Writing an essay with Aileen for Taking, Moving, Leaving, our point of departure was cities we lived in and we realized how these cities were not mere geographical locations, but that they were “places”, entangled with experiences, people and feelings. We found that these places and our memories of them, our dreams of them, define and shape our sense of home, and some ways our sense of self. This led us to investigate the notion of place and experience and how they are connected.

The philosopher, Malpas in his book Place and Experience (1999) argues that there is an intimate connection between person and place, and that because were embodied and situated creatures, “all our encounters with persons and things - [are] always “taking place” in place (Malpas, 1999, p. 15) - that we can engage with the world and think about it.

Yet it is noteworthy that he seems to assume that place refers to a single location, place. He does not discuss discuss nomadism. This led me to ask the question: what happens to the self when it’s not one location but multiple locations? It might not be that different than if you stay in one place and love your land like the Australian aborigines who have a conception of human life as inextrically linked with the land (Malpas, 1999, p. 2-3) and it might be that the difference is that it becomes more explicit, that moving, leaving places and discovering others is raising awareness about our relatinship to places and how they color and shape our experiences. Or it might be in fact that with no fixed locale, identity becomes fluid. I have no answer but this is an important question to explore as  175 millions of people live in a more or less voluntary exile, about 10 millions more each year and as place matters and in a non-contingent way, for human beings either nomad or sedentary people.

building_space_with_words is featured on Caught in the Act: Art in Brooklyn, on
Brooklyn Independent Television (Time Warner 56 and Cablevision 69). It was premiered on October 28 at 10 pm.

For the next month, it will repeat every Monday & Wednesday at 2pm & 10pm.

It’s also on their website:

http://www.bricartsmedia.org/community-media/brooklyn-independent-television/caught-in-the-act

As a follow up on Blum’s article on how digital media might enhance our urban experience, adding social layers to it, I found the Museum of the phantom city  project by Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder as they offer people to walk in the city adding layers  to it -not functional ones, but imaginary ones:

“iPhones and mobile devices are undoubtedly transforming the way we navigate the city. Apps like Google Maps and Urbanspoon put an unprecedented amount of information about the city at one’s fingertips. Most of these programs, however, are purely functional in purpose: they seek to clarify the city, to demystify and make it more legible. In contrast, we are interested in how mobile media can deepen and intensify urban experience, perhaps even introducing new pleasures and mysteries of the metropolitan condition. We are inspired by the work of artists and urbanists like Janet Cardiff and the Situationists, who strived to make ordinary landscapes appear unfamiliar and strange again. How might mobile media be used to reveal dimensions of the city veiled from everyday experience – to manufacture an augmented reality? ”

Playing with the affordances of the mobile media: using our Iphone to navigate the city, but not only a tool for “simplifying”, making the city manageable, but also for complexifying, adding imaginary layers and opening up questions for us.

I also like the idea of using this application as a “probe” for users and for architects and planners to reflect on the city.

I’m currently not in NY but I’ll try when I’m back. If you’re in NY, I’ll be curious to know about your experience.

In the Wired UK edition from November, Andrew Blum wrote about the relationship between physical and virtual space in cities, how technology - social networking, mobile phones, etc. - are adding a layer to the physical cities. He argues that technology is not killing real communities but reshaping our interactions inside these communities (in organization studies, work on online communities such as open source (O’Mahony and Ferraro, 2007) or my work with Gerry DeSanctis on public online forums show the importance of geography and location for these online communities). It also reminded me a post  discussing an article in the NY Times on local communities blogs and how they ‘enhanced’ the physical.

Andrew Blum quoted Anthony Townsend, an urban planner and forecaster at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future who talks about “blended urban reality”: “neither cyberspace nor an urban landscape blanketed with blinking television screens, but the regular old city, albeit socially fused with real-time electronic interactions”. It evokes for me the move in organizational studies on the importance of materiality in organizations (despite the increasing number of “virtual” organizations, “virtual” teams and “virtual” communities). It also highlights the complexity and subtlety of the phenomenon, where usual interaction patterns, communicative practices are blurred and redefined - something we started exploring in building_space_with_words.

Townsend makes a surprising argument that as cities grow bigger, and mega-cities multiply, technology make them manageable: “Cities maybe be much bigger, but the social graph is the same” (Townsend quoted by Blum).
Yet Blum rightly reminds us that even if technology is a tool that helps coping with the city’s chaos and scale, it does not mean that physical space should be not taken into account, on the contrary I would argue.

