(Up to: Other Art Calmness In ABig City )

Every bit of space has its own unique features, its life and its cycles, and all of it hangs together with itself.

Walking through a city, we can picture it as one piece of organic art, an ecosystem of all dimensions that pulses and shifts, has areas and times of quiet and of activity. By gaining a viewpoint of our own landscape from both a spatially-aware and a chronologically-extensive aspect, we can put together a picture of the puzzle that goes on from day to day, minute to minute. We can perform the equivalent of a time-lapsed photograph, only interpreting all of the senses and experiences that we have available to us.

I see these things across a couple of axes, different traces that mould together to form something greater. To simplify the process, I am splitting these axes into different categories:

• Spatially Static - this implies that a region has consistency over a larger area. For instance, the uniform paving and deliberate levelness of a town square would constitute spatial staticness. This can be applied in any number of directions - a long, straight road is, by itself, static along its length. (But see chronologically dynamic/static if one introduces vehicles along that road.)
• Spatially Dynamic - this includes a level of irregularity within a certain space, such as edges, changes in colour, et al. A space that has more irregularity, e.g. sharp, contrasting conflicts is more dynamic. This category also includes any "unexpected" items, such as litter, or even dynamically static items such as benches and lamp-posts that go towards breaking up a space's uniformity.
• Chronologically Static - these are facets of our environment that never move for some period of time, relative to other, more dynamic areas. What is deemed static changes as the timescale involved increases, so as this gets longer, we might see a "timeline" of static items as:
  • A person sitting down
  • A parked car
  • An item in a shop waiting to be sold
  • A shop and all of its decoration
  • A building, or fixture (such as a bench) There is a sense of permanency to each that extends to a particular length of time. The permanency we see depends on how long the time-lapse photograph takes. This can be applied to both individual objects and particular areas. For instance, an alleyway that leads to nowhere will have no people passing through it, and hence is generally static over a period of time.
• Chronologically Dynamic - these are things which are in constant motion and flux, in comparison to the rest of the environment, the alternative to chronologically static.

A range of relativity

It is important to note the interplay in those things that can swing from one end of a scale to another, according to how they are being looked at, and indeed this is where much of the beauty comes in. I take as my example roads, and road systems. Vehicles travelling along a reasonably busy road in a city will create both spacial and chronological dynamicism at first glance - ever changing, a vast array of colours and shapes, engine notes and the rest. But the important point is that is with a single glance. By extending the timescale with which we look at it, we start to see the differing patterns that emerge. We begin to see the cycles in motion, the stopping and starting of the flow of traffic caused by traffic lights. We emerge into what we see in photos, with the stream simply turning into a constant blur, the cycles above becoming part of a greater cycle of night and day. So this dynamic, momentariness has become a form of staticness as we shift our viewpoint.

This "abstraction" forms another constituent part of looking at space and time - it is not just a single viewpoint, but the progress and change introduced as we take in more and more viewpoints, all simultaneously. By contrasting one with another, or with many, and by tying in the various aspects of each particular one, we can create an orchestral experience, a point of view that takes everything and realises the links between it. Some events may disrupt chronological uniformity, even such simple things as a person rushing between everybody else to get somewhere on time. The contrast to the "status quo" at that particular point, or even to that area in general (this would not look so out of place at or near train stations) sets up another balance of staticness and dynamicism.

Rippling

From this, we can start to get a handle on how events and items play a role in affecting other times and spaces. We can attempt to define dynamicism in terms of effect on some scale. Not only this, but we ourselves, as a part of this ecosystem, can learn to guide our own causality onto that which surrounds us. It is important to understand how much, and how little, of an impact that our actions can have.

(See also: Things ISee Whilst Walking Brighton London Road Urban Flow Making And Breaking )