Captured? World on the move

This essay was written as a response to “Territory” a Fabrica Workshops project (May 2008) directed by Kevin Slavin from Area/code. This is a new program of research and education activities based around the environmental, social and relational. With special thanks to the students whose work inspired this essay.

‘Joseph Beuys’ project to raise the Berlin wall by one centimeter for “aesthetic” (proportional) reasons [w]as a way to subvert it, to overcome it “with interior laughter”, to displace the viewer’s attention towards its conceptual dimension, beyond the physical wall.’ (Vincent Pécoil).

Aesthetics and city space
Walls are built to define and defend territory – to keep people out or keep them in. Bridges are built, both literally and metaphorically, to make connections. Historically they have been one of the first targets of military attack. A compelling news image of recent years is of a Lebanese man bungee-jumping off Mudayrai Bridge, east of Beirut following Israel’s summer offensive on Lebanon in 2006. In the image, the man is minute against the bridge’s monumental pillars, with their bomb-blasted concrete splaying innards of meshed steel.

The Berlin wall, in Pécoil’s interpretation, was first internal and so it could also be overcome by the imagination. ‘Everyone is an artist’ is Beuys’ most quoted saying and the intention here was not that they should become practicing artists but that they could apply creative thinking in their own spheres. The Lebanese man’s gesture – reduced to the visual equivalent of a soundbite by its world media image - seems to tell us that this conflict too can be deflected with similar irreverence. Yet this time with the kind of exteriorised laugher thrown up by urban play?

From the 1960s ‘happenings’, we can draw a rough arc – including Beuys’ demotic and site-specific art – to a contemporary interest in the spontaneous and everyday both inside and outside of practice. The difference today is that technology has become pervasive - its networks largely invisible but the effects profoundly visible. How can we understand the dynamic behaviour of environments, people and networks as processes – both seen and unseen? Can artists and designers capture – and affect – a world on the move?

Poetics and augmented space
In 2003 a conceptual and technological bridge was built between two cities through the design of a ‘Big Urban Game’ (B.U.G) conceived by New York cross-media consultancy Area/code, co-founded by Kevin Slavin and Frank Lantz.  Played out by the citizens of Minneapolis and St. Paul – twinned by state convention and linked here by internet and mobile phone technology – the game played out in the physical locale of each city with players pushing huge inflatable game pawns through the streets, with their co-ordinates reported in the local morning papers. Another game, ConQwest (2004) pitched high school teams against each other, armed with the first-ever mobile phone-cams able to scan optic codes. A form of treasure hunt, here the kids captured territories in order to ‘shoot’ the codes as treasure. Here, the metaphorical link to bridges (connecting territories), and the relationship to classic computing (gamer versus computer) stops. The computers are connectors. They connect people.

The twin cities project was commissioned by the Design Institute of the University of Minnesota to inspire in residents a re-interpretation of their urban environment. And yet, today we live in a world in which 10 million people spend an average of twenty hours a week involved in the “game”, World of Warcraft. What ConQwest brought home, was how the kids of Tucson didn’t even have a relationship with their city. Kevin Slavin, speaking at Fabrica, the Benetton group’s communications research center in Treviso, Italy, sheds light on their philosophy; ‘The Internet is about anywhere, computer games are nowhere whilst Area/code games are somewhere.’ These are like ordinary urban childhood games - just with computers in. Area code ‘…push computers out into the world to change the conditions you understand about the world. It’s a totally different idea.’

Area/code operate in the realm of “augmented reality”. Lev Manovich, a digital media theorist, explains in ‘The Poetics of Augmented Space’  that this is physical space in the world overlaid with the data sphere. It’s not about escaping reality but, as Slavin puts it, folding what you are doing in the world – your sense of time and place and cognition – into a much bigger system. He tells a story of getting lost in the maze of Treviso streets and canals; as a tourist, he can either wing it, consult a map, or phone a friend and be guided home via Google Earth. Faded frescoes and peeling adverts remind us that the streets of Treviso – like other cities – have always been over-laid with information, be their mythologies biblical or modern. A difference today is that the data is dynamically changing – both multi-media and personalised. The bigger question then becomes: How does this change our phenomenological experience of ourselves?

