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/
I think this question you have raised about the possible ways of subverting or combating the commercial colonization of public space is an interesting one. Teenagers are prone to this act of claiming a space because they do not have spaces of their own to gather in.
When I was in middle school we used to “hang out” a lot in the parking lot of a local strip mall. The parking lot is a sort of no-man’s land (in probably the same way that the food court is): it doesn’t belong to any business specifically or to the city — or at least no one puts that much effort into patrolling the area, so it was an easy space for us to claim.
It is funny that teenagers have to go somewhere public in order to evade the overt supervision of adults.