Paul Virilio and Martha Rosler

The Overexposed City
Virilio discusses how technology is creating a disconnection between us and the real world and that our relationship to it is being ever increasingly mediated by technology. He talks about how there is no longer a sense of place for the city where we nolonger know wether we are in it or outside it or even if an edge even exists anymore. The space that is created by technology, by things like the internet, film, television and telecommunications is a space that needs to be addressed, or incorporated into the idea of the city today. Architecture in his mind should deall with this 'technological space-time'. Maybe our ideas of the edge and boundry need to be revised to go beyong a geographical deviding line, where space is not so easily constrained and sectioned. As in the editing of a movie space can be constructed and deconsrtucted at will where the idea of time can be controlled and manipulated to serve the need of the narritive our life has become controlled by the tools we use and these tools contibute to a ruptured concept of this technological space-time.

In the Place of the Public; Observations of a Traveller
Rosler talks about a disconnection to place in regards to the speed at which one travells. The car or bus, the train and the plane all of which are quicker modes of transportation and the quicker one travels the more of a disconnection that is created. If one thinks of the landscape that passes by in the winow of a train one might be disconnected to a specific sens of place but ones perspective is different in terms of how place is seen in its entirety. This total view or more expansive perspective is heightened even more in a plane as you can see yourself in respect to where you are in a ifferent way. I think there is a pysical disconnection with the place but the altered perspective gives one possibly a heightened mental connection to where you place yourself within the world. Maybe this different perpective and disconnection actually gives one the chance to reposition yourself in terms of place, to re-evaluate your position. I think that the idea of the plane and the airport as a placeless place, and and a place of transition is interesting in how it relates to the idea that it is not the destination so much as the journey that is important. How can or even should the plane or airport be more than it is, a means to an end? In some ways the disconnection that technology introduces is brdged by the face to face accesibilty that is offered by travel but the question may remain in what way the litmitless access to the far reaches of the world give to our understanding of where we belong with it.

Week Six Readings

Paul Virilio’s "The Overexposed City"
Martha Rosler's "In the Place of the Public; Observations of a Traveller"

In "The Overexposed City," Virilio presents a bleak assessment of the state of affluent society. He proposes that like an overexposed photograph, our experience of the city has been amplified to the point that too much is seen and all details are lost. Technologies such as television, satellites the computer act as time (and place) machines that instantly connect us with places near and far, microscopic and macroscopic, hidden and all-too revealed. This instantaneous connection to anything and everything through the video screen has eroded our experience of the real and disconnected us from natural physical existence. Timelessness and placelessness are now normal. The boundaries between spaces and between day and night have been eroded.

In my opinion, one must acknowledge that not everyone is a part of the “instant” world of the “overexposed city.” Billions of people in the world are not connected to the information overload of the Internet. Even within North America, certain segments of the population cannot (or choose not) to participate within some or all of the realm of advanced telecommunications. Their city exists simultaneously to the “overexposed city,” but perhaps has become eroded by the overexposure that they do not directly experience.

One might suggest that people can slip in and out of the overexposed city - sometimes operating in compressed space-time, sometimes operating in “real” space-time. Do we need a different type of architecture for each space-time? Do these two types of architecture already exist in the architecture of the real/permanent and the architecture of the “temporary contract”?

Do we all have to part of the “overexposed city” all of the time? Could it be that we can slip in and out of it (or is the slipping in and out just a symptom of the “overexposed city”)? Does the “overexposed city” treat everyone the same?

Should we try to limit “overexposure” (to limit how much we can see)? We use many different tools to gain a better understanding of the workings of life and the universe. Should we ignore parts of what we see using tools in order to stay more connected with what we can see without tools?


"In the Place of the Public" describes the phenomenon of air travel. Martha Rosler discusses the impact air travel has on society, as well as the symptoms of some societal phenomena that are exhibited in air travel. She particularly highlights issues of representation, simulation and isolation. Rosler discusses many of the same issues of timelessness and placelessness considered by Paul Virilio.

The 'hissing teakettle' that was the steam-powered locomotive has been replaced by the screaming maelstrom of the jet engine in our never-ending quest for power over time and space. Commercial jet aircraft have become interchangeable parts of the airport that periodically fly off and reconnect to another airport elsewhere. Aircraft function as long rooms crowded with seats that connect and disconnect places over time. One who enters this room does not dare leave it until enough time has passed to ensure the room has moved far enough to connect to another airport.

The airport/airplane hybrid is very much like a space-time machine. One who enters the airport in Winnipeg in hopes of going to Vancouver is never actually outside until leaving the airport in Vancouver. The long narrow corridor known as the jetway ensures a completely uninterrupted comfortable interior experience for the traveller. The speed of travel is so great that our bodies become disoriented and we suffer jet lag.

Is it a good thing that we can experience different places in rapid succession? Does this contribute to a better understanding of our place in the world, or does it destroy our place in the world?

