Thoughts On Place
Photo: Tidbinbilla Reserve, ACT Australia - September 2018.
Email to Professor Katina Michael
23rd September 2018 - 5:27 PM
Place is that 'sense of place' - belonging to and grounded in and on Country. The disambiguation and separation between the human and place occur first in language when ‘Country’ is referred to as ‘THE country’.
Location is a simple term, inanimate and only effective, but not affective. The term is derivative of and informed by GPS and GIS in a digital context, as it relates to networks, connections, and 'things' yet I would argue humans are not 'things'. The concept of 'things' as artifacts connected to a grid 'reveal' but largely, I would argue, misinform humanity.
It is like a friend of ours who still drives around Canberra using her TomTom GPS that barks orders at her. She says she is too frightened to turn it off as she would not know where to go, would not understand where she was. I argued with her that she never did and hadn't yet arrived in Australia :)
The whole 'method of loci' and the concepts of 'memory palace' bring humans to eternalizing these concepts as memory. I think that's what the 'virtual' is...a means to escape the physical reality, the dirty and ethics devoid ways in which we have let placeless corporations take over our terra firma.
Corporations as placeless, largely ethics-averse entities that exist in 'placelessness'.
