Emerging Topologies
Tours and Maps of Augmented Space
Joshua Harle
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Arts Faculty of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales
This research was supported under an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant with the Emergency Information Coordination Unit of the Land and Property Management Authority, NSW, as part of Real-time Porosity.
Abstract
Under the title “Emerging Topologies”, this thesis draws together theories conceptualising space (Michel de Certeau's tactical and strategic) and theories spatialisating concepts (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's machinic assemblages) in order to examine our contemporary experiences of the city 'augmented' by digital technology.
This thesis explores how developments in- and public adoption of- mapping, navigation, and documentation technology are leading to the emergence of new topological connections between people, technology, and environment, resulting in an everyday spatial practice that increasingly inhabits digital, virtual space.
Virtual space has been characterised variously as oppressive, emancipating, or degrees of both (Grozs, Shields, Haraway). This thesis argues that virtual space is a 'real' space in its own right (politically, socially, phenomenologically) and that despite its rigid organisation, propositional logic, and digital representation, it provides a strategic territory just as open to tactical inhabitation as the conventional built environment.
Building on the author's training as a computer scientist and artist, software was developed to map, scan, and visualise physical space, and virtual environments were created and explored as potential sites for both poetic, creative expression and rationalisation, digitising, and ordering of space.
The emerging topologies of body-technology-environment, as formations of new machinic assemblages, can dramatically disrupt the landscape around them but – as
Abstract
v this thesis demonstrates – they may not remain 'in flight' for long. Tours solidify into maps.
Early experiments into mapping tactical spatial practices offered valuable insight into the ease with which virtual space can be reterritorialised: my first attempt at an engagement with local graffiti practice (authoring a public, real-time map of graffiti using Google Maps) became mobilised against it, facilitating the logistical work of council clean-up crews. However, occasionally practices can remain temporarily autonomous from strategic control, tracing alternative, speculative spaces. I demonstrate that while the tactical practices of everyday life are being increasingly mapped, it is always possible to make poetic journeys across the mapped territory, whether city, virtual environment, or text.
Abstract
vi Contents
Abstract vii Acknowledgements xi Preface xii Foreword xvii
1 Introduction 1
I Maps 25
2 Territories 27 3 Ubiquitous Space 43 4 The Right to the (Fragmented) City 55
II Tours 65
5 Illegible Spaces 67 6 Playgrounds 83 7 Atmospheres 99 III Works 121
8 Paths 123 9 Herein 135 10 Relics 151 11 Monorail Pylons 163 12 Gamespaces 175
VI Emergence 183
13 Taking Flight 207 14 Emergency! 185
Appendix A: A Taxonomy of Spatial Practices 219 Bibliography 227
Acknowledgements
The last four years has been quite an incredible journey!
I'd like to acknowledge my supervisors, Prof. Richard Goodwin and Russell Lowe, for making this whole PhD possible and remaining the two most interesting academics I've ever met.
Many thanks are due to my friends, who have variously distracted, supported, inspired and motivated me. In particular I'm indebted to Tully Arnot, Peter Nelson, Andrew Newman for their thoughts, Hayden Daley, for his company on urban exploration jaunts, Melody Williams, for advice, formatting and referencing help well beyond the line of duty, Sarah Ouyang, for cupcakes, and Robynne Henry for gin-inspired proof-reads.
Finally, my thanks go to my family, and especially my mother, Rosie, for being forthcoming with both appropriate theoretical connections and boundless enthusiasm. Acknowledgements
xii Preface
A PhD thesis is a process of mapping new territory. A gap in the knowledge of a certain field is identified, and the researcher sets about exploring and illuminating their own little place within it; documenting “the frontier regions”1 and replacing the fearsome dragons for landmarks.
The textual component of a studio-based Fine Art PhD is usually seen as a documentation of the art practice and a discussion of theory, i.e. a map of the works' theoretical and artistic context, an illustration of where the works themselves sit within this context, and a comforting indication that 'you are here'.
This particular thesis is looking at the practice of map-making itself. It examines descriptions of space through the drafting of maps and models, and how these afford different perceptions of a territory and an inhabitant's place in it. It argues that the landscape of the city is constantly changing through the emergence of new relationships between body, environment, and technology – spaces opened up or closed off through the shifted boundaries of different types of map.
The thesis starts from Michel de Certeau's argument that something is lost in the abstraction of the world into a static map, and that the represented, intended use of a space is privileged over the changing ways it is actually inhabited. It reads de Certeau's description of strategic and tactical practice of space through Gilles Deleuze's discussion of concepts in order to critique how established maps (of cities, countries, ideas, bodies) restrict our potential, and how they can be disrupted and
1 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 284.
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xiii reformed through everyday creative practices.
This thesis is a form of 'Gonzo research'. Informed by the diverse strategic and tactical opportunities for thinking about a territory, this thesis approaches its 'object of research' with the intimacy of a native inhabitant rather than the distance of a supposedly impartial observer. The works that constitute the thesis are not the result of a single mapping process – an attempt at an overarching, simplified description of the territory at a moment in time – but rather a set of journeys through space, accompanied by roughly sketched-out directions.
Like the Gonzo style of journalism championed by Hunter S. Thompson, it sends the researcher in drunk, writing poetic 'reports from the field' in first-person to give an unashamedly subjective view of things. Field-notes from my topological explorations are woven into the texts: postcards from spaces of surveillance, data mining, mobile phones, CCTV, 3D scanners, ubiquitous computing, parkour, squatting, graffiti. The embedded researcher following a proud lineage – Raul Duke, Spider Jerusalem, Hakim Bey.
In this respect the thesis shares its methodology with fictocriticism, an approach to writing within the Humanities which departs from the traditional use of an objective, authoritative voice in argumentation. Fictocriticism is tactical rather than strategic. The author is not positioned outside of the territory they are discussing: they speak from 'on the ground', and acknowledge that their viewpoint, experiences, and associations colour their observations.
Fictocriticsm has been utilised by contemporary anthropologists (Sariola, Douglas- Jones, Muecke, Latour) as a way of avoiding the oversimplification of the map. Taking inspiration from Bruno Latour's “Compositionism”,2 it proposes a critical style that attempts to build pragmatic accounts of the world evaluated not on the basis of truth versus fiction, but (since all arguments must be constructed in one way or another) on how well constructed they are.3
The status of one account as 'better composed' than another is decided by what they can accomplish: the strategic map is not 'untrue', but is less reliable or helpful for understanding the territory it describes on anything other than an imposed structural level, i.e. it does not help discover new connections.
2 Stephen Muecke, "Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism without Judgement," Cultural Studies Review 18, no. 1 (2011): 50. 3 Bruno Latour, "An Attempt at a" Compositionist Manifesto"," New Literary History 41, no. 3 (2010): 478.
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xiv Where strategic maps present static, reductive models (representing place without time and privileging certain details, connections, and causes over others4), fictocriticism attempts to maintain the vitality and richness of descriptions through compositions that are tentative, experimental, and which try to preserve relationships no matter how subtle or holistic. These compositions are open to “ceaselessly [establish] connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances”.5
In comparison to neat, ordered, and stable maps of a territory, fictocritical accounts are more like Deleuze's description of rhizomes: “always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and [with] multiple entryways and exits”;6 interconnected tap-root topologies where each point can connect to any other. They are not afraid to take note of connections between disparate ways of describing the world:
Our reports 'from the field' try not to be reductions to one level of reality[...], but reports that envelope the poetry, the sensorium, the history, the mythology and the politics. The whole damn culture in other words.7
Both rhizomes and Latour's “Actor Networks” share a composition of tentative “heterogeneous chains of association” that connect together such things as “the European Union, the beef market, prions in the laboratory, politicians, vegetarians, public confidence, farmers, and Nobel prize-winning French scientists” (as assembled in Latour's description of the outbreak of CJD in Europe8) or “[little Hans's] mother's bed, the paternal element, the house, the cafe across the street, the nearby warehouse, the street, the right to go out onto the street, the winning of this right, the pride of winning it, but also the dangers of winning it, the fall, shame” (in Deleuze and Guattari's account of “little Hans”9).
This interweaving of connections continues earlier challenges to the model of a neatly structured, disenchanted world presented by modernism. Within spatial theory, Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space has argued the significance of the
4 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 37. 5 Eileen Honan and Margaret Sellers, "So How Does It Work? Rhizomatic Methodologies" (paper presented at the Australian Association for Research in Education Annual Conference. Retrieved from http://www. aare. edu. au/06pap/hon06003. pdf, 2006), 1. 6 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi(London: Continuum, 2009), 23. 7 Muecke, "Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism without Judgement," 50. 8 Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 113. 9 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 284.
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xv oneiric in our experience of the home,10 and de Certeau's tactics describe an “'anthropological,' poetic and mythic experience of space”11 in which familiar- sounding street names may unconsciously guide a tourist's path through a strange city.12
In this way fictocritical accounts are similar to artworks; both articulating connections that would normally be filtered out as part of the creation of a readable map: “mixing dreams with memories”.13 The artworks that form part of this thesis aren't 'solutions' to a 'problem'. They are poetic accounts of possible ways-of-being in space: speculative explorations of emerging body-topologies that play within mapped space (e.g. the CAD-software-cement-graffiti-artist of Monorail pylons, the city-mobilephone-poetry of Herein, etc.).
Following a tactical approach, my studio-practice does not aim at building a single linearly-developed work, or even an anthology or collection towards a complete account,14 rather the artworks are heterogeneous journeys. Tactics “[operate] in isolated actions, blow by blow”,15 and the results of my art practice are tentative, partial, hybrid accounts each adding their own connections. The different strands of the thesis contribute the fabric of the rhizome through conjunction, “[...]tracing pathways among multiple realities that affirm their own separate, but mutually sustaining, existences”,16 following Deleuze's advice to:
Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don't sow, grow offshoots! Don't be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! […] Don't bring out the General in you! […] Have short- term ideas. […] the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ''and... and... and …''17
Building on my training as a computer scientist, my research has appropriated mapping technologies in order to subvert their capabilities through the disruptive practices of play and hacking. Software and hardware were developed to map, scan, and visualise physical space, but with a focus on a tactical rather than strategic account. These artworks are a form of “radical cartography”: often utilising the
10 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space(Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 15. 11 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93. 12 Ibid., 104. 13 Muecke, "Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism without Judgement," 49. 14 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 9. 15 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 37. 16 Muecke, "Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism without Judgement," 56. 17 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 27.
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xvi aesthetic of the strategic map but so unlikely, unusual, or idiosyncratic that they cannot be taken as totalising. They offer radically different models of the world, 18 drawing connecting pathways that are usually left out.
As a critical practice, the artworks are a research tool in the investigation of possible emerging topologies. The works present a deterritorialisation of the normative body, the city, and technology, sketching “otherwise unseen and unheard, unfelt and unknown”19 landscapes. Each work has followed its own line-of-flight, discovering connections through generative relationships of desires (like the intimacy of my feet against the path, my desire for mystery not retail stores).
The written thesis combines field-notes and compositional accounts of the augmented city via direct experience, and through the speculative spaces that the artworks produce. The exploration of spaces in the city is mirrored in the form of the written thesis and artworks. The thesis negotiates the relationship between strategic and tactical space; shifting the usual authoritative voice through fictocritical writing while bringing the technologies of map-making into the art practice and attempting to transform their outcomes.
18 Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat, An Atlas of Radical Cartography(Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press, 2008), 6. 19 Dorothea Olkowski, "Flows of Desire and the Body-Becoming," in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, ed. Elizabeth Grosz(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 107.
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xvii Preface
xviii Foreword
Only birds up here to share the view with. I'm looking out across the city from the top floor of the district's tallest building. Perched up here, tiny cars and people move around below like the view in Sim City 4000. I could draw a box around the buildings; well positioned for making grand sweeping gestures that capture whole neighbourhoods in their arc. I've been experimenting with this view to survey the world. Pulling it into an ubiquitous space.
Only the most lofty observation point will do for this, elevated high above all else. The Empire State Building is no good. It shares the clouds with a forest of other skyscrapers. A view from there is smog-washed into black-and-white, spun with the slinking clarinet phrases of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, and with Woody Allen's voice echoing in your ears you've been teleported back down to the streets of Manhattan. Instead, the lookout I've chosen is the Oriental Pearl Tower, Shanghai. The “Space Module”, the upper-most spherical structure on the tower, being true to its name: we are conceptually extraterrestrial up here, isolated and freed from the city's grasp, untethered from the streets.
Before me, the city stretches out to the horizon. Roads become lines, buildings reduced to two-dimensional blocks. Everything important is legible from up here, and with the right kind of eyes – or the help of the Augmented Reality App running on the phone in my pocket – I can make out the location of friends, the hottest nightspots, tourist traps, and 5-star boutique hotels.
I'm here as field-work for my research: exploring both theoretically and
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xix viscerally the articulation of two different accounts of the experience of space; Strategic and Tactical. I'm trying to answer questions of the ways space can be inhabited, how emerging technologies are changing these spaces, and why poetic accounts of the city are still so important.
Strategies and tactics are the basis of Michel de Certeau's description of our perception of space, acknowledging the social and psychological aspects of our engagement with it.20 The strategic describes the demarcation and surveying of territory carried out from a privileged position of control and ownership. The tactical is everyone else's inhabitation of space.
De Certeau argues that while most people's engagement with the built environment is that of user/consumer, seemingly disenfranchised from the possibility of modifying the fabric of the city, our experience of space is not simply one of passivity. We inhabit space by investing it with our own set of associations and feelings, and can temporarily poach spaces for our own use.
De Certeau likens the strategic to a language (and its rules and syntax), and the tactical to an enunciation of that language. The formulation of rules of grammar and the cataloguing of definitions of words does not stop the use of slang or the creation of poetry: just as a conversation is the performance of language, space is the gestalt of vernacular spatial practices. “Space is a practised place”.21
I'm not an architect or urban planner, yet somehow I've managed to arrive at this strategic lookout. While I'm up here I want to be philanthropic, making use of a set of skills that can help digest and rationalise the world. The “big- picture” lets me coordinate information and strategise. The light-bringer in me – computer scientist, cartographer, disambiguator – wants to make tools to optimise and improve dissemination of information. In my journey up here I saw the treasures of graffiti and ephemeral art and imagine vast archives and maps to share it, make it legible; I passed pot-holes and broken water-mains that could be reported and fixed; witnessed local communities using twitter to coordinate peer-to-peer, spatiality-specific emergency responses;22 moved through an unique and varied architectural space. Now as an overseer I pick what seem the most appropriate technology platforms – a shareable,
20 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall(Los Angeles: University of California Press., 2002), xix. 21 Ibid., 117. 22 Kate Starbird et al., "Chatter on the Red: What Hazards Threat Reveals About the Social Life of Microblogged Information," in Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work(Georgia, USA: ACM, 2010), 241-50.
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xx collaborative, real-time, media-embedded online map, and a tool-set for reconstructing 3D models from images – and start categorising and adding elements within a digital representation of the world. Far below in the streets, tremors are being felt. My cartography is having consequences I would never have imagined, and by the drafting of a map the living city sits poised to be turned to stone...
But how did I get up here?
Friends and authorities paying attention to my Google Latitude account could tell you in precise detail, facilitated by my lack of privacy qualms and the GPS and sundry other locating apparatus built into my mobile phone. A little line zig-zagging through a map of the city from hotel to restaurant to bar – becoming progressively more co-incident with Instagram and Facebook posts.
For me though, it felt like emerging from a subterranean journey; a trip through a digestive system of internal cavities formed out of the facades of buildings and strangers' faces. As I moved through my world day-to-day technology advanced to slowly build the tower and hoist me to the top: the World Wide Web, embedded GPS devices and the widespread use of smart- phones, Google, Geo-tagging, and the collaborative data-sharing platforms of Web 2.0...
Finally arriving at the airport-style security, the high-tech elevator, and the appropriately state-endorsed attendant, I paid my way in with my own contribution to the body of facilitating technologies: a set of tools that simplified and refined the process of constructing 3D models of the world using photographs. I stepped out of the elevator to take in the city and begin plotting my own points.
This wasn't the first time I'd had such a view. I remember the time years ago that I bungee-jumped from a crane 100m above Amsterdam: I see the city in miniature foregrounded by my own feet, toes out into the void, extending beyond the industrial non-slip patterning of the metal platform, experiencing a conflict between my rational mind and a very impassioned sense of self- preservation. Jumping into the thick of it the tiny ant-people become flashes of expression, the snaking path of the river becomes a sudden wet kiss (I've just had an intimate experience with whatever unthinkable micro-organisms
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xxi call the Amstel their home). I get bungeed back to a more reserved distance, then involuntarily drawn in again... Back on the ground the sheer adrenaline lasts for hours and colours my walk through the cobbled streets of people. Everything seems more alive, solid, visceral.
Recently I seem to be up that crane a lot, figuratively speaking. Enjoying de Certeau's voyeuristic “god's-eye-view”, and surveying a strategic model where, like my first experience, the rational mind prevails. I share the crane with urban planners, strategicians, and proponents of “pedestal architecture”. The Sim City 4000 view all over again, foregrounded this time by the mouse pointer that wheels and dives like a crow, bending the world below in AutoCAD or 3D Studio Max. Someone realises I'm an artist, and the crowd of tyrants surges forward and pushes me from the platform; I hurtle towards the ground, only saved by my bungee attachment to a major academic institution. I slow, and am suspended for a second at street level...
I'm submerged momentarily in the bustle of busy streets, lost in the smells and sounds, and labyrinthine alleys. Each passer-by inhabiting their own poetic river-flow improvised out of the structured language of the city:
The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.23
There are some theorists down here in the thick of it, shouting obscenities at those above, trying to provoke them into jumping down themselves: Juhani Pallasmaa derides them for their delusion – maintained through the history of Western Philosophy – that they are observing from outside of the system;24 Henri Lefebvre calls them down to take stock of the psychological needs of city inhabitants for mystery and play;25 Gaston Bachelard reminds them of the power of the oneiric image of the home, utterly ignored from their position;26 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari take turns calling them fascists...27
Then I am yanked back into the sky by the requirement of theoretical critique.
23 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93. 24 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin : Architecture and the Senses(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 15. 25 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space(Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), 147. 26 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space(Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 1. 27 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi(London: Continuum, 2009), 10.
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xxii I'm back above the city, unwittingly threatening to kill it through vivisection. I want to contribute my own account, stake my own claims about the meaning and meaningful of the city. Up here those with the right tools have a chance to draw on the same map, happy to be adding their voice to the authoritative account. But this map isn't neutral or disinterested. The Euclidean systems we use to represent geometry are subjective too; invested in a reduction and effacement of real details of the world,28 even while they “[try] desperately to suppose that the utilitarian and functionalist law of [their] own mechanism is 'natural'”.29
This documentation and digitisation of elements of the world is a form of voluntary self-surveillance. Codification using tags, categories, and ratings neatly enframes30 the city into a strategic territory that now spans the entire surface of the Earth (referenced through GPS coordinates) which begs the question of the city as something that facilitates optimised, directed engagement – a city demystified, rationalised, and understood through productive logic.
I have come to call this monolithic, homogeneous representation “ubiquitous space”, in reference to its emergence from Ubiquitous Computing31 as an ever- present augmentation to our perception of space, its removal of the significance of physical distance to our ability to interrogate points, and its transparency and legibility. Just as de Certeau anticipated in 1980, the use of “rational technics” has produced a territory of abstracted data-points “analytically distributed over a space whose essence (even inside the computer) is to be a readable artifact, an object open from end to end to the survey of an immobile eye.”32
My quotidian spatial practice, the tactical, phenomenological inhabitation of space, is being colonised by thinking in ubiquitous space. With the prevalence of GPS, those on the ground are finding it useful to turn their binoculars
28 Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, "Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An Ant’s View of Architecture," Explorations in architecture: Teaching, design, research (2008): 84. 29 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 199. 30 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays(New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 19. 31 Anne Galloway, "Intimations of Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City," Cultural Studies 18, no. 2-3 (2004): 284-408. 32 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 199.
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xxiii around and see everything from a distance, isolating themselves from their intimate surroundings: my first few hours as a new arrival to Newcastle, NSW experienced through a calculated route on a map displayed by my phone, as I rushed to arrive at an appointment on time. As Chris Chesher puts it: “Real time information infrastructures such as GPS bring ‘conceived’ spaces into direct real time connection with the ‘perceived’ spaces of everyday life.”33
The visible consequences can be humorous or tragic. At the whim of GPS, drivers barrel through rivers that were once fords, drive the wrong way down one-way streets, plant their 18-wheelers into the arches of low-clearance bridges. The phenomenological differences are more subtle; the rationalisation of the world, fuelled by the seductive promise of getting more from it, or the requirement that we do everything as efficiently as possible:
The frank abolition of all distances brings no nearness... Everything gets lumped together into uniform distancelessness.34
In consequence, graffiti maps such as mine are sought out by council clean-up crews and used to coordinate the removal of new work, effectively outsourcing (and crowd-sourcing) their logistical work. The folksonomies and peer-to-peer networks formed in emergencies are effective only because they don't rely on cemented hierarchy: their responsiveness and flexibility doesn't survive the translation into militaristic command-control ideologies.35 Favourite spots and uniquely atmospheric nooks become homogenised commodities in an economy of experience.
The birds sharing my view have fled, scared off by a new arrival. A drone36 has appeared, to observe me and observe with me. Then another... and another. The authorities have become savvy to this particular vantage point (one in which the self-surveying populous has been filling in gaps in their surveillance). Not just the EICU, but the CIA, the Iranian government... In response, the beginnings of barricades are being constructed in the streets of ubiquitous space (“La barricade ferme la rue mais ouvre la voie”), but the worms are out of the can. Will they go back in? Probably not.
33 Chris Chesher, "Converging Mediations of Space in Computer Games and Spatial Navigation Systems," in Proceedings of the Sixth Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment(Sydney, Australia: ACM, 2009), 1. 34 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought(New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), 165. 35 Leysia Palen and Sophia B Liu, "Citizen Communications in Crisis: Anticipating a Future of Ict-Supported Public Participation," in Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems(San Jose, California, USA: ACM, 2007), 733. 36 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. See Tyler Wall and Torin Monahan, "Surveillance and Violence from Afar: The Politics of Drones and Liminal Security-Scapes," Theoretical Criminology 15, no. 3 (2011): 239-54.
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xxiv So I tie my bungee to the guard-rail, wave the drones goodbye, and take a leap...
In both Deleuze and Guattari's, and de Certeau's account, the categorising, hierarchical view is associated with the scientific approach; reducing and isolating variables – and the observational perspective itself – to form a linear relationship of cause and effect. The strategic view of space similarly produces propositions, such as the City, which “like a proper name, thus provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties”.37
These isolatable, interconnected properties are the concern of bureaucratisation and rationalisation, identified in Max Weber's analysis of modern capitalism as the process of tracking and recording progressively smaller details of the world, to allow calculations and optimisation of the efficiency of tasks.38
In the late 1950s the Situationist International formed to challenge the “capitalist degradation of the life of people” exercised through a mechanistic, strategic account of the city. They encouraged “play, freedom and critical thinking”39 that created alternative accounts of space, such as Psychogeography, described as:
A whole toy box full of playful, inventive [tactics] for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.40
Down from the totalising view of the world, a multiplicity of spatial stories are told as annotated tours rather than as a unified map. The map is a static representation of space, but the tour is full of timely encounters, and temporary “poaching” of territory. For a brief moment, a corner of ubiquitous
37 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 94. 38 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism(London: Routledge, 2001), 223. 39 Simon Sadler, The Situationist City(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 5. 40 Joseph Hart, "A New Way of Walking," Utne Reader (2004): 1.
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xxv space was used by protesters to track police movements,41 and twitter allowed the coordination of Iranian protests and the Arab Spring42 (an example of the “temporary” in action within Hakim Bey's description of Temporary Autonomous Zones43). For Deleuze, the May 1968 Paris protests, heavily influenced by the Situationists, were a wake-up call to the weakness of such static maps of political territory: Marxist philosophy failed to explain the diverse make-up of the protesters, or the operation of politics beyond class structures.44
As I reach the perigee of my bungee, coming closest to the ground, Deleuze and Guattari rally me to cut the cord. De Certeau describes the operation of tactics, but Deleuze and Guattari provide a manifesto for tactical critique: Write rhizomatically. Have short-term ideas. Form new assemblages of concepts that can become deterritorialised and transformed through lines-of- flight into other ideas.45 Perform schitzoanalysis rather than psychoanalysis: not a reduction to the single semiotic system, but a splitting into a multiplicity of accounts that brings out new “assemblages of enunciation”,46 like Italo Calvino's Marco Polo exploding Venice into a multiplicity of stories.47
A masked philosopher approaches to convince me of the place of generative critique, as I'm suspended, captivated at the end of my cord:
I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgements but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes—all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of
41 For Example "LIVE Protest Map", http://goo.gl/maps/vNxlD and "Sukey - Keeping Demonstrators Safe, Mobile, and Informed", http://www.opensukey.org/ 42 Alex Comninos, "Twitter Revolutions and Cyber Crackdowns: User-Generated Content and Social Networking in the Arab Spring and Beyond," Association for Progressive Communications (APC) (2011): 1-18. 43 Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism(New York: Autonomedia, 2003), 100. 44 Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze(NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2002), xxxiii. 45 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?(New York: Verso, 1994), 16. 46 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 19. 47 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities(London: Vintage, 1997), 78.
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xxvi possible storms.48
De Certeau speaks of the deterritorialising power of spatial practice: how a simple act like walking can shake the strategic narrative of the city. The potential for change comes from tactical spatial practices that jolt and seduce: “Like a peddler, carrying something surprising, transverse or attractive compared with the usual choice.” At any moment the walker can break from convention, can (for example) become a traceur taking a parkour line-of-flight across buildings that is “neither foreign nor in conformity” with the “proper” meaning of the city.49
With Deleuze and Guattari's 'schizzors' I cut myself from my attachment to the tower and totalising accounts, and commit to being a provocative tactical storyteller; an artist taking my own turns of phrase through the city.
48 Michel Foucault, "The Masked Philosopher," in Ethics. The Essential Works, ed. Paul Rabinow(New York: New Press, 1997), 323. 49 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 101.
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xxvii
1
Introduction
It's dark and bitterly cold, and I'm sidling up to a lamppost in Leipziger Platz, Berlin to furtively paste a scrap of QR-code laden paper onto it. I'm leaving my mark on the palimpsest of the city,50 but besides these occasional interventions my day-to-day engagement with it is fairly innocuous: I'm no saboteur, architect, terrorist, or politician, and so my opportunities for significantly determining the public spaces I inhabit are few. But I take heart in the knowledge that a few kilometres to the south, without planning permits, bulldozers, or a high-vis vest, David Bowie was able to create his own piece of Neuköln simply with the title of a song.
50 Kathrin Tobias, "Kunstprojekt ‘Herein Berlin’ Am Leipziger Platz." http://www.kunst- magazin.de/kunstprojekt-herein-berlin-am-leipziger-platz/. Herein Berlin, Installation documentation, Leipziger Platz, Berlin, Josh Harle, 2010
Introduction
2 The spaces of modern cities are becoming progressively more legible and striated, facilitated by mapping, navigation, and documentation technologies such as Google Maps and location-aware devices. The emergence of these technologies has resulted in a city 'augmented' by digital technology and spatial practices that increasingly inhabit digital, virtual space.
In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau argues that despite various apparatus that reinforce dominant meanings of place (laws, regulations, urban planning, maps), heterogeneous meanings are formed through the everyday spatial practice of its inhabitants.51 Meaning is not implicit to a place, but comes out of how space is used.
This thesis proposes the emergence of 'ubiquitous space': a monolithic, shared representational system facilitated by cloud-computing, mobile connectivity, and geo-locative technologies. Ubiquitous space is a globally-accessible, homogeneous, legible model of the world that has become an integral part of the spatial practice of many.52 With ubiquitous space (and the adoption of its enabling technologies into our daily lives) comes a drive to record and survey, through which we voluntarily map and document our own spaces.
Extending de Certeau's analysis of strategies and tactics through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of machinic assemblages, this thesis suggests that the meaning of technologies, tools, maps, and virtual environments are formed by the ways they connect with other bodies as assemblages. It explores the way new technologies and a changing city are used (the sort of connections they form) through emerging body-topologies: assemblages of inhabitant, environment, and technology that embody new ways of practising space.
The thesis argues that 'the practice of everyday life' can remain essentially tactical and creative even while operating through technologies and spaces that appear to be thoroughly strategic. Despite the proliferation of rigidly controlled places (physical and virtual), we can still find our own creative ways of practising them.
The thesis supports this argument through field-studies in the shadows of ubiquitous space. It gives accounts of body-topologies that have managed to disconnect themselves (however temporarily) from the control of the structure they inhabit: graffiti, squats, parkour traceurs, software pirates, players immersed in a
51 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall(Los Angeles: University of California Press., 2002), 30. 52 For example, there were 64 million unique US visitors to Google Maps website in January, 2013. https://siteanalytics.compete.com/maps.google.com/
Introduction
3 virtual game environment. Temporary Autonomous Zones that may not last long before being reterritorialised back into institutional apparatus.
In addition, the potentials for the tactical practice of ubiquitous space are explored through an experimental art-practice that performs its own tactical departures from controlled territory. The artworks are created with the use of cutting-edge mapping technologies (i.e. photogrammetry, cloud-computing, laser scanning, real-time object and human tracking), but generate new meanings through tactical practices of play, hacking, and poetic reuse.
This thesis document is divided into four sections:
The first section of this thesis, Maps, explores the rigid models and representation methods used to rationalise and simplify the complexity of the city. Territories examines abstractions and reductive body-topologies assumed by strategic mapping, and how these regulate inhabitants. Ubiquitous Space explores how modern spatial technologies are producing a homogenised representation of the world that influences our perception of the city. The Right to the (Fragmented) City gives an overview of Henri Lefebvre's Right to the City, and explores a revision that defends the mystery and fragmentation of lived space from totalising accounts.
