week 4: mapping and pervasive computing

by justinsprague

1) This thought has sort of been on my mind while reading Dr. Farman’s second chapter, and not really in one particular spot, but I wonder, if our concept of space is being consistently more and more dependent on digital media to layer our surroundings, I’m interested to know how we internalize or have learned to cope with the lag time? This makes me think about when digital cameras were first becoming accessible and I got one (a real shitty one at that). I spent a day walking around my neighborhood looking through the camera, not taking pictures but observing the lag time between someone walking and when it would appear on my little camera screen. How are we responding to the changes in mapping? Like this example, or when the gps is ‘recalculating’ randomly when driving, or when Dr. Farmans phone showed him a half mile from where he’s was at. What’s going on during that time (I suppose this is kind of oddly speaking back to Thrift as well as Sassen’s analytic borderlands)?

2) Sassen states, “The complex imbrications between the digital (as well as the global) and the nondigital bring with them a destabilizing of older hierarchies of scale and often dramatic rescalings. As the national scale loses significance, along with the loss of key components of the nation-state’s formal authority over the national scale, other scales gain strategic importance” (187). While she is speaking more directly to nationhood boundaries and hierarchies when she speaks to the issue of scale, I’m more interested in this blurring of local and global when it comes specifically to cultural products. To pair her idea of the ‘far flung span’ of the local with Farman’s case study of the Baghdad San Francisco map, I couldn’t help but think of the YouTube sensation “gangnam style” right now. In particular, the evolution of meaning between localities and the simultaneous mapping of Beverly Hills on Gangnam Province to create parallels for foreigners to relate to the social commentary of the music video. When does it stop being ‘Korean’ and become simple a global cultural product?

2) Sletto notes that “desires, fantasies, and fears shape and are shaped by both the material and the symbolic pro-duction of landscapes. In turn, these subjectivities lead to the production of specific spatialities, for example, spatial imaginaries such as Rosa Emilia’s map of places she had never seen but which she nevertheless intensely desired to see” (446). While this article discusses the cultural implications of mapping physical boundaries when blurred with third world or indigenous cultures, specifically in regard to the hegemony or the first world/third world divide, I wonder how mythology works in this landscape. Can the mapping of ‘nonexistent’ places be a subversive act? Maybe I’m reaching here..

Practices of Representation: Mapping and Pervasive Computing

by jessicawalker

Questions for Week 4 – Practices of Representation: Mapping and Pervasive Computing

Does it matter that certain local identities can be both microenvironments and have global span if the individual isn’t aware of their role in either or both systems? Is the very fact that one doesn’t know their sited materially and their global span a function of dominate topographic logics?

Sassen’s analytical borderlands theory argues that the powerless can claim power though “presence in global cities..” Sletto notes how Trinidadian fisherman used narrative performance “to make sense of their own presents” (447). I’m wondering if we can read Sassen’s “presences” as being displayed through the preformative strategies highlighted by Sletto?  Does this ‘presence performance’ then get implicated in politics of representation? As in, do images of authenticity and identity made through either map production (Sletto) or new political actors in Global Cities (Sassen) get flattened for certain interests?

Often ‘space’ betrays its interconnections by presenting itself as singular.

The idea that disparate populations have always been connected by various needs is not a new one. Sassen points us to the idea that digitalization becomes  an increasingly important part of the spatialization processes that define on what terrain these interconnections occur. Sassen note that the number, intensity, and character of the interconnections have changed, not the interconnections themselves. I wonder how this can come to bear on Slettos piece, which argues that performance in map production reveals something new about space making. But indeed, if making space in the imagined is a valid form of space making then these women have been doing it for while its just Sletto’s presence changes the character of it. I think Sassen teaches us that the where we look for space is just as important has the how of making place into space.

Space: A infinite processes whereby interconnecting systems of global, social, cultural and embodied knowledges inform the value of place.

Place: Fixed in the material and moving freely.

Identity:  How you make sense of places’ relationships to the idea of individualism.

