Thursday, October 13, 2011
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Noir Urbanisms; Dystopic Images of the Modern City
The Dystopic Fragments of Bombay Cinema
Ranjani Muzumdar
an active figure whose rage makes him see the city with a heightened
perception. This perceptual entry into the city does not generate urban images
through modes of distraction (jlanerie) but through sustained vigilante
action. 22 The figure of the vigilante is an imaginative urban figure, whose defiance
of the law produces a different order of urban mobility. As against the
aimless loitering associated with many urban figures, Madhav Apte's purposeful
mobility creates a heightened order of perception. This vigilante vision
operates like a counter-flaneur imagination that is not made of surfaces but
of dystopic "excavations:'
22 For Walter Benjamin, the flaneur was a "panoramically situated" spectator who
observed and absorbed through random selection the visual impressions generated
by the new commodity space of industrial modernity. The flaneur's gaze was
fragmented and adventurous as he/she confronted the magical world of the commodity
displayed in shop windows of city streets. As a perceptual mode flanerie
depends on distraction and a free movement of subjectivity where the gaze is organized
according to a "spontaneous, unmitigated and seemingly unsystematic
turn of attention towards the surface phenomena of the exterior world:' Encke
Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature and Film in Weimar Culture
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 26.
Society, says the philosopher Zygmut Bauman, is like a thin film of order
that functions like a cover-up operation to deny and suppress the chaos
beneath. For Bauman, chaos is a terrifying experience for those gripped by
the "routine of the given:' Chaos is like a "break in, 'the given', an irruption,
a crevice in the otherwise solid rock of normality, a hole in the smoothly
flowing routine of being:'24
24 Zygmut Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 14-15.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
hypertext city
hypertext city
Hypertext and the City
As a conceptual framework, Hypertext provides a specific means of configuring issues sourrounding the confrontation of cyberspace and the city. It does so by embracing the advent of the electronic realm and the proliferation of networked links while at the same time interpreting these technological transformations as part of the project of writing. More specifically, studies of hypertext have focussed on the history of writing as technology, on the potential for hypertext to change the relationships between reading and writing, to alter the demarcations between the inside and outside of the text, and to change the nature and role of narrative. For its proponents, hypertext is the mode of writing that articulates the sociality of the network, that promises democratization and the empowerment of the individual, and that rearticulates themes that writing and the city have been seen to share: in the construction of memory, in the relation between movement and the subject, and in the production of space through abstraction and narrative.
Historians of technology have often noted the complexities of persistence and change that occur at the transitions between one form of technology and another. In these progressive histories, the forms of an older technology are often taken up by the new one, even when the "logic" of the newer technology may not be well served. Or an older technology adopts some of the features of the newer one has a brief final moment of brilliance. (Examples of these in Schivelbush, Disenchanted Night, for example) Furthermore, cultural forms and typologies persist and structure the directions of technological development. (Ref Colquhoun typology and design method) Is hypertext a merely a transitory moment between printed text and post-print electronic multi-media?
There is a general sense that the era of print technology is coming to an end. What will happen next? A return to more oral kind of culture, the "global village" predicted by McLuhan? An end of literacy? Loss of high culture?
There is a parallel question in architecture, which faces an apparently inexorable drive towards dematerialized information technologies, resulting in either the thematicization of architecture or its elimination in favor of neutral containers for electronic devices. .
Increasing understanding of the complexities of technologies: more refined understanding of impact of physical techniques of writing / printing / dissemination and culture in which they occur. Broader understanding (esp. from Foucault) of technologies as social techniques.
Brief history of hypertext:
see hypertext Vannevar Bush: "As we may think"
Ted Nelson Literary Machines
Boulter
(Eastgate School of literature--interesting conjunction of software design,
manufacture, genre, and literary group )
Landau
how is hypertext spatial?
