Electronic Art: Resistance is Futile

Resistance is Fertile

Resistance is Necessary

The well-known electronic art event ISEA comes to Sydney in the middle of next year. ISEA 2013 will be held in Sydney and is playing around with the ironic theme “Resistance is Futile”.

Kathy Cleland, Marcus Westbury and I have each had a bit of a go at opening up some of the issues that will make up the theme for exhibitions, workshops, presentations and other contributions to the festival and symposium aspects of the event.

We’ve also had a few roundtables at Carriageworks to develop the ideas further. I’m starting to like the way people are playing with the idea and coming up with their own responses to the idea.

Have a read of the articles here at the ANAT Filter site.

Stay in touch with calls for work at the ISEA 2013 site.

Maria Fernanda Cardoso and Ross Rudesch Harley
2008-2011
One Channel HD Digital Video, colour, 37 min.

Witness the most intimate moments between male and female stick insects. The male, much smaller than the female, is nevertheless well-endowed with a probing, green intromittent organ. He seems to please her for what seems like an eternity. Stick insect copulation lasts for over 14 hours, and only in the final moments can you see a perfectly round pink spermatophore come out of his body cavity and get inserted into hers. Recorded over a two day period at the artists’ home-studio, the video documents the most intimate and domestic intercourse between human and insect worlds.

From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen
Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement

Looks like there are some great contributions “from around the world that explore how the power of social technologies can be harnessed for social engagement in urban areas”.

Check out the blurb and link to the book at the MIT Press site.

The full un-edited 2 hour audio recording of our Media Art Histories roundtable discussion in Liverpool during the RE:WIRE conference.

Lots of great discussion and contention among participants in the hope to build up something bigger.: a media art histories declaration in the near future.

Some serious looking roundtable types here: (from left to right): Paul Thomas, Pip Laurenson, Ross Harley, and Darren Tofts (photo Mike Leggett).

Fuller + Harley

University of New South Wales, Australia

Heavily reworked version of “Contactless Contact” paper (thanks to great readers’ comments and criticisms) for forthcoming From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press)

Moving within an architectural surround, a person fashions an evolving matrix, an architectural surround not entirely of her own making. (Arakawa and Gins 2002, 40)

1. Sensual integration in the mobile wireless city

This chapter proceeds from an assumption that the widespread introduction of wireless devices into the urban environment involves the formation of new relationships between bodies and practices of power. Here we want to initiate some discussion around the ontological and sociological implications of ubiquitous networks, especially as they pertain to an engagement with mobility and wireless technologies.

With the increasing prevalence of WiFi, RFID, Bluetooth and other novel radio technologies, a new kind of electromagnetic space is becoming integral to the life and shape of the urban environment. We are not so much concerned with the history of radio broadcasting as we are with redeployment of radio across urban environments in novel and unexpected ways. The contemporary electromagnetic spaces discussed in this chapter now occupy the banal and increasingly pervasive geometries of super-distributed control a barely discernible ‘surround’ that inaugurates a new politics of ubiquity.

Following Arakawa and Gins, we propose that the “characteristic features for an immensely large architectural surround such as a city will be everything that makes it a city, including those bustling or ambling through it” (Arakawa and Gins 2002, 39). Increasingly this surround is becoming informationalised, involving the dispersal of processing power into the everyday environment what Adam Greenfield terms ‘everyware information processing’ (Greenfield 2006). It forms part of a protocological ensemble that enables the automatic opening of doors, the registering of identity data, or the enabling of credit card transactions, telephone calls and access to tollways to happen (apparently) seamlessly. This increasingly pervasive surround harnesses “all of the power of a densely networked environment, but refining its perceptible signs until they disappear into the things we do everyday.” (Greenfield 2006, 26) Surrounded by an electromagnetic spectrum thick with information, the technologised atmosphere has drafted the body into the service of the urban infrastructure.

This chapter is an attempt to reconceptualise radio and architecture in contemporary urban environments, to consider some of the emergent architectural and protocological surrounds sometimes “not entirely of our own making” (Arakawa and Gins 2002, 40). We ask how this evolving interpenetration of architectural surfaces, bodies, signals, and waves (utilised by the mobile devices that guide and track a wide range of constantly moving human bodies and material objects) can be seen to create new kinds of social engagement and ‘forces of relationality’.

This interpenetration occurs in two ways. Firstly, communicating devices are in the business of exchanging information (and not meaning), and thus operate under the non-representational governance of protocol. Secondly, the negotiability of semantic systems give way to the non-negotiability of code. As Alexander Galloway puts it, “protocol is a circuit not a sentence” (Galloway 2006). Moreover, the increasing integration of mobile bodies within multi-sensate urban infrastructures (visible and invisible, tactile and contactless) requires a body that moves in certain ways and at certain times in order for the whole to be able to function. City, device, and body become prosthetically interrelated, part of a greater assemblage of mobile organisation (Terranova 2004; Galloway 2006; Manning 2007).

The much-vaunted ‘freedom’ offered by wirelessness is enabled by achieving what appears to be the total ubiquity of body-network relations. Always-on and always-connected, wireless technologies offer considerable freedom of movement by collapsing previously disparate spatial locations of labour (home, office etc.) into the mobile space of flows we now occupy (Castells 1996). What holds us in place is not the disciplinary fantasy or the architectural backdrop of modernity. Today our bodies are held in place by a dynamic architecture that is enabled in part by the novel use of radio spectrum and wireless communication. The move from disciplinary to control societies has been understood (cf Deleuze 2006 and Foucault 1996) in terms of the breakdown of one form of confinement into another “mechanism of control as rigorous as the harshest confinement” (Deleuze 2006, 178). Here we want to explore how the ‘protocological surround’ enabled by wireless technologies invokes a different power relation irreducible to the logic of surveillance or control but within its genus in both that is based instead on conditions of ‘smooth’ mobility and wireless connectivity.

This chapter seeks to explore the ways in which ubiquitous wireless technologies recalibrate the experience of urban spatiality. We propose that these new forms of situated computing cannot be understood outside of specific modes of social engagement, and that this is best framed in terms of a reconsideration of the interplay between radio, urbanism and architecture.

The relationships between architecture, movement and the city have long been discussed in terms of regimes of vision for instance the panoramas of railways, the idea of the cinematic city, or framing devices of all kinds. Anne Friedberg wonders whether there is “a new logic to vision as our windows, frames, screens are ever more fractured and virtually multiplied? Which technologies will break through the frame and have us climb out through the virtual window?” (Friedberg 2006, 242). Eric Gordon has argued that radio ‘reframed’ the modern city by dint of its inherently networked architecture, which broke the enframing regime of vision through the foregrounding of scale. Transmission towers strung together new connections that were beyond the horizon ‘out of sight’. The urban imaginings invoked by radio’s invisible connections and increasingly active air (Sloterdijk 2009) were made concrete in the aesthetics of a nascent mobile modernism in which electrical, telegraphic and radio transmission towers rose up to harness the invisible power of the air. The broadcasting of audio via radio waves also saw the inauguration of new soundscapes that challenge the dominance of visuality in the urban realm. The ‘invisible empire of the air’ was made visible through an acoustic aesthetic that “prioritised connectivity over isolation and mobility over stagnation” (Gordon 2005, 265). This invisible relational dynamic remains crucial to the role wireless networks play in media change today. Adrian Mackenzie asserts that wireless networks “[t]heir connectivity, intermittent, unstable and uneven as it often is, lodges in many of the overlaps, overflows and outgrowths badged as convergence, mobile media, and pervasive or ubiquitous computing. (McKenzie 2008)

The new deployment of low-powered radio generates an intimacy which strangely may not always be felt directly upon the body, but which nevertheless affects the body’s ability to act. That is, we may not perceive the invisible radio waves of the electromagnetic spectrum and may not feel the constant touch of machines registering our details, but they invariably affect how we move. In a sense, it this dance between what is perceived, what is known and what is registered that provides the experiential foundations of everyday life.

The potential spatial and social implications of new ubiquitous infrastructures have been noted by a number of researchers. Anthony Townsend reminds us that the “pervasive deployment of telecommunications networks was one of the defining characteristics of the 20th century city in the developed world” (Townsend 2007, 396). As the 21st century sees the pervasive deployment of new location-aware computing and telecommunications that is reshaping the geography of many sociospatial activities, “urban form has responded to the new spatial freedoms allowed by pervasive telecommunications”. (Townsend 2007, 396)

Dodge and Kitchin similarly argue that pervasive computing and the rendering of everyday objects into smart objects represent a major new regime, but from their perspective it is one of recording (after the previous regimes of writing and the printing press). Mundane and routine, this embedding of computing power into our everyday lives will constitute new pervasive “sociospatial archives” capable of recording details about all the places a mobilised individual has been. They situate this as part of the historical shift from surveillance to what they call sousveillance “the internal counter to external surveillance” (Dodge and Kitchin 2007, 432). Under the pretext of efficiency of movement, congestion reduction, or discourses of security, this new regime of recording is not top-down, but rather inside-out and bottom-up.

Echoing the work of Thrift (2004), Dodge and Kitchin frame their studies of mobilised pervasive computing in terms of trying to capture “the outlines of a world just coming in to existence, one which is based on continuous calculation at each and every point along each and every line of movement.” (quoted in Dodge and Kitchin 2007, 432) They highlight the shift from watching (surveillance) to recording of “capta” ie those “units of data that have been selected and harvested from the sum of all potential data” and typically derived from the use of swipe cards, the logging of computers, the tracking of vehicles by way of on-board locational devices and so on. (Dodge and Kitchin 2004, 854) These automated networks “produce particular and new sociospatial formations” and so far do not fill out the whole space of the city. (Dodge and Kitchin 2007, 434) The question remains to what extent ubiquitous computing will create novel sociospatial effects that may include the creation of “a mobile panopticon (as opposed to the partial oligopticon)” of the urban metropolis. (Dodge and Kitchin 2007, 436)

Loaded with our various radio-enabled peripherals (mobile phones, key fobs, e-tags, contactless smart cards, and other remote keyless systems) our senses are becoming more diffuse yet more interconnected. We beep unknowingly, register data, upload personal information, download encryption signals, or transmit passwords and identity codes. Our senses now engage with peripherals and systems of ‘dataveillance’ that have become essential to traversing urban networks and architectures and these devices are themselves increasingly integrated into the hard- and soft-ware of the city. We experience this in the form of tollbooths, automated door sentry systems, RFID gantries, and cell towers to name but a few of these new topological constants that trace and record (and in some instances block) our every move. One’s becoming is ‘becoming networked’, ‘becoming relational’. In order to be actualised, presence must be partial situated and sensate, cybernetically sensitive to feedback within the system (Munster 2005, Terranova 2004).

The prosthetic devices we are referring to here reach out and touch other devices (without ever actually touching them) across a scale that can no longer be contained by ‘frames’. These sensing devices activate both near and far, light and heavy, untethered and encumbered to “an empire of functions” (Thrift 2008, 9) in which antennae and algorithms reorganise contemporary practices of experience. An ‘awareness of the network’ an ever-present possibility of another connection has now become built into everyday experience. In the process, these sensing devices are folded into the network; they are integrated into the city and into the “cloud of electromagnetic radiation that bathes us in information” (Varnelis 2008).

2. Radio on.

This process occurs in physical realms that some scholars call ‘Hertzian space’: the space of radio signals in everyday environments. In order to understand this in more detail, we need to turn to a discussion of radio’s genealogy and transformation into a new procedural system for the construction of contemporary spaces.

Some recognition of the history of radio can help us contextualise recent developments over the last decade or so of ubiquitous media. In terms of the presence of electromagnetic spectrum, radio is part of the late nineteenth century scientific discoveries. Since the mid 1880s when the German physicist Heinrich Hertz identified what we now call radio waves, technologists have been concerned with practical issues to do with “what kind of device it would take to modulate and detect such waves and how far they would travel” (de Sola Pool 1990, 25). Wave-based and invisible, radio had a significant social impact and was quickly brought within legislative and regulatory frameworks that sought to minimise the impact of interference among a swelling number of transmissions. The regulation of airwaves and spectrum was from the very outset a hot political topic. “Interference by broadcasters with one another quickly became so severe that the industry appealed to the US governments to set up some system of licensing so that radio stations could be alone in their segment of the spectrum.” (de Sola Pool 1990, 26) It was not until the mid 1980s that low-powered radio devices (operating at certain frequencies in a very limited part of the spectrum) were deregulated and opened up for unlicensed use.

