[-empyre-] Walking the Future--- a question of reconciliation, restitution, healing?

[christina at christinamcphee.net]

To "actually make stuff that embodies those principles (of feminist ethics)…”   — thanks, Catherine d’Ignazio— I’ve copied below the whole quote around this from your introductory post today. 


In your collaborative project with artist Andi Sutton,  “Boston Coastline: Future Past” , participants walk past coastline edges through the core of Boston — physically performing the 1630 edge as a score through the city. 

http://www.kanarinka.com/project/boston-coastline-future-past/

In the video, the sound montage of voices delivers something like this…”When you put your body actually on the line… how can we emotionally reconcile ourselves to these various futures that are encroaching on us— an actual movement around the city creates a transformation of your body and your spirit…”

I wonder, does it also create a transformation of the city (— becoming a question of design)? 


To raise awareness through an affective means like this one— I note your emphasis on ‘reconciliation’ with a future of rising sea levels….  is there an element of feminist ethics in the process of reconciliation? The latter term echoes, strangely and intertextually, in my imagination to the ’truth and reconciliation’ justice hearings in post-apartheid South Africa…  making me speculate that, there is a kind of judicial, or anyway, judgement, element to your project?  Awareness of the old and future coast lines, as they were caused by urban development to fill in, and now are under threat (perhaps certain) of return to the ocean— is this awareness part of a kind of act of communal healing? as if the infill had been a kind of violent extension of human freehold on a delicate ecosystem?  Do you see this kind of work as a form of restitution? reconstitution ? …  



Recalling Kevin Lynch’s way-finding in Boston in the sixties:  “Our real task is not to prevent the world from changing but to cause it to change in a growth conducive and life-enhancing direction, ” Lynch wrote in  "What Time is This Place.” Do you think that the walking coastline project has a feminist aspect? Playing out the perceptual subject of time— personal and communal sensations—from within the matrix of big data— your project with Sutton follows up on Lynch and also  Lawrence and Anna Halprin’s scoring experiments.  These precursors hoped that such experiments would generate newly ‘humane’ options for urban designers and planners… 


From your perspective as a teacher and activist,  do you agree that a more ‘humane’ opportunity comes from the walking the coastline project, as they had hoped, fifty years ago? Or does feminism bring difference in a new register?   

Now that the climate change crisis is ubiquitously foretold and documented, thanks to  big data deployments in mediated information on every level of coding…does this context have feminist opportunity? 


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Catherine wrote, 

"In thinking about data visualization, I think we have a lot to draw on from the histories of critical cartography and indigenous mapping and feminist critique. But I feel like where we can build further is not stopping at critique (which is what academics so often do - point out oppression and leave it there, deconstruct everything and then goodbye) but actually move towards operationalizing critiques of power, feminist ethics into design principles for how to make things more just, more fair, more representative, etc. and then actually make stuff that embodies those principles. “ 



— Christina


http://christinamcphee.net