Wifi 'measuring rods' thanks to Oslo School of Architecture (click on image for their article)

Eric Fischer- Twitter and Flickr World Map - CC Cultural Product Copyright 2011

Eric Fischer of Oakland California has produced a stunning set of maps of flickr photos and Twitter tweets from geolocation tags in the posts.  These respatialize the world as lit up by these particular forms of new media/Web 2.0 use.  A higher resolution image of the world map is also online.   I especially like the North American map with its annotated areas and zoomable detail.  A Toronto Star article gives more detail, but browse the photostream of cities.  What is interesting is to see the lack of popularity of flickr in a city such as Jakarta or Singapore, and the obvious importance of blue twitter in suburbs (see Toronto).  Twitter follows main roads, suggesting the importance of tweeting from automobiles and public transport.  Mobility:  Twitter as commuting, flickr as tourist travel?   Spectacular tourism sites such as Banff and Jasper in the Rocky Mountains appear as red-orange flickr concentrations without tweets. These media settle like mists, differentially on the topography and the activity-scapes of everyday life.

-Rob

CALL FOR PAPERS

The aim of this symposium is to take advantage of our Asia-Pacific location by raising questions about gender and reality TV from a comparative, cross-cultural perspective. We are particularly interested in critical investigations of the intersections between gender, culture and place as engineered by reality television. While papers addressing reality television and gender from an international perspective are most welcome, we hope to maintain a critical focus on cultural specificity and the social geographies of gender, including the expressions and negotiations of indigenous, minoritarian, national and transnational cultures.

We invite papers on any aspect of gender, culture and reality TV, including the following topics:

• Culturally and/or nationally specific articulations of masculine or feminine identity in Reality TV
• The reconfiguration of gender-focused international formats within non-Western cultural contexts
• Gender, Reality TV and transnational flows of capital, culture and consumption
• Gendered identities within colonial/post-colonial/settlement narratives or histories
• The place of gender within a multiple modernities approach to Reality TV
• Gender, Reality TV and multiculturalism/biculturalism/mixed cultures
• Intersections of gender, race and/or ethnicity in Reality TV
• The relations between gender and individualised selfhood on Reality TV
• Reality TV as a site of gender performance and/or transformation
• Family and gender politics within Reality TV
• Sexual cultures and gender on Reality TV
• Gender, Reality TV and cultures of fandom and celebrity
• (Anti) heteronormative practices in reality programming
• Reality TV, gender and hierarchies of cultural value

Please submit a 300-word abstract & short biographical note to:

a.west@auckland.ac.nz
&
m.kavka@auckland.ac.nz

by 29 July, 2011.

Successful applicants will be notified by 19 August, 2011.

Reviewed by Marcel LaFlamme, Department of Anthropology, Rice University (US)

On the first Monday of September, the townspeople of Hegins, Pennsylvania would assemble in the park to kill pigeons. Birds rounded up in the railyards of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia were transported to Hegins by the crate, where they would be blasted out of the air by shotgun-toting sportsmen. By the early 1990s, when anthropologist Hoon Song began his fieldwork in Hegins, animal rights activists were descending on the pigeon shoot in droves; the apparent senselessness of the killing inspired in them a passion, Song writes, “unmatched by the plight of a million cows” (19). Yet the fervor of the protesters and the ensuing media circus seemed only to fuel the brutality: as the television cameras rolled, ecstatic onlookers decapitated the wounded birds with a flick of the wrist, squashed their bodies underfoot, and even smeared their children’s upturned faces with fresh pigeon blood.

[cc photo credit: Mohd Hafizuddin Husin]

The field, as Song finds it in Pigeon Trouble, is already mediatized, spectacularized, and Song’s informants are powerfully aware of their presence in the representations of others. The protesters have no illusions about winning converts in Hegins; rather, their yearly appearance allows them to gather visual and narrative “raw material” (33) for an audience of supporters who are understood to be elsewhere. The resulting newsletters and direct mailings make Hegins available for consumption as an otherwise inaccessible space of rural depravity. Meanwhile, the working-class hooligans who delight in baiting the out-of-towners also run home during the shoot to monitor the news coverage as it unfolds. Song emphasizes the lapse of time between the moment of being seen in the park and the moment of mediated seeing on the TV screen, a temporal lag that might have been eliminated if the shoot had continued into the smartphone era. As it is, the shoot was canceled in 1999 under threat of litigation, meaning that Pigeon Trouble is, among other things, a record of historically and technologically contingent modalities of “seeing oneself seeing” (205).