Mapping & Pervasive Computing

by robertjiles

Mapping & Pervasive Computing

 When I consider Sassen’s argument that, “Global cities become a sort of new frontier zone where an enormous mix of people converge and new forms of politics are possible. Those who lack power, those who are disadvantaged, outsiders, discriminated minorities, can gain presence in global cities, presence vis-à-vis power and presence vis-à-vis each other,” I wonder about homeless people in these global cities who can not afford rent, let alone access to digital networks. Can they gain power and presence in the same manner, or even visibility at the local level? It seems hard enough for homeless people to gain visibility in the material world as it is. I would think that being without the luxury of having a digital network at their disposal via pervasive computing or personal computing pushes them to the margins even further.

Sletto says, “Maps are representational objects intimately implicated in projects of place making, and therefore they are tools of power” (445). This is more of an observation of something that struck me as important than a question. Sletto’s colleagues in the review section of the article bring up this concern. I am interested in this idea of place making as a tangible tool of power in regards to land rights. Reading Sletto’s article made me think of participatory mapping as more or less a cathartic exercise with limitations in changing futures. The type of power that is achieved through the process seems ephemeral and lacking in the ability to disrupt existing power structures when the group engaging in participatory mapping has very limited or no access to material resources valued in the dominant culture.

Augmented space: is a material object on which information can be placed.

Place: space that can become personal by a person’s presence & memory.

Maps and Knowledge

by jessicavooris

1) In reading about the creation of the community maps I was thinking not only about the production of space, but also the production of knowledge.   In this article we see that one’s experience, age and gender are linked to whether or not you are viewed as having legitimate knowledge or not.  Farman discusses the ways in which certain objects are thought to be particular representations of knowledge, for example the objectivity and neutrality that maps are often imbued with, as well as the supposed objectivity of satellite cameras.  Both articles bring up questions around what knowledge is considered legitimate and who is thought to be knowledgeable about particular spaces.

2) Farman’s description of feeling lost when his phone wasn’t giving him correct information was something that resonated with me, albeit in a very different way.  I am a bird-watcher, and am used to being able to identify the birds around me, by sight and by call.  I have often described the sensation of being in a different country where I can’t identify the birds singing around me, as feeling “lost” or as though I have lost one of my senses.  Or as Farman puts it, “I feel as though one of my lenses to the world has been broken” (36). I can hear the birds, but I do not know what they are.  Knowing the wildlife around me is such a part of my experience of space, that it is jarring when I lose that connection to a place.  There is very specific knowledge and embodied experience that doesn’t get translated onto maps, as is shown by Sletto, which is why the process of map-making is as important as the map itself.  How can we better translate/represent these knowledges?

3) The reading on participatory map-making and the surveillance camera made me think of Collective Action For Safe Spaces (formerly Holla Back DC)’s map of street harassment.  Found here: http://www.collectiveactiondc.org/programs/view-the-street-harassment-map/.  Not only does it have pins at each of the spots where harassment has occurred, but also the personal experience/story of the person who experienced it.  Do any of you know of other collective maps out there?

Practices of Representation

by emilywarheit
  1. While mapmaking is a tool that can be used to exert power, it is a tool that requires some knowledge and skill to be effective. How does community mapmaking (involving people who are not trained cartographers) disrupt this power? Is it effective in actually empowering indigenous communities beyond their own boundaries?
  2. The idea of blank spots hiding secrets seems to grow more disturbing as cartographic information, on the whole, becomes more accessible through digital technology and particularly as user-created information becomes more prevalent. How does this greater volume and access to information change our relationship to “secrets” or spaces/places we don’t have access to?
  3. I was particularly interested in the two-way aspects of augmented spaces, and in the spread of surveillance from located only within government powers to being available to almost anyone, and the conception of surveillance as an economic necessity (asset protection) rather than strictly about power. Augmented reality, especially in examples from science fiction, seems to be driven by economics. Are there examples of digitally augmented space that do not serve a primarily economic function? Spaces that only transmit data to the person in the space seem to count under Manovich’s definition, but what about spaces that only transmit information from the space/person? Would any surveilled space be considered an augmented space?

Augmented space – a delimited area that incorporates the transmission of data into its physical  makeup.

Map – A document that indicates the physical location of objects in a space and aids in navigation.

