The story recounted in the prologue is an excerpt from Brian Massumi's essay "Strange Horizon", describing his personal experience of spatial disorientation and a process of reorientation. Although he was able to make his way from the entrance of the building to his office through a maze of corridors, his proprioceptive and visual systems of orientation somehow did not calibrate. As a result he experienced a moment in which this calibration took place, in a sensation of the "misplaced image of the buildings morphing, not entirely smoothly, into the corrected scene."

This active experience of being disoriented through and with an architectural environment mirrors a personal anecdote recounted to me by my friend and artist Dr. Jondi Keane. When he got out of the subway in New York thinking he was walking the direction towards his destination, and realizing after many steps that he was going in the opposite direction. At that moment of realization, he said that it felt like the street turned back through itself, as well as an internal physical feeling of turning through himself, though no motion took place.

What took place was the process of reorientation, his coming on-line with the actual direction he was facing. I’ve had similar experiences, especially coming out of subway exits in not-so-familiar places, and it generally leaves me with a feeling of frustration as I tend to pride myself on having a good sense of direction. But allied to that feeling is, at its beginning, the feeling of being lost. The moment when I realized that I was going the wrong way, that something was amiss. This happens before the morphing Massumi describes, or the turning through oneself that Keane described. Having a good sense of direction, when I’m not in a rush to get somewhere and I do get lost, I tend to enjoy it. When we lived together in the sprawling metropolis of Bangkok many years ago, an old friend helped me realise the benefits of being lost. She told me that when she first moved to Bangkok, she would take a random series of buses in the city until she was lost, and then tried to find her way home. This was her method for getting her bearings in the city.

The physical sensation of being lost is likely connected to the human sense of proprioception. Proprioception is the sensation of movement or strain in muscles, tendons, and joints, stimulated by bodily movementsand tensions, and is sometimes referred to as “kinaesthesia”. Alain Berthoz writes,

“Indeed, to the five traditional senses—touch, sight,hearing, taste, smell—we must ad the sense of movement, or kinesthesia.Its characteristic feature is that it makes use of many receptors, but remarkably it has been forgotten in the count of the senses.”

This sense offers information about how our body parts are moving in relation to each other, but also includes the vestibular system which gives us our sense of balance (through the otoliths in the inner ear usually in relation to vision). Disorientation, or moments of physical sensation like what Massumi and Keane describe, often come about through a discontinuity between vision and proprioception. For example, sitting on a train in the station and feeling like the train is moving when in fact it is the train outside the window which has moved (known as 'vection') comes about from the more immediate perception of vision overriding the slower process of proprioceptive perception.

Massumi writes, “[t]he alarmingly physical sense we feel when we realize we are lost is a bodily registering of the disjunction between the visual and the proprioceptive. Place arises from a dynamic of interference and accord between sense-dimensions.” These sense-dimensions are specifically those of vision and proprioception, which Massumi outlines as co-functioning towards orientation. I would agree with this explanation of the mechanisms at play in orientation, as well as with the belief in the predominance of proprioception in the correlation. What this leads me to, however, is a question about the potential arising through this moment of disorientation. Could this potential involve an opportunity for developing a different relationship to the surroundings we are with, and greater awareness of these mechanisms and their operations, present in such an event? The event of reorientation, finding oneself again after a moment of being disoriented or lost, is something that Massumi also describes:

Cross-sense referencing forms a third hinge-dimension of experience. This ‘lost’ dimension of experience is where vision’s conscious forms-in-configuration feed back into the vectorial tendency-plus-habit of proprioception, and where proprioception feeds forward into vision. Where we go to find ourselves when we are lost is where the senses fold into and out of each. We always find ourselves in this fold in experience.