Anthropology, as a discipline, fancies itself particularly savvy about the politics of seeing oneself seeing, and the so-called reflexive turn of the 1980s did usher in a new attention to the positionality of the fieldworker. Yet Song is openly skeptical about reflexivity as a textual technique that, by offering some additional context, somehow renders representation unproblematic. “The gaze of power is confessed to have been…coincident with the anthropologist,” he writes, “and the reflexive anthropologist volunteers to capture the heretofore invisible anthropological eye ‘from behind’” (208). But where is this “from behind,” he wonders, and what are the ethical and ontological stakes of occupying it? Song’s rejection of such a space of transcendence both informs and grows out of his own experience of foreignness in Hegins: as a Korean in a mostly white community with little enthusiasm for immigrants, as a shy, birdphobic intellectual more at ease with “people of the kitchen” (68) than the gruff, homosocial world of the pigeon killers. Song does gain a remarkable degree of access to the private gun clubs and drinking establishments where the sportsmen would congregate. Yet he remains, irredeemably, an outsider, and he uses this experience of apartness to link the problem of the ethnographer to the problem of the animal.

Song acknowledges the appeal of a “representationalist” reading of the Hegins pigeon shoot, in which racial violence or economic malaise are displaced onto the body of the pigeon. This, in a sense, was the logic mobilized by then-candidate Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, when he infamously suggested that people in small-town Pennsylvania “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them…as a way to explain their frustrations.” The line was political poison for Obama, but Song suggests that this line of thinking also reifies the very social formations that anthropologists are out to understand. To that end, Song sets out to ask “not what animals are ‘about’ positively and legibly but what they are negatively and illegibly; not the end product of how we render them legible with human meaning but the illegible gulf or difference that facilitates such a reading in the first place” (149). Indeed, Song concludes that this gulf may separate ethnographer and informant just as surely as human and animal. Therefore, for Song, sociality consists not in a shared experience of intersubjectivity or creaturely life. Rather, it consists in “a willing submission to dislocation and desubjectification, that is, a becoming-object to the Other’s gaze” (212). This radical renunciation of the subject’s sovereignty is, for Song, the beginning of ethics. It is a measure of what we owe one another.

Pigeon Trouble suffers, at times, from theoretical digressions that stray far from the lifeworld of Hegins, Pennsylvania. It is as though Song’s dense prose threatens to give way to the “ruins of speech” (119) that he ascribes to his conspiracy-minded informants. Still, the book remains an ethnographically rich and formally ambitious account of a rural community caught in broader webs of signification. It also comes as close as any book I know to offering a phenomenological account of a bird in flight, drawing on Song’s apprenticeship with an enigmatic pigeon trainer named Monk. Through Monk’s eyes, across the species divide, we glimpse the darkness of the trap into which the pigeons are placed, the murmur of the crowd, and then the release into a violent, dazzling brightness.

Survivall at MAM Salvador by A. Lemos, M. Fiorelli and R. Shields (Photo copyright A. Lemos and M. Fiorelli)

An update to our previous post on “locative art” using Google Maps and our collective article in Wi – Journal of Mobile Media (Hexagram Institute) – where Andre Lemos recently discussed locative media in Brazil.  Survivall is a locative art piece online here and there.

-Rob

Mashup Image from Facebook (*Note the black bars through the eyes were my own addition)

“Mashups combine views, data, and logic from existing Web sites or applications to create novel applications that focus on situational and ephemeral problems.”

This statement from Maximilien, Ranabahu & Gomadam (2008: 32) in IEEE Internet Computing refers to an open and programmable Web 2.0 where programmers, designers and architects work in relation to one another to develop fluid data-mediation, process mediation and user interface customization solutions.

But there is another world of audio, video and even these visual mashups which proliferate on Facebook: collages which rework representations and expected meanings. With ‘Wilderness Downtown‘, the band Arcade Fire shows what can be done in an interactive digital mapping mashup. This notion of the mashup draws on 1960s US countercultural interventions of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman to rework politics and gain attention in the context of 60s mass media.  Mashups were part of a tactic of political and media pranksterism.

Youth engaged in Social Networking Sites (SNS) are acutely aware of visible signs of age and grade of their peers. I entered as traveler in a foreign land, the land of high school youth aged 14 to 18.  As part of a project on community building and neo-liberal economics in the Global North, I worked with high school students on a photography project picturing place, home and community in Fort McMurray Alberta Canada: ‘Where is Fort McMurray‘.  Organizing the project and communicating through Facebook, the usual stuff came up: pictures of their cats, their friends and their family trips to typical vacation spots from this northern oil city. Then I came across the mashup above – a kind of calling card image – and stopped in my tracks.  How did they make it? Where did it come from? Shock and awe to say the least.