In a a certain sense, hypertext does not seem spatial at all, at least not in three dimensions. It is not meant to be anything other than text on the screen, and it shares two-dimensional design issues (eg: typography) with word-processing programs, the history of which can be traced from manuscript production to the printed book. Unlike word-processing, however, where the computer is fundamentally being used as typewriter, and where the ultimate product is meant to be a printed document, hypertext applications are meant for computer display only. The monitor display often appears as a number of overlapping boxes, similar to any display of more than one open document. The fundamental unit of text in hypertext has been called a writing space (by Bolter), but other theorists of the medium call it a lexia, borrowing the term from Roland Barthes. The writing space itself appears as a "box" both literally and metaphorically. It is a variable sized rectangle, which generally resizes text to fit its proportions, and serves the function of boxes: to store and make retreivable its contents within a generic and neutral container. The writing space can also be thought of as a "room"
The way in which hypertext differs more radically from printed text is through "links". The spaces, or fragments of text within them, can be linked to other bits of text, and these links can be followed through some simple means such as double-clicking on the mouse.The links are established by the author / reader, and remain attached to the text, even when it is moved around. The experience of this instanteous movement is what makes hypertext more convincingly spatial and provides the basis for the metaphor of navigation within the space of the whole document. The most common textual basis for such links is as cross-reference in non-fictional documents and as part of the narrative in literary ones. (relate to film examples of narrating a journey by movement on the map, except here the map and the territory are one.) Thus reading is transformed into itinerary, with landmarks, and intersecting paths.
Hypertext as the world of the net. Each hypertext, with its nodes and links, has the same structure as the Internet, and is, according to its proponents from Nelson to Landau, the logical form of writing in the networked world.
what difference is being suggested between text and hypertext? A kind of souped-up powertool: Landau: technology of hypertext enables reading / writing practices that deconstructive criticism calls for but cannot enact. According to Landau, "hypertext creates an almost embarrassingly literal embodiment" of the concepts, of de-centering as expounded by Derrida and of Barthes's conception of the readerly versus the writerly text.For Landau that raises questions about them and their interesting combination of prescience and historical relations (or embeddedness).Not quite techno-prophecy of dream coming true, but suggestion that these concepts can be tested, become practices of a community (stress on multi-authored documents--make cultural practice more like scientific practice?)
Could philosophy exist in hypertextual environment? Eg. Foucault, Kant..
Would you ever know if you had read the book? Hypertext as a kind of MTV of the attention span? like sound bytes
reading / writing:
priveledging of non-linearity. What about rhetoric of sustained argument? is this simply repressive?
relation between hypertext and other hyper-or multimedia:
The proponents of hypertext subsume other hypermedia into hypertext. They consider the inclusion of images, of video segments such as quicktime movies, as part of the writing project. As theorists whose allegiance is to Barthes, and Derrida, they believe in a literary culture and the continuity of its project.
why would architects be interested in hypertext?
Parallel to sense of change in text culture. Discipline of architecture haunted by threat of competition /demise by cyberspace. Ideological reason for architectural theory. Has become so text oriented. Hypertext preserves that literary/philosophical ambition, but translates it into a more contemporary technological dimension, perhaps even allowing it to become hypertextual, by further instrumentalizing textual qualities.
practical applications?
My own experiences of reading / writing hypertext. First readings: sense of being lost, later overcome, interest in moving around, keeping track of my own path, some irritation at having to stay on paths made by others. Dumb computer problems: eye strain, use mouse to read?
Writing: Weird Storyspace document: an extremely useful halfway step between reading and writing. My own use, in fact, closely parallels Vannevar Bush's description of the "memex". It is a kind of extended note taking stimulating associations, fragments of writing, and a prosthetic supplement to my own weak memory. A personal writing environment which grows in a kind of autopoetic way.
what relation to the city?
Primarily analogical?
History of mobile observors: Benjamin's account of the Flaneur, the detective and the film noir , the dérive.
city as producer of text with no overview. Ruined Map of Kobo Abe. demise of aesthetics of the hero. City always engulfed, always more to understand. city represented by its derelict frings. Woman creates vertigo around her. Narrative unfolds too fast,
Engel's promenade in Manchester
Giordano Bruno walking in London, in Frances Yeats in Bruno and Memory Tradition.
city as text? Zone 1-2 (Sanford's last words on Sant'Elia?) Jameson ? Pierre Bourdieu on Sentimental Education in sociological journal Miller in representations Dickens and Panopticism, Jonathan Arac Dickensian Foucault
Steven Marcus in Victorian City
Demise of the idea of the overall plan. If the hypertextual environment supports both hierarchical organization (?) and the proliferation of webs and links, it offers a model for the contemporary city, a city in which both physical and electronic place have been reconfigured.