More about maps

by felixburgos

1. Agency is one of the “concepts” that has called my attention in some of the readings this and last week. Although I don’t really dare to provide an explanation of what this concept means, I think that it is important to think of it as an essential part in the creation/reproduction of space. For example, in non-representational theory the human body and ‘non-human’ things are given equal weight. Therefore, the hybrid frameworks that are built within the relationship between the body and other objects troubles the idea of agency only being a human body characteristic. However, de Waal considers that agency is an essential component in the construction of the active citizenship within the context of sentient technologies constructing the public sphere. Agency also appears in Sletto’s article on participatory mapping. When discussing the way in which participatory mappings become part of emancipatory politics, the ethical connotation of agency becomes an inherent part of the human body and its experiences. Once again, agency seems to be very important when thinking about embodied spaces. What is the role of agency in the production of space? What are the implications of putting agency at the levels of the collective, the individual, or the relationship human body-object?

2. As I read the articles for this week, I cannot stop thinking of the notion of the ‘digital divide’. In short, the ‘digital divide’ signal the gap between those with access to Internet (or other types of ‘modern’ telecommunications) and those without them. In a sense, we are all ‘touched’ by different types of technologies as we walk around the city (augmented architectural spaces, Internet hot-spots, cyber cafes, etc.). Nonetheless, I think that the way mobile interfaces are changing our ways to perceive the changes in the city is mainly experimented by those who have access to those modern technologies. Let’s think for example of the new iPhone 5. Apple included in this device a map application that allows the user to explore streets from a “2D” and a “3D” perspective. We would all agree that the introduction of this technology modifies the way in which we move around urban spaces. However, this feature is only available in the USA. Other applications (such as traffic and turn-by-turn navigation) are available only in some countries (http://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/). This makes me think that the experience of urban life and the relationship with mobile interfaces in context-based. Although this might sound obvious, my only concern is that some of these theories might address only the experiences of specific parts of the population. Although Sletto’s article shows that participatory mapping gathers the experiences, modes of knowledge, and embodied spaces to create the map of an indigenous community in Venezuela, it is true that these types of experiences don’t take place everywhere. In a sense, I wonder how theories about sentinel cities, mobile interfaces, and mapping and representation of space account for those sectors in society that do not have a direct relationship with the use of technology.

3. Maybe this is related to the previous comments/questions. Sletto emphasizes that in the experience of participative mapping the sense of space is created within the interaction of physicality (that is identifying space through the walking), knowledge, imagination, exclusion, and power. Moreover, the conception of space in Kumarakapay is being determined by what is traditional (represented by the elder) and the modern (represented by the younger members of the community). I think that reconciling these production of spatialities is something that cannot be only determined by collective negotiation but by aspects of power differentials. As Sletto argues “cartography is intimately related with power” (p. 463) which differs from the conception of cartography as an art (or maybe cartography as a social event). If we moved participative mapping to the broader context of the city, what would determine the negotiation of the sense of space? Shall we consider that the mapped version of the city depends on the performance of different actors and their embodied actions within the space? In other words, is it possible to have a unique map of a city where a myriad of stories and embodied events take place?

Augmented Space:

Derived from the conception of Agumented Reality, in which technology “superimposes data onto an object (or a person) through a mobile device” (Farman, 2012), Augmented Space could be thought of those electronic spatial practices that provide, gather, and analyze data or information that cannot be retrieved only from sensorial perceptions, but also from mobile interfaces.

Virtuality: 

Out of the notion that the virtual sphere is the intangible, or a parallel (or false) reality, the Virtual Space must be considered as an extension of the real (or physical) space. As Farman (2012) explains, “the virtual serves as a way to understand the real and as a form of actualization that serves to layer and multiply an experience of that which is already realized” (p. 22). In other words, the virtual should be considered as a layered experience which is experimented through an embodied mobile practice. It is not that the virtual creates a world in which there are social interactions that are alien to actual ones.

Maps and Pervasive Computing (but mostly maps)

by cassygriff

1. In Dr. Farman’s book, he writes “I knew the map was representing my location incorrectly. I also knew the name of the nearest intersection. But, I had no idea where I was! Though I had barely taken a few steps outside of the hotel, I was already lost” (36). This made me think about that moment of realization of being lost and how mapping and mobile technology change the experience of that moment in terms of when it happens and how the realization hits. How do mobile devices and maps enforce that feeling? Do they? I’m thinking specifically about the moment when you realize your map is representing you incorrectly or your GPS loses its signal–you are suddenly aware that you don’t know where you are, but in relation to what? Would you have known you were lost if your device hadn’t essentially told you that you were? Also, how is our experience of location (and lost-ness) impacted by mobile maps? Do we experience being lost in a different way now?

