Urban Journeys of the Rhizomatic Line

Abstract

Using visual hierarchy, representational media often separate diverse urban experiences. Three categories of foreground, middle ground, and background are easily distinguished in photography and painting. Urban sketches separate buildings, figures, and natural features. In architectural working drawing, “poché, entourage, and mosaïque” forms a structural system for representing cut walls, environment, and texture respectively[1]. Recently, photogrammetry or Lidar scanning claim to break these hierarchies by creating “a uniform unbiased document of things in space as they exist.”[2] However, these tools fail to reveal the speculative imaginary experiences hidden behind surfaces.This series of my drawings that I named “rhizomatic line”, is the result of a non-hierarchical process inspired by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of rhizomes. Described as an array of attractions without beginning or end, a rhizome negotiates between things, “fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages.”[3] Rather than producing fragmented abstract shapes, the rhizomatic line moves between the objects and intertwines them. Seemingly recording eye movement, rhizomatic, line does not construct complete outlines, but through loosing their completion, it connects them. As it explores the city, it does not differentiate between humans, pedestrian lines, high-rise building edges, urban skylines, stairways, leaves of a small plant hiding behind a window in a private room, entrances to residential units atop towers, or imaginative spaces.When looking at similar images, different people show different eye movements.[4] A designer sees the world in the process of construction, and from multiple perspectives at once. Architects use a specific language to draw rhizomatic lines. Axonometric projection takes advantage of both the visual aspect of perspective in photography, as well as the mathematical precision of orthographic projection in computer cartesian systems. Although I do not claim that my rhizomatic lines are true or close to the vision, I emphasize on " a continuous space in which elements are in constant motion."[5] The dotted texture suggests one understanding of the scene's porosity, among many others. Through the blurring of boundaries between poché, entourage, and mosaïque, only a portion of the image is displayed as a work under construction, inviting the viewer to complete it with their imagination. In this sense, a rhizomatic line is not a cartesian representation of space. This single “active line” ending in itself, is an exploratory journey fusing imaginations, speculations, desires, memories, and dreams about the city; “a walk for a walk's sake.”[6] [1] Michael Young, Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics After the Digital Image. (New York: Routledge, 2021), 10. [2] Young, Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics After the Digital Image. 53. [3] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987), 12. [4] Alfred Yarbus. "Eye Movements During Perception of Complex Objects." Eye Movements and Vision”, (Springer: Boston, MA, 1967) [5] Stan Allen. "Construction with Lines: On Projection", Practice: Architecture, Technique+ Representation. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 19. [6] Paul Klee. Pedagogical Sketchbook. Translated by Sybil Moholy-Nagy, (New York: Praeger Publisher,1953), 16.