SINIR PEYZAJLARI

The project of becoming human necessitated the utilization of memory which developed with the objectification of representations. Thus, humanity not only passed on its experiences through generations, but also 'domesticated' the world by creating the existential domains of time and space. By reflecting its movement and activity upon the earth and within the universe in certain temporal and material orders and thus creating space and time, humanity built for itself a civilizing environment. This creation of time and space made 'confrontations' and 'meetings' with the unknown possible. By defining a place within which representations were transformed into orders, humanity could define an identity for itself. The meeting with the 'other', and confronting the new may be possible only in this way. The temporal and spatial orders constituted the base from which transgression and liberty were possible. The idea of liberty, as well as the capacity to learn, grow from the delicate interplay between object/subject, known/unknown, order/chaos, and self and the other, at the periphery. Both form-making and the definition of identities are articulated and conditioned at the periphery. Thus, the periphery is also the zone of consciousness. Although identity is intensified at the center, there it also becomes blind to itself.Today this delicate and vital zone no longer has a place. The articulations between object/subject, known/unknown, order/chaos, and self/other are being dissolved. Mechanic type of production, action and movement which no longer use representational systems, but depend on digital coding, fragment, dissolve, divide, in repeated units, time and space which had taken humanity hundreds of years to create. This dissolution destroys the idea of a periphery that is a skin alive and breathing and where definitions and confrontations take place. In order to sustain the human quality of aesthetic and ethical values, we have to somehow redeem, gain back, and invest again in this vital zone. By dissolving, breaking apart, decomposing, and de-constructing, humanity is being able to penetrate everything. The present system of capitalistic growth and victory over nature functions through destruction (Figure 1). In this way, a brutal and barbaric force turns the 'other', the unknown into something without identity. Our age is called the post-frontier age. This is not a factual but a paradigmatic condition. Thoreau has said, 'The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact'. This statement shows that politics starts at the limit of perception. To front a fact brings with it the apprehension of the 'other'. So far humanity has evolved by accepting otherness as a value to be safeguarded and respected. Rather than seeing itself as the center isolated within a foreign environment, as it does today, humanity has until now acted between nature and freedom, and as the peripheral condition of nature, where exchange and integration between matter and spirit happens. The great capacity for mobility that humanity possesses placed it at the periphery of nature. By transforming the lived moment, which is always an action on the periphery, and between two beings, into an image, into a sign, or into a language, human perception makes time and space, history and continuity, and hence consciousness possible. Human perception, which is able to create meaning only through an aesthetic mechanism, which is form-making, takes place on a living boundary, on the 'in-between' zone, which is called the ma in Japanese. Consciousness is nature's peripheral zone. It is a zone in perpetual focus and fluidity. It is the 'in-between', the area of exchange between object and subject. Thus man is the subjectivity in nature and this subjectivity unfolds in his being the periphery to nature. Humankind which is the consciousness of the world, could also be the positive and protective agent in nature. Can we redeem that zone of apprehension, the marginal territory where varying content come to terms with each other. Can we, in the space where we live, see our world neighboring other possibilities foreign to us? Can we be conscious again that we are inhabiting a place in constant flux, between being and nonbeing, life and death, self and the other, order and chaos? Can we bring to a level of apprehension, the unheimlich inhabited by gods, by those who have not yet appeared, by the intangible and by those who have been transformed? Can we call into existence again that field of discovery, only where we can grow and become human. Can we pay attention to that which is outside our immediate familiar terrain into which we have assimilated and domesticated everything which was sacred, secret, different. In short, can we re-create, or redeem within the contemporary condition the area of meeting where learning, representation, form-making, where experiment and innovation happen? Today it is penury and the third world which is seen as the periphery; the periphery İs the place for waste disposal, it is the peripherique, the speed-way where you cannot stop, cannot produce, understand, intake or perceive. Can this periphery be revitalized or can we find or define new peripherics? The problem is double; we have to see and understand what is a border, and