NOETIC VIDEO

“Entropy always wins, unless something actively resists it.” – Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, clinical psychologist

Noetic Video is an ongoing art-house project created by Noah J. Edmonds that treats abandoned places as psychological artifacts – sites where human intention once organized life into habitable order, and where the collapse of that order leaves more than physical vacancy. What remains is a vacuum of meaning: a structure still shaped by purpose, but no longer animated by it. In this sense, an abandoned building is not simply “uninhabited”. It is a place that has outlived the story it was built to serve.

Every abandoned building, whether school, mall, hospital, factory, church, store, or home, is as much a proposition as it is a location. Something was meant to happen there. Human beings do not build neutral containers: we build environments around values, roles, and futures. A building encodes a value structure (what it is for) and a future orientation (the assumption that it will continue to be used across time). These spaces subconsciously imply stability, progress, commerce, healing, belonging, formation, or transcendence. When those assumptions fail, economically, socially, morally, or institutionally, the structure then becomes a visible wound on the landscape. An interrupted narrative made material, a place where chaos has gained ground over order.

Noetic Video approaches urban exploration through this lens of integrated meaning-making and narrative psychology, asking: What story did this place embody? What future did it imply? What disrupted it? What traces remain? The allure of abandonment is not only aesthetic. It is narrative. These sites confront us with unfinished stories. Plans halted, identities dissolved, projects abandoned, promises broken, hopes dashed. They invite the observer to supply coherence where coherence was lost. This is why abandoned places “feel” enticing despite their silence. They still carry the contours of all that intention.

In this light, urban exploration can be understood as a form of symbolic retrieval – a return to what has fallen apart in order to make it intelligible again. The photographer, the videographer, the explorer walks into an abandoned place the same way an individual returns, through reflection, to the chaotic chapters of life, seeking the map that was missed, the warning that went unheeded, the meaning that was never integrated etc. One steps voluntarily into disorder not because chaos is preferable, but because the unexplored and uninterpreted tends to persist, haunting imagination and shaping perception as it pulls attention towards what remains unresolved. Here, the camera becomes less a tool of documentation and more a tool of interpretation: an instrument for finding, and sometimes restoring, meaning where meaning has withdrawn.

Noetic Video draws on psychodynamic and psychoanalytic perspectives to examine why abandoned places become such powerful sites of projection. When the ordinary social script disappears (i.e., no crowds, no transactions, no roles), inner life becomes louder. When a space is emptied of function, it stops telling us what it is “for”, and that ambiguity makes it psychologically charged. The building becomes more than a building: it becomes a symbolic landscape, capable of holding dread, longing, nostalgia, curiosity, grief, resentment, wonder, or maybe even reverence. You do not only explore the structure – the structure, in some sense, “explores” you back, revealing what you bring to it, what you fear, what you miss, and what you might be tempted to do when no one is watching.

Because of this, urban exploration is not merely an encounter with decay. It is an encounter with absence: the absence of purpose, the absence of a future, the absence of the story that once held everything together. In that absence, a question emerges, ethical as much as psychological: will you respond to that absence with a sense of attention, appreciation, and interpretive care, attempting to recover what the place once meant? Or will the vacuum invite further collapse, treating the space as permission for disregard through vandalism, theft, or degeneracy? Noetic Video is committed to the former: understanding urban exploration as a controlled encounter with disorder that can be oriented toward ordered integration rather than anarchy.

At its core, Noetic Video is the study of meaning under erosion, and of the human impulse to enter the ruins of a broken wold and attempt, even momentarily, to cast a structure of order over what remains. It aims to contribute visually, narratively, and conceptually to the growing body of work that takes urban exploration and the aesthetics of abandonment seriously as a psychological and cultural phenomena. It builds on existing scholarship and traditions around psychogeography, but seeks to add an explicitly integrated lens: meaning-making and narrative psychology as the primary framework, with psychodynamic interpretation as a depth layer. In other words, it is art first – but art pursued with the seriousness of research, intending to help clarify what the experience of abandoned places have on the human mind.