This page is referenced by:

• 1 2021-04-19T13:30:32-07:00 Concept mash-up (matthew Gurney) 10 plain 2021-04-25T04:43:58-07:00 In Last week's activities I elaborated a little bit on some ideas I want to mash up: namely spacetime, dis-emplacement, non-places, and expanse-ness. These started from elaborations on the collapsing of space and time due to the Anthropocene as seen in the COVID and climate crises. I will now explore these further through some images. 
  
  
  
  The Polar Bear hotel in China is cruel, and we can understand why through a mash up of these concepts. the polar bears have clearly been dis-emplaced, they have been pushed into this environment and have been fixed to these surroundings. Their environment has also collapsed onto these four walls, the white floor poorly mimicking snow and ice caps squashed into the wall. Their spacetime, and how they perceive the world has literally collapsed into these walls in a grotesque way. But more interestingly is the windows: these humans have been dis-emplaced onto the polar bear "habitat", in the loosest sense of the word, as some form of immersive experience. As a result, the urban culture has collapsed onto the unnatural, natural environment, and as a result, this is a non-place, that distorts the binary of natureculture. It is difficult to imagine how these bears perceive their space. 
  
  
  This second image is of another collapsing of spacetime, in a different way. It is somewhere I visited in 2017, the Hong Kong botanical gardens. It is the opposite of the polar bear hotel - the plants have been dis-emplaced into the urban city, which ominously looms over it. Their natural instinct to grow and expand is limited and curated by a sprawling metropolis, in a city that ironically struggles for space. This image also makes me thing of expanse-ness, in a different way to how I originally conceived it: the gardens feel expansive, you feel like you're in "nature", and you have that feeling of safety in an open space, yet this is ultimately a state of false consciousness, there is nothing natural about it. 
  
  
  The last image for me is much closer to home. I tried to find better images but this one nicely sums up my lived experience. This for me is expanse-ness as how I first thought of it - the safety you have from being only 2m apart yet it feels like you do in a large open field, in that there is safety, but an emptiness, in the opened space. These are non-places, atomised as Jennifer Cooke said, each 2m apart. These places are non places, as how each desk on campus now has an allocated number where it once was apart of a a larger room, we are all atomised into our own non-places. 
  
  to conclude, I think I want to cover all these ideas as dis-emplacement. For me it implies that we have all become fixed to these new ideas of place and space during the pandemic, and while it is a new sense for us, it is how I imagine the Canadian Geese in the Oil sands and the polar bears in their hotel feel. There is an absurd truth to the idea that these collapsed liminal spaces emulate the safety of an expanse, by collapsing spacetime down into atomised chunks, creates a feeling of safety that we know is false, but have to depend on.