Travel,
I guess just to start off a general discussion is a question that I have been pondering the last week.
The question is about travel and what it means to everyone. Do you think to travel you need to physically relocate your body and mind or do you think you can just relocate one of the two?
I have been thinking about this for the last while and I am not really sure. I could definitely agree reasonably either way but I am not really sold on any of my arguments presently.
And further more to add to the discussion is what gives us the right then to build buildings on sites we do not have 100% understanding on. Leon mentioned time after time that local knowledge is the best knowledge but is it? Everyone has his or her own perspective on the issue. So is it our job as architects to sift through worlds of information and decode what we see? Who gives us the right?
But I am really interested in is your definition of travel and how than do we project our definition of travel onto a project.
8 comments:
Another valid question to pose is our perception of authentic. It was suggested during our dinner and movie night that if that if one believes the experience they are engaging in is authentic than it is so. For instance lets say you are in a plane traveling over what you believe to be the Rocky Mountains, while peering out your window at the landscape you have a personal realization or an epiphany about life. What you thought was the Rocky Mountains is in fact not, you were deceived. Does that make your experience of the Rockies unauthentic? Or is authenticity subjective? I think it is one of those "if a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound" type questions. I think that if being in a place, real or virtual, causes you to alter your perception or gain something personally that is authentic. At least it is authentic to you, the individual. But as per the collective I am not sure you can have an authentic collective experience. I find that the opinion or perception of others will always taint yours.
I think that travel generally refers to a physical relocation, but this is not to say that travel cannot be mental. Generally when people talk about traveling they are referring to visiting a location different and far from their local community. Travel may be generally concerned with physical movement but I think that there is a mental component to traveling. Our minds allow us to suspend reality enough for us to imagine and conjure up fantasies of experiences other than our daily lives. Some of these experiences I would classify as virtual experiences. So I think that one can virtually travel using their imagination as well as physically travel by relocation.
Continuing with the notion of travel and experience I found Diller + Scofidio suggestion that authenticity is a main drawing factor for where and why people vacation. I question the “authenticity” of a site like the Grand Canyon or the place where JFK was shot. Is the experience of these sites authentic if thousands of other people have also experienced it sometimes daily? The location is obviously authentic, being the origin, but does one authentic feature make another authentic? Does the location make the experience authentic? I think an authentic event is something that travelers do not experience. The authentic experiences are those that occur outside the realm of planning and ticket purchasing. I think the authentic experience is created by spontaneity and creativity, these are things that I think are embodied in much of the architectures we se coming out of the postmodern period. I think although these buildings will probably only change because of erosion and use the variety of experiences they offer allow for a variety of authentic experiences with them even if the viewer has visited on numerous occasions. I guess my question is: is there an authentic experience and what is the difference between a collective authentic experience and an individual authentic experience (that is if they both exist)?
I think that an authentic experience can only exist within the moment that a place-based event is occurring. The tourism-driven 'authentic experience' described in the reading has never, will never exist. An authentic experience is not limited to place alone; context and content (human, social, physical, climatic, environmental, political, etc) are all part of the original event; they can never be recreated. You were either part of it, or you weren't. If you missed it, it won't happen again, and though you may pretend to do so (as described in the reading with the example of the Plymouth Plantation), you can't put yourself back into that context, at least not in the same way. (I suppose this could lead to a discussion of nostalgia / pastiche, but I won’t go there.) I say this to respond to the question raised at our dinner (can there be a collective authentic experience): I say, yes. If a group of people is participating in a specific event, or 'moment,' they collectively are components of the 'authentic experience' - the moment could not have existed without them. Or, it would exist, but not in the same way. I am trying to suggest that there may be different levels of 'authenticity' - a personal level (whereby an individual of a group understands the situation in a unique way, as only that person with his or her personal history could), and a collective level (whereby the group itself becomes part of the experience, and together their unique views form a multi-perspectival (read: truer?) understanding of the event).
