Wayne State University DigitalCommons@WayneState Wayne State University Dissertations 1-1-2012 Flickering cities: multimedia city fabrics and the changing nature of citizenship Andrew Geddes Engel Wayne State University, Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Recommended Citation Engel, Andrew Geddes, "Flickering cities: multimedia city fabrics and the changing nature of citizenship" (2012). Wayne State University Dissertations. Paper 538. This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. FLICKERING CITIES: MULTIMEDIA CITY FABRICS AND THE CHANGING NATURE OF CITIZENSHIP by ANDREW ENGEL DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2012 MAJOR: ENGLISH Approved by: ____________________________________ Advisor Date ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________ © COPYRIGHT BY ANDREW ENGEL 2012 All Rights Reserved DEDICATION For Brea What follows is my first contribution to our commitment of “fixing the engines of the world.” Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it. — Buddha ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful to the following people. Without them and their support this project would not have been possible. Richard Marback for being the best director I could have hoped for. He helped me to see the necessity of connecting academic work back to “real life,” and I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with him. Julie Thompson Klein for being a trusted advisor, confidant, and friend. Chinmayi Kattemalavadi for being my constant companion during our graduate work. She has evolved into more of a big sister than a colleague. Kim Lacey and Kay Stone for holding my hand through the finer details of this process. Gay Lorberbaum for always playing the devil’s advocate, and for giving me the opportunity to begin connecting my work in architecture with my work in rhetoric at an early stage in the process. Carole Geddes-Engel for proofreading various chapters as deadlines approached and for encouraging balance in all things. Sifu Brown for reminding me to breathe. My wife, Brea Engel, for providing a supportive and fun environment in which to work and for being the reason I needed to keep going. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ........................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iii Introduction: The Post-Urban City ..................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Exploded Artifacts .......................................................................................... 30 Chapter 2: Collapsed Artifacts .......................................................................................... 61 Chapter 3: On-Demand Artifacts .................................................................................... 100 Conclusion: Flickering Citizenships ............................................................................... 134 References ....................................................................................................................... 148 Abstract ........................................................................................................................... 163 Autobiographical Statement ............................................................................................ 165 iv 1 Introduction: The Post-Urban City The Wilderness Downtown Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing. — Italo Calvino In late 2010 an experimental and interactive video entitled “The Wilderness Downtown” was released that incorporated a new web coding language (HTML5), programmers from Google, and a song from the band Arcade Fire entitled “We Used to Wait.” When I link to the site I am asked to enter my home address in order to access the video. After I follow the prompts and hit “enter,” the video plays and the music begins, and I see a young man running along a street and past houses that look very much like the street and houses outside my home. The “magic” happens when the programing running underneath the video takes my address and pulls images of my location from Google Maps and Google Street View, in real time, and inserts them into sequences of the pre- established, recorded video and audio elements. The result is a personalized video, constructed in real-time, which presents an experience that both augments and complicates my understanding of my home.1 My home is “here,” I’m sitting in it and typing, cooking, living, but my home is also “there,” on the screen, and part of this video. It raises the question: what other versions of my house are there, and in what mediums? What is happening here, to my understanding of my own home when I consider that it exists not as a single artifact, but as something operating in multiple registers at the same 1 Arcade Fire has since released another video for their song “Sprawl II” that uses viewers’ webcams to control the speed of the video playback. As viewers dance to the music being played the people in the video dance as well. However, if viewers do not dance, the people either stand still or get stuck in a jerky set of movements like a stuck record. http://www.sprawl2.com/ 2 time: the physical space of the city block, the personal space of my memories, and the digital space of the music video? How does such a multifaceted artifact square with how we typically understand the spaces of the cities in which we work, play, travel, shop, communicate, and live? As we examine such a common but unexpectedly complex artifact—where “home” is not just one thing in one place, but is scattered across the whole range of our spectrum of media—how does this enrich and challenge our perspectives of, and actions within, the fabric of the city? In other words, how does the prevalence of multimedia in cities today make us rethink the “where” of our spaces and their effects on us? In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino describes 55 cities that are some mixture of “real” and “imagined,” although this distinction quickly loses its power as the narrative unfolds.2 Of one city, Irene, Calvino writes: For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene. (125) One might argue that the complexity of a city can only be experienced or lived. We must walk down its streets, see its sights, and smells its smells. Only by doing so, we assume, can we understand its shape, the way it makes us feel, and the appeals it is making of us. But does the fact that Calvino’s rich and dynamic urban hallucinations are rendered textually express, with any less potency, the quality “city”? Calvino’s text is told in the form of the explorer, Marco Polo, narrating his experiences for the Emperor Kublai 2 Recently one artist, Colleen Corradi Brannigan, has worked to physically construct all of the cities from Calvino’s text (http://io9.com/5867012/artists-mission-is-to-depict-all-55-of-italo-calvinos-invisible-cities). Her creations can easily be seen as physical iterations that repeat and compliment Calvino’s textual iterations. 3 Khan. Polo beautifully describes all of these cities—old and new, in the sky and underground, rich and poor, alive and dead—that are all, actually only one city, just different perspectives and different versions of it. The example of “The Wilderness Downtown” parallels Calvino’s work from a multimedia perspective. We see strikingly similar conditions today where the people, buildings, and technologies that constitute our cities cannot be understood to possess only singular meanings because they are repeated and refigured in so many different contexts, media, and relationships at the same time. By entering our address into the video’s engine we are engaging with different versions— different times, spaces, and media—from which to understand and describe our homes and their relationships to the larger communities and cities. Concurrent repetition of artifacts challenges and informs the appeals we have come to expect cities to make of us. How do we define, narrate, and engage with this type of city? Spatial Rhetoric of the City Robert Beauregard writes, “Urban decline exists because we have made it so” (243). What I take from Beauregard’s point is that the languages we use to describe cities can unnecessarily limit how our cities' fabrics function and whether they succeed. The fabric of a city, as I am defining it, is made up of the relationships between images, objects, spaces, and agents that inform—either through persuasion, inspiration, or coercion—how we carry out our daily lives.