Re-visiting the visited

I chose to revisit the image I chose as my BMC representation. I am going to list the guidewords that are fitting to my representation and some that are not before discussing how I now see my representation.

This image is:

Permaculture

Footprint

Foliage

Campus

Native

See

Adaptation

Green

Ecological

Pattern

Wanderlust

This image is not:

Garden

Country

City

Interaction

Know

Anthropocentric

It would be very hard I think for a representation of our campus to be all of the guidewords that we collected as part of our ecological imaginings… as we discussed in class, our campus is much more than the ecological representations that most of our class posted. Our campus is all that plus the people, the buildings, the history, the man-made infrastructure; until we embrace the idea of rheomode (or perhaps, more likely, Goatly’s call for a less Newtonian reality where the “observing instrument and the observed object cannot be wholly separated”) I do not think that we have the language to describe everything all at once. My lens, camera or otherwise, is simply not wide enough.

For words that we may need to understand better, I think Goatly has the right idea: it is not so much about understanding specific words better, but understanding what the broader implications of word usage is in how we relate the ecological world to the human world (which I think have become two different things- not on an individual level but on the institutional level, per Goatly).  

I guess what I am saying is that we need a collage, or a 360° all the way around global lens that goes on for miles to get a full representation of anything, really. But a representation doesn’t have to be complete, and each representation given is both a reflection of the campus and of the person whose lens we are looking through.