“As internet video matures, we face a crossroads: will technology and public policy support a more participatory culture—one that encourages and enables free expression and broader cultural engagement? Or will online video become a glorified TV-on-demand service, a central part of a permissions-based culture? Open Video is a movement to promote free expression and innovation in online video.”

I’m giving a talk on artists video and the so-called “open circuits” of distribution envisaged by some artists in the 1970s. Here’s my spiel:

“This presentation argues that the most radical proponents of video art were always concerned with establishing alternative networks of communication based on the principle of “open circuits” and “participation TV”.

An understanding of this historical context is helpful in highlighting the potentials to be found in today’s web-based networks that privilege “sharing”, “participation” and “openness”.

I want to suggest that solutions to these challenges can be found in open archive principles, and that these approaches will “diversify the video culture” in new and unexpected ways. The radical challenges to television, art and culture made by video artists in the 1960s and 1970s find their echo today in the principles of Open Source, Creative Commons, Open Content and other emerging principles of participatory culture.”

Contemporary distribution stands or falls on the steps taken to securely move and store products, from the manufacturing phase to the customer phase of the supply chain. The global supply chain links together a complex network of organizations, people, technology, logistics, information and resources that are needed to safely move products from the supplier stage to the customer stage of the process.

The configuration of this mobile network optimizes distribution by tracking and moving things as efficiently as possible from place to place. The guarantee of their secure arrival underscores the financial viability of the transportation industry.

In the 1980s, the term Supply Chain Management (SCM) was developed to express the need to integrate the key business processes, from end user through to original suppliers. The basic idea behind SCM is that businesses cooperatively involve themselves in a supply chain by exchanging information regarding market fluctuations and production capabilities. Today’s supply chain security combines SCM with state of the art networked security requirements of the system, which are driven by perceived threats such as terrorism, piracy, and theft.

The supply chain network constitutes one of the world’s largest industries. This global sector mobilizes resources that range from trucks to airplanes, trains, ships, barges, pipelines, warehouses and logistics services. During 2008, the total value of the U.S. transportation industry was about $1.8 trillion. The supply chain, in its many facets and sectors, is estimated to employ about 4.5 million Americans. Recent improvements in credentialing, screening and validating of products, advance notification systems, locks and tamper-proof seals, perimeter checks and surveillance systems provide the security that is essential to today’s SCM.

Speed is a central component of SCM. Despite this, the sequencing and scheduling of inventory often appears immobile, locked away in containers, sitting on docks and lying inert.  Velocity is measured not so much by land-speed, as it is by response time (the time between when a customer places an order and receives delivery). This is a key determinant in differentiating the provision of services by competing firms.
Product variety (the number of different products available in the system) is guaranteed by standardized processing that calculates information inputs and outputs. Thus, information management provides the configurations that a customer desires from the distribution network. In a complex series of sourcing, manufacturing and delivery of products, SCM networks privilege the concept of “availability” above all else (the probability of having a product in stock when a customer order arrives).

According to the principles of SCM, if all relevant information is accessible to all companies, everyone in the supply chain has the possibility of optimizing the entire supply chain (rather than making it less efficient based on local self-interest). SCM suggests that this will lead to better planning of production and distribution, which cuts costs and provides a better overall product. However, none of these efficiencies can be attained if the security of the supply chain cannot be guaranteed.

The wide acceptance of SCM has given rise to a new kind of competition in the global market. Competitive edge is no longer based on one company versus another, but rather takes place on a supply chain versus supply chain basis. For this reason, standardized data models have been implemented by the World’s Customs Organization in an effort to improve operational capacity while maintaining security of the overall system.

Their Framework of Standards to Secure and Facilitate Global Trade, known as the “SAFE Framework” underscores the manner in which SCM approaches have influenced security management. The Container Security Initiative (initiated in 2002 by the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection under the auspices of Homeland Security) extends the zone of security outwards to reciprocal  participant countries. Such initiatives seek to reduce the reporting burden of industry through the elimination of duplicated data entry and by maximizing the re-use of information across regulatory agencies.

Several distinct problems for SCM security have arisen in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008/9. As retail and business-to-business sales have fallen, worldwide purchasers and importers of goods have implemented inventory reduction to better position themselves for the recession. Because of this, orders to manufacturers have plummeted, and therefore the need to ship goods has plummeted as well. Much of the global distribution network currently lies idle, and security vunerabilities do not have the same priority as economic fundamentals.
The global credit crisis has made it extremely difficult (sometimes impossible) to get vital trade financing that has historically funded the flow of global shipments. In global capitalism, circulation (of all kinds) is crucial to the operation of the economy. However, firms that operate the container ships that traverse the world have seen a dramatic reduction in business. Intense competition and empty ships have created a fall in shipping prices. Ports are suffering a large decline in arrivals.

In early March 2009, the number of massive container ships sitting idle globally was estimated at an all-time high of 453 vessels. Container shipping prices had fallen by more than 90% at one point in early 2009.

Air cargo has seen substantially changes, with a global drop of 23% in January 2009. According to business reports, firms such as UPS, DHL and FedEx are experiencing a significant slowdown in the movement of products via their global networks.

The recent downturn in global distribution needs to be seen in a broader historical context. According to World Trade Organization statistics through 2005:

* World merchandise exports have risen from $157 billion in 1963 to $10.159 trillion (in 2005).
* The nations of the European Union lead the world in merchandise exports, accounting for $4.0 trillion in 2004 and representing 39% of all global merchandise exports. The US accounted for $904 billion, representing 8.7% of all global exports; China accounted for $762 billion, representing 7.3%; Japan accounted for $595 billion, representing 5.7% of all global exports.

“Distribution/Network/Configuration: A Photo Essay On Operating Control”, in Andrew R. Thomas (ed), Supply Chain Security, Praeger Security International, Connecticut, 2009, [forthcoming].

Regardless,I like the overall feel of the new video output, some of which can be found here.

These are some of many new videos I’m working on with Leo Martyn as part of a large project to map the experience of air travel through the invisible lines traced across the planet daily. They are cross-sections through time and space, idiosyncratic mappings of my own personal air travel over the past ten years. Here in one frame we can see the traces of my journeys up in the air and connecting to the terminal spaces that define the edges of global airways.

Looks like Lawrence English is all set to work with me on the sound for the piece. His Airport Symphony work was great, and he’s been off recording and mixing a whole bunch of new airport sound/music since that piece was launched. You can buy the double CD from his Room40 label (and check out a whole swag of other excellent independent experimental and electronica stuff).

Building upon work done with Mr Snow and Zina Kaye in 2007, this will be a mega collection of airpsaces I have entered into, negotiated and traversed. To me they are like spindly “air-tenrils” that connect me to the air from the ground up into the sky, and across fairly large temporal zones (if you reckon a decade is a long time to travel in time).

Clearly defined by the rules and regulations of air traffic control and the carving up and management of international airways, this project is an extension of earlier mobility research projects I have been working on for some time.

[See post to watch Flash video]Locked in to Landing, 3D visualisation of airspace, Ross Rudesch Harley [animation and modelling by Leo Martyn]

[See post to watch Flash video]Air Tendrils Overview, 3D visualisation of airspace, Ross Rudesch Harley [animation and modelling by Leo Martyn]

I’ve been in process with this project for almost a year now, and looking forward to start to resolve it into a new series of works. I’m playing with a new working title, alluding to Gus Van Sant’s Keanu Reeves/River Phoenix vehicle (itself full of allusions to the B 52s and other cultural time-warps). Not sure if it’s too “myspacey”, or whether people will think that I really think I have my own personal airspace.

