[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 191, Issue 19 - The Flow of Images in Contemporary Urban Space
Isaac Sullivan
Isaac.Sullivan at zu.ac.ae
Tue Jun 1 10:34:22 AEST 2021
Hello all,
I want to thank Patrick and Renate for welcoming me to the conversation - and all who have shared their thoughts, which I've read with interest.
Since, in my ongoing multimedia project, Hypothetical Spaces, I've been taking pictures of pictures that appear within and upon the architectural surfaces of various cities - including Dubai, where I've lived for several years - I'm particularly intrigued by Shama's consideration of urban flows in relation to so-called real time. I wonder which questions, agencies, and urban forms might arise if we were to specifically consider images, photographic and otherwise, as vectors not only of content but also of speed.
Through pictorial space, the elsewhere erupts into the here-and-now. In that sense, paintings have been shuttling us "on and offline" for thousands of years. Meanwhile, inasmuch as they can be seen as proto-AR, today's renderings on construction walls and advertisements on buildings gesture toward futurity.
Be that as it may, when I see an image in 2021, I feel somehow both omniscient and blind. Even when a photograph is crystalline and vividly detailed, additional browser tabs remain open, so to speak. Perhaps, in this stage of the long and ongoing death of photography, the photographic image points as much to other images as it does toward the content it purports.
If so, the pictorial has become as symbolic as it was iconic, and as temporal as it was spatial: an image populated by a horizon line speeds us along an endless chain of signification as much as it insinuates a distance. In Hypothetical Spaces, I'm taking pleasure in altering the circulation of images, speeding them up in the interactive digital work, hypotheticalspaces.zone; and, on the other hand, through oil paintings, mimicking the action of a transcendental signified by playing at bringing the images to a stop.
Since cognition requires duration, and time is relative, the remainder between presence and the idea of presence has, of course, always been a given. Yet the "real time" of the contemporary feels ever more curiously constituted. Iconicity leeches from the image, hopelessly compelling us to ask not where, but when, are we now.
www.instagram.com/echoholdings
www.instagram.com/hypotheticalspaces
www.isaac-sullivan.com
Isaac Sullivanإيزاك سوليفان
Assistant Professorأستاذ مساعد
College of Arts and Creative Enterprisesكلية الفنون و الصناعات الإبداعية
P.O. Box 19282 Dubai, U.A.E | T:+971 4 402 1111 | M:
w w w . z u . a c . a e
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On 5/30/21, 6:00 AM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of empyre-request at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of empyre-request at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> wrote:
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Week 4 | Flow and Real Time in the Urban (Johannes Birringer)
2. Time-Archiving (Negin Ehtesabian)
3. Re: empyre Digest, Vol 191, Issue 18 (Rebecca Rouse)
4. Re: Week 4 | Flow and Real Time in the Urban (Shama Nair)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Fri, 28 May 2021 00:06:39 +0000
From: Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>
To: Shama Nair <shama at bicar-india.org>,
"empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au"
<empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Week 4 | Flow and Real Time in the Urban
Message-ID:
<LO4P265MB37123D29F61B41A140B1D49BAC239 at LO4P265MB3712.GBRP265.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252"
dear Shama, dear all
sorry, having joined late, I missed some of the earlier posts but did like some of the images that were conjured on flow, and impulsiveness....
I now think just today, that Shama is perhaps idealizing or singling out something i do not feel is quite real-time, at this moment.
i don't at all see briskness and moving to and fro. nothing of the sort.
i see static-ness, stillness, precarious isolation, sadness, and depression, death, languishing inaction, brutalist dystopia (amidst afro-pessimism, probably rightly declaring social death (in Frank Wilderson's dire book), and non availability of redemption or any upbeat storyllne, for many people).
i walked passed two young black dancers in a vacant lot today, they danced slowly, in front of Brunel University's 1960s brutalist architecture of four science towers, looming overheard, one more ugly than the next, more deadening, more desperately inhuman.
regards
Johannes Birringer
DAP-Lab. London
________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Shama Nair <shama at bicar-india.org>
Sent: 27 May 2021 15:32
To: empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
Subject: [-empyre-] Week 4 | Flow and Real Time in the Urban
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Hello everyone,
I?d like to thank Renate and Patrick for sharing this space with me. I?ve been following the exchanges here with great fascination and I?m happy to share my response to this month?s theme of Flow, Impulse, and Affect in Real Time.
