My students showed me this video of a market in Bangkok that coexists with active train tracks yesterday.

Take a look if you haven't seen it yet.

For both my students and myself, this video was evocative of our contemporary condition. While we may not take apart our workplaces in order to accommodate a train, we are in a constant process of negotiation  with technology.

Every day that I go into the city, I set up my workplace in a train for forty minutes each way, armed with iPhone,  noise-blocking earphones and computer. Whereas in Los Angeles it was easy to carry larger quantities of material with me (mainly books), here I have to travel light, so I par down what I need.

But most of all, I think that our MP3 players and our mobile phones are accustoming us to new means of accessing both vast locally-stored libraries the and the immense content of the network. How are we learning to restructure our ways of behaving? How will these accommodate future technologies?

With the MP3 player and the cell phone, it seems like we are learning to live with ambient overlays of information. But ambience has a limit. Can we learn to live with technology as intense as the train that goes through the market?

Over at Read/Write Web, Alex Iskold looks at the Long Tail phenomenon and concludes that while Chris Anderson is correct when he argues that there is money to be made on the Long Tail (by aggregrators and Long Tail oriented retail giants like Amazon), there is no money to be made in the Long Tail itself. 

I've received a couple of requests for my Goodbye, Supermodernism article, published in now-defunct Architecture Magazine back in summer of 2006. Here it is, with a couple of revisions.

public wi-fi at cancun airport, photo by júbilo haku via flickr

It is nearly a decade since Hans Ibelings published Supermodernism: Architecture in the Age of Globalization, his manifesto for an architecture of “superficiality and neutrality” and fourteen years since the book that inspired him, Marc Augé’s Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity first came out. In the intervening years, both texts have achieved huge success worldwide.

Supermodernism sold over 17,000 copies and became de rigueur in many schools and offices while the surprisingly popular Non-Places put an anthropologist on the reading lists of many architects for the first time in quite a while. 

Augé’s remarkable observation was that, in the contemporary world, place is giving way to “non-place.” Places, Augé explained, are made up out of social interactions between people, accumulating in memory to form historical meaning. Contemporary life, however, is a relentless procession through spaces of transit. Airport lounges and freeways are non-places, but so are less obvious spaces: ATMs, computer workstations, and supermarkets. In these spaces shared experiences between humans rarely develop. Non-places, Augé concluded, remain empty, meaningless environments that we pass through during our solitary lives.

For Ibelings, this was simply a fact of globalization, nothing to lament. He brilliantly identified the rise of a “Supermodernist” architecture epitomized by the work of Herzog and de Meuron, OMA, Kazuyo Sejima, and Frank Gehry. Rejecting Postmodernism’s emphasis on symbolism as mere nostalgia for place in a world increasingly lacking it these architects instead deployed sensation through a play of surface and materials to sway the viewer. Supermodernism was, Ibelings insisted, expressionless and neutral, generally taking orthogonal form (the Box), but quite possibly also resembling sculptural objects (the Blob).

In revisiting these two texts recently, I lifted an eyebrow at how the edges of my paperback copies had yellowed (a glance at Amazon showed that Supermodernism was now out of print, a $94 collector's item) and as I read on, I was even more taken aback by how obsolete they seemed. I have had to do a bit of traveling for work during the last year so I know the airport lounge more intimately than I’d like. But my time there is far from solitary. Cell phone calls and email messages—if not via a wireless connection on my laptop, then via my iPhone—occupy my time. Nor is such connectivity limited to the digerati. During the last decade, the mobile phone became the most successful gadget ever, selling over 1.6 billion units, and the laptop computer—often outfitted with Wi-Fi—now routinely outsells desktop machines in developed countries. To appreciate how much wireless technology is changing our lives, visit your local Starbucks and watch the number of people browsing the web or, for that matter, get in your car: increasingly outfitted with Bluetooth wireless interfaces, many new automobiles are becoming mobile phone accessories.

This new technology facilitates our connections with co-workers, family and friends in a hectic world. Anthropologist Ichiyo Habachi has observed that the mobile phone creates a “telecocoon,” an extension of intimate personal space into our surroundings. Through both phone calls and text messaging, it is possible to feel the presence of others nearly constantly and non-places become domesticated. Moreover, as the Internet has matured, it too has become a virtual hang out, through social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook but also through forums, blogs, photo sharing sites, and even multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft (don’t dismiss these out of hand: the average age of players is 28 and Warcraft has 8 million subscribers worldwide).