2. This isn’t so much a question as a request. I’m really interested in the violence and the potential for reclamation that lies in cartography that Sletto discusses a number of times in his article. I wonder if we, as a class, could focus on this for a little while, examining the ways in which processes of mapping often necessitate a mapping over or onto that contributes to the erasure of certain people and places. I’d argue that Augmented Reality and Embodied Implacement are implicated in this process, especially if we use Dr. Farman’s example of the Streetmuseum application. What images are considered part of the history? Whose history? Why this image/event and not others? (Okay, it turned into a question…)

3. The questions of access and alternatives were a consistent thorn in my side as I read through this week’s texts. Who has access to mapping technologies? Who doesn’t? Why not? Why the primacy of maps? What alternatives to maps and mapping exist? How do people who do not or cannot use maps (paper maps, electronic maps) “map” space? Is it always necessary to do so? Is there some other form of knowledge that is more or differently useful than maps?

Body: This week, the body seems like a really locative technology–as in, it is through your body that you know where you are
Place: A space imbued with meanings that come both from the person inhabiting or considering that place, but also from outside, often larger institutional forces

Maps of Material Desires

by alyssaneuner

Sletto defines places as “existing only in someone’s imagination also are constitutive of landscapes and contribute to forming personal biographies (444).” The people who inhabit this space perform the identity of this space – they become the space itself. “Performers become the rightful ‘owners’ of the landscape (Rose 2000, 289) based in part on their embodiment of the landscape and on their relationship with the histories that are embedded within it and thus define it (444).”

(Manovich) I liked the idea of cellspace not only being important or visible to the individual user or holder of the device, but also to the passerby. This then makes the use of devices in public spaces a shared experience that connects two or more people together on the same playing field (if you will). It removes the idea of isolationist technology. This idea takes the physicality out of interaction, meaning, there is no need to acknowledge someone’s existence because they can experience your technology without you – although this is kind of invasive, but the more we start Googling in public on iPhones, tablets, laptops, the more we unwillingly share with those around us.

Sassen makes a direct statement about my issues with Requiem for Detroit and gentrification as a whole – the displacement of lower income residents. These upper class residents are moving into these areas and literally displacing individuals of lower income families. As I mentioned the gentrification in Brooklyn (and even Detroit with the emergence of these white people who have places to fall back to if all crops fail in Detroit) has become a major point of contention for me. This is also emphasized in the ways in which cities are mapped out and described. By the migration of the upper classes into areas and the dislocation of the lower income families and then the subsequent borders that develop.

Weekly Post 4

by alexcarson

1: With regards to the Sassen reading, I’m wondering just how much digitization and globalization have changed this “citcuit-based” means of analyzing the mapping the movement of people, economic goods, culture, and other factors between areas. I suspect that a map of this variety could have been made prior to the rise of digital media, and that while these media may have hastened this sort of exchange I suspect it was always present if one looked for it. That it was not looked-for seems to be a shortcoming of theory and practice (which the author points out) rather than one of this method being necessary to analyzing a global, digital world. I suppose what I’m getting at is the question of how much the world really has “changed” from digital media and how much this “change” comes from theoretical progress as we take into account new perspectives as time goes on.

2: This is something of a tangential thought from the Sassen reading (strange to draw so much from the short article, but I admit I am a lover of maps and the concept of such), but in the article Sassen notes the loss of the nation-state’s authority over components of activity. This is a common assumption in the research of the digital and the global – that nation-states are ceding de facto, it not de jure, authority over people to the tides of the global world – but it’s one I don’t think should be taken for granted. Despite the global nature of the internet, much of its infrastructure remains housed in the United States and, thus, is subject to U.S. Laws. As an example, during the SOPA/PIPA debate, the passage of either of these laws would have subjected web users across the world to U.S laws as the American government pursued copyright violators. With this example, my question is as follows. Has digitization truly resulted in a ceding of national influence, or has it perhaps allowed nations to project their authority over a global scale and even further beyond its borders? What does this mean for the study of globalization, digitization, topography, and other similar fields?