Area/code’s name highlights both the connection between geographical territory (area) and its informational overlay (code). Slavin puts it more poetically; ‘There is always something on the ground and always something that reaches to the clouds.’ With the shift to mobile devices the area code no longer relates to geographical territory but a network provider. The phone no longer connects to home or the office but you. What’s more, as part of the arsenal of surveillance technology the phone tracks, via satellite, the exact spot you’re in.

Or, there abouts. ‘GPS Data Cloud’ (2008) is a civic sculpture in The Netherlands by Jeremy Wood developed out of the Global Positioning System co-ordinates of two park benches originally placed on a site in Beatrixpark. The sculpture itself marks exactly where the two benches once were. It comprises a series of park benches of different heights placed near and colliding with each other. This is, according to Wood, ‘where technology thinks it is in relation to where we are now.’ As Slavin writes in his essay on ‘Territory’, there has been a significant shift ‘from the power of the visible (like a wall) to the power of the invisible (like a firewall).’ Wood uses technology to ‘read’ the world and then, by making the invisible visible, re-writes it. It’s about technology and the location of place (or, its inaccuracy), but it’s also about the location of self. It allows the bench sitter to contemplate their place in this ‘expanded’ world.

Use
‘If previously 3-D space was reduced in practice to a set of surfaces – walls in the case of the built environment, flat paintings or gallery walls in an art environment – now it is finally used as 3-D space.’ (Lev Manovich)

Use – even individuated and dynamic users – have been central to interactive design and spatial practice for a while. Slavin points out that a mobile phone, equipped with the latest “pointing” technology, can become a mouse for the real world. This gives agency and yet he asks; ‘For what?’ Most technology is here to make the world more precise. Instead, Area/code aims to usurp technology to make the world bigger, more fictive, to tell better lies with, to augment the imagination and desire.

…A role, in the past, of writers, poets, movie-makers and admen more than architects and planners. Slavin finds frustration with architecture: Film has its audience, Advertising targets consumers and Interaction design pre-supposes users and yet there is no specialist term in the language of Architecture for its people. Le Corbusier imagined an archetype and contemporary architects speak of ‘flows’, but these can only ask questions about use and movement not how you, or I, feel and behave. Least of all, whose feelings or behaviour count.

Tactics
Yet, can design draw greater meaning out of subjectivity and anecdote? Michel de Certeau, in his seminal book, ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’  took the thesis that everyday life, for all its unconscious acts, can be understood as a series of practices. In ‘Making-do: uses and tactics’ he writes; ‘Just as in literature one differentiates between “styles” or ways of writing, one can distinguish between “ways of operating” – ways of walking, reading, producing, speaking etc… These “ways of operating” are similar to “instructions for use”, and they create a certain play in the machine through a stratification of different and interfering kinds of functioning…’

Strategies are for achieving specific goals. Tactics constitute the ways that others might intervene: they can subvert strategies; deflect them or use them to their own ends. De Certeau’s example is of a French immigrant in Paris who adapts his new ‘home’ and language with objects, phrases and actions from his first culture. ‘Without leaving the place where he has no choice but to live and which lays down its law for him, he establishes within it a degree of plurality and creativity. By an art of being in between, he draws unexpected results from its situation.’

In recognising personal utterances as ways of operating, we are able to act on and within them. Consider the private space afforded a kissing couple in public by the mere aversion of the gaze. During World War Two, such etiquette provided a foil for the French Resistance, whose members walked in twos, adopting the pose of lovers and hugging their papers between them, hoping the Gestapo would pass on by.

These are, of course, practices of the everyday – if we can call war everyday - not as reflected on through practice. Area/code allow us to think about ways of playing. ConQwest, Slavin notes, is more that a treasure-hunt – which is implicitly tactical because one thing is followed by the next and the next and the next. ‘What a good game does is give provide you with plenty of opportunities to make decisions – some of them extremely consequential – and feel the weight of that.’ Games involve strategy. Slavin draws our attention to a man who lost the game but still offered the secret of his strategies to members of other teams although there was nothing in it for him. Odd behaviour – so, how was he feeling? He had invested emotionally in the game and couldn’t bear to leave. But why should we care? – Because, this man’s behaviour (cheating) had the power to affect the nature of the game.

Relations
Another practice, which lays note to the minutiae of everyday activities in ways that draws them out of anecdotal experience into ‘script form’, is the 1990s art movement, Relational Aesthetics. This was a term coined by the French art critic, Nicholas Bourriaud in his book of the same name.