It could be argued that air travel has allowed people greater freedom to travel, and from that gain a better awareness and understanding of other cultures. Does this awareness lead to better protection for distinct cultures, or does it lead to homogenization of cultures?

Virilio + Rosler

What stands out in "The Overexposed City" for me is the synonomisities that Virilio draws form the past to connect the present. The most prominent of these parallels is "to go into the city" as opposed to "to go to the city". The perhephery of the city is becoming absorbed. He goes on to talk about the lack of facade and that the city has no face. Therefore do we still recognize the city? Are we bound to confront a faceless identity? Have the homogenizing companies masked the face?
The transparency of materials in construction have aided in the facelessness of the city. So are we now assuming the role of the face of the city, are we becoming the city by revealing the goings-on within? Or are we tired of the soild walls that present a institutional over-skin/ a monumental inaccessability?
We are collapsing the our time through technology. It is possible to be apart of multiple times at once. What aobut our current place/time? We project into the 'net' to seek the opinions/oppurtunities of a distanced audience. The screen becomes the translator. Virilio decribes the CRT monitor as the vehicle of information, to access the world at home. Televisions are becoming thinner in profile, maybe we are ready to replace our windows with plasma and lcd displays. We can vew the outside, afar, any view we want.
The screen becomes the place, we are at odds with our origin, if the hearth was our focus then we might be more aware of our mortality...maybe living more for what we have instead of what we want to acquire.

Rosler-

We are able to access may things through cyberspace, through our disconnected air travels. The value of air travel allows us to be in a location in a lot less time. As opposed to road travel which is slow and more dangerous statistically, air travel presents oppurtunities for near instant relocation.
As Rosler points out, the aeroplane has become a techno-infused, dislocative space. Compared to the travel by road which has connection to what it traverses the plane is visually disjointed. The lack of journey, as Rosler states, substites scene for a map view. We have saved ourselves some time, the value is in its emergency sitution transportation. The struggle of travel is alleviated by transporting at a speedy rate. We no longer have to engage with the landscape we can transcend it. As we propel ourseves are we missing anything?
The dislocation, observed by Emerson, of the rail travel is annalogous to the airlines of today. The question is then what level of dislocation are we willing to allow, what is the cost? At the current state air travel is the most dislocated form. However the leaps in technology also create a huge disconnect, travelling through virtual space. Is teleportation the next travel disconnect?

As airports become more as touch down/take off sites consumed by the moving of goods (humans included) do they need to have/need a face? Teleporters certainly wouldn't. Airports have a pergatorial quality in their disconnect to most cities, operating on the perhephery.

Rosler

Rosler’s In place of the Public: Observations of a Traveller

In this quite poetic article, Rosler shares her experience of commercial flight and its spatial effects upon the traveler. These understandings of space are communicated through a description of architecture as well as through philosophically relevant psychological observations. There is a constant relation to the disparate yet parallel spaces of the virtual and the tactile.
She first introduces the notion of dislocation from place that the traveler experiences by discussing its historical beginnings in the speed of the locomotive. This speed results in an inability to understand the physical world exterior to the vehicle on ones own terms; the traveler is held captive. Rosler relates the ungraspable space of the passing landscape to the fictive spaces created by instantaneous transmissions of technology and the fragmented illogical worlds that have arisen out of globalization, existing all around us (the market, cyberspace…) These can be seen as discontinuities of perception, lacking a specific here or there.
One of the most profound insights of this article in my opinion is her discussion of the anti-euphoric environment of the airplane interior. She discusses the disdain for curiousity by attendants, the over-doting and concern for consumption related activities, the absolute banality being replicated in the face of a fantastic event. I am very much affected by this when I fly and marvel at how successful these tactics are at putting the other passengers into a stupor or right to sleep.
Rosler seems quite concerned with the lack of acknowledgement toward the airport as a public space. She discusses it as a space of surveillance, a space of consumption, an ordered space where information is highly controlled. It is increasingly becoming a space of work as well, being hooked up with phone lines etc. that deny the traveler the right to at least this freedom. Architecturally it is an engineered space directly linked to its function, offering corridor after corridor of fluorescent lighting and fenced off areas. She describes the airport, and its effects on the surrounding environment and population, as a space created by capital, an underworld and wasteland.

virilio

Virilio’s Overexposed City

Virilio is discussing a new kind of way of understanding the boundaries of the city. He claims they are no longer understood in terms of their geography or physical territory but have become spatially accessible only through an immaterial series of interfaces. He reflects on what the architectural implications of this phenomenon are; a nullification of space (near and far no longer exist) and the replacement of stone and wood with walls of light and transparent materials. He speaks of the urban wall as giving way to “an infinity of openings and ruptured enclosures” and surface becoming an osmotic membrane, an interface.
Due to this dissolution of the physical relations of things, the city has in fact lost its edge. Populations are leaving the centers and the borders are no longer distinguishable. But our new way of living has not only disrupted our understanding of space but has taken on a new temporality, one which is instantaneously exposed. It is no longer dictated by the physical reality of the day but, according to Virilio, by “commutations” which have no connection to real time at all. He claims this temporality takes on the attributes of the old spatiality: work time is the time center and vacation time the suburb of time.
This collapse of everything into placelessness leads him to question what it would take to break inside this new city. He equates the “door without a city” to the American military technology used to cause instantaneous destruction and wonders if one will be able to tell the difference in the future between the nature of recessions (in which buildings will be demolished for fiscal gain) and the nature of war. This parallel evokes a haunting and stark vision of the unfolding future….