The city is a hypertext
Again. You could argue that the arguments we have about the cognitive effect of reading for the web are largely a replay of the upheaval surrounding mass urbanization at the turn of the century. Continuing our Metropolis theme, pull up Georg Simmel's 1903 essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life" [PDF]. (Simmel's German word is "Grosstadt," which literally means "big city"; Lang deliberately used the slightly stranger, Greek-derived word to make his city feel different.) Simmel saw big cities as a tremendous economic and informational engine that fundamentally transformed human personality:
Lasting impressions, the slightness in their differences, the habituated regularity of their course and contrasts between them, consume, so to speak, less mental energy than the rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli. To the extent that the metropolis creates these psychological conditions - with every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life - it creates in the sensory foundations of mental life, and in the degree of awareness necessitated by our organization as creatures dependent on differences, a deep contrast with the slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of small town and rural existence.
And cognitive scientists have actually begun empirically verifying Simmel's armchair psychology. And whenever I read anything about the web rewiring our brains, foretelling immanent disaster, I've always thought, geez, people -- we live in cities! Our species has evolved to survive in every climate and environment on dry land. Our brains can handle it!
But I thought of this again this morning when a 2008 Wilson Quarterly article about planner/engineer Hans Monderman, titled "The Traffic Guru," popped up in my Twitter feed. (I can't even remember where it came from. Who knows why older writing just begins to recirculate again? Without warning, it speaks to us more, or differently.)
The idea that made Monderman, who died of cancer in January at the age of 62, most famous is that traditional traffic safety infrastructure--warning signs, traffic lights, metal railings, curbs, painted lines, speed bumps, and so on--is not only often unnecessary, but can endanger those it is meant to protect...
Traffic engineers, in Monderman's view, helped to rewrite [towns] with their signs and other devices. "In the past in our villages," Monderman said, "you could read the street in the village as a good book." Signs advertising a school crossing were unnecessary, because the presence of a school and children was obvious. "When you removed all the things that made people know where they were, what they were a part of, and when you changed it into a uniform world," he argued, "then you have to explain things."
In other words, information overload, and the substitution of knowledge for wisdom. Sound familiar?
I'll just say I remain unconvinced. We've largely gotten rid of pop-up ads, flashing banners, and the
Trading Cities 5
In Esmeralda, city of water, a network of canals and a network of streets span and intersect each other. To go from one place to another you have always the choice between land and boat: and since the shortest distance between two points in Esmeralda is not a straight line but a zigzag that ramifies in tortuous optional routes, the ways that open to each passerby are never two, but many, and they increase further for those who alternate a stretch by boat with one on dry land.
And so Esmeralda’s inhabitants are spared the boredom of following the same streets every day. And that is not all: the network of routes is not arranged on one level, but follows instead an up-and-down course of steps, landings, cambered bridges, hanging streets. Combining segments of the various routes, elevated or on ground level, each inhabitant can enjoy every day the pleasure of a new itinerary to reach the same places. The most fixed and calm lives in Esmeralda are spent without any repetition.
Secret and adventurous lives, here as elsewhere, are subject to greater restrictions. Esmeralda’s cats, thieves, illicit lovers move along higher, discontinuous ways, dropping from a rooftop to a balcony, following gutterings with acrobats’ steps. Below, the rats run in the darkness of the sewers, one behind the other’s tail, along with conspirators and smugglers: they peep out of manholes and drainpipes, they slip through double bottoms and ditches, from one hiding place to another they drag crusts of cheese, contraband goods, kegs of gunpowder, crossing the city’s compactness pierced by the spokes of underground passages.
A map of Esmeralda should include, marked in different colored inks, all these routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden. It is more difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping long invisible parabolas with their still wings, darting to gulp a mosquito, spiraling upward, grazing a pinnacle, dominating from every point of their airy paths all the points of the city.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Notes on Eric Gordon. Chapter 5 The Operative City
the technocratic justification for wide-scale urban renewal closely paralleled the growing popular faith in rational systems and thinking machines.
