Please go to my website for the polished version
in its best format (which I couldn't capture via blog)
As Lived and Written by Kristin Brush (aka: Peaceful Warrior)
Student of Neighborhood Narratives
Fall ’08 Rutgers University
The FoundationFrom the beginning of my life I was conditioned into suffering. I was loved but I did not experience that love. I was only capable of experiencing my life through the suffering brought to me by my disease. Believing that my soul chose this body and therefore this disease, I came to ask myself why? Why be born into a world of pain and blocked pleasures. Why be born into a family of love while simultaneously not connecting to that love? These are all questions I have asked myself because, at the age of twenty three, I am finally ready to begin releasing my past and find my way into a newly enlightened and tranquil present. My name is Kristin Brush and this is a narrative of my journey from pain to peaceful product. By ‘product’ I refer to this project “The Experience Intersection”, and all of its endeavors. To me, this undertaking has symbolized the culmination of my experience, the experience of others, and the connection between a place in space and how it has elicited a creative process from deep within my soul.The Formulation
It began with a CRACK.As a flaneur, I wondered about the streets of New Brunswick, searching for a ‘crack’. This ‘crack’ was, at the time, to represent my split between emotion and self. This principle was the only guiding element of my project, as I meandered from aimless point to aimless point, searching for inspiration. The assignment was to find a location within the urban environment and utilize it as inspiration for the creation of a final project. At the time, I of course had no idea what this might have meant. All I knew was that I came to New Brunswick in the middle of the afternoon, on a cold and overcast day in search of a ‘crack’. Standing on the corner of Hamilton Street and College Avenue, I noticed a distinguishable split in the sidewalk that somehow captivated my attention. I cannot begin to determine how this split drew me in, other than to say it looked much like the crack I had represented on the map of my emotional geography created for the Neighborhood Narratives class. In any case, I decided to sit, watch, and experience the crack and its surroundings. I felt a bit odd as I sat there on the sidewalk, being passed by cars, buses, bicycles, pedestrians and the like. Nonetheless, I simply took in the sight of the busy intersection, the sound of sirens, footsteps, and car engines, the smell of ‘fat sandwiches’ emanating from the Rutgers Grease trucks, and the crispness of the cool air against my skin. I journaled, took videos, and collected my sensory experiences from the world around me. Already I was fueled and feeling comfortable in the space. I had even already begun to create a mixed-reality experience. And as Yi Fu Tuan wrote, “When space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place.”
[1] .Somehow this intersection was far more than just an ‘in-between’ space for me; it was a place, it was familiar; it was to be the site of my project. In the days that followed my first encounter with the intersection, I returned again and again in order to develop my own interpretation of this place. Each time I returned I found something new including ‘tagging’ left behind by people of the past, and pieces of archeological debris. These aspects helped bring the location to life for me, and naturally, over time, the diverse facets of my project became more and more clear.
In visiting and re-visiting the intersection of Hamilton Street and College Avenue, I began to consider what modes of inspiration I was drawing from. To begin with, none of the ideas behind my project would have been fully developed if it weren’t for Michel Foucault. His piece Of Other Spaces, has a particular section entitled “Heterotopias”, which founded my understanding of ‘the third space’. This space was something which, with this project, I was creating by putting into motion virtual aspects (including my website, google map, blog entries, facebook group, and open source connections on each site) that coincided with the real place. Hence, my mixed reality, heterotopic space was born. The idea for hosting the internet-accessible variables in my project, including the web site I created and links to a variety of open sources, came from “Counter Cartographies” by Brian Holmes. Holmes writes in the very beginning of his article “The Internet is the vector of a new geography-not only because it conjures up virtual realities, but also because it shapes our lives in society, transforms our cities, and shifts our perception along with the ground beneath our feet.”
[2] I believe in this notion of the internet having the power to shape our perceptions of not just geographical and physical locations, but also virtual locations as well. This is why I felt it would be crucial to include the internet in my project-because leaving it out would be to ignore an entire realm of experience that correlates with the location. If for no other reason than because you can view this intersection on Google maps.com, which of course instantly brings it into ‘cyberspace’, I felt addressing the virtual aspect was necessary. Of course, it did not end there, because a Google map was only one tiny facet of the connections I came to build between a physical place and the sometimes unfathomable ‘cyberspace’. Ironically enough, “the term cyberspace literally means ‘navigable space’ and is derived from the Greek word kyber (to navigate)”
[3] Yet, during the course of my online endeavors, I often felt overwhelmed and lost in a sea of information, resources and possibilities. This made it difficult if not nearly impossible to navigate this so-called ‘navigable space’. But in the end, I made use of the chaos and drew upon the energy of any ‘struggle’ that ensued, to cultivate my determination. Moreover, I sought to disintegrate “the friction of distance” that is often associated with internet/reality relationships. Not that I believed that the “death of distance”
[4] would be achieved. Rather, I felt that through my project, the intersection would become at least a little closer to those not physically present, through its newly established relationship to the web and connection to ‘real-life’ narratives.