These are some of many new videos I’m working on with Leo Martyn as part of a large project to map the experience of air travel through the invisible lines traced across the planet daily. They are cross-sections through time and space, idiosyncratic mappings of my own personal air travel over the past ten years. Here in one frame we can see the traces of my journeys up in the air and connecting to the terminal spaces that define the edges of global airways.

Looks like Lawrence English is all set to work with me on the sound for the piece. His Airport Symphony work was great, and he’s been off recording and mixing a whole bunch of new airport sound/music since that piece was launched. You can buy the double CD from his Room40 label (and check out a whole swag of other excellent independent experimental and electronica stuff).

Building upon work done with Mr Snow and Zina Kaye in 2007, this will be a mega collection of airpsaces I have entered into, negotiated and traversed. To me they are like spindly “air-tenrils” that connect me to the air from the ground up into the sky, and across fairly large temporal zones (if you reckon a decade is a long time to travel in time).

Clearly defined by the rules and regulations of air traffic control and the carving up and management of international airways, this project is an extension of earlier mobility research projects I have been working on for some time.

SCREEN CULTURE IS EXPLODING AND MUTATING INTO NEW FORMS ALL AROUND US. IT’S HAPPENING IN PLACES AND FORMATS THAT ARE CHALLENGING THE VERY NATURE OF THE SCREEN AND THE BOUNDARIES OF MEDIA THAT MANY ARGUE HAVE BEEN CRUMBLING FOR DECADES. WHILE IT’S TRUE TO SAY THAT ART, CINEMA AND VIDEO HAVE CROSS-POLLINATED EACH OTHER SINCE THEIR INCEPTION, I WANT TO REFLECT ON THE POST-MEDIUM CONDITION IN WHICH WE FIND OURSELVES. THE SINGULARITY OF CINEMA (IF EVER THERE WAS SUCH A THING) HAS BEEN CONFRONTED BY THE EVOLUTION OF CAPTURE TECHNOLOGIES, MULTI-IMAGE LITERACIES, MULTI-PLATFORM DELIVERY AND NEW FORMS OF PRESENTATION YET TO BE INVENTED.

The idea of the medium as a physical substance for creating artistic forms is hard to maintain as the material conditions for this technical support are undergoing such massive transformation. These days it’s not uncommon for screens and projected images to appear on massive public displays, or on tiny 500-micron living tissues. Windows of office buildings may form the individual pixels for a giant image, or microscopic cells can be used for the purposes of “bio-cinema.” The night sky provides the canvas for orchestrated projections of light and sound. Portable domes and low cost sound/projection systems are becoming increasingly available for artists to work with. Enterprising designers are imagining car headlights as projectors that can beam these highly mobile images onto any available surface.

Even clouds, satellites and other celestial objects can now double as screens for the moving image. According to Scott Hessels (who reminds us of many of these things in the Summer issue of ANAT’s Filter magazine) “it is no longer so important what we are watching, but rather how we watch it.”

The Double Helix: Art and the Moving Image Symposium, held at the Samstag Museum as part of the Adelaide Film Festival, provided the impetus for stimulating insights into this question of how we watch and experience moving image culture. The two-day conference program also included a series of screenings, exhibitions and a selection of works from the DomeFest program (exhibited in a university planetarium). The relationships between visual artists, filmmakers and the plethora of new screen contexts lies at the centre of all these discussions. This article is not so much a review of this program as a reflection on the larger issues raised by this engaging international event.

For me the most challenging issue to come out of the Double Helix program is to do with the nature of the post-medium universe we work and play in these days. It makes little sense to talk about the media-specificity of cinema, for instance, in a moment where many films are made without the help of Kodak, the existence of sprocket-holes or a multiplex to play in. As Larry Kardish, Senior Curator of Film and Media from NewYork’s MoMA put it, cinema is no longer film, and films are made for contexts that can no longer be described as cinemas.

In this year’s Sundance Festival, for the first time in its history, more video was screened than celluloid. Nobody really seems to care any more about the ‘purity’ of film, and most of the directors shooting on HD and other digital formats continue to refer to themselves as filmmakers. As we head towards a massively networked ‘laptop cinema’ jacked in to LCD projectors configured for public and private viewings, it’s worth probing a little more into these and other forms related to the various screen cultures and practices that have emerged over the last couple of years.

The Double Helix conference presented plenty of opportunities for speakers and audience to reflect on the extent to which conventional rectilinear screen formats and cinema-style screening spaces predetermine and limit the potentialities of an expanded cinema. Gene Youngblood’s term (invented in the late 1960s) remains pertinent today as the possibilities for screen experiences outside conventional cinema proliferate significantly. Over the weekend there were plenty of talks referring to “cinema outside the cinema”, and plenty of opportunities to sample works barely recognisable as cinema in the ‘classic’ sense.

The DomeFest program clearly demonstrated the enormous possibilities being explored with ‘fulldome’ filmmaking and production techniques. Fulldome is a relatively new format (since around 1995) that provides immersive experiences via digital technologies presented on a hemispheric screen normally associated with planetariums. No longer constrained to imaging the night sky, fulldome is ‘exploding the frame’ of what planetarium domes might deliver. There are currently 500 fulldome facilities around the world, and the CGI-heavy short ‘films’ presented in the program clearly showed the potential for artists to push the boundaries. Scott Hessels’ extraordinary visualisation work Celestial Mechanics was made for fulldome, and reveals a digital universe that contains more than just stars. His patterns in the sky remind us of the mechanical constellations that invisibly encircle us in the form of satellites and all manner of human-made air traffic.

The questions that emerged from the symposium go to the heart of the dissolution and reformation of the screen. The work of Joyce Hinterding and David Haines (presented by way of an artists’ talk) is illustrative of this condition. Their work deals with fiction and phenomena, sensation, sound and the image plane in gallery and other spaces. It is a practice that is truly post-medium specific. (These ideas and others are explored in Haines’ blog, titled 21st Century Holograms, dealing with post-object art, aroma molecules, and post audio-video art practice—well worth a look.) Their work hints at an entirely different trajectory to cinema where, as Hinterding evocatively described their recent aroma works, “the image arrives directly to your brain in a powerful way” (see RT89, p27).

Another artist working in a similarly expanded practice is Mexican-Canadian Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (RT89, p22). While Australian audiences have had few opportunities to see his work, his keynote at the conference highlighted the extent to which the ‘cinematic’ can be transposed to techniques, viewing contexts and technological means that seem to have nothing to do with movies or filmmaking.

His large-scale public artworks and ‘interactive’ installations engage the public in playful and sometimes profound ways. He describes the work he presented (well documented on his website, www.lozano-hemmer.com) as a “dis-intermediation” of experience—a series of very public interventions into screen and public space. In many of his projects, the screen has nothing to do with a circumscribed surface. His projects play with the ability to skew, rotate, shift and map the image onto a variety of unexpected surfaces, and with playful, engaging and surprising results. He captures, re-presents and plays with the visualisation of data in complex and challenging ways.

As with many artists working at the limits of media specificity, his emphasis on “relational architecture” brings screen and sound technologies into dynamic relation with audience participants and the surfaces of projection. Many of Lozano-Hemmer’s works play with the absence of image and the heightened sense of real time interaction by way of the simplest of forms: public projections of light into the sky or onto public buildings at large scale. His work encourages audiences to participate in what he refers to as “a corporeality of shadows” that come to life in a self-organising fashion. In the words of the artist, these works “cast people’s presence onto the media.”

It’s an idea that many working with interactive media would want to claim, though it’s not always successfully achieved in screen-based forms that rely on the clicking of buttons and standardised navigation practices now highly codified in our everyday lives. How much has Flash and CSS shaped the way we click, drag and drop our way around the four-sided screens we work with these days?