By the I940s, some planners were talking about multinucleated urban growth patterns, downplaying the importance of a central business district for the life of the city.
The Bunker Hill renewal project in downtown Los Angeles was one of the largest and most dramatic in the country
Urban renewal was as much psychological as physical.
Urban renewal was a corrective process. It was meant to destroy decades of ingrained experiences and perceptions of the city and replace them with a stable, reliable, distant image.
Norbert Wiener described as operative: "Operative images, which perform
the functions of their original, may or may not bear a pictorial likeness to it.
Whether they do or not, they may replace the original in its action, and this is a
much deeper similarity"
replace the urban imagery of chaos and degradation with one of order and function.
the spectatorship associated with the operative city produced a functional aesthetic through the assemblage of logically consistent mechanical parts. Possession was still important; only now, the city was constructed through a spectator's ability to possess and control its functionality.
THE ROAD TO RENEWAL
the newly granted power of imminent domain allowed the city to condemn the building and take it from the owner at below-market rates.
In short time, the rhetoric of redevelopment translated to the new rhetoric of "renewal."
The premise ... was that if a large enough parcel was cleared and built anew, natural urban processes would extend the positive effects of development outward. If the development area was too small, however, renewal efforts would not be successful.
THE BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL
Bunker Hill came to symbolize confusion, corruption, convalescence, and the degradation of values.
the city was no longer seen within this constructivist context. It was presented as something that could be presented all at once- completely within the parameters of human understanding. Accordingly, if the city as a whole was "subject to human mastery and control," then the city could be produced from scratch. Whatever could be understood could be manufactured.
The war demonstrated that technology could easily overwhelm the intentions of its creator. Left unchecked, progress could be dangerous. For this reason, technological displays turned away from speculation and toward control.
THE OPERATIVE IMAGE
Norbert Wiener's 1948 book, Cybernetics.
study of how systems communicate with themselves in order to maintain internal cohesion, and how they interact with other systems.
People, cities, and societies were no different than machines.
he called the result of any system's production of another system an of operative
image. Every system creates in its own image- God and man, man and machine.
little emphasis on the specific architectural references in each of the structures-only on their combined function as urban image. The operative image was the foundation of a Concept-city that sought to distance the spectator from his central position of aggregator
Heidegger - This is how the modern world is knowable. The world is an image capable of existing alongside and not within experience. the world conceived and grasped as picture = World Picture
Just as machines were programmed to represent human thought, so were cities tasked with the challenge of representing urban function.
MACHINE INTELLIGENCE
If scientists cracked the code of human thought, the mind could be rendered a useful servant instead of a persistent antagonist.
Descartes believed that objects were totally contained in the outside world and known to the mind only through their representations.
Turing test - versatility, Universal Machine
The modern city should be able to pass Turing's test: it should be programmed to make its creators think that it is thinking. Through scientific planning it can solve urban problems and increase economic value far more efficiently than any human advisors.
OUTCOME PREDICTION AS URBAN DESIGN
This rational city stemmed from an urban planning discourse most notably initiated by Le Corbusier's Radiant City (1970). All activities were logically separated in Radiant City; leisure and commerce were physically removed from one another in order to assure order and easy maintenance of the urban plan.
The master plan was conceived as a Universal Machine, organizing the outputs of each part and building an information structure based on their activities- all within the careful structure of a controlled environment.
Mumford's The City in History (1961), Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities ( r 9 6 r) was strongly influential in the growing antagonism toward urban renewal.
Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City (1960) suggested possibilities for human intervention into the operative city. Cognitive Mapping
Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, in their book Collage City (1978)
urban problems should not be understood as issues of "simplicity" or "disorganized complexity,"
both of which characterized modern science. Instead, she argued, the city was a manifestation of organized complexity- a complex system quite distinct from Forrester's characterization. Organized complexity was not entirely predictable; it had order, but part of that order was its lack of predictability. The sidewalk was, by design, unpredictable.
