Grumblings & Machinations

I believe I have finally discovered the crux of my problems with the fundamental arguments with my dissertation. It is my hope that if I can work through this, I will be able to finally establish a structure and flow that enables me to write a solid amount and possibly … FINISH.

In my initial writings I had laid the groundworks of my dissertation around the premise that our REALITY is in part informed by our understanding and relations to SPACE. Our experiences of space are being changed because we are now living in technologically enhanced lives. My hope was that we can in fact alter our everyday usages of space, and create better ones. This was in part a call for Temporary Autonomous Zones a la Hakim Bey.

During the past year, in hiatus from writing, I have been gravitating toward what I lamely coin “party tech”, essentially how technology and the technologically enhanced can be integrated into and reinvent contemporary urban festivies. As I return to writing full time, my concern was how this work really integrates with my prior work in mobile. I have always felt that the two were somehow intertwined, but never fully put the two together.

Today I reflected on a statement my advisor Eugene Thacker had made to me, that my work is partially based around community. To be frank, I hear community and think hippy, and run far far away screaming. However, there is obviously something to this as it relates to parties. Understanding that parties are indeed temporary communities, then what is it that attracts me to them.

SWARMS/HIVES/COLLECTIVES.

I recently did a lecture series on the Avant Garde and Parties at a variety of colleges and universities in California as part of the Eyebeam Roadshow. The thesis to my lecture is that the act of partying was integral to the development of new work in the Avant Garde. I make some loose connections between Csíkszentmihályi’s Flow theory and the sort of phenomenon that occurs in groups at parties. This is a phenomenon that I continually observe at my parties, but am not 100% sure exactly what it is. People act more in unison, there is a “vibe”, etc. And this is where the connection between parties and mobile networks seem to intersect on the trajectories of my interests.

So the issue of being continually connected is important to my thesis. I think that it is sort of a meta-categories to the affordances and problems that are encountered, encapsulated by connectivity.

There are two other sort of meta-categories: perceptual reality and computation. Perceptual Reality is the influence that pervasive tech has on our perception. Computation is the ability to have an always on computer with us, aiding in everyday tasks. Both of these meta-categories are important in analyzing shifts to our everyday lives.

INVOKING ALTERNATIVES

The topic of my dissertation is to assert that intervention and bottom up action has changed in the pervasive network society. That instead of creating oppositions and protests to the powers that be, it has become far more effective to create alternatives. for instance peer to peer distribution networks provided alternative methods of media distribution. Open Source provides alternative economical models for technology development.

In the realms of intervening and challenging the everyday, a school with its roots in the avant garde, this means using pervasive technologies to create alternatives to everyday life. This is a point that I’m still not quite sure what I want to suggest. There are resources and tactics available. But this should not be a manual for contemporary intervention.

What my dissertation can be is an overview to the problem set of urban engagement in the pervasive network society. It can provide a historical reference of the avant garde and their strategies against the everyday and modernism. However, I am at a loss when it gets to the contemporary. Should I provide examples of pervasive tech? Of interventionists and political action?

I would LIKE to write about interesting issues in the field, such as the need for standardization in location based media. But I am not sure what it would be to create a scholarly contribution in this area.

SOCIOLOGY OF THE FUTURE

There is a secondary problem with my thesis, that I uncovered when I tried to reinsert connectivity into the picture. My thoughts on space are based around where technology is heading, not where it currently is. Wearing headsup displays, having remote tactility, control via brain waves are things that I experience in the labs at tech schools, but they are not yet everyday experiences.

Since my thesis is in part sociological, I believe that were I to continue evaluating the usage of future tech, I would be mostly SPECULATING. Yet, as I write 60% of all humans are connected to each other and a plethora of devices via mobile networks. There is a vast amount of information relating to issues in the Network Society. In short, by focusing on connectivity, I can write on our contemporary situation, and reserve my speculation on the future to the conclusion.

I still need to see how this sits a new outline. I think a lot of my work can be integrated into this format. However, I am not sure what this means in terms of new research, something my committee will likely frown upon.

In Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre proposes that spaces are produced by the application of specific representations set upon them. The codification of space is a form of semiotics, wherein one can study the signs that birth, order, and contain spaces.

A basic form of codified space is the pattern of white paint upon black asphalt to denote permittable crossings of an intersection. However, if we step away from actual street signage and attempt to discover a space without representation, it becomes more tricky. As Lefebvre correctly points out, the human mind can not help but generate and create space. It is similar to the phenomenon of judgement Merleau-Ponty describes, in which consciousness formulates a reading, despite sometimes faulty or lacking perceptions.

We can analyse space as a medium with the objects within it being representational texts. Our engagement in space is a direct result of what potentials are offered by this text.

The authorship of spaces are strictly regulated by both social and legal code. Robert Moses, the grand architect of modern New York, had special priveledges which enabled him the ability erase neighborhoods and build a freeway through New York City. For most, the authorship of space is possible only over their own property. Although some spaces might be technically public, an individual of the public is not allowed authorship.