I?ve always been deeply fascinated with our relationship with cities and architecture, and now, under Rohit's mentorship at BICAR, I?m forming my research interests in urbanism and critical theory more concretely. Keeping in mind the theme of our discussion, I?d like to think through and hopefully hear some of your reflections about the temporal experience of the neoliberal metropolis or ?smart-city?. I?m thinking about Flow in terms of movement (eg. ?flow' of traffic).
Often, we find ourselves describing a city with reference to its ?pace? - eg. a city I?ve known for a long time, Dubai, as ?dynamic, fast- paced, accelerated?. These words, through rampant advertising, quickly form the meta-narrative of the city on an international platform and we tend to internalise a lot of this too, even if it?s at odds with the way we experience our day-to-day, on ground. Does this conditioning impede our ?impulses? as city-dwellers?
As for individual experience of ?real-time?: How might two strangers experience time while moving from the same point A to B - where on the vertical axis of the city?s architecture do they live? Street level or in an apartment complex? How fast are each of their elevators? Do they have to take the stairs? Do they have to wait for a cab or bus or walk to the metro station? Do they drive? Do they carpool? Do they try to avoid tolls? How does the constantly shuttling between online and offline shape our perception of time? How do these different time-maps coexist and how do they create conditions for alienation? Whose experience is privileged and why?
This may be slightly unrelated but perhaps someone else may be able to make a more cohesive link to our theme ? but, I also find interesting the lexicon of time and what cognitive linguists might have to say about the way ?fast? words (quick, brisk, speed, accelerate, and such) shape our individual behaviours and experiences in late capitalism. Along similar lines, Researcher & UCL Professor Mathew Beaumont in his book The Walker: On Losing and Finding Oneself in the Modern City (Verso, 2020) talks about how our pace influences the way we experience the city on foot. To quote:
?Brisk?, a word which first crops up at the end of the fourteenth century in the Old Welsh form brysg, ?used of briskness of foot?, as the OED states, implies industriousness, purposefulness, busy-ness. In short, it means business.?
?People?s most ordinary mode of perambulation was reshaped by the discipline of capitalism. Business required busy-ness, briskness.?
?Hurried or brisk walking, to polarize rather crudely, marked one?s subordination to the industrial system; sauntering or wandering represented an attempt, conscious or unconscious, to escape its labour habits and its time-discipline?
Here are just some of my opening thoughts but I aim to return with some refined reflections on ?flow and impulse? soon.
____
p.s -
Dear Rebecca, thank you for sharing your thoughts on Flow and Real-time in Pandemic-time, I really enjoyed reading your post. I also came across the ?Augmenting the City Together? Keynote for ?Game of Cities: Culture, Participation, Democracy? on your website but unfortunately, the Youtube video is unavailable. I?d love to learn more and perhaps think about your work in urban studies in relation to our theme.
____
www.instagram.noclick_com/shamanair
www.instagram.noclick_com/bicar.india
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.noclick_edu
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Fri, 28 May 2021 22:12:57 +0430
From: Negin Ehtesabian <negin.ehtesabian at gmail.com>
To: empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
Subject: [-empyre-] Time-Archiving
Message-ID:
<CAHePOFTVFDVbpZcrwYmz=rtOCQO+2wat+OCPza89sixW9XjZbw at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Hello everyone,
First I want to thank Renate and Patrick to include me in the discussion, I
am amazed going through the archive slowly.
Most of my practice has been illustration, design, collaborative new media
and intercultural art and research, and recently I am doing more practice
on digital art and interdisciplinary art projects.
Regarding the theme flow, That I enjoyed reading brilliant ideas here, I am
going to talk about a project I am currently working on.
It is an abstract diary project, called ?cartography of moment?,
moment-graphy, and another name ?notes in music? that Roz Dimon suggested.
I am recording a piece of time of every day into a hypothetical
coding/symbolic language.
The idea is to capture a short time (about an hour) and archive it in a
visual form, as an abstract story book of a daily life to be delivered to a
later time.
