Parkour space
Excerpts from: Use the commonplace to Escape the Commonplace - Yosa Buson by West Sovereign Fury - Glass Bead Clan
Traceurs are what the protagonists call themselves. Their creed is get from point A to point B as gracefully and efficiently as possible - in a straight line. If that means vaulting a railing or fence, running up the side of a building, or occasionally leaping from a second story landing, so be it - the key word is Flow. Meaning fluidity. The size of the obstacle doesn’t matter. A Traceur could get props for hurdling a paper bag to get to a park bench if it’s in the Flow …
A Classic tale of Man vs Technology - It’s the old story redone… until the second act twist. If film editing allows the sampling of images like shuffling memories in a photo album; those images are flat and framed, those memories mere representations. If the DJ truly remixes ideas because his medium is closer to what we experience as reality — a voice, an occurrence, a feeling - the sound of it; that experience is a transmission, one way communication. But if the urban environment itself is the media, then the Traceur on a run has direct personal penetration with the technoverse encompassing him. She jams from business park to playground, demonstrating interrelationship, repurposing fences, monuments, and abandoned shopping carts. Redefining space, the Traceur is an organic denominator attempting to reconcile the storyline after Reggio’s Naqoyqatsi left off with newborns stranded on neon slabs. As Hesse would say “In the psychological Game, on the other hand, the object was to create unity and harmony, cosmic roundedness, interweaving association, and contrast of the contents…”
Traceurs unanimously agree that PK changes their perception of space and the world around them. Viscerally they describe it as if the three dimensional landscape were being flattened out. Or sometimes as if they were able to see a two dimensional world with occasional three dimensional aspects - would-be obstacles that, instead of restricting movement, are now used to escape - mockingly — the confines of the flat landscape. If this sounds confusing to a non or newbie Traceur, start by allowing your eyes to travel across the landscape of Relativity by M. C. Escher. PK transforms the entire urban environment into Escher inspired paths where stairwells become ceiling, railings become steps, and walls become walkways. Traceurs move about in a world loosely defined by a Non-Euclidean Geometry where the shortest distance between two points is a great arc or a Parkour Cat Leap. That’s not vertigo you’re feeling. That’s the Flow. It’s a quick revision for the average Traceur to translate this into a creed for everyday living - there are no obstacles in life, only opportunities.
Via Kiell