Locative Media & The City

Since I was sick on Thursday and haven’t rented the Minority Report yet, I thought I would comment further on my project for this week’s blog instead.

There are a few different preconceived thoughts I had about the project before I began my 8 hr observation. I felt that if I was on a city bench, a building lobby, or looking out a coffee shop window, I would see many repetitions of behavior. Most people seem to move through city space in the same way, much like the patterns of behavior that Chris observed in the elevator. This is part of why I chose to observe the grassy area on Bidwell during a time that I knew an event would take place. I wanted to observe not only patterns of behavior, but also how a place gets transformed based on its inhabitants. I also was very concerned with being inconspicuous, because when someone knows they are being observed, their behavior is no longer natural.

I believe in our class discussion of Benjamin and “The Flaneur” the idea that it may be compared to the Internet was brought up. I think this in an interesting thought and want to explore it a little bit.

There are certain qualities in the Flaneur walking the city that are similar to someone experiencing the Internet in the Flaneur style. This involves viewing the Internet as a kind of city, and thinking more about the social spaces that exist there. One of the similarities between Benjamin’s Flaneur and an Internet Flaneur (I’ll call him/her the “user”) is that it could be assumed that the user would be of the bourgeois class. While there are public computers in libraries that are available for free use, the user who can navigates like a Flaneur would presumably have a higher education and therefore be part of a higher social class. Likewise, the user has time to spare, time that is not occupied by labor. This would be true of someone who inhabits chat rooms and other social spaces on the Internet, observing interactions, identities, and conversations. Of course, there are no physical spaces that the user can inhabit, which makes it a strikingly different experience from Benjamin’s Flaneur. But what really strikes me as a similar experience is the ability to observe with distance while being hidden in the crowd, and to taken on momentarily the identities that the user observes. One might even place a computer hacker in this position, however, the hacker is invisible and completely segregated from the crowd so I would argue against that.

I'm trying to wade through de Certeau's Walking in the City chapter and make sense of it while also trying out some possible critiques. I've been trying to decide whether de Certeau's use of text and language in relation to movement and space is itself the use of metaphor--or if it can operate on some kind of concrete level--does it matter? What might the significance of this be? Clearly he was keenly aware of the subtleties of metaphor, metonomy and synecdoche, etc. (he makes a useful comparison at one point with synecdoche and the 'spatial continuum' (101)).

de Certeau seems to follow the typical structuralist approach in this work. Am I wrong to sense a tendency of reductionism and totalization? Does this reduction negate de Certeau's own assertion that 'traces are no substitute for the paths themselves'?

It is strange that I found out that Jacque Tati designed and constructed the whole city for playtime in my third time viewing it. In viewing the film this last time along with reading Lynch’s “The City Image and its Elements” and Debord’s “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” I saw, from a production designer’s perspective, the city as an element of metaphor. Playtime’s artificial city reflects Tati’s observation of modern society. Tati presents a monotonous, transparent and alienating space where the individual is integrated in a nihilistic existence.

The regularity of the materials and shapes used in the construction of the city creates a generic view of modern society. As Lynch describes, the landmark is a point of reference, and Tati, by showing the reflection of the Eiffel tower on the modern glass building, identifies the city as Paris. By using generic modern city structures Tati transforms the lives of Parisians into nonspecific urbanites.

I found that I was able to follow the Lynch’s examples because I am familiar with Boston. Owning a car was impractical so my navigation was based on paths, landmarks and nodes. Consequently, he lost me when couching his elements with street names. On the other hand, I could appreciate his descriptions of districts in Boston whether walking or driving. Subways, boundaries (coastlines, parks) and overhead lanes were very disorienting.

I can’t help but think of Buffalo’s waterfront (what Lynch would call an ‘edge’), cut off by highways, much like Boston Storrow Drive from the Charles River. As you might suspect, Buffalo’s plan was originally oriented to the lakes edge. UB’s Bob Shibley’s Urban Design Project recognizes the importance of this and has collaborated with students on a number of design initiatives http://urbandesignproject.ap.bufalo.edu

Stepping away from a one dimensional analysis, Frederic Johnson’s chapter on the theory of postmodernism offers an interesting approach to mediating the relationship between ‘existential experience’ and ‘scientific knowledge.’ He leads us to reflect on how we can build a link between both worlds in our modern day society by asking, “Can we in fact identify some ‘moment of truth’ within the more evident ‘moment of falsehood’ of postmodern culture? As he emphasizes later on in the chapter, it is the approach that should be reconstructed. Taking the notion of ‘cognitive mapping,’ I think Johnson is suggesting that we understand our world within languages of representations and our position within its confusion.

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."

Reading Lynch's "The City Image and Its Elements" prompted me to think about Buffalo in that context, and how Buffalo's paths, edges, districts, etc. are represented to me.

The paths of Buffalo in my mind are highways and main roads that I trace back and forth every day. The 33, 90, and 290 highways, Millersport, Delaware Ave., and Main Street are inscribed in my mental picture as pathways that cross through Buffalo. Delaware exists as a gradient for me; I forget that it is a street much past Hertel Ave, and still tend to be a little surprised when I see the sign for Delaware Ave. on the 290, on the rare occasions I travel that part. The gradient is thickest near the Allentown area since that is where I live, and slowly pulses off to nonexistence in my mental map as it travels north.

I would say after Thursday's lecture, I'm a bit closer to getting a grip on the meanings and motivations behind the authors of the readings. I do find the fusion between tangibles and intangibles, the physical world, and the world of ones thoughts, perceptions and imagination interesting and yet confusing at times. Each receiving equal weight, if not leaning to the intangibles. A map is a product that historically holds a good deal of intergrity. When I think of a map, i think of something that is factual, strong, unbiased in ways. It is intended to guide and perhaps enlighten us to a better understanding of our environment.

I enjoy reading “Social Space,” though Henri Lefebvre’s writing is a bit too loose to me. It’s hard to catch the entire flow of his thoughts. But one thing he does keep me thinking is the logic of producing space through the production and reproduction of representation, especially visualization. My thoughts started from the “visible” to the “invisible,” then the sounds of “Play Time” (Jacques Tati, 1967) knocked at the door of my mind. Hm…How does sound play its role in representing a place? We often ask: “Hey, how does this place look?” How about “how does this place sound to you?”