the form used to communicate that content.

All four of these series were based on theses related to information, rational systems, and communication. They presented themselves as critical inquiries into a system that inherently fails at complete communication. The method of critique involved stretching a semiotic system to expose its various weak points. They all depended on the viewer recognizing 'data' as a signifier for 'truth'. These works purposefully muddied that signifier/signified relationship in an attempt to find alternative meanings for data as a metaphor. Throughout these series, I have attempted to "[borrow] the very terms utilized by the host work itself…and [re-motivate] them, detaching them…from one conceptual set or semantic field and reattaching them to another" (Ulmer, 105). As a pretext for the current work, I propose that even after these deconstructive attempts, knowledge of the shortcomings of rationalism does not reduce our culture's (nor my own) futile desire for the rational project to lead to truth. This desire is the subject of my most recent investigation. This desire for truth via the rational can only be fulfilled, by degrees, within an abstract system or a model of reality. As a basis for the current work, I propose that within the brackets of a model, real truth can be found simply by creating it autopoeitically through the writing of rules. Within the brackets of the abstract model, the algorithm is the arbiter of truth.

To exist within the brackets of the model requires a denial of and escape from the real. Allowing me to avoid “that avalanche of simultaneous events that we call the universe” and to “slip through the finest interstices among the infinite combinations, permutations and chains of consequences...” (Calvino, "Mr. Palomar", 104). The abstract model’s allure is constantly present in our culture. It can be seen, for example, in the theoretical and practical work of the architect Peter Eisenman, whose work was based around a profound desire for the real-world articulation of pure, abstract systems. The difficulties resulting in the collision of the abstract model with the messy contingencies of the real world are exemplified in the catastrophic real construction of Eisenman's House II in which the architect's "primary concern…was the abstract perfection of his system" (Broadbent). Decades after the clients abandoned the real-world articulation of House II, Eisenman admitted that ''I don't design houses with the nuclear family idea because I don't believe in it as a concept. I was interested in doing architecture, not in solving the [client’s] privacy problems'' (Blair). Eisenman seemed to have been ready to abandon reality and remain in his theoretical construct in which the complications of cultural realities did not exist.

My non-place represents an investigation into this kind of abandonment. I argue that motivated by a desire for a sort of totalitarian control, we want to exist within the abstract. We exist in the real world only begrudgingly and because of the myriad physical contingencies of an frustratingly complex life. My non-place offers a view of a barren but completely rational simulation in which everything is presented as autopoietic truth.

In non-place // parallel translation, I use formal beauty as a device to draw the viewer into a discomforted relationship with the work. The surface of the object offers the viewer nested levels of detail that sequentially reveal themselves as one moves closer to the piece. This sequence sets up serial expectations wherein the viewer desires more information at each stage. Initially they desire an explanation for the large dark gray object occupying one wall of the gallery. They see that it is marked. They desire to know how the marks were made. They move closer. They see the system that created the marks when they are very close to the work. At this point they cannot get any closer. The flatness of the surface presents a barrier. Also, the object stops openly revealing further levels of detail, but the viewer may still desire more. They may wish to know which real place is represented by the marks found on this object. They cannot. This is a non-real place. A sense of beauty erodes into a sort of anxiety which "is only possible if something remains to be determined, something that hasn’t yet been determined" (Lyotard, 454). The agitation produced by the limits of the simulation in a non-place is the subject of my work's investigation.

The type of beauty utilized in non-place // parallel translation is what I would call machinic beauty. In my work, machinic beauty exhibits some intriguing and sometimes difficult aspects. Machinic beauty can relate in some way to the larger conception of technological determinism. In non-place // parallel translation, I combine two technologies: parametric modeling as a software tool and laser engraving as a hardware tool. The combination of these two tools offers the possibility of a profound increase in computational and physical detail. The software allowed me to automatically perform approximately 1.5 trillion calculations within the time frame of thirty-six hours. The hardware allowed me to precisely engrave approximately 2.5 million line segments into the piece's surface in seventy-two hours of machine time. While these specific figures do not relate to the value of the artwork, they reveal my desire to use these technologies toward the limits of their capabilities. This opens the difficult question of whether I am driving the machine or the machine is driving me. Does the technology's capability demand that it is used to articulate a certain level of complexity? This is a question I do not have an answer to, but I think it relates to the piece's mechanic beauty through a sort of revival of the somewhat anachronistic term ‘virtuosity’. Here instead of a violinist perfectly performing a Niccolò Paganini capriccio, a machine performs a 2.5 million line spectacle.