If Virilio is correct in implying that space has given way to time and spatial boundaries no longer exist, in what respect are we capable of mapping our environment? And if it is possible to do so, who has the power to make sense of such a topography?

If the ways in which we understand the unfolding of events start to take on multiple meanings (as in Virilio’s example of signs of war and signs of recession) what are the implications of this on how we understand, and more importantly how we communicate, the present in respect to those who come after us? Will this free historical narrative from its implicit linearity? Can we really think of time without thinking of the consecutive unfolding of things?

Week 5 Readings

Stuart Hall’s "Encoding, Decoding"
Jean Baudrillard's "The Ecstasy of Communication"

"Encoding, Decoding" discusses the structure of communication in television from sender to receiver. Messages from the sender are encoded to fit the technology and cultural milieu of broadcast television. Decoding of the message by the receiver is a relatively autonomous process, but the level of equivalence between the sender and receiver determines how much information is transferred and how it is translated. Codes set a standard or expected way for information to be sent and received. People may operate within the dominant codes (the expected way of communicating), they may negotiate with the codes (extracting the dominant message, but applying it to local conditions), or they may oppose the codes (extracting the dominant message but reading it with an alternative frame of reference).

Codes are unavoidable in communication. We use codes to present information to others in a way that we expect they will understand. Stuart Hall, the 'author' of the 'article' uses 'single quotes' around 'words' and 'phrases' often to 'highlight' certain 'ideas' and sometimes to 'distance himself' from the words located 'within the single quotes’. The use of single quotes is a type of coding used by the author to identify words essential to the points that he is making and also to identify ‘lingo’ and ‘clichés’ used by others. This coding is used by Hall in hopes that the reader will be able to ‘decode’ the key ideas presented in the essay. In some places the single quotes serve to identify common phrases that the author might not like to use, yet the phrases accurately describe a concept and act as a common point of reference that the reader may readily identify.

In "The Ecstasy of Communication" Jean Baudrillard describes the excessiveness of communication found in present society. There is a collapse of space, where sounds and images of almost anything are available wherever there is a screen or a speaker. Everything becomes visible (even the invisible) and is reduced and distilled into images for distribution and mass consumption. Baudrillard writes: “That’s the ecstasy of communication. All secrets, spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information. That’s obscenity.”

Baudrillard wrote this before the advent of the Internet and so-called ‘reality’ television, which has elevated the ‘ecstasy’ of communication to a ‘manic frenzy’ of communication. Information about almost anything is available by tapping out a few words on a computer keyboard, it being presented in simplified words and images. We can peek into the actual lives (and more commonly created/sensationalized lives) of complete strangers from the comfort of our living rooms.

Encoding, Decoding _ Stuart Hall

Encoding, Decoding

Things can be read in different ways and it is a construct of society and culture that defines the way information is coded and decoded. It is also important to realize that certain messages are coded in a way that makes it hard to miss the point, but also that these messages are intended to be read and understood in a specific manner and if they are not, you are operating outside the dominant or preferred code. The ideal for TV is perfectly transparent communication. This relates to the ecstasy of communication in that perfectly transparent communication is all over, and it makes it hard to distinguish between them when the messages are all the same and the codes and structures of them lead to the same result. There is no active position it; there is no personal objectivity. In that idealized world of communication there is no personal decoding no selective perception. Probably off topic but it makes me think of subliminal messages and the idea of receiving messages and information that are received without even realizing it; although this is outside of the social and cultural constructs that coding and decoding is discussed within the article.

Ecstasy of Communication _ Jean Baudrillard

We are disconnected but not from being alienated but by being inundated with information. We are the hub for all the obscenities, of imagined as well as real realities and meaningless information in a massive network of communication. We are left, oversaturated, to sift through our image populated minds, our consumer minds looking for some sanity in the schizophrenic world that we have created. Choices seem impossible in light of all the transparent and empty information we might look for something tangible, but with difficulty. Nothing is safe; we exist in both a private and public world that seems to have bled into each leaving it hard to distinguish where one might hide. There was a shift from a place where one might have had control in defining ones limits to a place that has both no limits and limits that are predefined outside our own control. The opposing 'hot' universe seems like the active one while the cold is the passive existence. Investment, desire, passion, seduction and competition give way to obscenity, fascination, communication, hazard, chance, and vertigo. A lack of control giving way to ambivalence; perhaps a result of our consumer culture where immediacy is the driving force and where nothing is secret and everything is like reality TV.