“Density increases the need for thoughtful public space. For the cities of the future to work, the physical and the virtual have to stick together” - Stick together to allow people to develop a sense of place…

I’ve just read about this installation which was exploring the relationship between the physical and the virtual space:

Constellations is a network music installation by Atau Tanaka connecting the physical space of a gallery to the imaginary space of the internet through sound and image. Visitors in the gallery navigate an onscreen universe of planets, invoking audio to stream into the gallery. The planetary system is the interface to a library of soundfiles existing on servers throughout the internet. Each planet represents a contribution from a different composer. The sounds coming from the network space resonate in the acoustical space of the gallery, connecting these two universes.

Last summer I described my experience of “playing the building”, an installation by David Byrne which was taking place in NY. When I moved to London this summer, as I was walking nearby Camden Town, I saw a big poster advertising “Playing the building”. Byrne had revived his work in the Round House, a building in Chalk Farm, close to Camden Town.

When  Aileen visited us in London, we went together - interested by this attempt to inhabit a material space allowing others to interact with it. I was also curious to see how similar and how different it will be. The concept was the same “a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of a building is converted into a giant musical instrument” (David Byrne, 2005) and people were invited to interact. Yet, the feeling was very different. The space in New York was an old factory, the infrastructure was visible. The Round House is a beautiful building, also quite “raw”. However, the “infrastructure” seems less visible and thus it did not feel so much like “playing the building” - “building space with sounds”. Moreover, the round shape of the building made the wandering through the space more difficult.

I heard, read and wrote  about The listening post by Hansen and Rubin but I never experienced it.

Today I went to the Science Museum with my kids as we were wandering in London… and I noticed on the museum map: 1st floor, Listening Post. Could it be? There can’t be many Listening Posts, can it? After doing all the interactive spots on the 3rd floor, I dragged my kids to the 1st floor and after a little bit of search found a sign “science art projects”. At the end of a corridor, there it was!

I really liked the piece although I wish it was not stuck behind a glass fence and that one could stand in front, walk around. People sat at there were seats in the middle of the room. I thought it took away some of the experience. People did not walk around. They just sat and “watched and listened”. I also realized that many people were puzzled. The audience was not right in a sense. People did not come to see art installations and they were not expected it, and they did not know how to interpret it, experience it.

Yet I was still very happy to see this work which in many ways is very close to the themes we explored with Aileen:words,online interactions, sounds. In a way Hansen and Rubin’s work highlights more the cacophony and the random aspect of the web, while we looked at the construction of connections, of relationships.

It was just a nice surprise and it made my day!

al

John Weeks just sent me a link to a great platform designed by The Economist:  http://thinkingspace.economist.com/#/explore

I like the design - the general space, but also the pictures with the red dots that point to the evocative objects of the person thinking space. It reminds us the materiality of thinking.  It is also interesting to see whether people really have spaces (locations), or if their thinking spaces consist mostly of objects (mobile, that they take with them in different places). I also like the collaborative aspect of it: people can build their own thinking space.

Thanks John!

As a follow up to the discussion started with my post on the project, Taking From, Leaving in, Moving on, I thought that the installation “Waste Not” by the Beijing artist Song Dong is very relevant. It is currently at MOMA. I saw it last Friday before leaving for London.

The installation consists of objects collected by Song Dong’s mother during 50 years. “The assembled materials, ranging from pots and basins to blankets, oil flasks, and legless dolls, form a miniature cityscape that viewers can navigate around and through.”My first thoughts were for the concept of materiality, of evocative objects, of the importance of “stuff” in our lives when I first came in the space. My second thought was “His mother did not move!”. I had thrown so much before moving to London, and had been throwing so much before (which is hard for me who tend to get attached to objects, and who love my books - these I don’t throw them. I left a few behind, but only a few and I keep shipping them… ). It also reminded me Yasmine’s post: All what I own or another post by Yasmine: How much does home takes?

These are issues we started exploring with Aileen in a curating collaboration on neo-nomads, evocative objects and a sense of place, with Baseera Kahn at Rotunda Gallery planned for March 2011 (I know it seems far away… to us too! but it’s an exciting project. We’ll keep you posted).

al

Yasmine Abbas is involved in a book project Taking from, leaving in, moving on by the Austrian architect and artist, Renate Mihatsh

Her contribution will be about neo-nomads whom she defines as “individuals constantly on the move who construct and reclaim a sense of belonging to places through digital means.” She argues that technology allows people to recreate a sense of place and notes that neo-nomads “sample cultures and the urban environments they roam in to reuse in the creation of a comfortable, personal and movable space.” Technology seems to allow people to carry with them, in their laptops, Iphone, Ipod, or any other portable devices, as well as by allowing access to various platforms, much more than one could put in a box, a bag or a suitcase. Our letters, packs of photos, favorite CD (or tape)… can be saved “online”. Yet, what is then the evocative object? The content or the object which allows to store or gives us access to the storage place?

Related to the theme of the suitcases, an interesting exhibition on immigrants: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/gallery/2009/mar/11/communities-immigration?picture=344441838