Month: May 2008

goodbye 20th century

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Woke up this morning to read a post by Enrique at a:456 and was amazed just how precisely he had nailed what’s been on my mind for the last two weeks.

Twenty years ago I was moving to the city to study architectural design (yes, at Columbia. Over that summer I came to realize that the music I was listening to (and, at the time, making) was giving me so much more than the formalist architecture of the day ever could. Unlike Enrique, I was a disappointed by Daydream Nation: my album was Sister. But Sonic Youth was still so important to reading the city as were other noise bands like Live Skull (and reading books like Gravity’s Rainbow…a whole summer of Gravity’s Rainbow). And at Sonic Youth’s CBGBs concert that summer I was right up against the stage the entire time. I remember thinking that the song Schizophernia in particular was much less about an individual and much more about a city and a world…this was, after all, still very much the postmodern moment. 

As Enrique points out, New York was as dirty a city as could be that summer, gripped in a crack epidemic, and heading for riot that would end all that. Soon, like Ulysses, I’d be back to Ithaca where I’d do a Ph.D. and somehow try to understand what all that meant. And no matter how great the city is now and no matter how nostalgic it is to say this, I really wish the city was dirty again. There was a potential then that has been exhausted by architecture.   

 

 

 

 

the biggest drawing in the world, take 2

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There was a lot of blog traffic about Eric Nordenankar’s project, "The Biggest Drawing in the World" last week in which Eric, an art student at Beckmans College of Design purported to use a package with a GPS device in it to "draw" a map on the world as the package was shipped back on fort via DHL.

So it should now be revealed. With the "help" of DHL I’m undertaking a similar project. Last week I shipped a package to Dublin, Ireland. Instead, DHL decided that the package should be shipped to Dublin, South Africa. Since then, the package has bounced back and forth between different locations on the Eastern Hemisphere.

You would think someone would just look at the waybill at some point.

In the meantime, I have finished copy edits for both the Johnson Tapes and Networked Publics. Next up is an index for the latter and its back to Infrastructural City in hopes that these are all off my plate starting next week!

surveillance society

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One of my perennial concerns is the growth of surveillance under network culture. I wanted to share two articles with you today, the first from Naomi Klein, who writes about the use of American surveillance technologies in the repression of dissidents in China’s All-Seeing Eye, the second a call to action by Bruce Schneier entitled Our Data, Ourselves. Maybe it’s that a generation that never experienced 1984 as a date in the future can’t conceive of the dangers of surevillance society. Maybe it’s that because the current administration has largely confined activities against citizens who aren’t "typical Americans." Maybe it’s that the Iron Curtain has been gone for so long. Maybe it’s that the Myspace generation is already used to constant exposure of their intimate activities.

Whatever the reason, to imagine that surveillance culture is innocent is naïve. For modernists like Hannes Meyer, transparency was something to build into public buildings so that politicians couldn’t operate behind closed doors anymore, not a means by which to repress the people. Times have changed, apparently. Nobody sees inside the Oval Office, but we have waned, our bodies transparent to  technology.