Susan Sontag: A New Visual Code
A new visual code
In her Essay On Photography Sontag says that the evolution of modern technology has changed the viewer in three key ways. She calls this the emergence of a new visual code.
Firstly, Sontag suggests that modern photography, with its convenience and ease, has created an overabundance of visual material. As photographing is now a practice of the masses, due to a drastic decrease of camera size and increase of ease in developing photographs, we are left in a position where “just about everything has been photographed” (Sontag, Susan, (1977), On Photography 3). We now have so many images available to us of: things, places, events and people from all over the world, and of not immediate relevance to our own existence, that our expectations of what we have the right to view, want to view or should view has been drastically affected. Arguably, gone are the days that we felt entitled to view only those things in our immediate presence or that affected our micro world; we now seem to feel entitled to gain access to any existing images. “In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notion of what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe” (3). This is what Sontag calls a change in the “ethics of seeing” (3).
Secondly, Sontag comments on the effect of modern photography on our education, claiming that photographs “now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present”(4). Without photography only those few people who had been there would know what the Egyptian pyramids or the Parthenon look like, yet most of us have a good idea of the appearance of these places. Photography teaches us about those parts of the world that are beyond our touch in ways that literature can not.
Thirdly, Sontag also talked about the way in which photography desensitizes its audience. Sontag introduced this discussion by telling her own story of the first time she saw images of horrific human experience. At twelve years old, Sontag found images of holocaust camps and was so distressed by them she says “When I looked at those photographs something broke... something went dead, something is still crying” (20). Sontag argues that there was no good to come from her seeing these images as a young girl, before she fully understood what the holocaust was. For Sontag the viewing of these images has left her a degree more numb to any following horrific image she viewed, as she had been desensitized. According to this argument, “Images anesthetize” and the open accessibility to them is a negative result of photography (20).
Sontag examines the relationship between photography and reality. Photographs are depicted as a representation of realism. Sontag claimed that “such images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only an image, an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real (Sontag, Susan (1982), The Image World 350). It is a resemblance of the real as the photograph becomes an extension of the subject. However, the role of the photograph has changed, as copies destroy the idea of an experience. The image has altered to convey information and become an act of classification. Sontag highlights the notion that photographs are a way of imprisoning reality- making the memory stand still. Ultimately images are surveillance of events that trigger the memory. In modern society, photographs are a form of recycling the real. When a moment is captured it is assigned a new meaning as people interpret the image in their own manner. Sontag claims that images desensitize the reality, as people's perceptions are distorted by the construction of the photograph. However this has not stopped people from consuming images; there is still a demand for more photographs.
Sontag observed some uses of photography, “Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation” (Sontag,1977 10), such as memorizing and providing evidence. She also states that “to collect photographs is to collect the world.” (Sontag,1997 3)
Sontag believes that photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. She states that photography has ‘become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation’.[15] She refers to photographs as memento mori, where to take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability and mutability. The progression from written word to an image shifts the interpretation from the author to the receiver. Sontag believes however that ‘photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire’.[16] It is a slice in time and in effect, is more memorable than moving images for example, videos. It fills the gaps in our mind of the past and present.[17] Even though photography has such effect, there are limits to photographic knowledge of the world. The limitations are that it can never be interpreted ethical or political knowledge.[18] It will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. [18]
Mumford On Cities
"The city multiplies man’s power to think, to remember, to educate, to communicate, and so to make possible associations which bridge and bypass nations, cultures. This mixture, this cosmopolitanism, is the chief source of the city’s vitality. And we must enlarge and enrich it as we move towards a new urban form.” Mumford
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Readings for Sep 14
No. 2 (Summer 2011), pp. 18-21.
Eric Gordon, Chapter 5: “The Operative City: The Machine Intelligence of Urban
Renewal,” The Urban Spectator: American Concept Cities From Kodak to Google
(Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2010), pp. 125-152.
Readings for Sept 21
Anthropological Issues in Cities and Mass Communication,” American Anthropologist,
Vol. 103, No. 1, (March 2001), pp. 96-111.
Nezar AlSayyad, “Preface,” “Introduction: The Cinematic City and the Quest for the
Modern,” and Chapter 3: “Orwellian Modernity: Utopia/Dystopia and the City of the
Future Past,” in AlSayyad, Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to
Real (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), pp. xi - 18, 72-96.
