databeautiful

world map from SAS in-flight magazine, Fall 2007

If you were to ask in 2000, in what cities did I get most intelligent and challenging questions after a lecture, my answer would be London and Berlin. This was to be expected. But then things started to change - rather quickly. The intellectual pyramid of the world started to get flat. If were to ask me again the same question in 2004, my answer would be Hong Kong. I was there for 2 weeks in September of 2004 giving a number of my lectures, and the questions i got after every lecture were simply amazing. I had a feeling that people understood my ideas better than I understood them myself, and every question would send into a delightful terror. Terror - because I did not how to answer them. Delightful - because I was seeing in action how globalization and internet has shifted the relationship between a handful of old modern centers of cultural power and every other place.

Equally strong were questions I got after my lecture done via teleconferencing in Columbia in November 2004.

Today is March 26, 2008. I am Mexico City for a Computer Art Congress 2008. I just got back to my hotel after a full conference day and a two hour car drive back (well, Mexico is the largest megacity at the moment, so this part was not unexpected) with two undergraduate students. They study at a new program in digital art and animation at Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus Estado de México. During the long car ride I had one of the best intellectual conversations of my life. Of course, students did not know everything - but they intuitively understood what were the key cultural issues facing digital culture today. When I would explain things, they understood me before I would finish a sentence.

Fernando, a media artist and curator from Mexico City showing his works on his iPhone

Compare this to my reception during lectures in London and New York last year where the audiences at some of the most well-known educational institutions (which I would not name) had real difficulty understanding what my talks were about (and consequently, none of the questions really got into the meat of my talk).London was particularly shocking: almost every question from faculty members involved Walter Benjamin. Why did not I quote or referred to Benjamin? I replied that while I have lots of admiration for Benjamin’s work, I don’t think he can help us to understand the some of the particular details of cultural changes now: such as the relationship between the interface of After Effects software and visual aesthetics of moving images created with its help. Although I don’t remember the literal text of the comment which followed, it was along the following lines: maybe I should dig deeper into Benjamin because somewhere he certainly says something which will help us address such current topics…

Last week I was showing some visitors around downtown San Diego. In part, it was like walking through a Excel spreadsheet created by developers. Everything was programmed according to some formulas, and the transparency of this programming was so clear that you felt embarassed. But at the same time, once you felt the downtown core, were in the hard-to-define / not clear how to call them / spread out / horizontal / spaces of a Southern California city. Decades of development and re-development, corruption, greed, massive waves of immigration, and changing ideas about what “city” should be have resulted in something which is the opposite of Sim City and more close to the spaces of Grand Theft Auto (original version - before graphics board and CPUs become faster and more details and people were added): flat polygons of car parks, empty lots, industrial buildings; buildings from different decades co-existing next to each other in a kind of ambient collage; ocassional people and cars traversing these polygon spaces. Everything is lighted by the single light source of the sun, and the color of shadows is the same as everything else.

The following week I am in a in car in a Mexico City which, as I learned from Wikipedia article, is classified as “Beta World City.” The only easily readable surfaces in the city are large advertising billboard which are trying to crowd the sky.

The rest is similar to San Diego but even harder to read. Even more layers have been piled on top of each other. Actually, the metaphor of layers is not good, since in most cities today different “layers” are not on top of each, like in Photoshop, but rather next to each other.

Like most cities in the world today - with the exception of a small number of “global cities” in the “old developed” world - most of Mexico City is not beautiful, or coherent, or soothing. It is a computer game which crashed many times. And just like in a game, your default feeling is that disorientation. And the live map on my iPhone only makes it worse since its one dimensionality foregrounds the real “live” messiness and complexity of the spaces around me.

Before you object that I can’t read what I see because I am a tourist, and therefore this is expected, consider this. Can 20 million people living in Mexico City read every one of its 250 “colonias” (neighborhoods)? Especially considering that a large proportion of these people just recently moved here from the country side. But we don’t have to always use megacities for examples. I live in San Diego and, as other 100,000 people who moved here between 2000 and 2006, I don’t really know where I live. I use the city as a set of bookmarks - but I don’t understand its larger “web.”

Everybody these says seems to be interested in “city,” “”community,” and “public.” As I am writing this, there must be a dozen of symposiums on these topics taking place at universities and cultural centers around the world right at this moment. Many millions of dollars are awarded yearly by various foundations for projects which proudly feature these terms in their proposals.
But are these terms useful at all anymore? Or do they prevent us from looking fresh at what is around us and registering the complexity of our build environments and social life?



In the last couple of decades, only a handful of thinkers have tried to come up with new terms such as “non-place,” (Marc Auge), “junkspace” (Rem Koolhaas), “third space” and a few others.

The popularity of these terms shows how hungry people are for new categories. And yet if you walk/drive through any large city (sorry for using this problematic term again), you are immediately confronted with dozens of spatial situations for which new terms do exist yet.



And if we go outside of the realms of academic theory and art discourse? I suspect that there are some places where at least some of needed concepts have already been worked out. Clearly, the most important (in terms of the effects of his work) architect of our times - Jon Jorde - knows a lot about build environments, theming, and space branding. (According to the film web site, “nearly 800 million people visit Jerde-designed places every year.”)


We may also look at modern art and cinema for descriptions of particular spatial situations which are not captured by generic terms such as “city,” “block,” “neighboorhood,” “infill,” urban core,” and “exurb.” Think of painting by Balthus and Edward Hopper, films by Michelangelo Antonioni (”Red Dessert”) and Kar Wai Wong (”Chung King Express”), and so on.


However, I am not sure that artists can keep up anymore with the rapid changes in our build spaces, or with their scale. I can’t think of any artworks in any media which have effectively captured and analyzed the verticality of Japanese cities, the three-dimensional spatially of Hong Kong, the particular juxtapositions of Los Angeles or Shanghai. Artists build comprehensive iconographies for the nineteenth century cities of Paris, New Your, or Moscow, but they seem to give in front of the new spatial phenomena of the last decades.



As a result, we live our lives in spaces which we can’t name and can’t read. All we can do is use them - jumping from one saved bookmark to another. And, like on the internet, the larger proportions of our spaces renames outside of our “intellectual search engines” - conceptually un-indexed and unnamed.