Generally I don't like to travel with others, and especially not with a group. This leads me to question and contradict what I wrote previously regarding a 'collective authentic experience.' I actually feel that if I were to travel with a group, authenticity of the place would be lost. There would still be a collective authenticity of experience, but I suspect it would be group-focused, not land or place-focused. To elaborate, I find that when I travel alone, I am better able to make friends with the 'locals,' and through these people I feel a closer connection with their place, land, and way of life. In a group, I feel like I would be observing rather than participating (perhaps because I would be surrounded by people that remind me of 'home,' which would in turn lead me to cling on to my home-based belief structure / way of life) and so the collective authentic experience would be group-based (we were so organized so we had time to do such and such, we felt like eating normal food so we went to x restaurant, we laughed so hard on the bus...), instead of place/participation-based (Marcello taught me/us the Samba and we danced in the street, Valeria invited me/us to her home and we made dinner together while discussing religion, Elizabet gave us a 'non-tourist tour' of the back streets in her neighbourhood and taught us how to say swear words in her language...).
To answer Candace's question (can travel be mind-based), I would have to say no, as per my above comments. Mind travel and travel (proper) have different purposes for me. Human imagination is vast, yes, but I think it is limited to what we already know to be true (or oppositions to what we know to be true). Through travel, we are sometimes introduced to people with values, thoughts, beliefs, and experiences that are so different from our own, (and often place-based), that we could not possibly imagine them ourselves. I wonder though, if a virtual reality machine could recreate not only place, but also stimulate our five senses (like the example of total recall offered in the reading), would it be the same as travelling? I have actually been thinking about this question for a few years, as a professor back-in-the-day asked it, and was certain that the answer is no, but refused to explain his response. I still don't know how to answer this question - it is similar to Judith's /Larraine's question of subjective authenticity: if all of my senses infrom my brain that the experience is real, and in the moment my brain thinks the event is really happening, is it real? I suppose it's a 'real experience.' Is a real experience 'real' in the physical sense? ACK What IS 'real'??? Okay I still don't know the answer. What do you guys think: can we remove / replace the physical realm and still experience reality?
I tend to agree with Bobbie, that group experiences are somewhat less authentic. I find that when I travel as a collective my perception of the experience tends to get tainted by that of the others I am with. I think we naturally appropriate the reactions of others, some to a lesser degree. I find that company, regardless of the amount, creates a certain level of noise that adds additional layers to the experience. The authenticity of that experience is then compromised in some regards as the feelings you receive about the place are filtered through the collective and then to you. But again I agree with Bobbie that there is a difference between an individually authentic experience, and a collectively authentic experience. The question of “authentic”, I am starting to realize is almost un-answerable. There are so many ways to interpret it.
I had an additional comment on the definition of "authenticity". I think I have decided that there is no answer to that question. Just as there is no wrong answer to the "tree falling in a forest, does it make a sound", question. Everyone has their own beliefs, therefore everyone has their own definition for authentic, none of which being wrong. I have my own understanding of what authentic means, but at the same time I don't disagree with opposing opinions.
I am particularly interested in the collective notion of travel and how it is linked to authenticity. I do agree with all the definition presented above. Depending on the individual the definition is going to have many meanings. Larraine’s comment about a "tree falling in a forest, does it make a sound" is really important to acknowledge. I believe that experiences that we have are not real unless we can create them with someone else. They are not authentic unless we can experience them with someone else.
To me I think that the truthful definition of authentic has to do with comparing one another’s experiences. It has to do with just one individual validating the authenticity of the experience: one individual who can relate to the experience.
In regards to the comment about “you are in a plane traveling over what you believe to be the Rocky Mountains, while peering out your window at the landscape you have a personal realization or an epiphany about life. What you thought was the Rocky Mountains is in fact not, you were deceived” is and is not an authentic experience. It is not an authentic experience with the Rocky Mountains because no one is going to validate the authenticity of the experience. It is an authentic experience because I am sure there is someone else in the world that can validate the same thing happening to him or her.
So how does this apply to mental travel then? How can an individual validate a mental travel? I know they can validate a physical travel.
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