Andreas Huyssen. “The Vamp and the Machine” in M. Minden and H. Bachmann (Eds).
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear. Rochester: Camden,
2000.
Anton Kaes, “The Phantasm and the Apocalypse: Metropolis and Weimar Modernity,” in
Gyan Prakash, ed., Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City (Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 17-30.
Chicago Architecture Foundation
Extended Due to Popular Demand!
COST Free and open to the public
HOURS 7 days a week from 9am-6:30pm
LOCATION Atrium Gallery, 224 South Michigan Avenue
How does a region as vast and complex as Chicago take shape? What are the goals of officials, real estate developers, corporations, and citizens who structure urban life? Chicago Model City tells the stories behind the planning of Chicago.
Rapid growth, innovative design, and a diverse population helped make Chicago a symbol of the modern city. Beyond this, Chicago became a model: a means of understanding cities and citizens everywhere. This exhibition explores Chicago’s role as a model for city-building.
The centerpiece of Chicago Model City is a 320-square-foot model of downtown that enables you to see Chicago as you’ve never seen it before. It is the only accurate and up-to-date model of the city.
Chicago Model City also features a unique 1950s model of the Eisenhower Expressway and Blue Line; a digital visualization of demolition and rebuilding on Chicago’s Near South Side; a model portraying the green renovation of the Willis Tower; a visualization of runway expansions at O’Hare International Airport; and an exploration of the 1909 Plan of Chicago.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Notes on Susan Sontag, On Photography
Photographs do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality, that anyone can make or acquire.
as a mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power
The industrialization of photography permitted its rapid absorption into rational—that is, bureaucratic—ways of running society. …photographs became part of the general furniture of the environment---touchstones and confirmations of that reductive approach to reality which is considered realistic
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
To photograph is to confer importance.
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
Readings for 9/7
September 7
Theory and Background
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1973), pp. 3-82.
Stefanie Harris, “Rilke, Photography, and the City,” New German Critique, No. 99, (Fall,
2006), pp. 121-149
Eric Gordon, Chapter 1: “More Than the Sum of its Parts: The White City and Amateur
Photography,” in The Urban Spectator: American Concept Cities From Kodak to Google
(Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2010), pp. 21-42.
Suggested background reading: Peter Bacon Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of
American Urbanization, 1839-1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984).
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Digital History
Need some inspiration? Look at a list of websites built in Omeka.net.
Assignment #1
What is a city? What are some of the frameworks for considering and theorizing the mediated city? These are the questions that permeate this week's readings. In "What is a City?" Lewis Mumford views the city as a social institution and describes it thusly: "The city in its complete sense, then is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity." Mumford's focus is not on "the built environment" as such but rather the city as a theater in which "man's more purposive activities are focused and work out, through conflicting and cooperating personalities, events, groups, into more significant culminations." In "Visions of a New Reality" Frederic Stout chronicles emergence of a new visual culture and observes that "each historical era creates characteristic forms of expression and explanatory discourse that reflect, indeed construct, the social reality of the period." Stout examines the role of photography in creating and capturing the social reality of urban life in a mediated city. Eric Gordon in his Introduction to The Urban Spectator: American Concept Cities From Kodak to Google, outlines his concept of possessive spectatorship, "a way of looking that incorporates immediate experience with the desire for subsequent possession" of the traces of that experience. Gordon is chiefly concerned with "how the dominant understandings of technologies, shaped through metaphors ... collide with the consumptive practices of spectators" and how "possessive spectatorship ... structured by architectural, urbanistic, and technological innovations, has influenced the shape of the American Concept-city." Georg Simmel outlines a more sociological-psychological framework in this "Metropolis and Mental Life." Simmel examines the influence of the environmental stimuli on the development of what he calls "mental life," namely the predominance of intellectuality and logic, the protective mechanism called reserve, the calculability of the money economy and the appearance of the characteristic blasé attitude as indicative of metropolitan influences. Michel de Certeau takes a more literary approach to theorizing cities. He views cities as texts, composed of "the tallest letters in the world", described by walkers who commit "speech acts" in a "rhetoric of walking", and "whose bodies follow the ... urban text they write without being able to read it." De Certeau draws upon Baudelaire's notion of the flâneur, the person who walks the city to understand the city and is both part of the crowd and simultaneously apart from it.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Notes on Frederic Stout "Visions of a New Reality"
Visual Culture,” (first published in 1999), The City Reader, (Fifth Edition) Richard T.