This technologically deterministic spectacle, as well as the anxiety of unmet expectations of infinite detail, relate to a broader investigation into the meanings endemic to the use of digital media in an art practice. Media theorist Lev Manovich writes extensively on this subject. Manovich posits that the type of emergent, non-deterministic complexity seen in digitally produced works of art is related to a broader interest in bottom-up informational systems that "evokes the world's richness and complexity" (“Abstraction and Complexity”, 348). This stands in opposition to the reductionist thinking of early modernism, seen both in Piet Mondrian's neoplasticism and Wilhelm Wundt's psychological structuralism ("Abstraction and Complexity”, 244). My current work contains aspects of both emergent non-deterministic form making and hierarchical, linear processes. The work is hierarchical and linear in the sense that any system using computer coding, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri put it, "only admits of a totally hierarchical solution" (16). The authors go on to admit, however, that there are places in which non-linear and non-deterministic systems can intrude into hierarchies. The non-deterministic properties of the custom software I used in non-place // parallel translation are evidenced by amount of data that is processed and presented. I could not possibly determine where each of the 2.5 million line segments is to be placed. Instead, I wrote a program that uses stochastic processes to create a digital mesh and then rigorously analyzes that mesh in order to place each linear element.

This focus on the specific processes of digitally-manipulated information is addressed by what Manovich calls an ‘info-aesthetic': “those contemporary cultural practices that can be best understood as responses to new priorities of information society: making sense of information, working with information, producing knowledge from information” (“Introduction to Info Aesthetics”, 6). The scope of my work does not stop at the borders of a visual aesthetic investigation. By highlighting the emptiness and the absence of inhabitation in non-place // parallel translation, I attempt to qualify the limitations of abstract computer simulations. I believe that this kind of emptiness can occur whenever any type of experience is simulated through generative use of generalized algorithmic rules. This digital practice denies the complexities of real-places, instead simulating and exhibiting only those aspects of reality for which rules can be numerically deduced.

I believe that this work needs to contain some aspects of formal beauty in order to bring the viewer into itself, and to set up a sequence of desires. The scale and the physicality of the object are meant to promote a limited degree of immersion. By the time the viewer is close enough to resolve the work's detail, the object extends across the viewer's entire visual field. While the use of a digital projector, a monitor display, or a digitally printed image would have simplified the piece's construction, I believe that the unusual use of a laser cutter on painted aluminum adequately delays the piece's being recognized as digital media, thereby extending the sense of immersion and prolonging the sort of anxiety that Lyotard's text describes.

Augé, Marc. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Print.

Baudrillard, Jean. "The Ecstacy of Communication." The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. New York: New, 2002. 145-54. Print.

Blair, Gwenda. "House Proud; A White Elephant Reincarnated." New York Times 10 October 2002. Web. 17 April 2013.

Broadbent, Geoffrey. "A Plain Man’s Guide to the Theory of Signs in Architecture." Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory, 1965-1995. Ed. Kate Nesbitt. New York: Princeton Architectural, 1996. 122-40. Print.

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Trans. William Weaver. London: Vintage, 1997. Print.

Calvino, Italo. Mr Palomar. Trans. William Weaver. London: Vintage, 1999. Print.

Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California, 1984. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987. Print.

Foucault, Michel. "Different Spaces." Trans. Robert Hurley. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Ed. James D. Faubion. Vol. 2. London: Penguin, 2000. 175-85. Print.

Lyotard, Jean-François. "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde." The Continental Aesthetics Reader. Ed. Clive Cazeaux. London: Routledge, 2000. N. pag. Print.

Manovich, Lev. "Abstraction and Complexity." MediaArtHistories. Ed. Oliver Grau. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007. N. pag. Print.

Manovich, Lev. Introduction to Info Aesthetics. Lev Manovich. N.p., 2008. Web. 5 Apr. 2013.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002. Print.

Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2005. Print.

Smithson, Robert. Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings. Ed. Jack D. Flam. Berkeley: University of California, 1996. Print.

Tufnell, Ben, Andrew Wilson, Bill McKibben, and Doug Scott. Hamish Fulton: Walking Journey. London: Tate Pub., 2002. Print.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. (2011, October). On the Relationship Between Cartography and Humanism. Keynote address presented at the North American Cartographic Information Society Annual Meeting, Madison, WI.

Ulmer, Gregory L. "The Object of Post-Criticism." The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. New York: New, 2002. 93-126. Print.