Reflection System

The city represents itself through its own reflections. The reflections of the city define a complex network that represents the city in a fragmented way. The system of reflections is made of different parts we can classify depending on their nature. We ask them if they are deliberate or accidental, and we obtain these results:

- The Buildings: The reflective surfaces of building are deliberate. They has been planned, they has been created. Even if the designer was not aware of its reflections, the windows' glasses, the reflective claddings and the mirrors, we consider that they are part of the staged realisation of the city and its reflections. This kind of reflectors are statics.

- The bodies of water: The rivers courses, the canals and the fountains are no longer accidental, they have been put there within the urban transformation, they are creations. The surface of these bodies of water reflect also ceaselessly the city. This kind of reflectors are semi-static, because they do not change their location but the water moves.

- The puddles: The city is reflected on puddles' water surface. These reflections are accidental if we focus on the weather unpredictable condition. They also depend on the streets' deppresions which are both accidental and deliberate. Thes refelctor are dynamic, they change their position depending on time and they appear as disappear.

- The vehicles: The city is also represented through vehicles' glossy painted bodyworks. The dark painted vehicules such as buses, cars and lorries are reflecting randomly the city. These reflectors are dynamic, and they can be cansider mainly accidental within the system because althought we find a deliberate action behind their drivers, their location and the observer locations are not linked, and their coincidence is accidental.

Las Meninas_Part 2

If we turn to history we know that the painter es Diego Velazquez, who was the royal painter
of King Philip IV, the girl in the middle is Princess Margarita áccompained by her nannies and meninas and even we know that the buffon was Nicolaso Pertusato. So we can argue that the Velazquez is painting the king and his wife, who we can be reflected on the mirror, and the rest of the characters are there to entertain them.
But... if the mirror is reflected another royal portrait that is hung on the wall of the room?

We have clearly three interpretations:
1. He is painting the Kings, in a room of the Royal palace
2. He is painting the scene he sees in front of a big mirror
3. He is painting us always we occupy the location of the model of his representation

In Foucault's words " these three possible views confuse themselves in a point out of the picture, an ideal point with that which is represented, but, at the time, an absolutely real one because by means of it the representation is possible.

This picture is a representation that deals with the problems of representation.The model of the representation is never determined, the model and the spectator, the object and the subject are ceaseless exchanging their roles. As the subject is dislocated, the representation is freed, and this way the painting can just represent itself.

Las Meninas_Part 1

As a first step toward the question of the self-representation of the city, we are going to review Michel Foucault's analysis of Las Meninas, the very example of the ontology of representation painted by Diego Velazquez in 1656.

Let us analyse the process of seeing this picture as if it was the first time we see it.

We see a painter close to some people as the main character, and we can see also a mirror and a man in the door's threshold at the bottom of the room where the scene runs. The painter is representing something that we cannot see because the front side of the canvas is not visible, we only can see the reverse of it. This way we do not ever know what or who is he representing.

We focus on the painter and he seems that he could not be seen at the same time on the real picture that represent him and see the inside canvas in which he is representing something. As Foucault points out, he "oscillates on the threshold of these two incompatible visibilities". According to this, Foucault continues saying that "the scene that he sees is two times invisible; because it is not represented in the picture space and because he is just in the blind point, in this essential frame where our gaze removes us in the very moment that we see it". This game between what is visible and what is invisible is the main trick of the picture. And it is this magic moment describes by Foucault that when we realise that we are occupying the space of the object that the painter is representing.

So, without any documentation about the picture, you can argue that he is painting the scene in front of a mirror and therefore that we can not see in the invisible canvas is just the picture itself.
But what is about the mysterious mirror at the bottom of the scene? What does it mean?

to be continued...

Tottenham Hale Self-Representation

Tottenham Hale offers us a myriad of different readings.
We could analysis it from the urban morphological development, as a historical retrospective
We could wonder what we ordinarily read as natural and why, as Jeff Wall does, in our analysis
We could understand it as a simulation of social reality as Jean Baudrillard suggets

Postmodern society is defined, among others, in its variety, banality and excessness. Multiple gazes, views of diversity, millons of millons of bits of information that condemns us to the infinite subjectiveness. Althought we consider this one of its original feactures and not wanting to reach any universal objective statement, we also want to obtein some answers from the city itself.
Then we need to make question to its own nature and find a system in which the city keeps a dialogue with itself.
That the reason why we firstly seek a system of self-representation of the city

Nature Self-representation

Nature represents itself.

In wild nature it does not exist the relation between the object and the subject so when nature is reflected in nature, it is representing itself

We consider representation as an equivalence between the value and the sign

Nature reflects on water surface. These reflections ensures nature self-representation.

It does not matter wether anyone is or not looking at it, it is ceaseless representing itself

Water surface is the mirror of nature.

Depending on the light conditions and on water movement due to current and wind these reflections vary. But this variations are out of its system of self-representation. It is only when we look at it as subjects examining it as an object that we can classify its feactures.

For, they could be interpreted as a poetry

cruelty, clean and literal like a mirror

through the times as blurred as vague suggestions

drawing actual as fragmented

and deformed allucination of light