Bourriaud asked if art can capture the world on the move. Like Manovich, he was interested in practice that moved away from finite objects and images – flattened and purely visual  – to the ongoing process of human relationships. For instance, moved beyond how the bustle of a street is ‘fixed’ with the click of the camera or the video cut and edit. Instead, Relational Aesthetics creates scenarios or “spaces of encounter” that aim to foster more spontaneous human interaction. Post-Berlin wall, this art no longer holds out for utopian ideals or grand-scale aims of social responsibility. It looks, instead, to create “microtopias” – pleasurable moments in the here and now.

One example of a relational practitioner is Jens Haaring – from whom Vincent Pécoil drew a link back to Beuys. In ‘Foreigners Free - Biel swimming pool’, Haaring worked with the council to establish free entry for foreigners at a public pool. Like a park bench, it’s symbolic of “being-together” (although the reality is more fraught). ‘This being-together is problematic when it comes to immigrants, whose status is the object of violent debates ripe with racist undertones in most European countries… it is a question of borders, since racism has less to do with the fear of the foreign than with that of violation of space protected by a border. In addition, to benefit from the free entry one must also accept representing oneself as foreign. Who is foreign and who isn’t?’  Are tourists or immigrants more foreign?

Is it enough to capture the world, albeit it on the move? Pécoil argues that Haaring is a “catalytic agent”. He effects changes in his and others behaviour and perception of their cultural, social as well as spatial environment. The measure, here, is the strength of change, not aesthetic judgement.

Folded planes
Like augmented reality, Relational Aesthetics engages beyond the 2nd and 3rd dimensions to capture how practices unfold over time. Yet in its purest scenario-building sense, this practice now seems limited in scope. Augmented practice, however, can work across all media platforms, be they old-fashioned small ads or ocean-going, GPS-tagged Great White sharks.  (…It’s true) What becomes interesting, beyond this, is how artists and designers will fold different media and spatial planes into one another.

Robin Rhode, a South African living in Berlin uses drawing and performance. In ‘Park Bench’ (2000), he sketched a bench on the white wall of the House of Parliament in Cape Town – a central place from which apartheid was legislated, all the way down to public benches labeled ‘Coloured’. Rhode then “performed” his drawing – he struggled to take a seat. Rhode, through his work, tries to re-draw the possibilities of architecture, city space and their politics of use. Subsequently, these performances are often displayed as a series of photographic stills like a time-lapse animation. Such an outcome refuses to fully document the event or condense it to visual soundbite. The work can only exist across media and spatial planes, across time.

The process is the medium, the user is the content.
To end, another news image of recent years – this time playing the media game. It is the spectre/spectacle of Banksy, tagging the Palestinian segregation wall with a window through which one can see an Alpine-scene. An old Palestinian man who had been watching him all day, commented that the scene made the wall look beautiful. Then the sting; ‘We don’t want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall. Go home.’

Instead, there is another arc we can trace from Beuys – a more relational practice that is not resolved before hand. It is open-ended, developing in and with the event. This fosters critical engagement with the world, not by combating it but, by inserting itself into it. It’s not about use and abuse of the city, but re-use. It’s not about replacing one monologue (of oppression) with another (of freedom), but dialogue.

Haaring’s pool is, in the end, of art. Area/code’s context – design – is different because they are commissioned by clients, be they Nike or the Girls Math and Science Project. nArchitects, are an American company who have developed a methodology for designing for an augmented world; ‘We re-write each program or project brief to simultaneously stage unexpected events as well as allow for the unexpected – neither pure choreography nor pure responsive interactivity.’ For these architects, it seems, their people are “performers”. Indeed, elsewhere Max Bruinsma has commented of the digital world that; ‘Users are performers of the content.’

What’s interesting here, and for communication design as a whole, is that they already work in “live” networks of communication. What remains to be seen is how these processes and performances can become media for future communications. Seen or unseen. Walls, wires or (wo)men.

©2008

For the original essay, ‘Territory’ by Kevin Slavin, see adjacent post. Kevin Slavin is co-founder, with Frank Lantz, of New York, game and media design company Area/code. http://www.playareacode.com/

Fabrica is the Benetton communication research center in Treviso, Italy. The Workshops Program is directed by Omar Vulpinari, who is also Head of Visual Communication at Fabrica.
http://www.fabrica.it/workshops/past.html