The Second section, Tours, looks at how tactical practice reconfigures the perception and possibilities presented by space. Illegible spaces explores the relationship of tactics to both physical and digital regulated places. Playgrounds describes the formation of body-topologies through an active engagement with the environment, and argues that this extends to the inhabitation of virtual environments. Atmospheres discusses attempts to create and experiment with intangible aspects of space, focussing on the creation of atmosphere in video-game worlds.
The third section gives detailed descriptions of the Works, drawing connections back to the last two sections.
The final section, Emergence, describes in general the forces of deterritorialisation that allow new ways of practising space to emerge. Emergency! gives an overview of the tactical practices employed by this research that disrupt and reconfigure the connections of an inhabitant to systems such as ubiquitous space. Taking Flight
Introduction
4 demonstrates the contribution of the thesis, and discusses the various body-topologies studied and produced by the research.
Introduction
5 Context – Porosity
This thesis forms part of the wider investigation of Real-Time Porosity, a research project directed by Professor Richard Goodwin of the College of Fine Arts, and Russell Lowe of the Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales. Real-Time Porosity is an Australian Research Council (ARC)-supported interdisciplinary collaboration with the New South Wales Emergency Information Coordination Unit (EICU).
The EICU was created shortly after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers, to capture and synthesise multi-agency information into a complete strategic overview, used to direct counter-terrorist operations and emergency coordination centres in the event of a natural or man-made disaster.53 Their purview includes both the physical organisation of space (through the coordinated development of emergency response scenarios) and the organisation of knowledge of space (through the development of a highly integrated “Spatial Information and Mapping System” based on Geographic Information System software).54 The EICU is deeply committed to understanding the organisation, usage, and risks associated with public space.
Goodwin's Porosity research proposes an understanding of the city as hybrid space, seeking to counter the disambiguation of private and public space in conventional forms of mapping (such as the EICU's). Goodwin acknowledges that pedestrian practices form an important part of the description of an urban space, disrupting the strategic assumption that a mapped space can be unambiguously delineated into neat territories and 'proper' uses.
The value of this approach to the EICU is in its composition of a more nuanced model of the city (and pedestrian movement within it) to better inform “public space planning, events management, counter terrorism and crime prevention.”55 The stated aims of the research also articulate a desire to challenge a model of greater security through greater control, expressing “a concern to maintain freedom of circulation and promote civic opportunities[...]”56
53 NSW, Legislative Council. "Full Day Hansard Transcript", (June 2, 2011), 1779, http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/parlment/hansart.nsf/V3Key/LC20110602026 54 John Moore, "Spatial Information and Mapping System (SIMS)." Australia. Sydney, CeBIT Australia, 2012. 55 Richard Goodwin, "New City Mapping Techniques – Real Time Porosity Lenses." Australia. Sydney, CeBIT Australia, 2012. 56 Linkage Project Coordinator, Summary of Linkage Projects Proposals for Funding to
Introduction
6 Goodwin has explored the performative element of these spaces through his own 'on the ground' fieldwork. Along with the performance of a series of spatial games through the city (inspired by the actions of Dada and the Situationist International57), he has experimented through occupation of space that would normally be considered private (interior floors of city office buildings) to show that they could be poached as temporary public space. Goodwin proposes that:
[...i]f one can visit a toilet adjoining a corridor leading from the lift lobby at level X of building Y and stay within that space comfortably for one hour then that constitutes a one hour public space.58
Through Porosity research, Goodwin acknowledges the power of the social in determining a space, suggesting that “the social construction of cities [be] prioritised over physical construction, program, or any issues to do with aesthetics”.59 The model that Porosity research produces maps desired public space, and informs the adaptive re-use of existing structures through architectural interventions Goodwin calls “parasites”.60
Real-time Porosity continues Goodwin's ongoing Porosity research through the addition of real-time tracking and modelling capabilities. Central to the Real-Time Porosity project is the use of gaming technology to map and analyse real-world pedestrian movements, and to perform in-game experiments that enable “a more complete understanding of the use of urban space in a major Australian city.”61
These experimental scenarios test the effects of different architectural parasites and political, physical, and social atmospheres on the environment's inhabitants. In addition, tracking tools such as the CSIRO's WASP technology has been used in the field, with the results visualised 'in-game' in real-time.62
Commence in 2009, Australian Research Council, 2009: 6. 57 Richard Goodwin, "Porosity: The Revision of Public Space in the City Using Public Art to Test the Functional Boundaries of Built Form" (University of New South Wales, 2007), 81. 58 Ibid., 40. 59 Ibid., 36. 60 Ibid., 27. 61 Richard Goodwin, "New City Mapping Techniques – Real Time Porosity Lenses." In CeBIT Australia. Sydney, 2012. 62 Russell Lowe, Mark Hedley, and Richard Goodwin, "Real-Time Porosity: Combining a Computer Game Engine with Environmental Sensors to Better Understand Pedestrian Movement in Public/Private Space and in Realtime. ," in Circuit Bending, Breaking and Mending : Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia, ed. Christiane Herr, et al.(Newcastle: The Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), 2011), 232.
Introduction
7 This thesis extends Goodwin and Lowe's use of virtual environments beyond a simulation of the subject's behaviour in a physical space, through the adoption of Michel de Certeau's concept of space as “practised place”.63 It continues the polemic account of hybrid space (and the use of play as a practice-based research approach) to explore the ambiguous 'porosity' of virtual and real spaces in contemporary cities, and to analyse virtual environments as legitimate spaces for tactical inhabitation in their own right.
63 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 292.
Introduction
8 Conceptualising Space
In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau acknowledges Michel Foucault's suggestion that architecture forms one of the controlling apparatus through which the powerful can dominate concepts of place, but goes further to describe a parallel set of everyday engagements with space that resists this control. De Certeau emphasises the inadequacy and restrictiveness of abstract representations of place as administered by authority (land owners, city planners, architects), and exposes the everyday lived experience of space which is enacted beyond it.
The definition of 'place' that de Certeau identifies is similar to Maurice Merleau- Ponty’s “geometrical” space of “homogeneous and isotropic spatiality”, in contrast to an “anthropological”, phenomenological 'space'.64 According to this definition, space is socially constituted; streets can be sinister or inviting not based on a label on a map, but on others' practice of the space, i.e. “space is practised place”.65
The abstract conception of place is held by those with established, demarcated territory who attempt to control, survey, and order it. He calls this action strategic, stating:
[The strategic] postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets of threats ([...] enemies, […] objects of research, etc. ) can be managed. [T]he eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured, and thus control and ''include'' them within its scope of vision.66
De Certeau's definition of the domination and ordering of strategic territory finds similar articulation in Henri Lefebvre's conceived space as Chris Chester explains: “For Lefebvre, conceived space is always the dominant and dominating form of space. The complex models created by architects and planner have direct application in imposing relationships of surveillance and domination.”67
64 Ibid., 117. 65 Ibid., 292. 66 Ibid., 36. 67 Chris Chesher, "Converging Mediations of Space in Computer Games and Spatial Navigation Systems," in Proceedings of the Sixth Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment(Sydney, Australia: ACM, 2009), 1.
Introduction
9 In contrast to the strategic is the tactical: the everyday poaching of space as we move through the city, working subtly and intuitively against the logic of the strategic model, resisting the mandated official account of a place without necessarily countering it.
De Certeau compares strategic place to a language, and the tactical spatial practice to an enunciation of that language – i.e. tactics and strategies are not opposites. While the strategic representation of place attempts to dominate our understanding of space, the space is actualised through its tactical use, for example in the walker's decision to respect conventions, or interdictions such as 'Keep Out' signs.
The context of any event – crucial to understanding it in its specificity – is reduced away in a strategic view. The process of creating a map (or record, or model) effaces the non-productive details of these trajectories. De Certeau states:
Indeed, this “representation” is insufficient, [because] time and movement are reduced to [something] read in a single movement. However useful this “flattening out” may be, it transforms the temporal articulation of places into a spatial sequence of points. […] It is thus a mark in place of acts, a relic in place of performances: it is only their remainder, the sign of their erasure.68
Mechanistic analysis of people in ordered places are unable to account for or capture the “psychogeographical” - the emotionally invested, sensual engagement with the city explored through techniques such as the Situationists practice of dérive (allowing oneself to 'drift' through the city). The personal idiosyncrasies of a walker’s path from A to B form a sort of spatial poetry; utilising a standard vocabulary, but in a way that is evocative beyond its representable meaning:
[tacticians] trace ”indeterminate trajectories” that are apparently meaningless, since they do not cohere with the constructed, written, and prefabricated space through which they move. They are sentences that remain unpredictable within the space ordered by the organizing techniques of systems. Although they use as their material the vocabularies of established languages (those of television, newspaper, the supermarket or city planning), although they remain within the framework of prescribed syntaxes (the temporal modes of schedules, paradigmatic organizations of places, etc.), these
68 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 35.
Introduction
10 “traverses” remain heterogeneous to the systems they infiltrate and in which they sketch out the guileful ruses of different interests and desires.69
69 Ibid.
Introduction
11 Spatialising Concepts
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari introduced an early 'post-structural' account of the world motivated by a difficulty in explaining the 1968 Paris protests from a Marxist political understanding: the structuralist narrative couldn't articulate the heterogeneous identities of the protesters.70
Rather than fixed structures in states of equilibrium, they describe the relationships of the world through the concept of “machinic assemblages” (or “desire machines”). 71 For them, systems are not fixed, monolithic entities, but are instead defined by the connections they form, i.e. “by active traversal or encounter rather than objectification.”72 Machinic assemblages are non-hierarchical networks of concepts that always have the potential to become deterritorialised and transform through lines-of-flight into other forms.
As progenitors of fictocriticism, Deleuze and Guatarri argue that simplifying and reducing the connections and actors being acknowledged into an a priori hierarchy is totalising and unethical.73 They attack psychoanalysis for attempting to do just that, by reducing symptoms and behaviours down to a relationship with a Freudian root signifier.74 Instead, they suggest the practice of “schitzoanalysis”, generating multiplicities of heterogeneous connections that each add to the richness and subtly of understanding.
Deleuze and Guattari describe the rhizome/tap-root structure in contrast to the arboreal (hierarchical, bifurcating) model of knowledge and meaning. The tree, like the conceptual arrangement of a strategic map, is highly ordered and structured., whereas the rhizome is a de-centred web of connectivity that has “neither beginning nor end, but always a middle from which it grows and which it overspills.”75
The rhizome does not define identity through binary difference (e.g. the
70 Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze(NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2002), xxxiii. 71 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi(London: Continuum, 2009), 41. 72 Brian Massumi, translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy to A Thousand Plateaus, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), xii.Brian Massumi, "Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy," G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (1987): 4. 73 John Marks, "Ethics," The Deleuze Dictionary (2012): 87-89. 74 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 30-43. 75 Ibid., 23.
Introduction
12 evolutionary tree that differentiates by bifurcation, ignoring horizontal gene transfer76) but by a conjunction of possible assemblages formed with other bodies. The rhizome is multiple, and the conjunctions that form it – such as public and private and inside and outside - may appear mutually exclusive to an arboreal model.
Assemblages of connections are formed by desire, but importantly Deleuze and Guattari do not define this desire as a negative (the desire for something missing e.g. for Sigmund Freud, the lost fulfilment of the mother), but as a positive, generative relationship (such as the desire between a wasp and an orchid). Seen as a machinic assemblage, a body in the world cannot be reduced to a strategic analysis of “a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties”,77 but is an open, tentative, and in-formation concept:
[...]that unravels the modern fantasy of the body as a stable, unified, bounded entity, and gives a language to the multitude of connections that bodies form with other bodies (human and otherwise). A body’s function or potential or ‘meaning’ becomes entirely dependent on which other bodies or machines it forms an assemblage with.”78
76 Ibid., 11. 77 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 94. 78 Peta Malins, "Machinic Assemblages: Deleuze, Guattari and an Ethico-Aesthetics of Drug Use," Janus Head 7, no. 1 (2004): 85.
Introduction
13 Spatial Technologies
Navigation systems like Google Maps and in-car GPS, Augmented Reality applications like Layar and Junaio, location-aware dating apps such as OkCupid and Grindr, check-in and review apps like FourSquare, location sharing tools like FireEagle and Google Latitude, and metadata harvesting on micro-blogging sites like Facebook's image tagging facility are amongst the technologies contributing to the increase in digitally mediated experience of the city.
These are all tools that represent a virtual space in parallel to physical space. They offer a (variously) abstract representation of spatial information, mapping out and optimising navigation through the world. These technologies not only change the way we think about space (allowing anyone with a smartphone access to these captured, strategic views), but also affect how we practice space, and open up entirely new (virtual, social) spaces.
The mobile phone [...] facilitates the possible transgression of property and propriety entertained by Porosity Research. The phone allows communication with someone who has deeply penetrated a private building zone. Locations and tracts can be quickly communicated as people move through the labyrinth of marginal spaces that are associated with public spaces.79
The location-aware mobile device can act as a portal into the collection of spacial documentation generated in our current location. With this ability, the mobile phone extends from a one-to-one, temporal connection to the world, into a one-to- many, archival communication on a par with maps and guide-books, street signs and graffiti tags.
I examine the consequence of these technologies producing a topology of ubiquitous space that offers the ability to view any part of this homogeneous space, at any time, from anywhere (making use of advances in “ubiquitous computing”: the presence of computers everywhere in our lives).80 This thesis investigates the potential for tactical spatial practice, play, and hacking within ubiquitous space.
Following de Certeau's language analogy of strategies and tactics, where tactics are
79 Goodwin, "Porosity: The Revision of Public Space," 46. 80 Lev Manovich, "The Poetics of Augmented Space: Learning from Prada," Visual Communication 5, no. 2 (2006): 3.
Introduction
14 everyday “enunciations” within the scaffold structure of language, the enunciative model has been used to generate a matrix of mappings from spatial practices back into ubiquitous space and identify common examples of these mappings and the technologies associated with them. Combining John Searle's A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts with an IT-industry categorisation of uses of spatial information has produced a Taxonomy of Spatial Practices81 connecting tactical practices to strategic mappings via various encoding apparatus. This taxonomy was a useful research tool for provoking thought and helping to categorise the modes of spatial practice and technologies that are used in their capture.
GIS representations attempting to comprehensively “capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present” information about a place82 inevitably leave ellipses and gaps,83 but in contrast, evocative, atmospheric virtual environments can provide a poetic space of inhabitation while nominally existing in a domain of abstracted geometry (i.e. represented in the computer).
Video-games provide sites of field-work, case-studies, and experimental laboratories for testing evocative and immersive spaces. They allow the spatial researcher to experiment with the legitimacy of phenomenological, psychological, and physiological accounts of our experience of (virtual) space. Successfully immersive virtual spaces offer confirmation of the accounts of tactical spatial practice and our perception of space, as well as concrete examples of the process of constructing such powerful scenes of spatial narrative.
81 See Appendix A. 82 Hongquan Song, Xuejun Liu, Xingguo Zhang, and Jiapei Hu. "Real-Time Monitoring for Crowd Counting Using Video Surveillance and GIS." In 2nd International Conference on Remote Sensing, Environment and Transportation Engineering (RSETE), IEEE, 2012: 1. 83 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 35.
Introduction
15 Body-topologies
This thesis uses the term body-topology to describe the assemblage of spatial practices, technologies, bodies, and environment that together form a particular experience of space. Body-topologies are a tentative attempt at extending de Certeau's tactics and strategies, and “practised space” – already contingent on a network of connections – into a contemporary world of multiple, mixed-reality spaces of Augmented Reality, GPS, video-games, RF fields.
The body, technology, and the environment are interwoven, so rather than talking of types of space being products of specific societies, communities, and relationships, or the result of a specific new technology (e.g. virtual space popping ready-made into existence at the creation of VR headsets), this thesis discusses topological assemblages of body-environment-technology; various ways that spaces (real and virtual), technologies, and bodies can be composed and relate; strata of organisation and influence; rhizomic networks of humans and non-humans in the midst of becoming (something new).
The space of our surroundings grow from 'strange attractors' of enabling technologies that pull and deform the space around them, generate connections between heterogeneous parts through desire: automobile-city-commuter, soundsystem-bush-dancer, GPS-flightpath-pilot. After cycling every day for a year, my bike has transformed my surroundings via my body, and Sydney's hills have become less steep.
The term body-topology brings together Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of body as “machinic assemblage”,84 Michel de Certeau's concept of tactical spatial practice, Arakawa and Madeline Gins' concept of “Organism-Person- Environment”,85 Donna Haraway's concept of the “cyborg”,86 and Gail Weiss' concept of techno-body.87
All these descriptions of the body share an architectonic thinking, defining the body
84 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 41. 85 Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa, Architectural Body(Tuscaloosa: University Of Alabama Press, 2002), xix. 86 Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," in The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory, ed. Steven Seidman(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 83. 87 Gail Weiss, "The Durée of the Tecnho-Body," in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, ed. Elizabeth Grosz(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 161.
Introduction
16 not as an isolated element, but through its relationships and interconnectedness:
• A machinic assemblage is made up of a series of connections between “bodies, actions, expressions, and [spatialities]”88 generated by the productive process of desire.89 Thought of as machinic assemblage, the body's meaning is not stable or interior, but through “the particular assemblages it forms with other bodies. [...The] body should, ultimately, be valued for what it can do.”90
• De Certeau's inhabitants' practice an “ensemble of possibilities” that are moved about or invented to actualise space in different ways.91
• Arakawa and Madeleine Gins conceive of a person as an always tentative architectonic “organism-person-environment” to avoid dangerous assumptions about the boundaries of systems and limits of influence. The organism-person-environment is “one site that is composed of many sites,”92 grasping their surroundings as a distribution of possible bodily interactions called “landing sites” that are apportioned out in the world (e.g. a ladder offers the ability to climb, a sofa something to sit on, stairs a way to ascend).93
• Donna Haraway's cyborg is an unstable, transgressive techno-social assemblage, a “hybrid of machine and organism" whose boundary is “an optical illusion”94 with a relationship to technology defined by “the machine [not being a separate it, but] us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment.”95 Identities such as gender are potentially destabilised with reconfigured topological connections.
• Gail Weiss's techno-body is likewise a cyborg subjectivity formed through connections with technology: “our own bodies and bodily possibilities to the extent that they are discursively represented, psychologically constructed, and physiologically reconstructed through technological 88 Graham D. Livesey, "Space + Architecture," in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2012), 263. 89 Dorothea Olkowski, "Flows of Desire and the Body-Becoming," in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, ed. Elizabeth Grosz(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 98-116. 90 Malins, "Machinic Assemblages," 84. 91 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 98. 92 Gins and Arakawa, Architectural Body, 5. 93 Ibid., 6. 94 Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," 83. 95 Ibid., 115.
Introduction
17 processes which include the pen, the analyst's couch, the speculum, forceps, the surgeon's knife, the computer, the city[...]”.96
I have chosen the explicit reference to “topology” to give an indication of a concern with connectedness, architectonics, and with physical and conceptual space, maps and tours: an interconnected topological space emerges not just outside the body, but through relationships to the body, and its internal organisation and affects. In reference to the title of this thesis, the body-topologies are emerging through the development of new geo-spatial technologies, play and deliberate disruption, and through everyday spatial practices.
96 Weiss, "The Durée of the Tecnho-Body," 163.
Introduction
18 Emerging Research
The focus of this research has changed over the course of its completion. During the research new tools and geo-spatial technologies have been developed, moving from an experimental niche into public adoption and everyday use.
Augmented Reality has been embraced as a commercially viable technology with potential revenue streams. Social media services (such as Twitter) have been recognised as potentially disruptive yet powerful tools, with authorities and industry becoming savvy to manipulating, censoring, monitoring, and taking advantage of them.
At the start of the research, the beginning of 2009, its main focus was as a case study of the use of Augmented Reality (AR) applications as an extension of the social-media tools that at the time were being championed as transformatively democratic.97 AR allowed the sharing of spatial stories; and a creative dialogue through the dissemination of alternative, non-productive proposals/poetic interventions in public space.
Early research into AR explored its use as a type of “digital graffiti”, that allowed a form of 'taking possession', “digitally occupying and reclaiming certain spaces in the city.”98 This seemed to fit well with an argument for the Right to the City, that Henri Lefebvre espoused, exploring the possibilities of 'democratic' participation in claims to- and discursive interventions with- the city, without the associated dangers of performing physical interference (i.e. the risk of prosecution by the property owner or police).
At about the same time, many of these nascent geo-located social-media tools were facilitating the formation of ad-hoc emergency response networks, created and run entirely by communities 'on the ground', without an organisational hierarchy: e.g. Twitter being used (via an SMS gateway) in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake as a robust way to communicate medical and logistical needs 99 and
97 Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together(UK: Penguin Books Limited, 2009), 81. 98 Morris Williams, Owain Jones, and Constance Fleuriot, "Wearable Computing and the Geographies of Urban Childhood: Working with Children to Explore the Potential of New Technology," in Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Interaction design and children(University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK: ACM, 2003), 115. 99 Kate Starbird and Jeannie Stamberger, "Tweak the Tweet: Leveraging Microblogging Proliferation with a Prescriptive Syntax to Support Citizen Reporting." (paper presented at the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference (ISCRAM),
Introduction
19 Facebook groups used to coordinate the creation of an accurate victim list for the Virginia Tech campus shootings.100
The growing adoption of internet-enabled mobile technology (capable of allowing near-realtime publication of socio-geographic information) supported widespread experimentation and novel, innovative spatial practices.
In mid-2010, as part of Porosity's task of extending the EICU's automated data modelling project, I had begun to explore the possibility of pulling the various sources of social-media 'chatter' into a consistent, real-time map; taking individuals' reports of their geographically sited activities and making them legible through automatic parsing systems in a process I called 'vernacular cartography'.
This decentralised approach to information gathering was helpful more specifically in the EICU's role in disaster response coordination. In many examples of disaster, the organisations responsible for responding to crisis (such as the US National Incident Management System) had been left struggling to maintain the operation of a strategic, “quasi-military”, command-and-control structure dependent on a rigid operational hierarchy.101
The highly visible use of Twitter in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake had fuelled an institutional interest in the power of crowd-sourcing information (whether the crowd was complicit or not), and for Real-Time Porosity, my implementation of real-time maps was another element of a set of novel data- gathering methods that “provided new ways to experience, test, observe, archive, review and assist pedestrian movement.”102
Geo-located social-media as a form of “spatial practice” was being mapped and surveyed, and presented for strategic ends. The crowds that fuelled these maps were not equal partners in the relationship, but rather self-surveying operatives who, unlike those in the ad-hoc networks created in emergencies, were not active participants but gormless self-incriminating subjects: social-media was becoming “a
Seattle, WA, 2010). 100Sarah Vieweg et al., "Collective Intelligence in Disaster: An Examination of the Phenomenon in the Aftermath of the 2007 Virginia Tech Shootings." (paper presented at the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference (ISCRAM), Seattle, WA, 2008), 1. 101Leysia Palen and Sophia B Liu, "Citizen Communications in Crisis: Anticipating a Future of Ict-Supported Public Participation," in Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems(San Jose, California, USA: ACM, 2007), 733. 102Richard Goodwin and Russell Lowe, Real-time Porosity: Using computer gaming technology to map and analyse pedestrian movement in public and private space. Research Data Australia, Accessed 15th January, 2013, http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP0991589.
Introduction
20 state surveillance agency run by gullible volunteers; a Stasi for the Angry Birds generation.”103 The dynamic maps created using a whole swathe of facilitating social-media tools had been co-opted, and were being used to provide strategic 'situational awareness' of territories to those who controlled them.
After Twitter's notable use in Iran and Egypt helped fulminate civil unrest and protests,104 the governments of the world – including Western countries – took measures to block, censor, and monitor social-media: the revolutionary tools were folded back into surveillance as a more powerful tool.105
It wasn't just the government that was interested in crowd-sourcing data. Augmented Reality apps like Nike True City were using the platform to both advertise selected venues and events, and collect a wealth of local knowledge for free; crowd-sourcing the hidden treasures of the city and bringing them under the banner of the Nike brand.
As a tactical spatial practice, AR was starting to feel conveniently lacking in teeth, something originally noted as helpful in research into childrens' documentation of space using AR tools:
[...]because this was, in part, a virtual, digital occupation of space it was possible for it to overlay adult space without too much intrusion into its continuing function as an adult space. (In contrast they could not build dens or do 'graffiti' in the space because this would be deemed too disruptive).106
No exclusively virtual intervention could disrupt the behaviour being critiqued, or intentional use of a space, and by 2010, “flashmobs” (usually innocuous large-scale physical gatherings formed spontaneously through the agility of social media communication) orchestrated via Twitter, Emails, or SMS were resulting in arrests for conspiracy and disturbing the peace.107
103Stewart Lee - Carpet Remnant World, directed by Tim Kirkby, Nottingham Playhouse, Stewart Lee, 2012. 104Ekaterina Stepanova, "The Role of Information Communication Technologies in the ‘Arab Spring’." PONARS Eurasia, no. 15 (2011): 1-6. 105Alex Comninos, "Twitter Revolutions and Cyber Crackdowns: User-Generated Content and Social Networking in the Arab Spring and Beyond." Association for Progressive Communications (2011): 1-18. 106Williams, Jones, and Fleuriot, "Wearable Computing and the Geographies of Urban Childhood," 115. 107Camilla Power and Chris Knight, "Arrest for Attempted Street Theatre." Anthropology Today 28, no. 1 (2012): 24-26.
Introduction
21 Even the individual's use of social media began to seem less emancipatory. Though the emergence of geo-located social-media technology had appeared to drastically extend the socially communicative aspect of spatial practice (e.g. being able to share YouTube videos of yourself skateboarding in your favourite locations in the city108), the drive to document and share the exciting events of one's life led to scenarios that often felt contrived and artificial, motivated by the awareness that any photo- worthy action at a party would soon (these days instantly) be posted to one's Facebook page.
Re-evaluating the practices of geo-located social media through Martin Heidegger's concept of enframing109, the drive to archive, document and optimise life looked more like an attempt to turn the ambiguity of life into a legible metric; navigating the world and accomplishing 'life-goals' achieved more efficiently. The process of curating Facebook pages seemed like a cynical exercise in objectifying oneself and managing one's appearance like a brand.
Having witnessed the institutional colonisation of these practices – occurring with the use of a set of technologies I was working closely with – helped to illustrate the dynamic tension operating between the strategic and tactical. Novel, disruptive technologies became subverted, and quickly absorbed into the institution apparatus. Heidegger's characterisation of the essence of technology as enframing the world into a standing-reserve seemed accurate, however the resulting spaces and spatial practices (the emerging body-topologies) could not be so easily characterised: they were not exclusively tactical or strategic, since the structured system is always open to tactical practice. Like other hybrid, “cyborg” assemblages, this one was ambiguous:
From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet [...] From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory stand-points.110
Richard Goodwin's Porosity research had already provided a subversive, playful practice-based methodology for investigating hybrid spaces (of private/public). Like
108Wilfred Brandt, "Crime Is Awesome: Skateboarding and the Law." In First International Crime, Media & Popular Culture Studies Conference, Indiana State University, IN, 2009. 109Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 19. 110Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto", 90.
Introduction
22 these assemblages, the newly adopted geo-spatial technologies demanded to be explored face-to-face, rather than from a safe distance. My own skills, abilities, and proclivities (a research degree in Computer Science, and a misspent youth), along with the freedom of studio-based research motivated me to poach, hack, and play: subverting the technologies rather than passively observing and giving judgement.
Introduction
23 Introduction
24 I
Maps
2
Territories
The Victoria and Albert Museum, London was the first significant test site for the deployment of my experimental technology. At 3:47pm on a warm summer day in 2010 I walked out into the courtyard of the museum, through the throng of laughing, smiling art-lovers enjoying the unusually pleasant English weather, positioned myself strategically for broadest exposure, and pushed the concave red button that triggered the device.
When the device was finished, the courtyard had been transformed from a vibrant space echoing with voices into a silent, lifeless shell. All that remained were the most solid elements of the architecture, the lowest-common- denominator of the courtyard. Any sign of movement or life had been erased by the process, leaving behind only the thinnest outer skin of the bricks and mortar, slightly melted into a liquid form...111
From the vantage-point of a lofty watchtower, strategists can demarcate and survey their territory. Looking down at the city from a height they draw out borders and boundaries, observing space from an objective distance as a static tableau of legible, abstract, discrete elements, rather than interwoven paths.112 From this distance “the eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured, and thus control and ''include'' them within its scope of vision.”113
111See below and Relics. 112de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 119. 113Ibid., 36. Scientific rationality, with its “reconnaissance missions […] exploring the frontier regions and linking the light to the darkness”, is fundamentally strategic, bringing the unknown and ambiguous “under the territory of analysis”,114 as is political authority,115 having laid claim to the entire world and manifested institutions to control and survey it:
The last bit of Earth unclaimed by any nation-state was eaten up in 1899 […] not one speck of rock in the South Seas can be left open, not one remote valley, not even the Moon and planets[...] Not one square inch of Earth goes unpoliced or untaxed...in theory.116
Strategists are map-lovers. Mapping exemplifies the strategic approach to space, delineating a territory for analysis and substituting it for an abstract model of “stable, isolatable” elements,117 with reduced dimensions and vocabularies for representation. While in practice even the most strictly controlled, effectively held territory is not entirely transparent, static, or impermeable (a “malleable site of passage” rather than a “sedentary place maintaining firm borders against outside threat”118) street-maps, architectural plans, and urban strategies efface change, are two-dimensional, clear-cut.
114Ibid., 6. 115Ibid., xix. 116Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, 102. 117de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 94. 118Kylie Message, "Territory," in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr(Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2012), 280.