3: While Farman’s discussion of the interactive museum application represents a clear mixture of the digital and the physical in a space, do spaces lose a connection to the digital for the lack of access to the internet or these mobile technologies? In a world where the same cables that bring us internet utilize the same sort of satellite communication as television and radio that are utilized even in areas which have little to no internet access, does the digital ever stop impacting the lives or the world of those living in the industrial west?

Terms:

Spacialization: From my reading, “spacialization” refers to the conception, creation, and interaction with various spaces, both physical and non-physical. In this week’s reading, spacialization seems to refer specifically to the construction and interpretation of digital space and how that space relates to and intermeshes with physical space.

Cartesian: While the term doesn’t explicitly come up in the readings, I’ve begun to take this as a term to follow in a way. I think Cartesian philosophy and how Lefebvre tries to relate it to physical space are important concepts here, as this idea of an imbedded space is almost exactly what he discussed in his book. The idea of embodying through certain items or behaviors and merging the physical and mental through meaning figures strongly into the ideas Lefebvre put forth.

Embodiment, Identiy, and Space

by jessicawalker

1. Indeed one toils with the incommensurability of relying on the predictable yet powerful refrain: “but you don’t know how it feels to be black.” This statement points to that essence, that Thing, that makes the Black experience a unique one. But the refrain also points to this notion of embodied practices and how we identify through our bodily engagement with the environment. Often, my bodily engagement with the environment has the weight of racism, and bigotry upon it as I enter a space I often assess how many people of color are in the space. The higher the number of people, the more I’ am inclined to think of and therefore interact in that space as safe. The higher the number also assumes that the space has seen black people before and therefore knows how to accommodate them. It is the case in most instances that spaces don’t accommodate the other so this is really good news. This is all to say we can’t underestimate the extent to which social relations founded on the logics of race might counter how we conceive of a social interaction or embodied digital practice to perform. For example, does cocooning always happen? Is there something to a Black sociality that sees the structuring and regulatory nature of cocooning (for that it most out rightly distinguishes between the public and private) as oppressive and not applicable to their embodied experience with public transportation? Mostly I’m thinking of those bodies who rather than invisabalize themselves through canoeing on public transportation make themselves hyper visible in the public space through the sharing (one would assume social to be at its base definition about sharing) their conversations, or as I have experienced music through phones.

2. So that “if embodiment depends on the cognitive unconscious” and embodiment is culturally contingent then would it follow that he unconscious also shares a symbiotic relationship with cultural context? Does ones cultural identity (made through social interaction) shape what one doesn’t notice as well as notices in a space? Can we see differently based on our embodied experiences? And if so can we say there is a collective unconscious? A way of seeing that is mediated through cultural conventions of how certain bodies are to act, and react in social spaces given that enough bodies share the same ‘vision’ from a certain social location (although the way their social interactions are performed is infinitely varied) can those bodies be said to share a collective unconscious?

3. What are the differences in operation between Thrift’s bare life and Farman’s sensory-inscribed? Does bar life mark the elements of a space that the sensory inscribed body practices being? Is bare life a domain of space that we move in and out of through sensory experience?

Embodiment: how we describe how our bodies feel in relationship to how others perceive our bodies to feel, act, and be.

Space: a term that helps us govern the ungovernable of experience.

The Production of Space

by jessicawalker
  1. Can we read space as The Sign. What would be its signified and signifier? Can we say that the social would be the signified and the material the signifier? Understanding that the signifier always shifts but in relation to what we perceive to be object or material in space? Is space the ultimate sign?
  2. In explaining how to explain the relationships between production and space Lefebvre says we must “on the one hand with the extreme formal abstraction of the logico-mathematical space, and on the other hand with the practico-sensory realm of social space..” (15). Is there a third conception of space that is not covered by the logics of the scientific and the social? Im thinking here of DuBois veiled consciousness or Fanons triply conscious body.

Embodiment: Our bodies relation to space.

Space: Is created by and with people through social relationships but is mostly understood through logics of the scientific and the social.

Embodiment, Identity, and Space

by tatianabenjamin

Space: Last week I discussed space as freedom to move. It is always in direction relationship to place. After this weeks readings I want  to add that space as movement is always in direction relation to culture. Space and its relationship to culture and place makes me think about the ways space creates new boundaries which makes me think about the transnational space as a cultural space.