Radio is the technical apparatus of Hertzian space the atmosphere of electromagnetic radiation that surrounds us in information and the space that makes panoptical technologies (but not regimes of vision) obsolete. As Eric Gordon’s work demonstrates, early responses to radio (and its electro magnetic invisibility) in New York illustrate how the separate fields of radio and architecture have changed eg where they have come from, how they have previously been theorized, and particularly in relation to networked technologies of the past. Light, sound and data all ride the electromagnetic forces that are now infusing the gravitational forces of classical and [post]modernist architecture. How is this new use of the spectrum clashing with, flowing alongside, and resisting the other non-corporeal forces of power that are warping and folding the fabric of urban experience?

Anthony Dunne puts it this way. Radio,

meaning part of the electromagnetic spectrum, is fundamental to electronics. Objects not only ‘dematerialise’ into software in response to miniaturisation and replacement by services, but literally dematerialise into radiation… Whereas cyberspace is a metaphor that spatialises what happens in computers distributed around the world, radio space is actual and physical, even though our senses detect only a tiny part of it. (Dunne 2005, 101)

Simply put, we are concerned with looking at how bodies are becoming bound to the fabric of the city through the invisible, silent and sometimes unregulated waves of radio. We want to trace its connection to the emergent logic of touch which appears around ‘contactless technologies’ enabled by electromagnetic fields using technical procedures drawn from the fields of radio and radar engineering (Finkenzeller 2003, 7). In recent years, automatic identification procedures have transformed distribution logistics, service industries and material flow systems. Their evolution from barcode and optical character recognition to silicon chips has ushered in a range of electronic data-carrying devices that allow for the contactless transfer of information between the device and its reader. Because of the procedures used for the transfer of power and data, contactless ID systems are called Radio Frequency Identification (or RFID) systems.

While RFID technologies are increasingly prevalent, they are not without controversy. Bruce Sterling’s long-running “Arphid Watch” blog contains a good summary of one persistent objection:

Many aspects of RFID interaction are fundamentally invisible; as users we experience two objects communicating through the ‘magic’ of radio waves. This invisibility is also key to the controversial aspects of RFID technology; once RFID antennas are hidden inside products or in environments, they can be invoked or initiated without explicit knowledge or permission. (Sterling 2009)

This invisibility requires a new conceptualisation that is not based on visuality, but rather, is founded on distributive principles that deal in waves, frequencies, and modulations. For us, the protocols of radio offer a crucial way to understand emergent networks of ubiquity. A number of authors have discussed very similar issues in publications that have sought to make a contribution to what might be termed “new media urbanism” (Graham 2007, Townsend 2000 and 2006, McCullough 2007, Zook and Graham 2006, Sassen 2001). As this issue has developed as a topic it has become clear that the reality of an invisible technological un-boundedness is far more complex and differentiated than many proponents of ubiquitous or pervasive computing acknowledge.

We might also usefully recall Lewis Mumford’s prescient studies of invisible infrastructures such as sewage and communication systems which can be viewed in the same manner: “Beneath the visible city, an invisible city grows apace: a buried city of waterpipes and sewers and gas mains and electric cables and steam pipes and telephone wires” (Mumford 1938, 239). More recently Stephen Graham raised many of these issues discussed in this chapter in the book Telecommunications and the City (Graham 1996).

Ubiquitous media and the changing social relationships that frame their use can also be seen as providing another variable geometry of everyday urban environments. As Crang, Crosbie and Graham argue, these changes present “opportunities for restructuring the time-space dynamics of everyday lives, service supply regimes, and the broader time-space patterns of urban development. The dynamic and relational geographies of such transitions reconstitute cities as key spatial pivots within telescoping scalar relations, operating at near instantaneous speeds, from the scale of the body to the transnational” (Crang, Crosbie, Graham 2006, 2552). They posit a “multispeed urban landscape” that structures urban areas in an uneven, accelerated and differentiated fashion. The urban morphology which has been effected by new communications technologies is also in a process of “unevenly reconfiguring the logistical time-space practices of everyday urban life” (Crang, Crosbie, Graham 2006, 2554).

As McCullogh has it, although the “dematerialized and tunneling effects of global communication certainly exist, the local integration and tuning of crossovers between these and preexisting infrastructures also becomes an important competitive advantage for a city” (McCullough 2007, 389). In response to Castells, McCullough argues that “not all is flow in the space of flows… the flows of people, goods, and information require fixed channels, switches, and fittings to become most effective” (McCullough 2007: 390). As can be witnessed with many location-based services (such as RFID, onboard navigation systems, intelligent transportation systems and the like) the issue of control or ‘access’ within the use of such technologies is different depending on the technology used and where you use it.

There are a number of different technological systems that employ spread-spectrum radio technology to create these new mobile architectures associated with ad-hoc networks, personal area networks and wireless systems such as Bluetooth, RFID and WiFi. The 802.11 family of over-the-air modulation techniques (commonly known as WiFi) was first released in 1997. WiFi is a particular type of unlicensed spread-spectrum technology, made available by the deregulation of certain radio frequencies for unlicensed use in 1985. Confined to a narrow part of the spectrum, this technical standard allows devices to operate on the 2.4 GHz band without a license. Although initially conceived as a small experimental project, wireless local area network devices based on the international 802.11 standard became popular as a non-regulated use of radio spectrum. WiFi allows for a range of wireless network practices to emerge, based on a set of global standards of interoperability. It is because of this technical standard that WiFi networks have become so popular as a connective and enabling technology, ‘free as the air’ (despite the fact that many networks are closed or only available via credit card).

Within the space constraints of this chapter, a short mention of what privacy means and how it is affected in relation to issues of freedom and control is warranted. Beyond the obvious issues to do with who has access to the network and the personal data that may be present, there are also new questions concerning the potential for wireless technologies to create a mobile panopticon. Dodge and Kitchin point to a number of concerns that pertain to the embedding and interconnecting of RFID-type devices into the everyday environment:

This location information will be generated at a fine spatial resolution, pinpointed to (potentially) within a few millimetres through pattern recognition, wireless triangulation to fixed sensor nets, and GPS, and will be dynamically collected so that the precise path of an individual can be recalled. All manner of things will `know’ where they are at all times, while many other `dumb’ objects will be routinely `chipped’ using RFID … technologies, making them instantly locatable on demand. Such rich capta will have the effect of opening up new time-space queries that were previously impossible. (Dodge and Kitchin 2007, 236)

The layers of radio communication operate at a series of scales, from long-distance high-powered radio signals to low-powered near-field signals. They form part of the creation of a machine-readable world that captures, stores and exchanges vast amounts of highly granular personal data about mobile bodies, objects, transactions and territorial units in urban environments. Across a variety of different technical protocols, layers, and devices, automatic identification and tracking of devices by readers operates in an apparently seamless fashion. A high density of private information is packaged, processed and recognised by a number of quite different technical systems, each of which has its own parameters and ability to share personal data it collects and records. This new kind of machine communication is defining an emergent architectural matrix that is both background and foreground a new type of ‘protocological surround’.

Protocol is by nature ‘indifferent to the content of information’ that it enables, publishes and distributes (Galloway 2006: xvi). We do not use the term ‘protocological surround’ metaphorically. Thus a protocological surround is a requisite condition for the type of sousveillance that Dodge and Kitchin discuss, inasmuch as it describes a network of material actions and processes, and also in the way that protocols are layered, stratified, sometimes ‘blatantly hierarchical’ (Galloway 2006: xvi). This type of protocol also highlights the regulated nature of information flows across multiple scales.

This protocological surround should not be confused with an enclosure, as it is as fragmented and dynamic as the bodies with which it coheres. An enclosure is merely one term in a semantic myriad of ‘surrounds’ which includes a variety of perspectival terms (like foreground, background, fore-middle-ground, periphery), navigational terms (such as path, enabling, blockage), volumetric terms (such as full and empty), as well as a host of other ‘atmospheric surrounds’ (like clear, polluted, spooky or tense). Thus the surround is as open as it is closed.

Operating under these wireless protocols, large and small devices constantly exchange data, creating new info-spatial formations that are perpetually shifting, impermanent and flexible. The scale of this protocological operation is more personal, domestic, and intimate. It is often related to the movements of our bodies in their own idiosyncratic quotidian movements. This flexible movement partly defines the protocological surround: it is a type of machine chatter that creates an enormous amount of background ‘conversation’ we hardly ever hear, let alone see.

Machine recognition is largely achieved today through a technological ensemble that utilises the radio spectrum in ways that confound traditional understandings of radio. Miniature transponders are embedded in an increasing array of everyday objects, which are typically ‘read’ by data capture devices (known as ‘interrogators’ or ‘readers’). An interrogator typically “contains a radio frequency module (transmitter and receiver), a control unit and a coupling element to the transponder… [M]any readers are fitted with an additional interface to enable them to forward the data received to another system (PC, robot control system etc)’ (Finkenzeller 2003, 7). The old conceptual models of broadcast radio and the regulatory practices of government are no longer appropriate to describe or understand the present plethora of radio-based identification systems that are shaping the new topologies we are exploring.

For this reason, this broader reconceptualisation of radio cannot be reduced to the increased use of two-way functionality. The multiplicity of today’s radio has little to do with the singularity of ‘the radio’ which we’ve come to associate primarily with AM or FM radio stations. New radio technologies such as WiFi, Bluetooth and RFID show us how some of these potentialities are being realised. The liveness and invisible aesthetics of classical radio also have little to do with the rapid evolution of the new urban surrounds that are emerging out of these contemporary technological and social formations. Mostly importantly in the context of this discussion, they draw our attention to the changing relationship between bodies and spaces. For Parisi and Terranova, ‘what bodies are thought to be’ is “a matter of an historically specific organisation of forces bought into being by capital and discursive investments” (cited in Clough, 2007,16). With this in mind, then how is the disciplinary body as ‘organism/self/subject’ that was enclosed within the multiple architectures of the Foucauldian ‘great confinement’ reorganised by what we might call the ‘enforced mobility’ of the ‘great connection’ (in which material walls and optical regimes reconfigure as wireless channels and hot spots built out of air and numbers)?

Following the work of Nigel Thrift and others, we can say that these new systems we are describing are re-ordering life through new non-representational systems of classification, mediation and measurement, ‘qualculated’ world of continuous and ubiquitous calculation (Thrift 2008, 102). The qualculated body is one that is endlessly varying, in constant oscillation. It moves through the city as a mobile body. As Brian Massumi succinctly puts it, “when a body is in motion, it does not coincide with itself. It coincides with its own transition: its own variation.” (Massumi 2002, 4). Thus movement, the relentless flow of bodies and bits, becomes fundamental to thinking through both space and bodies: or “nothing but affects and local movements, differential speeds” (Parisi and Terranova 2008).

As Mackenzie notes, wireless networks operate through what he calls “prepositionality”; in other words, they govern and express spatio-temporal relations like ‘at,’ ‘in,’ ‘with,’ by’, ‘between,’ ‘near,’ etc. “Because of their prepositional power to connect subjects and actions, wireless networks act conjunctively, they conjoin circumstances, events, persons and things.” (Mackenzie 2008). This prepositional relationship is transductive, pragmatically stitching the potentials of semantics into an ongoing experience of the city. The prepositional realtionship is also in a sense ‘governmental’ and anticipatory, not only preceding the ‘thing’, the ‘noun’ etc, but in so doing, determines spatio-temporal relations. There is a big difference between being ‘in’ range to being ‘out of’ range in a wireless world.