Territories
28 Controlling Territory
De Certeau's distinction between strategy and tactic is borrowed from General Carl von Clausewitz's treatise On War. Strategies are formulated from the position of the Warlord overseeing and controlling their territory, whereas tactics are practised by the footsoldiers on the ground.119
Strategy video-games provide an exemplary illustration of the 'perfect' strategic view. Games such as Starcraft, Command and Conquer and the Sim City and the Civilisation series provide a top-down view of a territory at a distance, where buildings and units can be manipulated or issued with orders. The game narrative generally fits the expected schema; strategy games typically position the player as emperor, controller, master, architect, city planner.
Figure 1 Sim City 3000, Maxis, 1999
The game spaces lay out a homogeneous, discrete space, implicitly or explicitly divided into identical geometrical parcels; the architecture of strategy games, like the 119de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 37.
Territories
29 architecture of the city, is highly striated: “rectilinear, measured, controlled, centred, extensive, constructed, and regulated”.120
These games almost exclusively use an isometric view that obliterates the sense of distance: nothing is privileged over anything else, there is no focus on foreground or a background that diminishes towards the horizon. This isometric representational style has been likened to a historical Chinese painting style used to depict an emperor's tour of their territories121 (where in contrast to Italo Calvino's Kublai Khan, the Emperor gets just what they want: a rationalised, legible territory).
Figure 2 Along the River During Qing Ming Festival (detail), 18th-century remake of 12th- century Song Dynasty original, Zhang Zeduan, 1736
Like many government institutions in an era of imminent threat, the EICU is attempting to scope out the “unknown unknowns”,122 and engineer certainty through technologies of surveillance, regulation, and simulation.123 Through such
120Livesey, "Space + Architecture.", 262. 121Peter Nelson, "Extensions of a No-Place: Four Narratives for Invented Landscapes" (paper presented at the Intersections & Counterpoints: International Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking Conference, Monas University, Melbourne, Australia, 29th September 2011), 3. 122"Defense.gov News Transcript: DoD News Briefing – Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers, United States Department of Defense (defense.gov)" 11:30 AM EST, February 12, 2002 123Such as DARPA's “Total Informational Awareness” program: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office
Territories
30 simulation, modelling, and analysis, the EICU is creating training and planning scenarios for “transport management, counter terrorism and emergency planning, response and recovery”.124
The aim of the EICU's mapping project is to produce a set of “seamless state-wide spatial data layers” as clear and 'actionable' as possible, through the use of architectural models, 3-D virtual environments and the Geographic Information System (GIS)-based Spatial Information and Mapping System (SIMS):
By visually representing this information on a map, the system enables users to translate complex scenarios into a universal language that enables agencies to work collaboratively to make informed and confident decisions in a timely manner.125
Figure 3 Spatial Information and Mapping System, John Moore, EICU, 2012
124John Moore, "3d Transport Interchange Models." Australia. Sydney, CeBIT Australia, 2012. 125John Moore, "Spatial Information and Mapping System (SIMS)." Australia. Sydney, CeBIT Australia, 2012.
Territories
31 The Regulated Body
The removal of the subjective body from the strategic viewpoint is part of the distancing of the subject from the object. The observer has been removed from the world being observed, just as the map-maker and their actions have been removed from the conventional modern-day map.126
No coincidence that those bodies left in the scene are regulated, disciplined, controlled bodies, or at least bodies the player is trying to bring under control. In Civilisation, the player – from a God's-eye-view – sends their forces to attack enemy units. In 'real life', somewhere in Nevada a soldier is remotely firing a missile from a drone over Pakistan that will destroy a building and kill its inhabitants.127 More warlords 'controlling' and 'managing' bodies in an strategic, monitored territory.
The normative body is the result of a strategic reduction (by urban planners, architects, interior designers) of bodies down to predictable elements within a territory. It represents a formalised and codified assemblage of connections; a limited set of possibilities defined by constraints on the performance of space via building codes, social conventions, and laws. These provide the structure determining what can be done in the space, and presents a model of the 'normal body'. The homogenised, normative body restricts actions to a banal set of lowest- common denominators of ability, while devaluing non-conforming bodies. The normative model is invisible, defined in architecture only through implication, but for unaccommodated body-topologies – i.e. those “with permanent and temporary extensions, such as wheelchairs, crutches, walking sticks or baby buggies”128 – its regulative nature is apparent:
One of the more literal place-maps that surround us is our architectural/environmental framework. This map, this instruction for using a place, creates and is created by normative bodies - bodies that fit its doorways, pavements, dimensions, transport systems.129
126de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 120. 127Brian Glyn Williams, "The Cia's Covert Predator Drone War in Pakistan, 2004–2010: The History of an Assassination Campaign," Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 33, no. 10 (2010): 875. 128Petra Kuppers, "Placing Our (Disabled) Selves: Everyday Practices, Map-Making and Embodied Syntax," in Cord 2001: Transmigratory moves: dance in global circulation: conference proceedings(New York University, New York, New York: Congress on Research in Dance, 2001), 183. 129Ibid.
Territories
32 The built environment, constructed on the basis of the normative body, regulates only actions that are expected or required of this body, calcifying restrictions and inequalities. Urban architecture actively subverts certain behaviour of bodies, such as anti-skate devices (e.g. metal studs and bars to prevent 'grinding' on walls),130 anti-sleep devices (e.g. spikes placed on flat building surfaces, benches designed with armrests positioned to prevent their use as a bed – figure 4),131 and anti-youth devices (e.g. The Mosquito: a high-pitched noise-making device only audible to younger ears, used to drive off children and teenagers from particular public spaces).132
Figure 4 Anti-Sleep metro bench in Rotterdam, Flickr user: unpleasantdesign, 2012
The city, already the “exemplar of striated space”,133 is becoming more so. Children are suffering a “crisis of spatialities”134 caused by over-regulated and over-determined
130Frank T. Sealers, "Anti-skate device." U.S. Patent 3,189,352, issued June 15, 1965. 131Dan Lockton, "‘Anti-Homeless’ Benches in Tokyo." http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2006/10/05/anti-homeless-benches-in-tokyo/. 132Charlotte Walsh, "The Mosquito: A Repellent Response," Youth Justice 8, no. 2 (2008): 122. 133Livesey, "Space + Architecture.", 262-64. 134Williams, Jones, and Fleuriot, "Wearable Computing and the Geographies of Urban Childhood," 113.
Territories
33 public space (“to be a child outside adult supervision, visible on city centre streets, is to be out of place”),135 while “CCTV, […] ID cards, [...] visible security, the zero tolerance of public drunkenness and the police presence, curfews, banning orders and on-the-spot fines”136 of modern cities lock down the possibilities of the body and space.
135 Mark Connolly and Judith Ennew, "Introduction Children out of Place," Childhood 3, no. 2 (1996): 133 quoted in Williams, Jones, and Fleuriot, "Wearable Computing and the Geographies of Urban Childhood," 112. 136Peter Squires, Asbo Nation: The Criminalisation of Nuisance(Bristol: Policy Press, 2008), 14.
Territories
34 Mapping
In the early stages of my research, I embraced the role of map-maker. Computer scientists are also map-lovers, making use of conceptual maps at progressive levels of abstraction to comprehend and chart otherwise overwhelming problem spaces: at its greatest level of abstraction the program becomes a single black box with defined inputs and output; capturing and representing the world through strictly defined sets of expectations. The EICU and I shared the benefits of a strategic approach to the world:
limit[ing] the sheer number of variables affecting us by creating some kind of protected zone, a place in which the environment can be rendered predictable if not properly tame.137
As the resident computer scientist of Real-Time Porosity, my experimental map- making held the strategic viewpoint, initially ignoring the poetic and attempting to organise and rationalise whatever data I could get my hands on. This involved not only mapping out the territories of physical space, but also conceptual space: diagramming problems (how to implement a GPS tracking solution in Crysis, how to integrate our system with the CSIRO's WASP equipment (figure 5),138 how to track bikes, wheelchairs, and people in real-time with cameras,139 how to achieve better reconstruction results) and analysing them as a strategic practice.
137Ian Buchanan, Michel De Certeau: Cultural Theorist(London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2000), 89. 138Lowe, Hedley, and Goodwin, "Real-Time Porosity: Combining a Computer Game Engine with Environmental Sensors", 232. 139Josh Harle, Richard Goodwin, Russell Lowe, Vinh Nuygen. "Real-Time Porosity." In Magic Spaces, Today Art Museum. Beijing, 2011.
Territories
35 Figure 5 Tracking pedestrians in real-time Townhall Station using Crysis 3D engine and WASP devices (CSIRO/UNSW Collaboration), Josh Harle, 2011
I was my own surveillance system: I voraciously recorded my journeys (as I motorcycled and walked around Sydney, and then more further afield during international travel), my experiments, and my developments, sharing the results of new discoveries (revised workflows, new tools, observations) via my blog, YouTube and Vimeo. By the end of my research I had amassed 992 documentation videos, 1000s of hours in total.
My full compliment of recording equipment consisted of: 2 x GoPro Hero HD Wide-Angle, High-speed video cameras configured for 3D capture, an H4N high- definition digital audio recorder, a Flip Micro HD high-definition portable video recorder, a Nikon D90 12.9 mega-pixel Digital Single Reflex Lens (DSLR) camera, a Samsung Galaxy Nexus mobile phone (with video, sound, and image recording capabilities), 3 x 'spycameras' disguised as key fobs (capable of sound and video recording up to 4 hours each), an Apple Mac Powerbook laptop for archiving, editing, and uploading material. (figure 6)
Territories
36 Figure 6 Set of recording equipment taken on tour of Melbourne, Beijing, Shanghai, Berlin, The Hague, Lancaster, Amsterdam, London, New York, and San Francisco, Josh Harle, 2010-2012
Territories
37 Structure-from-Motion The device I had deployed in the Victoria and Albert courtyard had been a small Flip high-definition video-camera, and the experimental technology was a refinement of a process called “Structure-from-Motion”140; a set of algorithms that constructed 3D models from frames of video.
Figure 7 The Victoria and Albert Museum courtyard reconstruction, London, Josh Harle, 2010
Structure-from-Motion is an 3D reconstruction process based on an approach called “Simultaneous Localizing and Mapping” (SLAM), that was originally used in robotics to build maps and locate the robot within them, as it travels through an unknown territory.141 This technical approach – designed for a surveying robot setting out on “reconnaissance missions […] exploring the frontier regions and linking the light to the darkness”142 – is an apt metaphor for the strategic researcher: as I was researching, I was attempting to build my own map of territories (physical, academic, technical) and localise myself within it. Similarly, the name “Structure- from-Motion” fantastically captures the strategic view's abstraction of space into place, timeliness into object, practice into map.
140David Crandall and Noah Snavely, "Modeling People and Places with Internet Photo Collections," Communications of the ACM 55, no. 6 (2012): 60. 141Hugh Durrant-Whyte and Tim Bailey, "Simultaneous Localization and Mapping: Part I," Robotics & Automation Magazine, IEEE 13, no. 2 (2006): 99. 142de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 6.
Territories
38 This modelling process was an experiment in new forms of recording the world, mapping a snap-shot of it into a form that could be stored, read-back, used for reference and decision-making. The results of these experiments was an improved Structure-from-Motion workflow. I had developed a package for automating the process for feature detection of images, calculating correspondence, reconstructing camera positions, and finally reprojecting surfaces onto a digital model.
Figure 8 Example output from Structure-From-Motion toolkit, Josh Harle, 2010
Territories
39 Reconnection My final project as a conventional map-maker was to create a real-time map of local graffiti to capture the fleeting pieces that were so quickly defaced, replaced, or erased. The project leveraged Google Map's capabilities for creating, sharing, and distributed updates of custom maps, including the ability to subscribe to updates, export a standardised format of the map, and find directions to the specific points.
Figure 9 Graffitorist, Graffiti mobile app, Josh Harle, 2012
I believed that these tools could be used for disseminating and encouraging counter- narratives of the city, i.e. that through these tools heterogeneous uses (and thus meanings) of the city could be proposed. Similarly, my interest in 3D reconstruction technology was as a tool for (tactical) mapping of architectural space. It felt like a minor coup against the control of knowledge of space: that using cheap, inconspicuous technology (i.e. the digital camera in a mobile phone) anyone could get access to ad-hoc, detailed, and unauthorised scans of architecture.
The graffiti project produced a surprising result, however. The idea was to present an up-to-date archive of graffiti in Sydney that could be updated by anyone, read from anywhere, and would show directions to find and experience the graffiti yourself. In terms of the sort of machinic assemblage it formed, I had naively intended my technology to connect bodies (graffiti artists & the public) and the
Territories
40 environment (points in the city & individual graffiti) through mobile technologies and the desire to see street-art.
The paradox of this technology (and similar emerging technologies) is that while they decentralise the power to survey, the result maintains the strategic narrative: the process and its product perfectly suit de Certeau's description of strategic representation “flattening out” the world and “transform[ing] the temporal articulation of places into a spatial sequence of points”.
The graffiti was now on display in plain sight of the strategic apparatus, and the graffiti app was quickly reterritorialised into something with a very different meaning: an assemblage of graffiti & points in the city & local council & property owners & graffiti clean-up crews. I had failed to notice the prediction of my Taxonomy of Spatial Practices,143 which plugged 'assertive' geo-spatial statements (such as marking a point-of-interest) directly into a bevy of strategic operations: Logistics, Routing, Monitoring and Analysis. Geo-tagging and online map projects were making the locations of graffiti legible and easily surveyed, and graffiti clean- up crews were using them to crowd-source their job.
143See Appendix A.
Territories
41
3
Ubiquitous Space
Emerging technologies are producing new everyday practices that map the motion and ambiguity of the world as a fixed, static territory. Pervasive ownership of digital cameras and smartphones (which include image and video capturing, and GPS tracking capabilities) have led to an explosion in the number of images being taken, as casual photographers take a series of photos indiscriminately rather than prepare a shot.144
We have entered a regime of recording,145 and these technologies are the facilitating tools. In conjunction with our cheap, available recording devices, services like YouTube and Flickr are offering unbounded, distributed online galleries for our media. These services form a “cloud commons”: a monolithic, shared knowledge system “essentially defined by remote storage of and access to all information, away from our own computers or access devices, as part of a huge archival system.”146
Cloud commons contains a growing number of services including Layar, Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Vine, and Spotify. Both social media and AR applications operate (at least in part) within the cloud commons paradigm to build an archive of social connections (uploading and tagging geo-located images, documenting friends and relations)147 and abstracted
144Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering, "Digital Remembering and Everyday Photographic Practices" (paper presented at the Data, Memory, Territory, UWS, Sydney, 2012). 145Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, "Rethinking Maps," Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 3 (2007). 146Rob Coley and Dean Lockwood, "Cloud Games: Reinventing Invention-Power" (paper presented at the International conference: The Experimental Society, Lancaster University, UK, 2010),1. 147Galloway warns that through social media “ephemeral or transitory activities may be keywords and ratings; creating machine-readable information about places.
The rapid development and widespread adoption of geo-locative technologies on mobile devices – initially starting with cell-tower triangulation, followed by built-in GPS devices, accelerometers and digital compasses, and most recently Wi-Fi triangulation (WPS) for ~4m accuracy148 – opens up geographical space for inclusion in this cloud commons.
Cloud commons is allowing spatial information to be written onto a digital representation of the world (See A Taxonomy of Spatial Practices):
• Online images from social-media and online archives such as Flickr can be used to build real-time spatial information149 and even reconstruct 3D models of real environments,150
• Micro-blogging practices utilising tools such as Twitter can support either formal or ad-hoc spatial tagging, and context specific 'Folksonomies' of meta-data about locations, for example in communicating medical requirements in post-earthquake Haiti,151,152
• AR applications typically allow contributors to add their own Points Of Interest (POI) (defined by their latitude and longitude and including meta-information such as ratings, reviews, and keywords) to a vast map of the world,
• Various tools exist for voluntarily broadcasting one's location in real-time (e.g. Google Latitude, Yahoo FireEagle),153 while methods exist to allow
captured, stored and redistributed in perpetuity”. Anne Galloway, "Intimations of Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City," Cultural Studies 18, no. 2-3 (2004): 389. 148Jonathan Raper, "How positioning technologies are revolutionising the scope of location- sensitive applications", Future of Location Technologies, City University London, 2012. 149Sophia B Liu et al., "In Search of the Bigger Picture: The Emergent Role of on-Line Photo Sharing in Times of Disaster," in Proceedings of the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference (ISCRAM), ed. Frank Fiedrich and Bartel Van de Walle(Washington, DC: ISCRAM, 2008), 140. 150David Crandall and Noah Snavely, "Modeling People and Places with Internet Photo Collections," Communications of the ACM 55, no. 6 (2012). 151Sophia Liu and Leysia Palen, "Spatiotemporal Mashups: A Survey of Current Tools to Inform Next Generation Crisis Support," in Proceedings of the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference (ISCRAM)(Gothenberg, Sweden2009). 152Sophia B. Liu and Leysia Palen, "The New Cartographers: Crisis Map Mashups and the Emergence of Neogeographic Practice Special Issue on Mapping Hazards and Disasters " Cartography and Geographic Information Science 37, no. 1 (2010). 153Katina Michael, Andrew McNamee, and Michael Michael, "The Emerging Ethics of Humancentric Gps Tracking and Monitoring," in International Conference on Mobile
Ubiquitous Space
44 tracking of phones via Bluetooth154 or using proprietary technology.155
This data, taken in its entirety, forms what I have dubbed 'ubiquitous space': a monolithic, homogenised, transparent, legibility, searchable and indexable representation corresponding to the physical space of the world where physical distance has no bearing on the ability to interrogate points.
Ubiquitous space has displaced the internalization of surveillance posited by Foucault through the panopticon.156 The “normal, socialized, 'Western' subject” is no longer motivated by fear of being watched, but has now been seduced157 into sharing their movements and action through “sousveillance […an] inside-out and bottom-up” crowd-sourced self-surveillance motivated by “efficiency of movement, congestion reduction, or discourses of security”.158 Individuals documenting their city become complicit in an extension of surveillance, expanding the ordering of information into what would have been previously hidden. Users “checking in” with FourSquare at an illegal venue have just broadcast its presence to the world. Google Glass owners will effectively have a broadcasting, always-on CCTV camera attached to their head:
It [...] makes sense to conceptually connect the surveillance/monitoring of physical space and its dwellers, and the augmentation of this space with additional data, because technologically these two applications are in a symbiotic relationship. […] Thus, augmented space is also monitored space.159
Through the formation of ubiquitous space all space becomes augmented, populated with data points by an army of Augmented Reality users, digital photographers, home movie sharers, restaurant reviewers, via the tools of cloud commons.
Business(Copenhagen, Denmark: IEEE, 2006). 154Jason McDermott and Joanne Jakovich, "Realtime Response: New Form through Transducive Media" (paper presented at the SEAM: Spatial Phrases, Sydney, 2009). 155Russell Lowe and Richard Goodwin, "Real-Time Porosity Using Computer Gaming Technology," Automation in Construction 20, no. 3 (2011). 156Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish(New York: Random House of Canada, 1995), 195. 157Roy Boyne, "Post-Panopticism," Economy and Society 29, no. 2 (2000): 285. quoted in Thomas Allmer, "The Internet & Surveillance-Research Paper Series." (2010). 8. 158Gillian Fuller and Ross Harley, "The Protocological Surround: Reconceptualizing Radio and Architecture in the Wireless City," in Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement, ed. Marcus Foth, et al.(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 39. 159Emphasis in original. Lev Manovich, "The Poetics of Augmented Space: Learning from Prada," Visual Communication 5, no. 2 (2006): 8.
Ubiquitous Space
45 Figure 10 Panoramio Search results for 'recent images' taken in Newtown, NSW, January, 2013
Ubiquitous Space
46 Homogenising and Flattening
The EICU's Spatial Information and Mapping System (SIMS) project aims to translate the euphemistically termed “complex scenarios” of an uncertain, ambiguous world into a “universal language”. It involves unweaving some connections, privileging others, choosing scales of influence and accuracy, and then cementing these decisions into a cartographic standard.
The universal language is similarly proposed by inventor of the World Wide Web (WWW), Tim Berners-Lee, in the form of the “Semantic Web”; a vision of the web made up “of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines”:160
I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers.
This dream is now approaching realisation, progressively embraced since the development of Web 2.0: a design ideology and set of technologies that allow collaborative remixing of user-generated content, based on shared standards (e.g. XML, KML, RSS). Different types of data formatted in a standard way allows for automatic recombination. For example, Yahoo Pipes (a 'mashup' tool) can easily take the output from a news website as RSS, process it to look for location names, and project news reports onto a map in their appropriate locations.
In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger identifies the essence of both technology and modern science as enframing; a drive to create standing-reserves, ready to be used.161 For example, through technology a hydroelectric dam creates a standing-reserve of electricity from the river, and science creates a standing-reserve of ordered knowledge from the uncertain world.
Enframing occurs in the use of technology in creating a territory of abstracted and ordered representations of spatial practice. AR and the wider field of social media can be seen as creating a standing-reserve out of the social and spatial elements of our lives; pulling sensual aspects of the city experience into a mere sign of its reduction. The paradigm of cloud commons is creating a standing-reserve out of
160Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web: The Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor(Oakland, CA: Texere, 2000), 157-58. 161Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays(New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 17.
Ubiquitous Space
47 the social and spatial elements of our lives; pulling sensual, singular aspects of life into a standing-reserve; ordered, indexed, searchable, and abstract.
Everyday spatial practice – a creative enunciation (acting out) of structured space – is being captured by various technologies. This thesis's Taxonomy of Spatial Practices162 illustrating examples of the processes by which these practices are mapped into ubiquitous space to become the driving data for siting, logistics, routing and navigation, inventory, monitoring and analysis tools.
The now-ubiquitous devices and tools that form our everyday practices have been developed from a common lineage as business tools aimed at bureaucratisation and rationalisation, where more and more minute details of the world are tracked and recorded to allow calculations and optimisation of the efficiency of tasks. They harness and control the world; are extremely good at enframing the ambiguousness of everyday life into something succinct and readable, guilty of the same violent removal from context, and insertion into a system of commodities and productive logic. This paradigm has created a monolithic shared archive for online spatial information, located unambiguously within an isotropic space and time of Global Positioning System coordinates and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) timestamps.
162See Appendix A.
Ubiquitous Space
48 Harvesting Metadata
Metadata is data about a piece of data itself, attached and readable by computers. It is a standard set of descriptors. For example, digital cameras automatically add information about the lens, aperture, date taken, and exposure into image files created in meta-data according to the EXchangeable Image File (EXIF) standard. Mobile phone cameras by default add to this information the GPS location the image was taken from.
Image gallery tools such as Picasa can create automatic organisations of images, based on metadata. Entire photo-collections of thousands of images can be ordered according to size, date modified, date created, camera type, (and when geo-tagged) by location.
Albums are being replaced by the paradigm of open search we have become used to for other enormous archives of semantic information e.g. the Internet. We are recording everything without worrying about ordering, since the metadata automatically ascribed to it in conjunction with the automatic (semantic) ordering systems are doing this for us. At will the photographs can be re-arranged according to date, location, and included friends. Through the inclusion of metadata, our recorded media is available to be distributed (in time and location) across ubiquitous space.
New technology is allowing the mapping into this space of more of the ambiguous aspects of our life. For example, Picasa, iPhoto, and Facebook all have facilities for scanning images to detect and match faces, and automatically identifying subjects of photos (adding this data to a set of machine readable metadata), though Facebook disabled this feature globally, and is bringing it back selectively in the USA.163 Prior to this, and as a continuing practice, Facebook has been harvesting the same information manually, effectively crowd-sourcing the collection of face-to- individual data.
163Paul Ducklin, "Facebook Is Turning Facial Recognition Back on - So Here's How to Check Your "Photo Tagging" Settings." http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/02/02/facebook-turns-facial-recognition-back-on/.
Ubiquitous Space
49 Figure 11 iPhoto '11, (Facial recognition feature), Apple, 2011
Facebook is significantly more worrying than the other technologies, since it performs the search with reference to the global set of Facebook users, signed up as members of the cloud commons, and ties this global ID to the images, whereas Picassa performs a search relative to all local images, and requires you to assign names yourself – i.e. they perform different levels of global legibility and local blindness.
Similarly, the AR application Nike True City maps out interesting spots of the city, and allows users to add to the map and share their own locations.164 The tag-line of the app is “Making the hidden visible”, suggesting a secret, underground, hidden city being revealed. Individuals documenting their city become complicit in sousveillance, revealing the previously hidden, and adding it to a vast, distributed, homogenised spatial-temporal archive “analytically distributed over a space whose essence (even inside the computer) is to be a readable artefact, an object open from end to end to the survey of an immobile eye.”165
164Rob Ford and Julius Wiedemann, The App & Mobile Case Study Book(Cologne: Taschen Benedikt Verlag Gmbh., 2011). 165de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 199.
Ubiquitous Space
50
Figure 12 Nike True City, Augmented Reality App, Nike, 2010
Ubiquitous Space
51 What does Ubiquitous Space look like?
Ubiquitous space is a speculative concept. While in reality there are many different systems for mapping, archiving, and ordering artefacts of our shared use of space, in practice Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Google Maps are unchallenged, ubiquitous technologies.
Just as Wikipedia captures in one monolithic system a universal, ubiquitous archive of knowledge, Google Maps (through its near-universal use in embedded mobile applications and websites) provides a theoretical unified globe-space for representing all spatial information on earth, inspired in part by the fictional software product “Earth” from sci-fi novel Snow Crash:
[...]A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's length in front of his eyes. [...]the user interface that [the security organisation] CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns — all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.166
Google Earth is the perfect image of ubiquitous space. A resonant mythology of voyeurism and omniscience that has charmed many with the prospect of observing an object in extreme detail from an isolated, untouchable viewpoint.
Over a flat white in a café in Sydney, Australia I can instantly access high-resolution satellite imagery of my old home in The Hague, Netherlands, see recent images and tweets posted in the village, monitor traffic, weather, and air quality. The most significant distance for those travelling in ubiquitous space is the length of the search query they must type to arrive, but I am no closer to the pickled herrings and stroopwafelen: “the frank abolition of all distances brings no nearness...”167
166Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash(New York:Bantam Books,, 1993), 106. 167Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought(Perennical Classics, 2001), 165.
Ubiquitous Space
52 Figure 13 Google Earth, Google, 2013
Ubiquitous Space
53
4
The Right to the (Fragmented) City
I recount a tale of n-1 cities. They exist in parallel, occupying the same physical space, yet only interacting through phantasms of shadow and light.
The one seen from far above, the strategic city, is watched by the spatial theorist Michel de Certeau in his Voyeur incarnation. Perched atop the highest skyscraper, he is joined from this “god's-eye-view” by countless urban planners, strategicians, and the architects who design their buildings from a distance and as objects on a pedestal. From here they exercise a scopic and gnostic drive to observe and measure, transforming all they survey into a single demarcated territory.
The multiplicity of other cities can only be seen from the ground. Their occupants bustle through busy streets, getting lost in the smells and sounds, and labyrinthine alleys. When Gaston Bachelard climbs his attic steps, he comes to daydream, not to observe: there are no real vantage points here; every location is an internal cavity.
Some have tried - and failed - to map these tactical cities; they are constantly changing, fragmented, nebulous, and appear different from various angles. If you asked a local to describe their shape or circumference they may well give a vague gesticulation or wordless shrug. Or they may laugh. Location-aware technology such as Augmented Reality (AR) introduces a new field of spatial practice that is becoming progressively more intertwined with everyday life. As complementary technologies to the vast body of social media applications, they allow the documentation and sharing of socio-geographic information with unprecedented ease. For example, using YouTube or Flickr, a resistant spatial practice such as urban skating can be documented and used to present a contradiction to the mandated use of the space. The open nature of most social media technology vastly extends Michel de Certeau's understanding of spatial practices as “phatic” (socially communicative).168
It is this level of uninhibited peer-to-peer communication that potentially challenges monolithic structures of knowledge and suggests a meaning-giving system based on open participation. AR gives the ability to visualise at a location the previously invisible spatial counter-narratives. Research by the multi-university group Project EPIC emphasises the advantages of these structures of information sharing over command-and-control systems for effective, flexible emergency response;169 a domain where effective communication of spatial information is essential.
De Certeau argues the importance of the emotionally-invested, psychological landscape to our lived experience of space. He maintains that everyday tactical spatial practices go beyond geometric and productive logic, yet notably AR in particular is restricted to representing propositional statements of space using methods developed as part of this geometric and productive logic.
The emancipatory, disruptive potential for new technologies is matched by the danger that they will simply re-encode existing oppressive systems.170 For example, when technologies are utilised to articulate human experience only to the extent that they engage in economically productive processes, their account is oppressive:
[It] limits the ways in which the target individual can connect with the individuals and objects with which it coexists . . . Exclusive usage spreads like cancer. It is not only reactive but imperialist by nature.171
168de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 98. 169Palen and Liu. "Citizen communications in crisis”, 733. 170Gail Weiss, "The Durée of the Tecnho-Body," in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, ed. Elizabeth Grosz(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 174. 171Brian Massumi, A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 56-57.
