Theo Jansen Quotes

In this new age of GPS, Google Earth and multidimensional digital maps, mapping is suddenly hugely relevant again.

If I start outsourcing all my navigation to a little talking box in my car, I'm sort of screwed. I'm going to lose my car in the parking lot every single time.

One of the biggest hurdles about Foursquare is you need to remember to use it.

Firstly I did it in this huge theatre in Avignon, then to smaller places, then bigger places. You have to change the volume of the voice, give more or less. The way you have to relate to space makes it like sculpture.

In real life, that's how we're moving around. We look at things while we're walking and moving and turning around. We stare at objects in the world.

Data is gathered all the time. Just take your mobile phone. Geo-location data collected by your (mobile phone service) provider is not just about your movements. It's about who you are with and what you will do next.

You'd better watch where you go, and remember where you've been

The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.

Time and movement became really crucial to how I deal with what I deal with - not only sight and boundary, but how one walks through a piece, and what one feels and registers in terms of one's own body in relation to another body.

When you know where somebody is, you know the most important thing about them.

The people talking on their cell phone and following GPS instructions to where grandma's house is saying I don't need space - excuse me, that's how you know where grandma lives, and when to make the left turn.

The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes.

GPS not only played a large and delocalizing role in the war in Kosovo but is increasingly playing a role in social life.

There's the added element of adrenaline if you're performing. You're aware of spatial relationships and the music.

Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.

Imagine the uproar if the Federal government tried to make everyone wear a radio transmitter around their neck so we can keep track of their movements. But people happily carry their cell phones in their purses and pockets.

Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.

I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh. The effect that they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell ... Therefore the painter must be as concerned with the air surrounding his subject as with the subject itself. It is through observation and perception of atmosphere that he can register the feeling that he wishes his painting to give out.

It’s wherever you are. If it’s tapped into any of your senses, it knows where you are and what you’re doing.” Oh no, I thought, my spirits sinking. I hadn’t considered that. Did that mean nothing I did was ever anymore? “Even in the bathroom?” the Gasman’s eyes widened with surprise.

What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.

Life had become a reproduction: it was not the real thing.

If worms have the power of acquiring some notion, however rude, of the shape of an object and over their burrows, as seems the case, they deserve to be called intelligent; for they act in nearly the same manner as would man under similar circumstances.

Like many men, I can never find anything that I'm looking for, even when I'm actually looking at it. In a fridge, I think milk is actually invisible to the male eye. And so, it turns out, are dirty great holes in the fence.

The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken.