Space, Translation

Excerpted from notes written on 2019-08-08

Let's imagine that the spaces we've visited and stayed in are each like a room. And let's imagine that the time it takes to move between these rooms is equivalent to the time it takes using public transportation or walking. In this way, we can view the spaces visited in a city as a single house with multiple interconnected rooms. If we set a movement path within a space and lay out the experiences a person has at each moment while moving along this path according to time, we can create a long linear space with time as its depth axis. If you had a dream where you had to turn your body 1 and 3/4 turns to see the scenery you originally saw, it would be possible to decide on a way to map the angles in the dream to some concept in real space, allowing us to discuss both spaces in the same language.

The same space can be perceived differently depending on the subject observing it. It's said that people who travel by bicycle and those who travel by car understand the city differently due to the difference in speed. Humans and cats would have different understandings of the spatial connections within a city because they can move through different areas of the urban space. Dogs, with their superior sense of smell, would likely understand spaces by mapping olfactory information onto them.

Even a single individual can view the same space from multiple perspectives. Let's imagine visiting a popular restaurant for the first time. Some might view it in the context of its ranking among other restaurants they've researched online. Others might see it as a point on the map they observed while walking there. Yet others might perceive the restaurant through details such as the atmosphere of the neighborhood it's located in, the sequence of scenes they encountered while walking, or maybe the smell of baking bread from a nearby bakery.

We live among countless spaces and countless perspectives from which to view them. Space translators are people who create meaningful connections between various space-perspectives to enable significant interactions. An architect who proposes building a new facility by interweaving the relationships between work spaces and residential spaces in a city is also a space translator. People who walk while looking at map applications are mapping points, lines, and planes on the screen space to urban space and their own position, so in this case, the person who designed the application is the space translator.

Space translators need to consider what information to map onto spaces, and how to explain spatial experiences through this mapping. In an era where interactions between experiences in virtual spaces and real spaces are increasingly growing, we will need space translators suited to this reality.