The Right to the (Fragmented) City
56 The Right to the City
The right to the city was first suggested by spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre, in his 1968 book Le Droit à la Ville.172 Lefebvre understands space to form a two-way relationship with social relations, where types of physical space and types of social space are interdependent.173 Thus in order to progress social justice, both must be investigated. His declaration of a “Right to the City” prescribes that the physical and social spaces of the city be constructed as an inclusive process; there should be "potential for personal involvement in making space".174
Two key components of Lefebvre's Right to the City can be identified as participation and appropriation.175 Participation describes the right of the individual to all the opportunities of the city, i.e. the right not to be excluded, where “opportunity is spread more equally across the population”,176 along with a political participation that ties in with the democratic formation of the city. Appropriation in its most straightforward sense is “the right to be physically present in already- existing material space”, and by extension a right to be able to carry on one's everyday routine, or use public space for survival. Beyond this the right to appropriation also defines “the right to a city that fully meets, above all other considerations, the needs of inhabitants”.177
Lefebvre constitutes space through three concepts: Perceived Space,178 Representations of Space, and Spaces of Representation.179 Within these modes Lefebvre understands a cultural-social, abstract-conceptual and phenomenological space respectively. Following from this, Lefebvre's analysis of the needs of inhabitants include social needs that reflect the breadth of our experience of space, including those that are seemingly opposed and mutually exclusive:
Social needs have an anthropological foundation. Opposed and
172Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas(Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1996), 63. 173Jane Rendell, "(the Re-Assertionof Time into) Critical Spatial Practice," in Conference Proceedings of One Day Sculpture(Wellington, New Zealand, 2009), 5. 174Helen Liggett, Urban Encounters(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 89. 175Mark Purcell, Recapturing Democracy: Neoliberalization and the Struggle for Alternative Urban Futures(New York: Routledge, 2008), 95. 176Ibid. 177Ibid. 178“Perceived Space” is used here rather than “Spatial Practice” to avoid confusion between Lefebvre and de Certeau's use of this term. 179Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space(Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), 38.
The Right to the (Fragmented) City
57 complimentary, they include the need for security and opening, the need for certainty and adventure, that of organization of work and of play, the need for the predictable and the unpredictable, of similarity and difference, of isolation and encounter, exchange and investment, of independence (even solitude) and communication, of immediate and long-term prospects. The human being has the need to accumulate energies and to spend them, even waste them in play. He has a need to see, to hear, to touch, to taste and the need to gather these perceptions in a 'world'.180
Since Lefebvre's Le Droit à la Ville, Marxist geographer David Harvey has revisited the right to the city, reaffirming an acknowledgement of the neglected political territory of the city itself.181 However, while Lefebvre and Harvey share a Marxist heritage, Lefebvre's original right offers a much richer account of the social constitution of space. There has been a disappearance of the concept of social and phenomenological space from the right to the city, with Harvey's analysis providing a stark abstraction of the operation of urbanism into one exclusively of mechanisms of class conflict. Such contemporary readings of Lefebvre give “the [false] impression that Lefebvre thinks about space politically and ideologically [in a way] well within the concepts of early Marx”.182
Similarly, the use of the term “right to the city” by many Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and development agencies is disconnected from the dialectical production of space and framed as simply an extended political participation in city planning, “on the basis of a ('reformed' and 'improved') representative 'democracy'”.183 They share a distance from Lefebvre's rich conception of space, and are far removed from considering the city as anything more meaningful than a an ideological or political “battleground”.184
180Writings on Cities, 147. 181David Harvey, "The Right to the City," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27, no. 4 (2003): 939-41. 182Lefebvre, Kofman, and Lebas, Writings on Cities, 43. 183Marcelo Lopes de Souza, "Which Right to Which City? In Defence of Political-Strategic Clarity," Interface 2, no. 1 (2010): 315. 184Jackie Leavitt, Tony Roshan Samara, and Marnie Brady. "The Right to the City Alliance: Time to Democratize Urban Governance." http://www.plannersnetwork.org/publications/2009_fall/leavitt_samara_brady.html
The Right to the (Fragmented) City
58 Technology and Ubiquitous Space
The Internet has been heralded as the perfect platform for participative processes and grass-roots movements, an “architecture of participation” supporting a many- to-many communication paradigm on which social media sits.185 These social technologies are often seen as a plug-in mechanism to gain easy access to a plurality of voices.186
The unprecedented access to- and use of- social media and computer-mediated tools can circumscribe the traditional hierarchies of information,187 allowing challenges to monolithic structures of knowledge188 and the forming of ad-hoc, responsive peer-to-peer communication networks that can function more resiliently than institutional emergency response.189
The ability for users to comment on a map, to add meaningful places, and to share those comments and places with others, may provide means of putting practices of spatialisation and temporalisation in the hands of users (allowing them to manipulate, shape, and “'write against' totalizing concepts of the city”190) instead of limiting the potential of everyday life and controlling the flow through abstracted technological objects and models of information.191
Mapping technologies are compelling tools, helping to meet the demands of modern life. Where they might fail is if they prevent or inhibit the ability of a person to experience the city on their own terms; if they start from a premise of what the city is rather than allowing it to emerge through the spatial practices of its inhabitants.
The emergence of Google Maps as the de facto map provider has dampened the
185Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together(UK: Penguin Books Limited, 2009), 40. 186Robert Goodspeed, "Citizen Participation and the Internet in Urban Planning" (Master’s thesis, University of Maryland, 2008). 187Gloria Mark and Bryan Semaan, "Resilience in Collaboration: Technology as a Resource for New Patterns of Action," in Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work(ACM, 2008). 188Gloria Mark, Ban Al-Ani, and Bryan Semaan, "Repairing Human Infrastructure in a War Zone," in Proceedings of ISCRAM(Gothenberg, Sweden, 2009). 189Leysia Palen and Sarah Vieweg, "The Emergence of Online Widescale Interaction in Unexpected Events: Assistance, Alliance & Retreat," in Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work(San Diego, CA: ACM, 2008). 190Galloway, "Intimations of everyday life", 394. 191Galloway, "Intimations of everyday life", 403.
The Right to the (Fragmented) City
59 hopes of challenging a monolithic knowledge-authority, at least as far as cartography goes.192 Google's dominance has led to a homogenisation of cartographic choices as their competitors undergo a “Googlification”, adopting the same mapping conventions, emulating their fonts, symbols, colour scheme, road width, etc.193
The mobile travel guide app mtrip provides guides for the larger cities of the world through a uniform layout, set of categories, and Google Maps-style view.194 Beijing, Shanghai, Berlin, London, and New York all appear as venues for the various possible travel experiences, split conveniently into six categories: “Attractions”, “Shopping”, “Restaurants”, “Bars & Nightlife”, “Hotels”, and “Others”. The fascinating differences between these cities are obscured by a reduction of each one to a collection of discrete sites on an identically-styled map. Not only that, but the map is normalised from a set of operational assumption implicit in the Google Maps design. What good is such a streetmap in a city of arcades, bazaars, or tunnels? What scope is there for doing justice to the hugely different spaces of each city?
Ubiquitous space is isotropic, ordered, and measured, and doesn't understand tactical space, which is shaped by everyday spatial practices through “swellings, shrinkings, and fragmentations”:195
The “map” is a political abstract grid, a gigantic con enforced by the carrot/stick conditioning of the “Expert” State, until for most of us the map becomes the territory[...]196
Google Maps' (and ubiquitous space's) archive of geographical elements begs the question of the city as something that facilitates optimised, directed engagement: 197 a city understood through productive logic. Even when these strategic models compete with the status quo, they do not radically challenge conceptions of space as they compete within a field of calculated worth. What is implicitly accepted is an erasure of the psychological landscape of the city, and the lived experience within it, in favour of an overarching strategic logic.198
192Don Reisinger, “Analyst: Google Maps Reigns Supreme.”, Techcrunch, Accessed January, 14, 2013. http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/29/analyst-google-maps-reigns-supreme/ 193Timothy R Wallace, "Google Maps: Homogenizing Our Landscape" (paper presented at the Is Google Good for Geography? Web2.0 and the Political Economy of User Generated Geographical Knowledge, Las Vegas, USA, 2009). 194Mtrip (iPhone and Android app - v.1.0), mTrip Guides, 2013 195de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 101. 196Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism(New York: Autonomedia, 2003), 103. 197E. David, 'Archive Fever', Arthur No. 30, 2008. 198Josh Harle, 'Tactical and Strategic Experimentation in Space', 106.
The Right to the (Fragmented) City
60 They utilize the familiar listing, searching and ordering mechanisms for navigating through a representation of space. These mechanisms allow us to “direct and optimize” our experiences like the production processes they were originally created to support, representing the world in a “universalising chronological grand narrative”.199
Figure 14 mtrip travel guides to Beijing, Berlin, and New York (iPhone App screenshots), illustrating homogenised virtual space of very different cities, 2011
199Message, "Territory.", 280-84
The Right to the (Fragmented) City
61 The Fragmented City
Both Lefebvre and de Certeau's account of space emphasise the significance of an imaginative/psychological aspect. Similarly, in The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard robustly examines how 'poetic images' of space constitute our experience of spaces, and how spatial images such as the attic inform an understanding of our psychological engagement with space.200
Extending Bachelard's examination of the oneiric, Juhani Pallismaa's The Eyes of the Skin identifies the operation of strategic spatiality in contemporary architecture practice.201 Identifying a pervasive ocularcentrism – the privileging of focused vision that sits at the foundation of Western Philosophy's concept of objective knowledge – he calls for an architecture that appeals to “the essence of lived experience moulded by hapticity and peripheral unfocused vision”.
In Identity, Intimacy and Domicile. Notes on the Phenomenology of Home, Pallasmaa explores the neglected psychic element of houses versus homes. Taking inspiration from The Poetics of Space, he examines the oneiric home and the myriad poetic images that resonate with it.202 The oneiric images of the home form emotionally- invested mythologies which define our understanding of space far beyond the naked geometry of the house.
In his essay, Pallasmaa contends that contemporary architecture works in opposition to these understandings of space:
Modern architecture has forcefully attempted to avoid or eliminate oneiric image […] One of the reasons why contemporary houses and cities are so alienating is that they do not contain secrets; their structures and contents are conceived at a single glance. Just compare the labyrinthine secrets of an old medieval town or any old house, which stimulate our imagination and fill it with expectation and excitement, with the transparent emptiness of our new cityscapes and blocks of flats.203
200Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space(Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). 201Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin : Architecture and the Senses(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008). 202Juhani Pallasmaa, "Identity, Intimacy and Domicile. Notes on the Phenomenology of Home," Finnish Architectural Review 1(1994). 203Ibid.
The Right to the (Fragmented) City
62 The transparent legibility of modern architecture and lack of mystery resonates with de Certeau's description of a strategic account of space; one that is disenchanted; empty of magic and mystery. For de Certeau this “enchantment” is essential to inhabitation of a space:
There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can 'invoke' or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in.204
The acknowledgement of a lived experience of the city – the tactical of de Certeau's practice of everyday life; Spaces of Representation identified by Lefebvre; the oneiric realm described by Bachelard – is crucial to a comprehensively realised understanding of the right to the city. Hence the importance of a right to the city exercised beyond competing use-value propositions distributed in ubiquitous space.
In the face of an elimination of the oneiric in architecture, new technologies that quietly erase them while map-making, and the reformulation of the right to the city without them, we must discover how to evoke (or invoke) the 'spirit(s) of a space'.
204de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 108.
The Right to the (Fragmented) City
63 The Right to the (Fragmented) City
64 II
Tours
5
Illegible Spaces
We're flying blind in the shadows of unknown Beijing streets: beyond the reach of Australia's 3G service and damned if I'll pay $20 a MB for it here...
I've finally made my way out of sight of the towers, within a sprawling network of alleys that make up the Hutong – a collection of traditional courtyard residences – adjacent to the Forbidden Palace. My companion and I are slightly drunk, searching for a Mongolian bar that's rumoured to be hidden down one of the winding paths.
Flying blind in invisible spaces: our knowledge of them, de Certeau suggests, “as blind as lovers in each other's arms”. Or perhaps (to choose a less romantic metaphor) like blind men groping an elephant. We are castaways from strategic abstractions of space that would give us bird's-eye views of the whole area. All I know is what I've “touched”: the street scene around me, the path in front of me. Just like the proverbial elephant, everyone gives a different guess at what the city actually is, formed from how we've embrace it.
I'm recording our feet as we walk, and we wander along with our conversation. Later I will create an elongated image from the frames of the video, one that sketches out an impression of space defined by our points of contact with it; the paths we form through these streets.205
205See Paths. In-Between Architecture, Concept sketch of a 'parasitic' unauthorised inhabitation between two buildings in Mumbai, India, Studio Mumbai Architects, 2010
In-Between Architecture, Final work, 1:1 scale plaster cast reconstruction of space in Mumbai, India, Studio Mumbai Architects, 2010
Illegible Spaces
68 Inhabiting
The functionalist model of living in architecture – modernist ideals care of Le Corbusier and friends – are of an occupant's engagement with the house as “machine for living in”;206 something that provides material support for the continuation of life according to the supposed universal specifications of a simple engineering problem:
Let us state the problem […] A house: a shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. A receptacle for light and sun. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work, and personal life. A room: a surface over which one can walk at ease, a bed on which to stretch yourself, a chair in which to rest or work, a work- table, receptacles in which each thing can be put at once in its right place. The number of rooms: one for cooking and one for eating. One for work, one to wash yourself in and one for sleep.207
In contrast, what it means to inhabit is an open question for Michel de Certeau. Faced with “machines for living” that reduce their design brief to sustaining bare life (and presumably joined by 'machines for shopping', 'machines for working', 'machines for entertainment' to form the city as 'machine for capitalism'), the inhabitants must be “poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality”.208
Strategies draw lines in the sand to geometrically define their field of operation, tactics transform the abstract place into an inhabitable space: “[insinuating] itself into the other's place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance.”209 De Certeau's account of a space produced through tactical practice (rather than determined by concrete, “proper” meanings) continues his theme of everyday life being quietly inventive, not passively consuming. Reading shares this tactical description:
The thin film of writing becomes a movement of strata, a play of spaces. A different world (the reader's) slips into the author's place.
206Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture(New York: Courier Dover Publications, 1931), 107. 207Ibid., 114. 208de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xiix. 209de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xix.
Illegible Spaces
69 This mutation makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment. It transforms another person's property into a space borrowed for a moment by a transient. Renters make comparable changes in an apartment they furnish with their acts and memories[...]210
The Situationist 'derivists' drift in spite of the productive, organisational structure of the city, walking through the city without being determined by the districts and boundaries of the map.211 Parkour traceurs extend this 'play of spaces', unhindered by obstacles and undetermined by even the streets: over and above!212
What is at stake is our existence: de Certeau gives us an ontology (a description of our being in the world) which is creative and personal in opposition to Foucault's dire portrait of the discipline and control of biopower. Against Foucault's “disciplinary procedures” de Certeau wants to entertain “so many other series [of practices] which, pursuing their silent itineraries, have not given rise to a discursive configuration or to a technological systemisation.”213
210de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xxi. 211Simon Sadler, The Situationist City(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 20. 212Stephen John Saville, "Playing with Fear: Parkour and the Mobility of Emotion," Social & cultural geography 9, no. 8 (2008): 908. 213de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 48.
Illegible Spaces
70 Hidden
The power of tactics should not be misread as being in their thousand “little victories” against disciplinary control, but in their successful inhabitation of a structural system that leaves little room for them.214 Out of the alienating Brutalist architecture of Los Angeles, urban skating managed to conjure the spirit of freedom and exhilaration of surfing: evoking a poetic image of the city as an ocean of concrete waves.215 Tactics are not in opposition to strategic territory, but within and in spite of it.
Though the practice of everyday life may be widely distributed (spread far like weeds, viruses, superstitions, and mythologies) they are hidden in “proliferating illegitimacy[, as] unreadable but stable [...] surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization.”216
Tactical space operates out-of-sight of the ocularcentric, objective view, in the “blind spot in a scientific and political technology”.217 Nothing is pinned down in an absolute scale in these spaces. It is a Deluezian 'smooth space' with no external measure or organisation, understood through a sort of blind, intimate frottage with features of the landscape and other inhabitants,218 not legible and mappable except relative to itself:
The smooth space shared with others emerges not with reference to an 'immobile outside observer', but rather through the tactile relations of any number of observers. It is thus a space – like that of the steppes, the desert or polar landscapes – occupied by intensities, forces and tactile qualities, with no fixed reference point.219
De Certeau doesn't shine a light on tactics. He doesn't pull back a curtain to reveal and analyse. Instead, he points to the whispers in the darkness, and lets us know
214Ian Buchanan, Michel De Certeau: Cultural Theorist(London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2000), 87. 215Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body(Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001), 32. 216de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 96. 217Ibid., 95. 218Ibid., 93. 219Tamsin Lorraine, "Smooth Space," in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2012), 258.
Illegible Spaces
71 there's more to the world than the apparatuses of control that Foucault elucidated.220 The subterranean smuggler's tunnels, the footsie under the table, the perennial graffiti in the public square: “practices which an urbanistic system was suppose to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay”.221
My time living in an industrial warehouse taught me some of the practices (choreographed movements, guileful ruses, tactics) that are needed to maintain the tentative, borrowed space: every few months rooms must be disguised, pantomime caricatures of studios and offices assembled, to satisfy the gaze of one inspector or another. We practice a modern version of the primeval tactics “certain fishes or plants execute with extraordinary virtuosity”:222 staying hidden to keep from being consumed.
Inhabitation is the practice of invisible spaces that resist connection to observational apparatus. Not structures imposing themselves on people, but dreams mixed with memories, play, associations, alternative uses, subversions: a generative process of growing a space beyond the scaffold of structured, striated territory.
220Buchanan, Michel De Certeau: Cultural Theorist, 14. 221de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 96. 222Ibid., 40.
Illegible Spaces
72 Figure 15 Northwood St Warehouse, Author's room hidden at the top of industrial pallet- racking, 2009
Illegible Spaces
73 Temporary Autonomous Zones
There's something living in the dark valleys between buildings, behind the exposed faces of the city. Wedged in the angular black shadows of infra-red CCTV flood-lights; edged against spots of WiFi coverage; dithered and fuzzy in the inaccuracy of GPS geo-locating. Occasionally springing out from hiding places, cubbyholes, caverns, and burrows, spilling like spores across space, and weaving itself back into the cracks.
When no one's looking, life has a way of gaining a foothold, clinging on tenaciously, and thriving in borrowed space.
I don't feel like a passive object residing in a container, more like a dancer of Brownian molecular motion where temperature, pressure, 'container', and 'contents' are all functions of movement: “less a matter of a liquid circulating in the interstices of a solid than of different movements making use of the elements of the terrain.”223
Hiding in the “margin of error” between the map and the territory, the industrial zoning and the illegal warehouse venue, tacticians inhabit the borrowed space of Temporary Autonomous Zones.224
A Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) is not revolutionary – not a staging-ground for a fight, the clubhouse of an established “counter-culture”,225 or an ends in itself226 – just a surreptitious space generated by inhabiting the world tactically; a topology of connections generated by uncaptured or illicit desires227 (for uncommodified experiences, for shelter, for freedom from bigotry, for the free exchange of goods, etc.) and managing to avoid plugging into reterritorialising forces.
The term 'Temporary Autonomous Zone' was coined by “ontological anarchy” and “poetic terrorism” advocate Hakim Bey. According to Bey, the exemplar TAZs were
223de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 34. 224Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism(New York: Autonomedia, 2003), 101. 225de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xii. 226Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, 101. 227de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 35.
Illegible Spaces
74 “Pirate Utopias”; the global network of islands and intentional communities that operated outside of the control of world governments.
The sea-rovers and corsairs of the 18th century created an “information network” that spanned the globe: primitive and devoted primarily to grim business, the net nevertheless functioned admirably. Scattered throughout the net were islands, remote hideouts where ships could be watered and provisioned, booty traded for luxuries and necessities.228
The world is full of these autonomous spaces of various half-lifes: squats, communes, illegal venues, Occupy movements, Travellers' camps, tent embassies, quietly settled nooks and alcoves, “sprawling, temporary, shifting shanty-towns of nomads”.229 The legible spaces of a strategic territory are actually filled with heterogeneous zones:
[...]displacing dominant visions of political geography, which divide the world into discrete state spaces[,] through the lens of the zone, the globe appears a patchwork of anomalous territories[...]230
The autonomy of these spaces is balanced by their fragility. Discovered and exposed they inevitably collapse back into the world “leaving behind it an empty husk, only to spring up again somewhere else, once again invisible.”231 The list of Sydney's defunct underground venues grows, along with the list of new ones: 505, Tap gallery, Lanfranchi's Memorial Discoteque, Quirks, Dirty Shirlows, Concrete Jungle replaced by The Barn, The Hutch, Adult Contemporary, Midian, Sashimi, Cosmos, Join-the-dots, and my own warehouse space.
The development of (satellite) surveillance technology has made the invisibility of traditional, geographically remote autonomous zones difficult, but with this technology come new territories, new space to hide in.
228Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, 97. 229Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi(London: Continuum, 2009), 531. 230Brett Neilson, "Data, Zone, Territory," in Proceedings of Data, Memory, Territory – International Symposium and Masterclasses, ed. Tanya Notley, et al.(UWS, Sydney, Australia: Digital Media Rearch, 2012), 16. 231Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, 101.
Illegible Spaces
75 Figure 16 Lanfranchi's Memorial Discoteque, unlicensed venue (shut down), Sydney, 2005
Figure 17 Qirkzs, unlicensed venue (shut down), Sydney, 2008
Illegible Spaces
76 Figure 18 Author's current warehouse space, concept model, Josh Harle, 2012
Figure 19 Author's current warehouse space, Josh Harle, 2012
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77 Bey himself, writing in 1991, was sceptical of Temporary Autonomous Zones existing in virtual space, but described a modest role for the Web:
If the TAZ is a nomad camp, then the Web helps provide the epics, songs, genealogies and legends of the tribe; it provides the secret caravan routes and raiding trails which make up the flowlines of tribal economy; it even contains some of the very roads they will follow, some of the very dreams they will experience as signs and portents.232
More than 20 years on, the Internet can provide the “real goods” Bey expected of physical Temporary Autonomous Zones, rather than just information. The make- shift, virtual spaces formed out-of-view can certainly now accommodate the desires for “food, drugs, sex, tax evasion”,233 as well as those less hedonistic desires, e.g. for a community of peers who are accepting of your sexuality, lifestyle, etc.
Websites providing dating and hook-up services – such as Grindr, Craigslist, Adult Friend Finder – are joined by clandestine online bazaars hidden in the “Darkweb” (a series of servers communicating by piggybacking on standard Internet services and using specialist encryption tools and anonymising proxy servers to thwart surveillance234), a shady digital continuation of the hidden tactics of physical space:
Increasingly constrained, yet less and less concerned with these vast frameworks [of control], the individual detaches himself from them without being able to escape them and can henceforth only try to outwit them, to pull tricks on them, to rediscover, within an electronicized and computerized megalopolis, the “art” of the hunters [...] of earlier days.235
The “secret caravan routes and raiding trails”236 leading to Temporary Autonomous Zones differ from space to space. In the early 90s, my modem and I knew the secret digital handshakes and the right phone numbers to gain entry to the enticing shadows of pirate Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) (tethered to it by land-line and dreading the inevitable phone bill). Lights danced hypnotically across its front as we moved together into the more wholesome spaces of WorldsAway: In a quiet
232Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, 109. 233Ibid., 115. 234Cath Everett, "Moving across to the Dark Side," Network Security 2009, no. 9 (2009): 10- 12. 235de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xxiii. 236Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, 109.
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78 room in a house next to a canal and a windmill in a small village in a strange country I could open a portal to a virtual space “enduring and independent of geographical spaces”237 where people spoke my own language, welcomed me in to share friendly conversations and give me the grand tour.
Figure 20 Iniquity BBS, Dial-up Bulletin Board System menu screen, Mike Fricker, 1990s
Later, in a rusty, cast-off '87 Vauxhall Astra hatchback packed with friends, we bumped through the streets of Reading in the early hours: our own little tribe of feral hippy kids dumpster-diving supermarkets for food and industrial parks for the computers, routers, and network cables needed to create our linked archipelagos of pirate islands. We formed “remote hideouts” trading files (warez, music, cracked games) rather than booty: reinvented pirates operating in autonomous zones of beige boxes strung together by ethernet cable.
These days tools like BitTorrent and websites like PirateBay bring these zones of free pirate exchange to the mainstream, to be descended on by swathes of adverts and law suits:
Much of the popular discussion of computer-mediated communications amounts to domesticating virtual spaces and bringing it out of its liminoid status – a realm of illicit information
237Rob Shields, The Virtual(London: Routledge, 2003), 48.
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79 (how to build a nuclear bomb and so on)[...] an arena in which forbidden desires are unleashed, and a subculture populated by mythified figures such as the hacker.238
Despite the constant expansion of control and legibility emerging through the use of mapping technology, the technologies themselves bring with them more space for tactical practice. Like physical spaces, hidden digital spaces are vulnerable to collapsing back into a strategic system of surveillance – ubiquitous space – but they resurge elsewhere: the Darkweb is now peppered with “honey-pots” and outbound nodes run by government agencies to entrap or monitor illicit activity, but elsewhere Google Maps is used to find vacant buildings for squatting and Twitter to track police mobilisation during protests.239
Remaining autonomous from ubiquitous space requires avoiding using its enabling technologies for their intended purposes, i.e. by playfully re-appropriating them, or using them for camouflage. My Taxonomy of Spatial Practices240 provides a reference of spatial 'statements' captured by strategic apparatus, but there's no need for them to be true. Through the creative re-appropriation of Facebook tags geographically disparate friends can be reunited in one 'place', or transformed into humorous inanimate objects. Jokes and tricks can be played through a co-opted notification system. Through ad hoc or choreographed interventions Google Street View can be turned into the scene of fictional spatial stories.241 The 'assertive' spatial statements that feed the world into ubiquitous space in legible pieces can be fictions, that create their own spaces of desire and myth.
238Ibid., 14. 239For Example “LIVE Protest Map”., http://goo.gl/maps/vNxlD and "Sukey - Keeping Demonstrators Safe, Mobile, and Informed". http://www.opensukey.org/ 240See Appendix A. 241http://www.streetwithaview.com/scenes.html
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80 Figure 21 Tactical Facebook tagging practices (for humour)
Figure 22 Tactical Facebook tagging practices (for humour)
Figure 23 Tactical Facebook tagging practices (for nostalgia)
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81
6
Playgrounds
Space is anything but passive. It calls for action, scintillates with possibilities, echoes with footsteps, car horns, and voices. “Space is a practiced place.”242
So as I stand here in space, on the roof of the office building I've just fled from, with cops closing in on me from the only apparent escape path, it's tough to know if it's me leaping desperately for the distant rooftop or the distant rooftop leaping at me.
In mid-air the bricks, mortar, glass, wood and paint extend as a hand reaching out to catch me, across the yawing gulf.
When I land – safely, barely – the rooftop has reconfigured into my landing site. Familiar pedestrian paths (pavements and corridors) have suddenly exploded in a spaghetti-junction of fly-overs and underpasses; disrupted and now operating according to a shifted set of driving forces: escape.
242de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117. Mirror's Edge, Concept Art, EIDOS, 2010
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84 I play at being an outlaw sometimes (freedom fighter, escapee, insurgent), deterritorialising the city underfoot. Or sometimes I'm simply an outsider, lost in unfamiliar territory.
The spaces I play within refuse to sit still. They move with the fast and slow rhythms of the city like a world shot in time-lapse: flows of rush-hour commuters, ambling tourists, drunken night-time revellers, scavenging rats, early-morning street cleaners and bin men.243
Maps, models, and plans arrest motion in silhouette form; a representation of an atemporal place (that despite common experience doesn't indicate a qualitative difference between a UK town's high-street at midday on a Sunday and at quarter- past pub-kickout when the streets are a human running-of-the-bulls).
The distinction between “place” and “space” is between a given spatial arrangement designed with a particular intention (i.e. the product of urban planning), and the everyday practices of those places that make them meaningful, inhabited, inhabitable.244
The allowances of the built environment – particular configurations of spatial ordering – give a structure for possible use, but they don't dictate how the location is actually practised. A place provides the conditions to perform an “ensemble of possibilities” (e.g. stairs to ascend, monkey bars to climb, doors to open), and contains obstacles and blocks to other possibilities (e.g. walls, fences, locks). The inhabitants might choose which of these possibilities they actualise, but they can also invent altogether new ways of using the space.245
Re-appropriating territory counter to- or outside of- the intentional use of the place (such as not stepping on cracks in the pavement, or deciding to scale some looming wall) generates new spaces: “the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers.”246 Like the Situationist's dérive, Henry Miller's stroll through the striated, organised space of Paris or New York – his “nomadic transit” – produces a smooth space of “differentials of speed, delays and accelerations, changes in orientation, continuous variations”.247
Sometimes, architecture is mobilised to regulate and control in decisive,
243Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban(London: Polity, 2002), 16-21. 244de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117. 245Ibid., 98. 246Ibid., 117. 247Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 532.
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85 unambiguous ways: banks regulate ingress, prisons regulate egress, borders regulate passage, through arrangements of physical features like locked doors, walls, surveillance, and fences. The prison cell attempts to lock down the possibilities of its inhabitant and to control their behaviour: “The very architecture shapes the way life can be lived within the confines of a particular environment: its possibilities and potentialities.”248 But this control is never exhaustive: it's dramatically subverted regularly through prison breaks, smuggling tunnels, and bank robberies.
[..The] disciplinary apparatus cannot determine in an absolute sense, for all contingencies, the behaviour of all inmates all of the time. There will always be those who escape.249
Architecture fails to totally regulate behaviour: the controlling apparatus of society don't manage to produce the “reliably docile subjects”250 we might have expected 'post-panopticon', and all these elements of the built environment and the regulations for their use – like words and grammar rules in de Certeau's language analogy – are open to remixing and recombination into any number of intentional and accidental spatial poetries. Spatial practices exhibit a “fractal ontology”, where a “finite number of [spatial] components produce an infinite number of combinations”.251 The vast complexity of relationships and possibilities within a city allow “[...]chance, subversion, accretion and accident.”252
My awareness of the place / space distinction comes from a mix of many experiences: through childhood play (Lantana and building sites as playgrounds); travelling (a tourist “blundering into the unknown to search and discover spaces that the everyday occupant might never realise”253); growing up as an “expat” in Europe (being aware of having a different set of “operational schema” to the local norm); hacking (rethinking and subverting the 'place' of intentional systems); urban exploration; and via exotic spaces of computer games and cinema.
