ABSTRACT
Today we recognize that vision does not represent a passive capacity, rather it is constructed in a way which reflects cultural orientations, as well as the needs of dominant social groups. It also reflects the creative needs of the narrator. Ingold 1 provides rich evidence of how the operation of viewing space and moving through it is articulated in a kind of visual praxis where cultural knowledge and operational activities are inseparable. We can only express our understanding of space by acting in the world as we know it. And that action includes narration. Space is an encoded medium allowing us to externalize a situated understanding of ourselves in a way that can never be spatially detached or decontextualized. In advanced industrial or post-industrial societies our spatial vision is invariably naturalized in ways reflecting the society of spectacle that Debord 2 was the first to theorize. In an era of global convergence multiple scopic frameworks shape our vision in ways that express ideological, technological, ethnic and other biases. 3 Yet notwithstanding the presence of multiple constraining forces, the act of producing an individual vision of the world is profoundly creative, and involves the appropriation of elements from the public realm which are elaborated and then disclosed in a novel reformulation. This process of internalization and externalization shows us just how inextricably intertwined is that all-encompassing distinction between public and private. 4