we have to also redeem and safeguard the border as a vital zone of exchange, of form-making, of creating meaning. Diversity and heterogeneity will be possible if we can continue to create form. Life is a process through time and space and a constant metamorphosis in which being is constant becoming. It is a nomadic state through conditions, drawing in the peripherics to the center, or going out, expanding, opening up. One's orientation and placement in the world and the intentions and orders of one's process through time/space are reflected in the frame, in the periphery and in the boundaries of the time/space that one has built about oneself in defining one's identity and one's relation to the world. Architecture, the city, landscape, and all forms of art reveal a relationship to the unknown, to what lies beyond, in drawing up specific forms of boundaries, walls, etc. Each passing beyond the border, each trespassing, somehow necessitate a kind of paying back, an apology, a truce. The attention and effort made to be able to see, to hear, to taste, to understand, in other words to reciprocate to the surrounding, manifest certain gestures, certain positions or dispositions, certain movements of the body and of the being. While each perception constitutes a direct physical, albeit intangible bond with its object, creating a continuous flow of energy, the body and its senses dispose themselves in a certain way, take on certain forms, adapt to their object. The body and the senses thus reciprocate to the 'other', to the unknown. Here begins the first aesthetic form-making with one's whole being, with one's body which becomes malleable as it apprehends the 'other'. Bending, leaning-over, turning, twisting, posing in stillness, and many other barely visible movements make lines, shapes, articulations to connect to the environment; they are all kinds of a dance, uniting with and defining time and space. In fact, all different geopolitic and economic situations, in all different periods and styles of production, and in different societies also produced their particular time/space forms. Like arts, music, dance, architecture, these were the manifestation of patterns which the senses and the body adopted, the better to relate to the environment. The curves of a dress, the form or clusters of a settlement, the spatial articulation of rooms in a house, the temporal order of musicand dance, the compositions of sculpture and painting, and lastly of verbal language, have to do with complex syntheses of form-making and ordering, which are based on patterns of memory, cognition and representation peculiar to a culture. This representational and order giving faculty is a poetic effort to orient oneself in the environment as one derives a meaning from it and as one reflects meaning onto it. It is the primary aesthetic and creative act and the cultural basis from which all art grows and evolves. As this development in form making becomes less and less dependent on the physical/biological relationship between nature and culture, it begins to become merely conceptual and eventually ceases to produce form and meaning.Apprehension becomes a form and form-making by adapting the body and the senses to the environment to receive/perceive and to reciprocate to its stimuli and to the many signs of the world. This form-making is the work of both perceiver and perceived in a way where both are active and where the perceiver is truly attentive to the 'other'. The relationship is held at a most delicate and fragile balance, between outside and inside, self and the 'other'. Throughout history, up to the end of the industrial age, and until the middle of the twentieth century, the many different ways this delicate relationship was held and was interpreted by various societies can be traced and analyzed in their interpretations and representations of their environment, in their understanding and in the poetics of their orientation within the rest of the world. Accordingly, each type of form-making giving rise to various behavior and movement patterns in the environment, kept the periphery alive and dynamic, as a realm of exchange, and in interaction (Figure 2). These alternative patterns can be deciphered for all cultures and settlements, and for all forms of art; but they may best be illustrated in architecture. Here the Egyptian, the aboriginees, the Mexican pueblo, the Hindu, Tantric Buddha, the medieval Christian and Islamic, the Renaissance, and finally as it evolves out of the latter, in the İ9th century Hegelian dialectics of mind and matter and its reflection in industrial culture will be shown as examples. The patterns that we here explain in words or in photographs or drawings can only be simplified schematizations of world views which were reflected in multiple dimensions and experienced in plural aspects and against which, even when they were completely closed systems, their societies had inner mechanisms of trespassing. Trespassing was possible because the periphery was always somehow defined. These schematizations show the artistry with which societies interacted with the environment, and the value of the periphery as a realm of interchange which was kept alive and dynamic. The unknown or the 'other' could never be totally assimilated.