Harvey article

POPULAR CAPITALISM AND POPULAR CULTURE
By David Harvey

My experience of visiting the Bradbury building in LA, which was used prominently in the film Blade Runner, was disappointing because of the state of the building. The building in the film was presented as many buildings and the city in the film as dirty old run down and used. The Building today has been renovated to the point that it is an artificial image of itself. It holds no reference to the life it lived over the last hundred years It makes me think of histrorical preservation projects and the idea that fixing them up and repainting them to look as they once did changes them and removes it from its historical narrative. The thing becomes understood as an object of the past with a constructed image of it of the past as represented in the present. The building in its ruined and used state could be considered a romanticized picture of itself but it seems to hold more truth than that of what exists today. This relates to Harvey’s article in that it talks about the construction of the image of a thing say with the political image of Reagan as the ‘teflon president‘ where his pubic image was so strong that it prevented any truth from tarnishing this image. Maybe the idea of creating this pristine example of the Bradbury holds up in that the tourists who come to see it can believe in it as a working building as opposed to the reality of the building as what it used to be. Both relate to the idea that an image can be constructed whether true or not and that both are concerned with aesthetics as opposed to ethics.

POSTMODERNISM AND CONSUMER SOCIETY

POSTMODERNISM AND CONSUMER SOCIETY
By Fredric Jameson

If modernism was a reactionary movement in architecture in search of a personal private style and then post modernism is a reflection of the current global multinational and decentered consumer capitalist culture, is one more valid than the other and is there no truth in the idea that ones own personal view of the world should be valued. Postmodernism seems to imply that the individual does not matter and that our relationship to a space is not as important as reflecting the state of our current culture. Does “this latest mutation of space – postmodern hyperspace,” hold more value than ones own individual relationship to the space itself, does the need for elevators and escalators of prescribed conduct and movement through the space outweigh the value of a place that resonates with and connects with the body and the people that inhabit a space?

In Los Angeles we were exposed to two buildings one postmodern, Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall and the modern Schindler House and in truth they were very different in terms of how I felt towards them. I felt much more of a connection to the Schindler House than the Disney Music Hall. After reading this article I recognize in Gehry’s building this disconnect between the individual and the space with its large lobby that is full of shapes that may be structure and yet may not, and the balconies of the different levels rising above that were connected by escalators and as I read, “while a constant busyness gives the feeling that emptiness is here absolutely packed, that it is an element with in which you yourself are immersed” which seemed to reflect my feelings towards the space. I was immersed and lost, and subsequently, it lost me. With the Schindler House the journey from the street allowed for the house to be hidden and it is revealed only once you have entered and then only parts are revealed, a few at a time, layers upon layers of the house seem to unfold in front of you and disappear and hide again behind you. There is a busyness to this house but a busyness that comes out of itself and its simplicity, out of the plan and the repetition of spaces and form that connect you to the space and at the same connecting the space to the outside and back to the inside. Is my reaction ideological and rooted in a nostalgic appreciation for the modernist ideal or is the connection something that shows a value in the ideas present in the design?

L.A. Harvey

Thought I'd share this one with you guys, I know the article is older now, oh well:

In this article the author is discussing postmodernism as a compression of space-time, a phenomenon which results in a defeat of ethics to aesthetics and a fracturing of morality from scientific endeavour. This space time compression arises out of a modernity steeped in pressures of circulation and accumulation.
The effects of such compression, according to Harvey, have led to a desire for resolution most pronounced by the preference for and production of aesthetic movements over movements concerned with ethical issues. Some examples of this tendency are given: politicians remaining unsullied by their inhumane and hypocritical deeds due to falsified and orchestrated wholesome (popularized) images; urban centers reflecting the wealth of illusory structures, services and transactions rather than the production of materially palpable industries; and the rise of a wealthy new culture fixated upon image-centered consumption and symbolic capital.
Yet as much as this article is about the signs of postmodernism, it is also about its dissolution. Harvey describes a fracturing of this centerless, spaceless way of seeing through such examples as Jesse Jackson’s political seriousness and moral concern despite an image-centered campaign, and Lyotard’s philosophical appeal to a universal concept of justice.

One of the most powerful experiences I had in L.A. involved visiting a John Lautner home, the Goldstein residence. This place was insane: glass bridges, retractable glass walls, open vistas with no railings, a JAMES TURRELL SKYSPACE in the back yard, leather clad sunken beds, and pictures of countless megastars with Goldstein(including a rather graphic shot of Pamela Anderson in the pool). Somehow my experience there might be akin to Harvey’s space-time compression, where reason and order collide with the power of the image and lose themselves. The skyspace is a good example of how the culture of aesthetics and an artistic pursuit of meaning have become part of the same world. Maybe the fact that Turrell’s pieces can exist within this seemingly vacuous landscape is evidence of a continuous return to definitive perspectives.

