Reading Ki Se-ho's A Death at the Right Distance, which asks fundamental questions about the problem of distance — specifically the changes in life caused by the loss of the interval.
From Heidegger's "The Thing"
Places that used to take weeks or months to reach can now be reached overnight by plane. Events we could only hear about years later — or would have had no way to know at all — today's people hear in real time and know instantly through radio.
Human beings, by conquering the greatest distances, bring everything to the shortest distance in front of themselves. Yet they hastily eliminate every distance. Nearness is not something produced by shortening distance. Through film images and radio sound, what lies at the shortest distance from us may in fact be the farthest thing. Short distance is not the same as nearness. Great distance is not the same as remoteness.
This passage is similar to what I was wrestling with four years ago while doing AI-related planning at a startup, so I'm noting it down. The insight I got back then was: does a faster internet give humans more time? The answer is no. I reasoned from: "when roads are widened, do roads become less congested?" Answer: no. When roads get wider, more cars come. When the internet gets faster, people look up more things. No — they get pushed into situations where they have to. Ah.. this is, similar to the statistic that IT workers in Seoul work later than those in other regions (correlation with public transportation) it reaches a similar conclusion. AI shows a similar pattern too. Recognition rate and frequency for voice — based on correlations grounded in past user patterns — the moment you leave the routine, in almost every daily situation, it outputs results far off from expectation. A key clue in problem-solving is first understanding just how far the scope of the facts and questions related to the problem actually extends.
From "Space Was Killed" (p.54)
The lost sense of distance soon led to changes in how space was perceived. Every place on earth that can be pinpointed exactly by latitude and longitude is perceived not by its own uniqueness but as numerical differences within a single, identical system. It loses its own aura and is treated, literally, as homogeneous. And homogenized space becomes editable as needed.
A passage that made me think — it would be useful to measure the perceptions, psychological distance, and experiences citizens of each region hold, and build a kind of perception-map across multiple regions on that basis.
Guy Debord's "The Naked City" (1957)
A human being is not an object plopped down in 3D space but a being who actively lives within the world — in Merleau-Ponty's phrase, a "being-toward-the-world." And it is right there, between body and world, that a map is generated — mapping.
A map is a record of how my body relates to the world, and mapping is the very process of that relating. Even though I can reach any place easily with the help of navigation, taking that place as a ground for my life is a wholly different dimension of the problem. Debord expressed, through his work, the changes in modes of dwelling and meaning-making in the modernized urban space.
Interpretation 1) Imagine the arrows as a person. He moves his steps following things that catch his eye. His body drifts this way and that through the city. In a wandering walk, orientation becomes harder, and getting lost is natural. The places where his gaze was briefly caught and he paused belong to a single trajectory, yet do not form a unified meaning.
Interpretation 2) Rather than the aimlessness of wandering or loss of place, the fragments of the map might be the places of a life torn into pieces. It might be a record of someone moving around during a day or two, riding subways along their daily routine. The flow of our lives only gets tied into knots after we get off the subway or the train. Experience in the transformed city turns the city and its outskirts into simply abandoned places. Within regional transport, they become places you just pass by. That is why Debord's mapping comes close to representing the kind of world-experience Heidegger spoke of, where intervals have disappeared.
Related keywords
1) Musealization of urban space : http://www.kgeography.or.kr/homepage/kgeography/www/old/publishing/journal/48/05/07.pdf
2) Psychogeography http://seoulgrandmother.com/tag/%EC%8B%AC%EB%A6%AC%EC%A7%80%EB%A6%AC%ED%95%99/