Wireless technologies thus hold the multiple surfaces of bodies into an evolving matrix that controls a person’s experience of the city. And digital cities, with all their baroque foldings and multiple surfaces (each sensing each other and creating a riot of beeps, alternating lights and intelligent passages), are about experience. Wireless structures experience and does not construct stable objects or static space. In a dematerialising (ie radio/wireless) city, the quality of experience becomes paramount, increasingly measured by how mobile one can be. The experience of the city is where many of the prime forces of power operate. As Deleuze explains Foucault’s concept of power,

We can conceive of a necessarily open list of variables expressing a relation between forces or power relations, constituting actions upon actions: to incite, to induce, to seduce, to make easy or difficult, to enlarge or limit, to make more or less probable and so on. (Deleuze 2006, 70)

But here in the radio city, power itself is made ubiquitous, soliciting its subjects by way of speed and convenience. No stopping, no waiting no resistance, in all senses of the phrase. In other words, power makes things smooth by taking away the friction that previously slowed down the body and its associated disciplinary information (what are now its multiple datasets stored across interconnected networks of business and governmentality).

3. Wireless regimes and the lightness of touch

Under these new conditions, our understanding of touch needs to move from the intimate and localised sensation of body-on-body (in whatever form that body may take) to a type of haptic engineering in which touch (as a sense) is extended over larger and more public spaces. Following Manning, for us, touch is a prosthetic gesture:

Touch is a prosthesis through which our bodies make contact. Touch is the manner in which I navigate from a subject position (an imagined stability) to an in-betweenness where the line between you and me becomes blurred. To touch is to become posthuman. (Manning 2007, 156)

Touch is extending its sensory range as more surfaces are becoming touchable, ‘thresholding’ us increasingly into the logistical drives of architecture. Along with this transformation, our descriptions of tactile sensations such as ‘soft’, hard’, ‘hold’, ‘push’, ‘grasp’ etc. will also change their meanings (Thrift 2008, 103). True to the locative sense of the contemporary urban condition, we don’t ‘touch’ so much as we move in or out of touch. In terms of a cybernetic sense of targeting, we stay ‘in range’ of the machines we couple and exchange data with.

The increase of tactile surfaces available for connectivity is tantamount to an increase in the multiple prostheses available to produce certain types of relations and certain types of data. Following Bruno Latour’s ‘Parliament of Things’, we could say that our prostheses have voices in the datascape. Or as Bratton and Jerimenko note, as objects become ‘alive’ and give voice to information, they gain a public voice in our mobile civic lives (Bratton and Jerimenko 2009). We are touched by machines that touch each other, and in so doing create new intensities of force.

When we speak of people navigating a city, of scanning and being scanned, it is important not to monumentalise the nature of control society. From our present perspective, this is not a Big Brother style pat-down from a broadcast radio imaginary. Instead, we would like to suggest that our daily navigations through these radio-enabled networks are much more modulated than this. For the touch we are dealing with is, on the whole, a light and intimate touch that often happens in the background of other complex negotiations with the city/architecture. “I reach out to touch you in order to invent a relation that will in turn, invent me” (Manning 2007, vx). As we sign up for various plans and attach various wireless prosthetics to our already thoroughly layered skin/phone/car/subway assemblages, we reach out to institutions of transit, information, and architecture in a loaded ‘handshake’. The compulsory exchange of personal data has never been so easy or seemingly painless (for those who comply at least). The topology of this ‘surround’ however, is riddled with power relations.

Once locked into this grid of the ‘urban sensible’ we flex and move within a constant surround of touch, in which one threshold folds into another (apparently seamlessly). Bodies and machines generate and radiate electromagnetic waves in infinite compositions. However, as is often the way, the de-centering of bodies and subsequent de-institutionalisation results in an ever tighter integration into a modulated system of control that is both public and pervasive. Thus we are touched by the machine.

But what is it that is touched? Certainly it is a touch that extends beyond the skin. Touch is not just concerned with the literal laying on of hands though in the ubiquitous city, that also occurs with greater and greater frequency. For instance, at the airport, the security officer’s latex-gloved hands runs over your breasts and along the inner leg, as if the clinical semiotic of the glove miraculously de-sexes the body and eradicates a lifetime of taboos associated with intimate and uninvited touch by strangers. Of course if we’ve read the governmental fine print on our boarding pass, we have ‘consented’. In order to gain the ‘right’ to travel, we submit to the surrounding processes that form part of our conditions of movement. Or as Erin Manning says, “to touch is not simply to put the organs in contact with the world. Touch foregrounds the senses as machinic assemblages.” (Manning 2009, xxii). This is precisely a form of touching without touching; or in the terms of RFID technologies, it is a form of ‘contactless contact’.

In an increasingly seamless world of ubiquitous computing and low-powered radio transmissions, there are no more hard-line borders. There are just intersecting thresholds of intensity. While the recognisable architectural thresholds of window, door and entrance continue to be invoked in the construction of contemporary space, ubiquitous radio identification systems add a significant number of background thresholds into the equation. Often unnoticed (or at least not foregrounded in an obvious visible fashion), these transmissions between transponders and radio frequency readers have become pervasive in the background architecture of contemporary urban life. We are in touch with a highly variegated system of tracking and identification without being in direct contact with the surface of objects or places.

This ‘contactless contact’ is one of the key characteristics of low-powered radio and miniaturised ubiquitous modulation-demodulation procedures. The digital communication systems that facilitate the transfer of data are brought about by a series of intimate transmissions and signal decodings that are achieved by way of electromagnetic waves in the radio spectrum. This contactless transfer of data between the data-carrying device and its reader constitutes a new set of spatial and material protocols that give shape to the ubiquitous city.

“The centre is no where the circumference is everywhere at once”, says Paul Virilio (Virilio 1995, 36). From outer space to inner space, it has all been colonised and integrated precisely because everything is now so converged and connected. Of course, this is not always a good thing, as Vilem Flusser has noted: “An omnipresent dialogue is just as dangerous as an omnipresent discourse” (Flusser 2007,124).

4. Engagement and contact in the wireless surround

What kind of sensuous regime is in operation, when contact is not felt, noise is not heard and vision is conducted without optic techniques? When engagement is prosthetic? It remains for us to ask how citizens can engage with power under these new conditions of mobility and connectivity. As we have shown, many of the transactions and interrelations that make up the new architectural topology we are concerned with here occur outside the field of vision we might even say ‘under the radar’. The contactless contact we are describing assumes a body that does not itself need to be aware of the network.

The wireless body is connected, linked-in and fully operationalised and yet mostly it is unable to perceive the network and its own conditions of existence. The protocological surround of the wireless city, this ‘everyware’, operates at the scale of the body and at the scale of architecture. Despite this, we tend to engage with the city in a disengaged fashion, within a barely perceptible protocological surround. Under such conditions, the notion of citizen with all its incumbent rights is modulated back into the space of flows (in the same way that any other material object in this mobility system is). Here we might highlight the transformation of civil society to logistical society and ask what kind of engaged citizen we might imagine if citizenry isn’t even really aware of its engagement anymore?

The logic of access, control, tracking, and supply chain management grant unique identifiers by way of radio waves that define new shapes for the city. They promise synchronisation, anti-collision protocols, and ‘automatic’ identification on the fly. Signal, spectrum, coding and modulation procedures fold into haptic relations and new possibilities of touch. Even when you’re not touching something you’re touching something. This is what happens when networks go mobile they have to graft on to you in a new way. There’s a contact of some sort, even if it’s ‘contactless contact’. Within the parameters of the new control society, we need to focus on the politics of touch. It is a politics and an aesthetics that has moved off the body (without organs) and shifted elsewhere. The sources of control happen within the realm of touch, and we need to think about this in terms of the politics of these new conditions.

We have highlighted the pernicious ubiquity of radio frequencies in everyday accessories of mobility: the car key, e-tag, bus card, and money cards that give us access (or not) to networks of data, objects, mobility, and highways. These diagrammatics and aesthetics refer to the ways we enter physical and data portals, pass through the threshold, open the door, enter the passenger section and so on. A number of thematics emerge: the inadvertence of the network; the ineluctable nature of data transfer; distributed processing; compulsory dialogue in the background of the ubiquitous-city. These machinic communications are largely unseen, unknown, but not unfelt. This thresholding activity is happening all around us and all the time. It is registered on bodies with the intensity of the communications handshake. And still, the lightness of touch and the intimacy of radio we are invoking here is highly charged. It is almost a sexual intimacy that emerges between you and the things in your pocket that can be ‘read’ by a machine. All of these things are associated with closeness, personalisation, the touching of the senses, or the penetration of a vibration that literally goes inside your body. Following David Bissell, we would say vibration is “not an intermediary force that is exerted by or forms a presence between more-or-less powerful objects. Rather the event of vibration as a process generates the very effect of different materialities whilst on the move”(Bissell 2010).

The topological constancies we are invoking here do not privilege the visual, but instead focus on the way that coding and modulation happens over a complex invisible assemblage. A new understanding of the wireless city is not about mapping the urban panorama; it is about mapping the ‘protocological surround’ that allows us to understand how the complex interplay of bodies, spaces and data interconnect to form new geographies and architectures.

The topological formation we are describing is also what we might call ‘membranic’. If classical radio is largely concerned with analogue wave and modulation procedures, digital modulation procedures invoke a concatenation of low-powered and spread-spectrum signals, coding and transcoding. Wireless architecture is thus also about about negotiating and understanding the different channels, ‘membranes’ and thresholds that we are folded into. In this sense there are multiple variations on the ‘wireless body’ and the ‘wireless city’ which is why architecture and urbanism needs to attend to this new topology. Hence we can say that the skin of architecture what we have been calling the ‘protocological surround’ is digitally modulated. It oscillates across a spectrum of code-signal that organises the body and architectural space in a variety of ways.

Under such conditions, the ‘freedom’ implied by wirelessness comes at a cost. The total ubiquity of body-network relations actually constrains freedom of movement as much as it appears to allow it. In the emergent wireless city, we are increasingly enmeshed in the informational loops of feedback and emergence that modulate boundaries between bodies and objects/spaces of all sorts. The wireless city is organised into differential degrees of speed and intensity that invoke new techno-social relationships between embodiment and information, between bodies and borders.

In this seamless world of ubiquitous computing, there are no more borders, only thresholds of intensity where the ambient reality of life in the city is formed through prosthetic desire for mobile momentum and easier connections; where our wireless lives (that seemingly free us in space) only bind us tighter to a digitally modulated geography of the air.

REFERENCES

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Boyer, Christine, 1996. Cybercities. New York.: Princeton Architectural Press.

Bratton, Benjamin. and Jeremijenko, Natalie. 2009. Suspicious Images, Latent Interfaces. New York.: The Architectural League of New York.

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de Sola Pool, Ithiel. 1990 Technologies Without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global Age, Cambridge.: Harvard University Press.

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Authors Bio:

Fuller + Harley are an interdisciplinary research-production team who fuse new media theory and practice in a variety of formats. For the past five years, they have been working on a multi-modal project that analyses the flows and network spaces of contemporary airports. Gillian Fuller, who trained as a semiotician and now specialises in new media geographies and mobile cultures, has worked in public radio, museums, now academia. She has published in journals such as Borderlands, FibreCulture and Social Semiotics and chapters in many international texts around topics of Mobilities, Airport cultures and politics and biometrics and biopower. She is co-editing the forthcoming book, Stillness in a Mobile World for the International Library of Sociology Series (Routledge). Ross Rudesch Harley is an artist and writer whose media work has been exhibited in venues such as at the Pompidou Centre, New York MoMA, Ars Electronica, and the Sydney Opera House. His writing has appeared in Art + Text, Convergence, Screen, Rolling Stone and The Australian. Their recent work, Aviopolis: A book about airports was published by Black Dog Publishing, London, in 2005. They are both researchers at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. For further information about their work, visit aviopolis.com, stereopresence.net and transitsemiotics.org.

