Via Enrique Ramirez’s always wonderful A456, we find Kosmograd’s review of Petra Kempf’s new book, You Are the City:
“Subtitled ‘Observation, organization, and transformation of urban settings’, the main element of this publication are 22 sheets of clear acetate, onto which are printed different conceptual layers and frameworks of a city … In ‘You are the City’, the 22 diagram drawings are split into four operational categories: Cosmological Ground; Leglisative Agencies; Currents, Flows and Forces; Nodes, Loops and Connections. By combining different sheets, and adding layers, a huge range of different compositions can be created – a handmade decon version of SimCity. It invites the user to make new urban connections and realities, as different spatial arrangements and possibilities reveal themselves…”
Sounds and looks interesting!
I recently learned of University of Chicago PhD student Eli Thorkelson’s blog, Decasia: Critique of Academic Culture and it is wonderful to read.
Eli’s PhD project comprises an anthropological analysis of university culture, and he’s also looking at the socialisation of graduate students. I remember being told as a Master’s student that it was not entirely acceptable to study “our own,” and since I always thought that was bullshit I was really excited by Eli’s commitment to study academia. Anyone interested in institutional space and culture can check out an overview of the project, or read the full proposal (pdf).
I’m especially taken by his observations on fieldwork in French philosophy departments, and this fascinating post on reading as an ethnographic tactic.
NY Times: Data Center Overload
“Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network … But where is ‘there,’ and what does it look like? ‘There’ is nowadays likely to be increasingly large, powerful, energy-intensive, always-on and essentially out-of-sight data centers. These centers run enormously scaled software applications with millions of users … Small wonder that this vast, dispersed network of interdependent data systems has lately come to be referred to by an appropriately atmospheric — and vaporous — metaphor: the cloud … [T]he electricity on a low-end server will now exceed the server cost itself in less than four years — which is why the geography of the cloud has migrated to lower-rate areas…”
Photos: NY Times: Search Me
The Reinvention of Everyday Life: Culture in the twenty-first century. Edited by Howard McNaughton and Adam Lam (2006). Christchurch NZ: Canterbury University Press. 264 pp. ISBN 1-877257-48-6
Reviewed by Niamh Hennessy, York University
This is an interesting and provocative collection of stories, commentaries and reviews that offer a series of meditations on the transformations of everyday life in the new century. The perspectives are drawn from a range of cultural contexts even as these particularities strike a universal chord in the themes that link them together. The tones of the various articles continually shift; even the emphasis on nostalgia in Bell’s subtle inquiry on the Garbage Museum in Curitiba, Brazil is coupled with a certain joy in the discovery of lost objects made meaningful by the social relationships embodied or projected in their display. The female workers at the museum sort objects by hand as they move along a conveyor belt. Not well paid, but with relatively good benefits and conditions, the workers are situated in relation to the poor who collect and deliver garbage to the museum in exchange for food. All of this takes place in context the active promotional campaign the city of Curitiba launches during the 80s and 90s as the eco capital of the world.
The complexities of the social relationships examined by Bell are followed by Quentin Stevens’ eerie account of the American Murdo Station as the hub of scientific conquest of Antarctica. US interests in Antarctica date back to post World War II and the Cold War, and come to reflect contradictory impulses of modernity in the design of metropolitan and frontier spaces at Murdo. In detailing the ‘architecture’ of its colonial ideology, Stevens seems to mimic the mono-tonal hum and monochromatic images of the military’s regulation of landscape and social relationships. If these lead essays offer contrasts in tone and centre-periphery dynamics, other essays on cultural production and display invert and subvert the public/private dimensions of reality television, the construction of nation and the inward/outward glances in the reporting of community tragedies.
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Blanchot, M. (1987). “Everyday speech” (S. Hanson, Trans.). Yale French Studies, 73, 12-20. (Original work published 1959)
Reviewed by Amy Macdonald, University of Alberta
What is the everyday? This question might seem unnecessary and superfluous. Are we not surrounded by it, steeped in it? Is it not something we can know and understand naturally, something we can safely take for granted? As Ben Highmore writes in the introduction to his Everyday Life Reader, “It is to the everyday that we consign that which no longer holds our attention. Things become ‘everyday’ by becoming invisible, unnoticed, part of the furniture. And if familiarity does not always breed contempt, it does encourage neglect” (2002, p. 21). This short paper is intended as a reminder. The enormous breadth and diversity of writers who have pursued the question of the everyday—including, but certainly not limited to, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Michel de Certeau, Erving Goffman, and Henri Lefebvre—suggests that perhaps there is value in confronting this neglect, in attempting to define, or at least illuminate certain facets of, the everyday. I wish to narrow my focus to Blanchot’s (1987) essay “Everyday Speech,” which seems to resonate with a distinct feeling that underscores his conception of the everyday as an experience that always escapes, as something inaccessible through knowledge.
(Michael Gardiner’s related review essay on Sheringham’s ‘Reading Everyday Life’ appears in the journal issue 12.3)
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