August 15, 2005
Roomology
Rooms as Psychogeodynamic Objects
Drinking whiskey laced with vodka can not not produce drunkenness: a room first entered evokes in you an immediate involuntary mental sensation. The human mind senses environments by instinct, scans and evaluates them for properties like ambience, lines of sight and darkness. The horror genre, invented by the partisan architect Horace Walpole, thrived on the discovery that rooms can scare you to death. The grassroots study to this little understood effects of space on mind that transpires through everything humans undertake, as after all you are always somewhere, is called psychogeography.
Psychogeodynamic objects are defined as those blurry-edged entities from which strong psychogeographic 'rays' emanate. The history of landscape representation is one overflowing with anecdotes about the psychogeodynamic demanding its reproduction by the overwhelmed artist or snapshoteer. Roomology, the subdomain of psychogeography that studies rooms as psychogeodynamic objects, can retrace a similar but more covert tradition of artistic studies and observations about the ways rooms and minds work together.
The Gothic Cathedrals are an obvious example of the fact that long before the word psychogeography was invented the thereby described effects were recognised and consciously manipulated to achieve psychological patterns in its spectators. The solitary confinement/sensory deprivation tactic used by certain regimes to put pressure on prisoners is another example of psychogeodynamic engineering in need of urgent analysis from psychogeographic angle.
On a more common level, rooms are ideal environments for the psychogeographers scrutiny because most people have one, and most of them have very precise and immutable ideas of the how their room should look, or to be more precise: should 'feel' like. The vagueness of expression shows the elusiveness of the stuff psychogeographers try to deal with and what makes it the rocket science of poetry.
Roomology and art have a long intertwined history. In her essay "A Room of One's Own", Virgina Woolf explained to woman aspiring to become writers that securing a room for themselves was the one prerequisite they could not do without. Lee 'scratch' Perry's Jamaican studio was called the Ark for a reason. Pictures shows its with leaflets, gear and memorabilia overcrowded walls: conveying the room as a sacramental shrine channelling the bogeyman away from his head and into the record. Perry eventually burnt the Ark down.
The mind-room feedback loop (a psychogeonic system if you like) creates a stream of consciousness that makes it impossible to separate interior design from creative production. Every change in the room indicates/creates/reinforces in many different ways, impossible to untangle, some mental change. The Yellow Room by Vincent van Gogh, the famous painting of his room in Arles with the furniture frenzied by absinthian voodoo, is ample evidence of the fact that artists and rooms are an unbreakable psychological tandem. When Andre Breton during the second world room had to vacate his room, his production faltered dramatically because of it.
Our rooms are part of our intelligence. From notebooks, biographies, diaries and other sources we can analyse the roomologic faculty in others, constant monitoring of our own room-sized spaceship as part of the self is another way to go. Related: The Taxonomy of my Room
Posted by jo at August 15, 2005 11:56 AM
