Who made your iPod?
“The real value of the iPod doesn’t lie in its parts or even in putting those parts together. The bulk of the iPod’s value is in the conception and design of the iPod. That is why Apple gets $80 for each of these video iPods it sells, which is by far the largest piece of value added in the entire supply chain.
Those clever folks at Apple figured out how to combine 451 mostly generic parts into a valuable product. They may not make the iPod, but they created it. In the end, that’s what really matters.”
[via nyt]
meaningless distance
Never in history has distance meant less. Never has man’s relationships with place been more numerous, fragile, and temporary. Throughout the advanced technological societies, and particularly among those I have characgerized as “the people of the future,” commuting, traveling, and regularly reloacting one’s family have become second nature. Figuratively, we “use up” places and dispose of them in much the same that we dispose of Kleenex or beer cans. We are witnessing a historic decline in the significance of place to human life. We are breeding a new race of nomads, and few suspect quite how massive, widespread and significant their migrations are.
-Future shock by Alvin Toffler (p75)
limbo
It is a pit stop, an in-between place, a “nowhere,” a technicality – a grudging intrusion into the seamless dream of teleportation that is transcontinental jet flight.
The hub is essentially an anti-experience borne of technological necessity and the imperatives of petroleum, flight schedules, the curvature of the planet, and geographic accident. Hubs are nowheres, with their security apparatuses, landing and fueling infrastructures, and pictograms both patronizing and incomprehensible. The unspoken ethos is one of keep-up-with-the-Joneses anti-regional sterility.
Hub signage almost exclusively employs the Helvetica type font, a font specifically engineered to have no personality. Hub food is always vacuum-packed and seems to strive for unitized, stainless placelessness. The buildings feel so sterile that they could only be the precise opposite: incubators of great plagues; fathers of all microbial lies. But airline hubs – more so than airports – are complete nowheres.
This nowhereness both attracts and repels; seduces and frightens. The hub is the embodiment of a certain dimension of capital-P Progress – that dimension equating progress with comfort, the dimension that views progress as those technologies that separate our senses from the world as it was created by nature. The hub is where we experience the horrific torpor of Extreme Progress, where Modernism is fully integrated into a universe of Smarte Kartes, nubbly maroon fabric chairs, nonspecific accents squawking across grand halls that flights with numbers four digits long are currently boarding. The hub is a dead-number office for damned digits, where numbers like 1388, 1490, 1218 are abandoned and thrown away, only to be reappear with Sysyphian regularity.
-Douglas Coupland
annihilation
“Annihilation of space by time”
-Karl Marx
Architecturally originated sensations
“Certain of De Chirico’s paintings, which were clearly inspired by architecturally originated sensations, exert in turn an effect on their objective base to the point of transforming it: they tend themselves to become blueprints or models. Disquieting neighborhoods of arcades could one day carry on and fulfill the allure of these works.”
[img via flickr][via Bureau of Public Secrets]
-
Debord, Guy. “Critique of Urban Geography.” Bureau of Public Secrets – Situationist Texts and Translations. Trans. Ken Knabb. Web. 14 Oct. 2010. <http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/urbgeog.htm>.
The City as Database
“If nothing else, the modern city is defined by heterogeneity. It is marked by a constantly changing amalgam of diverse people, buildings, objects, cultures, and processes. The urban is the condensation of the human. As J.B. Jackson said, ‘Whatever its point of departure, every discussion in the field of human geography sooner or later comes back to the city as the supreme example of man’s modification of his environment.’ One of the primary challenges that has confronted artists since the rise of the metropolis has been how to effectively represent this tremendous complexity and perpetual flux” (2)
The city itself is a type of massive, living, breathing, smelly database. However, there is no effective way to draw information from it. On the internet, some services (like twitter or flickr) may make their information accessible through an API, others (like some government agencies) may publish their databases in various forms, still others (like the database this blog uses), can only be accessed with correct permissions. All of these digital databases are conceptually simple and relatively easy to access. On the other hand, the database of the city is much more complex and nuanced than a simple row/column schemas. To be comprehensive, everything from the physical to the intangible, the enduring to the ephemeral would have to catalogued. The sheer number and diversity of the entries would easily dwarf the largest of digital databases, but at what point is a database too large to be useful? How does one pare down, sort, and search such a database to understand it? Traditionally, phonebooks, tour guides, and maps, which are all specialized subsets of the larger set of data found within the city, have been utilitarian methods of sorting and presenting data useful to everyday living. To a large extent, the internet has adopted those roles and been successful in better inter-correlation between formerly separate (sub)databases. Even still, the implementation has been a simple mimicry of the old familiar formats which still say very little about the city as a place.
