monocultured

What is this place? / This is the place A monocultured.com project about a nice place in the woods

WITP/TITP is a broad mapping of a place on the outskirts of Gothenburg Sweden. It doesn’t matter that it’s in Gothenburg, but it matters that it’s an actual place. What struck me about this particular spot was that that it reminded me of a stage, with a cliff face acting as a curved backdrop with you as a focal point – this, my first reaction to the place, is the first measurement of it. The scale is ”catch my interest” and the measurement is plotted on a scale which goes from ”ignore” to ”pay attention to” and the instrument – my brain, albeit "real" – is completely phenomenological. Having started there, everything else follows: Man is the measure of all things, and no matter how hard and diligently I work – or convince other people to work – all results are always tainted by this: I stopped here while picking mushroom because I thought the place was pretty, and I wanted to quantify somehow how pretty it is, or go deeper and see what it is. But everything comes back to this:

Homo mensura - Protagoras

Let’s measure this place as well as possible. Let’s see which measurements are related to my appreciation of it, and which measurements are there but completely unrelated to my appreciation, or even beyond understanding or appreciation. The perspective is still mine, and in a wider extent, human. I could try to give you a trees perspective on this place, but I can only tell you a statistically probable chain of events – I can’t tell you how it would feel to stand rooted here, having a cliff behind you, and a quick brook close by eroding the dirt from under your roots, one year to the next. In the end – everything we humans do, we do because we want to rationalise our understanding / appreciation / dislike, of something in the world, or we want to learn more about our way of rationalising / thinking. All examinations of the world is a self-examination – to some extent.

So that is what I’m doing here. I’m looking at a place, and ask others to help me look as well, and maybe in the end the place will look back at me and I’ll be able to say something non-banal.

Click below for individual mappings