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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">Thank you
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">Johannes!</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black"><br>
<br>
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">I do agree with you! </span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">Dubai has 'opened up’ so
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">to</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black"> speak and in many cases it seems like business as usual</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">
<span lang="EN-US">– the ‘flow’ of traffic and labor has returned and is moving through the city (in fact, it hardly left)</span></span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">. Here in this city, even if we aren’t
facing a stillness of time in terms of </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">strict
</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">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? </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">When do I ask my employer for vacation days when the very concept seems laughable at this point? With</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">
Dubai being an expat-heavy city, there’s the endless wait to visit ‘home’; for borders to reopen in many parts of the world.
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">Not to mention an internal slowness we experience as a result of fatigue and sorrow in this catastrophic time in history. A</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">lmost
all the news we consume here as expats is about the situation ‘back home’ where </span>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">devastation</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">and lockdowns
</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">continue. This is also disorienting because all the information we’re constantly consuming is about a certain suspension of time,
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">while</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black"> our
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">physical
</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">reality here is quite different and ’sped-up'.</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">I think that this stillness and slowing down that we feel
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">internally
</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">on a personal, individual level is in conflict with the way th</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">e</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">
city is spoken about</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black"> in the commercial context</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black"> or even
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">in
</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">the way technology is advancing to
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">compress time</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">: apps to ’speed’ things up, ‘hyper-loops’</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">
in the near future</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">,</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">
<span lang="EN-US">‘express delivery’</span></span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black"> etc. And because we are
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">incessantly</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black"> 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
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">on the contrary,</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black"> is ’slowing down’ in the face of the accelerated ’smart-city’
almost liberating? </span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif"><br>
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.<br>
<br>
</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif;color:black">I’ll hold on to this thought without deviating too much and will think about impulse a little further :)</span><span lang="EN-US"><br>
<br>
</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Calibri Light",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:black">_____<br>
<br>
<br>
Shama Nair<br>
</span><b><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:black">Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research</span></b><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:black"><br>
</span><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:black"><br>
7 Sandhurst House<br>
Mereweather Road, Colaba<br>
Mumbai 400 001 INDIA<br>
</span><a href="mailto:info@bicar-india.org" title="mailto:info@bicar-india.org"><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:black">info@bicar-india.org</span></a><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:black"><br>
</span><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#AFABAB"><br>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black">From:
</span></b><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black">Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer@brunel.ac.uk><br>
<b>Date: </b>Friday, 28 May 2021 at 4:06 AM<br>
<b>To: </b>Shama Nair <shama@bicar-india.org>, empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au><br>
<b>Subject: </b>Re: Week 4 | Flow and Real Time in the Urban<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">dear Shama, dear all<br>
<br>
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....<br>
<br>
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.<br>
i don't at all see briskness and moving to and fro. nothing of the sort.<br>
<br>
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).<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
regards<br>
Johannes Birringer<br>
DAP-Lab. London<br>
<br>
________________________________________<br>
From: empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Shama Nair <shama@bicar-india.org><br>
Sent: 27 May 2021 15:32<br>
To: empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au<br>
Subject: [-empyre-] Week 4 | Flow and Real Time in the Urban<br>
<br>
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
Hello everyone,<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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).<br>
<br>
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?<br>
<br>
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?<br>
<br>
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:<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<br>
“People’s most ordinary mode of perambulation was reshaped by the discipline of capitalism. Business required busy-ness, briskness.”<br>
<br>
“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”<br>
<br>
Here are just some of my opening thoughts but I aim to return with some refined reflections on ‘flow and impulse’ soon.<br>
<br>
____<br>
<br>
p.s -<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
____<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.instagram.com/shamanair">www.instagram.com/shamanair</a><br>
<a href="http://www.instagram.com/bicar.india">www.instagram.com/bicar.india</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
_______________________________________________<br>
empyre forum<br>
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au<br>
<a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu">http://empyre.library.cornell.edu</a><o:p></o:p></p>
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