Been hard at work with a dedicated crew to produce Christian Jankowski’s new work for the Biennale of Sydney, opening on Tuesday 11 May. Andrew Frost (of Art Life fame)is appearing in front of the camera and coproducing the work which will also appear on ABCTV’s “Art Nation” in four separate segments. Simon von Wolkenstein is behind the camera, capturing some beautifully lit scenes in a bunch of pretty cool locations — like Quay Restaurant on Sydney’s harbour, thanks to the generosity of Leon Fink. Melissa Ratliff at the Biennale has been getting the least sleep of anybody as the countdown to the opening continues, and COFA students and alumni (Karl Emmett, Jo Skinner and Hugh Marchant) have been doing a great job assisting in the production.Check out a bit more on the shoot on the new COFA blog.

Here’s a bit about the project from Christian:

The art work will consist of TV Journalists reporting on the production of an artwork which will become the artwork itself ‘reporting’ live from the inside of art production. The journalists will find different theater-like settings, staged in the style of a tableau vivant with “frozen” artists, actors and people that in fact work for the biennale. The TV-journalists are requested to inform the public about the situations they are facing, ( e.g. the location the happening takes place, the activity that is represented by the participants of the tableau vivant) in the style of a reporter reporting live from the site of action. Their reports will form part of Christian Jankowski´s video work shown at the Biennale in a work that reflects on the creation of art, journalism, and the media-spectacle of large cultural events such as biennales.

Stick insects on rod from Maria Fernanda Cardoso on Vimeo.

New project withMaria Fernanda Cardoso: Stick insects on rod can be found on Vimeo. HD mono channel video. X minutes.
Juvenile stick insects mimic the movement of a branch as if moved by wind, all while hanging up in the air from a metal rod.

Off to New York to participate in the Open Video Conference. Looks set to be a great event with some great presentations scheduled by the Information Society Project at the Yale Law School with support form the Mozilla Foundation among others. So what is Open Video? From the site:

“As internet video matures, we face a crossroads: will technology and public policy support a more participatory culture—one that encourages and enables free expression and broader cultural engagement? Or will online video become a glorified TV-on-demand service, a central part of a permissions-based culture? Open Video is a movement to promote free expression and innovation in online video.”

I’m giving a talk on artists video and the so-called “open circuits” of distribution envisaged by some artists in the 1970s. Here’s my spiel:

“This presentation argues that the most radical proponents of video art were always concerned with establishing alternative networks of communication based on the principle of “open circuits” and “participation TV”.

An understanding of this historical context is helpful in highlighting the potentials to be found in today’s web-based networks that privilege “sharing”, “participation” and “openness”.

I want to suggest that solutions to these challenges can be found in open archive principles, and that these approaches will “diversify the video culture” in new and unexpected ways. The radical challenges to television, art and culture made by video artists in the 1960s and 1970s find their echo today in the principles of Open Source, Creative Commons, Open Content and other emerging principles of participatory culture.”

Contemporary distribution stands or falls on the steps taken to securely move and store products, from the manufacturing phase to the customer phase of the supply chain. The global supply chain links together a complex network of organizations, people, technology, logistics, information and resources that are needed to safely move products from the supplier stage to the customer stage of the process.

The configuration of this mobile network optimizes distribution by tracking and moving things as efficiently as possible from place to place. The guarantee of their secure arrival underscores the financial viability of the transportation industry.

In the 1980s, the term Supply Chain Management (SCM) was developed to express the need to integrate the key business processes, from end user through to original suppliers. The basic idea behind SCM is that businesses cooperatively involve themselves in a supply chain by exchanging information regarding market fluctuations and production capabilities. Today’s supply chain security combines SCM with state of the art networked security requirements of the system, which are driven by perceived threats such as terrorism, piracy, and theft.

The supply chain network constitutes one of the world’s largest industries. This global sector mobilizes resources that range from trucks to airplanes, trains, ships, barges, pipelines, warehouses and logistics services. During 2008, the total value of the U.S. transportation industry was about $1.8 trillion. The supply chain, in its many facets and sectors, is estimated to employ about 4.5 million Americans. Recent improvements in credentialing, screening and validating of products, advance notification systems, locks and tamper-proof seals, perimeter checks and surveillance systems provide the security that is essential to today’s SCM.

Speed is a central component of SCM. Despite this, the sequencing and scheduling of inventory often appears immobile, locked away in containers, sitting on docks and lying inert.  Velocity is measured not so much by land-speed, as it is by response time (the time between when a customer places an order and receives delivery). This is a key determinant in differentiating the provision of services by competing firms.
Product variety (the number of different products available in the system) is guaranteed by standardized processing that calculates information inputs and outputs. Thus, information management provides the configurations that a customer desires from the distribution network. In a complex series of sourcing, manufacturing and delivery of products, SCM networks privilege the concept of “availability” above all else (the probability of having a product in stock when a customer order arrives).

According to the principles of SCM, if all relevant information is accessible to all companies, everyone in the supply chain has the possibility of optimizing the entire supply chain (rather than making it less efficient based on local self-interest). SCM suggests that this will lead to better planning of production and distribution, which cuts costs and provides a better overall product. However, none of these efficiencies can be attained if the security of the supply chain cannot be guaranteed.

The wide acceptance of SCM has given rise to a new kind of competition in the global market. Competitive edge is no longer based on one company versus another, but rather takes place on a supply chain versus supply chain basis. For this reason, standardized data models have been implemented by the World’s Customs Organization in an effort to improve operational capacity while maintaining security of the overall system.

Their Framework of Standards to Secure and Facilitate Global Trade, known as the “SAFE Framework” underscores the manner in which SCM approaches have influenced security management. The Container Security Initiative (initiated in 2002 by the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection under the auspices of Homeland Security) extends the zone of security outwards to reciprocal  participant countries. Such initiatives seek to reduce the reporting burden of industry through the elimination of duplicated data entry and by maximizing the re-use of information across regulatory agencies.

Several distinct problems for SCM security have arisen in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008/9. As retail and business-to-business sales have fallen, worldwide purchasers and importers of goods have implemented inventory reduction to better position themselves for the recession. Because of this, orders to manufacturers have plummeted, and therefore the need to ship goods has plummeted as well. Much of the global distribution network currently lies idle, and security vunerabilities do not have the same priority as economic fundamentals.
The global credit crisis has made it extremely difficult (sometimes impossible) to get vital trade financing that has historically funded the flow of global shipments. In global capitalism, circulation (of all kinds) is crucial to the operation of the economy. However, firms that operate the container ships that traverse the world have seen a dramatic reduction in business. Intense competition and empty ships have created a fall in shipping prices. Ports are suffering a large decline in arrivals.

In early March 2009, the number of massive container ships sitting idle globally was estimated at an all-time high of 453 vessels. Container shipping prices had fallen by more than 90% at one point in early 2009.

Air cargo has seen substantially changes, with a global drop of 23% in January 2009. According to business reports, firms such as UPS, DHL and FedEx are experiencing a significant slowdown in the movement of products via their global networks.

The recent downturn in global distribution needs to be seen in a broader historical context. According to World Trade Organization statistics through 2005:

* World merchandise exports have risen from $157 billion in 1963 to $10.159 trillion (in 2005).
* The nations of the European Union lead the world in merchandise exports, accounting for $4.0 trillion in 2004 and representing 39% of all global merchandise exports. The US accounted for $904 billion, representing 8.7% of all global exports; China accounted for $762 billion, representing 7.3%; Japan accounted for $595 billion, representing 5.7% of all global exports.

“Distribution/Network/Configuration: A Photo Essay On Operating Control”, in Andrew R. Thomas (ed), Supply Chain Security, Praeger Security International, Connecticut, 2009, [forthcoming].

I’ve been in process with this project for almost a year now, and looking forward to start to resolve it into a new series of works. I’m playing with a new working title, alluding to Gus Van Sant’s Keanu Reeves/River Phoenix vehicle (itself full of allusions to the B 52s and other cultural time-warps). Not sure if it’s too “myspacey”, or whether people will think that I really think I have my own personal airspace.

Regardless,I like the overall feel of the new video output, some of which can be found here.

These are some of many new videos I’m working on with Leo Martyn as part of a large project to map the experience of air travel through the invisible lines traced across the planet daily. They are cross-sections through time and space, idiosyncratic mappings of my own personal air travel over the past ten years. Here in one frame we can see the traces of my journeys up in the air and connecting to the terminal spaces that define the edges of global airways.

Looks like Lawrence English is all set to work with me on the sound for the piece. His Airport Symphony work was great, and he’s been off recording and mixing a whole bunch of new airport sound/music since that piece was launched. You can buy the double CD from his Room40 label (and check out a whole swag of other excellent independent experimental and electronica stuff).

Building upon work done with Mr Snow and Zina Kaye in 2007, this will be a mega collection of airpsaces I have entered into, negotiated and traversed. To me they are like spindly “air-tenrils” that connect me to the air from the ground up into the sky, and across fairly large temporal zones (if you reckon a decade is a long time to travel in time).

Clearly defined by the rules and regulations of air traffic control and the carving up and management of international airways, this project is an extension of earlier mobility research projects I have been working on for some time.

I’ve been in process with this project for almost a year now, and looking forward to start to resolve it into a new series of works. I’m playing with a new working title, alluding to Gus Van Sant’s Keanu Reeves/River Phoenix vehicle (itself full of allusions to the B 52s and other cultural time-warps). Not sure if it’s too “myspacey”, or whether people will think that I really think I have my own personal airspace.

These are some of many new videos I’m working on with Leo Martyn as part of a large project to map the experience of air travel through the invisible lines traced across the planet daily. They are cross-sections through time and space, idiosyncratic mappings of my own personal air travel over the past ten years. Here in one frame we can see the traces of my journeys up in the air and connecting to the terminal spaces that define the edges of global airways.

Looks like Lawrence English is all set to work with me on the sound for the piece. His Airport Symphony work was great, and he’s been off recording and mixing a whole bunch of new airport sound/music since that piece was launched. You can buy the double CD from his Room40 label (and check out a whole swag of other excellent independent experimental and electronica stuff).

Building upon work done with Mr Snow and Zina Kaye in 2007, this will be a mega collection of airpsaces I have entered into, negotiated and traversed. To me they are like spindly “air-tenrils” that connect me to the air from the ground up into the sky, and across fairly large temporal zones (if you reckon a decade is a long time to travel in time).

Clearly defined by the rules and regulations of air traffic control and the carving up and management of international airways, this project is an extension of earlier mobility research projects I have been working on for some time.

SCREEN CULTURE IS EXPLODING AND MUTATING INTO NEW FORMS ALL AROUND US. IT’S HAPPENING IN PLACES AND FORMATS THAT ARE CHALLENGING THE VERY NATURE OF THE SCREEN AND THE BOUNDARIES OF MEDIA THAT MANY ARGUE HAVE BEEN CRUMBLING FOR DECADES. WHILE IT’S TRUE TO SAY THAT ART, CINEMA AND VIDEO HAVE CROSS-POLLINATED EACH OTHER SINCE THEIR INCEPTION, I WANT TO REFLECT ON THE POST-MEDIUM CONDITION IN WHICH WE FIND OURSELVES. THE SINGULARITY OF CINEMA (IF EVER THERE WAS SUCH A THING) HAS BEEN CONFRONTED BY THE EVOLUTION OF CAPTURE TECHNOLOGIES, MULTI-IMAGE LITERACIES, MULTI-PLATFORM DELIVERY AND NEW FORMS OF PRESENTATION YET TO BE INVENTED.

The idea of the medium as a physical substance for creating artistic forms is hard to maintain as the material conditions for this technical support are undergoing such massive transformation. These days it’s not uncommon for screens and projected images to appear on massive public displays, or on tiny 500-micron living tissues. Windows of office buildings may form the individual pixels for a giant image, or microscopic cells can be used for the purposes of “bio-cinema.” The night sky provides the canvas for orchestrated projections of light and sound. Portable domes and low cost sound/projection systems are becoming increasingly available for artists to work with. Enterprising designers are imagining car headlights as projectors that can beam these highly mobile images onto any available surface.

