Kennedy, Stephen ORCID: 0000-0003-1119-9505 and Withers, Simon ORCID: 0000-0002-0203-359X (2024) Time, Space, and Monumentality: a few minutes before midnight on Wednesday 4th September 2024. In: Time, Space, and Monumentality, 4th Sep, 2024, University of Greenwich, London. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Monumental Process

‘There is Cleopatra’s Needle.’ If we define the Needle in a sufficiently abstract manner we can say that it never changes. But a physicist who looks on that part of the life of nature as a dance of electrons, will tell you that daily it has lost some molecules and gained others, and even the plain man can see that it gets dirtier and is occasionally washed. Thus the question of change in the Needle is a mere matter of definition. The more abstract your definition, the more permanent the Needle. But whether your Needle change or be permanent, all you mean by stating that it is situated on the Charing Cross Embankment, is that amid the structure of events you know of a certain continuous limited stream of events, such that any chunk of that stream, during any hour, or any day, or any second, has the character of being the situation of Cleopatra’s Needle.” (The Concept of Nature: 164)

The steady flow of time, is arrested by abstraction and the establishment of cerebral trust to deduce that the needle ‘never changes’. What is perceived in the moment is organized in the mode of presentational immediacy to ensure a degree of order and predictability. In reality, if one stares at Cleopatra’s needle for a protracted period then one is, without being conscious of it, witnessing the degradation or change that exists in the relational exchange between the obelisk and the percipient. This can be confusing and logically at odds with the proposition by Isabelle Stengers that nothing exists outside of visual perception. To be clear, what is meant here is that there does not exist a reality outside vision and another reality inside it. When staring at cleopatra’s needle one may witness a ‘static object’, but equally one is always experiencing an object that is changing, but just at a rate this not immediately perceptible. Either way the same thing, an exchange and processing of data is being enacted and shared. The relationship is a temporal one and as a process it can be embodied and deployed by artists, philosophers or scientists, as advanced beings not given to assumption. Rather than being based on assumption or immediate recognition, their perception is active in a dynamic relational manner that draws as much from the mode of causal efficacy (as temporal and musical/sonic) as it does from that of presentational immediacy (visual). If the process is manifest and experienced consciously then the limiting tendency of symbolic reference can be overcome. Ordinary ‘language’ becomes extraordinary.

Rethinking objects/monuments from the perspective of process leads to a Heisenbergian Architecture. Ultimately, considering points as events in a heritage point cloud would mean embracing a view of heritage as an active, open-ended process of meaning-making, rather than a passive, fixed record of bygone times. It would invite a more fluid, reflexive, and creative approach to engaging with the built environment, one that recognises the fundamental entanglement of past and present, material and digital, human and technological. The point cloud becomes not just a model of heritage, but a space of heritage-making in its own right.

Item Type:	Conference or Conference Paper (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	monuments; digital heritage; 3D scanning; Noise; Cleopatra's Needle; Commissioners House Chatham
Subjects:	N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR N Fine Arts > NC Drawing Design Illustration N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > School of Design (DES)
Last Modified:	20 Sep 2024 10:10
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/47994

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