Ecstasy of Communication

In Baudrillard’s essay, he describes the shift from the modern world as mirror to the present world as screen. The world of the mirror was a world in which the idea of the intimate, the private, could exist separate from the realm of the public. He claims that today this delineation between the two realms can no longer exist and that, instead of a world in which a scene can be played out, there’s only an “operational surface” of communication.
With the claimed death of the scene, the playing out of earthly metaphors has brought about a universe of multiple networks with television as the best example. Baudrillard claims that there’s been a displacement of bodily movement and efforts into electric or electronic commands. He describes this glut of useless information as a replacement of pornography and deems it obscene, where the most intimate moments become the “virtual feeding ground of the media”. This obscenity begins where the spectacle ends and everything is transparent. He calls this the ecstasy of communication. Nothing can be represented anymore. The message fades out of existence and the circulation of the medium becomes everything. The pleasure of this ecstasy is fascination. Baudrillard claims that with this fascination and ecstasy, passion disappears taking with it the end of intimacy.

Hall's 'Encoding, Decoding

This article looks at the process of mass-communication as discursive, resting upon the articulation of links existent between differing states within a chain or loop (from the broadcasting institution, via circulation, to the audience). The author describes this system as an open one,receiving other discursive formations from the wider social and political framework. This system is created through a series of determinate moments in which information is either encoded or decoded. The information passed yields its meaning through the dominating formal rules of discourse and language, terminating in 'realisation' on the part of the receiver. Hall uses this diagram of communication to reveal the broadcasters' notion of 'perfectly transparent communication' as being in actuality 'systematically distorted information'.
In order to do this Hall leads the reader through an explanation of the above-mentioned chain, from production to consumption, and introduces linguistic theory to demonstrate the way in which communication occurs in a discursive sense (through denotation, connotation, iconic signs, etc.). He then introduces the idea of 'dominant' structures that are based on performative rules. These act to enforce or induce preferrence of one semantic domain over another.

I found that this is where the article got the most interesting. He mentions disparate signs 'contracting' with one another, resulting in a continuous rearrangement and perscription of where, into which 'awareness of one's total environment', they belong. He talks of the decoding of the event as possibly fitting within a limit of of dominant definitions, these resulting from a process of construction and articulation and not a 'natural' position (he claims there is no natural position). Because of this he is able to look at the discrepencies between the process of encoding and that of decoding, and the various possible positions of the receiver in terms of the systematic production of a message.
His idea of the receiver as being wthin the dominant hegemonic position, negotiated position or oppositional position I found to be extremely well thought out, clearly explained, and very relevant to the present. Along with identifying a huge problem he also presents, in some sense, a solution. If it is possible to wear away at the conflicting structure of the negotiated position, some situations could possibly form out of realisations that are free of the dominating thought system....if it is a matter of logic rather than belief it may be less of a longshot to think in terms of a shift in the believability of the media as an objective source.

Ecstasy of Communication & Encoding/Decoding

The Ecstasy of Communication by Jean Baudrillard speaks about our ever-revealing culture perpetuated by the televisual medium. We have been transported into a new realm where the virtual has overtaken the real and the real becomes abandoned. Our search for individuality has cost us the relationships to each other and to the other than human presences. Everything in our created environments slowly become the processor and the partner of our lives. The distance that we create between the virtual and the real has distorted our reality and created a fronted, soulless existence. Everything is beyond arms length and we put it there. The homogeneity of this techno conglomeration alleviates only the perceived annoyances of everyday. We can now sync everything. But all this time savings leaves us with time for what? More time saving activities, for what? Why are we trying to save time then? (maybe slightly off topic)

Baudrillard pursues the idea that the sense of mystery in life is now being bought and sold at an alarming pace and that our secrets as humans are now readily available. There is no more seduction in our lives because of TV. The bombardment of image and sound has ended the fantasy. We have become observers and not participants.

Encoding and Decoding provides a look at the way messages in the media are translated through the different stages of its life cycle: ie. production-circulation-distribution-consumption-reproduction. The relationship between pure event and our reception represents a whittled or a "Cole's notes" version of the information passed where each translation from stage to stage changes the information to find its universal identity as the message to be received.