Even clouds, satellites and other celestial objects can now double as screens for the moving image. According to Scott Hessels (who reminds us of many of these things in the Summer issue of ANAT’s Filter magazine) “it is no longer so important what we are watching, but rather how we watch it.”

The Double Helix: Art and the Moving Image Symposium, held at the Samstag Museum as part of the Adelaide Film Festival, provided the impetus for stimulating insights into this question of how we watch and experience moving image culture. The two-day conference program also included a series of screenings, exhibitions and a selection of works from the DomeFest program (exhibited in a university planetarium). The relationships between visual artists, filmmakers and the plethora of new screen contexts lies at the centre of all these discussions. This article is not so much a review of this program as a reflection on the larger issues raised by this engaging international event.

For me the most challenging issue to come out of the Double Helix program is to do with the nature of the post-medium universe we work and play in these days. It makes little sense to talk about the media-specificity of cinema, for instance, in a moment where many films are made without the help of Kodak, the existence of sprocket-holes or a multiplex to play in. As Larry Kardish, Senior Curator of Film and Media from NewYork’s MoMA put it, cinema is no longer film, and films are made for contexts that can no longer be described as cinemas.

In this year’s Sundance Festival, for the first time in its history, more video was screened than celluloid. Nobody really seems to care any more about the ‘purity’ of film, and most of the directors shooting on HD and other digital formats continue to refer to themselves as filmmakers. As we head towards a massively networked ‘laptop cinema’ jacked in to LCD projectors configured for public and private viewings, it’s worth probing a little more into these and other forms related to the various screen cultures and practices that have emerged over the last couple of years.

The Double Helix conference presented plenty of opportunities for speakers and audience to reflect on the extent to which conventional rectilinear screen formats and cinema-style screening spaces predetermine and limit the potentialities of an expanded cinema. Gene Youngblood’s term (invented in the late 1960s) remains pertinent today as the possibilities for screen experiences outside conventional cinema proliferate significantly. Over the weekend there were plenty of talks referring to “cinema outside the cinema”, and plenty of opportunities to sample works barely recognisable as cinema in the ‘classic’ sense.

The DomeFest program clearly demonstrated the enormous possibilities being explored with ‘fulldome’ filmmaking and production techniques. Fulldome is a relatively new format (since around 1995) that provides immersive experiences via digital technologies presented on a hemispheric screen normally associated with planetariums. No longer constrained to imaging the night sky, fulldome is ‘exploding the frame’ of what planetarium domes might deliver. There are currently 500 fulldome facilities around the world, and the CGI-heavy short ‘films’ presented in the program clearly showed the potential for artists to push the boundaries. Scott Hessels’ extraordinary visualisation work Celestial Mechanics was made for fulldome, and reveals a digital universe that contains more than just stars. His patterns in the sky remind us of the mechanical constellations that invisibly encircle us in the form of satellites and all manner of human-made air traffic.

The questions that emerged from the symposium go to the heart of the dissolution and reformation of the screen. The work of Joyce Hinterding and David Haines (presented by way of an artists’ talk) is illustrative of this condition. Their work deals with fiction and phenomena, sensation, sound and the image plane in gallery and other spaces. It is a practice that is truly post-medium specific. (These ideas and others are explored in Haines’ blog, titled 21st Century Holograms, dealing with post-object art, aroma molecules, and post audio-video art practice””well worth a look.) Their work hints at an entirely different trajectory to cinema where, as Hinterding evocatively described their recent aroma works, “the image arrives directly to your brain in a powerful way” (see RT89, p27).

Another artist working in a similarly expanded practice is Mexican-Canadian Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (RT89, p22). While Australian audiences have had few opportunities to see his work, his keynote at the conference highlighted the extent to which the ‘cinematic’ can be transposed to techniques, viewing contexts and technological means that seem to have nothing to do with movies or filmmaking.

His large-scale public artworks and ‘interactive’ installations engage the public in playful and sometimes profound ways. He describes the work he presented (well documented on his website, www.lozano-hemmer.com) as a “dis-intermediation” of experience””a series of very public interventions into screen and public space. In many of his projects, the screen has nothing to do with a circumscribed surface. His projects play with the ability to skew, rotate, shift and map the image onto a variety of unexpected surfaces, and with playful, engaging and surprising results. He captures, re-presents and plays with the visualisation of data in complex and challenging ways.

As with many artists working at the limits of media specificity, his emphasis on “relational architecture” brings screen and sound technologies into dynamic relation with audience participants and the surfaces of projection. Many of Lozano-Hemmer’s works play with the absence of image and the heightened sense of real time interaction by way of the simplest of forms: public projections of light into the sky or onto public buildings at large scale. His work encourages audiences to participate in what he refers to as “a corporeality of shadows” that come to life in a self-organising fashion. In the words of the artist, these works “cast people’s presence onto the media.”

It’s an idea that many working with interactive media would want to claim, though it’s not always successfully achieved in screen-based forms that rely on the clicking of buttons and standardised navigation practices now highly codified in our everyday lives. How much has Flash and CSS shaped the way we click, drag and drop our way around the four-sided screens we work with these days?

Lynette Wallworth’s major show at the Samstag Museum, Duality of Light, brings together a number the artist’s major interactive works created in recent years. Her work demonstrates the kinds of potential for new screen-based experiences that ask for our bodily engagement and personal (inter)action with her images and sounds “”no clicking here.

The way we touch, walk, and navigate our way through these works brings them into existence. We may capture the projected images on a beautiful translucent bowl, or raise our hand against the glass wall she’s projected her video portraits against in order to commence the work. The artist asks us to quite literally make a connection with the work.

Intimate, social and communal, these works are light years from conventional narrative cinema, and yet they gesture towards the power of the image in sequence, in space and in relation to the body of the audience.

The lines of distinction between cinema, video, installation, architecture and data visualisation seem less and less convincing as each moment passes. As John Conomos put it during his presentation, “artists don’t think categorically, they think a-categorically about these things.”

In the post-medium situation we find ourselves in, the media that artists use are infinitely differentiated, composited together, emergent and interconnected. In short, these are the tools of a dynamic media beyond the cinema.

Adelaide Film Festival and Samstag Museum of Art, Double Helix: Art & Moving Image Symposium, Feb 27-March 1; Domefest Project, Feb 24-27; Lynette Wallworth, Duality of Light, Samstag Museum, Feb 19-April 24; www.unisa.edu.au/samstagmuseum

For the first time in history at this year’s prestigious Sundance Film Festival, more video was screened than celluloid. And yet nobody really worried any more about the obsolescence of film. While most artists shooting on HD and other digital formats continue to refer to themselves as ‘filmmakers’, the media-specificity of film has been blown apart into a thousand shards.

It makes little sense to talk about ‘pure cinema’ in a moment where many films are made without the help of Kodak, the existence of sprocket-holes, or a multiplex to play in. Cinema is no longer film, and films are made for contexts that can no longer be described as cinemas. Most of us travel the world with mobile and portable devices capable of storing and networking more sound and images than the majority of people had access to in their entire lifetime even ten years ago.

And it’s not just cinema. Media culture is exploding and mutating into new forms all around us. It’s happening in places and formats that are changing the very nature of the media itself. From the ever-expanding Web to the latest generation of game platforms and mobile devices, artists are inventing new forms of expression that often defy the old categories.

Digital images and sounds are embedded into everyday places in a variety of ways. The young digital artists working today will be the ones who will shape this not-so-distant future just over the horizon. The Art Express 4D program provides an excellent glimpse into that nascent world.

Not quite cinema and not quite art, neither computer game or mainstream anime, the output of young emerging media artists show us new ways to blend, customise and challenge familiar media forms.

The most inventive and successful media works being made by young creators such as those presented here in Art Express cast their own presence onto the media. In the post-medium context of the present day and age, the art of media is emergent, participatory and interconnected. And as the media works included in this exhibition demonstrate, this emerging art of media is also personalised, expressive and playful.

Professor Ross Harley
Head of School of Media Arts
COFA, University of New South Wales

Position paper for Digital Cities 6 conference workshop

Ross Harley
University of New South Wales
Sydney, NSW2052
Australia
612 93850758
ross@unsw.edu.au

Gillian Fuller
University of New South Wales
Sydney, NSW2052
Australia
612 93856813
g.fuller@unsw.edu.au

Fuller + Harley are an interdisciplinary research-production team who fuse new media theory and practice in a variety of formats. For the past five years, they have been working on a multi-modal project that analyses the flows and network spaces of contemporary airports. Gillian Fuller, who trained as a semiotician and now specialises in new media theory, has worked in museums and published in journals such as Borderlands, FibreCulture and Social Semiotics. Ross Rudesch Harley is an artist and writer whose media work has been exhibited in venues such as at the Pompidou Centre, New York MoMA, Ars Electronica, and the Sydney Opera House. His writing has appeared in Art + Text, Convergence, Screen, Rolling Stone and The Australian. Their recent work, Aviopolis: A book about airports was published by Black Dog Publishing, London, in 2005. They are both researchers at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. For further information about their work, visit aviopolis.com, stereopresence.net and transitsemiotics.org.

ABSTRACT
The intimate relations of architecture to information in the new ‘u-city’ raises a set of questions around aesthetics, intimacy and constant interfacing with communication networks of all kinds. The relationships between architecture, movement and the city have long been discussed in terms of regimes of vision” eg the panoramas of railways and the cinematic city (cf Friedberg). This project is about tracking a genealogy/topology of mobile concepts, techniques and aesthetics located within the invisible waves of radio and an emergent logic of touch around “contactless technologies”. Rather than follow a representationalist logic of vision, we propose a new conceptualisation of touch and contact (Abelson et al, Benkler, Greenfield).

Here we initiate some discussion around the ontological and sociological implications of ubiquitous networks and automatic identification procedures, including mobile telephony,RFID, Bluetooth, wi-fi, and other wireless technologies. We ask how the interpenetration of architectural surfaces, bodies, and mobile devices involve a range of interrelations that guide and track human bodies and material objects in constant motion. Our focus is on reconceptualisation of the relation between architecture and radio” the different channels, “frames” and thresholds that bodies are folded into. If architecture is not only about the construction of the built environment and material forms, what new insights can be gained by considering the relationship between architecture and radio in the context of the contemporary wireless world?

General Terms
wireless, radio, networks, architecture, mobility, ontology, aesthetics

Keywords
wireless, transparency, radio, networks, architecture, mobility, haptics, aesthetics, touch,

1.INTRODUCTION
Moving within an architectural surround, a person fashions an evolving matrix, an architectural surround not entirely of her own making’” ( Arakawa and Gins 2002, p 40)

This position paper proceeds from a rhizomatic assumption that people form topological constancies within their environments and that these relations have (among many other things) an aesthetic dimension. What happens when the political aesthetics of screens, windows and motion through the “cinematic city” meets the beeps, whirrs, clicks and often inperceptible codes of ubiquity or “u-city”? If the political realm of aesthetics delimits what is visible/invisible, audio/inaudible, what do we make of wireless systems, in which one navigates a dynamic aesthetic often unknowingly? In this paper we breifly look at relations of radio and architecture through a consideration of the aesthetics and politics of touch.

2. WIRELESS REGIMES AND THE LIGHTNESS OF TOUCH
Following Erin Manning, ‘to touch is to engage in the potential of an individuation’ (Manning 2007, p xv). When we speak of people navigating a city scanning and being scanned, it is important not to monumentalise the nature of control society in this dynamic. From such a perspective, this is not a Big Brother style pat down from a broadcast radio imaginary. Instead, we would like to suggest that our daily navigation through networks are more modulated than this. For the touch we are dealing with is on the whole, a light and intimate touch that often happens in the background of other complex negotiations with the city/architecture. “I reach out to touch you in order to invent a relation that will in turn , invent me’ (Manning 2007.p vx). As we sign up for various plans and attach various wireless prosthetics to our already thoroughly layered skin/phone/car/etc assemblages, we reach out to institutions of transit, information, and architecture in a loaded handshake” the compulsory exchange of personal data has never been made so easy or seemingly painless (for those who comply at least).

