Space as Consciousness

This paper explores the concept of character in city spaces, defined as the typical behaviour of a particular person or thing, extending this notion to suggest that spaces also possess personality. Space in this case is limited to the public realm, where accessible volumes are made up of surfaces, material, geometry, history, function, and potential affordances.

Creating an original 'spatial personality rubric' the author sets out a methodology to enable any streetwalker to approach and understand city space through a system of meaning. The analysis draws on the dialectical lenses of Hegel and Nietzsche observing a 'middle-term' that allows for a spectrum of spatial personalities between two opposing drives. This approach is further enriched by urban theorists such as Saskia Sassen, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Marc Augé, whose concepts contribute to a refreshed spatial language set in the rubric between the authors own polarised terms of ‘Sterile’ and 'Dissonant’. Using this guide the author then engages in practical exploration (walking in the city) and identifies spatial personalities that can afford artistic intervention beyond documentation.

These interventions form a creative collision whereby the personality of space and its classification is further interrogated through inhabitation and a material language, thus attempting a consciousness between the agent and space. Two case studies illustrate the application of this rubric to real spaces, presenting artistic interventions ‘in-vivo’ to ‘in-vitro’, from the city into the white cube of the gallery for closer inspection. These are:

01. ‘Liberty on the Liffey’, set on Dublin’s Liffey River, an experiment takes place on the site of a heterotopia for an artistic protest.
02. ‘I’m Squatting in your Condo’ set in Tokyo’s finance district, highlights an invisible resident that becomes the genesis of an art installation representing the master, the slave and the middle-term.