I’ll start by give a little context to this post and introduce myself as one of the students in Amber Frid-Jimenez’ s Networks, Tactics and Breakdowns course. Each one of us was asked to comment on one of the evenings of the lecture series, and particularly how it relates (or doesn’t) to material and concepts we are discussing in class. I will be commenting on the ‘Imagining Communities’ night of the lecture series particularly on Yvonne P. Doderer’s and Jesko Fezer’s presentations (I am excluding Ute Meta Bauer’s presentation which was more of a description and contextualisation of the lecture series as a whole and which probably doesn’t need to be summarised in this post).

Yvonne P. Doderer - Imagining “Other” Communities

Yvonne’s talk focused on approaches to appropriate space for the development of alternative practices to the organisation of socio-political life, with a particular focus on gender and gender-political movements. One important comment she made was on the importance of ‘generating a space’ (and i think in particular a physical space) in which a subgroup can define itself and express alternative opinion and practice. It was interesting to see a few examples of these spaces ‘carved out’ from the larger space in which [in this case] women could develop alternative form of social organization, also notable was the difficulty in defining a space or set of practices purely on the basis of a single factor, such as gender, when there are indeed many other factors (racial or economic for example) that operate at the same time to produce various socio-political organization.

In relating these ideas to our class, i see definite parallels in the practice of creating alternative spaces to the promise of virtual space that provides a space for everyone. Because space is infinite in the virtual sphere the ability to carve out alternative space is simplified. However i wonder if to some extent the spacelessness of virtual space, given that there is no need (and possibly no way) for alternative spaces to bump up against each other is a hindrance to the cross fertilisation of ideas and social practice between various alternatives. Is this issue somewhat mitigated by the spatiality of 3d virtual environments (though even here space is still effectively infinite)?

Another question is what is the effect on gender and identity politics in the disembodied space of our modern mediated communication forms? Yvonne posed some question on the differences between male and female and often we have strong associations between these categories and our physiological features? How are these questions answered when we have no bodies? While I have no answers I will link to a paper that describes a method to guess gender based on word usage . Also a link to a web based gender guessing tool. Thoughts?

Jesko Fezer

Jesko Fezer’s presentation consisted of a look at ten or so projects mainly around mapping and small to medium scale architectural interventions to the use of public and private spaces. The mapping work included some 3D maps and ‘physical’ visualisations of social structures, and i was particularly interested in the mapping projects because i could draw a parallel between these maps and the visualizations of digital network structure I periodically see that ‘map’ online spaces. I find them interesting because mapping is one of the really important ways to more clearly see the structure and dynamic properties of digital networks.

The rest of work was architectural intervention work at different scales (though since all architecture intervenes in the use of physical space - maybe the term ‘intervention’ is somewhat redundant here). And while I won’t go through and describe all the work i will highlight one of the projects which was really about open participation (by the residents of the town) in the process or urban and political planning in a particular town. Participation being one of the things we are interested in the class, and networks like the internet are often seem as fairly democratic media, I was drawn to think about the intersection of mediating technologies and civic participation and wanted to include a link to MIT’s center for future civic media.

Rekacewicz began by framing the cartographer as a filter for researched data (his diagram was much like that of a camera, with a subject, lens, and film), and presented some examples of politicized cartographic decisions. His fantastic hand-drawn maps backed up his emphasis on cartography based on field research - that is, actually visiting and measuring the situations he maps. Many of his maps depict ideas or desires — his map of the “Autoroute de l’Internationale insurgee” contrasted American intentions with the flow of insurgents which counter that sphere of influence.

Most of the remainder of his talk focused on the space of exception formed by airports - a kind of distributed authoritarian state which he presented as being progressively colonized by private commerce. Duty free shops slowly engulf public space as profits are used to subsidize flights, increasing the population of the airport pseudo-state. Travelers, forced through duty free shops, are stripped of their disposable cash, while security practices strip them of their rights.

Sengupta focused on biometric technologies as contemporary versions of pseudo-scientific anthropometric practices, and discussed both fingerprinting and facial compositing to identify suspects. He pointed out that a) fingerprinting was invented in India to help British policemen distinguish Indian suspects who “all looked the same”, and b) facial composites in India are assembled from a database of noses, eyes, and other features culled from photos of Indian policemen. These technologies are presented as both authoritative and impartial, but, Sengupta proposes, are open to the injection of bias and agenda. They are used to generate varying taxonomies of FUD; to structurally “cantilever the truth”.