L.A. Postmodernism

L.A. and Jameson’s ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’

In this article Jameson is describing postmodernism as the absorption of the everyday -- the saturated landscape of conveniences and fleeting images, into the unfolding dialogue of the artist . He recognizes postmodernism as both a reaction against modernism and as the act of collapsing culture, as mentioned above, with an integrity resulting in a manifestation of indefinable perspective (both physically/psychologically, as with the Bonaventure Hotel’s reflective glass and escalators, and temporally, as with the nostalgia film).
Like the disorienting four towers of the Bonaventure, Universal Studios in Los Angeles offers a chance to link technological vertigo-inducing thrills with directionally meaningless, surprisingly uniform avenues. Each seems to encourage the visitor to walk in circles, each shop-face implies that there is not an existence beyond the immediate. Here one has the opportunity to purchase clothes that may or may not have been worn on set, shop for a life-size Yoda or have one’s picture taken with an unconvincing Wolverine or Marilyn Munroe. The illusion is as thin as it is sellable. Both the back stage nature of the studio and the nostalgia-evoking slant of Universal Studios as an integral part of people’s lives fuse together to create a total yet fragmented experience.
An experience that I would like to talk about, which strikes me as relevant but was only a temporary construct, is in regard to an anti-war protest that was held at the Santa Monica pier. A series of white crosses as one would find in a military burial ground was erected in the sand, flanking the pier itself. People were wandering through the aisles, some were gathered in informal groups conversing. To the side were a series of booths and posters. On the pier itself is an established fairground with a roller coaster and ferris wheel, and as well a series of booths. To approach the site with the expanse of crosses and the noise of the fair, with milling people and scattered beach-goers, one couldn’t help but wonder at the simultaneous effect of these events. Somehow this seems to be a more and more commonplace kind of situation…one moves from a crisis on the news to a cooking show—one walks through crosses to mount a tilt-a-whirl. Are we becoming so adept at switching gears that we no longer effectively distinguish between worlds (in this case the world of amusement and the world of war)? If so, are the resulting mental and creative constructs capable of telling us about anything outside of the immediate present?

Times Square tot oder lebendig?

This article discusses the strength of the mythology of Times Square in New York in the face of an aggressive corporate pop culture. Coloured by a seedy history and set amongst a cluster of theatres, peep shows and neon lights, it exists as the transportation nexus of the city.
Recognized by the nation and in media saturated parts of the world for its unmistakable character and site specific nature, Times Square exists as, according to Boyer, an 'iconic place of pop culture'. Yet, due to its central location, it is desired real estate for corporate/commercial offices and megastores such as Disney, Virgin, Planet Hollywood, etc. As a result of such rich private interests it has become its own community, monitored and patrolled by private police. Boyer wonders if it could become an 'any-space-whatever place', where people no longer experience directly their environment, where the space has become so fragmented through representation that its meaning is left unrecognizable. I think that this is a valid question.
Living in Toronto periodically over the past ten years I have seen a similar phenomenon come to pass at Young and Dundas. It was not until I read this article that I recognized that it is truly a question of authenticity. When a space is designed instead of formed over time, it leaves a different flavour all together. With the new central square and flashy American advertising at this corner how long will it take people to forget that the space was augmented, that it formed out of a different kind of process than its historical predecessor, that it represents something of another place all together? i think that places can lose their meaning, and that this tactic of corporate display is perhaps one of the more accelerated routes toward the any-space-whatever.

Week Four Readings

Diller + Scofidio’s "Homebodies on Vacation"
M. Christine Boyer's "Times Square Dead or Alive?"

“Homebodies on Vacation” discusses the tourism and vacation phenomenon that is increasingly being reduced to an act of viewing idealized images. Our general disconnectedness drives us on a quest for “authentic” experiences (which apparently don’t have to be authentic at all – examples being Arizona’s London Bridge and Nashville’s reinforced concrete Parthenon). So much of the mass-marketed vacation ideal encapsulates us in a “bubble” of the comforts of home. Our experience of the world becomes reduced to sanitized and popularized images fed to us through the windows of the car, tour bus and cruise ship, as well as the screens of our computers and televisions.

In “Times Square Dead or Alive?” M. Christine Boyer questions whether New York’s Times Square has died during its evolution to a “Disneyfied” tourist mecca. She questions the effects of the intersection’s technological skin of neon, flashing lights and video screens. Has the quest to recreate an idealized version of Times Square turned it into a flashing image produced for the mass consumption of society? Is it a form of nostalgia for what was once located in Times Square, or is the lament for what Times Square has become an even greater nostalgic view (a mourning for what has been lost)?

These cultural phenomena may be caused by a general boredom in the “affluent world” (previously known as the “Western World,” which I believe no longer has such well defined boundaries). Our basic needs are well met, and we no longer have any grand common projects (such as World War II or the mass exploration and colonization of North America) that we must devote our time to accomplish. I believe this boredom exists despite the hectic pace of our lives. Many “life goals” that society suggests we accomplish (such as pursuing a high-paying career, owning a suburban house and car(s), going on vacations) can be quite hollow, acting only as “check-marks” on an idealized list of what someone should achieve during their life. Many of these goals simply serve to occupy our time enough that we don’t realize how bored we are. As a society, we have time to dream of romanticized versions of the past and present and seek out to experience those dreams. The mass media, entertainment and tourist industries and the larger consumer and corporate world are more than happy to perpetuate and fulfill these desires in exchange for money and profits.

