TOPOI: An Exercise in Visual Rhetoric

Looking back, I can say that topos—the concept of “place” anchored in Greek philosophy—was a well chosen topic for our workshop. The fact than you can only approximate what it is, and never quite know, kept the project going.

On one hand, the notion of topos is simple—you point a finger and say: there. On the other hand, once you start pointing, the reason becomes less and less clear. Is it a topos that I am looking at, or not? Having others pointing, not only me, meant that there was actually something to it.

Interestingly, we seemed to have a similar interpretation of the term. We all agreed that topos was not an objective entity, but a mental construct. Our project was not about topoi per se, but about ways of constructing/constituting topoi. References to philosophical readings were important to me. I wanted to test my understanding of some arcane concepts and was happy to have that opportunity.

It seems that the ancient Greeks didn’t have the idea of one space, somehow covering or unifying a multitude of topoi. I first read about it in Robert Tragesser’s essay on Verticality and found it intriguing and inspiring. It brought to mind my own early experiences —memories of the very first places that I was able to identified in the continuous, blurry nothing. There were indeed only singular places not connected with one another. In my memory they were only those places but no sense of any space between them. There was a shaft of light forming a rectangular shape on the floor, there was a window facing the street, and the rest was somewhat insignificant, it didn’t yet present itself, or— perhaps, I should say—I haven’t become present there. Connecting places in space and time, abstracting, organizing, mapping, it all came gradually and turned into a skill. But apart from its necessary utilitarian function—moving around, recognizing, identifying places has remained powered by an emotional need of locating, finding, and identifying myself.

My initial approach to taking pictures for the project I would call “psychoanalytical.” I tried to figure out what kind of spacial configurations “vibrated” for me/in me. I wanted to analyze the subconscious impulse behind taking a photo. A bit of rainbow chasing, I suppose. At the same time I became aware of the challenge that the project had posed, to create a statement that would be at the same time ambiguous and precise. Precision was not in the details or execution, but rather in choosing criteria and sticking to them. But then, I forgot all about my initial goals when the stream of images started coming from A, MC, and R. The conversation was unfolding rapidly and constantly changing direction. The picture postings of my fellow topoistas were puzzling. It often took me a while to figure out their relation to the subject matter. Mathematical background of A and R made the discourse go into completely unfamiliar areas: sheaf theory (I can’t believe that I responded), then something numerical, then set theory, then (in-between)ness, grounding, singularity, modularity, and what not. I liked very much the most recent exchanges between A and R about nonstandard models of arithmetic.

Once, only for a moment, I felt alarmed that MC and I did not create some kind of artist/feminist coalition to push the discussion into “our” direction, but as she said and I agreed: we wanted to learn more how our husbands— mathematicians—think. After all, the idea of the project was to focus on discussion and resist the temptation to “make art.” Mathematical thinking helped to stay on course. Many visually attractive photos have been made in the process, but I see the beauty of the project somewhere else. We still don’t know what topos is, but we surely know, by now, what a sequence of topoi photographs (or videos) looks like.

The format of the project has worked out. The sequence of four photographs accompanied by key words turned out to be sufficient for creating an argument. Unexpectedly, the meaning of the term “topos” shifted. A different dictionary definition, which we didn’t initially consider, has become applicable. In Rhetoric, a topos is “a standardized method of constructing or treating an argument.”

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Note: Motto comes from “Kairotopos: A reflection on Greek space/time concepts as design implications in Minecraft,” online article by Isaac Lenhart. The game of Minecraft —as Lenhart explains—provides an open virtual environment which is somewhere between game and pseudo-game framework in which the players are free to explore, investigate and change the world around them.