He went on to document and closely examine the creation of diverse narratives surrounding an “encounter” with suspects in the bombing of Jaipur, Delhi, and other Indian cities. A close reading of the amateur and press photos reveals possible inconsistencies, and his own visit to the scene mirrored Rekacewicz’s commitment to visiting and measuring the site in person.

A common thread between the speakers was the interest in the spatial organization of narrative; both attempted to describe explicit and consistent sequences of events in space in order to situate the varying agendas which interested them. Rekacewicz carefully documents the scale of his sketches in meters, on graph paper; Sengupta questions the sequence of shootings and injuries as purported by various accounts and photographs.

I was interested in Rekacewicz’s documentation of the colonization of public space by private interests. I believe strongly in the need for proscribed public space, and I think it’s wrong when commercial interests are allowed to infringe on that space. Still, I think a lot of codified public space fails to serve public interests, and much of it is nebulous — what are these interests, whom do they serve, how is the space programmed? Public plazas in Manhattan, required by code, are often empty, designed to discourage people from congregating. Jesko Fezer, from the first lecture in this series, documents sitting spaces which have been “sharpened” to make them less comfortable — similar to the metal studs found on many railings to prevent skateboarding.

In contrast, shopping malls are an overtly commercial space, architecturally designed — like the duty free shops Rekacewicz describes — to contain and fleece people. But malls serve as refuges to teenagers, who see it as an unprogrammed space, a hangout. Food courts especially are one of the only public spaces where groups can sit for extended periods of time without being hassled.

This is not meant to challenge the assertion that commerce is colonizing private space, or that that is a bad thing, but it does expand the possibilities for how to combat or subvert that trend — or at least point out some other de-facto public spaces we should consider defending.

For a comparison of airport and mall architectures, see:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffreywarren/2962164940/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffreywarren/2962173140/in/photostream/

On Monday, October 20, we will host an event entitled The Right to the City. Shuddha comes from a copy left background, and for almost a decade he has been involved in Sarai- a center that creates civic media and open source educational platforms in Delhi. Philippe has been working for twenty years for Le Monde diplomatique as a cartographer and has been co-editor of the “Atlas Of Globalization” (German/French). With a background in radical cartography, he recently began consulting for the World Bank on issues of climate change. Amber Frid-Jimenez, who will introduce and moderate the evening, engages currently in networked cultures and participatory platforms. All three positions are recognized and debated within the current visual arts discourse that engages in renegotiating definitions of “public sphere” and the right to the city.

Please join us for the second evening in the This Is Tomorrow series on October 6 from 7-9pm in the Joan Jonas Performance Hall (N51-337, 3rd Floor) at the MIT Visual Arts Program Building at 265 Mass Ave in Cambridge, MA. Pia Maria Ahlbäck and Peter Marcuse will be speaking on the topic of “Urban Utopias?”.

Specifically, Pia Maria Ahlbäck will examine a small number of spatial examples, urban and others, in the light of the phenomenological thought of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. She will also make use of the concepts of the “chronotope”, which was devised by Russian literary theoretician Mikhail Bakhtin, and the “heterotopia,” conceived by the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Her purpose in utilizing these thoughts and concepts is to facilitate a way of thinking imaginatively about climate change that is related to the Western tradition of utopias/dystopias. Ultimately, she will attempt to answers questions about the challenges this particular approach presents and its implications for current urban spatial thinking.

Peter Marcuse will speak about utopia, planning and urban activism. Utopias can be good (humanist) or bad (neo-liberal), achievable (the city of plenty) or unachievable (the dream city), strategic (utopias of process) or illusory (architectural fantasies). Critical approaches to planning and urban activism would incorporate the former images of utopia into meaningful programs of change. The Right to the City is an example of the effort at such a use of utopian thinking.

On October 8, 2008, 5-7 at Barker 133 on MIT campus, the Humanities Center Seminar on Gender and Sexuality presents The Human Project: Bodily Dystopias and Utopics of Race, a lecture by Jayna Brown (University of California, Riverside) with comment by Wendy Chun (Brown University).