Once locked into this grid of the “urban sensible” we flex and move within a constant background hum of touch, in which one threshold just folds into another. Bodies and machines generate and radiate electromagnetic waves in seemingly infinite compositions. This is a tantalising proposition: the constant motion in which hard architecture and mobile traffic communicate may in fact impede the nomadic imperatives of everyday life. However, as is often the way, the decentering of bodies and subsequent deinstitutionalisation results in an ever tighter integration into a modulated system of control that is both public and pervasive.

“The centre is no where the circumference is everywhere at once”, says Paul Virilio. From outer space to inner space, it has all been colonised and integrated precisely because everything is now so converged and connected. And network connections are (at the least) two way. This is not always a good thing, as Vilem Flusser has noted: “An omnipresent dialogue is just as dangerous as an omnipresent discourse”.

In an increasingly seamless world of ubiquitous computing and low-powered transmissions, there are no more hard-line borders. There are just intersecting thresholds of intensity. While the recognisable architectural thresholds of window, door and entrance continue to be invoked in the construction of contemporary space, ubiquitous radio identification systems add a significant number of background thresholds into the equation. Often unnoticed or at least not foregrounded in an obvious visible fashion, these transmissions between transponders and radio frequency readers have become pervasive in the background architecture of contemporary urban life. We are in touch with a highly variegated system of tracking and identifaction without being in direct contact with the surface of objects or places.

This “contactless contact” is one of the key characterisitics of low-powered radio and the miniaturised and ubiquitous modulation-demodulation procedures. The digital communication systems that facilitate the transfer of data are brought about by a series of intimate transmissions and signal decodings that are achieved by way of electromagnetic waves in the radio spectrum. This contactless transfer of data between the data-carrying device and its reader constitutes an new set of spatial and material protocols that give shape to the ubiquitous city. In order to understand this in more detail, we need to to turn to a discussion of radio’s genealogy and transformation into a new procedural system for the construction of contemporary spaces.

3.U-CITY: RADIO ON AND ON!
For us, radio offers a crucial way to understand the networks of ubiquity. It is not visual, its distributive in waves, frequencies, and modulations, it is quite literally invisible. Radio is a “refrain” that gathers us in. RFID systems construe people and objects as particular shapes in ephemeral dynamics, haptics and channels.

The new deployment of low-powered radio generates a new intimacy. It’s about the constant collapsing of the near and far, but in a seamless way. The layers of two-way radio communication operate at a series of scales, from long distance high powered radio signals to nearfield low-powered signals. Across a variety of different technical layers and devices, automatic identification and tracking operates in an apparently seamless fashion. A high density of information is packaged, processed and recognised by a number of quite different technical systems, each of which has its own parameters.

Large and small devices talk to each other constantly, creating an enormous amount of background chatter that we hardly ever hear, let alone see. Machine recognition is largely achieved today through low powered radio identification systems that utilise the radio spectrum in ways that confound traditional theories of radio. The old broadcast models of radio and the subsequent regulatory practices are no longer appropriate to describe or understand the present plethora of radio based identification systems.

It also cannot be reduced to the increased use of two-way functionality which has rarely been taken up by mainstream broadcasting and corporate ventures (as in talk-back radio, Top 40 radio etc). The multiplicity of today’s radio has little to do with the singularity of “the radio” which we’ve come to associate primarily with AM or FM radio stations. New radio technologies such as WiFi, bluetooth and RFID show us how some of these potentialities are being realised. They draw our attention to the relationship between bodies and spaces.

The liveness and invisible aesthetics of classical radio also have little to do with the rapid evolution of the new “urban sensible” that is emerging. Our topology does not privilege the visual, but focuses on the way that coding and modulation happens over a complex assemblage that is invisible. A new approach to the wireless city is not about mapping the urban panorama. It is instead about mapping the “urban sensible” so that we focus on how the complex interplay of bodies, spaces and data become intelligible.

Our topology is also what we might call “membranic”. If classical radio is largely concerned analogue wave and modulation procedures, digital modulation procedures invoke a concatenation of low-powered and spread-spectrum signals, coding, transcoding . Wireless architecture is no longer just about physical supports and the construction of lived space. It also about negotiating and understanding the different channels, “frames” and thresholds that we are folded into. In this sense there are multiple variations on the “wireless body”, which is why architecture needs to attend to this new topology: the design and construction of buildings needs to take into account the new wireless, which facilitates “contactless contact” and flow, rather than stability of form.

Hence the skin of architecture is digitally modulated, it oscillates, and contains a spectrum of code-signal that organises the body and architectural spaces in a variety of ways. At this point we might ask the question “what body?” This biometricised body is one that is endlessly varying, in constant oscillation. “When a body is in motion, it does not coincide with itself. It coincides with its own transition: its own variation.” This modulation of the body and identity across distinct and simultaneous systems of reference is both utopian and in Foucault’s terminology “pitiless”. In other words, the utopia of the ubiquitous network has collapsed into the Baroque complexities and Gothic horrors of real space-time. “Utopia is a place outside all places, but it is a place where I will have a body without body, a body that will be beautiful, limpid, transparent, luminous, speedy and colossal in its power and infinite in its duration”. This utopian body needs grounding, it needs to be contained again in the body that is “never under different skies” but an “absolute place, the little fragment of space where [one is], literally embodied”.

4. CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A NEW ONTOLOGY AND AESTHETICS OF RADIO
“Bringing abundant computation and communication, as pervasive and free as air, naturally into people’s lives.” MIT Project Oxygen

When the city follows the new principles of non-classical radio, what does that mean for our understanding of architecture? While there has been much discussion about the nature of spectacle and subjectification (in relation to the visual concept of the city), there are many questions that arise from the perspective of considering the city under the logic of touch, nearfield radio frequency and contactless contact. We would therefore need to develop an aesthetics, an ontology and a politics that has to do with wireless. There are a range of issues emerging from this reconceptualisation, and we need to construct a language in order to do this.

“Touch” is a research project that investigates Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things. They are developing applications and services that allow people to interact with everyday objects and situations through their mobile devices. More importantly, the work of Touch researcher Timo Arnall points to the kind of aesthetic framework that helps articulate many of the things we are signalling in this position paper. His work “explores the visual link between information and physical things, specifically around the emerging use of the mobile phone to interact with RFID or NFC”. Specifically, his work concerns the ways we might visually link information and physical things. His work asks how we can represent objects that have a digital function, information or history beyond it’s physical form. The dotted line stands as one such exemplar in the visual language and aesthetics of touch.

For us, the use of the dotted line is the equivalent to what Dziga Vertov’s “Man With a Movie Camera” was for Walter Benjamin in his search for an aesthetic approach and visual vocabulary that embodied the prosthetic eye” that 20th century body pulled apart, the mobile eye that could go anywhere. The dashed line that Arnall and his colleagues identify in a range of visual strategies, points to the lightness of touch that is part of the emergent wireless city . Radio frequencies are what cohere the mobile architectural body (an assemblage of material/immaterial, hard/soft etc) in place. It is also about the pernicious ubiquity of radio frequencies in everyday accessories of mobility: the car key, e-tag, bus card, and money cards that give us access (or not) to networks of data, objects, mobility, and highways. These diagrammatics and aesthetics refer to the ways we enter physical and data portals, pass through the threshold, open the door, enter the passenger section and so on.

The logic of access, control, tracking, and supply chain management grant unique identifiers by way of radio waves that define new shapes for the city. They promise synchronisation, anti-collision protocols, and “automatic” identification on the fly. The signal spectrum, coding and modulation procedures fold into haptic relations and new possibilities of touch.

Even when you’re not touching something you’re touching something. There’s a contact of some sort, even if it’s “contactless contact”. Within the parameters of the new control society we need to focus on the politics of touch. It is a politics and an aesthetics that has moved off the body (without organs) and shifted elsewhere. The sources of control happen within the realm of touch, and we need to think about this in terms of the politics of this new aesthetics.

Bounded by skin and under the same regulatory sky, biometrics inserts the body into the distributed database, and in so doing pushes the edge of the network to a new threshold. This, coupled with the increasing granularity of biographic data, emerges as the final loop in the network’s logic and actions. If biometrics capture the body, biographics captures its actions, its extensions across time and space.

A number of thematics emerge: the inadvertancy of the network; the ineluctable nature of data transfer; distributed processing; compulsory dialogue in the background of the u-city. These machinic communications are largely unseen, unknown, but not unfelt. This thresholding activity is happening all around us and all the time. It is registered on bodies with the intensity of the communications handshake. The lightness of touch and the intimacy of radio we are invoking here is highly charged.  It is almost a sexual intimacy that emerges between you and the things in your pocket being read by a machine. All of these things are associated with closeness, personalisation, the touching of the senses, the penetration of a vibration that literally goes inside your body.

In the emergent wireless city, we are increasingly enmeshed in the informational loops of feedback and emergence that modulate boundaries between bodies and objects/spaces of all sorts. The wireless city is organised into differential degrees of speed and intensity that invoke new techno-social relationships between embodiment and information, between bodies and borders. As we pass through the thresholds of networked life, we become an organism of that ecology. In this seamless world of ubiquitous computing, there are no more borders, only thresholds of intensity.

REFERENCES

[1] Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, Harry Lewis, Blown to Bits: Your Life Liberty and Happiness after the Digital Explosion, Addison Wesley, Boston, 2008.

[2] Arakawa & Gins, Architectural Body, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.

[3] Arnell Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/11/graphic-language-for-touch and http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/the-dashed-line-in-use

[4] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale, New Haven, 2006.

[5] Boyer, M. Christine, Cybercities, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996

[6] Klaus Finkenzeller RFID Handbook: Fundamentals and Applications in Contactless Smart Cards and Identification. John Wiley & Sons, 2003

[7] Friedberg Anne, The Virtual Window: from Alberti to Microsoft, Cambridge:MIT Press, 2006.

[8] Adam Greenfield, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, New Riders Publishing, 2006.

[9] Andrew Lippman and David Reed, “Viral Communications”, Media Laboratory Research, 2003.

[10] Manning Erin, The Politics of Touch” Minneapolis: MInnesota UP, 2007.

[11] Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Penguin Press, New York, 2008.

[12] David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Times Books, New York, 2007.

0. Introduction

If we follow the line of much literature surrounding airports and urban mobility, the emphasis often falls on the fact that these spaces are designed to handle the mega-scale and super-human pace of mass transit. Airports have rightly been associated with velocity, as zones of rapid movement managed by enormous processing systems that guide bodies and things in transit (Pascoe; Pearman; Koolhaas; Gordon; Fuller & Harley). Yet this emphasis tends to ignore the spectrum of tempos and flows that are at play in airport terminals from stillness to the much exalted hyper-rapidity of mobilized publics in the go-go world of commercial aviation.

In this photo essay I’d like to pull a different thread and ask whether it’s possible to think of aeromobility in terms of “uneven, differential mobility” (Bissell 280). What would it mean to consider waiting and stillness as forms of bodily engagement operating over a number of different scales and temporalities of movement and anticipation, without privileging speed over stillness? Instead of thinking mobility and stillness as diametrically opposed, can we instead conceive of them as occupying a number of different spatio-temporal registers in a dynamic range of mobility?

The following is a provisional “visual ethnography” constructed from photographs of air terminal light boxes I have taken over the last five years (in Amsterdam, London, Chicago, Frankfurt, and Miami). Arranged into a “taxonomy of differentiality”, each of these images comes from a slightly different angle, mode or directionality. Each view of these still images displayed in billboard-scale light-emitting devices suggests that there are multiple dimensions of visuality and bodily experience at play in these image-objects.

The airport is characterized by an abundance of what appears to be empty space. This may be due to the sheer scale of mass transport, but it also arises from a system of active and non-active zones located throughout contemporary terminals. This photo series emphasises the “emptiness” of these overlooked left-over spaces that result from demands of circulation and construction.

1. We Move the World

To many travellers, airport gate lounges and their surrounding facilities are loaded with a variety of contradictory associations and affects. Their open warehouse banality and hard industrial sterility tune our bodies to the vast technical and commercial systems that are imbricated through almost every aspect of contemporary everyday life.

