CitySpaceMindSpace: How to read Los Angeles: Banham and McLuhan in the light of Cognitive Neuro-scientific theories of comprehension

Flaxton, Terry

Abstract

In the 1970’s, Rayner Banham (with Marshall McLuhan), set the tone for understanding CyberCity/MindSpace with Banham’s book, Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies, which was an examination of the LA cityscape which used the idea of the moving-gaze rather than the static-gaze as a way to read LA. Though this concept still partially works for reading the emerging hyper-cities from the BRIC countries, since the 1970’s new Dystopian/Utopian tales have re-fuelled the mediated-moving-gaze.

This way of conceptualizing the world is about eye/brain/mind/gaze and so runs in parallel with new research in the production, display and consumption of moving images. These expanding parameters (higher frame rates, resolution, and dynamic range) unencumber the production and display of images from the two-dimensional limitations of photochemical film and propel image creation into three and four-dimensional forms which now enable manipulation of space as well as time.

Having experimented with these expanding parameters, in collaboration with University of Bristol, and BBC R&D, the Image Research at University of the West of England propose that it is just as important to examine our physical and cognitive structure, specifically because technical advances now imitate the parameters of the eye/brain pathway: we ourselves are now the study. In the UK, with this recognition there has been a headlong rush by arts and humanities subjects to utilize the tools of neuroscientists to prove the nature of the human condition, as FMRI scanners look into the brain to validate each new hypothesis. But cognitive-neuroscience has its own biological, philosophical and ideological limitations. In this paper I will speak about human knowledge as is formulating and discuss how we might understand the paradigm change that is upon us - and through this I will try to give some perspective on the insights of both Banham and McLuhan.

Citation

Flaxton, T. (2016). CitySpaceMindSpace: How to read Los Angeles: Banham and McLuhan in the light of Cognitive Neuro-scientific theories of comprehension. In E. Clift, G. Amayo Caldwell, & C. Smith (Eds.), Digital Futures and the City of Today: New Technologies and Physical SpacesIntellect

• Acceptance Date: Oct 1, 2014
• Publication Date: May 1, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Series Title: Mediated Cities
• Book Title: Digital Futures and the City of Today: New Technologies and Physical Spaces
• ISBN: 9781783205608
• Keywords: city, mediated, cultural value, medium sized
• Publisher URL: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books/view-Book,id=5177/