A geo-referenced walking work at Racetrack Playa / May 15th, 2K4
Navigational inquiry
The history of navigation is addressed across many disciplines. Interestingly, the history of land navigation is barely existent in almost any literature, no doubt because it represents a fundamental pre-historic aspect of nominal hominid experience; predating the particular hominid Homo sapiens. Although there are many resources on orienteering and land navigation ("how to"), very few of these engage in historical or genealogical analysis. The history of navigation as a technology generally seems to 'begin' in the literature with the citation of celestial navigation techniques (and the development of related technologies, often in reference to sea navigation), which were developed over time to traverse larger distances than the domains typically wandered by small scale, non-industrial (hunter-gatherer), pedestrian cultures; although there is, quite interestingly, no shortage of navigational literature on small scale, non-industrial seagoing cultures. The history of navigation somehow connotes voyages of exploration, dislocation, or endeavors involving significant distance; not quotidian walks to the water hole or shorter overland journeys between patches of resource in the landscape.
Navigation over smaller distances, the matter of how humans navigate in the landscape using tactical landmarks and other opportunistic features for orientation (foliage change, animal trails, geology, human markings such as cairns, shelters, rock art, etc.) via the use of concepts such as mental maps or "cognitive maps"[1], has been a matter of research explored a to a great degree in archeology, anthropology, cognitive science, and psychology. Presently, navigation is mediated by maps as well as wireless technology such as GPS, location aware mobile phones, and wireless networks that deliver traditional internet connections. Somewhere in the interstice between innate navigation, the history and techniques of applied land navigation, the history of navigation technology utilized for long distance travel, and contemporary networked navigation should lie a theory that somehow encompasses both voyages of exploration requiring well developed cultural technologies for wayfinding over long distances (long paths) and the types of cognitive and cultural processes that let one move in a motivated manner toward a food cache when hungry, or in a more contemporary sense, toward an entertainment station when bored, or through the lobby, up the correct escalator, and down the correct corridor for the next meeting (short paths).
http://www.paintersflat.net/landform_interpret.html
http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=13618&text=26000
http://www.c5corp.com/research/landscapeculture.shtml
http://www.c5corp.com/index.shtml
Posted by walkinginplace at February 6, 2005 02:23 AM