Here at the departure gate the traveller’s body comes to a moment’s rest. They are granted a short respite from the anxious routines of check in, body scans, security, information processing, passport scanning, itineraries, boarding procedures and wayfaring the terminal. The landside processing system deposits them at this penultimate point before final propulsion into the invisible airways that pipe them into their destination. We hear the broadcasting of boarding times, check-in times, name’s of people that break them away from stillness, forcing people to move, to re-arrange themselves, or to hurry up. Along the way the passenger encounters a variety of techno-spatial experiences that sit at odds with the overriding discourse of velocity, speed and efficiency that lie at the centre of our social understanding of air travel. The airline’s phantasmagorical projections of itself as guarantor and enabler of mass mobilities coincides uncomfortably with the passenger’s own wish-fulfilment of escape and freedom.

In this we can agree with the designer Bruce Mau when he suggests that these projection systems, comprised of “openings of every sort in schedules, in urban space, on clothes, in events, on objects, in sightlines are all inscribed with the logic of the market” (Mau 7). The advertising slogans and images everywhere communicate the dual concept that the aviation industry can deliver the world to us on time while simultaneously porting us to any part of the world still willing to accept Diners, VISA or American Express. At each point along the way these openings exhort us to stop, to wait in line, to sit still or to be patient. The weird geographies depicted by the light boxes appear like interpenetrating holes in space and time. These travel portals are strangely still, and only activated by the impending promise of movement.

Be still and relax. Your destination is on its way.

2. Attentive Attention

Alongside the panoramic widescreen windows that frame the choreography of the tarmac and flight paths outside, appear luminous advertising light boxes. Snapped tightly to grid and locked into strategic sightlines and thoroughfares, these wall pieces are filled with a rotating menu of contemporary airport haiku and ersatz Swiss graphic design.

Mechanically conditioned air pumped out of massive tubes creates the atmosphere for a very particular amalgam of daylight, tungsten, and fluorescent light waves. Low-oxygen-emitting indoor plants are no match for the diesel-powered plant rooms that maintain the constant flow of air to every nook and cranny of this massive processing machine. As Rem Koolhaas puts it, “air conditioning has launched the endless building. If architecture separates buildings, air conditioning unites them” (Koolhaas). In Koolhaas’s lingo, these are complex “junkspaces” unifying, colliding and coalescing a number of different circulatory systems, temporalities and mobilities.

Gillian Fuller reminds us there is a lot of stopping and going and stopping in the global circulatory system typified by air-terminal-space.

From the packing of clothes in fixed containers to strapping your belt ““ tight and low ““ stillness and all its requisite activities, technologies and behaviours are fundamental to the “˜ï¬‚ow”™ architectures that organize the motion of the globalizing multitudes of today (Fuller, “Store” 63).

It is precisely this functional stillness organised around the protocols of store and forward that typifies digital systems, the packet switching of network cultures and the junkspace of airports alike.

In these zones of transparency where everything is on view, the illuminated windows so proudly brought to us by J C Decaux flash forward to some idealized moment in the future. In this anticipatory moment, the passenger’s every fantasy of in-flight service is attended to. The ultimate in attentiveness (think dimmed lights, soft pillows and comfy blankets), this still image is captured from an improbable future suspended behind the plywood and steel seating available in the moment more reminiscent of park benches in public parks than the silver-service imagined for the discerning traveller.

3. We Know Chicago

Self-motion is itself a demonstration against the earth-binding weight of gravity. If we climb or fly, our defiance is greater (Appleyard 180).

The commercial universe of phones, cameras, computer network software, financial instruments, and an array of fancy new gadgets floating in the middle of semi-forgotten transit spaces constitutes a singular interconnected commercial organism. The immense singularity of these claims to knowledge and power loom solemnly before us asserting their rights in the Esperanto of “exclusive rollover minutes”, “nationwide long distance”, “no roaming charges” and insider local knowledge. The connective tissue that joins one part of the terminal to a commercial centre in downtown Chicago is peeled away, revealing techno-veins and tendrils reaching to the sky. It’s a graphic view that offers none of the spectacular openness and flights of fancy associated with the transit lounges located on the departure piers and satellites.  Along these circulatory ribbons we experience the still photography and the designer’s arrangement of type to attract the eye and lure the body. The blobby diagonals of the telco’s logo blend seamlessly with the skyscraper’s ribbons of steel, structural exoskeleton and wireless telecommunication cloud.

In this plastinated anatomy, the various layers of commercially available techno-space stretch out before the traveller. Here we have no access to the two-way vistas made possible by the gigantic transparent tube structures of the contemporary air terminal. Waiting within the less travelled zones of the circulatory system we find ourselves suspended within the animating system itself. In these arteries and capillaries the flow is spread out and comes close to a halt in the figure of the graphic logo. We know Chicago is connected to us.

In the digital logic of packet switching and network effects, there is no reason to privilege the go over the stop, the moving over the waiting. These light box portals do not mirror our bodies, almost at a complete standstill now. Instead they echo the commercial product world that they seek to transfuse us into. What emerges is a new kind of relational aesthetics that speaks to the complex corporeal, temporal, and architectural dimensions of stillness and movement in transit zones: like “a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts” (Bourriaud 11).

4. Machine in the Café

Is there a possible line of investigation suggested by the fact that sound waves become visible on the fuselage of jet planes just before they break the sound barrier? Does this suggest that the various human senses are translatable one into the other at various intensities (McLuhan 180)?

Here, the technological imaginary contrasts itself with the techno alfresco dining area enclosed safely behind plate glass. Inside the cafes and bars, the best businesses in the world roll out their biggest guns to demonstrate the power, speed and scale of their network coverage (Remmele). The glass windows and light boxes “have the power to arrest a crowd around a commodity, corralling them in chic bars overlooking the runway as they wait for their call, but also guiding them where to go next” (Fuller, “Welcome” 164). The big bulbous plane sits plump in its hangar no sound barriers broken here. It reassures us that our vehicle is somewhere there in the network, resting at its STOP before its GO. Peeking through the glass wall and sharing a meal with us, this interpenetrative transparency simultaneously joins and separates two planar dimensions machinic perfection on one hand, organic growth and death on the other (Rowe and Slutsky; Fuller, “Welcome”).

Bruce Mau is typical in suggesting that the commanding problem of the twentieth century was speed, represented by the infamous image of a US Navy Hornet fighter breaking the sound barrier in a puff of smoke and cloud. It has worked its way into every aspect of the design experience, manufacturing, computation and transport.

But speed masks more than it reveals. The most pressing problem facing designers and citizens alike is growth from the unsustainable logic of infinite growth in GDP to the relentless application of Moore’s Law to the digital networks and devices that define contemporary society in the first world. The shift of emphasis from speed to growth as a time-based event with breaking points and moments of rupture has generated new possibilities. “Growth is nonlinear and unpredictable … Few of us are ready to admit that growth is constantly shadowed by its constitutive opposite, that is equal partners with death” (Mau 497).

If speed in part represents a flight from death (Virilio), growth invokes its biological necessity. In his classic study of the persistence of the pastoral imagination in technological America, The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx charted the urge to idealize rural environments at the advent of an urban industrialised America. The very idea of “the flight from the city” can be understood as a response to the onslaught of technological society and it’s deathly shadow. Against the murderous capacity of technological society stood the pastoral ideal, “incorporated in a powerful metaphor of contradiction a way of ordering meaning and value that clarifies our situation today” (Marx 4).

5. Windows at 35,000 Feet

If waiting and stillness are active forms of bodily engagement, we need to consider the different layers of motion and anticipation embedded in the apprehension of these luminous black-box windows. In The Virtual Window, Anne Friedberg notes that the Old Norse derivation of the word window “emphasizes the etymological root of the eye, open to the wind. The window aperture provides ventilation for the eye” (103).

The virtual windows we are considering here evoke notions of view and shelter, open air and sealed protection, both separation from and connection to the outside. These windows to nowhere allow two distinct visual/spatial dimensions to interface, immediately making the visual field more complex and fragmented. Always simultaneously operating on at least two distinct fields, windows-within-windows provide a specialized mode of spatial and temporal navigation.  As Gyorgy Kepes suggested in the 1940s, the transparency of windows “implies more than an optical characteristic; it implies a broader spatial order. Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations” (Kepes 77).

The first windows in the world were openings in walls, without glass and designed to allow air and light to fill the architectural structure. Shutters were fitted to control air flow, moderate light and to enclose the space completely. It was not until the emergence of glass technologies (especially in Holland, home of plate glass for the display of commercial products) that shielding and protection also allowed for unhindered views (by way of transparent glass). This gives rise to the thesis that windows are part of a longstanding architectural/technological system that moderates the dual functions of transparency and separation.

With windows, multi-dimensional planes and temporalities can exist in the same time and space hence a singular point of experience is layered with many other dimensions. Transparency and luminosity “ceases to be that which is perfectly clear and becomes instead that which is clearly ambiguous” (Rowe and Slutsky 45). The light box air-portals necessitate a constant fluctuation and remediation that is at once multi-planar, transparent and “hard to read”. They are informatic.

From holes in the wall to power lunch at 35,000 feet, windows shape the manner in which light, information, sights, smells, temperature and so on are modulated in society. “By allowing the outside in and the inside out, [they] enable cosmos and construction to innocently, transparently, converge” (Fuller, “Welcome” 163). Laptop, phone, PDA and light box point to the differential mobilities within a matrix that traverses multiple modes of transparency and separation, rest and flight, stillness and speed.

6. Can You Feel It?

Increasingly the whole world has come to smell alike: gasoline, detergents, plumbing, and junk foods coalesce into the catholic smog of our age (Illich 47).

In these forlorn corners of mobile consumption, the dynamic of circulation simultaneously slows and opens out. The surfaces of inscription implore us to see them at precisely the moment we feel unseen, unguided and off-camera. Can you see it, can you feel it, can you imagine the unimaginable, all available to us on demand? Expectation and anticipation give us something to look forward to, but we’re not sure we want what’s on offer.

Air travel radicalizes the separation of the air traveller from ground at one instance and from the atmosphere at another. Air, light, temperature and smell are all screened out or technologically created by the terminal plant and infrastructure. The closer the traveller moves towards stillness, the greater the engagement with senses that may have been ignored by the primacy of the visual in so much of this circulatory space. Smell, hunger, tiredness, cold and hardness cannot be screened out.

In this sense, the airplanes we board are terminal extensions, flying air-conditioned towers or groundscrapers jet-propelled into highways of the air. Floating above the horizon, immersed in a set of logistically ordained trajectories and pressurized bubbles, we look out the window and don’t see much at all. Whatever we do see, it’s probably on the screen in front of us which disconnects us from one space-time-velocity at the same time that it plugs us into another set of relations. As Koolhaas says, junkspace is “held together not by structure, but by skin, like a bubble” (Koolhaas). In these distended bubbles, the traveler momentarily occupies an uncommon transit space where stillness is privileged and velocity is minimized. The traveler’s body itself is “engaged in and enacting a whole kaleidoscope of different everyday practices and forms” during the course of this less-harried navigation (Bissell 282).

7. Elevator Musics

The imaginary wheel of the kaleidoscope spins to reveal a waiting body-double occupying the projected territory of what appears to be a fashionable Miami. She’s just beyond our reach, but beside her lies a portal to another dimension of the terminal’s vascular system.

Elevators and the networks of shafts and vents that house them, are to our buildings like veins and arteries to the body conduits that permeate and structure the spaces of our lives while still remaining separate from the fixity of the happenings around them (Garfinkel 175).

The terminal space contains a number of apparent cul-de-sacs and escape routes. Though there’s no background music piped in here, another soundtrack can be heard. The Muzak corporation may douse the interior of the elevator with its own proprietary aural cologne, but at this juncture the soundscape is more “open”. This functional shifting of sound from figure to ground encourages peripheral hearing, providing “an illusion of distended time”, sonically separated from the continuous hum of “generators, ventilation systems and low-frequency electrical lighting” (Lanza 43).