Lynette Wallworth’s major show at the Samstag Museum, Duality of Light, brings together a number the artist’s major interactive works created in recent years. Her work demonstrates the kinds of potential for new screen-based experiences that ask for our bodily engagement and personal (inter)action with her images and sounds —no clicking here.

The way we touch, walk, and navigate our way through these works brings them into existence. We may capture the projected images on a beautiful translucent bowl, or raise our hand against the glass wall she’s projected her video portraits against in order to commence the work. The artist asks us to quite literally make a connection with the work.

Intimate, social and communal, these works are light years from conventional narrative cinema, and yet they gesture towards the power of the image in sequence, in space and in relation to the body of the audience.

The lines of distinction between cinema, video, installation, architecture and data visualisation seem less and less convincing as each moment passes. As John Conomos put it during his presentation, “artists don’t think categorically, they think a-categorically about these things.”

In the post-medium situation we find ourselves in, the media that artists use are infinitely differentiated, composited together, emergent and interconnected. In short, these are the tools of a dynamic media beyond the cinema.

Adelaide Film Festival and Samstag Museum of Art, Double Helix: Art & Moving Image Symposium, Feb 27-March 1; Domefest Project, Feb 24-27; Lynette Wallworth, Duality of Light, Samstag Museum, Feb 19-April 24; www.unisa.edu.au/samstagmuseum

For the first time in history at this year’s prestigious Sundance Film Festival, more video was screened than celluloid. And yet nobody really worried any more about the obsolescence of film. While most artists shooting on HD and other digital formats continue to refer to themselves as “filmmakers”, the media-specificity of film has been blown apart into a thousand shards.

It makes little sense to talk about “pure cinema” in a moment where many films are made without the help of Kodak, the existence of sprocket-holes, or a multiplex to play in. Cinema is no longer film, and films are made for contexts that can no longer be described as cinemas. Most of us travel the world with mobile and portable devices capable of storing and networking more sound and images than the majority of people had access to in their entire lifetime even ten years ago.

And it’s not just cinema. Media culture is exploding and mutating into new forms all around us. It’s happening in places and formats that are changing the very nature of the media itself. From the ever-expanding Web to the latest generation of game platforms and mobile devices, artists are inventing new forms of expression that often defy the old categories.

Digital images and sounds are embedded into everyday places in a variety of ways. The young digital artists working today will be the ones who will shape this not-so-distant future just over the horizon. The Art Express 4D program provides an excellent glimpse into that nascent world.

Not quite cinema and not quite art, neither computer game or mainstream anime, the output of young emerging media artists show us new ways to blend, customise and challenge familiar media forms.

The most inventive and successful media works being made by young creators such as those presented here in Art Express cast their own presence onto the media. In the post-medium context of the present day and age, the art of media is emergent, participatory and interconnected. And as the media works included in this exhibition demonstrate, this emerging art of media is also personalised, expressive and playful.

Professor Ross Harley
Head of School of Media Arts
COFA, University of New South Wales

Ross Harley
University of New South Wales
Sydney, NSW2052
Australia
612 93850758
ross@unsw.edu.au

Gillian Fuller
University of New South Wales
Sydney, NSW2052
Australia
612 93856813
g.fuller@unsw.edu.au

Fuller + Harley are an interdisciplinary research-production team who fuse new media theory and practice in a variety of formats. For the past five years, they have been working on a multi-modal project that analyses the flows and network spaces of contemporary airports. Gillian Fuller, who trained as a semiotician and now specialises in new media theory, has worked in museums and published in journals such as Borderlands, FibreCulture and Social Semiotics. Ross Rudesch Harley is an artist and writer whose media work has been exhibited in venues such as at the Pompidou Centre, New York MoMA, Ars Electronica, and the Sydney Opera House. His writing has appeared in Art + Text, Convergence, Screen, Rolling Stone and The Australian. Their recent work, Aviopolis: A book about airports was published by Black Dog Publishing, London, in 2005. They are both researchers at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. For further information about their work, visit aviopolis.com, stereopresence.net and transitsemiotics.org.

ABSTRACT
The intimate relations of architecture to information in the new ‘u-city’ raises a set of questions around aesthetics, intimacy and constant interfacing with communication networks of all kinds. The relationships between architecture, movement and the city have long been discussed in terms of regimes of vision — eg the panoramas of railways and the cinematic city (cf Friedberg). This project is about tracking a genealogy/topology of mobile concepts, techniques and aesthetics located within the invisible waves of radio and an emergent logic of touch around “contactless technologies”. Rather than follow a representationalist logic of vision, we propose a new conceptualisation of touch and contact (Abelson et al, Benkler, Greenfield).

Here we initiate some discussion around the ontological and sociological implications of ubiquitous networks and automatic identification procedures, including mobile telephony,RFID, Bluetooth, wi-fi, and other wireless technologies. We ask how the interpenetration of architectural surfaces, bodies, and mobile devices involve a range of interrelations that guide and track human bodies and material objects in constant motion. Our focus is on reconceptualisation of the relation between architecture and radio — the different channels, “frames” and thresholds that bodies are folded into. If architecture is not only about the construction of the built environment and material forms, what new insights can be gained by considering the relationship between architecture and radio in the context of the contemporary wireless world?

General Terms
wireless, radio, networks, architecture, mobility, ontology, aesthetics

Keywords
wireless, transparency, radio, networks, architecture, mobility, haptics, aesthetics, touch,

1.INTRODUCTION
“Moving within an architectural surround, a person fashions an evolving matrix, an architectural surround not entirely of her own making’” ( Arakawa and Gins 2002, p 40)

This position paper proceeds from a rhizomatic assumption that people form topological constancies within their environments and that these  relations have (among many other things) an aesthetic dimension. What happens when the political aesthetics of screens, windows and motion through the “cinematic city” meets the beeps, whirrs, clicks and often inperceptible codes of ubiquity or “u-city”?  If the political realm of aesthetics delimits what is visible/invisible, audio/inaudible, what do we make of wireless systems, in which one navigates a dynamic aesthetic often unknowingly? In this paper we breifly look at relations of radio and architecture through a consideration of the aesthetics and politics of touch.

2. WIRELESS REGIMES AND THE LIGHTNESS OF TOUCH
Following Erin Manning, ‘to touch is to engage in the potential of an individuation’  (Manning 2007, p xv). When we speak of people navigating a city scanning and being scanned, it is important not to monumentalise the nature of control society in this dynamic. From such a perspective, this is not a Big Brother style pat down from a broadcast radio imaginary. Instead, we would like to suggest that our daily navigation through networks are more modulated than this. For the touch we are dealing with is on the whole, a light and intimate touch that often happens in the background of other complex negotiations with the city/architecture. “I reach out to touch you in order to invent a relation that will in turn , invent me’ (Manning 2007.p vx). As we sign up for various plans and attach various wireless prosthetics to our already thoroughly layered skin/phone/car/etc assemblages, we reach out to institutions of transit, information, and architecture in a loaded handshake — the compulsory exchange of personal data has never been made so easy or seemingly painless (for those who comply at least).

Once locked into this grid of the “urban sensible” we flex and move within a constant background hum of touch, in which one threshold just folds into another. Bodies and machines generate and radiate electromagnetic waves in seemingly infinite compositions. This is a tantalising proposition: the constant motion in which hard architecture and mobile traffic communicate may in fact impede the nomadic imperatives of everyday life. However, as is often the way, the decentering of bodies and subsequent deinstitutionalisation results in an ever tighter integration into a modulated system of control that is both public and pervasive.

“The centre is no where – the circumference is everywhere at once”, says Paul Virilio. From outer space to inner space, it has all been colonised and integrated precisely because everything is now so converged and connected. And network connections are (at the least) two way. This is not always a good thing, as Vilem Flusser has noted: “An omnipresent dialogue is just as dangerous as an omnipresent discourse”.