An individual's composition of paths through the environment constitutes their “fundamental way of being in the world”.254 The skateboarder is constituted by the way they articulate an “ensemble of possibilities” through actions with and around 248Ian Buchanan, "Extraordinary Spaces in Ordinary Places: De Certeau and the Space of Postcolonialism," SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 36(1993): 57. 249Buchanan, "Extraordinary Spaces in Ordinary Places", 58. 250Roy Boyne, "Post-Panopticism," Economy and Society 29, no. 2 (2000): 8. 251Simon O‘Sullivan, "Fold," in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 107. 252Richard Goodwin, "Porosity: Projecting Urban Metamorphosis,"(2012), 1. 253Ibid., 2. 254de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 100.
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86 their skateboard. The cyclist will enunciate a different set of possibilities in conjunction with their bicycle, and the homicidal drivers of the city.
Those verbs of mine that say something about my spatial practice also say something about who I am: tourist, expat, gamer, explorer. I form a hybrid machinic assemblage, with my psychology and physiology influenced by my environment, and my environment made meaningful only through my contextual inhabitation:
Exhorted and cajoled by their town, by virtue of being gently constrained by its features and elements, [...] people work and play at figuring out what in the world they could possibly be.255
Christoph Brunner describes the interplay in the context of Parkour:
If Pakour has the potential to ''weave into architecture to become a living whole'', then architecture and its material ground weave into the Traceurs [(Parkour practitioners)] and enable movement to happen.256
The tactical practice of space generates an emergent relationship between bodies, objects, buildings. The possibilities afforded by the physical environment are only actualised when they are acted out, in concert with the allowance of the tactician's own body. In turn, the chosen form of practice – the tactician's stylistic 'turns of phrase' through the environment – condition and amplify certain allowances of their body (and so on): “[...H]ow the body moves determines what turns out to hold together as architecture for it.”257
The skateboarder's practice of the environment through the skateboard produces an expanded architecture:
[I]t is not solely the various constructed architectures of skateboarding which […] form the principal contribution of skateboarding to architectural space[,] skateboarders re-imagine architectural space and thereby recreate both it and themselves into super-architectural space.258
255Gins and Arakawa, Architectural Body, 9. 256Christoph Brunner, "Nice-Looking Obstacles: Parkour as Urban Practice of Deterritorialization," AI & Society 26, no. 2 (2011): 146. 257Gins and Arakawa, Architectural Body, 2 & 50. 258Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body, 89.
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87 Through play, we can depart from our conventional connections to the world, our usual ways of inhabiting it: we invent our own non-physical constraints on the environment, like children imagining the carpet as lava and using the living-room furniture as islands and stepping-stone refuges, discovering new ways to move through the space.
Spatial practices such as Parkour set up their own 'instructions for use' for the urban environment ('Find the most efficient way to move across different obstacles. Don't stop!') that form an experimental dialogue with “obstacles, built structures and often abandoned or useless architectural configurations”259 to actualise new paths through space:
[Regulating architectures] fall short in light of Parkour's potential for different ways of encountering and moving with and through supposedly rigid structures.260 […] Through its encounter with obstacles Parkour activates the silent potential for movement located in the relation between bodies and thus reaches beyond material boundaries (e.g. a wall).261
Play – as a tactical spatial practice – “displaces the analytical, coherent proper meanings of urbanism; it constitutes a 'wandering of the semantic' produced by masses that make some parts of the city disappear and exaggerate others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it from its immobile order.”262 It generates heterogeneous meanings out of everyday elements of the city, and transforms the player into someone capable of using the world beyond the pedestrian potentials of the normative body, i.e. play deterritorialises strategic place and generates new body- topology assemblages.
259Brunner, "Nice-Looking Obstacles.", 143. 260Ibid., 146. 261Ibid., 142. 262de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 102.
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88 Virtual Environments
Computer-generated virtual environments are representations of space existing in an abstracted and codified data structure. In the case of contemporary computer games, they are typically three-dimensional representations viewed through a piece of software (a “3D engine”) which decodes, displays, and allows interaction with the environment. The 3D engine and the virtual environment itself are generally conflated, as they are often developed in tandem. For example Second Life refers to both the online, persistent, multi-user environment, and the software client used to connect to and visualise the environment. Often modification and design of the virtual environment can be done through a tool called a level or map editor, which allows the editing of the landscape in a style similar to architectural Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools, where the world is paused and static; 'outside' of the 'game-time' that may influence character and environmental behaviour.
Figure 24 CryEngine 3 Editor (v3.5.3), Crytek, 2013
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89 These environments in their entirety can be approached strategically: the abstracted representation of the world is “defined by a universe of coordinates [which] at its core and at the moment of its creation, is spatial but not a [space]”.263
Viewed in the level editor, the representation is a visually legible artefact. It is quite usual to zoom out to observe the entirety of the world, and fly around in a detached, ungrounded perspective. When editing a virtual environment in this way, the world becomes and object interrogated and manipulated via CAD-style tools.
Juhani Pallismaa criticises the use of computers in architectural practice for putting a distance between the architect and their work, blaming CAD for “[turning] the design process into a passive visual manipulation, a retinal journey”.264 He sees the privileging of sight (ocularcentrism) as a legacy of the traditional Western philosophical conception of knowledge through objective (visual) observation. As Dermot Moran explains:
[sight is] the sense that inserts a distance between us and the world so that we think we are removed from tampering with the seen. Sight doesn’t manipulate things; it is the detached, neutral observer. It is objectivity itself.265
Likewise Elisabeth Grosz suggests that the experiences offered by virtual environments (e.g. through Virtual Reality) are intentionally divorced from the users' body:
That one enters cyberspace only as a disembodied mind, as neither male nor female, is a central assumption underlying the current enthusiasm surrounding VR.266
The concept of Cyberspace that Grosz attaches to virtual reality sells itself as transcendental of the body and the identities that aid or inhibit it. Cyberspace presents a world where power is exercised through the rational mind, as illustrated in this mid-90s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”:
263Nitsche uses a convention for the meanings of “space” and “place” which is exactly the opposite of de Certeau. For the sake of clarity I have indicated the latter's terminology in Nitsche's quotes. Michael Nitsche, Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3d Game Worlds(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 191. 264Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin : Architecture and the Senses(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 12. 265Dermot Moran, "The Touch of the Eye," The Philosophers' Magazine 45(2009): 85. 266Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space(Cambridge, MA: Mit Press, 2001), 43.
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90 Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.267
Just as with the Western model of knowledge, this is a fantasy of being an observer without a body, presenting a virtual world that has transcended the physical; the sort of world futurist Ray Kurzweil dreams of 'inhabiting' as a digitised consciousness.268 Grosz attacks this fantasy as one that could only be believed by those who have no sense that their identity is tied to their embodied specificity (i.e. those who do not have it pointed out to them; the 'not-other': white, male, heterosexual):
The idea that one could take on a second-order body and somehow leave one's real body behind with no trace or residue, with no effects or repercussions, is a luxury only afforded the male subject.269
An account of practised space, where one's sense of the world and self is interwoven, doesn’t work for this mind/body separation, as Arakawa and Gins warn:
Any term that purports to reveal the dynamics of person formation but which fails to suggest the body's intricate relation to the environment muddies the view.270
These critiques of 'virtual environments' focus on the disembodied, informational realm of Cyberspace. In keeping with early critiques of virtual environments, they
[focus] on the superficiality of the medium: its erasure of referential origins in favour of virtual presences, of spatial and semantic depth in favour of the shallow surface.271
Of course, the desire to transcend the physical body (“leaving 'the meat' behind”) was appealing for many technology and Sci-fi enthusiasts who in the early days of discussion of Cyberspace were weak, non-athletic, and shunned as members of an
267John Perry Barlow, "A Cyberspace Independence Declaration." Retrieved November 14 (1996) cited in Rob Shields, The Virtual(London: Routledge, 2003), 73. 268Barry Ptolemy, "Transcendent Man,"(Docurama Films, 2011). 269Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, 42. 270Gins and Arakawa, Architectural Body, 2. 271Shields, The Virtual, 53.
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91 asocial, unattractive underclass,272 especially when it provided them with a digital territory that they could strategically dominate.
First-person computer games are quite different: the body is a fundamental part of the experience (albeit an athletic and capable one). These games are useful perceptual laboratories for testing the conditions of the production of space, having proven (with varying degrees of success) to be able to evoke a 'sense of space' through interaction.273 274
Once the level editor has been closed, and the game itself is running, the player is engaged by a sense of bodily presence within the virtual environment: a world of atmospheric spaces filled with signs of others' spatial practice which build 'phatic topoi' and throw the player into the midst of them.
272Ibid., 72. 273Hunter G Hoffman, "The Illusion of Presence in Immersive Virtual Reality During an Fmri Brain Scan," CyberPsychology & Behavior 6, no. 2 (2003): 128. 274Gregory More, "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: An Immersive Real-Time 3d Urban Environment," in Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level, ed. Friedrich von Borries, et al.(Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007).
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92 Entering the game
In CAD programs and level editors, the camera floats around like a bird, helicopter, god. Sometimes, the behaviour of the navigation control gives the impression that the entire object of manipulation is moving while the camera stays still – like you're rotating a small toy in your hands. Perspective is a defining feature of tactics and strategies: we stand on observation towers to strategise, we run through the streets to tactically practice space.275 The choice of perspective provided to the player ties the game to a form of spatial understanding.
As a surrogate set of eyes, the vantage point displayed allows the digital virtual space to be seen from various different angles […] the POV is associated with the user's position and with 'me' – it represents subjectivity within the computer-generated scene.276
The two computer-game genres of Strategy and First-Person Shooter (FPS) elegantly illustrate Michel de Certeau's strategic and tactical modes of perception of space. Strategy games like Sim City give a top-down command of a territory, while FPSs like Dear Esther, Crysis and Half-Life 2 give the player an on-the-ground perspective through the eyes of a character within the game environment.
The player-character's identity in FPSs are usually that of a tactician: a single weak agent up against an incalculably more powerful foe, trespassing in others' territory in daring opportunistic attacks: escaping prisons (Dead Island, Wolfenstein 3D, FarCry2), fighting in enemy-controlled territory (Max Payne 2, BioShock, Portal, Metro 2033), becoming an outlaw (Grand Theft Auto, Mirror's Edge, Borderland, Half-Life 2).
Rather than detached observation as an “immobile eye” or through a “retinal journey”, FPSes allow you into the world as an inhabitant, where your sight is of someone fundamentally connected to the world (clambering along the ground and demonstrably vulnerable). The pursuit of a more convincing virtual body and embodied mobility for first-person games has led to a host of effects that distort the view of the game: blurring, tunnel vision, and shaking simulating the subjective perceptual effects of pain and exhaustion, while it is usual for the characters hand and arms to be visible while operating equipment and weapons.
275de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 91. 276Shields, The Virtual, 61.
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93 Figure 25 Metro 2033, (Cracked and fogged gas-mask - In-game screenshot), 4A Games, Deep Silver, 2010
Figure 26 FarCry 2, (Malaria medication - In-game screenshot), Ubisoft Montreal, Ubisoft, 2008
In Half-Life 2, your 'eyes' adjust to the brightness of the scene: entering broad daylight from a dark interior will leave you blinking to adjust to the glare. In Farcry 2, the player-character begins to develop fuzzy vision and blindness from the effects of contracting Malaria. In Metro 2033, your gas-mask cracks and fogs with
Playgrounds
94 condensation, and your breathing becomes laboured as you pick your way through a freezing, irradiated landscape. In some games (a notable early appearance in Duke Nukem 3D), 'your' corporeal body is even highlighted through the inclusion of usable toilets!
In navigating around a virtual environment, we mobilise an implicit spatial understanding that is tied up with our body-in-space. What is going on in the virtual space only makes sense because of my bodily understanding of the VR environment, since our bodies are the condition of our access to and conception of space.277
The intertwining of real-world and virtual prosthetics extend the body like driving a car,278 or the blind man's cane which "has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight." 279 Video- games bring the possibilities of the body 'into play' in the virtual environment, and through their performance the structured geometrical (virtual) space becomes inhabitable and “the masses of polygons can transform into [spaces]:”280
What counts [...]is not my body as it in fact is, as a thing in objective space, but as a system of possible actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal "place" defined by its task and situation. My body is wherever there is something to be done.281
In video games, proprioceptive sense is achieved through a tight sensory feedback loop supported by timely input and world response.282 Interaction with the virtual world begins to build up a sense of perceived surrounds just like in real world bodily engagement.283 Some virtual environments are so engaging that they can be used to reduce pain, such as in the virtual environment SnowWorld, which presents an Arctic environment with penguins and ice to effectively reduce the pain experienced by child burn patients while they are being treated.284
277Elizabeth Grosz, "Lived Bodies: Phenomenology and the Flesh," in Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Grosz(New York: Routledge, 1994). 278Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science(Vic: Scribe Publications, 2010), 26. 279Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception(New York: Routledge, 2012), 245. 280Nitsche, Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3d Game Worlds, 191. 281Merleau-Ponty,Phenomenology of Perception, 250. My emphasis. 282Steve Swink, Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation(MA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2009). 283Manos Tsakiris and Patrick Haggard, "The Rubber Hand Illusion Revisited: Visuotactile Integration and Self-Attribution," Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 31, no. 1 (2005): 80. 284Hunter G. Hoffman et al., "Virtual Reality Pain Control During Burn Wound Debridement in the Hydrotank," The Clinical journal of pain 24, no. 4 (2008): 299-304.
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95 The trainee pilot learns to fly as they practice take-offs and landings in the flight simulator.285 The virtual environments of the game, full of possibilities for bodily engagement, offer new ways of constituting oneself as an expanded architectonic assemblage: as I become a parkour traceur practising the ledges and rooftops of a fictional cityscape, my body-image reconfigures to accommodate this new way of thinking about space, and apportioning landing sites.
Figure 27 Mirror's Edge, (In-game screenshot), EA Digital Illusions CE, 2008
285Robert T. Hays et al., "Flight Simulator Training Effectiveness: A Meta-Analysis," Military Psychology 4, no. 2 (1992): 63-74.
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96 Playgrounds
97
7
Atmospheres
New York! London! I want to turn ubiquitous space upside-down, shake people out of it like spiders from shoes, and have them fall on their asses on the red-brick London street or NYC Sewer manhole cover. Onto something so imbued with the character of a place that it will remind them of the poetry they are inhabiting, and their participation in it.
De Certeau's city is not just a place, but a 'taking place'; “best thought of not so much as enduring sites but as moments of encounter, not so much as 'presents', fixed in space and time, but as variable events; twists and fluxes of interrelation.”286 The city is inhabited in an atmosphere of memories, myths, superstition, spirituality, fashions, echoes of past events and actions. Not the concrete features of a place, but real nonetheless:
The childhood experience that determines spatial practices [...] floods private and public spaces, undoes their readable surfaces, and creates within the planned city a 'metaphorical' or mobile city, like the one Kandinsky dreamed of: 'a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation.'”287 Instead of drawing the line of significance at solid buildings, and abstracting models
286Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban(London: Polity, 2002), 30. 287de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 110. and systems of interaction to that level, atmospheres are open sets of conjunction (“and...and...and...”) that do not delineate, reduce, totalise, or decide where influence stops.
Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them[...]288
What is missing from maps – climates of more-or-less comfortable survival; rain on cobbled London streets; snow melting above New York subway vents; the warmth of an open fire in an English pub; the welcome chill of high-street doorways' air conditioning on a hot day in Sydney; the thin layer of spray-paint on a wall; social atmospheres of “conflicting stakeholders—users, communities of neighbors, preservationists, clients, representatives of the government and city authorities”;289 the mixes of fashions, ethnicities, religions, music, accents – is woven into the entirety of an unmapped plane of immanence, out of which different territories and body-topologies are articulated.
Puppet strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed will of an artist or puppeteer but to a multiplicity of nerve fibres, which form another puppet in other dimensions connected to the first: ''Call the strings or rods that move the puppet the weave''.290
Atmosphere is a “victor[y] of the 'weak' over the 'strong'”291; something intangible that weathers and erodes buildings, constructs then levels the Berlin wall, turns Chernobyl into a wasteland, transforms a battlefield into a football pitch, raises the sea level, makes a hero out of a hot-dog seller...
Atmospheres are nowhere to be found within ubiquitous space; the air is crisp, clear, and sobering, and the outlines of objects are solid. In the world though, clouds of intoxicating incense swirl in opaque tendrils through the streets. Obscuring mists haunt city districts, hampering the mapping of the city as a legible object. The observation tower is shrouded in cloud.
288Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 290. 289Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, "Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An Ant’s View of Architecture," Explorations in architecture: Teaching, design, research (2008): 81. 290Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 9. 291de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xix. Herein Manhattan, documentation photograph, Josh Harle, 2011
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100 Herein Manhattan, documentation photograph, Josh Harle, 2011
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101 Creating Atmosphere
Cinema and literature are accomplished in evoking the atmosphere of specific cities and creating compelling, immersive virtual spaces through to experience them. These stories themselves become part of the mix of the actual city's atmospheric mythology.
Likewise, architects work to produce and maintain the atmospheres of their projects, over their “supposedly primordial function of shelter from the elements”.292 Even the minimalism of Le Corbusier's “L'Esprit Nouveau” of architecture was not an absence of atmospherics, but an atmosphere/spirit of a certain modernist aesthetic.
A long tradition of architectural theory suggests that architecture is never more than such a theatrical effect. [...]Architecture is but a stage set that produces a sensuous atmosphere.293
Architectural drawings often show an effusion of atmosphere, “buildings glowing or surrounded by a kind of haze that blurs the edges of the object, merging it with the atmosphere”,294 or using evocative styles and visual effects to give a sense of space beyond the construction. Diller, Scofitio + Renfro's Blur pavilion takes this further with a literal realisation of the atmospheric effects of architecture where the 'building' is the local climate: a fine mist cloud produced by various apparatus (figure 29).
Physical architecture operates with similar mechanisms to a theme-park ride, or cinema: the compelling emotional spaces that are produced from controlling light and darkness, camera angle and motion, and sound effects, are similar between architecture and cinema. Architecture controls the motion of the inhabitant rather than the position and direction of the camera: architecture makes use of the “architectural promenade”, the mise-en-scene of landscape gardens of the picturesque movement, and Le Corbusier's villa and the Acropolis direct the gaze through paths and frames in a cinematic way.295 There is a parallel between Daniel Libeskind's Jüdisches Museum Berlin use of tilted floors and jarring angles, giving a
292Mark Wigley, "The Architecture of Atmosphere," Daidalos 68(1998): 18. 293Ibid., 20. 294Ibid., 19. 295Richard Etlin, "A Paradoxical Avant-Garde: Le Corbusier's Villas of the 1920's," The Architectural Review CLXXXI(1987).
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102 sense of psychological unease, imbalance, and disorientation, and the “Dutch Angle” technique used in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) that produces “an overwhelming sense of the world's being unbalanced or out of kilter”.296
Figure 28 Blur, Expo.02 in Yverdon, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, 2002
Arguably the most important element of cinema, literature, and theatre's creation of space are the dramatic scenarios that happen within them, the emotional-states and spatial practice of the characters:
[T]he power of literature to signify place rests on continual and sustained evocation enlivened by dramatic tension or by descriptive power through a fixed story line. It conjures up an emotionally charged setting, it is an imaginatively reconstructed projection and suggests place via atmosphere that is an integral part of character intentions and tasks.297
296Bruce Mamer, Film Production Technique: Creating the Accomplished Image(Wadsworth: Cengage Learning, 2008), 9. 297Erik Champion and Bharat Dave, "Where Is This Place," in Proceedings of ACADIA 2002: Thresholds Between Physical and Virtual(Citeseer, 2002), 6.
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103 While architects can't control the actions of building inhabitants in the same way as scriptwriters, their buildings may engender particular rituals and performances of reverence, studiousness, merriment, conspicuous consumerism, etc. temples, churches, old libraries, malls, etc. are all sites of specific ritual, evoking a liminal space with a particular atmosphere.
Spaces are “echoing labyrinths”298 that resonate with the sounds of others' spatial practice, both figuratively and literally. The laughter of children playing or the smash of a bottle and arguing fill a space, while the things inhabitants leave behind, either intentionally or unintentionally – the old newspapers, cigarette butts, broken glass, discarded detritus, names in the cement, graffiti, and eventually their bodies, houses, and possessions – provide persistent signs of others' spatial practice in the absence of their owners.
Graffiti is an exemplary articulation of others' practice of a space. It makes explicit the writing back onto space, the timely opportunism, the temporality, the phatic, and appropriating nature of tactical spatial practice. De Certeau describes New York graffiti as
[...]Calligraphies that howl without raising their voices and emblazon themselves on the subterranean passages of the city, “embroideries” composed of letters and numbers[...] Dancing graphics whose fleeting apparitions are accompanied by the rumble of subway trains.299
There's a sorcery to invoking the spirit(s) of our everyday spaces; creating “psychic/physical space or openings into a space”300 and allowing us to inhabit them. Our haunted spaces sit just out of sight (or at least out of legibility) of the CCTV cameras, “betwixt and between geographical places[,] in a nonplace space”.301 Our personal practices and rituals weave magic spaces of nostalgia, superstition, suspicion, fear, imagination, desire through the city.
In fictional spaces, we require only the outlines of a world in order to construct our own psychic spaces out of it, using our “human capacity for imagination and a perceptual flair for filling in the gaps and fleshing out visual images”.302 Incomplete, ambiguous scenes, mysterious, partial accounts of the world leave room for our
298de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 99. 299Ibid., 102. 300Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, 23. 301Rob Shields, The Virtual(London: Routledge, 2003), 13. 302Ibid., 71.
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104 imagination to create an atmospheric space we can emotionally engage in.
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105 Testing Atmospheres
The square is filled with angry protesters, smoke, and tear gas; the nightclub with mists of sweat, dry ice, thumping music, and flashing lights. When hot winds blow from a real explosion, shrapnel fills the air (bricks, mortar, glass, wood and paint) and lashes out violently.
Richard Goodwin and Russell Lowe's Real-time Porosity research looks at an extended architecture of socio-political and physical atmospheres, using video-game engines. Video-game engines typically accommodate the ability to simulate climate: “attenuating environmental forces” such as “wind, fog, rain, directional and dynamic lighting, sound, varying vision acuity”.303 These tools allow the “layering of lenses to build up gaming environment as a virtual laboratory.”304
Virtual reality [...] provides a simulation in which to experiment with substitutes of the material world that are 'close enough to the real that its conditions may be tested without the normal risks. In these cases technology provides prostheses for the real in order to better control it'.305
Using video-game engines Real-Time Porosity could experiment with changing the atmosphere of spaces in a way that would be too dangerous, expensive, and disruptive to do in the physical environment.306 With these tools, atmospheric conditions such as “dynamic modelling of explosions, shrapnel damage and toxic smoke and gases” were simulated for catastrophic emergencies such as a terrorist attack, fire, or building collapse.307
In addition to climactic atmospheric effects (such as rain, snow, lightening, and fog) Real-Time Porosity simulated various states of the breathable atmosphere, with the Crysis 2 engine being capable of approximating the physiological effects on the player-character.
303Champion and Dave, "Where Is This Place." 304Richard Goodwin, Russell Lowe. "Real-Time Porosity: Lenses.", (presented at the EICU, Sydney, 2009) 305Shields, The Virtual, 47. 306Ibid., 65. 307Goodwin, "Real-Time Porosity: Lenses."
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106 Political and social atmospheres were produced through the recruitment of
Figure 29 Real-Time Porosity reconstruction of Townhall Station, Sydney, 2011 experiment participants, who were given specific social roles to act. Particular combinations of atmospheres were tested via an orchestrated 'playing-out' of
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107 individual characters and responses in the virtual environment using the multi- player feature of the game engine, rather than using non-player AI characters with scripted behaviour: each researcher/actor/participant role-played different types of social identities.
Experiments into participant behaviours were configured through several “lenses” or atmospheric dimensions:
Architectural Closure: “Security Shut-down of urban fabric” “Terrorist in disguise”, “tolerant crowd”, “specific ethnic crowd” , “multi-culturally mixed crowd”.
Player role: “antagonist perspective”, “antagonist sympathiser”, “the observer”, “protagonist sympathiser”, “protagonist”.
Political atmosphere: “Fundamentalist”, “intolerance”, “tolerant”, “pluralist”.
Culture: “Mono-culture”, “Minority groups within crowd”, “Mix of cultural groups within crowd”.
These experiments were intended to add supplementary dimensions of consideration to the EICU's modelling and mapping of public space.
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108 Virtual Atmospherics
Once again on a field-trip, armed with a small torch, I explore the dilapidated ruins of an abandoned shack. The location is a little more remote, and the signs of previous inhabitants a little less conspicuous, but the feeling is familiar: the sense of bearing witness to the echoes of others' lives, apparitions glimmering through a thousand points of contact they made with this space: abandoned belongings now irrevocably decayed, scrawled messages on the walls, and the buildings themselves.
The shack isn't real, despite the spirits it has managed to summon to whisper to me, and what I may have heard them say. This wind-swept corner of a Hebridean island is a virtual environment experienced within the computer game Dear Esther.
The field-trip has been valuable non-the-less: exploring each engaging scene of a computer game is a little self-administered phenomenological experiment in the experience of space: a study of creating atmosphere in digital representations.
Figure 30 Dear Esther, in-game screenshot, thechineseroom (developer), 2012
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109 Computer games like Dear Esther (those presenting a first-person view of the world) manage to create dramatic and evocative locations, while operating in the seemingly sterile domain of Euclidean space, using a finite set of isolated parts. Somehow the discrete elements of the represented environment come together to form the enunciation of a space. These computer games manage to create an emotionally inhabitable (haunted) space beyond their geometric representation, through poetic and artistic practices informed by the evocative spatialising techniques of theatre and film.308
Sheer accuracy in the (re)composition of an environment is not enough to give a sense of atmosphere:
What is missing in virtual models of places one can visit in the non- virtual world is not just wind and sun but memory. A virtual tour of the Pyramids is more likely than not to include only the Pyramids: no chance encounters with other visitors, guides, no risk of discovering the current conditions of life in Giza from encounters with guides, touts and hustlers.309
Like theatre, computer games can script the spatial practice of their environments' inhabitants (with the loose exception of the player, though they are generally required to perform certain actions essential to the narrative progression).310 The (scripted or procedural) actions of dramatic personae create the evocative, emotional spaces of the game through their actions, by creating characters and events that generate their own virtual 'phatic topoi' to be experienced by the player.
The sense of immersion in virtual environments comes from our ability to influence and interact with the space and its inhabitants. A breathless description of the phenomenological experience of text-based “Multi-User Dungeons” (MUDs) written in the 1980s reads identically to a review more than twenty years later of the Second Life experience (along the lines of “I'm standing in a room with other...but shockingly it's actually virtual!”).311 Virtual environments, including early text adventures, create an immersive space through an engagement of “existential insideness”,312 where the player feels they can leave their mark on the world.
308Michael Nitsche, Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3d Game Worlds(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 79. 309Shields, The Virtual, 68. 310Ibid., 54. 311For example: Annalee Newitz, "Your Second Life Is Ready," Popular Science (2006). 312Edward Relph, "Place and Placelessness Pion,"(London, 1976), 51-55.
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110 More than 'just' the transferral of sound, image and text, and thus beyond the transmission of content, data is mobilized to affect one's capacity to relate to others, to shape the contours of memory and how one experiences and inhabits territories.313
The difficulty of recreating our social experience of space in computer games is a testament to its richness. Interactions with Artificial Intelligence (AI) must be convincing on a conscious level, but also follow our unconscious interpretation of body-language and eye-contact. If this doesn't happen, the interactions can feel mechanical, contrived, or uncanny. Because of this difficulty, different games have attempted various approaches to the recreation of social space:
313Timon Beyes, "Mediating Atmospheres: Apprehending the Intersections of Data, Memory and Space," in Proceedings of Data, Memory, Territory – International Symposium and Masterclasses, ed. Tanya Notley, et al.(UWS, Sydney, Australia: Digital Media Rearch, 2012), 33.
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111 Fully Populated (sandbox games) In keeping with the artful recreation of the feeling of a locale, densely populated games such as the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series and FarCry 2 acknowledge the importance of people (accents, socio-economic positions, ethnicity) to the atmosphere of a city (and its various districts and suburbs) or continent (with vastly different flora and fauna, weather, landscapes, and vernacular architecture).
The sheer number of AI characters in a location at any time, and the 'sandbox' style of gameplay (where interactions with the world are open and intended to be relatively unconstrained) requires their behaviour to be fairly basic. Exposition of characters, and general storytelling is achieved through cut-scenes and pre-scripted conversations. There is also a comprehensive recreation of signs of inhabitation such as trash, graffiti, bloodstains, etc.
GTA: Liberty City's open “sandbox” recreation of New York is entirely the opposite approach to that of the example “virtual model” of the Pyramids. The city is recreated in caricature, with the street life and architectural styles of whole districts reduced down to single in-game blocks, and where “chance encounters with other visitors, guides[,] touts and hustlers” are commonplace and effectively give a feel for the specific area. The game understands the atmospheric importance of hot-dog and pretzel carts to New York city.
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112 Figure 31 Regional African village, in-game screenshot, FarCry 2, Ubisoft Montreal, Ubisoft, 2008
Figure 32 Liberty City, in-game screenshot, Grant Theft Auto IV, Rockstar Games, Take-Two Interactive, 2008
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113 Sparsely Populated Games like Half-Life 2 and Rage have a greatly reduced set of interactive actors, but those characters present are thoroughly scripted and essential to the narrative. With realistic body-language, gestures, facial expressiveness, and eye-contact, these characters “appear to have desires, personality and intentions”, and their convincing non-verbal behaviour allows the story to be told without breaking out into cut- scenes.314
The games often involve performing collaborative activities with these characters, and the player may develop a strong emotional attachment to them, which can be exploited in the narrative to build dramatic tension and to motivate the players actions.