There is another dimension to this acoustic realm: “The mobile ecouteur contracts the flows of information that are supposed to keep bodies usefully and efficiently moving around … and that turn them into functions of information flows the speedy courier, the networking executive on a mobile phone, the scanning eyes of the consumer” (Munster 18).

An elevator is a grave says an old inspector’s maxim, and according to others, a mechanism to cross from one world to another. Even the quintessential near death experience with its movement down a long illuminated tunnel, Garfinkel reminds us, “is not unlike the sensation of movement we experience, or imagine, in a long swift elevator ride” (Garfinkel 191).

8. States of Suspension

The suspended figure on the screen occupies an impossible pose in an impossible space: half falling, half resting, an anti-angel for today’s weary air traveller. But it’s the same impossible space revealed by the airport and bundled up in the experience of flight. After all, the dimension this figures exists in witness the amount of activity in his suspension is almost like a black hole with the surrounding universe collapsing into it. The figure is crammed into the light box uncomfortably like passengers in the plane, and yet occupies a position that does not exist in the Cartesian universe.

We return to the glossy language of advertising, its promise of the external world of places and products delivered to us by the image and the network of travel. (Remmele) Here we can go beyond Virilio’s vanishing point, that radical reversibility where inside and outside coincide. Since everybody has already reached their destination, for Virilio it has become completely pointless to leave: “the inertia that undermines your corporeity also undermines the GLOBAL and the LOCAL; but also, just as much, the MOBILE and the IMMOBILE” (Virilio 123; emphasis in original).

In this clinical corner of stainless steel, glass bricks and exit signs hangs an animated suspension that articulates the convergence of a multitude of differentials in one image. Fallen into the weirdest geometry in the world, it’s as if the passenger exists in a non-place free of all traces. Flows and conglomerates follow one another, accumulating in the edges, awaiting their moment to be sent off on another trajectory, occupying so many spatio-temporal registers in a dynamic range of mobility.

References

Appleyard, Donald. “Motion, Sequence and the City.” The Nature and Art of Motion. Ed. Gyorgy Kepes. New York: George Braziller, 1965.

Adey, Peter. “If Mobility Is Everything Then It Is Nothing: Towards a Relational Politics of (Im)mobilities.” Mobilities 1.1 (2006): 75″“95.

Bissell, David. “Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities.” Mobilities 2.2 (2007): 277-298.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Paris: Les Presses du Reel, 2002.

Classen, Constance. “The Deodorized City: Battling Urban Stench in the Nineteenth Century.” Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism. Ed. Mirko Zardini. Baden: Lars Muller Publishers, 2005. 292-322.

Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge: MIT P, 2006.

Fuller, Gillian, and Ross Harley. Aviopolis: A Book about Airports. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2005.

Fuller, Gillian. “Welcome to Windows: Motion Aesthetics at the Airport.” Ed. Mark Salter. Politics at the Airport. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2008.

““”“”“. “Store Forward: Architectures of a Future Tense”. Ed. John Urry, Saolo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring. Air Time Spaces: Theory and Method in Aeromobilities Research. London: Routledge, 2008. 63-75.

Garfinkel, Susan. “Elevator Stories: Vertical Imagination and the Spaces of Possibility.” Up Down Across: Elevators, Escalators, and Moving Sidewalks. Ed. Alisa Goetz. London: Merrell, 2003. 173-196.

Gordon, Alastair. Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure. New York: Metropolitan, 2004.

Illich, Ivan. H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of Stuff. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985.

Kepes, Gyorgy. Language of Vision. New York: Dover Publications, 1995 (1944).

Koolhass, Rem. “Junkspace.” Content. 6 Mar. 2009 “¹http://www.btgjapan.org/catalysts/rem.html“º.

Lanza, Joseph. “The Sound of Cottage Cheese (Why Background Music Is the Real World Beat!).” Performing Arts Journal 13.3 (Sep. 1991): 42-53.

McLuhan, Marshall. “Is It Natural That One Medium Should Appropriate and Exploit Another.” McLuhan: Hot and Cool. Ed. Gerald Emanuel Stearn. Middlesex: Penguin, 1967. 172-182.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. London: Oxford U P, 1964.

Mau, Bruce. Life Style. Ed. Kyo Maclear with Bart Testa. London: Phaidon, 2000.

Munster, Anna. Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics. New England: Dartmouth, 2006.

Pascoe, David. Airspaces. London: Reaktion, 2001.

Pearman, Hugh. Airports: A Century of Architecture. New York: Abrams, 2004.

Remmele, Mathias. “An Invitation to Fly: Poster Art in the Service of Civilian Air Travel.” Airworld: Design and Architecture for Air Travel. Ed. Alexander von Vegesack and Jochen Eisenbrand. Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 2004. 230-262.

Rowe, Colin, and Robert Slutsky. Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal. Perspecta 8 (1963): 45-54.

Virilio, Paul. City of Panic. Trans. Julie Rose. Oxford: Berg, 2005.

Went to the Urban Screens conference and associated events in Melbourne. Very enjoyable time had by all, and a bit of my take on the whole affair can be found in realtime.

THEY’RE IN OUR POCKETS, THEY’RE IN OUR HOMES, IN OUR CARS, AND THEY’RE ALL AROUND OUR URBAN ENVIRONMENTS. IT’S HARD TO THINK OF A METROPOLITAN EXPERIENCE THAT ISN’T THOROUGHLY OVERLAYED AND INTERLACED WITH A HUGE VARIETY OF DIFFERENTLY SCALED SCREENS. THIS IS WHAT FIRST CAUGHT MY EYE AND LED ME TO ATTEND THE URBAN SCREENS EVENT IN MELBOURNE AT THE START OF OCTOBER 2008. HOW DO WE DEAL WITH ALL THESE IMAGE SURFACES AND NETWORKED DISPLAYS THAT TYPIFY THE PRESENT GLOBAL PUBLIC SPHERE?

When we think urban screens (as opposed to sub-urban, ex-urban or non-urban ones?), we typically conjure images of oversized projections strangely attached to Gehry-like buildings in hypermodern CBD plazas. Think Seoul. Think Times Square. Think Fed Square.

While the Bladerunner-scale of the moving image takes hold of our imagination and tends to hog centrestage, Urban Screens Melbourne 08 took a broader and more expansive view of the spatial impact of screen technologies in contemporary culture and cities. Urban screens can be seen as providing a new digital layer to the city, an augmented media space that folds and flexes its way into and out of contemporary urban experience. It was the event’s engagement with this broad field that made Melbourne’s Urban Screens 08 such an engrossing and stimulating event.

The third in an ongoing series of international projects (the first was held in Amsterdam in 2005 and the second in Manchester in 2007; RT84, p30), the Melbourne program focused its conference and related events around the theme of “Mobile Publics.” Consisting of a series of keynote addresses, panels and discussions, the conference provided a framework for the presentation of a wide variety of media works presented in public urban contexts. This multimedia program was developed by Mirjam Struppek, who was one of the originators of the Urban Screens conference in Europe, and a founding member of the newly established Urban Screens international network. The Mobile Publics Conference was jointly developed and presented by Scott McQuire, Nikos Papastergiadis and Sean Cubitt from Melbourne University’s School of Culture and Communication, and set the intellectual scene for the event as a whole.

It could be argued that Fed Square houses one of the most successful implementations of a large screen in a public mall/piazza space. Filling up an entire city block, the square was purpose-built in 2002 as a public meeting place for Melbourne. As Kate Brennan (CEO of Federation Square) noted in her opening remarks and comments during later discussions, the Fed Square screen has been programmed by the authorities/managers of that space at the same time as it’s been claimed by the general public. We see this most clearly in the public assemblies and displays of mass emotion around major sporting events and significant moments in our collective political and social history””witness the crowds around this and other large public screens for the Prime Minister’s Apology.

But does this mean that these outdoor screening spaces are appropriate for contemporary artists and media makers? Through the multimedia program, film screenings and joint broadcasting initiative, curator Struppek strove to engage audiences in the social/technical space of the Fed Square environs. This extended from the main 65-square metre Barco screen in the outdoor plaza to numerous indoor and outdoor public LED screens, interactive ticker screens and temporary projection installations. The scale of the programming, and the scope of the works was impressive, though ultimately impossible (for this reviewer at least) to see it all.

The large screen space was used to engage passersby in contemporary interactive works such as MobiToss””MobiLenin by Jurgen Schelble from Finland, SEED by Canadian artists Napoleon Brousseau, Gabe Sawhney, Galen Scorer, Dave Reynolds and Adam Bacsalmasi, and Troy Innocent’s x-milieu abstract interactive installation.

This context and curatorial strategy for works presented in Melbourne is not at all like the infamous SPOTS media facade in Berlin which began showcasing large-scale interactive artworks in 2005. Although this “˜screen’ and others of its kind in Europe were (for some time at least) devoted exclusively to electronic art and experimental/alternative content, the standard large TV format of Fed Square provides a very different, and arguably more difficult set of constraints for artists to work with. Many of the attempts I witnessed to involve the public in this kind of interactive engagement were not particularly successful, and highlight the complexity of making urban scale works that connect with “˜random’ publics.

The interactive program was complemented by a series of projection-based works that played open-air-cinema style in the evening. This is where the scale of screen, urban context and bodily rhythms of the audience fell into sharpest relief. It is incredibly difficult for these works to grab the attention of the casual passerby who has to find an entry point and an acoustic space for linear works such as these. A bit like outdoor cinema for the avant-garde, these works struggled to connect with the mobile and disengaged audience. Without the organising principle of a public political or sporting event, our bodily engagement with this form of public/social space collapses.

A number of speakers at the conference demonstrated these dilemmas from a variety of angles, focusing in on the ways media, art and technology collide with the practical construction and experience of urban space. Saskia Sassen’s opening night keynote was one of the highlights. Her talk, entitled “Heavy Metal and Fuzzy Logic”, neatly contrasted the liquid potential of media with the solid steel structures of the heavy architecture so predominant in the BMX Theatre where the conference took place. Building upon much of the work she has done as an investigator into global city/global slum (she invented the term), Sassen opened up a series of questions that were echoed by other presenters throughout the conference.

ANAT Director Melinda Rackham gave a beautifully illustrated overview of the types of work that artists and designers have been producing for a wide range of public spaces over the past few years. This helped set the scene for more culturally specific presentations by Yoshitaka Mori on “MobileTechnology Culture and the Emergence of “˜Mobile’ Subjectivities” in Japan and Aaron Tan’s impressive discussion of recent work from his Hong Kong design firm RAD. Other international speakers (such as Andreas Broeckmann, who spoke on the “Intimate Publics. Memory, Performance, and Spectacle in Urban Environments”, particularly as it applies to the contemporary reconstruction of Berlin’s social/screen space), and Leon van Schaik’s talk, “Spatial Intelligence”, expanded the theoretical horizons of the conference. Case studies presented by Manray Hsu on the Taipei Biennial and Soh Yeong Roh’s presentation on “The City as Open Creative Platform” were also noteworthy contributions to the discussions.

While it was difficult as a conference participant visiting from another city to find time to see all of the works presented around Fed Square in a couple of days, the informative display in the foyer outside the main conference theatre gave an interesting snapshot of the innovative ways that artists, designers and architects are dealing with screenspaces in urban settings.

It was apt to stage Urban Screens 08 at Fed Square, itself something of a success story in the unfolding narrative of large scale screens in public spaces. This event offered a number of provocative and fruitful ways into thinking about the claims made on behalf of public screenspace, and will provide stimulus for local endeavours in this field for some time to come.

Urban Screens Melbourne 08: Mobile Publics, Federation Square, Oct 3-5 www.urbanscreens08.net; www.seedcollective.org

Ross Harley, Professor and Head of the School of Media Arts, College of Fine Arts, UNSW, is an artist, writer, and educator in new media and popular culture. His work crosses the bounds of media art practice, cinema, music, design, and architecture.

RealTime issue #89 Feb-March 2009 pg. 21