In an increasingly seamless world of ubiquitous computing and low-powered transmissions, there are no more hard-line borders. There are just intersecting thresholds of intensity. While the recognisable architectural thresholds of window, door and entrance continue to be invoked in the construction of contemporary space, ubiquitous radio identification systems add a significant number of background thresholds into the equation. Often unnoticed or at least not foregrounded in an obvious visible fashion, these transmissions between transponders and radio frequency readers have become pervasive in the background architecture of contemporary urban life. We are in touch with a highly variegated system of tracking and identifaction without being in direct contact with the surface of objects or places.

This “contactless contact” is one of the key characterisitics of low-powered radio and the miniaturised and ubiquitous modulation-demodulation procedures. The digital communication systems that facilitate the transfer of data are brought about by a series of intimate transmissions and signal decodings that are achieved by way of electromagnetic waves in the radio spectrum. This contactless transfer of data between the data-carrying device and its reader constitutes an new set of spatial and material protocols that give shape to the ubiquitous city. In order to understand this in more detail, we need to to turn to a discussion of radio’s genealogy and transformation into a new procedural system for the construction of contemporary spaces.

3.U-CITY: RADIO ON AND ON!
For us, radio offers a crucial way to understand the networks of ubiquity. It is not visual, its distributive — in waves, frequencies, and modulations, it is quite literally invisible. Radio is a “refrain” that gathers us in. RFID systems construe people and objects as particular shapes in ephemeral dynamics, haptics and channels.

The new deployment of low-powered radio generates a new intimacy. It’s about the constant collapsing of the near and far, but in a seamless way. The layers of two-way radio communication operate at a series of scales, from long distance high powered radio signals to nearfield low-powered signals. Across a variety of different technical layers and devices, automatic identification and tracking operates in an apparently seamless fashion. A high density of information is packaged, processed and recognised by a number of quite different technical systems, each of which has its own parameters.

Large and small devices talk to each other constantly, creating an enormous amount of background chatter that we hardly ever hear, let alone see. Machine recognition is largely achieved today through low powered radio identification systems that utilise the radio spectrum in ways that confound traditional theories of radio. The old broadcast models of radio and the subsequent regulatory practices are no longer appropriate to describe or understand the present plethora of radio based identification systems.

It also cannot be reduced to the increased use of two-way functionality which has rarely been taken up by mainstream broadcasting and corporate ventures (as in talk-back radio, Top 40 radio etc). The multiplicity of today’s radio has little to do with the singularity of “the radio” which we’ve come to associate primarily with AM or FM radio stations. New radio technologies such as WiFi, bluetooth and RFID show us how some of these potentialities are being realised. They draw our attention to the relationship between bodies and spaces.

The liveness and invisible aesthetics of classical radio also have little to do with the rapid evolution of the new “urban sensible” that is emerging. Our topology does not privilege the visual, but focuses on the way that coding and modulation happens over a complex assemblage that is invisible. A new approach to the wireless city is not about mapping the urban panorama. It is instead about mapping the “urban sensible” so that we focus on how the complex interplay of bodies, spaces and data become intelligible.

Our topology is also what we might call “membranic”. If classical radio is largely concerned analogue wave and modulation procedures, digital modulation procedures invoke a concatenation of low-powered and spread-spectrum signals, coding, transcoding . Wireless architecture is no longer just about physical supports and the construction of lived space. It also about negotiating and understanding the different channels, “frames” and thresholds that we are folded into. In this sense there are multiple variations on the “wireless body”, which is why architecture needs to attend to this new topology: the design and construction of buildings needs to take into account the new wireless, which facilitates “contactless contact” and flow, rather than stability of form.

Hence the skin of architecture is digitally modulated, it oscillates, and contains a spectrum of code-signal that organises the body and architectural spaces in a variety of ways. At this point we might ask the question “what body?” This biometricised body is one that is endlessly varying, in constant oscillation. “When a body is in motion, it does not coincide with itself. It coincides with its own transition: its own variation.” This modulation of the body and identity across distinct and simultaneous systems of reference is both utopian and in Foucault’s terminology “pitiless”. In other words, the utopia of the ubiquitous network has collapsed into the Baroque complexities and Gothic horrors of real space-time. “Utopia is a place outside all places, but it is a place where I will have a body without body, a body that will be beautiful, limpid, transparent, luminous, speedy and colossal in its power and infinite in its duration”. This utopian body needs grounding, it needs to be contained again in the body that is “never under different skies” but an “absolute place, the little fragment of space where [one is], literally embodied”.

4. CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A NEW ONTOLOGY AND AESTHETICS OF RADIO
“Bringing abundant computation and communication, as pervasive and free as air, naturally into people’s lives.” MIT Project Oxygen

When the city follows the new principles of non-classical radio, what does that mean for our understanding of architecture? While there has been much discussion about the nature of spectacle and subjectification (in relation to the visual concept of the city), there are many questions that arise from the perspective of considering the city under the logic of touch, nearfield radio frequency and contactless contact. We would therefore need to develop an aesthetics, an ontology and a politics that has to do with wireless. There are a range of issues emerging from this reconceptualisation, and we need to construct a language in order to do this.

“Touch” is a research project that investigates Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things. They are developing applications and services that allow people to interact with everyday objects and situations through their mobile devices. More importantly, the work of Touch researcher Timo Arnall points to the kind of aesthetic framework that helps articulate many of the things we are signalling in this position paper. His work “explores the visual link between information and physical things, specifically around the emerging use of the mobile phone to interact with RFID or NFC”. Specifically, his work concerns the ways we might visually link information and physical things. His work asks how we can represent objects that have a digital function, information or history beyond it’s physical form. The dotted line stands as one such exemplar in the visual language and aesthetics of touch.

For us, the use of the dotted line is the equivalent to what Dziga Vertov’s “Man With a Movie Camera” was for Walter Benjamin in his search for an aesthetic approach and visual vocabulary that embodied the prosthetic eye — that 20th century body pulled apart, the mobile eye that could go anywhere. The dashed line that Arnall and his colleagues identify in a range of visual strategies, points to the lightness of touch that is part of the emergent wireless city . Radio frequencies are what cohere the mobile architectural body (an assemblage of material/immaterial, hard/soft etc) in place. It is also about the pernicious ubiquity of radio frequencies in everyday accessories of mobility: the car key, e-tag, bus card, and money cards that give us access (or not) to networks of data, objects, mobility, and highways. These diagrammatics and aesthetics refer to the ways we enter physical and data portals, pass through the threshold, open the door, enter the passenger section and so on.

The logic of access, control, tracking, and supply chain management grant unique identifiers by way of radio waves that define new shapes for the city. They promise synchronisation, anti-collision protocols, and “automatic” identification on the fly. The signal spectrum, coding and modulation procedures fold into haptic relations and new possibilities of touch.

Even when you’re not touching something you’re touching something. There’s a contact of some sort, even if it’s “contactless contact”. Within the parameters of the new control society we need to focus on the politics of touch. It is a politics and an aesthetics that has moved off the body (without organs) and shifted elsewhere. The sources of control happen within the realm of touch, and we need to think about this in terms of the politics of this new aesthetics.

Bounded by skin and under the same regulatory sky, biometrics inserts the body into the distributed database, and in so doing pushes the edge of the network to a new threshold. This, coupled with the increasing granularity of biographic data, emerges as the final loop in the network’s logic and actions. If biometrics capture the body, biographics captures its actions, its extensions across time and space.