Yi Fu Tuan’s “Experiential Perspective” was also a great muse. The way the author described experience as being “a cover-all term for the various modes through which a person knows and constructs a reality” really resonated with me. In its infantile stage of creation, “The Experienced Intersection”, was to show how people, including myself, are able to experience a particular location in space. Because Yi Fu Tuan claims “Experience is directed to the external world”, I wanted to see if in fact this was true or if people were able to connect experience to internal and external factors. And as Tuan stated in his work, “Seeing and Thinking clearly reach out beyond the self. Feeling is more ambiguous”. But was this really true? Did I believe that this attribution of feeling to the intangible and cognition to the tangible was enough to account for the ways in which people interacted with experience and location? As someone who experiences things physically, emotionally, and mentally, I found it difficult to narrow down experience to a one-dimensional entity. In this sense, I actually agreed with Yi Fu Tuan’s notion of experience as an all-encompassing term. This is why I chose to get many different individuals’ perspectives on their experiences of the Intersection of Hamilton Street and College Avenue, as was reflected in various portions of the project.
Another aspect I took into consideration was the fact that this location was likely one which no one really stopped to think about in terms of experience, because it is a location in which people pass by/through on the way to somewhere else. But does this really mean that they could not experience the intersection nonetheless? No, I think my project proves that the answer is no. Furthermore, my project shows how no two experiences are the same, which is so crucial to remember because it really speaks to the human capacity for interpretation based upon learning. Tuan writes:
Experience thus implies the ability to learn from what one has undergone. To experience is to learn; it means acting on the given and creating out of the given. The given cannot be know in itself. What can be known is a reality that is a construct of experience [5]Thus, each person involved in my project, including myself, based experience upon his/her own learned actions/perceptions/feelings/etc. This is what made the project so exciting to play out, because no one has the same reality and even if we all live in ‘one reality’, this reality is still open to interpretation and is, in many ways, a construct of experience as the author states.
Consequently, “The Experienced Intersection” was and is just that, one which is felt, perceived, learned, and told by many different people in many different forms. This notion is what drove me towards the end product of this journey, which sought to connect others’ experiences with not only my own, but also with the site itself in both a virtual and very ‘real’ way. Without giving away this end result, let it suffice to say…
It ended with a CRACK…
And so much more.
So Now I Present:
The Manifesto of a Peaceful Warrior
1. I must dive head-first into this experience of the intersection of Hamilton Street and College Avenue, and be open to any discoveries that are yet to be found. I expect that others will do the same.
2. I allow this place to guide me rather than forcing myself to guide or change it.
3. I intend to leave any preconceptions, self-judgments, and doubts in the past.
4. Sensory Observation,Emotionality,’Real-life’Inspiration, and Interaction are driving forces in my art.
5. Mixed-Reality is welcomed in this project, as a means of attempting to bridge the gaps between time, space, and people.
6. The landscape and the people moving about it will be given a voice.
7. I will not narrow the lens through which I look at the site so as not to exclude or eliminate possibilities.
8. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to interpret experience.
9. Never lie to yourself about what you are observing or what you were meant to see, because sooner or later it will come back and smack you in the face! Of this, I am now sure.
10. We must recognize that every place within this place, is a place in and of itself.
11. The site itself addresses the issue of how we as humans interpret experience on a one-dimensional level and seeks to break open experience as it is defined by myself and those outside of me.
12. The reality of the connection that exists between me and particular elements of this place will not be denied, and the end result of the project will reflect this notion.
13. This is an integrative project and therefore is composed of a dynamic element, a social element, and a personal element.
14. This project has been shaped by and has helped to shape some very personal aspects of my life and for this I am grateful.
15. It is my hope that others might experience such a rich connection to not only this location, but any place or places for that matter, and if they don’t they should at least try.
16. There is no way for us to fully experience the world and see how some of its most tiny intricacies relate to us personally, unless we take the leap of faith needed to venture out and explore. This is what I’ve done and this is how “The Experienced Intersection” came to be.
Footnotes:
[1] Tuan, Yi Fu. “Spatial Ability, Knowledge and Place”. Space and Place. 73. University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
[2] Holmes, Brian. “Counter Cartographies”. Else/Where: New Cartographies of Networks and Territories Ed. Janet Abrams and Peter Hall, University of MN Press, 2006.
[3] Kitchin, Robert. “Introducting cyberspace”. Mapping Cyberspace 1
[4] Source 3. 13
[5] Tuan, Yi Fu. “The Experiential Perspective.” Space and Place . University of Minnesota Press. 1977.