With all this said, one must be careful to remember that it is the city that defines this theoretical database and not the database that defines the city. Individually, each entry does not a city make. The city changes from day to day, minute to minute. People move in, people move out. etc etc etc. The city is neither more or less complete with the addition or subtraction of entries. Rather, it is the unique interplay between each part, the relationships, no matter how small or tenuous, that define the whole.
–
Shapins, Jesse. “Mapping the Urban Database Documentary.” Urban Geographers: Independent Filmmakers and the City. Ed. Mark Street. Berghahn, 2011. Print.
I am not interested in art as affirmation or complicity.
Works which are built within the contextual frame of governmental, corporate, educational, and religious institutions run the risk of being read as tokens of those institutions…Every context has its frame and its ideological overtones. It is a matter of degree. But there are sites where it is obvious that an art work is being subordinated to / accommodated to/ adapted to / subservient to / useful to… In such cases it is necessary to work in opposition to the constrains of the context so that the work cannot be read as an affirmation of the questionable ideologies and political power. I am not interested in art as affirmation or complicity.
–Richard Serra
The Question of Democracy
“This even raises the question of the constitution of the social space, of the form of society, of the essence of what was once termed the ‘city’. The political is thus revealed , not in what we call political activity, but in the double movement whereby the mode of institution of society appears and is obscured.” (11)
“Society appears to be a community all of whose members are strictly interdependent; at the same time it is assumed to be constructing itself day by day, to be striving towards a goal — the creation of the new man — and to be living in a state of permanent mobilization.” (14)
“As power, law and knowledge become disentangled, a new relation to the real is established; to be more accurate, this relation is guaranteed within the limits of networks of socialization and of specific domains of activity.” (18)
–
Lefort, Claude. “The Question of Democracy.” Democracy and Political Theory. Trans. David Macey. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988. 9-20. Print.
Database as Symbolic Form
Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don’t have a beginning or an end; in fact, they don’t have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise, which would organise their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.” (80)
In Lev Manovich’s article “Database as Symbolic Form,” he explores the effects of the database on culture and how we perceive the world. The database is not a new invention and has been around for centuries, but how people interact with them has changed over time. The term “database” seems to be linked specifically to the digital, the wikipedia entry defines it as: “A database consists of an organized collection of data for one or more uses, typically in digital form.” But the restriction is only semantic and obviously has much broader application. The database can take on various forms, each with their own characteristics. Books, architectural plans, the internet, cinema, photo albums, and CD/DVD-ROMs (the inclusion of which seems to date the article by today’s standards) to name a few. Each database holds different types of information which is stored in different ways. A dictionary stores words and their definitions organized alphabetically, a zoo stores live animals usually organized by habitat or species, while an art museum stores artwork by time period or geography. The logic of each of these is generally well known and accepted.
But what happens t to the database when a new technology is introduced into a system? With the ubiquitous nature of personal computers, and the widespread accessibility of the internet the amount of information that is gathered every day is staggering. Google founder Eric Schmidt recently estimated that “every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.” [via]. This information comes in the form of digital photographs, email, blog posts (like this), sensor data, tweets, youtube videos, etc, and is largely unfiltered and available to anyone anywhere. The computer is perfect for the database. It’s in an environment like this that the database is especially relevant and necessary to not only logistically, but also in order to be able to sort through the massive deluge of information.