Picnik.com offers web-browser based image editing (in fact Flickr.com has links throughout its own user interface that encourage image editing through this now popular website). ‘Of course’ it is so simple, as I tried to master software the ‘youth of today’ are employing. Judging from my own experience, if it isn’t borrowed, it is probably stolen or better yet, free! And it is free just head over to picnik.com I was told.

The questions for me are about communication and culture. What are image/text/design compositions like this conveying as attempt to shock and awe viewers, ‘friends’ on Facebook? One student suggested that, a program like picnik.com is used ‘to make images look better.’ Agreed, pushing the contrast or the saturation on most digital images will yield a more striking and/or clearly focused image. But this is something else entirely. These compositions have the look and flavor of youth culture from another land: wild colors and cartoon characters emphasizing cuteness with no regard for western compositional aesthetic guidelines. There may also be a betrayal of memory, and this may well be the case since others like Livingstone have noted in the academic literature that youth may actively engage in the process of ‘updating’ their profiles on a daily basis, erasing traces of the past. I also consider Bauman’s Liquid Arts towards the new and destined for disposal a poignant reminder.

Composition, like a piece of music or a painting, takes time.  This current digital mode of crafting is no different as a means of work and labor for creation. Mashed-up communication are working in relation to one another as a new kind of dialogue and one that you or I may very well lack the literacy to comprehend. We may be able to analyze the artistic merit or the component pieces of the composition and even the spelling and grammar, but those elements cannot be read as a matter of finite course. Instead these seemingly disparate elements have been fused, remixed and mashed to create a new form of age and perhaps geo-socially specific dialogue.

These are ways of representing oneself to others and also ways of representing one’s world – in these examples, mashups are ways of representing towns and cities where one grew up as part of meaning-making coming to terms with them.  In the process mashups, not new wave video, are establishing the next generations’ understanding of what cities are.

-Andriko Lozowy with Rob Shields

Reviewed by Peter Lugosi, School of Services Management, Bournemouth University (UK)

Jansson and Lagerkvist’s edited collection explores the processes through which spaces become uncertain, opaque…strange.  At times these uncertainties emerge as negativities – fear, loss, exile, discomfort, but they may also be positive in the form of novelty, excitement, amusement and wonder. Some things are strange because they are new, and fall outside existing norms or even systems of classification, while others become strange as they become outdated, abandoned and increasingly obscure. Jansson and Lagerkvist’s text brings together concepts from geography, media and cultural studies in stressing how the immediacy and apparently straightforward nature of space inevitably obscures and excludes. Familiarity, therefore, cannot be disentangled from the strange; the ordinary exists alongside and in relation to the extraordinary. The various chapters in this book examine, through different contexts, the processes and agencies that produce, and, more importantly, mediate strangeness. A thread running through all the chapters is the importance of the media, mediation and representation in uniting the mundane with the fantastic, or the obvious with the obscure, thus normalising or extinguishing strangeness in the creation of effect or experience. However, the chapters also show how mediation can serve to delineate the deviant, the extraordinary, and the fantastic or highlight the strangeness of those things that are somehow vague. The authors demonstrate how strangeness emerges through changing relationships of power in which it is experienced differently by various people, at different times, and how strangeness is absorbed into cultures and societies.

[cc image credit: Joseph Robertson]

The book is split into three sections: part 1 examines the different scales at which opacity emerges and how mediation influences the manifestation of strangeness. In the opening chapter Carney and Miller wrestle with notions of vagueness in general and with how vagueness emerges in urban contexts, before offering two specific forms of cultural practice that at once captures strangeness but can also be read as attempts to mobilise it. The first of these is early 20^th century photography of derelict, marginal urban spaces, which presents possibilities for vagueness and strangeness to emerge in amongst, and in contrast to, the ordered sensibilities of cities. The second example offered by Carney and Miller is the Eruv, a process through which large urban and suburban areas are redefined by its Jewish residents as one enclosed space, thus allowing them to travel between premises and to transport objects without breaking the rules of the Sabbath. Both these examples of mediation and social practice offer different readings, interpretations and the possibility for alternative experiences of the spaces being represented, thus allowing socio-spatial practices to challenge or disrupt existing power relationships.