1. In the ending of chapter 4 of Non-Representational Theory, Thrift discusses “new modes of embodiment” as a way to understand “that new spaces for action are continually being opened up as old ones are closed down” (88). Thrift’s statements challenged me to think about the ways in which transnationalism creates new forms of embodiment. What does mobility look like when we are no longer talking about cars but the ways in which bodies transgress nation-state boundaries through the internet and the travel of capital? This is seen through transnational bodies that can occupy multiple spaces through the physical and mental. These bodies are here in the U.S. but are simultaneously mentally abroad in their respective countries.

2. I found Farman’s statement, “though I was still utilizing my home computer to connect to friends and colleagues across vast distances, I found that I was far more eager to take advantage of proximity when connecting” (16). This stood out to me because it forced me to question this idea of “longing for proximity,” and the ways that it disturbs and/or complicates the distinctions between the virtual and actual. How is it possible that through my conversations on the phone I am simultaneously conceptualizing the pace and place of the person on the other side? I think this may speak to Thrift’s relationship between the cognitive and non cognitive but I am unsure.

3. This is not as much a question but a thought. This week’s readings in conjunction with last week’s reading made me think about the immigrant body  and the deported immigrant body and these individuals inscribe meaning into a place through their transnational activity. I was thinking about how the mental space is still able to connect their pre-deportee life with their post-deportation life. How are these individuals configuring their binational ties post deportation? Is this made possibly only through the mental space?

Week Three Response: Embodiment, Identity, and Space

by emilywarheit

1. What is meant by embodiment when we are talking about digital space? Where does the embodiment occur? Is it located in the actual physical body, in the digital space, or somewhere else?

2. It seems from various mentions in the two readings that we can theorize cars in a lot of different ways regarding space and place. The inside of a car can be a space or place, while simultaneously moving us from place to place. Can a car also be considered an extension of the body? How does this idea relate to viewing bodies as occupying space or even constituting a spaces or places in themselves?

3. I found the idea of “bare life” being comodified and reconstituted particularly disturbing (and recognizable in my own life), particularly in the fact that this gives those who market experiences an incentive to make attaining those experiences outside the capitalist system difficult or impossible. Thrift explains on page 74 that he does have hope in the form of performance and philosophy, but when thinking specifically about nature, what is the alternative to the complete monetization of “experiences”?

Embodiment – experiencing phenomena through physical sensations and action.

Space – an area, delimited in some way, where social interaction can occur.

Place – a location or space endowed with meaning.

Embodiment, Mobility, Temporality

by melissarogers

Definitions:

Space: that which we create in and around us by virtue of our bodily presence, and by virtue of our relationship with other bodies (including objects).

Place: those specific spaces to which we are affectively attached, bound, or oriented toward by virtue of meaningful relationships with other bodies (including objects).

Identity: the enduring bodily and psychic perception and conception of self across spacetime(s), including the extension of self through cultural tools and technologies.

Questions:

1. While reading Jason Farman’s chapter “Embodiment and the Mobile Interface” and Nigel Thrift’s chapters “Still Life in Nearly Present Time” and “Driving in the City,” I found myself returning to Donna Haraway’s concept of naturecultures, a way to think about the mutual imbrication or co-constitution of “nature” and “culture” and thereby avoid the binary between the two, which serves to reinforce the fallacy of human exceptionalism (and, possibly, technological determinism). Farman’s attempt to bridge phenomenology and poststructuralism (19), like Thrift’s impulse to move away from de Certeau’s focus on inscription and purely linguistic ways of thinking (77), seem aligned not only with Haraway’s thinking but also with the constellation of theoretical frameworks that have come to be described as “new materialism.” What could be gained by situating these authors’ theoretical moves more explicitly within the camp of new materialism, as indistinct or as shifting as its borders and boundaries may be? Conversely, is there a reason for not doing so?
2. Throughout the Thrift chapters, I had to resist the urge to start thinking about disability as a way to conceptualize (non)normative ways of being in time and space. In trying to think about speeded-up or slowed-down modes embodiment, I was surprised that Thrift does not consider drugs and other substances that affect our perception of present-ness and presence, especially given his emphasis on mysticism and the implication of drugs in both licit and “underground” capitalist economies. It seems that substance use and abuse would factor heavily into any consideration of biopolitics.
3. My final question is prompted by a somewhat casual statement by Thrift regarding the spatial equivalent of anachronism (77). Despite footnoting this concept, he does not attempt to define or elaborate on it, yet for me it sparked a series of questions about obsolescence and its relationship to embodiment and spacetime. Do obsolete spaces exist in anything other than a theoretical way? In brainstorming this concept with a friend, we immediately thought of ARPAnet, the military precursor to the internet. How are obsolete spaces practiced or produced? What would it feel like to inhabit one or sense one? Can spaces be obsolete it they still function in some way or serve a purpose? (My first thought was of an outhouse—they still exist and they still get the job done, but in the popular imaginary they are at worst obsolete and at best rustic.) “Driving in the City” also prompted me to think about certain cars as obsolete technological spaces. My 1989 Jeep Cherokee, for example, still runs but is on its way to the scrap heap, its working parts to be redistributed among other soon-to-be obsolete cars. And the growing prevalence of software-regulated engines that Thrift points to means that certain humans and their skill sets, like my stepfather’s ability to keep my old car running, will soon become obsolete as well. I am fascinated by obsolescence, age, and its ripple effects throughout economies and ecologies unfolding in real (or nearly present) time.

