In ways architecture can be considered to be the spatializing of concepts. As an exercise in organizing ideas in space I’ve begun translating the texts I read into “Spatial-Notes”, a way visualizing the concepts in a given text.

To make a Spatial-Note:
1) Drink a large cup of coffee
2) Start reading the text and draw selected images and passages as they come to mind.
3) Visually and spatially connect those images in the same way the concepts are related in the text.

Unlike a hierarchical outline, ‘note-taking’ is highly selective and used to recall the original text rather than to be a substitute for it; in other words it’s a personal memory device. By visualizing these personal images, new associations are allowed to intuitively form. Instead of being a reductive reading of the text, it expands the connections of the text while creating a spatial construct of the concepts.

That being the goal, I made a spatial-note of Slajov Zizek’s essay “From Virtual Reality to the Virtualisation of Reality”

Spatial-note of Slajov Zizek's essay "From Virtual Reality to the Virtualisation of Reality"

The most difficult things when taking the spatial-notes were on deciding how much of each object to draw and how to illustrate the relationships to one another. Relationships of concepts that are described spatially in the text as “within” or “in tandem” are fairly straight-forward to draw, but others that seem to bridge different fields or jump between several states become more ambiguous. At some point the analysis really becomes about the structure of the text itself rather than the concepts embodied in that text. This was the same problem I had with an earlier drawing experiment I called “mind-maps”. It was a substitute for a journal in which the places/people/feelings/thought I had during a given day were embodied in objects rather than words and set to react against one another in space to capture the state of mind as an image. Unfortunately it was too difficult to describe the complex relationships between the concepts while still creating interested spaces and I abandoned the drawing before finishing it.

Mindmap Test (Abandoned)