ZBYNĚK BALADRÁN: COGNITIVE MAPS
Cognitive maps – mental maps, guides, or models – are a method that we use to construct and store spatial information, allowing the “mind’s eye” to visualize, code, and store information in order to recall, decode, and use it when needed at a later date.
Artist Zbyněk Baladrán has often been described as an archaeologist of knowledge and memory, and he continues to use maps and diagrams in his work as a representational means of visualizing concepts, ideas, and interrelationships in a clear and structured manner. In the video installation “Assemblages Against Essences” (HD video projection on 10 stacks of white paper), ten constantly changing images are projected onto a surface of ten stacks of blank white paper that represent a dynamic map as well as a projected model.
- I´ve been thinking recently00:00:16.606
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- what has happened in last five years00:00:20.737
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- with the beginning of my work when I worked with archives, and00:00:23.031
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- when I tried to understand them, to find the way how to search in them.00:00:25.815
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- Simply said, I have got from archive to diagram.00:00:30.327
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- Seemingly, there is a contrast.00:00:41.145
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- I have been more and more interested in archiving itself.00:00:46.183
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- I think many archives have appeared.00:00:52.814
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- They are lot of methodological ways how to compile them.00:00:55.241
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- I focused on the way of thinking,00:00:58.519
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- what way a man thinks about things, how he connects them,00:01:01.861
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- to what extent it is a question of coincidence,00:01:09.603
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- or of processes either biological or chemical.00:01:13.566
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- This exhibition contains works where I tried to articulate it.00:01:16.814
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- This installation is called "Assemblages Against Essences".00:01:24.862
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- The title is named after a chapter from a book00:01:30.674
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- by an American contemporary philosopher or sociologist Manuel de Landa.00:01:33.723
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- I´ve been fascinated by the way00:01:36.486
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- he thinks about entities, or things and how he connects them.00:01:39.148
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- He thinks about different scales00:01:42.762
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- and how they are interconnected.00:01:45.542
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- One thinks when he sees ten things that are on the same level00:01:48.505
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- however, it is not true due to the different scales.00:01:55.595
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- It is well seen in case of history.00:01:58.243
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- When one perceives history of the Earth,00:02:00.755
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- it is a different scale in comparison with the perception of family history.00:02:04.773
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- When you look at a stone, and at a family event,00:02:08.460
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- they coexist somehow, but each of these things00:02:11.486
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- has different scale and belongs to different causal state.00:02:14.917
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- I´ve been very interested in this.00:02:21.045
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- Simplifiedly said, it may be a cosmological model.00:02:24.073
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- This is another installation that deals with tension among people,00:02:32.718
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- and with perception and relation of a man and society.00:02:38.117
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- I was inspired by an interesting book by Karl Deutsch.00:02:42.242
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- It is called "The Nerves of Government".00:02:46.093
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- He describes there how to govern, how society constitutes itself.00:02:50.375
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- It is called "cognitive maps" because it is a visualization of this phenomenon.00:02:58.625
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- It is a case study on how to connect things00:03:04.714