Image: Dennou Coil, an anime in which pervasive mobile technology leads to networked cities in which Saatchi, the pink machine pictured, is responsible for updating (thereby destroying) “obsolete” spaces.

Week 3 post: Farman and Thrift

by justinsprague

1) Now this question may seem a bit tangential, but it is sitting at the back of my mind, so why not? Farman states that “our bodies, our spaces, and our technologies are all formed within culture and subsequently work within the bounds of culture to transform it. Culture is reworked from the inside by embodied interactors designing and repurposing technology. Within this situation, technology often serves as a catalyst for the massive cultural and embodied transformations that come to define an era” (25). If embodiment is so dependent on culture, I wonder what ways that culture becomes present in the crafting of technology to suit cultural needs? Are there particular signifiers of cultures that are so evident that other cultures are able to grasp? For example, take LG and Samsung, Korean companies that dominate both American and Korean markets. The Koreans, however, do not use the android products that they make for Americans (in fact, flip phones are still very popular because they serve their cultural purposes), yet they are able to craft phones for America that utilize American specific gestures.

2) Near the end of his first chapter, Farman mentions, “our embodied engagements with each other are always about meaning being deferred as we interpret words, gestures, clothing, race, gender, sexuality, and the cultural signifiers that are inscribed onto the body. Our sense perceptions here work in tandem with the ways that we read the world around us” (30). If ‘reading the world’ is involved with the ways that we interact with one another, I am curious as to how the evolution of commercial technology is influencing this idea, in particular from the phenomenological perspective. For instance, google glasses and the augmented reality app (I believe thats what it’s called) on phones imbue the physical surroundings with digital data aggregates and information. So, what kind of implications would arise from seeing what brand of shirt someone is wearing or seeing the Wikipedia page pop up of the kind of car they drive up in? Is this merely another extension of the ways we perceive embodied space or is this something else?

3) Thrift notes, “what this article has argued is that such an emancipatory politics of bare life, founded in practices such as contemplation and mysticism, both already exists – and continues to come into existence which is a ‘product of the double investment of the body by space (the information coming from the physical world) and the investment of space by the body” (70). If he is making the case that ‘nature’ is an embodied practice that is dependent on the way our bodies allow it to become significant or meaningful, can we then call digital spaces ‘nature’ as well (or at least put them in the ‘bare life’ category)? Furthermore, if walking is his case study, can the argument be made that exercise in general is modern day mysticism (granted, he mention exercise later, but in terms of consumerism). He kind of nods to this in his discussion on transubstantiation on page 83, but my thoughts seem to drift more to this ‘bare life’ side.

Definitions:
Space: that which can be occupied; an intermediary, dependent on the existence of ‘bodies’ which will fill it
Production: the creation of something which, in some form, occupies space. To consolidate matter through movement, or a collection of ‘things’ together for various purposes
Embody (embodiment) – The intermediary between body and space, or, the act of fulfilling a perceived or created space; can be conscious interactions with surroundings, influenced socio-culturally