Locative technologies, such as GPS enabled mobile phones, connect us with the ability to associate information to particular coordinates in space. The potential of this is to provide layered and alternate texts to a space.

In Storyscape, we were faced with the challenge of Freedom Park, a space whose objects did little to convey the deep history of the area. By using their phones to leave and share stories about specific areas of the park, people created a narrative fabric, which provided a new text in the space.

There is a problem with locative media, in that it often requires technology to engage in it. People will priveledge the reading of the space that they consider REAL, the space they embody, over a virtual layering on that space. However, locative media is an interesting form of reinscribing the medium of space. For now it is a patchwork, replacing particular senses. However, we can imagine some cybernetic future, the one being strived for in laboratories, where eyepieces overlay the crosswalk onto the road. In this near possibility, we can gleam that spaces may have multiple co-existing texts.

D&G analyze the degrees of defining space as being smooth or striated. Striated space is ridged, like the scratches on a rock, or the grooves of a record. The striations are fractal and infinite, lines within lines all the way down. Striated space is defined and mapped space. Smooth space is that which has no differences between it. D&G note that “smooth space is always being transversed”, that we move through it without stop, since we don’t notice any points.

Both smooth and striations are abstractions, and actual space is both. D&G use felt as an example of a space that feels smoooth, but is infact numerous intertwined patches.

As a fractal space, it is possible to measure an infinite amount into the space. I’m reminded of the map maker who makes a 1:1 map that covers the country.

In music the striation is the variance of interval and frequency. D&G rely on Riemann’s notions of local geometry and space to explain. We can map what we can experience and know around us, but can not determine the linkages between that space and any other. This theorem shares with the post modern notions of relativity, where we can only define by our own perspective from our own vantage point. Returning to music, it is the variance of interval and frequency that we are experiencing at that moment, which we can then encapsulate into a defined space.

D&G then study the line as a point of distinction, analyzing the use of the line in art, particularly nomadic art. To D&G nomads drew at close range, and dealt only within the local geometry. There was no distinction of space. Their wall drawings take on the haptics of their surface. The ideas of space then become conferred into the use of line in later art. Greek and Egyptian art use the line to reduce the sky or sea into a horizon. We now have the abstract line, which is the beginning of artistic expression over what we percieve. The abstract line condenses and changes space as a means of expression.

Paul Virilio tackles the qualities being and speed in his book Aesthetics of Disappearance where he describes the effect that technology has upon time, space, and our sense of being in the world.

Virilio writes about how memory is a consciousness of movement through time, and that we denote the passage of movement by differences. Virilio uses the picnoleptic as a metaphor of this, where we simply lose track of the space and time between our remembered instances.

To Virilio, man has naturated technology, to the point where we do take on new technologies without even noticing them. We tend to imagine our futures by thinking of the technologies that will be present then.These technologies help us to speed faster through the world, not to go any where specific, but simply to move faster.

Virilio compares cinema to the way the world moves past us in cars. I think this is a touching metaphor, especially when comparing the absence between frames of film, with the absence of memory as we drive. To Virilio these places disappear. Space and time become annihalated by high speeds.

Personally, I believe that annihalation is rather dramatic since they tend to remain, although unnoticed. What happens over time is that more and more space are forgotten and left. These grow and reach critical mass, and we have instances of people engaging with them.Exotic landscapes in the city: buildings empty for 50 years, kudzu strewn fields, etc. Contemporary horror often revisits these places, atleast in imagination, with films like the Hills Have Eyes, or even Saw which occurs in an empty warehouse somewhere in the city. Clearly these places have not been annilalated, merely become some type of Jungian dark forest to remain menacing us.

In his chapter Modernism in the Streets Berman exemplifies the shift of modern man in 19th century Paris as brought about by Haussman’s creation of the boulevard.

Baudelaire represents this new modernity well through his writings. Baudelaire’s dislike for the common man, yet love of the public is something which Berman shows as being an embedded conflict, or wound of modernity.

Baudelaire’s writing on the boulevard is significant in part because the boulevard, the traffic it causes, the change of flow, are part of the character of his work. Baudelaire’s characters have chance encounters in the new streets, where the poor can now freely wander to the re-newed areas of the bourgeois. The great artists and poets are thrown into the muck of Parisian dirt, and come out better for it. Symbolizing the modern notion that one is required to really become a part of every day life, to get one’s knees dirty, to appreciate things.

Berman’s chapter on Paris contrasts nicely with his account of the horrid destruction of the bronx by Robert Moses’ cross-bronx expressway. It is difficult to read Berman’s personal account of its affects upon his home without feeling a great sympathy for all of us born in modern times.

Where the shuffle of the Parisian boulevard became a mixture of automobile and street commerce, the New York neighborhoods have been eviscerated by the highway. There is a significant difference in this progression. The boulevard has sidewalks and the ability to stop off at an block. The highway is intended to go through and get out. The great escape to the weekend resort, or through the city up North. There is no consideration for those without cars or who live in these neighborhoods. Berman describe’s Moses’ action as a murder a dissection of neighborhoods.

