Re: [-empyre-] locative city, annotated space au

[Simon Taylor <swht@clear.net.nz>]

Dear empyreans,
this type of silicon-augmentation of the meatscape brings a number of things
to mind. They are, in no particular order:

1. Benjamin's Arcaden-Pojekt. Antecedent for the flaneur is the Baudelairean
dandy for whom "style is a personal form of originality". (I would like to
juxtapose here the impersonally totalised reading of place with the
"monument to sentiment" (Deleuze and Guattari) I understand as both
underwritten by Baudelaire's idea of style and as constitutive -might one
use the word hypostasis? - of the art act);

2. The legend of the Golem - place augmented by data as Golem-like;

3. From 1984 onward, New Zealand (whence I write) underwent a thoroughgoing
and abstract reorientation of its social and economic structures towards a
Friedman-esque 'free' market system. This one local commentator has called
"the New Zealand experiment". The impact of the experiment on cultural
institutions has been immense, experientially, although unmeasured. But I am
bringing to your attention one aspect of this transformation of the socius:
there is no longer - outside the field of transformative processes - an
effective means, media, for critiquing the State in its affairs, in its
complicity with business interests (outside of the State itself). My point
is that the newspapers have given up some of their rights to editorialise,
universities have up some - a lot - of their autonomy in regard to the
State, artists and architects and social reformers and social services are
remanded to the triple P's (Public and Private Partnerships - meaning
Corporate sponsorships - this includes education and health institutions) by
government funding agencies: the public realm collapses in upon itself.
Margaret Thatcher said already in the early 1980s "society does not exist".
Artistic content (or its discontents, opinion) in the field of data seems
here to be the missing thing. The silicon enhancement - which again is only
a mediation of forces and not a filtering - or augmentation of place
totalises the sensible world along ideological lines, self-destructs at the
level of meeting a public it already inhabits, goes to further the
demolition of public space. (Christopher Hope writes "architecture cannot
lie" - he is wandering East Berlin.)

4. Tim Etchell's company Forced Entertainment organised a guided tour of
several cities based on the idea of personal maps: this is where I took my
first date; this is where the drunk was singing etc. The tours were
conducted from the moving platform or stage of a bus or stage-coach. This is
interesting?

...sorry have raved a bit. Am interested in the use of techs like this but
have yet to see one with the sort of content... well, I think in order to
use tools like this they have to be hit with something hard, beaten into the
shape of a desire... I've yet to see this.

5. Then there is the positioning of "I" as the centre of a narrative it has
control of only along predelineated and delimited lines... so-called
interactive media (what? no interface?!)

...something wrong with this model,

yours
Simon Taylor

> > More of a layered reading of all that is in place from different times,
> moments, architecture, movements, what is lost, what is present, what
> can comment and collide with what is seen as much as "reading" unseen
> information(s).  You could map multiple berlins, different times,
> different layers in physical city, in metaphorical references/ sense of
> the city, comment on the layers in time and even slip from one to other
> on a physical map and in what is to be seen and/or heard in a certain
> physical location. Also, what can be read of movement in the city, of
> traffic, of walkways, of how one navigates, and of the physical shifts
> in perspective with distance ...how would that be read and translated
> experientially and through metaphors and shifts in artistic content
> (sound, music, visual etc..)
>
> travelling salesmen off in his 54 buick...
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Dear empyreans,
> >> On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 hight@34n118w.net wrote:
> >>
> >> >>> To all eyes pointed toward empyre:
> >> >
> >> > If you could pick one place in the world to use some form of locative
> >> > technology to "read" where would you choose and why?  What place
> >> > fascinates you with architecture, natural forms, layout, decay and/or
> >> > redevelopment.....etc?
> >> >
> > i like this sort of question. it's like the travelling salesman. my
answer
> > is Berlin. but it's already been done. innumerable times. is data a new
> > mythology of place - this sort of augmentation you're talking about?
what
> > is
> > literacy  - or the novel's relationship to place? like say gregor von
> > rezzori's reading of Berlin. more questions for the academicised
empyrean
> > travelling salesman.
> >
> > yours
> > simon taylor
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >
>
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