The discipline of the project is that, I focus on a subject, a passing
feeling, something that inspires me at the moment and engages me, either
emotionally, physically or mentally, and while I'm totally focused on it, I
draw on a page of the plaid notebook and fill its squares with different
symbols, colors, and codes that come to my mind as I feel the presence time.
I let my unconscious take part in the process and try not to intellectually
engage with the choices I make. Either aesthetically, or for the
composition and color palette.
I try not to plan or think ahead and, I just let it happen at the moment,
as it comes naturally as a visual translation of how I feel about the whole
idea of presence in the moment. Let it to be a direct note from the moment
I experience.
Now that I have done more than 100 pages in the past 6 months, I can
observe a pattern in my visual memos. I can see how my mind tends to choose
codes of the moment; forms and colors to express herself, and how my hand
tends to draw in similar space.
It's interesting how all these similar patterns and limited colors and
shapes could be so unique in their own way; and how different the concept
could be as a whole, compared to the details. How they relate and influence
each other and could change the meaning of each other.
I want to know if it is possible to capture the time we experience, those
moments that we are aware of our existence; I want to know if we could take
our feelings' selfies, and if we could be able to read them later too,
directly, from subconscious, and if all the process could make us be more
aware of our passing time. Like a selfie diary.
I was actually always obsessed with selfie photos and believed they are one
of the best time-capture memos materials, if taken honestly; because I
believe nothing can reflect our being better than our facial expression and
condition; and nothing could tell more about us than a face; the eyes, the
look in them, how much the person cares about himself, and when it is our
own face, what we remember of that specific time and space that has been
captured in that frame, and how much we remember of what we were going
through at the time, emotionally, even when we don't remember the story.
Moreover, A selfie represents only a glance in a second of someone's life,
but it can represent a period of time in the concept of a face itself. And
all the selfies through time together, would make another bigger collection
that can picture a more inclusive concept of that life and make a
meaningful story.
So, every moment could be a detail, representing a pixel, that helps to
shape the bigger picture. It can be dark or light, but doesn't matter as
long as it has a meaningful place and role in the whole concept.
Now that's a question: When we talk about the flow, are we actually talking
about those details, those individual pixels, frozen in a second, or we are
talking about the quality of the passing details, shaping a whole concept
as time experience, like the water passing in a river? Are we talking about
the river or the water?
Another question is that, what if we could take a selfie of every moment?
Could we communicate its quality with others? How much we could understand
those abstract language of others' subconscious, talking about their time
experiences, that is the only thing we ever know as living.
And isn't it all about art, anyway? That connection, that struggle to
understand another being, in a coded language that only our mind would
understand with an immediate abstract knowledge and we struggle to define
with human languages?
On the other hand, as Heraclitus theory, says ?We look and do not look at
the same river; We are, and we are not.? It might be a philosophical
theory, but even scientifically, we know that every moment we live, our
body and mind are slightly different than before, Every moment, our body
organs are a moment older, our cells are in another phase of their lives,
each atom is in a slightly different place, moving around, in a different
pattern, that is so tiny that only could be observed in digital
microscopes, but it is happening. So actually every moment we are in a
slightly different quality of our existence.
In the end, this project started with me trying to make a personal visual
code language for music pieces and compare them together; Also a project
Patrick Lichty was doing with daily Asemic calligraphy to collect the
unconscious mind's patterns, inspired me to think of capturing the life
moments, the experienced time and feelings.
So, metaphorically, if every moment of life is a music note, we are the
composer of every day music. We are the only ones who could hear our own
music too. If we consider every thought we have during the day, as a code
and symbol we actually add to our existence time, we would realize how
important it is what we think of, or feel for in a daily basis; what we see
or listen or experience.
So, this project also led me to an Art therapy idea, that capturing time as
a passing quality -that we usually hardly notice in the speed of everyday
life- would help people to notice all those pixels that the big picture is
being made of; all those notes that make the music, and maybe lead them to
realize that, for making a better picture, and a more beautiful music, we
need to take care of those little details we spend our moments on.
I hope my writing does not differ so much from academic discipline, and if
it is, I apologize;
I am more of an artist with ideas and thoughts and I am still learning
academic English, the language I've started in my adult life.
I am really looking forward to hearing your thoughts, critiques,
suggestions, and comments on my project, if anyone has done anything
similar to it, if anyone is involved in art therapy or visual music I would
love to share ideas.
