Conceptual Grounding for the Mobile Timeline

‘…an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it.’

from Mapping the Homunculus, Steve Dietz (p 200), in reference to
Guy Debord’s excerpt on sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe

Psychogeography.  The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.

from The Situationist International: A User´s Guide, by Simon Ford

The Mobile Timeline draws on sociology, science, and literature to construct different Rome’s.  The artists’ conception is based on urban sociology and cognitive neurology, or neuro-mapping.  The project poses the questions, what and where is Rome, and who determines the history of a city and the story of a place?

Cycling through Rome(s) borrows from Janus, who represents time and transition, as the conceptual basis for its mobility through various Rome’s throughout times, cultures, and social strata.  As Janus peers in opposite directions, simultaneously facing the future and past, old and new, the cyclists also may travel and experience the tour in both directions.  The tour’s elasticity reflects Janus’ fluid progression from one condition to another, between epochs and places, mind sets and time zones. 

Mapping has emerged in the information age as a means to make the complex accessible, the hidden visible, the unmappable mappable… mapping has become a way of making sense of things.

from Else/Where: Mapping-New Cartographies of Networks
and Territories, edited by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall

Rebuilding Rome reveals that place is co-constructed by its inhabitants, and by those who never venture into the city but have a fully mapped out sense of place.  In his article, “Cerebral Cities,” Tom Vanderbilt points out that the brain is both elastic and responsive, with separate parts of the brain for retaining memories of place and collecting topographical information.  Like Janus, the brain is in transformation.  The brain constantly revises place.

The Mobile Timeline presents a collective picture of Rome and maps a topography built on the individual experiences of visitors and inhabitants, storytellers and dreamers.  The project offers viewers the tools to add to the picture, to reposition and remap the city according to their own psychogeography.  Each of these personal maps builds Rome.

How many maps, in the descriptive or geographical sense, might be needed to deal exhaustively with a given space, to code and decode all its meanings and contents?  It is doubtful whether a finite number can ever be given in answer to this sort of question.  What we are most likely confronted with here is a sort of instant infinity.

Henri Lefebvre, from Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark