Spatial Imaginaries

With the example of Paris as a city imaginary, I illustrated a subset of a spatial imaginary. Now this general term encompass any form of imagined space. First of all the geography, landscapes of our Earth existed as physical environment. Throughout the ages the civilised worlds had create maps and cartography to describe the world, or the known, explored world. The map and cartography is one layer of representing the world on paper or digitally, yet this form of representation generates a certain imagination for the map reader or cartographer. Therefore representation of anything is necessarily attached with a certain imagination. Even photographic representation of a place or an object attaches with it the point of view of the photographer, the time and lighting such photographic act takes place. These details and decisions contribute to a viewpoint and with viewpoint, a way of seeing things. When the seeing eye of human is involved, a layer of imagination always surfaces. So one set of spatial imaginaries contain the physical world and its representations, be them photographs, maps, painting of landscapes, geography, etc. Another set is the literature and writing related to the geography: stories, fictions, legends, myths always take place at locations, base on a certain landscape as backgrounds. One can say writing is another form of representation too, different from images, writings conjure up and trigger the reader's own reserved memories of images, experience and knowledge and therefore construct with the reader a world by language. The third set comprise of imagined realms, partly based on the existing realities and synthesised as variations of such realities, such as the world created in Lords of the Ring, or the world described in the film The Matrix; or the alien created room for astronaut David Bowman in the film 2001 A Space Odyssey. There are semblances of recognised featured in these worlds, we as viewers understand them by certain elements or properties, yet we know they are imagined worlds, product of human imagination. The final set is the completely alien, incomprehensible dimensions of space, unknown or unknowable spatial dimension, such as how an ant views architecture. The conception and creation of such spatial dimension that may be incomprehensible to human just as an ant's attempt to know or understand the meaning of architecture. We will reserve a variables within the spatial imaginaries that is unknown. Thus the 4 sets of spatial imaginaries are defined here today.