Negin Ehtesabian
neginete1 at gmail.com
negin.ehtesabian at gmail.com
neginete.com
Instagram pages:
Art <https://www.instagram.noclick_com/neginete.art/>
illustration <https://www.instagram.noclick_com/neginete.illustration/>
design <https://www.instagram.noclick_com/neginete.design/>
*Personal <https://www.instagram.noclick_com/neginete.art/>*
SaNg Art projects <https://www.instagram.noclick_com/sangartprojects/>
NPT projects <https://www.instagram.noclick_com/nptprojects/>
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Message: 3
Date: Fri, 28 May 2021 09:48:43 +0000
From: Rebecca Rouse <rebecca.rouse at his.se>
To: "empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au"
<empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 191, Issue 18
Message-ID: <0baff17fff6b47efa8f3bba14e339f36 at his.se>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Dear Shama,
I am fascinated by your discussion of time, flow, and space in urban environments. This is especially interesting to think about over the course of the past year, as trajectories within and between urban spaces have altered and paused during the many lock downs. I wonder about the tempo of the non-place spaces in city (like Marc Auge writes about) - the places in which people mostly just pass by or pass through. When those spaces are so slowed or even emptied, as during lock down, does it change them from non-places into spaces?
I'm sorry the video of my Augmenting the City Together talk was missing. It looks like the conference folks had changed some links. I've managed to upload a copy via my website now:
http://www.rebeccarouse.noclick_com/talks.html
The talk shares thoughts on embracing the playfulness in cities, and using augmented reality technology in co-design processes to reveal hidden or under-examined histories in cities. In terms of thinking about time and flow, the AR application has the potential to introduce the type of flow-based interaction of games, but also the potential to provide a defamiliarizing effect through the layering of other times/spaces into physical space, maybe even the potential to give a bit of a sense of time travel. But unlike VR (virtual reality) the effect is not immersive, but rather one of accretion or layering, that is intended to build on the already immersive environment of the city itself.
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Rouse, (She/Her)
Senior Lecturer in Media Arts, Aesthetics, & Narration
School of Informatics, Division of Game Development
University of Sk?vde, Sweden
www.rebeccarouse.noclick_com
________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of empyre-request at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-request at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Friday, May 28, 2021 4:00:07 AM
To: empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
Subject: empyre Digest, Vol 191, Issue 18
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----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Today's Topics:
1. Week 4 | Flow and Real Time in the Urban (Shama Nair)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Thu, 27 May 2021 14:32:23 +0000
From: Shama Nair <shama at bicar-india.org>
To: "empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au"
<empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: [-empyre-] Week 4 | Flow and Real Time in the Urban
Message-ID:
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Hello everyone,
I?d like to thank Renate and Patrick for sharing this space with me. I?ve been following the exchanges here with great fascination and I?m happy to share my response to this month?s theme of Flow, Impulse, and Affect in Real Time.
I?ve always been deeply fascinated with our relationship with cities and architecture, and now, under Rohit's mentorship at BICAR, I?m forming my research interests in urbanism and critical theory more concretely. Keeping in mind the theme of our discussion, I?d like to think through and hopefully hear some of your reflections about?the temporal experience of the neoliberal metropolis or ?smart-city?. I?m thinking about Flow in terms of movement (eg. ?flow' of traffic).
Often, we find ourselves describing a city with reference to its ?pace? - eg. a city I?ve known for a long time, Dubai, as ?dynamic, fast- paced, accelerated?. These words, through rampant advertising, quickly form the meta-narrative of the city on an international platform and we tend to internalise a lot of this too, even if it?s at odds with the way we experience our day-to-day, on ground. Does this conditioning impede our ?impulses? as city-dwellers?
As for individual experience of??real-time?: How might two strangers experience time while moving from the same point A to B - where on the vertical axis of the city?s architecture do they live? Street level or in an apartment complex? How fast are each of their elevators? Do they have to take the stairs? Do they have to wait for a cab or bus or walk to the metro station? Do they drive? Do they carpool? Do they try to avoid tolls? How does the constantly shuttling between online and offline shape our perception of time??How do these different time-maps coexist and how do they create conditions for alienation??Whose experience is privileged and why?
