Re: nettime A miniature city waiting for attack (military urbanism)
Anyone interested in more Isr/Pal/global military urbanism questions (as per Brian Holmes's question, below), check out Bryan Finoki's recent news-grabs on Archinect: http://archinect.com/news/article.php?id=P23879_0_24_0_C http://archinect.com/news/article.php?id=P23708_0_24_0_C http://archinect.com/news/article.php?id=P23454_0_24_0_C And BLDGBLOG, of course, circles through that topic quite frequently... GM # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Psychovideography / 'Fortress Urbanism'
Psychovideography / 'Fortress Urbanism' [1] And so now New York City may attempt to install the total cinematic dream that has consumed London's private security firms for the past three decades, lost as they are in the Warholian ecstasy of filming every last centimeter of urban space, week after month after year, in what is surely the largest outright expenditure of cinematic ambition since perhaps since film began. That dream is known as the 'ring of steel' part of what I call 'military urbanism,' and what is referred to by Eric Lupton, in The New York Times, as 'fortress urbanism.' [2] 'For more than a century now,' we read, 'winged dragons flanking a shield have guarded each entrance to the City of London. In recent decades, this coat of arms has been reinforced with an elaborate anti-terrorism apparatus known as the ring of steel, consisting of concrete barriers, checkpoints and thousands of video cameras. City planners call the system, set up to defend against bombings by the Irish Republican Army, fortress urbanism.' It would be interesting to put 'fortress urbanism' into the context of utopia/dystopia [3], were that not 1) immediately obvious, and 2) less interesting than going further, into the realm of a generalized psychovideography of urban space. When Alison and Peter Smithson write that today our most obvious failure is the lack of comprehensibility in big cities, and that the very aim of urbanism is comprehensibility, we should perhaps reconsider the proclaimed purpose of public surveillance. The 24-hour closed-circuit voyeurism we impose upon the voidscape of empty car parks and untraveled motorways all around us is already a response to the directionless sprawl of 21st century space. As such, security cameras are the next phase of an advanced urban sociology, a vanguard attempt at understanding the limits, contents and directions of our cities; these cameras have nothing to do with security unless, of course, cognitive security is the issue at hand. But to introduce a new term here, we would find ourselves discussing not *psychogeography* that outdated fetish of a new crop of uninspired theses, from Princeton to the AA but *psychovideography*, the videographic psyche of the city. If security firms are the new providers of our urban unconscious, a hundred thousand endless films recording twenty-fours a day, indefinitely, then we should perhaps find that the outdated methodologies of the psychogeographers have hit an impasse. The geo- is now in the video-, as it were, and the -graphy survives just the same. Throw in some 24-hour psycho-, and we begin to see the city through the lens of an unacknowledged avant-garde: a subset of the film industry whose advance front has taken on the guise of security. The security industry, in this case, finds itself a (presumably unwitting) heir to John Cage. As Cage himself wrote, 'There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear.' London's private security firms could hardly agree more passionately and that surveillant/cinematic enthusiasm now spreads to New York and Chicago. [4] J.G. Ballard: 'He had spent the past days in a nexus of endless highways, a terrain of billboards, car marts and undisclosed destinations.' Iain Sinclair: 'The landscape is provisional.' The response: psychovideography. Endless filming. Install the umbrella of a total cinema and move freely into the next phase of urbanism: fortress urbanism. 'Security' is a red herring; we are witnessing instead the triumphal rearing-up of an unconscious cinematic fantasy. Accordingly, we find ourselves, everyday, living more fully than ever before in the utopia of someone else's inescapable, fortified film set. [5] The Department of Homeland Cinematics. + + + + + + [1] This piece was simultaneously posted to BLDGBLOG: http://bldgblog.blogspot.com, specifically http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2005/07/psychovideography-fortress-urbanism.html [2] See http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/weekinreview/24lipton.html [3] See http://dav.princeton.edu/news/2004/06/e7/new_theme_for.html [4] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.05/crime.html [5] See, for example, http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,63316,00.html # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime The car park theory of American takeover