LeGates and Frederic Stout, eds., (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 150-
153.
In "Visions of a New Reality" Frederic Stout chronicles emergence of a new visual culture, one fostered by and focused on the city. Drawing from Marx, Stout begins with the observation that "each historical era creates characteristic forms of expression and explanatory discourse that reflect, indeed construct, the social reality of the period." Focusing mainly on the realm of visual arts, Stout begins his story with the "dramatic and rapidly changing social realities" embedded within the cities of the Industrial Revolution. It was during this turbulent period that new "forms of expression and modes of discourse arose" and a "whole new kind of visual culture emerged, rooted in the observation of the new urban reality, both social and physical."
Not surprisingly this new visual culture traces its beginnings to the popular newspapers of the day. Stout reviews the early development of illustrated journalism and its role in meeting "the growing demand for information and entertainment on the part of a marginally literate but fully enfranchised working class and petit bourgeoisie." While establishing a characteristic style of static composite picture, it was soon supplanted by a new technology of representation - photography. Stout argues that it was this technological turn which established the importance of the social reality of urban life to the new visual culture. Photography "perfectly exemplified the spirit of the modern age" - ubiquitous, immediate, democratic and kinetic. While all aspects of the human subject found their way into the frame, it was the urban subjects - "the inescapable social and physical reality of the modern city" that took prominence. From the spectacles of disaster, to the frenetic city sketches, to the monumental architecture, to the plight of human suffering and injustice, photography embraced and uplifted them all as subject; a subject in which the viewer often recognized herself and her own experiences. As living and working conditions deteriorated Through the Great Depression photographers gradually turned to "the intersection of art and social protest."
While photography did not complete the project of understanding cities visually, it did set the stage for future developments. Soon it was connected to narrative, particularly to the "urban narrative" and with the new kinetic visual representation morphed into cinema. But still, in "the modern city, it is the image ... that is paramount both as spectacle and revelation."
Notes on Lewis Mumford's "What is a City?"
In "What is a City?" Lewis Mumford, one of the most preeminent urban historians descries what he sees as the chief handicap to modern city planning, the failure to understand and embrace the social function of the city. Rather than view the city as a "purely physical fact" Mumford suggests a broader view and asks "what is the city as a social institution?" and offers the following answer; "The city in its complete sense, then is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity." Mumford's focus is not on "the built environment" as such but rather the city as locus of social networks and a theater in which "man's more purposive activities are focused and work out, through conflicting and cooperating personalities, events, groups, into more significant culminations." While the nature of the built environment no doubt influence this social drama, Mumford sees its role as primarily that of a well designed stage set, to facilitate and intensify the performance of the actors upon it. Mumford asserts that the quintessential character of the city is to "create drama," for although all of the necessary physical structures of cities may exist elsewhere, namely in the suburbs, it is this "opportunity for social disharmony and conflict" that only urban densities and proximities provide. A city may be viewed according to Mumford as "a special framework directed toward the creation of differentiated opportunities for a common life and a significant social drama."
Mumford argues that it is this consideration that ultimately should determine such limiting factors as size, density, area and layout of a city, rather than topographical or technological concerns. Since it is most important to express "size as a function of the social relationships to be served" it is natural that Mumford should advocate for small scale clusters of communities "adequately spaced and bounded" known as the "polynucleated city" as opposed to the monopolistic, hypertrophied and aggrandizing "mononucleated city" with its single focal point. Dubbing it the Highwayless Town, Mumford sees an eventual trend toward this form of limited, decentralized and dissociated urban development through the effective zoning of functions in which "the various functional parts of the structure are isolated topographically as urban islands appropriately designed for their specific use." It is through this deliberate design and articulation that the necessary social concentration for social drama may be best achieved.