Does this mean that we are connecting with the others who share in the space we pass through? No, this networked culture does not portend a return to the place of old. But neither do we live in a space of solitude (although often we might wish to be in one). Instead, our space is a networked one, with wireless communications linking individuals both nearby and distant.

Yet more changes to our notion of space may be around the corner as well. Experiments by hackers and artists with “Locative Media” suggest that uniting GPS sensors and PDAs will allow us to overlay vast amounts of networked information onto the environment. Space will acquire new forms of networked meaning. Using your smart device, you will be able to pull up information—historical information, personal notes, restaurant reviews, and collective histories—about your environment.

Non-place, then, is only a brief transitional entity and Supermodernity only a way-station on the way to a network culture. As the vast collective reading/net surfing room of OMA’s Seattle Public Library or the tubes that reveal the infrastructural underpinnings of Toyo Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque begin to suggest, the new architecture for the twenty-first century will be less concerned with sensation and affect, less obsessed with either the box and the blob, and more concerned with a new kind of place-making, enabling us to dwell more creatively in both “real” and network space.

Tags: nonplaces, network culture, architecture

Thanks to Archinect for this Psychology Today article on the importance of diversity in cities. Today, the conventional wisdom points to the unpredictability and creativity that one finds in cities as essential for network culture. Outsourcing may work, but not for work demanding innovation.

Alas, as I've been suggesting for quite some time now, we have a new kind of urban blight emerging in places like New York, San Francisco and Boston. In "The Embers of Gentrification" at New York Magazine  Adam Sternberg suggests that the fires of gentrification may be self-perpetuating, but they may also be self-extinguishing.

Blogged with Flock

Outside of our usual sphere of coverage, but nevertheless worth thinking about. In 1983 the world nearly came to an end. At the Russian equivalent of NORAD, alarms sounded indicating that the United States had launch a missile strike against the Soviet Union. In fact, it was faulty technology. But the effect would have been the same, if not for Stanislav Petrov's intuition and refusal to follow orders blindly.

In the new issue of Wired, Rex Sorgatz weighs in on the role of gaming today in When Reality Feels Like Playing a Game, a New Era Has Begun. As with many aspects of network culture, it's taken me a while to get this far (I blame architecture, historically the slowest of the arts in taking up new cultural … then again Karl Chu was telling me that games were the future for architecture many years ago), but there's no question that if there is a new cultural form for Network Culture it's software gaming (and yes, I think there are crucial distinctions between software gaming and older forms of gaming). Alex Galloway's Gaming. Essays in Algorithmic Culture is a great introduction to such questions. But games require a huge amount of work to produce and as a conesquence the gaming industry is one of the few big media entities out there today (in fact, we could argue against the idea of the Long Tail, suggesting that operating systems and productivity software, software games, and aggegrators are the new big media). I'd love to see the software game equivalent of early television pioneer Ernie Kovacs, but I fear that period is long gone, something we can only experience today through emulators of 1980s videogames. Still, when AUDC states that the novel is dead, there is no question in my mind that games are the successor.

I ran across this story on artist and agitator Peter Missing this morning. Missing was a key player in the anti-gentrification movement in New York's Lower East Side in the late 1980s, arguably a last stand against the eventual turning of the island into a giant stock broker dormitory-cum-shopping mall. I was living in the city in those days and in many ways it was a far more interesting and certainly more provocative place than it is today.

Where are the Peter Missings of network culture? Where is today's Lower East Side? People don't seem to have an answer to these questions which, in itself, is disturbing...

Where is alt.culture today? Author Warren Ellis concludes that our curatorial culture is just plain exhausted… This strikes me as true to a large degree, although I wonder if the best work isn't taking place off-line or in secret? Much as I suggest that AUDC is Internet-based, we don't blog about our working habits in public (why?). Rather, we talk to each other relentlessly on the phone and communicate via e-mail. Hopefully some of you will think that Blue Monday is an original and creative work, but yes, there seems to be some degree of exhaustion out there now.

A Japanese designer has come up with ways of avoiding crime by hiding in plain sight.

See the New York Times.