A number of thematics emerge: the inadvertancy of the network; the ineluctable nature of data transfer; distributed processing; compulsory dialogue in the background of the u-city. These machinic communications are largely unseen, unknown, but not unfelt. This thresholding activity is happening all around us and all the time. It is registered on bodies with the intensity of the communications handshake. The lightness of touch and the intimacy of radio we are invoking here is highly charged.  It is almost a sexual intimacy that emerges between you and the things in your pocket being read by a machine. All of these things are associated with closeness, personalisation, the touching of the senses, the penetration of a vibration that literally goes inside your body.

In the emergent wireless city, we are increasingly enmeshed in the informational loops of feedback and emergence that modulate boundaries between bodies and objects/spaces of all sorts. The wireless city is organised into differential degrees of speed and intensity that invoke new techno-social relationships between embodiment and information, between bodies and borders. As we pass through the thresholds of networked life, we become an organism of that ecology. In this seamless world of ubiquitous computing, there are no more borders, only thresholds of intensity.

REFERENCES

[1] Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, Harry Lewis, Blown to Bits: Your Life Liberty and Happiness after the Digital Explosion, Addison Wesley, Boston, 2008.

[2] Arakawa & Gins, Architectural Body, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.

[3] Arnell Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/11/graphic-language-for-touch and http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/the-dashed-line-in-use

[4] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale, New Haven, 2006.

[5] Boyer, M. Christine, Cybercities, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996

[6] Klaus Finkenzeller RFID Handbook: Fundamentals and Applications in Contactless Smart Cards and Identification. John Wiley & Sons, 2003

[7] Friedberg Anne, ‘The Virtual Window: from Alberti to Microsoft, Cambridge:MIT Press, 2006.

[8] Adam Greenfield, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, New Riders Publishing, 2006.

[9] Andrew Lippman and David Reed, “Viral Communications”, Media Laboratory Research, 2003.

[10] Manning Erin, The Politics of Touch” Minneapolis: MInnesota UP, 2007.

[11] Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Penguin Press, New York, 2008.

[12] David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Times Books, New York, 2007.

0. Introduction

If we follow the line of much literature surrounding airports and urban mobility, the emphasis often falls on the fact that these spaces are designed to handle the mega-scale and super-human pace of mass transit. Airports have rightly been associated with velocity, as zones of rapid movement managed by enormous processing systems that guide bodies and things in transit (Pascoe; Pearman; Koolhaas; Gordon; Fuller & Harley). Yet this emphasis tends to ignore the spectrum of tempos and flows that are at play in airport terminals — from stillness to the much exalted hyper-rapidity of mobilized publics in the go-go world of commercial aviation.

In this photo essay I’d like to pull a different thread and ask whether it’s possible to think of aeromobility in terms of “uneven, differential mobility” (Bissell 280). What would it mean to consider waiting and stillness as forms of bodily engagement operating over a number of different scales and temporalities of movement and anticipation, without privileging speed over stillness? Instead of thinking mobility and stillness as diametrically opposed, can we instead conceive of them as occupying a number of different spatio-temporal registers in a dynamic range of mobility?

The following is a provisional “visual ethnography” constructed from photographs of air terminal light boxes I have taken over the last five years (in Amsterdam, London, Chicago, Frankfurt, and Miami). Arranged into a “taxonomy of differentiality”, each of these images comes from a slightly different angle, mode or directionality. Each view of these still images displayed in billboard-scale light-emitting devices suggests that there are multiple dimensions of visuality and bodily experience at play in these image-objects.

The airport is characterized by an abundance of what appears to be empty space. This may be due to the sheer scale of mass transport, but it also arises from a system of active and non-active zones located throughout contemporary terminals. This photo series emphasises the “emptiness” of these overlooked left-over spaces that result from demands of circulation and construction.

1. We Move the World

To many travellers, airport gate lounges and their surrounding facilities are loaded with a variety of contradictory associations and affects. Their open warehouse banality and hard industrial sterility tune our bodies to the vast technical and commercial systems that are imbricated through almost every aspect of contemporary everyday life.

Here at the departure gate the traveller’s body comes to a moment’s rest. They are granted a short respite from the anxious routines of check in, body scans, security, information processing, passport scanning, itineraries, boarding procedures and wayfaring the terminal. The landside processing system deposits them at this penultimate point before final propulsion into the invisible airways that pipe them into their destination. We hear the broadcasting of boarding times, check-in times, name’s of people that break them away from stillness, forcing people to move, to re-arrange themselves, or to hurry up. Along the way the passenger encounters a variety of techno-spatial experiences that sit at odds with the overriding discourse of velocity, speed and efficiency that lie at the centre of our social understanding of air travel. The airline’s phantasmagorical projections of itself as guarantor and enabler of mass mobilities coincides uncomfortably with the passenger’s own wish-fulfilment of escape and freedom.

In this we can agree with the designer Bruce Mau when he suggests that these projection systems, comprised of “openings of every sort — in schedules, in urban space, on clothes, in events, on objects, in sightlines — are all inscribed with the logic of the market” (Mau 7). The advertising slogans and images everywhere communicate the dual concept that the aviation industry can deliver the world to us on time while simultaneously porting us to any part of the world still willing to accept Diners, VISA or American Express. At each point along the way these openings exhort us to stop, to wait in line, to sit still or to be patient. The weird geographies depicted by the light boxes appear like interpenetrating holes in space and time. These travel portals are strangely still, and only activated by the impending promise of movement.

Be still and relax. Your destination is on its way.

2. Attentive Attention

Alongside the panoramic widescreen windows that frame the choreography of the tarmac and flight paths outside, appear luminous advertising light boxes. Snapped tightly to grid and locked into strategic sightlines and thoroughfares, these wall pieces are filled with a rotating menu of contemporary airport haiku and ersatz Swiss graphic design.

Mechanically conditioned air pumped out of massive tubes creates the atmosphere for a very particular amalgam of daylight, tungsten, and fluorescent light waves. Low-oxygen-emitting indoor plants are no match for the diesel-powered plant rooms that maintain the constant flow of air to every nook and cranny of this massive processing machine. As Rem Koolhaas puts it, “air conditioning has launched the endless building. If architecture separates buildings, air conditioning unites them” (Koolhaas). In Koolhaas’s lingo, these are complex “junkspaces” unifying, colliding and coalescing a number of different circulatory systems, temporalities and mobilities.

Gillian Fuller reminds us there is a lot of stopping and going and stopping in the global circulatory system typified by air-terminal-space.

From the packing of clothes in fixed containers to strapping your belt – tight and low – stillness and all its requisite activities, technologies and behaviours are fundamental to the ‘flow’ architectures that organize the motion of the globalizing multitudes of today (Fuller, “Store” 63).

It is precisely this functional stillness organised around the protocols of store and forward that typifies digital systems, the packet switching of network cultures and the junkspace of airports alike.

In these zones of transparency where everything is on view, the illuminated windows so proudly brought to us by J C Decaux flash forward to some idealized moment in the future. In this anticipatory moment, the passenger’s every fantasy of in-flight service is attended to. The ultimate in attentiveness (think dimmed lights, soft pillows and comfy blankets), this still image is captured from an improbable future suspended behind the plywood and steel seating available in the moment —more reminiscent of park benches in public parks than the silver-service imagined for the discerning traveller.

3. We Know Chicago

Self-motion is itself a demonstration against the earth-binding weight of gravity. If we climb or fly, our defiance is greater (Appleyard 180).

The commercial universe of phones, cameras, computer network software, financial instruments, and an array of fancy new gadgets floating in the middle of semi-forgotten transit spaces constitutes a singular interconnected commercial organism. The immense singularity of these claims to knowledge and power loom solemnly before us asserting their rights in the Esperanto of “exclusive rollover minutes”, “nationwide long distance”, “no roaming charges” and insider local knowledge. The connective tissue that joins one part of the terminal to a commercial centre in downtown Chicago is peeled away, revealing techno-veins and tendrils reaching to the sky. It’s a graphic view that offers none of the spectacular openness and flights of fancy associated with the transit lounges located on the departure piers and satellites.  Along these circulatory ribbons we experience the still photography and the designer’s arrangement of type to attract the eye and lure the body. The blobby diagonals of the telco’s logo blend seamlessly with the skyscraper’s ribbons of steel, structural exoskeleton and wireless telecommunication cloud.