In the following chapter Löfgren changes the scale of analysis to the microcosm of the home and considers the fate of media objects and technologies, for example, photographs, cassettes, videos, records, CDs, reels of home movies, slides, computer games, consoles, diaries, drawings and media players. In their prime these objects amuse, enchant and capture moments in people’s life, but once they become redundant, they are hidden, and people attempt to dispose of these strange remnants from the past. While individuals retain, or recapture, a nostalgic connection with some objects, such as photo albums, diaries and video footage, they are estranged to many others. Löfgren narrates his own experiences and relationships with the dying and hidden objects that subsequently haunt him.

Ahrén and Sappol change scale again in focusing on representations and displays of the human body. The chapter takes the form of two dialogues by the authors who take turn to comment on the ways in which representations or displays of the body engage the viewer; how they can, in specific forms, appear to create an image of order and unity, while in others displaying its disordered, dysfunctional nature, but at all times transforming the body into an object of consumption. These processes of representation and display make a series of scientific truth claims, while at the same time reproducing power relationships, for example about the central status of the healthy male body ideal against which the strange other, the female or the sick, is imagined. However, these representations of the body also serve to highlight its strangeness – and, for the authors at least, they challenge the viewer to reflect on their sense of selves and embodied experiences of space. In the final chapter of Part 1, Parks considers an overlooked aspect of mediation and mediatisation, the satellite, which, in their various forms, transmit information around the world, while also casting a digital gaze back on the earth.

Part 2 of the book, entitled Dislocation, disruption and disobedience focuses on the various cultural practices and events that either challenge existing power relationships, or expose some deviant aspect of culture, and thus serve to challenge perceptions and experiences of space and notions of self. Habel examines the experiences of women at the 1897 Stockholm Exhibition and the ways in which various representations and mediations of those experiences shaped women’s engagement with the event. Lagerkvist draws on Lefebvre’s work on rhythms, which she uses in her analysis of representations of China and Shanghai’s past, as they are reconstructed, through the juxtapositioning of objects in a colonial building, the La Villa Rouge. Straw considers the role of 20^th century crime novels and films in creating and reproducing particular representations of cities as criminal spaces and centres of deviance. A similar theme is explored by Wilbert and Hansen in their discussion of walking tours of London crime scenes. They focus on historical and contemporary representations of murder and the relationship visitors share with the spaces in which these events actually took place in London. More specifically they consider several walking tours of these city spaces and discuss how these strange, marginal spaces are performed by guides and visitors in relation to these representations of crime and criminality. Deviance of a different kind is the focus of Hammond’s chapter: she discusses the fate of a modern Spa complex built in the city of Bath in the UK.  Hammond considers the ideologically loaded constructions of Bath as a historical city, which she uses to explain the negative reactions to the Spa.

Part 3, Secrets and Wonders of Media Spaces, shifts focus on to the obscure and magical spaces of the media and of mediation. Ericson’s essay sheds light on a physically present, but hidden media space of Broadcasting House – The British Broadcasting Corporation’s office and studio complex. His discussion is concerned with the physical design of the building, the complex functions entangled in its design and also in the symbolic aspects, which has provoked much debates among architects, critics and commentators. On the one hand this media space is seen as a sacred temple of communication, but it also functions as a carefully controlled machine for the production and transmission of sound. Themes of revelation and control also emerge in Jansson’s chapter, which focuses on two centres of media production and orchestration at the Expo 67: the Operations Control Centre and International Broadcasting Centre. As with the preceding chapter on Broadcasting House, Jansson offers a particular reading of these two facilities as highly orchestrated attempts to make visible and transparent mysterious media backspaces that have considerable influence in shaping the flow of people and information. This orchestrated spectacle demystifies the act of mediation and control but it is an estranging act – obscuring the potentially problematic acts of such centres of mediation and positioning the visitor as an observer of the media spectacle.

Sloan deconstructs the postcard; or, more specifically, pictorial representation of the moon on postcards and interrogates how these playful representations, once they are written, addressed and sent, thus being incorporated into networks of communication, interaction and interpretation,  create strange and fantastic objects for viewers. Jacobs’ objects of attention are representations of museums and galleries in film. In films these venues are liminal sites and places of transgression for those “haunted, in hiding or are in transit” (297), which include spies, criminals, lovers, socially marginal characters alongside tourists and art connoisseurs. Museums and galleries in films reflect the superficiality of touristic consumption, while also demarking and reinforcing social distinction between the educated, the snobbish and those lacking cultural capital; they are spaces of contemplation as much they are sites of deviance, intrigue, danger and excitement where crimes, illicit meetings, chases and supernatural events take place. Representation in films is a theme also explored in the final chapter by Pike. He is concerned with the various manifestations of underground spaces from train lines, tunnels and sewers to hidden dwellings and realms. These hidden places of mystery, resistance, evil and awe sometime act as the backdrop or context to a more immediate, compelling plot, while at other times reflecting more broadly the vertical, hierarchical nature of society.

