A SUBJECTIVE SCHEME OF RELATIONS
A visual system based on personal perception of social interactions
Research on social relations that surround the author can be led in different ways. Number-based scientific methods, or quantitative methods, allow the researcher to make relatively objective an exact obervations. Despite the differences, all these methods share a systematic approach to data, the idea of understanding population by gathering information on the sample, as representative as it can be.
The idea of personal, subjective view on social interaction can seem, at first, as an opposite to scientific methodology. Even when we draw the line between subjective and objective information, it is clear that logical thought can take place in both approaches. Also, subjective information are not arbitrary. Personal „map“ of relations is built by gathering numerous information, events, memories.
This „personal diagram“ that anyone can form in his mind, based on his experience of being a part of society, can serve as an analogy to a potential, exact data-based, scientific scheme. This image, being egocentric in a way, contains information that can be somewhat distorted, but complex and surprisingly complete as well. It can be very important in specific person's value system, as an individualy formed image. To realize such an image, based on one person's information on his surrounding relations, and also based by this, specific participant in interactions of the group – it is to try to make a scheme, a set of signs, or even symbols; it is a spatial installation containing some of the elements important to this individual, but also many of the universal elements. This second group of elements relate to general form of a scheme, it's complexity, as well as to its constantly changing nature. This „map“, this spatial installaiton, is consisted of forms representing specific individuals taking part in one social collective, their phisical position and distance functioning as representative of their social relations.