This may be slightly unrelated but perhaps someone else may be able to make a more cohesive link to our theme ? but, I also find interesting the lexicon of time and what cognitive linguists might have to say about the way ?fast? words (quick, brisk, speed, accelerate, and such) shape our individual behaviours and experiences in late capitalism. Along similar lines, Researcher & UCL Professor Mathew Beaumont in his book?The Walker: On Losing and Finding Oneself in the Modern City?(Verso, 2020) talks about how our pace influences the way we experience the city on foot. To quote:
?Brisk?, a word which first crops up at the end of the fourteenth century in the Old Welsh form brysg, ?used of briskness of foot?, as the OED states, implies industriousness, purposefulness, busy-ness. In short, it means business.?
?People?s most ordinary mode of perambulation was reshaped by the discipline of capitalism. Business required busy-ness, briskness.?
?Hurried or brisk walking, to polarize rather crudely, marked one?s subordination to the industrial system; sauntering or wandering represented an attempt, conscious or unconscious, to escape its labour habits and its time-discipline?
Here are just some of my opening thoughts but I aim to return with some refined reflections on??flow and impulse? soon.
____
p.s -
Dear Rebecca, thank you for sharing your thoughts on Flow and Real-time in Pandemic-time, I really enjoyed reading your post. I also came across the??Augmenting the?City Together? Keynote for??Game of Cities: Culture, Participation, Democracy? on your website but unfortunately, the Youtube video is unavailable. I?d love to learn more and perhaps think about your work in?urban studies in relation to our theme.
____
www.instagram.noclick_com/shamanair<http://www.instagram.noclick_com/shamanair>
www.instagram.noclick_com/bicar.india<http://www.instagram.noclick_com/bicar.india>
------------------------------
_______________________________________________
empyre mailing list
empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.noclick_edu
End of empyre Digest, Vol 191, Issue 18
***************************************
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Message: 4
Date: Fri, 28 May 2021 07:03:43 +0000
From: Shama Nair <shama at bicar-india.org>
To: "empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au"
<empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Week 4 | Flow and Real Time in the Urban
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Thank you Johannes!
I do agree with you!
Dubai has 'opened up? so to speak and in many cases it seems like business as usual ? the ?flow? of traffic and labor has returned and is moving through the city (in fact, it hardly left). Here in this city, even if we aren?t facing a stillness of time in terms of strict lockdown, it does feel like a strange time-warp because we are still missing a lot of ?time-markers? - for those who work from home: when does the weekend begin? When does the work day begin? What is rush hour anymore? When do I ask my employer for vacation days when the very concept seems laughable at this point? With Dubai being an expat-heavy city, there?s the endless wait to visit ?home?; for borders to reopen in many parts of the world. Not to mention an internal slowness we experience as a result of fatigue and sorrow in this catastrophic time in history. Almost all the news we consume here as expats is about the situation ?back home? where devastation and lockdowns continue. This is also disorienting b
ecause all the information we?re constantly consuming is about a certain suspension of time, while our physical reality here is quite different and ?sped-up'.
I think that this stillness and slowing down that we feel internally on a personal, individual level is in conflict with the way the city is spoken about in the commercial context or even in the way technology is advancing to compress time: apps to ?speed? things up, ?hyper-loops? in the near future, ?express delivery? etc. And because we are incessantly receiving this in mainstream media both consciously and unconsciously, I wonder how it impacts us. Could it induce a feeling of guilt for 'slowing down'? Does it lead us to believe that ?fast? is the ideal state and any ?slowing down? is a failure on our part? Or on the contrary, is ?slowing down? in the face of the accelerated ?smart-city? almost liberating?
I?ve used Dubai as a starting point only because that?s where my immediate observations begin, but I aim to look at this conflict of time in a universal context say between the personal vs. the commercial experience of the city, the online vs. offline.
I?ll hold on to this thought without deviating too much and will think about impulse a little further :)
_____
Shama Nair
Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research
7 Sandhurst House
Mereweather Road, Colaba
Mumbai 400 001 INDIA
info at bicar-india.org<mailto:info at bicar-india.org>
Subscribe<http://eepurl.noclick_com/hbY2pr> | Instagram<http://www.instagram.noclick_com/bicar.india> | Facebook<http://www.facebook.noclick_com/bicar.institute> | Courses<https://linktr.noclick_ee/BICAR>
From: Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>
Date: Friday, 28 May 2021 at 4:06 AM
To: Shama Nair <shama at bicar-india.org>, empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Week 4 | Flow and Real Time in the Urban
dear Shama, dear all
sorry, having joined late, I missed some of the earlier posts but did like some of the images that were conjured on flow, and impulsiveness....