314John Shearer et al., "Requirements of Non-Verbal Communication in Believable Synthetic Agents" (paper presented at the Proceedings of the AISB Symposium on Narrative AI and Games, 5th-6th April, University of Salford, Manchester, 5th-6th April 2006), 63.
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114 Figure 33 Mel, in-game screenshot, Rage, ID software, 2012
Figure 34 Isaac, Eli, and Alyx, in-game screenshot, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Valve Corporation, Electronic Arts, 2007
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115 (Near-)Abandoned Abandoned, near-abandoned or post-apocalyptic worlds are a frequent theme in computer games. This is motivated by limits in game developers' technical ability to build realistic Artificial Intelligence, combine with the inherent poignancy of the narrative of ruined civilisation. To create a sense of atmosphere, they have to rely on evocation based on absent former inhabitants rather than present ones.315
Near-abandoned games like Max Payne, Crysis 2, and Bioshock feature recently abandoned worlds (explained in the narrative through evacuation or severe weather), while Portal 2, Deus Ex, Rage, Metro 2033, and Fallout 3 have been left abandoned for much longer, as the result of a disaster sometime in the distant past.
Not surprisingly, graffiti and detritus is a significant focus of these computer games' crafting of locations: they form the only persistent sign of far-past human inhabitation. The Finnish developers of the game Max Payne were so dedicated to their level-design research and the recreation of the atmosphere of New York's “howling calligraphies” of graffiti that they flew to the city and hired body-guards to insure their safety while they documented the most dangerous parts of Manhattan.316
These games put significant narrative effort into explaining why the environment is uninhabited, and elements of the abandonment can become an evocative part of the the space in itself (body-bags, recorded messages, etc.). They rely on an archaeological activity of the player to slowly reconstruct the sense of the original space, and the dramatic events that occurred within it. These artefacts “allow us to see through the eyes of the original inhabitants”,317 and give the spaces a sense of being haunted by the original occupants. This exploration builds up a vivid haunting of the dramatic spatial practice of the now-absent inhabitance.
315With notable exceptions being Half Life 2, that features very engaging and natural-feeling character interaction, Grand Theft Auto where the constituency and spatial practice of inhabitants of different areas is used to give a sense of the district being referred to, and Rage where the unique atmosphere of each settlement is richly evoked through characters that inhabit the various nooks and alleyways. 316"Remedy Designers Visit New York!", http://www.3drealms.com/max/newyork.html, 1999 317Erik Champion, "Indiana Jones and the Joystick of Doom: Understanding the Past Via Computer Games," Traffic: A Vision Splendid 5(2004): 56.
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116 Figure 35 Graffiti in abandoned building, in-game screenshot, Dear Esther, thechineseroom, 2012
Figure 36 Discarded items from the aftermath of a biological disaster, in-game screenshot, Crysis 2, Crytek, 2011
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117 The signs of use like graffiti, detritus, etc. tell a compelling story. It's an indication of the intuitive reading of these signs that in game spaces that feel most 'real', graffiti and trash are always present (for example in Fallout 3, Deus Ex, Duke Nukem 3D, Myst, Crysis 2, Dear Esther, Max Payne, and Portal).
These games present incomplete, partial accounts of the game-world, giving enough clues and suggestions of others' use of the space that the player's imagination can do the rest:
Beyond […] the technologies involved, there is always an innately human work of metaxis, translation and imagination which transposes digital action and virtual encounters to the world of living animals and objects.318
Ambient environmental soundscapes can also help us to perform this transformation, creating a believable world outside of the immediately visible,319 and giving us a sense of spatiality through the material acoustics of a space:
Sound effects are part of a virtual world's identity and they dramatize the individual object in the virtual space as well as the position of a listener within this space.320
In film, sound design (foley) is heavily relied on to construct a space beyond what can be seen, and also to dramatically emphasis elements of the materiality. It captures the resonance and materiality of the space and objects within the space: a door is knocked on and we have a sense of the type of wood, how thick and sturdy it is; footsteps are heard, and we know the size and gait of the owner, their mood, speed of approach, and distance. Sound in computer games is an essential element of creating a sense of presence in a virtual space.321 Through the evocative uses of sound effects, FPSs can be thoroughly immersive.
Like laughter or arguments echoing through physical space, the sounds of a computer game create a sense of social space. The space may be of an ad hoc battlefield inhabited by hostile mobsters (e.g. supported by the 68 various cries, taunts, and shouts Max Payne provides for this purpose), or a space of believable,
318Shields, The Virtual, 49. 319David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film(London: Routledge, 1985). 320Nitsche, Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3d Game Worlds, 133. 321Rudolph P. Darken et al., "Quantitative Measures of Presence in Virtual Environments: The Roles of Attention and Spatial Comprehension," CyberPsychology & Behavior 2, no. 4 (1999).
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118 expressive friends and acquaintances (supported by exposition through long 'set- piece' conversations on the way to a mission location in the Grand Theft Auto series).
Even in games with little character interaction, the sounds people make are important: the affectual landscape is dramatically shifted by the sound of distress or calm. Shell-shocked people muttering to themselves in Crysis 2, psychotic addicts in Max Payne, mid-skirmish taunts from Fallout 3.
Atmosphere, narrative, and motivation come from other people in the world, through love interests (e.g. Mel from Rage, Alyx from Half-life 2), duty and honour (fighting games), or revenge (BioShock). Without conscious effort, we empathise and emotionally invest in the computer-generated game characters similarly to how we would with real people.322
Our embodied inhabitation of virtual spaces is configured according to the desire- generated topological connections across the environment and its inhabitants: “at the end of this journey I will see my crush”, “past these obstacles is my nemesis”, “home (and safety) is just around the corner”.
An examination of these 'poetics of digital space' (i.e. the evocative and atmospheric spaces of computer games) confirms the possibility of deeply engaging digital spaces. These can be inhabited, and practised with a sense of mythology, emotional connection; fleshed out by our own experiences, memories, desires. These digitally represented spaces can feel truly 'enchanted'.
322Matthew W. Campbell et al., "Computer Animations Stimulate Contagious Yawning in Chimpanzees," Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 276, no. 1676 (2009): 4255.
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119 Atmospheres
120 III
Works
8
Paths
The Path works are a series of large-scale, high-resolution vinyl prints displaying a ribbon of ground winding through the streets of Berlin, Melbourne, and Newcastle. The images were created through a bespoke, automated image-compositing process, driven by my video documentation of walks.
These works came out of my compulsion to record and document my 'tours' through the world, and an attempt to produce a figure of the journeys that does not remove the specificity and atmosphere of the original walk.
The Paths series is intended to a draw contrast between our first-hand tactical engagement with the architecture of our built environment and the strategic abstract representations of the city through maps, plans, and models.
The works explore architecture as "verb rather than noun",323 meaningful through the actions it allows and that are practised within it rather than in its a priori meaning as an object. Each work maps out the respective city in relationship to a single, specific phenomenological engagement (i.e. my practice of walking). They resist an account of the city on objective, referential, and absolute terms – written onto ubiquitous space, traced onto Google Maps through GPS coordinates (figure 37) – but rather conjure it up entirely as a product of my subjective experience.
Facing Image: Berlin, Josh Harle, 2013 323Abraham Thomas, "An Architecture of Refuge and Retreat," 1:1 Architects Build Small Spaces (2010): 15. The tactical space of the city is only manifested at the sites of our engagement, between city streets and our passages through them: the quotidian activities of city- dwellers are the motions of frottage that sketch out an impression of the city, defined by the contact points.
The images evoke (not capture or represent) the idiosyncrasies of a particular walk through the city, ignoring the wider view of the city in favour of the short- sightedness of a specific, unique drift through the space. The intertwining paths of others are evident through details of the detritus their performance of the space has left: cigarette butts, trash, muddy footprints.
Read as a mapping practice the works can be considered a form of radical cartography, cutting out the privileged elements of a conventional map (the buildings, the intersections of roads) and instead documenting the contingent, the temporary, and the usually ignored. They attempt to map motion and affect, rather than represent the path in any descriptive sense. Each path's physical form illustrates a trajectory, but they are not intended as graphs, which abstract the original performance into something propositional (“Josh went between here and there.”):
“Trajectory” suggests a movement, but it also involves a plane projection, a flattening out. It is a transcription. A graph (which the eye can master) is substituted for an operation; a line which can be reversed (i.e., read in both directions) does duty for an irreversible temporal series, a tracing of acts.324
The point of differentiation from a strategic figure comes from my decision to keep 'ghosted' fragments of video frames (e.g. the toes of my shoes) rather than erasing them. The source video and the composition process supported the possibility of a 'perfect' reconstruction of the street (notwithstanding the many aesthetic choices that produce a supposedly 'neutral' image), but I chose to produce something more like a time-lapse; where the ghosted shoes percussively express the pace and direction of my “act [...]of passing by”.325
324de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xviii. 325de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 97.
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124 Figure 37 A journey GPS tracked and displayed within Google Maps, Josh Harle, 2011
Figure 38 Newcastle, Josh Harle, 2013
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125 Process
Volumetric networks Initial studies in preparation for the eventual Path works began as a series of 3D printed reconstructions of the 'negative spaces' of the city, inspired by Rachel Whiteread's concrete casts of internal architectural spaces (figure 39),326 and Walter Tschinkel's plaster casts of the networks of tunnels in ants' nests.327 The intention was to produce burrow-like networks of paths; casting as 'negative space' the series of “landing sites”328 (points of possible interaction such as the surfaces of buildings and pavement that formed my local surrounds) that I perceived as I walked through the streets.
Figure 39 House, concrete, (destroyed), Rachel Whiteread, 1993
These early studies were an attempt to illustrate the composition of the built environment through a chorus of singular performances of space, rather than representing a stable, predefined architecture that dictates and regulates action (i.e. streets you may pass down, spaces you may inhabit). The casts reverse the privileging of solid over (the practice of) space in the creation of meaning of the city.
326Rachel Whiteread, "House." concrete, (destroyed), 1993. 327Walter R Tschinkel, "The Nest Architecture of the Florida Harvester Ant, Pogonomyrmex Badius," Journal of Insect Science 4, no. 21 (2004). 328Gins and Arakawa, Architectural Body, 6.
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126 As an articulation of the body's movement in relation to space, I found this volumetric approach to have strong resonance with experimental approaches to visualising dance performances. Choreography shares a focus on the body in motion, and the 'abstract diagrams' of William Forsythe's One Flat Thing, Reproduced generated using the tool Synchronous Objects329 (in particular fabricated objects and video of digital models) share a common sculptural presence (figure 40).
Figure 40 Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced, documentation (video still), Matthew Lewis, Maria Palazzi, Norah Zuniga Shaw, and William Forsythe, 2009
These studies were created using my Structure-from-Motion tool-set (See Territories and Relics), and 3D printed in colour using a sandstone-like material known as resin-impregnated plaster. Like the final Path works, they were produced from recorded video documentation of my walks through city streets, although these were made using a pair of GoPro Hero HD wide-angle video cameras configured in a 3D video capture set-up (side-by-side in a specially designed enclosure, replicating the gap between the eye to produce depth perception). The raw generated surface reconstruction of the open spaces of the street was left unmodified, keeping the liquiform geometry that the meshing algorithm formed around the rectilinear angles of the buildings.
While the materiality of these maquettes closely followed Tschinkel's plaster casts,
329Beth Weinstein, "Performative Opportunities within the Parametric" (paper presented at the SEAM: Spatial Phrases, Sydney, Australia, September 8 2009).
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127 the colour reproduction of the surface was neither detailed nor vivid enough to give a sense of the original surroundings. This material and printing technique had worked well for the stone of the early reconstructed Relic scan, but for artificial colours it gave disappointing results. The signs and façades of the buildings were reproduced only as vague combinations of dull colours.
The final work using this approach was a reconstruction of the internal spaces of Townhall station, Sydney, generated using the same GoPro cameras to document my walking path through the building. The work accompanied the Real-Time Porosity installation for Magic Spaces at the Today Art Museum,330 Beijing, and was virtually 'installed' into Richard Goodwin and Russell Lowe's digital reconstruction of the station: overflowing the modelled corridors with a liquiform shape (figure 44).
The process of creating the Townhall walk-through revealed a significant weakness in the reconstructing approach: it could not handle long paths. Structure-from- Motion is not optimal for reconstructing the world solely from forward motion, as there is very little redundant information shared between frames of video. At the same time, the area being reconstructed is much larger, since it is not a set of overlapping features viewed from different angles, but a whole series of areas (in the case of Townhall, 2400 images worth). On the first try, the reconstruction process quickly reached the memory limit of my computer, and failed. The exhibited work required the source images to be split into sets of 100 images to be processed, then recombined, and the final results were not a continuous network, but separate sections. After completion of the Townhall work, I abandoned this approach to research a more effective path-forming process.
330Josh Harle, "Townhall, Sydney." In Magic Spaces, Today Art Museum, Beijing, 2011.
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128 Figure 41 King St walk, documentation (video still), Josh Harle, 2011
Figure 42 Reconstructed path as 3D inverted space (digital model), Kings St, Sydney, Josh Harle, 2011.
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129 Figure 43 Reconstructed path as 3D inverted space (3D print), Kings St, Sydney, Josh Harle, 2011.
Figure 44 Reconstructed path through Town Hall Station, Sydney, Josh Harle, 2011.
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130 Ground paths At the end of 2011, after the exhibition of the last volumetric work, I was at the start of a round-the-world trip that would take me from Beijing, to Shanghai, Berlin, London, New York, and back to Sydney. While in Beijing, I began exploring a method of documenting walks that was less indiscriminate: less about capturing as much as I could, and more about capturing the feeling of the walk. I found something understatedly poetic about the expressivity of different streets. Having grown accustomed to the Sydney street-scape to the point where it seems neutral and undifferentiated, focussing on foreign roads gave me a renewed sensitivity to their unique signatures.
Figure 45 Study of streets: London, New York, Josh Harle, 2011.
I began to use the Flip Micro HD camera to document my feet as I walked, with the intention of capturing both the amazing character of the streets I was walking, and the haphazard, wandering path I was making. The perspective of the recordings – the view confined to a frame just larger than my body, as my feet made successively, rhythmic contact with the ground – was much more intimate than the volumetric reconstructions, which extended at too large a scale to give a meaningful feeling of my body in the environment.
The reconstructions were made using Microsoft Image Composition Editor, after
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131 extracting the frames from the video into image files. However the length of the paths was far greater than that allowed by the software and equipment I had access to (the intermediate image files were typically +2GB). I overcame this restriction with a similar approach to the one I'd used for volumetric reconstruction: I split the set of source video frames into sections, experimented to discover what set of operations would produce the desired results consistently, documented the pipeline, then used the automation program Sikuli Script331 to play back a macro of the process iterating through the source image (done at night, while the computer was unattended).
The first work produced using this method was a short walk through the cobbled streets of Berlin; travelling a distance of only 17 metres. At this point I was interested in combining the performance of the walk with the concept that the clean aesthetic of laser cut architectural models was being disrupted by the actuality of the landscape. I chose to laser etch the path, the texture of the streets, the rubbish, dirt, and spills, into the wood, playing with writing the noise and tactical practice back into the map with an ironically precise fabrication process. This work was exhibited as part of the Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) Conference 2011, for which I received the Young CAADRIA award (figure 46).332
The Paths had become too 'busy' by trying to bring another set of tensions into them (i.e. the medium and fabrication process in dissonance with the content). Returning to the photographic study and the Berlin reconstruction as an untreated composite image (before processing for etching), it was clear that the images were engaging in themselves.
I decided to leave the theme of tension between clean-cut, 'utopian' fabricated architectural models, and the marks and detritus of everyday life to be investigated more effectively in another 'topological' work: the Monorail Pylon works. The final exhibited works were images printed at a scale that allowed the path to be viewed as a single flow, but large enough to maintain details of footprints, leafs, discarded tickets, and rubbish. Printed at 300 DPI, the chosen scale allowed features such as discarded rubbish to be distinguishable with the naked eye.
331Tom Yeh, Tsung-Hsiang Chang, and Robert C Miller, "Sikuli: Using Gui Screenshots for Search and Automation" (paper presented at the Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, 2009). 332Josh Harle, "Berlin." CAADRIA 2011: Circuit bending, breaking and mending, Newcastle, 2011.
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132 Figure 46 Laser etched and cut path (Berlin), Josh Harle, 2011
Figure 47 Melbourne (detail), Josh Harle, 2013
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133
9
Herein
The Herein works are a series of interactive video pieces each set at a different geographical site. The works run on an iPad tablet, and allow the participant/viewer to navigate around a cloud of digital images corresponding to the position they were originally shot from. Motion through the cloud and direction- of-view are controlled using the tablet's touch screen interface through swipe gestures. This cloud of images wraps around the point-of-view of the participant, and suggests the form of the original space. This peripheral view is also projected around the participant from behind. The images are accompanied by an ambient sound-scape recorded on location using a portable H4N high-definition sound recorder. After a period without interaction, the view will begin slowly moving through the spaces. 333
In early 2011 I found myself midway through a round-the-world tour of iconic cities; Beijing, Berlin, London, New York. Arriving at each new city felt like diving into a deep and speckled ocean, filled with unique and awe-inspiring sights, and trying to remember to go up for air. Each one has a tangible presence and history – contributed to through the countless love-stories, comedies, tragedies, that are woven through it in “newspaper and magazines, guides and maps, photographs, films, newsreels and novels, street-level conversations and tales”.334
As a tourist, I was aware of the distinctly different approaches offered for dealing
Facing Image: Bare Island (interactive video still), Josh Harle, 2012. 333 Video Documentation: “Corelli's Café”, http://vimeo.com/album/2328178 334Amin and Thrift,Cities: Reimagining the Urban, 2. with unfamiliar territory. One year earlier in Newcastle, NSW, I had relied exclusively on mobile-based Google Maps, dashing toward my appointment phone- to-face along the line that had been rendered and displayed for me. But inevitably my most vivid experiences as a traveller came from accidental discoveries, and developing my own sense of the local atmosphere and 'mythology' – something irreducible to a few sentences and a star-rating in a guide book (See The Right to the (Fragmented) City).
I wanted to challenge what I perceived as the progressive enframing and commodification of space working its way into spatial practices – mine included – through AR apps, mobile GPS, and digital tour guides. The Herein series of works initially acted as experiments in re-appropriating the strategic technologies of geo- locative technology (mobile phones, the internet, QR-codes) to evoking the atmosphere of a particular location.
In contrast with Real-Time Porosity's experiments into physical atmospherics (exploring the effects of smoke, fire, adverse weather, political and social climate – See Testing Atmospheres) I was focussing on affectual, “haunting” atmospheres. Informed by my 'virtual field-work' in various computer-game spaces (See Atmospheres, and Playgrounds), Herein transports the participant into the midst of a virtual environment of enveloping clouds of indefinite, semi-transparent images, filled with a distorted soundscape.
The works resist legibility and deny a neutral, observational distance, inverting the usual drives of strategic systems: rather than an overview, we are in the thick of it; rather than a clear, focussed image, I am shooting with the smallest depth-of-field possible, deliberately smudging and distorting the images, using a High Dynamic Range process to make them glow with an uncanny light; rather than precise navigation through the space, the motion is languid, with images fading and merging like a dream or hallucination.
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136 Figure 48 Herein: Chinatown, documentation photograph, Josh Harle, 2013
Figure 49 Herein: Bare Island, documentation photograph, Josh Harle, 2013
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137 Process
Swatches and poetry The first set of Herein installations were a direct response to tools such as Google Maps and Augmented Reality (AR) applications that transform spaces into disambiguated and legible place, mapped into GPS co-ordinates. The pieces worked to address the danger of these technologies in homogenising and rationalising spaces, and to reactivate the imagination as a faculty through which we experience our surroundings and inhabit space.
Installations in Berlin,335 London,336 and New York337 used QR-codes (2D barcodes that can be read by mobile phones) that linked into web-pages of images, sound, and poetry (figure 50). These vignettes attempted to pull city space out of productive logic and into a landscape for imaginative, emotional inhabitation, emphasising a sense of the mythic spaces and poetic encounters of the city that had been so significant in my own experience.
In these works scanning the QR code loaded up a mobile-friendly web-page featuring a textural 'swatch' of space, along with an accompanying (though unrelated) recording of ambient sound, both taken from various locations around the city.
Through the pasting-up of physical QR-codes, the works countered the transcendental ephemerality of AR (its nature as facilitator of ubiquitous space to be location-insensitive, accessible everywhere) by contributing to the palimpsest of graffiti tags and symbols as a mechanism for interaction (figure 51). My own QR- code 'tags' insinuated themselves onto cities' walls, nuzzling into borrowed space. In one location (Martin Place, Sydney) there was no graffiti to hide amongst, so I was required to practice more devious tactical tricks to inhabit the space: I designed the QR code to disguise itself as a surveillance camera warning, and had it fabricated by an building signage company (figure 52).
335Josh Harle, "Herein Berlin Installation." Leipziger Platz, Berlin, February 2011. 336Josh Harle, "Herein London Installations." various, London, March 2011. 337Josh Harle,"Herein Manhattan Installations." various, New York, March 2011.
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138 Figure 50 Herein London, installation documentation, and detail, Josh Harle, 2011
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139 Figure 51 QR codes in-situ amongst graffiti (New York, London, Melbourne), Josh Harle, 2011.
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140 The ambient soundscape gave an immersive sense of the recorded location made vivid by the language and accents of the voices, the sounds of vehicles, the hubbub of everyday city activities. As noted in Playgrounds, “sound can create spaces”,338 giving us an enveloping experience of a particular time and place, in contrast with the separation allowed when viewing an image.
The pieces were not trying to produce an epitaph or summation of the host cities, but to offer their own momentary tours; some rhizomatic trajectories of the city. The hermeneutic gap between the content of the image and the sound recording provided a poetic tension that extended beyond the two, and mobilised a line-of- flight through the city, for example:
• a wall in SOHO lit in pink, stained red with what could be alcopop vomit, accompanying the sound of a busking bagpipe player at Trafalgar square339
• an old brown brick wall, accompanying the sound of an opera singer performing “O sole mio” in the Piazza of Covent Garden market.340
For the first two installation, Berlin and London, the image/sound page went on to link into a piece of “Interactive Fiction” that presented poetry (written by two collaborating local artists, Hayden Daley in Berlin, and Craig Selwyn Roper in London) as 'locations' to be navigated through. Interactive Fiction, also known as Text-Based Adventure, is a computer-game genre that was popular before sophisticated computer graphics were developed. It resembles 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books, where the reader can make decisions and interact with the world.
Experimenting with the interactive fiction format was both a tongue-in-cheek rejection of the thoroughly ocularcentric, high-tech, high-resolution aesthetic of Augmented Reality at the time, and a way of exploring parallel, evocative, fictional city spaces similar to those described by China Miéville in Embassytown341 and Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere.342
Feedback from the installations indicated that the images and sound worked well, but that the interactive fiction was too cumbersome to comfortably navigate on a mobile phone. A number of attendees suggested the poetry would be less
338Nitsche, Video game spaces: image, play, and structure in 3D game worlds, 131. 339 Web Link: http://herein.tacticalspace.org/London/7/ 340 Web Link: http://herein.tacticalspace.org/London/4/ 341China Miéville, Embassytown, (Pan Macmillan UK, 2011). 342Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere, (Headline, 2010).
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141 distracting, and more evocative, if it was read out rather than printed.
Figure 52 Herein Martin Place, disguised QR code, Josh Harle, 2011
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142 Atmospheres In considering how to refine the works' ability to create a vivid sense of immersion, I recalled a destination I'd visited years ago. The location had been entirely fictional – the mist-shrouded island of the game Myst (figure 53)– but the awe, curiosity, and emotional-investment the island had aroused was very real.
The Myst world was presented through a series of static computer renders, with each location made up of four or more images to give the view North, South, East, and West. Rotating of view and movement between static positions was generally not animated, but simply a fade transition to the still image of the next position. Despite this unsophisticated representation (and overwhelmingly thanks to a rich, stylised soundscape), the game world was extremely compelling.
Figure 53 Myst, Cyan, 1993
On returning to Sydney I began experimenting with using the Structure-from- Motion process (see Territories, Relics) to generate camera positions, rather than a 3D model. These camera positions were an interesting bi-product of the process, but
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143 until now I had not made use of them. Using these camera points, I could place images in their relative positions into a 3D environment (figure 54), and then navigate between the viewpoints of the original images, i.e. I could recreate the Myst navigational aesthetic in a real space.343
The works were intended to be used on mobile devices, so I chose to use Unity 3D, a popular development tool for mobile games. To simplify development and sharing of the works, I decided to create a stand-alone mobile App to act as a viewer for whatever individual location reconstructions I produced. From the App, new works could be downloaded to the device from my webserver, and viewed offline later.
Within Unity 3D, I created a number of prototypes/studies, reconstructed using High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography for the source images (a technique that produces high saturated images without under- or -overexposure, resulting in a CGI-like aesthetic) to give the final space an uncanny, otherworldly feel (figure 55).
Early on in the development process for this iteration of Herein I realised that allowing the images to overlap and remain semi-opaque not only contributed a compelling aesthetic to the work, but helped to disrupt the legibility of the image. I had already seen this aesthetic through the 3D reconstruction website Microsoft PhotoSynth (figure 56), but with navigation driven by touch-screen gestures the results are even more effective at giving the impression of the surrounding space; looking around the space involves the direct tactile engagement of dragging the view, like moving foliage aside on a path through a jungle; an experience “moulded by unconscious haptic imagery and peripheral unfocused vision”.344 345
Much of the work to develop the Herein viewer involved applying the techniques used by 'First-Person Shooter' computer games: aligning the position and behaviour of the camera with the viewpoint of a virtual inhabitant, and moving beyond Myst's straightforward view to a much more embodied, surrounded view. The source photographs recreate my various positions in the real-world space (the tripod was set up at my eye-height) so that viewing the reconstruction is a re-enactment of my own inhabitation of the real space. In comparison to Myst, the look mechanism is also much more natural: you can gaze around smoothly in all directions, looking one way or another by pulling your finger across the screen. Motion too, models a
343 Video Documentation: “Environment Reconstruction and Mobile Navigator”, http://vimeo.com/album/2328178 344Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, 14. 345 Video Documentation: “Bare Island Reconstruction”, http://vimeo.com/album/2328178
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144 real body moving smoothly from one location to another, rather than the teleporting 'jump' of Myst.
The result was a navigable virtual environment that shares the aesthetic of Isidora Blasco's photographic installations (figure 57), similarly evoking the atmosphere and spatiality of the original environment through enveloping flocks of geometrically placed photographs. Unlike Blasco's work however, the world is unstable, constantly shifting and tentatively reassembled as it is performed by the participant.
Figure 54 Early Herein prototype, images placed into 3D environment of Unity 3D, Josh Harle, 2012
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145 Figure 55 Randwick Backyard, (source image taken with HDR), Josh Harle, 2011
Figure 56 COFA construction site, Reconstructed using PhotoSynth, Josh Harle, 2011
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146 Figure 57 Courtyard, Isidro Blasco, 2008
The Myst game narrative presented the player with a mystery that needed solving. The space of the island was uncannily empty of inhabitants – only relics remained (remnants of previous island inhabitants; discarded books, tools, pages of notes) – so that the exploratory experience was one of archaeology. Initial real-world reconstructions based on the Myst aesthetic did give a sense of being in a space (accompanied by background sound recordings that captured some sounds of others' inhabitation), but the spaces felt empty and atemporal.
Myst follows a set of techniques for evoking space shared by a set of contemporary first-person video-games that work in abandoned spaces: using diaries, recorded voices, abandoned items and marks of use to evoke the 'haunting' atmospheres of the spaces. For fictional worlds, relying on “showing not telling” to present the narrative is extremely effective. The player is implicated in the reading of the space's history (usually involving grand disasters and tragedies); a reading that is heavily emotional-invested.
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147 For Herein, I want to recreate the sense of lived spaces as they are now. The history prior to the photography is not the focus, although in works like the Newcastle reconstruction the images evoke the spatial practice of graffiti artists, and the prior states of building, which are a strong part of the overall feeling of the space as I experienced it. In fictional works, the environments can be peppered with clues and story-fragments essential to building a narrative (often as a 'reward' for overcoming some difficulty). In my real-world reconstructions, these stories are less forthcoming.
Documenting someone within the space totally transformed the experience: no longer a solitary exploration of an empty space as a disconnected observer, the presence of another is confronting; jolting the “observer” into the role of fellow- inhabitant, and creating a social space that exists in a specific (though indeterminate) time and context (figure 58). This is much closer to the creation of spaces in games like Rage, that manage to create extremely evocative and distinct atmospheres for locations through the inhabitants of the towns; eccentric traders, gruff, intimidating privateers, or attractive, shy locals. Even for characters that don't offer interactive conversation, their inclusion changes the space (figure 59). The reconstructed place becomes an atmospheric space to be tactically inhabited.
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148 Figure 58 Herein Newcastle, Newcastle, NSW, Josh Harle, 2012
Figure 59 Rage, Shy, attractive local, (game screenshot), ID, 2012
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149
10
Relics
The Relic works are a series of 3D fabricated 1:10-scale models of architectural features from local Sydney landmarks. The models' face is a highly-detailed, colour surface that closely corresponds to the original architecture, while the reverse side becomes progressively distorted and faceted. These are generated with a customised Structure-from-Motion reconstruction pipeline developed as part of this thesis (See Territories). They are printed in colour resin-impregnated plaster, and have the appearance of sandstone. 346
These works investigate the rationalising practices of recording, reconstruction, and scanning, and the illusion of equivalence maintained through our ocularcentric engagement with these digital representations and replications.
