Getting Lost

Getting lost, or not knowing where you are is a situation that at first instance produces anxiety. It is an indefinite state that assumes that the motivation of navigation and movement is rational or functional. This assumption arises from the narrow explorative space in our local area that most of map and from also the way in which drifting has become a cultural template of sorts of swimming against the current.

If they are moving fast, we can go slow. If they know where they are, we can forget - and get lost in the process. This reversal has become too easy to state and so has become impossible to achieve. Because language is a map. It lends concepts a valid location in our imagination and makes them accessible. So accessible in fact that they are not surprising anymore.

The idea of getting lost in an urban landscape is one such idea. It is always possible but also technically impossible. The urban landscape is too marked, populated and mapped to be truly lost in anymore. Of course you can be lost in relation to reaching some final destination but getting lost in an absolute way is difficult. It is a lost cause. At best the idea can be revisited, appropriated again and again with hopes of it rubbing off some sediment of the intended experience on you.

So we talk about getting lost as if it were a story. Only in confounding you, can we help you blur out the edges of the world that you perceive and ambiguate your emotions. When we talk in this way, we are only talking. Only talking in a specific language, a language that does not translate very well. We treat the surface of translation (incomplete, faulty, porous) itself as a way to mislead you and lead you into the labyrinth of our mind.

Because in our mind, we have consistently refused to seek clarity. Because landscapes cannot render the view-ports that make them visible. Landscapes can exist in their expansiveness and this expanse then has to be glimpsed. The contours of the landscape of our minds are rough, chaotic and hopeless. We cannot package them in a sheath of clarity just in time or you to catch a glimpse. We can only point to pathways that can bring you in and be confounded. Clarity is a reductive force. We never try to simplify our stories.

Pattern-recognition is a matter of habit. Complexity gets simplified if matched with a very elaborate filter. The experience of getting lost (even if largely imagined) applies well to the politics of self-representation. We feel free, and we invite you to feel free and make up all kinds of stories about who we seem to be.

We will walk, but we will seem to be only have a weak motivation.

We will through our loose hold on our narrative, force your buffer to feel overwhelmed.

We will trust only the friction that occurs between our words and your ears. A soup of sounds will delude you. That is the only promise.