From The Companion Series
The idea of “learning from” began here. Before there were fragments, trays, or tins, there was Times Square—restless, excessive, endlessly refracting. My doctoral dissertation, Mirrors and Labyrinths: Learning from Times Square How to Make an Urban-STS Ethnography (Orrego 2021), turned this place into a teacher. I did not go there to study it, but to learn with it—to see how a site saturated with light, media, and movement might transform ethnographic practice. Like Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972), my project began as a reevaluation of the ordinary urban landscape. Yet where their concern was architectural symbolism, mine was epistemological: how could ethnography itself become architectural, infrastructural, illuminated by the reflexive noise of the city?
Times Square taught me that method is spatial. Its signs and reflections offered not content but form—a choreography of attention, a grammar of excess. There, description could no longer be linear; it had to be recursive, folded, luminous. Each field encounter mirrored another, producing what I came to call “labyrinthic ethnography”—a writing practice in which knowledge is not a line but a loop. This idea drew heavily from Borges’s reflections on mirrors and infinity, and his assertion that “it only takes two facing mirrors to construct a labyrinth” (Borges 1964). The dissertation became a textual Times Square: an ethnography to be navigated rather than read, composed of entrances, reflections, and recursive detours. It was my first attempt to turn fieldwork into architecture—to make writing itself spatial, reflective, and excessive, like the square that inspired it.
In Times Square, I also learned to think with surfaces and reflections. The square’s glass façades, screens, and neon signs forced me to confront mediation not as an obstacle but as a field. Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social (2005) helped me reframe this: every reflection is also a relation, every mediation a moment of attachment. To study a mediated environment, one must write with its mediations, not against them. The square thus became my first ethnographic studio—a place where thinking, writing, and designing collapsed into each other. What Venturi and Scott Brown found in Las Vegas’s signage and symbolism, I found in Times Square’s glare and saturation: a city that teaches through its own excess.
Learning from Times Square also meant confronting failure. The field was too bright, too fast, too overdetermined for the classical ethnographic gaze. Observation dissolved into saturation. I had to find ways to stay with confusion—to translate sensory overload into method. That difficulty led to experiments with diagrams, photographic fragments, and textual detours: early versions of what would become Tarde: A Handbook of Minimal and Irrelevant Urban Entanglements (Orrego 2023) and my ongoing fragmentographic explorations. Each of these later projects carries an echo of that luminous chaos: the desire to work with excess rather than reduce it, to let attention be built through density and reflection.
To learn from Times Square, finally, is to learn from intensity. It reminds me that ethnography is not only about immersion in distant worlds but about the capacity to stay with proximity—amid light, speed, and sound—and still find resonance. Times Square continues to echo in my current work: every fragment, every cabinet, every improvised method carries traces of that original experiment. The square taught me that attention is architectural, that writing can be spatial, and that learning, in ethnography, is always a matter of standing still in the middle of movement.
Hands-on exercise: The Reflective Field
Find a surface—window, screen, puddle, or mirror. Observe what it reflects for five minutes without looking away. Write what you see, but include every reflection: yourself, the surroundings, the distortions. Then step aside and rewrite from the reflection’s point of view. How does the method shift when perception is mirrored?
References
- Borges, Jorge Luis. 1964. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions Books.
- Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Orrego, Santiago. 2021. Mirrors and Labyrinths: Learning from Times Square How to Make an Urban-STS Ethnography.PhD dissertation, Technical University of Munich / Munich Center for Technology in Society.
- Orrego, Santiago. 2023. Tarde: A Handbook of Minimal and Irrelevant Urban Entanglements. Berlin: Self-published.
- Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. 1972. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.