When the space becomes a place
interactive installation
This experiment, which goes beyond the cultural framework of perception, allowed me to perceive more broadly from a distance of location and to better acquaint myself with a new way of discovering reality. Traveling and constant movement draw attention to the scale of the world, integrating us with the changes taking place in nature through this oscillation in space. In this way, the path, unaffected by the experience of a permanent place, realizes the integrity of the human element with the larger, autonomous organism, allowing us to see the cyclicality and the flow of time.
The area in which we exist and move our bodies is called space. Its size is measured in units of length, area, and distance, and we also calculate its width and depth. As we begin to move through this space, time becomes a more significant, more precise unit of measurement. We read the value of how long it takes for a train to travel from one city to another, compare how long we will travel by tram versus by bike, determine how many hours we stay at the workplace, and measure the distances between celestial bodies in light years. Thus, space is space-time.
There is a popular quote: “Happy people do not count time,” but how can we exist in space when the main axis is not the depth of space? It is a spectacle of the passage of time traversed along this value, and all bodies and organisms in this space follow this one path, this concrete dimension.
At the same time, it's surprisingly easy to see that we still don't really know where we are. By expanding our field of view and implicitly thinking, we can extend our vision to see ourselves as a micro-point in the Milky Way.
Condensing this pyramidal thought to an ordinary sense of being, we find ourselves somewhere in the middle of something that is very subjective and internally felt, such as the feeling of having a soul, which, in turn, becomes the property of our body and mind. Considerations interpreted from completely different perspectives prove that the chosen concept and knowledge of the essence of existence can be freely stretched and contracted.
Defining being depends mainly on clarifying where we look at this process of recognizing ourselves in reality. At the very beginning, it is easiest to locate ourselves somewhere, that is, in a material place indeed. The spaces in which we stay for longer become familiar to us—these spaces we have already visited and marked with memories. "If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are."
The interpretation of places changes through the events that unfold in them. Monuments and memorials often represent the glow of those past events. This architectural example seems to convey my concept most easily. I would like to show that we distinguish between the perception of places as individuals and as groups (collectively).
At the same time, what we keep in our memories is only a vision of the past tense, so in the present, it can influence the meaning of a place in a completely different way. For example, the historical memory of societies is closely related to tradition and its celebration; however, we do not relate to the past, but rather to the present by continuing these customs and living in the present time.
Aristotle, in Book IV of Physics, metaphorically calls space a vessel filled with bodies, while in Book V, going deeper into the mathematical meaning, he wrote that "space (like time) is "quantity", i.e. it is that which is divided into two or more parts. It is also a "size", that is, it is measurable - it is divided into continuous parts, i.e. length, width, and depth. Additionally, the length is limited by a line, the width is limited by the surface, and the depth is limited by the body."