“…the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database. But it is also appropriate that we would want to develop a poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this database.” (81)
One characteristic of this new database is that it’s unordered. It exists on different computers, different servers, runs on different software, stores different information, and is accessed for different reasons. We can’t predict or judge what bit of information is more relevant now or in the future. Each exists and makes up a small part of the whole. Internet search engines constant crawl the web to find new content, update the old, and remove the deleted. Their specialized algorithms guess at the relevance of each page and serve as a gatekeeper, but every piece of content remains where it was originally uploaded. This un-curated randomness is the the heart of the internet, and also the antithesis of many other media that exist in linear, narrative form. The “database and narrative are natural ‘enemies’. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world.” (85)
As the physical and digital worlds converge, how do we reconcile the physical database found in the book, museum, or zoo with myriad virtual databases scattered throughout virtual space?
–
“So the only way to create a pure database is to spatialise it, distributing the elements in space” (95)
“How can a narrative take into account the fact that its elements are organised in a database? How can our new abilities to store vast amounts of data, to automatically classify, index, link, search and instantly retrieve it, lead to new kinds of narratives?” (94)
–
Manovich, L. “Database as Symbolic Form.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 5.2 (1999): 80-99. Print.
The Anthropology of Space and Place
The opening chapter of The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture (Low & Lawrence-Zuniga ed. 2003) gives a brief overview of the essays that follow. It categorizes and summarizes their arguments, all of which deal in some way with the issue of Space and Place from an anthropological viewpoint. While I intend to go further into the relevant essays at a later time, I will post a few of the more compelling excerpts below.
“…Anthropologists have begun to shift their perspective to foregrounding spatial dimensions of culture rather than treating them as background, so that the notion that all behavior is located in and constructed of space has taken on new meaning.” (1)
“This interest in space and place is not accidental; it is necessary for understanding the world we are producing…” (2)
“Starting with Munn’s idea that the person makes space by moving through it, he traces how movement patterns collectively make up locality and reproduce locality. Places, he argues, are not in the landscape, but simultaneously in the land, people’s minds, customs, and bodily practices.” (6)
“Speaking about space can be a way of bridging physically distant but emotionally and ethically close worlds.” (7)
“Inscribed space implies that humans ‘write’ in an enduring way their presence on their surroundings…” (13)
“…We are interested in how people form meaningful relationships with the locales they occupy, how they attach meaning to space, and transform ‘space’ into place’. We are interested in how experience is embedded in place and how space holds memories that implicate people and events.” (13)
“…does the ethnographer speak for the native, the native for the ethnographer, or does only the selected native speak?” (15)
“The use of narrative to inform the anthropological understanding of place focuses on details of how local populations construct perceptions and experience place.” (16)
“The production and reproduction of hegemonic schemes require the monopolization of public spaces in order to dominate memories.” (22)
“The global economy and flows of capital transform local places, creating, homogenized, deterritorialized spaces.” (25)
“Globalization also radically changes social relations and local places due to interventions of electronic media and migration, and the consequent breakdown in the isomorphism of space, place, and culture.” (25)
“The anthropologist, traveler, and the tourist generate their own kind of translocality as they move from one setting to another in search of authenticity and place.” (29)
“The pedestrian’s walking is the spatial acting-out of place, creating and representing public space rather than subject to it.” (32)
“…the distinction between object and representation is no longer valid, a new world emerges constructed out of models or ‘simulacra’ which have no referent or reality except on their own.” (32)
“Architectural facades become detached from their original meanings, taking on new roles in the ongoing conflict.” (33)
“…heritage museums are perfect places for working out modern anxieties about what has been ‘lost’ and what must be preserved, and as such become arbiters of authenticity.” (34)
I will soon be revisiting these points and go further into the readings, but until then, this list will have to do.
–
Low, Setha M., and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga, eds. The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2003. Print.