week four readings

HOMEBODIES ON VACATION
By Diller + Scofidio

The authenticity of a place can only be experienced by living in it, by becoming a part of that society even if only temporarily. To visit is to see or to be there, and only experience it on one level but the life of a place, its reality, exist on many levels and to experience it on multiple levels requires time or investment. I think that seeing a place and taking pictures that record the event and make it possible to remember that you have been there, points to memory and its importance to place. There is no importance to that place beyond the importance that brought you to it in the first place but personally it holds no meaning and the record of being there becomes pointless once the purpose for having gone there in the first place is forgotten. The day to day living that makes life interesting and also makes a place special it is memories and experiences that
create a sense of place and with out those experiences, the experience itself becomes superficial. Travel can provide an escape from the activities of day to day life but then why the obsessive need to record being away from the place you are trying to escape, especially if the act of recording it becomes meaningless? One should not passively see a place but actively experience it.


TIMES SQUARE DEAD OR ALIVE?
By M. Christine Boyer

Times Square cannot be experienced any other way than the sanitized version of what it is, because the unclean version of the place is perhaps more true to the unique reality of New York than the one that has developed into an idea of what it should be. The authenticity is lost, what one sees every new years on TV is as good as it gets, it seems even less intriguing in reality unless that is what you expect it to be like, an if your expectations are too high the reality falls short. It seems a lot like Las Vegas.

It seems like the idea in revitalizing the place was to remove what makes in dirty and inherently interesting and then follow to make it bright and flashy in an attempt to hide the fact that it may be just another intersection surrounded by office buildings. The interest of the place lies in the history an how the different worlds coexist within the sorted past of this intriguing place. To remove any element removes a piece of its history, its story and renders it less interesting less lively and by encouraging signage that is bright and shinny only hides that fact, or at least distracts from it.

If the new Times Square is like a simulated reality, an electronic artificial visualization reflecting our current economy driven by data, information, services and entertainment, they got what they wanted, too bad it’s no fun! An alternate reality based in advertisement and superfluous flashy lights may entice the imagination but like Vegas with any further investigation the life of the place dies with no reality to cling to.

Times Square Dead or Alive?

This article presents the history of and the present state of Time Square/42nd Street. Saturated with media-soaked visualizations and big name companies, the Square creates a cultureless tourist image that deviates from the original setting. This offset course that the new situation evokes represents the intermingling of businesses such as Disney and Warner.

The image of Times Square is instantly recognizable as a pop culture mecca that finds its placelessness in the tourist phenomena. The Square is overrun by the big names and it has lost its inceptive identity as a culturally unique mix of theatre, music and burlesque.

How do you fix a problem perpetuated by our media culture? What is the direction, do you tear down all the boards and images?

Diller and Scofidio's 'Homebodies on Vacation'

This article discusses the notion of synthesized realities that have developed out of a common desire to locate and capture the 'authentic'. First the authors discuss the notions of heroic travel vs. tele-travel; the first seeming authentic in its struggles and the second being (perhaps) presently an acceptable substitute for some. Focusing on this question of what constitutes an authentic experience, the article brings up the advertising value of anything that claims to be real. This hunger to experience an authentic moment leads to such oddities as 'living histories' and random signifiers of the real, such as the London Bridge reconstructed in Arizona (with its fake channel so as to make it appear less out of place), and the Parthenon of concrete in Nashville. This sort of offered authenticity seems to have much in common with Farschou's system of fashion; both are uprooted and trained versions of a palletable idea of history.
Diller and Scofidio also comment on the desire to capture the authentic through the souvenir. In their work "Tourisms: suitCase Studies", which focuses on a tourist site in every state, they reorder geography to suit the alphabet, invent narratives from pieces of official and unofficial documentation, and use the double-sided nature of the postcard to split the story from the place. Using these ambiguous modes of representation further amplifies the discontinuous understanding we have of the world around us.
I found their "Slow House" to be particularly interesting in its marginalization of the place itself. The home becomes only another fragment of the mind, a virtual position tied to a symbolic and non-present reality. The only authenticity lies in the idea of a continuity between one position of control to another.

Homebodies on Vacation

This article develops the idea of tourism as a phenomena that adapts history to current trends and displaces the tourist in the quest for authenticity. It also links vacation to a growing virtual filter that we develop as a result of technological interceptors. The resultant effect is a "framed" experience where the natural landscape is controlled to create image for consumption.

The latter part of the article looks at the vacation home as a phenomena linked with technology that combines to hybridize the experience of destination, vacation and home. It identifies the window as a device that controls the experience and becomes the currency of vacation. The connection that the window has to other view-devices such as the TV and the windshield establishes the mode by which we perceive the vacation experience and largely our everyday.

