Re: [-empyre-] media architecture and cross-cultural influence

[millimilli@milliechen.com]

Stimulating questions and observations, Johannes.

What happened in the instances of PED where the external conditions  
for participation became unanticipated didn't affect the capacity for  
public broadcast. In Chongqing, because we utilized battery-operated  
megaphones (the kind used by the bus operators to solicit riders in  
Chongqing, and the same kind used by Hong Kong pro-democracy rally  
organizers during protest marches) that were connected to players that  
were powered by the pedaling action, we were able to broadcast loudly  
over a generous geography. Despite the fact that we were hemmed into a  
'safe' zone (i.e. the campus), we were able to bend the ears of  
numerous people on the street by pausing the machines at strategic  
points facing the streets and pointing our megaphones their way.

This situation foregrounded the impetus behind PED's use of low-tech  
public broadcasting devices: at the core is a do-it-yourself spirit of  
not only generating one's own motion but also empowering the rider to  
intrude upon passersby and smear the landscape with the probing  
soundtracks.

My experimentations are not always geared specifically toward social  
interaction - as I stated early on, social interaction is just one of  
the mechanisms I explore and not applied wholesale to every work I  
generate. The potential to become disrupted or at least challenged in  
one's perceptual habits or cultural assumptions is equally strong in  
situations of private, individual experiencing as they are in the  
larger public gestures.

Although I agree that there is a lot of "a-political (i.e. useless)  
... interactive audio-visual digital media" work being generated that  
have more bells and whistles than socially-conscious substance, I  
believe it's misleading to define relevance based on media.