By Ollie Thomas

In Sophocles’ play, Antigone refuses to let her brother Polynices, who has died attacking his own state and whose corpse has been exposed in punishment, lie unburied. Creon therefore labels her a traitor, and demands that she be buried alive by being walled up in a small hill-cave. Tiresias then warns (too late) that the gods are angry at him for having ‘cast underground one of those above… and kept here one of those from underground’ – he has impiously misaligned the categories ‘above/below’ with ‘dead/living’.

Tiresias presents ‘above’ and ‘below’ as immutable categories which can ground divine laws, but Antigone’s case shows rather that topographical concepts are conventional and change from society to society. To me, it is only natural to call caves ‘underground’ if they have long and/or descending entrance-passages – other caves are problem-cases which are not clearly above or below. For the Greeks, however, caves are underground. But they did not simply apply the criterion ‘Is there earth above you?’. The Athenians sometimes threw traitors’ bodies into a large uncovered pit, which they evidently deemed underground enough for the corpse not to pollute the surrounding community as Polynices’ does.

This difference between ancient Greece and Britain in the concept ‘below ground’ may be relevant for understanding Greek disposal of traitors, but is trivial against the variety of spatial terms in the world’s languages – which interestingly do not at all reflect a single set of evolved concepts. More surprising, for example, is the existence of ‘-vara’ to denote ‘through a tube’ in Karuk (a Californian language), or of distinct single prepositions for ‘in a tube’ and ‘in a cup’ in Tzeltal (a Mexican language), or of languages which use spatial relators measured against the Earth (e.g. compass-terms) instead of ones measured against other movable objects (e.g. left / right / behind). Despite this variety, there is little evidence that different cultures think about space differently – for example, people whose language distinguishes between ‘on’ (touching) and ‘above’ (not touching) are no better at recalling a series of pictures where that difference is important. Read more »

By Jonny Thakkar

A seaplane, a speedboat and a helicopter – all white – set against golden beaches and the cyan sea. Bond alights and stands for a moment, summer suit and shades, sizing up the surroundings and waiting for them to return the favour. The peacock has landed. This is 007 for the GQ era.

A car engine sounds just outside the frame and is held there teasingly. This is the first time Bond has driven in Casino Royale – what’s his choice of wheels this time?

It’s a Ford. A Ford. And the fact is flaunted. The camera is deliberately kept at badge-height for four of the next nine shots. The exposition is so long-winded it draws attention to itself. The car comes round a corner twenty metres ahead of us, and we pan right to follow it trundling on past. Bond gets out and ties his shoelaces right in front of the badge as the porter drives off. When we’re not looking at the front badge we’re looking at the back one. When we’re not looking at the outside we’re looking at the inside. Meanwhile, trumpets sound. It’s a strange combination of the car worship common to all Bond films and primitive advertising techniques. Product placement raised to a level of intensity made utterly bathetic by its object – the Mondeo. Read more »

by Doctor Reeve

In order to draw a map, we have to move. The space we move in as we do this can’t be the space of the map. If it were, we wouldn’t be dealing in maps but in territory: the business of the man of action. In our loftier work as mapmakers, we only stretch our limbs the better to sketch with them back at our draughting-tables -the more faithfully to deploy there the power of our minds, the more accurately to code and annotate features of a landscape that others might not find or perceive were it not for our efforts.

Where are we in relation to the contents of a map when we draw it? The answer is only easy to give when the territory we are sketching is already somehow familiar, or connected to territory we do know by familiar movements. It is obviously only possible to even try and point our own location out on the map if it depicts the landscape we take ourselves to be in as we draw it. It hardly needs to be noted that in a culture, or a species, of mapmakers, we have almost certainly formed our idea of that landscape under the influence of the maps of others. We may suspect that it can’t be otherwise – that there can’t have been any first mapmaker, though there can obviously have been some first map of a particular stretch of ground. Read more »

By Jonny Lowndes

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, 1907. Source: Museum of Modern Art, New York

The painting shown above - Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, first exhibited publicly in 1916 - is a seminal image in the development of modern painting. The civilization of the Classical poses - elbows raised, one shoulder higher than the other - is forced to collide with wild barbarism in the African-inspired faces. I am going to write about a computer game which has a similar stature in its medium to that of Picasso’s painting in the plastic arts: Super Mario Bros., released by the Japanese company Nintendo in 1985. I am going to argue that, if modern art as exemplified above asks the question ‘what is space for?’, Super Mario Bros. offers the most comprehensive answer that we have seen so far.

The title character of Super Mario Bros. is an Italian plumber with eyes and hair of the same colour as his shirt and boots, as pictured below: Read more »

by Hamid Khanbhai, formerly Denis the Carthusian

If time is the principal element of narrative, then one might well imagine the difficulty facing a painter of istorie – narrative painting based on fact or fiction – who tries to describe a series of events in a single, unchanging visual frame. Inherent in language is both the concept and experience of duration: written and spoken narratives work in a single linear sequence from start to finish. In uninflected languages like English, sequence determines meaning (cat eats mouse; mouse eats cat) and global comprehension relies on the reader or listener having understood one word after another in order. In the perception of a pictorial image, on the other hand, the viewer receives an immediate impression of the whole; and there is no predetermined route for her eye to take through the image should she wish to examine the individual details. Read more »

By Ed Cooke

Living in South London, I could be having a marvel of a time listening in to Urdu-borne gossip on the bus. But despite my combining frequent bus travel with a great appetite for gossip, I have thus far been left unable to make the most of my eavesdropping opportunities. The problem is rather worse than my merely not knowing what the words mean or the identity of the people discussed. For as it turns out, all the Urdu I ever hear is a species of frenetic, undifferentiated noise. Not only am I unable to spot where the one word ends and the next begins (if this language is indeed divisible into words) but I am even deaf to the sounds themselves- I couldn’t say for sure that there are more than three of them, and I couldn’t say what the three I think I hear are. Because I know no Urdu, my ear can’t even begin to get some purchase on it, and so it all sounds like so much mischievous jabbering. I’m not at the stage where what I can access could even be called information: information requires a code, and the code for Urdu is not on my hard drive.
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