Today, I had an idea for coordinating the art and pictures we hang on our walls at home: a “direction room”. The essence of it is that we hang a picture on a wall oriented towards the direction where the subject of that picture is or was. This layers into the decoration of the room a sense of orientation augmented by representing the location of the subject – metadata of that subject.
In the last couple of days, I’ve been thinking about orientation systems and how a person becomes oriented, or reoriented. I learned about two of these systems in graduate course on memory: egocentric and allocentric orientation. Egocentric, or idiothetic, means you find orientation by the properties of yourself – front, back, right, left. Of course, those are not absolutes in the environment, they are wholly subjective. Allocentric, or allothetic, means you establish orientation by the cues of your environment. In this case, the orientation becomes more objective – north is north to all of us, contrasted with forward or backward.
Orientation systems are bound with navigation. Augmented reality iPhone apps usually augment navigation systems – revealing “where” things are by augmenting their visibility, or augmenting your ability to see them.
If the Direction Room were to provide orientation, it would orient me in the experiences that define and describe me by placing them around me and representing some of their traits. It is scheme of representing meaning and not just location.
If the Direction Room were to provide navigation, I hope it would reveal to my children (and friends or other visitors) where I have explored in the world, what shaped me. And, it wouldn’t strip the referent of its meaning only to fit it into my story. It would preserve, or represent, more of that thing’s own nature. Perhaps they would see stories more as I saw them, than as I might recall and tell them.
To top it off, how would I deal with the transformational events? You see, monsters are very important characters in our world. I believe monsters are what we construct to represent things we don’t understand, thus, I believe they are rich characters in our individual and collective mental spaces. I believe that monsters form as we approach the horizon of a (potential) transformation; and, that we can make sense of, understand, appreciate, and even identify with the monster as and after we transform into a state described by that character’s full dimensionality.
I would put those characters in the hallways, corridors, and stairways, those spaces that deliver you from one place to another.
Finally, this reminds me of a story – a story whose title I don’t remember now, but will add in a revision to this article – I read in grades school where the children’s room transformed into the African serengeti. In that book, I believe the lion’s devour the children’s parents. If I may – since this is my augmented reality – I am willing to be devoured by the nature of children’s imagination, but I want to do so as Wittgenstein describes in his Treatise on Logical Philosophy. I hope to offer my children a scaffolding, a ladder, by which they can climb out of where they have been as they transform. Death becomes me, as they become themselves?