In this plastinated anatomy, the various layers of commercially available techno-space stretch out before the traveller. Here we have no access to the two-way vistas made possible by the gigantic transparent tube structures of the contemporary air terminal. Waiting within the less travelled zones of the circulatory system we find ourselves suspended within the animating system itself. In these arteries and capillaries the flow is spread out and comes close to a halt in the figure of the graphic logo. We know Chicago is connected to us.

In the digital logic of packet switching and network effects, there is no reason to privilege the go over the stop, the moving over the waiting. These light box portals do not mirror our bodies, almost at a complete standstill now. Instead they echo the commercial product world that they seek to transfuse us into. What emerges is a new kind of relational aesthetics that speaks to the complex corporeal, temporal, and architectural dimensions of stillness and movement in transit zones: like “a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts” (Bourriaud 11).

4. Machine in the Café

Is there a possible line of investigation suggested by the fact that sound waves become visible on the fuselage of jet planes just before they break the sound barrier? Does this suggest that the various human senses are translatable one into the other at various intensities (McLuhan 180)?

Here, the technological imaginary contrasts itself with the techno alfresco dining area enclosed safely behind plate glass. Inside the cafes and bars, the best businesses in the world roll out their biggest guns to demonstrate the power, speed and scale of their network coverage (Remmele). The glass windows and light boxes “have the power to arrest a crowd around a commodity, corralling them in chic bars overlooking the runway as they wait for their call, but also guiding them where to go next” (Fuller, “Welcome” 164). The big bulbous plane sits plump in its hangar — no sound barriers broken here. It reassures us that our vehicle is somewhere there in the network, resting at its STOP before its GO. Peeking through the glass wall and sharing a meal with us, this interpenetrative transparency simultaneously joins and separates two planar dimensions — machinic perfection on one hand, organic growth and death on the other (Rowe and Slutsky; Fuller, “Welcome”).

Bruce Mau is typical in suggesting that the commanding problem of the twentieth century was speed, represented by the infamous image of a US Navy Hornet fighter breaking the sound barrier in a puff of smoke and cloud. It has worked its way into every aspect of the design experience, manufacturing, computation and transport.

But speed masks more than it reveals. The most pressing problem facing designers and citizens alike is growth — from the unsustainable logic of infinite growth in GDP to the relentless application of Moore’s Law to the digital networks and devices that define contemporary society in the first world. The shift of emphasis from speed to growth as a time-based event with breaking points and moments of rupture has generated new possibilities. “Growth is nonlinear and unpredictable … Few of us are ready to admit that growth is constantly shadowed by its constitutive opposite, that is equal partners with death” (Mau 497).

If speed in part represents a flight from death (Virilio), growth invokes its biological necessity. In his classic study of the persistence of the pastoral imagination in technological America, The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx charted the urge to idealize rural environments at the advent of an urban industrialised America. The very idea of “the flight from the city” can be understood as a response to the onslaught of technological society and it’s deathly shadow. Against the murderous capacity of technological society stood the pastoral ideal, “incorporated in a powerful metaphor of contradiction — a way of ordering meaning and value that clarifies our situation today” (Marx 4).

5. Windows at 35,000 Feet

If waiting and stillness are active forms of bodily engagement, we need to consider the different layers of motion and anticipation embedded in the apprehension of these luminous black-box windows. In The Virtual Window, Anne Friedberg notes that the Old Norse derivation of the word window “emphasizes the etymological root of the eye, open to the wind. The window aperture provides ventilation for the eye” (103).

The virtual windows we are considering here evoke notions of view and shelter, open air and sealed protection, both separation from and connection to the outside. These windows to nowhere allow two distinct visual/spatial dimensions to interface, immediately making the visual field more complex and fragmented. Always simultaneously operating on at least two distinct fields, windows-within-windows provide a specialized mode of spatial and temporal navigation.  As Gyorgy Kepes suggested in the 1940s, the transparency of windows “implies more than an optical characteristic; it implies a broader spatial order. Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations” (Kepes 77).

The first windows in the world were openings in walls, without glass and designed to allow air and light to fill the architectural structure. Shutters were fitted to control air flow, moderate light and to enclose the space completely. It was not until the emergence of glass technologies (especially in Holland, home of plate glass for the display of commercial products) that shielding and protection also allowed for unhindered views (by way of transparent glass). This gives rise to the thesis that windows are part of a longstanding architectural/technological system that moderates the dual functions of transparency and separation.

With windows, multi-dimensional planes and temporalities can exist in the same time and space — hence a singular point of experience is layered with many other dimensions. Transparency and luminosity “ceases to be that which is perfectly clear and becomes instead that which is clearly ambiguous” (Rowe and Slutsky 45). The light box air-portals necessitate a constant fluctuation and remediation that is at once multi-planar, transparent and “hard to read”. They are informatic.

From holes in the wall to power lunch at 35,000 feet, windows shape the manner in which light, information, sights, smells, temperature and so on are modulated in society. “By allowing the outside in and the inside out, [they] enable cosmos and construction to innocently, transparently, converge” (Fuller, “Welcome” 163). Laptop, phone, PDA and light box point to the differential mobilities within a matrix that traverses multiple modes of transparency and separation, rest and flight, stillness and speed.

6. Can You Feel It?

Increasingly the whole world has come to smell alike: gasoline, detergents, plumbing, and junk foods coalesce into the catholic smog of our age (Illich 47).

In these forlorn corners of mobile consumption, the dynamic of circulation simultaneously slows and opens out. The surfaces of inscription implore us to see them at precisely the moment we feel unseen, unguided and off-camera. Can you see it, can you feel it, can you imagine the unimaginable, all available to us on demand? Expectation and anticipation give us something to look forward to, but we’re not sure we want what’s on offer.

Air travel radicalizes the separation of the air traveller from ground at one instance and from the atmosphere at another. Air, light, temperature and smell are all screened out or technologically created by the terminal plant and infrastructure. The closer the traveller moves towards stillness, the greater the engagement with senses that may have been ignored by the primacy of the visual in so much of this circulatory space. Smell, hunger, tiredness, cold and hardness cannot be screened out.

In this sense, the airplanes we board are terminal extensions, flying air-conditioned towers or groundscrapers jet-propelled into highways of the air. Floating above the horizon, immersed in a set of logistically ordained trajectories and pressurized bubbles, we look out the window and don’t see much at all. Whatever we do see, it’s probably on the screen in front of us which disconnects us from one space-time-velocity at the same time that it plugs us into another set of relations. As Koolhaas says, junkspace is “held together not by structure, but by skin, like a bubble” (Koolhaas). In these distended bubbles, the traveler momentarily occupies an uncommon transit space where stillness is privileged and velocity is minimized. The traveler’s body itself is “engaged in and enacting a whole kaleidoscope of different everyday practices and forms” during the course of this less-harried navigation (Bissell 282).

7. Elevator Musics

The imaginary wheel of the kaleidoscope spins to reveal a waiting body-double occupying the projected territory of what appears to be a fashionable Miami. She’s just beyond our reach, but beside her lies a portal to another dimension of the terminal’s vascular system.

Elevators and the networks of shafts and vents that house them, are to our buildings like veins and arteries to the body — conduits that permeate and structure the spaces of our lives while still remaining separate from the fixity of the happenings around them (Garfinkel 175).

