VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages

Abstract

Our world is, by its nature, a place of change; trees grow, skin wrinkles and stone discolours; every state of being is finite and all opportunity is fleeting. Intrinsic to the apparatus of perception are pre-reflective judgements concerning the transformative processes constitutive of this world. We experience these intuitions as ‘age’ and, although derived from momentary observations, this perceptual discernment allows us to ‘chronicle’ the flux and stabilise the evanescent environment in which we find ourselves. This primordial perceptual apparatus, evolved to allow us to understand the ‘Natural’ environment, is applied equally to the artefacts of our technicity, and particularly the sedimentations of our built heritage. Through the phenomenon of age, we are able to ‘feel’ Time in physical objects. Furthermore, the exercise of these sub-conscious perceptual skills generates within us the positive affect we feel from temporally complex environments such as heritage sites; in such contexts , age actually ‘nourishes’ us. The paper proposes hypotheses concerning the mechanisms that underlie ‘age phenomena’, developed through a doctoral project pairing traditional literature-based research and phenomenology with sculpture practice, proposing routes by which perceptual structures adjust meaning and generate emotional affect. Clearly an informed understanding of our experience of objective age is crucial for anyone engaged with the physical world but particularly designers and manipulators of place. Armed with a structured view of how age ‘moves’ us, we can confidently progress toward being culturally more comfortable with the phenomenon and employ its emoluments fruitfully in the ‘worlds’ that we construct for ourselves.