I now think just today, that Shama is perhaps idealizing or singling out something i do not feel is quite real-time, at this moment.
i don't at all see briskness and moving to and fro. nothing of the sort.
i see static-ness, stillness, precarious isolation, sadness, and depression, death, languishing inaction, brutalist dystopia (amidst afro-pessimism, probably rightly declaring social death (in Frank Wilderson's dire book), and non availability of redemption or any upbeat storyllne, for many people).
i walked passed two young black dancers in a vacant lot today, they danced slowly, in front of Brunel University's 1960s brutalist architecture of four science towers, looming overheard, one more ugly than the next, more deadening, more desperately inhuman.
regards
Johannes Birringer
DAP-Lab. London
________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Shama Nair <shama at bicar-india.org>
Sent: 27 May 2021 15:32
To: empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
Subject: [-empyre-] Week 4 | Flow and Real Time in the Urban
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Hello everyone,
I?d like to thank Renate and Patrick for sharing this space with me. I?ve been following the exchanges here with great fascination and I?m happy to share my response to this month?s theme of Flow, Impulse, and Affect in Real Time.
I?ve always been deeply fascinated with our relationship with cities and architecture, and now, under Rohit's mentorship at BICAR, I?m forming my research interests in urbanism and critical theory more concretely. Keeping in mind the theme of our discussion, I?d like to think through and hopefully hear some of your reflections about the temporal experience of the neoliberal metropolis or ?smart-city?. I?m thinking about Flow in terms of movement (eg. ?flow' of traffic).
Often, we find ourselves describing a city with reference to its ?pace? - eg. a city I?ve known for a long time, Dubai, as ?dynamic, fast- paced, accelerated?. These words, through rampant advertising, quickly form the meta-narrative of the city on an international platform and we tend to internalise a lot of this too, even if it?s at odds with the way we experience our day-to-day, on ground. Does this conditioning impede our ?impulses? as city-dwellers?
As for individual experience of ?real-time?: How might two strangers experience time while moving from the same point A to B - where on the vertical axis of the city?s architecture do they live? Street level or in an apartment complex? How fast are each of their elevators? Do they have to take the stairs? Do they have to wait for a cab or bus or walk to the metro station? Do they drive? Do they carpool? Do they try to avoid tolls? How does the constantly shuttling between online and offline shape our perception of time? How do these different time-maps coexist and how do they create conditions for alienation? Whose experience is privileged and why?
This may be slightly unrelated but perhaps someone else may be able to make a more cohesive link to our theme ? but, I also find interesting the lexicon of time and what cognitive linguists might have to say about the way ?fast? words (quick, brisk, speed, accelerate, and such) shape our individual behaviours and experiences in late capitalism. Along similar lines, Researcher & UCL Professor Mathew Beaumont in his book The Walker: On Losing and Finding Oneself in the Modern City (Verso, 2020) talks about how our pace influences the way we experience the city on foot. To quote:
?Brisk?, a word which first crops up at the end of the fourteenth century in the Old Welsh form brysg, ?used of briskness of foot?, as the OED states, implies industriousness, purposefulness, busy-ness. In short, it means business.?
?People?s most ordinary mode of perambulation was reshaped by the discipline of capitalism. Business required busy-ness, briskness.?
?Hurried or brisk walking, to polarize rather crudely, marked one?s subordination to the industrial system; sauntering or wandering represented an attempt, conscious or unconscious, to escape its labour habits and its time-discipline?
Here are just some of my opening thoughts but I aim to return with some refined reflections on ?flow and impulse? soon.
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p.s -
Dear Rebecca, thank you for sharing your thoughts on Flow and Real-time in Pandemic-time, I really enjoyed reading your post. I also came across the ?Augmenting the City Together? Keynote for ?Game of Cities: Culture, Participation, Democracy? on your website but unfortunately, the Youtube video is unavailable. I?d love to learn more and perhaps think about your work in urban studies in relation to our theme.
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