Estranged Space Appropriated

Abstract

In everyday life once the spatial and social conditions are enacted in spacetime they reveal, with varying clarity, worlds that are constantly re- presented, re-structured, re-made, re-appropriated and re-interpreted. To borrow Nelson Goodman’s metaphor, worlds melt into other versions of worldmaking, and thus the emerging worlds have relational existence rather than self-existence, i.e. the spatial and temporal position of the created world is nothing but a node in the feld of networks of spatial and temporal relations. Simultaneously, the “re” in the re-presentation, re- structuring, re-making, re-appropriating and re-interpreting refers back to the social characterised in the multiple selves and connotations of the body that we encounter throughout our everyday physical, digital, hybrid and augmented participatory experiences. Hence my proposition for this chapter is ontogenic as much as it is ontological. The chapter unthreads the characteristics of the overlaid conditions between the spatial and the social in participatory architecture praxis via a critical discussion into the effects of active perception, network society and participation on the construction and re-constitution of a spatial-technological installation: Overlaid Realities. The theoretical context is based on Goodman’s ideology of irrealism and Leibniz’s relational theory, and is realised through an interrogation of the ideas implemented in Overlaid Realities installation. It is through this interrogation that the chapter develops into a triadic enquiry of the overlaid ontological (represented by notions of active perception and cognition and their effects on alternative experiences of the world), ontogenic (represented by the relationship between body/self, spacetime, and social flow), and in return, the behavioural conditions of spatial-technological worlds. This work reveals a new theoretical analysis to the way in which we perceive and conceive of spatial-social and technological installations.