In Transit: Perceptual Terrain of a Liminal Landscape

Abstract

The ground, within the figure ground, is dismissed as blank. In transit, spaces of moving and waiting are spaces of liminality. Here, the liminal landscape is the ground, investigated as a palimpsest of historical and future transformations, latent in its mattered surface. This perceptual terrain is engaged through the streetcar which moves along its track, a datum, where stops and stations within Toronto’s Port Lands are proposed as mediators between observers and sampling of the interstitial space: weather, soil contamination, river flows, remnants of industrial artifacts, and so on. These architectures use surface to operate as a device that materializes the liminal landscape by capturing the projection of the dismissed, alongside other technological sampling devices that transmit data for casting a different version of the projection elsewhere. These screens resist efficiency, through experiments of duration, as the control of flows is juxtaposed with signals that invert the mask on urbanity.