The Structure-from-Motion reconstruction method produces an abstracted model of the scene that ignores all contingency and motion. Like Atta Kim's long-exposure photographs (figure 60), the reconstruction produces an architecture without movement or people, building up a model of the static elements that represent the lowest-common-denominator of features shared between images. As an attempt to accurately represent a location, the process only succeeds within the reduced concerns of a strategic view. Structure-from-Motion reduces the world into a static shell; a mapping process which leaves out the “temporal articulation of places”:
Facing Image: Relic - Steeple (3D reconstruction render), Josh Harle, 2013 346 Video Documentation: “Relic - Steeple”, http://vimeo.com/album/2328178 It is thus a mark in place of acts, a relic in place of performances: it is only their remainder, the sign of their erasure.347
\ Figure 60 On-air project 160-13 (8-hour exposure), Pahar Ganj, New Delhi, Atta Kim, 2007
Figure 61 Victoria and Albert Museum interior courtyard reconstruction, Josh Harle, 2010 347 de Certeau, The practice of everyday life, 35.
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152 The fabrication process produces a physical artefact that resembles the original architecture in shape and appearance, but even on a 1:1-scale model, the two are fundamentally different. All that remains is a surface that can be replicated without limit using 3D printing, CNC, et al. and whose creation bears no resemblance to the performative process of the workmen and their tools and the particular rock it was carved from.
The Relic works disrupt the reconstructions' claim to equivalence. The works magnify the distorted, abstract edges of the Structure-from-Motion reconstructions, exploring the point at which the veracity of the representation breaks down in a catastrophic way: the smooth curves exploding into raw, abstract polygons to reveal the underlying digital construction.
Where the reconstruction process lacks information the resulting geometry becomes accidental and contingent, slipping from correspondence with real-world space into structures formed according to the underlying mechanisms of the algorithms. The object loses coherence as its surface becomes a digital badland, with vivid colours mapped as an unintended consequence of the faithful recreation of the front face.
Rather than attempting to reconstruct a comprehensive model of the entire original environments, the works focus on an intimate detail, re-appropriating the scans as subjective accounts of space courting the point of loss, the absent, the obscured and uncaptured.
In the fragmentary reconstruction of a tiny detail of the entire space, the “relic in place of performances” becomes an evocative poetic image for the absence of the whole. Like fragments of Roman artefacts (or the weathered remains of the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes) the relic mobilises an oneiric space of mythological affective connections much larger than the place it occupies.
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153 Figure 62 Relic - Steeple (front), Josh Harle, 2013
Figure 63 Relic - Steeple (back), Josh Harle, 2013
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154 Figure 64 Relic - Wall (front), Josh Harle, 2013
Figure 65 Relic - Wall (back), Josh Harle, 2013
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155 Process
The Technology The Relic works emerged from 3D reconstruction research that I began in 2007, prior to the start of this thesis. At that point, I was experimenting with a variant of 3D reconstruction other than Structure-from-Motion known as “volumetric” reconstruction.348
Both Structure-from-Motion and volumetric reconstruction require knowledge of the relative positions of cameras in order to reconstruct, but the approach for determining this and the subsequent image processing differ between the two: Structure-from-Motion determines camera positions by solving in parallel every camera against what they can see in the world (i.e. Camera #1 sees the object from straight on, and Camera #2 sees the object from a slight angle, and algorithm determines the actual 3D shape of the object and the corresponding positions of the cameras), and the volumetric process calibrates relative camera positions through the use of a special physical marker pattern visible in each image.
Once camera positions are known Structure-from-Motion projects pixel values from the image out into the world, forming a 3D triangulated cloud of voxels, while the volumetric process uses silhouette masks of the object of interest to 'carve' out space.349
The tool I was using to process volumetric models was a commercially available program called 3D Software Object Modeller (3DSOM), designed to reconstruct a still object from a number of images. My innovative contribution to the usual reconstruction configuration was to replace one camera taking images of a still object with many cameras taking simultaneous photographs of a (potentially) moving object. In pursuit of my independent research into 3D reconstruction of people I constructed a cyclorama featuring 25 modified (read: hacked) digital cameras (figure 66) connected a single custom-built shutter-release system, designed to take 25 simultaneous digital photographs from angles surrounding the subject.
The results were satisfying, although not perfect: since the volumetric models are formed out of silhouettes, the reconstruction cannot handle overhangs or
348Peter Eisert, "Reconstruction of Volumetric 3d Models," in 3d Videocommunication: Algorithms, Concepts and Real-Time Systems in Human Centred Communication, ed. Oliver Schreer, Peter Kauff, and Thomas Sikora(West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 133. 349 Video Documentation: “3D Volumetric Reconstruction from multiple cameras”, http://vimeo.com/album/2328178
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156 indentations (figure 67).
Figure 66 Cyclorama Interior, Josh Harle, 2007
Figure 67 Example of volumetric reconstruction (Steve Harle), Josh Harle, 2007
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157 At the start of this thesis, I returned to the field of photogrammetry (the umbrella term for building reconstructions out of photographs), and found that the Structure-from-Motion technique had developed enough to explore utilising. At that point, early 2009, the tools were extremely experimental, requiring a Linux machine, familiarity with the programming language C++, and experience with compiling source-code to be able to run them. I began tests on reconstructing spaces from images, a process that could take up to 38 hours of dedicated computing time to compete (i.e. the machine would be unusable for anything else while this process was ongoing)!
The Structure-from-Motion reconstruction pipeline I was experimenting with involved multiple tools from different researchers, combined to (hopefully) produce a final model. The stages involved were:
1) extracting a list of 'interesting' features from each input image (SIFT), 2) finding related images based on shared features, 3) solving the relationships between these features to reconstruct a sparse point-cloud of 3D-located features, and the original camera positions (Bundle adjustment), 4) splitting images into smaller image-sets for parallel processing (CMVS), 5) triangulating pixel values to produce a dense point-cloud reconstruction, based on the detected 3D camera positions (PMVS), 6) running a meshing algorithm on the dense point-cloud to reconstruct the surface of the object ('Poisson' reconstruction).
Up to stage 3 had been possible for some time, being a feature of the 3D image navigation tool that later became PhotoSynth.350 The exciting development had been the creation of a software library to achieve the 4th stage, and allow the final reconstruction of the subject into a mesh model.351
In 2010, researchers ported some of the components to Microsoft Windows, and I was able to create a tool that took the disparate pieces of software and libraries, and combine them together with scripts for automating the stages of the process. This simplified the reconstruction process, and lowered the bar for entry into the experimental domain.
A few months later, in the process of reconstructing a very large scan of the
350Noah Snavely, Steven M Seitz, and Richard Szeliski, "Photo Tourism: Exploring Photo Collections in 3d" (paper presented at the ACM transactions on graphics (TOG), 2006). 351Sameer Agarwal et al., "Building Rome in a Day," in International Conference on Computer Vision(Kyoto, Japan2009).
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158 Newtown park graffiti wall (A 170 metre long sandstone wall behind St. Stephen's church, Newtown, used as a canvas for graffiti) I created a tool for reprojecting high-resolution photographs back over reconstructed models, allowing for 'gigapixel' reconstructions (images with very high resolution).
Figure 68 Newtown Graffiti Wall (process documentation in 3D Studio Max showing early camera projection test), Josh Harle, 2011
I released this tool as Free Open-Source Software (FOSS), receiving significant exposure. It was quickly utilised by the photogrammetry community in projects such as the reconstruction of archaeological digs sites and cave paintings (by archaeologist Mark Willis - figure 69), and was subsequently adopted into a popular reconstruction toolkit.352
352 Web Link: “Photorealistic mesh created with PhotoSynthToolkit”, http://goo.gl/f4yOPi
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159 Figure 69 Panther Cave near Comstock (3D construction created using Josh Harle's texture reprojection tool), Texas, Mark Willis, 2011
Finally, I created a set of automated processes for reconstructing scenes from video, and used them to create a reconstruction web service called SwirlApp.353 The system uses a virtual machine running in 'The Cloud' (i.e. a high-powered computer system accessible remotely that can be used on a pro rata basis) to monitor an email address, download any email received, extract the images from the video at 10 FPS, then run a Structure-from-motion reconstruction on them. Once the dense point-cloud has been reconstructed, a meshing algorithm is run on the data to produce a solid object, and the results are uploaded to an FTP site and emailed to the user (figure 68). The App was named after the circular gesture that is needed to produce best 3D reconstruction results from video.
This same set of technologies was used for producing the Relic works; using cloud- computing to reconstruct the models but selecting the input photographs to deliberately leaving the coverage of the object partial. While the 'front' of the image is reconstructed as a high-polygon, true-colour surface, the area of the object that is not photographed forms as a low-poly, faceted surface.
353 Video Documentation: “SwirlApp: 3D meshes from video via email”, http://vimeo.com/album/2328178
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160 Figure 70 Screenshots from Swirl documentation video, Josh Harle, 2012
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161
11
Monorail Pylon
The Monorail Pylon work is a 1:1 scale model of a Sydney monorail pylon, precisely cut in 4mm plywood according to the specifications of a parametrically defined CAD model. The work is painted with a photo-sensitive emulsion which has been exposed and developed, leaving the patina, scratches, and graffiti of the real-world monorail pylon marked on its surface.
The work articulates the dissonance between the abstract, utopian ideal of the architectural model, and the diverse spatial practices of inhabitation that leave their mark on the realised structure, and reconfigure its meaning.
The city is contested territory, yet the architectural model ignores the timeliness and contingency of the built environment in constant renegotiation. Musing on Etienne-Jules Marey’s pre-eminent photographic study of movement,354 Latour suggests the need for a parallel study exploring movement in architecture capable of “generating earthly accounts of buildings and design processes, tracing pluralities of concrete entities in the specific spaces and times of their co-existence”; 355 finding ways to voice the enunciative practice of the supposedly immobile city. In CAD software, virtual buildings are formed from an impossibly perfect geometry: surfaces of zero thickness effortless projected along the vectors of pre- Facing Image: Monorail Pylon, Maquette (1:10) and illustration of scale for 1:1 final work, Josh Harle, 2011 354Etienne-Jules Marey, Movement, vol. 73(New York: D. Appleton, 1895). 355Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, "Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An Ant’s View of Architecture," Explorations in architecture: Teaching, design, research (2008): 88. defined axes. The proto-building exists in a idealised form, uncompromised by allowances of the building process, the strains of weathering, or inhabitation by real people.
Contemporary architectural model-making tools such as laser cutting maintain the rectilinear rationality of the building design: the 2D vectors are 'extruded' from the thickness of the cut material. It is now possible to produce final models with only the slightest sign of manual involvement. The rationalisation and repeatability of ubiquitous space is reaching into the physical world through CNC processes, calibrated instruments, and laser cut vectors.
The monorail pylons are an ideal structure to explore this theme via: the monorail was built as a utopian symbol of futuristic transportation (being millions of dollars more expensive to run than an alternative light-rail356), and has now become a testament to the gap between ideal and reality; an artefact of a nostalgic future like 1940's visions of 21st century lifestyles. The pylons themselves are uniformly geometrical, formed in clean utilitarian shapes and planes. Most importantly, these structures have been marked by a 'time-stain' of human activity; graffiti, weathering, and the patina of use 'haunt' and disrupt their surfaces (figure 71).
Monorail Pylon deprivileges the physical, geometrical aspect of the structure, using photosensitive paint to transform it into a camera capturing the spectre of human activity which is normally silent and effaced in the idealised architectural model. The work is a step towards an account of buildings in motion: the first photographic frame in a revisit of Marey’s study of movement, written back onto the building itself.
356Tracey Aubin, "Why Sydney Found Itself Looking up at a Monorail," Sydney Morning Herald, Friday April 29 1988.
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164 Figure 71 Documentary images of monorail pylons in Sydney, Josh Harle, 2011
Figure 72 Documentary images of monorail pylons in Sydney, Josh Harle, 2011
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165 Process
Laser etching The Monorail pylon work came out of experiments in laser-etching for the Path piece exhibited in CAADRIA 2011 (figure 46). I had begun to experiment with setting up poetic conflict between process, material, and content to illustrate the tactical practices (and time in general) that were missing from abstract, strategic maps of the world.
The monorail pylons themselves were chosen as uniquely sited examples of the gap. In an early proposal I identified them as being stuck between place and space; their concrete hexagonal feet in the everyday hubbub of the city streets, the site of prolific graffiti practice, while I-beams stretch skywards towards some futurist/utopian ideal.
In the modelling and fabrication of the pylons, I wanted to emphasise the gap between the abstract model and actual in-world usage as much as possible. After reverse-engineering the structure of the pylon from measurements, I then set about creating a parametric model system that would generate the model from a propositional rule-set. The parametric modelling approach was one level abstraction further from the actual object: rather than modelling the shape explicitly (defining the size and shape of each face, etc.), I used the generative modelling tool Grasshopper to produce the final shape as a result of a linear pipeline of constraints (figure 77). This model was exported into Adobe Illustrator, to form the laser-cutting pattern for the 1:10 scale maquette.
The real-world graffiti'ed faces of the monorail pylon were recreated from documentary photographs of the chosen monorail pylon (one with a particularly striking face stencil) in Sydney. The photographs were filtered into high-contrast black-and-white images (necessary for laser etching), mapped over their respective positions on the cutting pattern using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, and the pattern cut in 3.5mm plywood. The resulting aesthetic was striking: the laser- cutting technique used for producing precise designs now co-opted for forming grunge and dirt. The smooth surface of the plywood had been burnt and eaten away, appearing to have been attacked by the hostile forces of everyday city life (figure 75).
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166 Figure 73 Monorail Pylon, Process documentation (Grasshopper parametric file for generating the model), 2011
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167 Figure 74 Monorail Pylon, Process documentation (parametrically generated model), Josh Harle, 2011
Figure 75 Monorail Pylon (1:10 maquette), Laser etched and cut face, Josh Harle, 2011
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168 Textured Following on from this first maquette, I extended my study to four more monorail pylons in the Sydney CBD. Informed by techniques used in video-games, I explored emulating the environmental modelling approach of 'skinning' (often photo-realistic) textures over primitive geometry. Most contemporary First-Person Shooters rely on this method to recreate impressive architectural scenes while relying on relatively simple base geometry. For example, a building may be represented as a simple block, but have an photo-realistic image of a buildings face – complete with bricks, windows, shadows, and plants – applied to its surface.
These studies used the same laser-cutting pattern with the etching layer removed, producing clean models. The surface textures were then printed and applied to the surfaces of the models (figure 78).
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169 Figure 76 Monorail Pylons, applied texture models, Josh Harle, 2011
Figure 77 Monorail Pylons, applied texture models, Josh Harle, 2011
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170 Exposed, Stained faces The textured models approached the effect of computer-game level representation, but were confused by the underlying material and process. The attempt to recreate photo-realistic objects was inconsistent with the play on architectural model aesthetics. Other's had produced much more coherent results through 'papercraft', where the model is translated into a colour net, printed on cardboard, and folded into shape.
In comparison to the textured models, the etched, black-and-white marks of the first Monorail Pylon work were far more striking: the pristine wood of the architecture model being marked and burnt with the actual usage of the space, like an architectural Picture of Dorian Gray kept in the attic while the displayed model remained free from the effects of time.
I decided to go back to the original aesthetic for, and to pursue the texture mapping concept 'in-game' for the Gamespaces works, which similarly explore the use of dirt, detritus, and non-uniformity in (Euclidean) virtual spaces to give a richer sense of authenticity and atmosphere.
For the final work, the 1:1 scale precluded the use of laser-etching in the fabrication: it was simply too large to be practical. A similar and equally striking effect to the laser-cutting method was produced using “Liquid Light” paint (a photosensitive emulsion) to allow the faces of the model to be exposed like a photograph (figure 78). This allowed forgma the large scale model, while still maintaining the relationship between the untreated, 'pure' architectural model, and the marks that I reinscribe on it.
The production of the final work consisted of the painting, exposure, and development of 9m2 of plywood surface under darkroom conditions. The individual pieces were too big for the use of photographic chemical trays, and instead had to be placed in large purpose-built troughs and sprayed evenly with each chemical using pressurised spray equipment intended for gardening applications. The entire process took myself and an assistant 18 hours to complete, working non- stop.
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171 Figure 78 Monorail Pylon, Josh Harle, 2013
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172 Monorail Pylon
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12
Gamespaces
The Gamespaces works are photo-realistic reconstructions of art galleries, installed in the physical gallery itself, and playable by visitors via an Xbox controller. The reconstructions are rendered using a cutting-edge video-game engine (CryEngine 3 SDK) that allows real-time dynamic lighting effects. The works recreate the chosen spaces through extensive photo-documentation and audio recordings, to give a sense of presence within the game space. 357
This work offers the visitor the opportunity to enter a perceptual laboratory and experiment with their own embodied perception. The study of First-Person Shooters (FPSs) forms a major component of this thesis, since inhabiting them involves an emotionally-invested, tactical practice of an (internally) rigidly organised, digitally represented Euclidean model, governed by propositional logic. FPSs have provided me with sites of field-work, case-studies, and experimental laboratories for testing evocative and immersive spaces.
The work shares a similar set of concerns to Artist Jens Reinhert's faithfully recreated models of graffiti'ed subway tunnels. These give a sense of the co-existent topologies of planned public spaces: the stark, brutal geometry of cement features – a utilitarian solution to pedestrian movement around the city – contrasted with the overflowing of intimate subjective 'turns of phrase' that generate a space through
Facing Image: Gamespaces: Kudos Gallery (game image), Josh Harle, 2012 357 Video Documentation: “Gallery Reconstruction”, http://vimeo.com/album/2328178 their performance. (figure 79) The models, like Gamespaces, offer a perceptual armature through which one can interrogate a feeling of the space full size, like a maquette or architectural model gives a sketch (through imaginative projection of scale) of the final work.
Figure 79 5 Tunnel, 3 Tunnel Jens Reinhert, 2008
As part of the creation of a compelling environment, Gamespaces explores themes of:
• Embodied perception in First-Person Shooters,
• The 'haunting' of digital spaces through signs of fictional fellow inhabitants' spatial practices (dirt, rubbish, graffiti),
• The creation of space through others' practice. (mainly through the ambient sound recordings that include traffic noise and passers-by). This work is supported by my perceptual 'field-work' into virtual environments that has been ongoing for the last two decades or so. Happily, computer game spaces have become progressively more sophisticated and immersive as game design progressed. This is not directly tied to improvements in video technology that allow for the display of more complex scenes (the visual aspect of a virtual environment is
Gamespaces
176 not necessarily the most compelling, counter ocularcentrism358) but with more subtle inclusion of the (virtual) body into the players perception (See Playgrounds).
Figure 80 Gamespaces (Alleyway), (design image), Josh Harle, 2012
Gamespaces allows the visitor to explore their own sense of (body-topological) connections to their environment, through their ongoing apportioning out of “landing sites” in the space (elements of the environment that invite and suggest physical interaction).359 The work is a perceptual harness the visitor can strap into, to attach a whole other elaborate topological assemblage into their existing perception of the world. Placing the virtual gallery space inside the real gallery space foregrounds the embodied sense of the virtual environment at the point where the player 'leaves' the game and returns to the physical space.
358Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, 22. 359Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa, Architectural Body(Tuscaloosa: University Of Alabama Press, 2002), 9.
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177 Figure 81 Gamespaces: Kudos Gallery, (Documentation photo), Kudos Gallery, Josh Harle, 2012
Figure 82 Gamespaces: Kudos Gallery, (Documentation photo), Kudos Gallery, Josh Harle, 2012
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178 Process
Both the Kudos gallery and Museum of Contemporary Art360 Gamespaces works were created using Google Sketchup, from extensive photographic documentation of the gallery and surrounding area. The basic geometry of the galleries were constructed from floor-plans provided, and the photos applied to the surfaces of the geometry. The results were then exported to CryEngine 3 using the PlayUp export tool.
Figure 83 Gamespaces - MCA, (Documentation photo), Josh Harle, 2013
360 Video Documentation: “MCA HD Walkthrough”, http://vimeo.com/album/2328178
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179 Figure 84 Gamespaces: MCA, (Screenshot), Josh Harle, 2013
Figure 85 Gamespaces: MCA, (Screenshot), Josh Harle, 2013
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180 Gamespaces
181 Gamespaces
182 IV
Emergence
13
Emergency!
Write rhizomatically. Have short-term ideas. Form new assemblages of concepts that can become deterritorialised and transformed through lines-of- flight into other ideas.361
It would not be possible to map - in the traditional sense - the emerging topologies resulting from a changing city, developing technologies, and ways of practising space.
1. They are porous, hybrid spaces, disrupting the dualities of public/private, virtual/real, ordered/organic that constitute mapped boundaries i.e. they are partial, ambiguous, fragmentary, cyborg.
2. They are in a state of flux: always at a point of transition from one thing to the another.
In order to talk about them I've mobilised contemporary critical methodologies that look a lot like de Certeau's tactics. With no viewpoint from which the world can be surveyed as an isolated whole, no stable territory to survey from, I can only give timely reports from the field through fictocriticism, conjunctions of multiplicities forming a tentative assemblage or composition.
361Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?(New York: Verso, 1994), 16. The potential of cities and their inhabitants are being restricted by strategic models which disenchant, disambiguate, and control urban space. The aim of the thesis, as with the wider Real-Time Porosity research, is to produce an account of hybrid space which challenges the privileged, monolithic model of the city:
Security seeks to close a city down. Porosity seeks to open it up.362
Porosity did this by showing that what is conventionally considered a 'private' space can be entered and temporarily appropriated as a 'public' space. Goodwin critically practised rooms and corridors of office buildings to show that the usual distinction of public and private is prescriptive rather than descriptive, illustrating that the meaning of a space is determined according to how it is used.
This thesis extends the account of porous, hybrid space through the concept of 'emerging topologies' constituted out of body-world-technology and formed through productive desire with new technologies. De Certeau, Bachelard, and Pallasmaa critique a virtual/actual distinction through accounts of memory, the mythological, and the oneiric in our experience of everyday spaces.363 Body- topologies further disrupt the boundaries of virtual/actual and body/environment through the suggestion that “my body is wherever there is something to be done”,364 which can include actions within a virtual environment.
Through an account of body-topologies, this thesis explores the emergence of a city 'augmented' by digital technologies, and argues that the ordered territories of this semi-digital city can still be tactically practised and inhabited.
The thesis follows a fictocritical methodological approach: composing an account of the augmented city through non-exhaustive explorations of inhabitants' creative uses and the author's own experiences. The document and the artworks which make up this thesis have tried to maintain the features and intent of a fictocritical composition, namely:
Motion The strategic map of territory – a static description of space – cuts out movement, privileging “place over time”,365 failing to show the city as something in transition,
362Paul McGillick et al., "Introduction to 'Performance to Porosity'," in Richard Goodwin: Performance to Porosity(Australia: Craftsman House, 2006), 8-11. 363Discussed in the Right to the (Fragmented) City chapter. 364Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception(New York: Routledge, 2012), 250. 365de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 36.
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186 “as movement, as flight, as a series of transformations”.366 The intent of this thesis has been to give an account of the augmented city and its inhabitants in a state of becoming, of emergence.
Not only that, but the thesis has attempted to maintain the performative quality of the research that formed it. It has given tours of Temporary Autonomous Zones hidden in strategic territories, on the point of collapse, has watched technologies develop and usage patterns change, and followed the various lines-of-flight the artworks have taken in their re-appropriation of mapping. The artworks in particular are still in motion, open to disrupt or be transformed further by the viewer's own reading.
Creativity Richard Goodwin's performance-research and radical interventions ('parasites') drive the generation of new assemblages by connecting disparate parts of the city across invisible lines of 'building desire'. Russell Lowe's virtual environments coupled with real-time tracking devices allow the analysis of current pedestrian behaviour, and the testing of speculative configurations of the urban environment under different conditions.367
Giving accounts of the hybrid space of emerging topologies has involved inventing new concepts. While the written document has composed concepts such as body- topologies and ubiquitous space to describe the landscape of the augmented city, the art practice has formed new spaces of its own. In line with Foucault's suggestion, these are multiplied “signs of existence”368 that present seductively reconfigured assemblages of technology, environment, and body: hacked, playful (mis)appropriations of strategic mapping tools.
Good Construction The value of a fictocritical composition is in how well composed it is. It is not the critical deconstruction of an existing claim to truth, but an attempt at a pragmatic account which is better constructed than the conventional maps it seeks to challenge.
366Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, "Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An Ant’s View of Architecture," Explorations in architecture: Teaching, design, research (2008): 80. 367Russell Lowe and Richard Goodwin, "Real-Time Porosity Using Computer Gaming Technology," Automation in Construction 20, no. 3 (2011): 279. 368Michel Foucault, "The Masked Philosopher," in Ethics. The Essential Works, ed. Paul Rabinow(New York: New Press, 1997), 323.
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187 This thesis doesn't accuse the representation that ubiquitous space produces of being 'untrue', but of being badly constructed for the task of understanding a hybrid, changing world. By defining identity through negative difference and failing to represent the actual practice of space, strategic maps are unresponsive and reductive: maps of the city as discrete, mutually-exclusive zones ('internal' or 'external', 'public' or 'private') are simplified at the expense of the heterogeneity of the city. As compositions, these maps serve the need to control and optimise space rather than giving insight into its potential.
In contrast, Real-Time Porosity's alternative account of a hybrid “porous” city explicitly investigates the pedestrian performance of space and the points where strategic compositions break down: showing their failure to include temporary public spaces, ambiguous zones, et al.
Acknowledging that the world is in a state of transition, and avoiding an attempt to understand it through ready-made theoretical systems, are important parts of a fictocritical compositions relative robustness:
[the] idea that for a new object we might have to create a new concept, perhaps a new method of thinking369
Along with these comes a need for honesty by the author in their role as 'composer'. What may seem like a 'radically subjective' agenda in presenting research as personal field-reports and tours rather than an objective map is actually just a change in the authoritative voice and a preservation of the context in which it was performed. The strategic map – EICU's SIMS, Google Maps, conventional theses written in passive formation – separates the visible presence of the observer from the observations, but the observer was nonetheless instrumental in the mapping process, bringing to it a set of values, judgements, and politics:
Maps are transitory and fleeting, being contingent, relational and context-dependent; they are always mappings; spatial practices enacted to solve relational problems (e.g., how best to create a spatial representation, how to understand a spatial distribution, how to get between A and B, and so on).370
369Claire Colebrook, Deleuze and the Meaning of Life, Continuum, London, 2010, p. 2. cited in Stephen Muecke, "Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism without Judgement," Cultural Studies Review 18, no. 1 (2011): 48. 370Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, "Rethinking Maps," Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 3 (2007): 331.
Emergency!
188 Latour points out that scientific discourse has talked about the influence of culture and politics only in the context of explaining previous failures, implying that the successful exclusion of these outside distractions from the lab will avoid any further error.371 At the same time, he illustrates how scientific research is thoroughly socialised, and requires a vast network of allies to be successful.372
Given that this research is supported by a state government counter-terrorism unit, it seems important to be aware and honest about the context in which Real-Time Porosity was carried out, and the paths we took to remain tactical.
371Roger Luckhurst, "Bruno Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and Tangled Objects," Science Fiction Studies (2006): 5. 372Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society(Boston: Harvard University Press, 1987), 62.
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189 Tactical Research
The process of tactical engagement generates new concepts, disrupts organised space, scribbles illegible poetry through midnight streets: like the desire-driven line- of-flight that once thrust the first parkour traceurs into a playful love-affair with the roof-tops.
When the usual connections are deterritorialized, more meaningful ones may emerge.373 Paradigm shifting discoveries are often made through frantic experimentation or accident,374 then rationalised and justified after the fact. There is a difference between the stoic face of Science, and the activity out of which discovery comes:
[...on] the one hand, the tentative moves, pragmatic ruses, and successive tactics that mark the stages of practical investigation and, on the other hand, the strategic representations offered to the public as the product of these operations.375
This thesis has been carried out tactically, not only as an art practice, but through technical investigations, software development, and theory. As a research project, Real-Time Porosity jerry-rigged, hacked, and improvised, utilising unusual combinations of approaches and apparatus. We used appropriated and borrowed tools (Crysis 2, CSIRO's WASP tracking technology, on-phone GPS, AR tracking symbols, photogrammetry) to “form new assemblages of concepts”; “short-term ideas”376 as proof-of-concept rather than long-term investments in one linear research goal.
While my own early research involved a commitment to mapping, it shared Real- Time Porosity's provocative relationship with the EICU; to present polemic perspectives that would give new insight, bringing the body-in-motion back into the map through the creation of radical cartographies, and clandestine gorilla interventions.
373Dorothea Olkowski, "Flows of Desire and the Body-Becoming," in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, ed. Elizabeth Grosz(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 107. 374Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, 13. 375de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xxiii. 376Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 16.
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190 Over the course of the thesis, the assemblage of concepts in the research shifted and transformed as the technological landscape changed. New potential directions of art practice and interesting framings of the theory emerged.
At the mid-point in my research, I had abandoned an attempt to cast Augmented Reality as either fundamentally tactical or strategic, and began to look at technologies and practices as connections that formed assemblages, and explore how these assemblages could be transformed. I created software to visualise the concepts I was exploring and their relationships as a Rico cluster: a 3D model that generated (through modelled elastic tension) a cloud configuration of concepts based on their shared connections (figure 86).377 The tool allowed me to interrogate the paths of connections between what seemed like unconnected concepts.
The Rico cluster illustrated the research as rhizome, with the inherent potential to become something else: as the connections and scope of the research changed, so did the topology of the Rico cluster, shifting to accommodate the best shape for the connections. The thesis's experimental methodologies – shared with Goodwin and Lowe – allowed the project to adapt to the emergence of new technologies and changes in patterns of usage. As I was exploring it, the research was growing.
The thesis required making journeys through ubiquitous space, taking note of practices of re-appropriation ('misuse' of technologies such as Facebook tags), and engaging in my own interventions. The research showed that the same tactics that de Certeau, Goodwin, and the Situationists had suggested could create new uses and meanings of physical space – play, hacking, seductive alternative practices – continued to disrupt the strategic territories of virtual environments. These tactics became essential elements of the research methodology.