It seems that we are moving closer to a virtual experience of the world home and abroad. I believe that the quest for authenticity will hinder total virtual immersion. However the environmental neglect leads us closer to a virtual-natural hybrid as we move willingly to a desolation of our roots. There also seems to be a general repulsion of virtual because of its shortcomings in producing believable reality.

Are we going to succumb to this virtual (somewhat real) environment aspects? Are we less aware of the integration of the virtual? We tend to access nature as needed, what level of accessibility are we willing to relinquish?

Class Discussion

The engagement of humans in the responsible acts necessary to negate the trend of consumerism is paramount. We only make connections when we are able to see ourselves in the process. How do we implicate the consumer (us) in the act of consumption?

Advertising provides the medium of consumer attraction, so why not opt to attract responsibility in the same way. This can only be effective if the company advertising the responsibility is the same company who makes the products we are trying to relinquish/question.

One potential is that the market reflects the primary consumption.. We as consumers have the power of choice and our own vanity can aid us in the goal of responsible purchase. The environment is a more recent concern as we warm our planet and run out of fossil fuels. The goal then is to move to a more friendly and sustainable future. If the corporations produce a image of sustainability (with serious sustainability) then we will bite. And thus as enviro-products become more consumable then we can move towards driving the price down for accessibility to all markets.

ie. (point brought up in class) we will starve to have style. So make sustainability the new craze but do it with depth not veneer. LEEDs begins this trend but it must intensify to be meaningful. No one wants a LEED bronze when they can potentially have platinum.

Faurschou's Obsolescence and Desire

In this article Faurschou is bringing to light the state of meaninglessness and triviality within the culture of late capitalism. She uses the fashion object, as the clearest and most pronounced example, to explore connections between human desire and the controlled frenzy of consumer culture.
Faurschou claims that fashion has lead to a totalizing logic that subsumes all commodities, so that one cannot escape the system of consumption; there is no longer a simple object that does not carry with it a place within this system. Some objects claim to be only valid as part of a system, for example some of the skin care products.
Faurschou also discusses the way in which we culturally absorb these systems. She claims that there is an abstraction of meaning whereby the true social and symbolic worlds are being marginalized through "reprocessing". She describes the acceleration and dissection of history by the fashion world and capitalist agenda, the results of which can be constituted as a symbolic divestment (the grand instrumentality of this process remaining hidden).
It is this symbolic divestment that is so disturbing to me, and yet people are so seemingly convinced of the value of the objects they buy. What Baudrillard says about filling the void vs. describing the void (pg 240) is powerful as well, in that the desire to experience is being fulfilled by something which only represents the possibility of experience.

Week Three Readings

TEMPORARY CONTRACTS: on the economy of the post-industrial landscape
By Ellen Dunham-Jones

The temporary contract is a reflection of our consumer-based culture driven by the market where major corporations want the most return for the least investment. According to Dunham-Jones the post-industrial landscape is defined by temporary contacts and an ever-increasing exodus of businesses and production from expensive central and urban locations to cheaper suburban areas creating edge cities with strip malls or mega malls as the main attraction. These edges cities have little or no public spaces and are primarily accessible only by car.

Our relationship with our landscape and our community is being affected. The profit driven market is encouraging individuals to consume based on desire more than need and people want what the market tells them is in fashion. Because profit drives the market and “gains in productivity correspond to gains in consumption,” thus creating an industry where the ‘planned obsolescence of goods’ is crucial to keep this well oiled machine running. Now the gains in productivity are generated in the purposeful lack of quality of products creating a continual demand on consumption generating continual profit. We are obsessed with profit and gains, “buy now pay later,” and less concerned with long-term goals and results of our irresponsible temporary contracts and shot term transactions.

I think that if we were to start thinking more of the future, and in reinvesting in the environment and our culture we might see the returns in the form of not only an architecture that resists commodification but also a culture as well.

OBSOLESCENCE AND DESIRE: fashion and the commodity form
By Gail Faurschou

Faurschou in referencing Baudrillard, talks of fashion as a commodity void of any symbol or sign of its own within the realm of capitalist society, that it searches outside of it to find meaning within history, non capitalist societies, marginal social groups etc. She questions capitalism as a society where objects have become the goal; the end where merely all exchange is merely a means. If we see fashion as this object then the goal of possessing the object becomes a means to an end.

Currently we seem to define ourselves by what we do, how much we make and the things we possess, all of which have the potential to change and do in their own right as well as by our own volition. We are defining ourselves, or expressing our individual identities by things that hold no meaning as with the commodity of fashion. Should we willing position ourselves in such a way that the ways in which we define ourselves be so closely connected to the existence of our capitalist society? Architecture can be seen in the same way, as a commodity, what will sell now as opposed to what will be good for the future. How does what we build express who we are? Maybe in a capitalist society meaning can only come from profit margins.

In regards to the Ralf Lauren fashion environments are we buying the products or the name? Is someone who wears him more valuable than someone ho does not? Some would say yes, is this a good thing?