DigiTale: Ampelmännchen
Marjan Colletti (2003).
An example how to demonstrate how the virtual can be prosthetic to the actual is given by the traffic light figures. Seen as interactable inhabitants, or agents, of the most basic digital environment, the traffic light figures occupy an existence space facilitated by their flexible topological expressions. Although referring to the same and unique message (stop or go), and therefore conveying collective qualities, traffic light figures appear diverse and distinctive in different countries, and therefore convey local qualities of heterogeneity. In the case that the architect/student, engaged with computer-related properties, accepts the inevitability of authorship, establishing her/his position in relationship to research and design, technology and software, what will be avoided is a psychosis described by Janet as ‘legendary psychasthenia’: the failure by the imaginary body, the ego, the existence (and/or the student/architect) to locate and represent themselves in space (and/or within the spline geometry). In psychasthenia, the impossibility of the interlinking of subject, body, and objects occurs in a psychotic definition and representation of space.
An example how to demonstrate how the virtual can be prosthetic to the actual is given by the traffic light figures. Seen as interactable inhabitants, or agents, of the most basic digital environment, the traffic light figures occupy an existence space facilitated by their flexible topological expressions. Although referring to the same and unique message (stop or go), and therefore conveying collective qualities, traffic light figures appear diverse and distinctive in different countries, and therefore convey local qualities of heterogeneity. In the case that the architect/student, engaged with computer-related properties, accepts the inevitability of authorship, establishing her/his position in relationship to research and design, technology and software, what will be avoided is a psychosis described by Janet as ‘legendary psychasthenia’: the failure by the imaginary body, the ego, the existence (and/or the student/architect) to locate and represent themselves in space (and/or within the spline geometry). In psychasthenia, the impossibility of the interlinking of subject, body, and objects occurs in a psychotic definition and representation of space.
[Image: Various European traffic light figures, and the ‘Ampelmännchen’ (pedestrian light traffic figure) from former East Berlin.]