377 Video Documentation: “Rico map of research concepts (circa January, 2012)”, http://vimeo.com/album/2328178
Emergency!
191 Figure 86 Rico Cluster visualisation of the thesis (Image Captured January, 2012), Josh Harle
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192 Play
Playing games is a way of temporarily disconnecting some connections to the world and creating new ones. Games produce a spaciality outside of our usual sense of the ordinary that allows us to become “something/someone else or to play an entirely different role”.378 Johan Huizinga suggests a model of the 'magic circle' as a liminal space produced through games:
The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain.379
Huizinga's examples are specific spaces of ritual or meaning, but others have created playgrounds through the superimposition of rules of play over ordinary space: the Situationist International practised the dérive (drifting through the streets free from the control of a particular destination or thought about districts and borders); Goodwin performed various games such as snakes and ladders through the buildings of Sydney's CBD (“operati[ing] without interruption by the propriety of the buildings”380).
The medieval carnival is another such playground, where transgressive games offered alternative sets of 'operational schemas':
The purpose of these collective games was the world turned upside down, to reenact social conditions through playful inversions (the king of carnival as a peasant, etc.).381
The face masks and elaborate costumes the Carnival of Venice, like many contemporary digital virtual spaces (WorldsAway, Second Life, chat forums), provide an anonymity which allows the de-coupling of one's usual sense of identity and agency from the fantasy body one choses to perform. The culture of “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” encouraged by the anonymity and playfulness of these festivals produces subjectivities that resemble 378Rob Shields, The Virtual(London: Routledge, 2003), 17. 379Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture(Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 10. 380Richard Goodwin, "Porosity: The Revision of Public Space in the City Using Public Art to Test the Functional Boundaries of Built Form" (University of New South Wales, 2007), 11. 381Stephen Dosinger, Space between People(Berlin: Prestel, 2008), 26.
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193 Donna Haraway's modern “cyborg”:382
[...]Resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private.383
The internet offers Temporary Autonomous Zones of respite from oppressive social conventions, and the possibility of experimenting with other “practices of becoming” outside of the demands of the ordinary world. Even within the regulated structures of ubiquitous space tactics playfully subvert ordered systems, and inhabit the virtual space with similarly creative ruses, tagging and geo-locating according to desires and in-jokes.
In computer games, simulations of real urban space are presented to the player with a modified set of drives and rules to incite new practices. The affordances and curated desires of the virtual space can destabilise the player's body into becoming- skater, becoming-traceur, etc.
These (virtual) playgrounds aren't just excursions from one space to another, eventually landing back in ordinary space. From personal experience (the field work I have performed in virtual spaces), I know that computer games produce a persistent change in my bodily sense of space. Games like Mirror's Edge and Tony Hawk require a novel way of practising urban spaces – such as skating, parkour – through an embodied first person perspective, they give the player a re-organised sense of their body's potential to interact with the environment: for months after playing Jet Set Radio, a Japanese in-line skating game that predominantly features the ability (and often the requirement) of “grinding” down handrails, I couldn't help but perceive bodily the potential offered by the layout of an urban space for grinding. It had changed how I perceived the affordances of the physical space; drawing out possible forms of engagement that would not have been apparent before.
These games allow discovery; they are forms of generative research. Goodwin tests the “functional boundaries of built form” through a non-linear art-practice.384 The Situationist dérivists “jolt [themselves] into a new awareness of the urban
382Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," in The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory, ed. Steven Seidman(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 84. 383Ibid. 384Goodwin, "Porosity: The Revision of Public Space in the City", 10.
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194 landscape”,385 and float through a city of intensities feeling out subtle atmospherics. The playing of games is a form of 'sorcery': the “cultivation of enhanced consciousness or non-ordinary awareness & its deployment in the world of deeds & objects to bring about desired results”.386 It creates new spaces with new rules.
385Joseph Hart, "A New Way of Walking," Utne Reader (2004): 1. 386Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, 22.
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195 Hacking
Hacking is a tactical practice closely related to play. Rather than starting with a set of overarching rules, the system is de-constructed, deterritorialised, and played with on the level of its constituent parts. It opens the “black-boxes” of the systems387 (questioning the accepted set of relationships and connections that are embedded within) and reconfigures them according to what they can actually do irrespective of their intended uses. Hackers tease out alternative rhizomatic connections, finding non-linear, unanticipated ways of using software, the city, their own bodies.
When Charlie Chaplin tactically re-purposes his cane, he is pushing it “beyond the limits that the determinants of the object set on its utilization.” 388 When I hack my Nook E-ink reader I remove artificial constraints on the functioning of its software and hardware, and it becomes a cheap, miniature Linux computer. When Goodwin infiltrates the city it becomes a playground. Up against restrictive and controlling systems, hacking can re-appropriate them and radically alter their meanings and uses. A subversive movement through a space can shake the standard narrative of the city: climbing here, jumping there, acting against the expectations and designs provided for the normative body.
The meaning and purpose of particular sets of technologies can be radically altered: the claim of a technology as enframing only captures it in the set of connections that produce a 'standing-reserve', and new technologies that help control space can also give new ways of disrupting it. 'Data gathering', 'data mining', and 'data mapping' tools used by the powerful to monitor and analyse can be re-purposed in crisis situations,389 technologies hacked together out of necessity “combining elements of an existing toolset”390 to replace or superseded failing communication networks. These 'mashups' are weird and wonderful re-conceptualisations of chains of tools and datasets,391 new machinic assemblages generated by desires (e.g. to survive, to aid others, and to confirm the well-being of loved-ones). They form elaborate Rube-Goldberg machines that re-purpose component technologies to construct a new type of assemblage with a very different use.
387Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, 2. 388de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 98. 389Sophia B. Liu and Leysia Palen, "The New Cartographers: Crisis Map Mashups and the Emergence of Neogeographic Practice Special Issue on Mapping Hazards and Disasters " Cartography and Geographic Information Science 37, no. 1 (2010): 69. 390Andrew Turner, Introduction to Neogeography(Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, 2006), 3. 391Liu and Palen, "The New Cartographers: Crisis Map Mashups and the Emergence of Neogeographic Practice Special Issue on Mapping Hazards and Disasters " 69.
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196 Social-media services provide functional tools designed for the construction of ubiquitous space. Facebook tagging builds up an enormous indexed archive of images, and uses the information to seed a facial-recognition database and to induce who knows who. The tagging feature is also widely and deliberately misused, co- opting Facebook's notification system to perform humorous ruses and tricks.
In my software/hardware development cum art practice, I focussed on creating modular tools intended for 'mashing up' rather than whole processes that provided an 'end-to-end' work-flow. Developing these single-task components worked to discourage the concretised sets of connections that are usual for monolithic, 'black- box' software, and and encouraged repurposing and experimentation.
These 'free-range' tools were quick to develop, easy to modify, and could lead to unexpected/novel uses through mashup-style experimentation. In a few cases, these tools were the single thing needed to connect very disparate sets of tools: e.g. the real-time data input system I developed for CryEngine allowed Real-Time Porosity to connect CSIRO's WASP location data into character positions in-game.392
In many first-person shooters, though working through tactical themes and embodied, phenomenological engagement, the world features a rigid set of expectations that can be more regulating and controlling than other types of games. Certain actions may be required for the successful continuation of the mission (resulting in failure if the player deviates) or in sandbox-style games there can be a more subtle chilling effect, where the player is rewarded less with scripted, rich narrative if they deviate from the expected.
Despite these constraints (enforced via scripted behaviour, conditions on the modelling of physics, invisible barriers and linear narrative structures) the striated, regulated virtual space can be tactically inhabited, hacked and subverted. There are many ways of hacking the game that create different drivers for enjoyment or competition: for example 'quick running' - ignoring the narrative to get through the level as fast as possible, and 'rocket-jumping' – using the explosive push of a rocket to push the player much higher than intended to access off-limits areas (subverting the game designers' expectation that the player will avoid injury).393
392Russell Lowe, Mark Hedley, and Richard Goodwin, "Real-Time Porosity: Combining a Computer Game Engine with Environmental Sensors to Better Understand Pedestrian Movement in Public/Private Space and in Realtime. ," in Circuit Bending, Breaking and Mending : Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia, ed. Christiane Herr, et al.(Newcastle: The Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), 2011), 234. 393Michael Nitsche, Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3d Game Worlds(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 35.
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197 By pushing the limits of their virtual body, the player can arrive at parts of the gameworld that were never intended, and discover emergent physical behaviour that was never considered possible (even by the developers), such as the ability to fly on a correctly thrown wooden pallet in Half-Life 2. Russell Lowe hacks the system to deviate from the normative body in another way, using a wheelchair-bound virtual body to test the assumptions and allowances of Crysis 2 levels.394
Alien incursion into the cityscape can jolt or seduce, providing an alternative growth logic “surprising, transverse or attractive compared with the usual choice”395 similar to the pedestrian who has broken free from convention, become a traceur taking a parkour line-of-flight across buildings that acts within a scaffolding framework, but not according to it: “neither foreign nor in conformity”396 with the orthodox conception of place.
394Russell Lowe, "A Wheelchair in Crysis: what might the presence of a wheelchair reveal about the environments in Crysis?" (unpublished paper), 2009. 395de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 101. 396Ibid.
Emergency!
198 Figure 87 Flying in Half-Life 2 through the exploitation of a physics engine glitch.
Figure 88 Revealing aspects of environment in Crysis, through the use of a wheelchair, Russell Lowe, 2009
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199 Radical Cartography
The Euclidean systems we use to represent geometry are subjective; invested in a reduction and effacement of real details of the world,397 even while they “[try] desperately to suppose that the utilitarian and functionalist law of [their] own mechanism is 'natural'”.398 The strategic maps endorsed by authority are static, timeless, objective, and seemingly dispassionate.
In contrast to conventional mapping, radical cartography generates subjective, fragmentary accounts of the world that disrupt the authority of the strategic map: “unhing[ing] our beliefs about the world, and […provoking] new perceptions of the networks, lineages, associations and representations of place, people and power.”399
The inverted world map is a powerful example of radical cartography, challenging the imperial European perspective on the world:
The modern north-oriented map continually reproduces the idea of the global North and the global South. The “inverted” map calls into question our ingrained acceptance of this particular “global order.”400
Radical cartographies capture tactical accounts of space, such as those by artists Donna Rawlins and Larissa Fassler (figures 89, 90 and 91). In these maps, the everyday practice of public spaces are investigated over weeks, and formal meanings and representational conventions are de-privileged and deterritorialised through an articulation of the artist's own concerns and associations.
Real-Time Porosity has involved a process of radical cartography in their provocative relationship with the EICU. The primary research result of the collaboration challenged the static mapping of the city through speculative interventions – parasites that map new connections on the basis of the 'desire' of the buildings and their inhabitants (figures 92 and 93). The reconstructions of real spaces in computer-games also offered an embodied perspective of the architecture, that revealed hidden connections and atmospheres that influenced the practice of the
397Latour and Yaneva, "Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An Ant’s View of Architecture," 84. 398de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 199. 399Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat, An Atlas of Radical Cartography(Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press, 2008), 6. 400Ibid., 3.
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200 space, but wouldn't show up on a 2-dimensional plan.
Goodwin's parasites, Lowe's virtual scenarios, and my own works are all forms of radical cartography, drawing real yet usually silenced connections between elements of the world. They provide field-reports of spaces that do not exist on the conventional map, and their roughly sketched directions might guide others in finding them. My travel diaries in evocative video-game spaces, accounts of warehouse venues, and artworks are all heterogeneous, partial, hybrid maps that hopefully provide “something surprising, transverse or attractive compared with the usual choice,”401 mapping in ways that emphasise rather than efface the topologies of connections between myself as cartographer, the tools and technologies used to map, the environment, and the multiplicity of spatial practices that form them together and constitute my own 'style' of inhabiting space (figures 94 and 95).
Figure 89 Donna’s Place, Donna Rawlins, 1987, National Library of Australia
401de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 101.
Emergency!
201 Figure 90 Regent Street ⁄ Regent’s Park (Dickens thought it looked like a racetrack), Archival C-Print, Larissa Fassler, 2009
Figure 91 Kotti (revisited), Archival C-Print, Larissa Fassler, 2010
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202 Figure 92 Zone 2: What a Building Desires, Richard Goodwin, 2003-2006, Digital 3D Modelling
Figure 93 Zone 2: What a Building Desires, Richard Goodwin, 2003-2006, Digital 3D Modelling
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203 Figure 94 Graffiti Atlas (Pemell Lane), Josh Harle, 2013
Figure 95 Paths (Melbourne), Installation sketch, Josh Harle, 2013
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204 Emergency!
205
14
Taking Flight
This is how it should be done: lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.402
402Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi(London: Continuum, 2009), 178. Emerging body-topologies
The strategic analysis of a territory isolates the individual from the environment, as separate systems. A line of demarcation is drawn up between built structures (tied up with a program; a mechanistic appraisal of usage patterns, activities presented, opportunities assessed, constraints identified) and normative bodies (with culturally and physically determined set of actions such as walking up steps, climbing ladders, driving cars, opening doors, sitting behind desks working). But as a body-topology there's no line to draw between the technology, the environment, and the organism- person.
The development and public adoption of mapping, navigation, and documentation technology is transforming the city into one experienced as an 'augmented' partially virtual space. Inhabitants of this city practice space through a network of connections (to map servers, to cell towers, to WiFi base stations, to friends online). Through these topologies the modern city dweller is becoming-cyborg.
The cyborg inhabits the world in new and novel ways, forming flashmobs, then protests, according to the mobilisation of smartphone-based social networking tools. Leaving their own type of marks on a partially visible aesthetic realm that may require new senses to perceive (the aesthetics of these emerging topologies – WiFi signal strength, FourSquare check-ins, dating App local notifications).
Private and public physical space no longer make sense as domains of exposure to regulation and scrutiny, since our moments of vulnerability and transgression can be exposed to many more people via social media. An iPad playlist turns one's life into a privately experienced movie scene, with its own bespoke theme-song. We share our space more with online Facebook friends than the schmucks waiting at the bus- stop.
Our feelers, antennae, appendages – networked electronic prosthetics such as “mobile phones, key fobs, e-tags, contactless smart cards, [and] remote keyless systems”403 – stretch into many spaces, dip into the virtual. They beep, download updates, transmit IDs, track GPS satellites, actuate alarms all autonomously – operating like unconscious, internal biological processes.
403Gillian Fuller and Ross Harley, "The Protocological Surround: Reconceptualizing Radio and Architecture in the Wireless City," in Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement, ed. Marcus Foth, et al.(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 39.
Taking Flight
208 Augmented cyborg bodies in their various surrounds can perceive in many registers. Through the new eyes of augmented reality, buildings become transparent to show landmarks of interest behind. Dating apps like Grindr and OKCupid fill the air with a pungent, localised, digital pheromone; encoding romantic compatibility through compatible interest keywords, and spreading mating rituals between virtual spaces. GPSs and Google Maps disentangle sign-posts, road markings, favourite short-cuts, and your grandfather's out-of-date advice from cyborg body-in- navigation, replacing them with distributed cloud-based path optimisation.
The 'augmented' city we inhabit is filled with an atmosphere of invisible connections,404 a “digital topology that outweighs and shadows its physical topography”.405 At the centre of the cyborg topology is a body tied-up, tethered, barbed and hooked into ubiquitous space, social media, virtual environments.
404Ibid. 405Brett Neilson, "Data, Zone, Territory," in Proceedings of Data, Memory, Territory – International Symposium and Masterclasses, ed. Tanya Notley, et al.(UWS, Sydney, Australia: Digital Media Rearch, 2012).
Taking Flight
209 Lines of flight
Bodies and spaces (or their assemblages: body-topologies) have the potential to form new meanings according to how they connect with each other: a body has “as many meanings as there are forces capable of seizing it”.406
Lines of flight are the break-away departure from the old formation and connections into something else; they deterritorialise bodies. The Situationists' 'jolt',407 de Certeau's 'surprise and attraction',408 Kandinsky's 'incalculable force',409 Bey's 'non-ordinary awareness',410 Goodwin's 'dissolution',411 and (with any luck) my own hacking and art practice disrupt conventional meaning and facilitate a becoming-other.
Deleuze and Guattari call this an “incorporeal transformation”,412 and the encounter that produces it the “event”: “a moment at which new forces might be brought to bear […] challenging us to think differently and to consider things anew.” 413 When someone practices space in a novel way, their spatial 'turns of phrase' actualise different possibilities of the space, and transform it for themselves and others.
In an airplane hijacking, the threat of a hijacker brandishing a revolver is obviously an action […] But the transformation of the passengers into hostages, and of the plane-body into a prison-body, is an instantaneous incorporeal transformation, a ''mass media act'' in the sense in which the English speak of ''speech acts''.414
The whole gamut of 'illocutionary acts' generate their own new spaces, like the barrier-into-passageway of the prison break, the warehouse-into-home of squatting, or the central-business-district-into-playground of Goodwin's games.
Through play, hacking, improvisation, and experimentation seemingly controlling
406Massumi, A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 10. 407...into a new awareness of the city. Hart, "A New Way of Walking.", 1. 408...towards a novel spatial practice. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 101. 409...shaking the ordered city. Ibid., 110. 410...deployed in the world. Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, 22. 411…of architecture as we know it. Goodwin, "Porosity: The Revision of Public Space.", 15. 412Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 90. 413Cliff Stagoll, "Event," in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2012), 91. 414Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 90.
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210 technologies can be reconfigured into new connections, “fundamentally transform[ing] the ways in which we conceive both cities and bodies, and their interrelations”:415 rebel “Archisuits” fill in negative spaces around the body to re- create a comfortable relationship to the anti-sleep bench;416 Oxyacetylene torches remove anti-skate equipment for 2AM skate sessions; mobile-phone ring-tones subvert the Mosquito high-pitch technology (inaudible to adults) to hide students' school-room SMS messaging.417
Figure 96 Archisuits (Bench), Los Angeles, Sarah Ross, 2005-2006.
Deterritorialised bodies become reterritorialised eventually. Temporary Autonomous Zones don't last long, and tactical practices such as my own and those I've described are in danger of being captured418 (our tours solidify back into maps), but the temporary escape makes its mark on the map; things have changed.419
415Grosz quoted in Weiss "The Durée of the Tecnho-Body.", 161. 416Sarah Ross, "Archisuits." Los Angeles, 2005-2006. Viewed: http://insecurespaces.net/archisuits.html 417Mitchell Akiyama, "Silent Alarm: The Mosquito Youth Deterrent and the Politics of Frequency," Canadian Journal of Communication 35, no. 3 (2010). 418As of 14th October, 2013 Facebook has disabled the ability to tag images where faces are not detected, thus restricting the creative practice discussed in Illegible Spaces. At the same time Facebook has activated automatic face-tagging, facilitated by an internal facial- recognition system discussed in Ubiquitous Space. 419Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 193.
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211 There is a risk that the re-encoded body is disappointingly familiar. The promise of the cyborg and its lines of flight lie in disconnection:420 deterritorialisation offers freedom from oppressive social conventions and a chance to experiment with other ways of being outside of the demands of the ordinary world. Online, we can play and hack our identities and our worlds in relative safety, but there is a danger (especially on message forums such as 4Chan421) that “oppressive corporeal practices are reinscribed in a more ubiquitous, virtual register”422 and “cyberspace [...] will, in effect, serve as another site for the technological and no less conventional inscription of the gendered, race-marked body.”423
But more spaces can open up for becoming. Even the most rigidly organised territories and topologies are all open to tactical practices, and can be deterritorialised in the process:
Within the fractal complexities of actual geography the map can see only dimensional grids. Hidden enfolded immensities escape the measuring rod. The map is not accurate; the map cannot be accurate.424
420Rob Shields, The Virtual(London: Routledge, 2003), 13. 421Kavi Abraham and Renee Marlin-Bennett, "Cyberplace: Conceptualizing Power and Politics in Extended Reality," in APSA 2013 Annual Meeting Paper(Washington, DC: American Political Studies Association, 2013). 422Weiss, "The Durée of the Techno-Body.", 174. 423Anne Marie Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women(Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1996), 131. 424Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, 103.
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212 A small plot of new land
The aim of this thesis was to investigate the possibility of tactically inhabiting the highly controlled, digitally represented territories of our everyday lives, i.e. answering the question: 'How can we continue to live creative, free lives, when the augmented cities we live in and the tools we use day-to-day are becoming more restricted and restrictive?'
In Territories, Ubiquitous Space, and The Right to the (Fragmented) City, I give a description of strategic territories, a speculative vision of a monolithic digital map, and an argument against it.
In Illegible Spaces, Playgrounds, and Atmospheres I suggest that these digital spaces can be (and are being) tactically inhabited, that they constitute part of our body- topology, and I explore how de Certeau's description of 'space as practiced place' informs the creation of evocative, inhabitable spaces.
In Emergency! I explore the practices of play, hacking, and radical cartography as tactics that lead to a deteritorialisation in the ways we connecting to the world and emerging technology.
Everyday tactics are lines of flight away from an ordered place within ubiquitous space. They give us some autonomy; some room to breath; a chance to imbue the world with our own sense of meaning and inhabit it rather than just live in it.
After documenting and engaging in tactical practices in physical space, my art practice was a chance to explore the possibility of disrupting the very technologies that were rationalising the world. The works Paths, Herein, Relics, Monorail Pylons, and Gamespaces are all a form of radical cartography, mapping out my own ways of connecting technologies in contrast to their intended schemas and work-flows. I took the “rational technics of legibility and distinguishing”,425 disconnected them from the production of 'useful', readable, stable maps, and generated my own meaningful spaces with(in) them.
Though each work is different, they are all intentional departures from their constituent technologies' connection to strategic apparatus, and thus share some themes and properties:
425 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 199.
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213 • a disruption of focussed, objectifying vision privileged by strategic maps,
• a partiality, irony, and intimacy, countering the use of mapping technologies for enframing into ubiquitous space, and embracing their status as 'cyborgs'426
• a preservation of the gestural, performative practice that created them.
As mentioned earlier, these features are shared with fictocriticism, embraced in this thesis's 'gonzo research' methodology.
The Path series of works transform a conventional map-making process and technologies of capture and analysis (composite image processing, cloud- computing) to trace a spatial practice. They give maps of my walks through various cities, but rather than the familiar GPS 'breadcrumb' line tracked through Google Maps (an object in a fixed relationship to the map containing it), Paths map the point of connection between the city and my body, abandoning reference to buildings, roads, or absolute scale and leaving only the point of intimate contact.
The act of viewing the work requires a mirroring of the original walking practice: the paths have a start, a direction, and a natural pace, indicated by ghosted shoes captured like frames of a video. Following the path with their eyes (as it stretches several meters across the gallery wall), the viewer encounters detritus, marks, and footprints of others – the specific, momentary state of the world as I passed through it. The paths are partial, intimate shared experiences of my drifts through the streets of unfamiliar cities.
The Herein works take a set of strategic technologies (ubiquitous image capture and sharing, photogrammetry, mobile devices, internet) and use them to produce an evocative, atmospheric sketch of a space. Herein installations are composed of a spatial assemblage of photographs, enveloping the user inside an ambiguous, layered cloud of images that extends to their periphery. The photographs that form the space are intangible and constantly destabilised (shifting and overlapping, fading in and out of opacity), yet taken together are able to give a sense of a space and the photographer's movement within that space.
Unlike the photogrammetry technology the works utilise, Herein installations
426Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto.", 84.
Taking Flight
214 maintain the specificity of the images and do not produce a solid object, never giving a static view of the entirety. Instead, they take tours through fragments of viewpoints, resisting readability; one image never entirely distinguished from the rest.
The Relic works subvert technologies of reproduction (3D scanning, photogrammetry, 3D printing) to reveal the false equivalency of the image (the surface is maintained, but nothing else) over the original. The reconstruction process is left deliberately incomplete, and the resulting object breaks down to expose the striated territory of its underlying representational structure. At the same time, as a fragment rather than whole object, the works are activated as evocative spaces onto which the viewer can project their imagination.
The Monorail Pylons work reconnects time and practice with the pristine, timeless architectural model. The work takes design and modelling technologies (parametric modelling, CAD software, laser cutting), maps the model at 1:1 rather than to scale, and re-inscribes it with the signs of real (mis)usage of space: graffiti, weathering, knocks and scrapes. The work is a radical remapped representation that deprivileges the architect's intention and emphasises the spatial practices that are usually considered incidental.
Gamespaces, in contrast to the other works, is more of a ready-made (albeit one that required a fair amount of effort to prepare). The most significant element of Gamespaces is the player's process of inhabitation through metaxis: putting themselves into the game, fleshing out the elements of the digital virtual environment to bring it to life, and become immersed. It is an example of how we can fill spaces with our own memories and mythologies informed by our past experiences.427
First-person video-games are experienced unequivocally as tours rather than maps, despite their internal digital representation.428 The disruptive map-making in Gamespaces is generated by the player, who is given the chance to inhabit the virtual environment and take note of their own embodied perception of it, and set of associations it draws. These affects of playing the game (becoming 'immersed') are foregrounded by the placement of the game space in the installation space, where 'leaving' the game can be an uncanny experience.
The works are the result of lines of flight from ubiquitous space, reconfigurations of
427de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 110. 428See Playgrounds.
Taking Flight
215 connections with technology and my environment, but they are also open to forming new assemblages with the viewer, who brings their own connections into the mix and form an inhabited reading. Art itself can deterritorialise, “operat[ing] as a rupture in otherwise dominant regimes of signification and expression”,429 and as both art, radical cartography, and spatial practice, they have disruptive, affective potential.
This thesis provides a set of disruptive technologies – thoughts, tools, and artworks. The technical developments have already been re-appropriated into new assemblages and configurations (e.g. 3D re-projection tools now used in archaeological cave-painting reconstruction). With any luck, the thoughts and artworks will spread and germinate too.
429Simon O‘Sullivan, "Subjectivity + Art," in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 277.
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216 Taking Flight
217 Taking Flight
218 Appendix
A
A Taxonomy of Spatial Practices
This Taxonomy of Spatial Practices was inspired by Michel de Certeau's analogy of spatial practice as a form of “enunciation” of the structured “language” of the built environment.430 It combines an established IT industry Taxonomy of Spatial Information Usage with John Searle's A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts to form a matrix of speech/information mappings. These mappings are intended to provoke thought and help categorise the modes of spatial practice and technologies that are used in their capture.
430Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall(Los Angeles: University of California Press., 2002), 99. Name Description Finding optimal locations Siting e.g., siting a fire station or a waste site. Movement or distribution through space Logistics e.g. emergency response, military movement Optimal movement through a known network Routing e.g., school buses, garbage, mail
Way finding, may or may not involve a known network Navigation e.g., ground, sea, air Count and location of objects for a given time period Inventory e.g., census, tax rolls Monitoring/ Examining a process over space and time Analysis e.g. ecological, zoological, geographical, epidemiological studies
Table 1 “Taxonomy of Spatial Information Usage” variously used in an IT context431
Name Description Speech acts that commit a speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition, Assertives e.g. reciting a creed Speech acts that are to cause the hearer to take a particular action, e.g. Directives requests, commands and advice Speech acts that commit a speaker to some future action, e.g. promises and Commissives oaths
Speech acts that express the speaker's attitudes and emotions towards the Expressives proposition, e.g. congratulations, excuses and thanks Speech acts that change the reality in accord with the proposition of the Declarations declaration, e.g. baptisms, pronouncing someone guilty or pronouncing someone husband and wife
Table 2 “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts”, John Searle432
431For example in Gaiy J Hunter and MF Goodchild, "Managing Uncertainty in Spatial Databases: Putting Theory into Practice," in The Annual Conference – Urban and Regional Information Systems Association(Urban and Regional Information Systems (URISA), 1993), 57. 432John R Searle, "A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts," in Language, Mind, and Knowledge, ed. K. Günderson(Minneapolis: 1975).
A Taxonomy of Spatial Practices
220 Name Description Blendr, Grindr, These are location-sensitive dating apps, that allow you to connect to OKCupid Local other compatible potential-partners based on your proximity. E-tag is an electronic, contactless payment system for the toll roads of E-tag Sydney. The system tracks the users' movements through toll gates in the process of charging the E-tag system. Facebook is a hugely popular social-networking site that enables uploaded images to be tagged with the names of the 'occupants'. Events can also be created (with specific times and locations), and friends Facebook explicitly invited. 'Joining' the event will indicate to the event organiser that you will attend. When used from a location-aware device, uploaded images and instant messages can be tagged with the devices location. Google Latitude is a service run on location-aware devices which Google Latitude broadcast the location of the user in real-time. These are image and video sharing services that allow the shot location Flickr, Vimeo, Picasa, YouTube of the material to be tagged. They provide search capabilities for finding images/video taken at a certain time and/or place. FourSquare is a location-based social networking service with which FourSquare users “check-in” at venues using a location-aware device. Each check-in awards the user with points, and can be seen by other FourSquare users. FreeCycle is an Internet-based recycle and re-use network that FreeCycle coordinates the free exchange of goods. Google Maps and Google Earth are mapping tools that provide an Google Maps & accurate streetmap, satellite map, and topographical information for the Google Earth world. The tools provide a route planner and allow the sharing of collections of points-of-interest. Provides driver route-finding capabilities using a built-in Global In-car GPS navigation Positioning System and streetmap. “Augmented Reality” tools that superimpose points-of-interest over the Layar and Junaio view from a mobile-phone camera. Oyster Card A contactless payment system used with the London Tube. A service for announcing short messages that may be geo-tagged or Twitter include location information in the text. A geo-spatial 'mashup' created to map reports of politically motivated Ushahidi violence in Kenya at the beginning of 2008, and in 2010 to coordinate emergency response efforts in post-earthquake Haiti.
Table 3 A glossary of social media and geo-spatial tools and services
A Taxonomy of Spatial Practices
221
A Taxonomy of Spatial Practices
223 A Taxonomy of Spatial Practices
224 A Taxonomy of Spatial Practices
225 A Taxonomy of Spatial Practices
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