This is in an eclectic collection of essays, and although the editors make a good attempt to produce a coherent account of the (re)emerging themes of the book, it is inevitably the start of a dialogue on the subject rather than any attempt to produce a definitive notion of strange spaces, if such a thing was ever possible. This eclecticism means the individual chapters will appeal to readers interested in the specific subjects e.g. material culture (Löfgren), touristic sites and the multidimensional nature of touristic production/consumption  (Wilbert and Hansen), cinematic (Pike; Jacobs), photographic (Sloan; Carney and Miller) and textual representation (Straw) or the contested nature of urban space (Hammond; Carney and Miller), but the book’s fundamentally ambiguous theme means it is unlikely to become a core reader of a particular university course or become the basis of a distinct area of academic debate. Nevertheless, this book, like any other provocative academic work challenges us to rethink and to re-imagine what may appear to us as natural, obvious and transparent, and to appreciate its strangeness.

“Here it is, our next Web Trend Map. No Metro lines, no URLS. This time, it’s the 140 most influential people on twitter, sorted by #name #handle #category #influence #activity. Plus: When they started tweeting and what they first said. It took quite some time until we had it in the shape we envisioned. Since there is a lot of data we processed to get it here, we’d like to ask you to give it a final check. Tell us if you find any errors, before we send the file to the printer.”

The work is introduced as a point and space which marks an end point, a crossing and opening onto a new space:

“The terminus is the end, the boundary, and the border: this exhibition is a celebration of these borders but not an exaltation; it is a playful engagement with reflexivity and positionality; it asks what lies beyond and what lies within. No longer content to theorize the ends of the discipline and possibilities of new media, new locations, or new methods of asking old questions, the ethnographers in this exhibition are working in capacity to develop generative ethnographies that do not subordinate the sensorium to the expository and theoretical text.”

[Bogotá City Blues by Coso Blues]

Wired UK reports on the digital city. Here are some utopian, critical and imaginary highlights:

Digital Cities: ‘Sense-able’ urban design
By Carlo Ratti

“By receiving real-time information, appropriately visualised and disseminated, citizens themselves can become distributed intelligent actuators, who pursue their individual interests in co-operation and competition with others, and thus become prime actors on the urban scene. Processing urban information captured in real time and making it publicly accessible can enable people to make better decisions about the use of urban resources, mobility and social interaction. This feedback loop of digital sensing and processing can begin to influence various complex and dynamic aspects of the city, improving the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the places we inhabit.”

Digital Cities: Words on the street
By Adam Greenfield

“[T]he technologies that the networked city relies upon remain opaque, even to those exposed to them daily. In fact, it’s hard to be critical and make sound choices in a world where we don’t understand the objects around us … In the networked city, therefore, the pressing need is for translators: people capable of opening up these occult systems, explaining their implications to the people whose neighbourhoods, choices and lives are increasingly conditioned by them. This will be a primary occupation for urbanists. If we’re reaching the point where it makes sense to consider the city as a fabric of addressable, queryable, even scriptable objects and surfaces – to reimagine its pavements, building façades and parking meters as network resources – this raises an order of questions never before confronted, ethical as much as practical: who has the right of access to these resources, or the ability to set their permissions?”

Digital Cities: London after the great 2047 flu outbreak
By Geoff Manaugh

“Public squares were rebuilt using data taken from air-circulation studies and the physics of the human cough. The distance a sneeze could travel took on architectural form. The congestion charge was applied to pedestrians, keeping transmissibility to a minimum; you could cross from borough to borough only with the written consent of a GP. Movement was controlled; public gatherings of people with incompatible immunities were made illegal; even the floorplans of flats and houses were carefully reshaped in accordance with medical regulations. Being at home felt like quarantine (and often, it was: if your daily skin tests didn’t look so good, you’d find your front door temporarily sealed). It was cold; some said dystopian. Until the prescription districts started to appear.”

[The City by lepiaf.geo]

Same day update: Also worth checking out are Ben Hammersley’s comments on this and related things.