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.