Berman then continues into the 60s where activism begins to reclaim the streets. this is an interesting time, and I wish that this section were covered in more detail. The politics of stopping traffic.

Berman’s 70s are largely a statement against the seperation of modernity and post-modernity. Berman’s view is that postmodernity is in part due to the 70s atttempts to look to the past for answers, rather than trying to start a clean slate and renew. Recycling becomes popular, and at last the drive towards novelty and progress is slightly curtailed.

I find that this point of distinction is rather getting caught up in terminology rather than appreciating that all terms are not going to be concise. Perhaps by definition, we are able to determine patterns of culture and society in our modern capitalist age. However, it seems too often that these theorists then forget that this is not a truism but rather a labeling of an abstraction. Whether po-mo is modern or beyond is perspective and semantics.

Berman’s insistence on refining cultural definitions brings out another problem I have with his book, in that it tends to overgeneralize the entire human existence into specific trends. I agree that there are social and cultural phenomena which directly correspond to capitalism, industry, and technology.Berman’s writing glazes between Marx and Baudelaire and Jacobs with frightening ease in an effort to find similarity. However, that is indeed a modernist stance, of stating an assumption and sticking to it. And I am proposing a splintered post modern one.

I am intrigued by the framing of modernism that Bergman seems to be giving in All that is solid Melts Into Air. Principally, that by studying the history of the modern age from the 18th centuries revolutions to the 1960s we can understand our modern condition better, and thus better handle our current situations.

To me, it is a rather positive stance to take, considering that modernists themselves use the values of modern times to bemoan the problems they are facing, and to project some future where those problems are fixed. Postmodernism in turn, establishes itself as more relevant, avoiding the self-contained overly narrow approach of the modern. Bergman points out that it is a conservative strategy to discourage the modern, since the solution is regulation and restriction.

Reading through Bergman’s introduction was like reading the abridged romantic story of man and technology. Intrigue passion distrust and finally a nihilistic apathy. I am looking forward to more accounts of the thoroughly modern man, yearning for more progress, uniting under various new banners and ideologies.

In Jameson’s chapter on architecture in Postmodernism he focuses upon the house that Frank Gehry built for himself. As Gehry tells in interviews contained within the chapter, the house was bought because his wife liked it, and then Gehry built another shell of a house around the original (which can still be seen poking out.)

Jameson uses the example to discuss the nature of postmodern architecture. The issues that he brings up through the example have to do with notions of creating surface areas, but also of playing with dimensionality within space. The two houses merged together is a postmodern gesture which to Jameson reflects the schism of late capitalism between dreams and reality.

Jameson states that Gehry uses perspective to always throw off what the viewer would expect to see, thereby leveraging the memory, or re-percieved, over the actual. This is an interesting notion for sure since it implies that postmodern architecture is attempting to create structures which operate within a mental or virtual sphere, and not be grounded in our euclidean geometry.

Jameson also brings up the attempts of architecture to defy space, to seem floating outside of the context of their surroundings. The envelope of description that the surrounding spaces would imply upon the piece are refused, and the piece stands in its own. I often find this to be true in some of the new buildings with mirrored glass being built in Atlanta. They seem to be more shimmerings of air, suggesting that they are not fully in my world, but nonetheless maintaining dominance through their height and mirrored glass.

Jameson’s writing inspired a thought to me, athough still not fully formed. I think that there was a shift in public consciousness due to 9/11. Perhaps not a very profound one, I’m not sure. However, there is a new crisis brought on by the piercing of our two great buildings of global empire, by a plane. If they drop from the sky, they can go anywhere. This shattering of our trust in buildings, may have repercussions in how new buildings are created.Do architects now imagine what will happen were their building hit?

McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto defines the hacker as a class of people capable of creating and developing products from abstractions.

I find it curious how these terms are used. Clearly, the marxist notion of a class, as a specific group which has control over some means of production, comes into play in this discussion.

However, since we are dealing in the defining of a class best known for its production of the virtual or digital, we can’t avoid the secondary definition of class, as that of a section of code. Class;: a basic building block that describes the data and behaviour of instances of that class.

Is it possible to use the body of code as a metaphor for economic and social structures. Certainly stranger things have been attempted by the CS minded? The hacker, the bourgeois, the vectoral class, the peasant/pastoral, they all could be ascribed with specific traits and behaviours.

The other term that Wark uses frequently is Abstraction, which is essentially “an abstraction of nature.” Abstraction to me is a strange term, since often when we create a product, it becomes more concrete from an abstraction. As Heidegger points out, we define space (abstract) by the structures that are around it, forming a specific location (concrete.) I suppose one benefit to relating product with abstraction, regarding the hacker is that it diminishes any value difference between products that are virtual and those that are physical.