Locative Media & The City

Like some others have commented already, I found last weeks texts were complex and a little hard to digest and speak about. I thought I’d pick one point of the Lefebvre article that I thought was interesting. Lefebvre says “repetition has everywhere defeated uniqueness, that the artificial and contrived have driven all spontaneity and naturalness from the field, and, in short, that products have vanquished work.” He describes these repetitious spaces as the products of workers’ repetitious movements. This reminds me of everything from restaurant chains, to urban condos that all look the same (I see these in downtown Cleveland, Ohio), to suburban neighborhoods with houses that are all copies of each other, one after another.

I’m still trying to get my head around the chapter from Levebvre’s The Production of Space that we read last week. Something that I find particularly puzzling is the way in which L. first traces a clear-cut distinction between the concept of production and the concept of creation, and then blurs the line between them. More specifically, I wonder how this dialectical move impacts on his answer to the question whether a city is produced or created (73).
Creation, L. suggests, is the process of bringing into existence “works”, understood as irreplaceable and unique “things” (as in “work of art”). Production, on the other hand, is the process of bringing into existence (through organized sequences of repetitive actions, i.e. through labor) “products”, which by definition can be exactly reproduced and lack any of the uniqueness and individuality of works. Insofar as we define works as “unique, original and primordial, as occupying a space yet associated with a particular time” a city like Venice (L.’s example) has to be considered a work, i.e. something that is created rather than produced (73). Yet it has been labored on: “behind Venice the work … there assuredly lay production [sinking pillars, building docks]” (76). This brings L. to conclude that there is no good reason for positing “a radical separation between works of art and products” and that “even in Venice, social space is produced and reproduced in connection with the forces of production” (77).

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.

I am writing an ice breaker blog post. I will post some other ideas and thoughts on things a bit later. Perhaps getting the ball rolling -- so to speak -- will bring about some writing momentum. I'm still mulling over some of the discussion from yesterday.

Have a good Wednesday everyone.

We are clearly warned at the beginning of Lefebvre’s article that the concept of production remains purely abstract, but what he does offer however, is an analytical understanding of the shift between productions to social spaces. Keeping in mind that social spaces transcend the notion of object vs. subject, how are they created? And what is its relationship to the process of forming social spaces? Lefebvre suggests that the key is in looking at how objects and subjects are looked at, understood and expressed or lived. But these sorts of interactions aren’t fixed and are determined by a variety of elements because social space works within material space and outside of it. Setting up a binary understanding of this process we have the ‘representation of space,’ which seems to define a particular model used to direct space by those in political and economic power and ‘representational space,’ which I understand as the social relationship between people in a given environment. With this in mind, the negotiation of space is what bears society and how humans interact and it seems that Lefebvre is suggesting that both the ‘representation of space’ and the ‘representational space’ are mutually exclusive and change with time, economics and history. What remains in the center is a number of spaces producing and reproducing themselves with time while concealing some level of ‘truth.’ (…As he states about the products of nature on page 80.) But is his study simply trying to unmask truth or is he questioning the idea that society produces ‘truth’?

I have been exploring the projects discussed in “Beyond Locative Media:” .walk, urban tapestries, and 34N 118W. This is the first time I have read or thought deeply about locative media in the city, and seeing the projects helped me to go back and understand the readings a little more clearly.

Checking out urban tapestries really got me starting to grasp the concept of locative media’s possibilities. More so than .walk, here it seemed that the city is existing as a living, breathing, code producing computer. The threads of social interaction and information exchange seem endless. In the first animation example, the man on crutches receives a helpful hand, a new reading list, and pleasant destination in just a few clicks from his handheld. I imagined the park not as a simply a scattered tree field with benches, but a networked link between strangers, conversations, and a book club of sorts.

Below are links to the topic for the first paper and the description for the first project. We will discuss these in class on Tuesday, September 12.

Paper Topic I is accessible here.

Project I Description is here.

Two little thoughts on the Vertov film. One has to do with those early shots of the city in the morning. The city is almost empty; there’s only one car passing through an intersection, or a lonely passer-by cutting through the corner of the frame. And my first thought was: Why not entirely empty? I guess the answer has to do with the idea of the city as an organism, as opposed to a mere architectural structure (social constructivism vs. spatial determinism?). I mean, imagine shots of an entirely empty city: that would just be an architectural arrangement, something inanimate, a monument. Here, on the other hand, we see the city as a sleeping, living organism; it’s almost as if the city was breathing in its sleep through these sporadic, solitary crossings.

It is the first time for me to read something about locative media, I find it difficult to follow some of the concepts in this article “Beyond Locative Media.” However, this article does help me start exploring some major theoretical and practical issues that locative media has encountered on its self-identification and development, such as its autonomy as art, its collaboration with corporation, its relationship with human subject and so on. I am particularly drawn to Marc Tuters’ notion about the complex in the relationship between locative media and human subjects. Tuters pointed out that locative media projects like “Can You See Me Now” and “Milk” involve people in the process of exploring the production and distribution of technology, which makes the project transform from a scientific and technical phenomenon to a social and cultural issue. So to what degree can human subjects involve in the production process of the locative media project? How can human experiences be documented and represented in the process of locative media project? I am also interested in how locative media can benefit people in the society, which should be one of the first questions that I have as a beginner in locative media. I want to explore these questions further in this response paper by looking at the project “Can You See Me Now.”