The terminal space contains a number of apparent cul-de-sacs and escape routes. Though there’s no background music piped in here, another soundtrack can be heard. The Muzak corporation may douse the interior of the elevator with its own proprietary aural cologne, but at this juncture the soundscape is more “open”. This functional shifting of sound from figure to ground encourages peripheral hearing, providing “an illusion of distended time”, sonically separated from the continuous hum of “generators, ventilation systems and low-frequency electrical lighting” (Lanza 43).

There is another dimension to this acoustic realm: “The mobile ecouteur contracts the flows of information that are supposed to keep bodies usefully and efficiently moving around … and that turn them into functions of information flows — the speedy courier, the networking executive on a mobile phone, the scanning eyes of the consumer” (Munster 18).

An elevator is a grave says an old inspector’s maxim, and according to others, a mechanism to cross from one world to another. Even the quintessential near death experience with its movement down a long illuminated tunnel, Garfinkel reminds us, “is not unlike the sensation of movement we experience, or imagine, in a long swift elevator ride” (Garfinkel 191).

8. States of Suspension

The suspended figure on the screen occupies an impossible pose in an impossible space: half falling, half resting, an anti-angel for today’s weary air traveller. But it’s the same impossible space revealed by the airport and bundled up in the experience of flight. After all, the dimension this figures exists in — witness the amount of activity in his suspension — is almost like a black hole with the surrounding universe collapsing into it. The figure is crammed into the light box uncomfortably like passengers in the plane, and yet occupies a position that does not exist in the Cartesian universe.

We return to the glossy language of advertising, its promise of the external world of places and products delivered to us by the image and the network of travel. (Remmele) Here we can go beyond Virilio’s vanishing point, that radical reversibility where inside and outside coincide. Since everybody has already reached their destination, for Virilio it has become completely pointless to leave: “the inertia that undermines your corporeity also undermines the GLOBAL and the LOCAL; but also, just as much, the MOBILE and the IMMOBILE” (Virilio 123; emphasis in original).

In this clinical corner of stainless steel, glass bricks and exit signs hangs an animated suspension that articulates the convergence of a multitude of differentials in one image. Fallen into the weirdest geometry in the world, it’s as if the passenger exists in a non-place free of all traces. Flows and conglomerates follow one another, accumulating in the edges, awaiting their moment to be sent off on another trajectory, occupying so many spatio-temporal registers in a dynamic range of mobility.

References

Appleyard, Donald. “Motion, Sequence and the City.” The Nature and Art of Motion. Ed. Gyorgy Kepes. New York: George Braziller, 1965.

Adey, Peter. “If Mobility Is Everything Then It Is Nothing: Towards a Relational Politics of (Im)mobilities.” Mobilities 1.1 (2006): 75–95.

Bissell, David. “Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities.” Mobilities 2.2 (2007): 277-298.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Paris: Les Presses du Reel, 2002.

Classen, Constance. “The Deodorized City: Battling Urban Stench in the Nineteenth Century.” Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism. Ed. Mirko Zardini. Baden: Lars Muller Publishers, 2005. 292-322.

Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge: MIT P, 2006.

Fuller, Gillian, and Ross Harley. Aviopolis: A Book about Airports. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2005.

Fuller, Gillian. “Welcome to Windows: Motion Aesthetics at the Airport.” Ed. Mark Salter. Politics at the Airport. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2008.

–––. “Store Forward: Architectures of a Future Tense”. Ed. John Urry, Saolo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring. Air Time Spaces: Theory and Method in Aeromobilities Research. London: Routledge, 2008. 63-75.

Garfinkel, Susan. “Elevator Stories: Vertical Imagination and the Spaces of Possibility.” Up Down Across: Elevators, Escalators, and Moving Sidewalks. Ed. Alisa Goetz. London: Merrell, 2003. 173-196.

Gordon, Alastair. Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure. New York: Metropolitan, 2004.

Illich, Ivan. H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of Stuff. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985.

Kepes, Gyorgy. Language of Vision. New York: Dover Publications, 1995 (1944).

Koolhass, Rem. “Junkspace.” Content. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.btgjapan.org/catalysts/rem.html›.

Lanza, Joseph. “The Sound of Cottage Cheese (Why Background Music Is the Real World Beat!).” Performing Arts Journal 13.3 (Sep. 1991): 42-53.

McLuhan, Marshall. “Is It Natural That One Medium Should Appropriate and Exploit Another.” McLuhan: Hot and Cool. Ed. Gerald Emanuel Stearn. Middlesex: Penguin, 1967. 172-182.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. London: Oxford U P, 1964.

Mau, Bruce. Life Style. Ed. Kyo Maclear with Bart Testa. London: Phaidon, 2000.

Munster, Anna. Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics. New England: Dartmouth, 2006.

Pascoe, David. Airspaces. London: Reaktion, 2001.

Pearman, Hugh. Airports: A Century of Architecture. New York: Abrams, 2004.

Remmele, Mathias. “An Invitation to Fly: Poster Art in the Service of Civilian Air Travel.” Airworld: Design and Architecture for Air Travel. Ed. Alexander von Vegesack and Jochen Eisenbrand. Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 2004. 230-262.

Rowe, Colin, and Robert Slutsky. Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal. Perspecta 8 (1963): 45-54.

Virilio, Paul. City of Panic. Trans. Julie Rose. Oxford: Berg, 2005.

THEY’RE IN OUR POCKETS, THEY’RE IN OUR HOMES, IN OUR CARS, AND THEY’RE ALL AROUND OUR URBAN ENVIRONMENTS. IT’S HARD TO THINK OF A METROPOLITAN EXPERIENCE THAT ISN’T THOROUGHLY OVERLAYED AND INTERLACED WITH A HUGE VARIETY OF DIFFERENTLY SCALED SCREENS. THIS IS WHAT FIRST CAUGHT MY EYE AND LED ME TO ATTEND THE URBAN SCREENS EVENT IN MELBOURNE AT THE START OF OCTOBER 2008. HOW DO WE DEAL WITH ALL THESE IMAGE SURFACES AND NETWORKED DISPLAYS THAT TYPIFY THE PRESENT GLOBAL PUBLIC SPHERE?

When we think urban screens (as opposed to sub-urban, ex-urban or non-urban ones?), we typically conjure images of oversized projections strangely attached to Gehry-like buildings in hypermodern CBD plazas. Think Seoul. Think Times Square. Think Fed Square.

While the Bladerunner-scale of the moving image takes hold of our imagination and tends to hog centrestage, Urban Screens Melbourne 08 took a broader and more expansive view of the spatial impact of screen technologies in contemporary culture and cities. Urban screens can be seen as providing a new digital layer to the city, an augmented media space that folds and flexes its way into and out of contemporary urban experience. It was the event’s engagement with this broad field that made Melbourne’s Urban Screens 08 such an engrossing and stimulating event.

The third in an ongoing series of international projects (the first was held in Amsterdam in 2005 and the second in Manchester in 2007; RT84, p30), the Melbourne program focused its conference and related events around the theme of “Mobile Publics.” Consisting of a series of keynote addresses, panels and discussions, the conference provided a framework for the presentation of a wide variety of media works presented in public urban contexts. This multimedia program was developed by Mirjam Struppek, who was one of the originators of the Urban Screens conference in Europe, and a founding member of the newly established Urban Screens international network. The Mobile Publics Conference was jointly developed and presented by Scott McQuire, Nikos Papastergiadis and Sean Cubitt from Melbourne University’s School of Culture and Communication, and set the intellectual scene for the event as a whole.

