Locative Media & The City

Although the murmur project was interesting there is something missing for me. After discussing "top down" and many-to-many structures of providing content, I feel as though the murmur project was too scripted for my liking. I do support the project but I believe there is more work or thinking to do.

My first gripe is that most of the audio is heavily edited. To me, there is a certain character link between the person and to the way a story is told. Um's and Ah's don't bother me, and they could possibly add something to the experience if they remain intact to the snippets. My reasoning for this is that I don't care much for tampered evidence. Oprah Winfrey and Ms. Spears always look so good on the cover of magazines because they have passed through the ol' Photoshop routine. Imagine if the pictures of the buildings in the Murmur project were all photoshopped to look perfect. EX - broken windows fixed, weeds removed, minor/major blemishes touched up...I would argue that it detracts some of the value of the project at hand. The audio clips are rearranged to make the story sound "better" - Im not really sure how good I feel about this.

I heartily enjoyed the Foucault reading. The most interesting thing to me is that he isnt making a judgement whether or not this is a good or bad thing. I feel as though his tone throughout the reading has a "warning" feel to it. He can see the future through the past and is throwing up a flag for us to realize what is happening before its potentially too late. People like the Surveillance Camera Players are doing the same thing, but in a more tangible and approachable way. So if Foucalt wont make a judgement, I'll have to do it for him!

During some conversations I have had with people on the subject, I have heard things like, "Surveillance projects are overdone and uninteresting." They might not be all too interesting to some, but I believe they are addressing a serious and important issues that are relevant to all of our lives. I recently cams across this project about a week ago. RFID Sniper. Please take the time to read it over. In summary, an artist created a hoax in which he displayed plans for a rifle that would shoot RFID tags into people from long distances. Large defense companies from all over the world jumped on this and wanted to fund/buy the project. This goes to show the level to which government agencies want to be able to track us.

I'd like to touch on some things that weren't really discussed in class, but I either comprehended or them found interesting nonetheless. I think it's somewhat essential to think about the idea of the fetishization the commodity. We find ourselves in a world of things and products. Sometimes we make "art" with them, other times we become reliant on what they do for us. Lefebvre had some interesting things to say about this.

"Not that they don’t speak at all; they use their own language, the language of things and products, to tout the satisfaction they can supply and the needs they can meet; they use it too to lie, to dissimulate not only the amount of social labour that they contain, not only the productive labour that they embody, but also the social relationship of exploitation and domination on which they are founded. Like all languages, the language of things is as useful for lying as it is for telling the truth."

Although it's a little difficult for me to digest some of the stuff we are reading/discussing, I thought I would share some thoughts about some of the stuff that I found interesting or that I could "understand."

I'll start with this idea of representation. In the Habermas reading, I was captured by this idea of the nobility or serf lords having to represent themselves in a certain demeanor. This is how I understand part of this distinction between private and public to work. In order for these noblemen to have respect and a higher social status, they had to present themselves in such a manner that would seem unattainable to the common peasant. This was done through the use of symbols (crests, insignia), clothing, dialect (rhetoric), and poise/demeanor. This is generally referred to as "noble conduct." My idea is that this type of behavior helps to pave the way for this distinction between private and public citizen. To further this point, even church sermons were making the movement from a commonly spoken language to being held exclusively in Latin. Only the educated rich people could partake in this ritual. So this private distinction of a class of people even has some roots in not only a spacial level, but also a religious or spiritual one as well.