A theory that has not found itself in wide circulation on nettime, and for an understandable reason, is the one about too many car parks: that is, the United States is full of parking lots - huge, paved, empty spaces built on a scale that's literally inhuman - and so the only possible response a person can have to them is to go to church and vote Republican... Which is to say that the landscape, the built American landscape, is so bleak, so out-of-scale when it comes to the human body, so incomprehensibly empty, that the existential void it induces forces you to look for a holy spot, a place with meaning, a place that makes sense. A psychogeographic centre of some sort. Someone like Jean Baudrillard comes to the United States and he sees Las Vegas and he sees the desert and he sees massive roadside shopping warehouses, and he interprets it all in terms of European secular Marxism, and so it's all a kind of giddy, Heideggerian earth-lessness - but an American doesn't do that. An American says, Holy Christ, this place sucks - I better go to church on Sunday, I'm lonely as hell. I'm lonely as fuck-all. I need to find God. The sheer quantity of parking lots - and highway flyovers and cloverleafs and feeder roads and subsidiary rural routes to nowhere and redundant overpasses circling dead cities is a major factor in the creation of the quote-unquote American personality. What it means to be American. In other words, you grow up in a paved void built on the scale of Hummers and SUVs and you start to think, Man, the world is total shite, the world needs more purpose, the world needs more spiritual depth - and you slowly morph into a fundamentalist Christian. It's a landscape problem. The American landscape creates a certain personality structure. It's intellectually exhilirating if you're prepared for it, if you've read Baudrillard or Ballard or Iain Sinclair or Mark Taylor or avant-garde architectural theory, but if you're illiterate and poor - ie., an American - you turn to God. And so of course Americans are right-wing Christian fundamentalists who vote for George W. Bush. What else are you going to do when you're surrounded by parking lots all day? And that's the car park theory of American takeover. Car parks - parking lots - are in the Republicans' direct interest. Build more of the fucking things and you'll stay in power for the rest of - for the life-span of concrete. And that's pretty fucking long, I think. I think it is. Build a landscape that has absolutely no meaning at all, a vast, abstract void of grey surfaces completely resistant to all but the most persistant of poetic or interpretive projects (ie., Baudrillard), and you're more or less generating religious fundamentalism. You haven't heard this theory for two reasons: 1) it's ridiculous, and 2) the Ouroborus effect, ie., there are so many fucking parking lots here you don't even notice them! And so you don't realize the effect they have on your cognitive relation to the world. You have to go out into the commuter belts of Surrey to find this in England, and not even there; JG Ballard doesn't know the half of it. Brasilia? Fuck off. The Taj Mahal of the future will not be the Guggenheim Bilbao but the parking lot of a Home Depot in rural Alabama. Parking lots are the Chartres's of tomorrow. And they're responsible for re-electing Bush. It's not Karl Rove - it's vast expanses of concrete. There are, of course, optimistic ways of recuperating this landscape into some kind of poetic project, ie., a Wordsworth - who was a dick, by the way - of the car parks instead of the hills, a Wordsworth of the overpass (but Ballard already fills that role), a John Muir of the Ikea multi-storey parking deck, but first of all rural Americans are too full of industrial pollutants, and therefore chromosomally mutating, to care, and they don't know who Wordsworth is! So they turn to God. They are mutating, and they turn to God. They walk to school - through a parking lot. If they walk to school. They go across town - driving past incredibly huge parking lots. If there is a town to cross. They look out their windows - at shimmering fields of poured concrete. And so they think secular modernism equals boring bullshit. They think secular modernism equals existential meaninglessness. But it's really just too many parking lots. As long as there are this many parking lots religious fundamentalists will always rule America. And you heard it hear first. It's the car park theory of American takeover. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