It could be argued that Fed Square houses one of the most successful implementations of a large screen in a public mall/piazza space. Filling up an entire city block, the square was purpose-built in 2002 as a public meeting place for Melbourne. As Kate Brennan (CEO of Federation Square) noted in her opening remarks and comments during later discussions, the Fed Square screen has been programmed by the authorities/managers of that space at the same time as it’s been claimed by the general public. We see this most clearly in the public assemblies and displays of mass emotion around major sporting events and significant moments in our collective political and social history—witness the crowds around this and other large public screens for the Prime Minister’s Apology.

But does this mean that these outdoor screening spaces are appropriate for contemporary artists and media makers? Through the multimedia program, film screenings and joint broadcasting initiative, curator Struppek strove to engage audiences in the social/technical space of the Fed Square environs. This extended from the main 65-square metre Barco screen in the outdoor plaza to numerous indoor and outdoor public LED screens, interactive ticker screens and temporary projection installations. The scale of the programming, and the scope of the works was impressive, though ultimately impossible (for this reviewer at least) to see it all.

The large screen space was used to engage passersby in contemporary interactive works such as MobiToss—MobiLenin by Jurgen Schelble from Finland, SEED by Canadian artists Napoleon Brousseau, Gabe Sawhney, Galen Scorer, Dave Reynolds and Adam Bacsalmasi, and Troy Innocent’s x-milieu abstract interactive installation.

This context and curatorial strategy for works presented in Melbourne is not at all like the infamous SPOTS media façade in Berlin which began showcasing large-scale interactive artworks in 2005. Although this ‘screen’ and others of its kind in Europe were (for some time at least) devoted exclusively to electronic art and experimental/alternative content, the standard large TV format of Fed Square provides a very different, and arguably more difficult set of constraints for artists to work with. Many of the attempts I witnessed to involve the public in this kind of interactive engagement were not particularly successful, and highlight the complexity of making urban scale works that connect with ‘random’ publics.

The interactive program was complemented by a series of projection-based works that played open-air-cinema style in the evening. This is where the scale of screen, urban context and bodily rhythms of the audience fell into sharpest relief. It is incredibly difficult for these works to grab the attention of the casual passerby who has to find an entry point and an acoustic space for linear works such as these. A bit like outdoor cinema for the avant-garde, these works struggled to connect with the mobile and disengaged audience. Without the organising principle of a public political or sporting event, our bodily engagement with this form of public/social space collapses.

A number of speakers at the conference demonstrated these dilemmas from a variety of angles, focusing in on the ways media, art and technology collide with the practical construction and experience of urban space. Saskia Sassen’s opening night keynote was one of the highlights. Her talk, entitled “Heavy Metal and Fuzzy Logic”, neatly contrasted the liquid potential of media with the solid steel structures of the heavy architecture so predominant in the BMX Theatre where the conference took place. Building upon much of the work she has done as an investigator into global city/global slum (she invented the term), Sassen opened up a series of questions that were echoed by other presenters throughout the conference.

ANAT Director Melinda Rackham gave a beautifully illustrated overview of the types of work that artists and designers have been producing for a wide range of public spaces over the past few years. This helped set the scene for more culturally specific presentations by Yoshitaka Mori on “MobileTechnology Culture and the Emergence of ‘Mobile’ Subjectivities” in Japan and Aaron Tan’s impressive discussion of recent work from his Hong Kong design firm RAD. Other international speakers (such as Andreas Broeckmann, who spoke on the “Intimate Publics. Memory, Performance, and Spectacle in Urban Environments”, particularly as it applies to the contemporary reconstruction of Berlin’s social/screen space), and Leon van Schaik’s talk, “Spatial Intelligence”, expanded the theoretical horizons of the conference. Case studies presented by Manray Hsu on the Taipei Biennial and Soh Yeong Roh’s presentation on “The City as Open Creative Platform” were also noteworthy contributions to the discussions.

While it was difficult as a conference participant visiting from another city to find time to see all of the works presented around Fed Square in a couple of days, the informative display in the foyer outside the main conference theatre gave an interesting snapshot of the innovative ways that artists, designers and architects are dealing with screenspaces in urban settings.

It was apt to stage Urban Screens 08 at Fed Square, itself something of a success story in the unfolding narrative of large scale screens in public spaces. This event offered a number of provocative and fruitful ways into thinking about the claims made on behalf of public screenspace, and will provide stimulus for local endeavours in this field for some time to come.

Urban Screens Melbourne 08: Mobile Publics, Federation Square, Oct 3-5 www.urbanscreens08.net; www.seedcollective.org

Ross Harley, Professor and Head of the School of Media Arts, College of Fine Arts, UNSW, is an artist, writer, and educator in new media and popular culture. His work crosses the bounds of media art practice, cinema, music, design, and architecture.

RealTime issue #89 Feb-March 2009 pg. 21

CONCEPT

VHS (originally short for Vertical Helical Scan, later Video Home System) was invented in the 1980s and allowed viewers to watch movies in their own home. It also gave us the technology to record and store content from broadcast television in a relatively cheap and accessible format. In 2007 the last Hollywood film was released on the medium, now mostly superceded by DVD. It is envisaged that VCR players will no longer be manufactured in the next twelve months. An era has ended. What was the VHS era?

The work of Ross Harley and Elvis Richardson has intersected in a number of exhibitions and publications dealing with questions of archives, storage, access and remix culture. They began to develop this new project as a way to bring together and investigate their respective VHS collections. Ross selectively recorded classic cinema [broadcast primarily on late night TV during the 1980/90’s] while Elvis amassed her collection by way of rubbish tips, garage sales and donations from friends in Canberra.

During their 3 week residency at Artspace Sydney, they developed a flexible and scalable installation that uses the physical materials and content of VHS cassettes. The work — entitled LOOM-O-RAMA — poetically meditates on the nature of change and the spatial dimension of video-time, collective memory, and pre-internet networks of exchange and distribution.

[See post to watch Flash video]

WHAT IS LOOM-O-RAMA ?

LOOM-O-RAMA pulls apart the VHS black box to weave new patterns and forms. The humble  VCR and VHS cassette have been disected and reconstituted.  During the Artspace residency, the artists sketched out their first concept/prototype: a video-loom that displays 20 minutes of VHS tape woven through a series of rotating spools attached to the wall. It evokes the memory of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage [whose Jacquard loom inspired Analytical Engine is the Victorian precursor to contemporary computing] while it connects with the experimentation of early video pioneers of the 1960s and 70s..

There are a number of designs the loom-like wall pieces can take. Borrowed and adapted from pop/op culture string art patterns, they reference craft and a kind of pre-digital aesthetic that can be scaled to cover even the largest of walls.

[See post to watch Flash video]

“VHS BOX“, Ross Harley and Elvis Richardson, colour video projection loop, 2008.

This ongoing series of video works reconstitutes the recorded material stored on their collections of VHS cassettes. The  content is then projected from the stripped-back wall-mounted VHS player onto another wall.  It can also be displayed on a monitor in the gallery space.

Harley and Richardson have recycled the redundant VHS cassette and playback machines. They have reinvested in the technological sublime promised by the system that first allowed the user control and feedback to the singular voice of broadcast television and cinema. This abondoned archive of memories and cultural manipulations, once stored with such pride in lounge rooms and TV cabinets across the world, now seems destined for dumpsters and landfill.

LOOM-O-RAMA reminds us of the ever-shrinking spiral of technological change and cultural obscelesence.

DERIVATIONS

LOOM: a frame or machine for interlacing at right angles two or more sets of threads or yarns to form a cloth; to appear in an impressively great or exaggerated form; to take shape as an impending occurrence.

LOOM is also a graphical adventure game originally released in 1990. It was both developed and published by Lucasfilm Games (now called LucasArts).

RAMA: from the Greek meaning ”that which is seen”

LUMA: the brightness portion of a video signal (”Y”); from the Latin word “lumen”, meaning radiance or light.