Tourist Productions 2005

October 24, 2005

Surveillance, pizza, etc.

Here's what the American Civil Liberties Union has to say about video surveillance.

http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=13482&c=130

And a funny/terrifying clip about privacy and ordering pizza: http://www.aclu.org/pizza/index.html?orgid=EA071904&MX=1414&H=1

Posted by Brigitte Sion at 5:00 PM

What Kind of Experience Do You Want to Have?

Psychogeography, the study of the effect of the geographical environment on the emotions and behavior of individuals, provides a useful lens to view the issues in this week’s readings. In Casey’s examination of place, Simmel’s analysis of adventure and Brown’s exploring urban adventurism, there is an examination of alternate ways of experiencing place that privileges individual, subjective experience in order to better understand the complex interaction between a site and the individual. The derive, urban adventurism, i-See and the Surveillance Camera Players are all endeavors that increase one’s awareness about the interaction between place and self; empowering you to make a conscious decision about what place-self interaction you want to have and how to reshape the urban landscape to allow for that experience.

Casey in “Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does it Mean to Be in a Place-World?” looks at the human subject situated in place, what he calls “the geographical self.” (683) As opposed to space, which Casey identifies as abstract and about the gross positioning of things, place is deeply phenomenological, rooted in the subjective experience, the “immediate environment of the lived body.” (683) He examines three different dimensions of place: self, body and landscape. In this post-modern era, places are loosing specificity; they no longer define identity as the “work world” used to do. Indeed, psychogeography is appealing in this post-modern era precisely because it is about reclaiming the specificity of places.

Simmel in “The Adventure” (1919) describes how adventure is “a form of experiencing,” (7) rather than a particular type of experience. In the adventure there is a “life tension” in which “the quantity of these tensions becoming great enough to tear life . . . completely out of itself: this is what transforms mere experience into adventure.”(9) Adventure is a form of experiencing the world in the present moment in which there is a balance between active and passive, certainty and uncertainty. Adventure functions outside of our “meaningful context of life-as-a-whole” (1) and therefore becomes dreamlike. There is an affinity between the artist and the adventurer because both value the experience of the present moment and both the adventure and the art work are bounded experiences cut out from the continuous sequence of experience.

In the adventure, room is made for chance there is a welcoming of accident, like the gambler, “the adventurer . . . lets the accident somehow be encompassed by the meaning which controls the consistent continuity of life, even though the accident lies outside that continuity.” (3) The adventurer gives the experience meaning, which might be denied because of its accidental and extra-ordinary qualities. Adventure gets us in touch with a greater reality, that of the soul, “such that our earthly, conscious life is only an isolated fragment as compared to the unnamable context of an existence running its course in it.” (4) Moreover, adventure provides a category of experience around which other categories of experience are conceptualized in relationship to. There is immediacy to adventure: “the intensity and excitement with which it lets us feel life in jus this instance.” (8)

The notion of immediacy and chance made me think back to my experience on the Cardiff walk. On the walk, I felt a real immediacy and connection to the park, a heightened awareness and a being in the present moment. Indeed, Cardiff had us literally breathe with her at the end of the walk; becoming aware of the rhythm of your breathe is one of the easiest ways to bring yourself into the present moment.

The urban adventurism Brown describes in “Online and underground” is an example of people seeking out what Casey calls “thick places in which their own personal enrichment can flourish” (685) As there become fewer and fewer places which can keep something within it, there is a desire to hunt out places which are bounded and help people reflect on self. Solis and Deyo are urban explorers who engage in “infiltration,” whether it be of abandon subway tunnels or achieving an expansive view of the city by climbing to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge. Solis fascination with abandoned lunatic asylums and hospitals seems to speak to a desire for Casey’s “thick places,” exploring places filled with rich, forgotten stories. Moreover, by exploring abandoned places or familiar places in unfamiliar ways, experience in heightened and comes into the present moment as described by Simmel in “The Adventure.”

Debord in “Introduction to a critique of Urban Geography,” outlines his notion of psychogeography, which entails changing the social organization to allow for new notions of desire that are counter to the homogenized desires produces by the Coca-Cola capitalist machine. In “Theory of the Derive,” he provides an example of this type of urban geography or urban exploration. Derive, literally drifting, involving passing rapidly through varied ambiances while staying aware of the psychogeographical effects. You can be an adventurer in places you know and do not know by changing the way you are going about experiencing place. Two key aspects of a derive is both to study a terrain, for example its emotional affects, and emotionally disorientation. The derive, like all forms of adventure, involves some form of disorientation in order to allow for a new experience of place.

The New York Surveillance Players and the Institute for Applied Autonomy both deal with increasing awareness of surveillance around the city. One becomes aware of the surveillance aspect of psychogeography which is often forgotten, but none the less affecting one’s experience. Going on the tour, I became aware of the magnitude of cameras around Washington Square Park. I was not particularly surprised, rather the tour confirmed feelings of surveillance that I had that had not been articulated; these feelings were brought into consciousness. Indeed, the derive, iSee and Surveillance Camera Players all increase awareness of how city space is constructed to encourage or allow only certain types of interactions. For example, ostensively the camera where there to deter and pre-empt crime, but no one knew about the cameras and people weren’t being spotted pre-crime; the surveillance was not functioning according to script. Our tour, looking at the surveillance cameras, was a greater deviation from the original script. Participating in a derive offers a concrete example of how to broaden possible interactions with the city.

In terms of how this could apply to my project on Hassidic Williamsburg, I could search out Casey’s thick, bounded places, which will be filled with history and meaning. It is important that I stay aware of my psychogeographic response to place. I could also ask people in the community to make their own psychogeographic maps, which could be of emotion-space, or perhaps a biographical map (i.e. this is the synagogue where I had a bat mitzvah). Also taking inspiration from the derive, I could explore the forgotten places, not just the main boulevards and pay attention to the detail. Indeed, I could do a derive of Williamsburg. Taking a cue from the surveillance camera tour I could look at how Williamsburg is constructed to function (city planning wise) and how it actually functions.

Posted by Sarah Zoogman at 8:40 AM

Surveillance Camera Tour at Washington Square Park

In the tour, I was surprised at the considerable number of surveillance cameras around Washington Square Park, a place which I consider safe and does not need to be monitored. The revelation of the fact that surveillance cameras are installed in high density around the area makes me curious about why this public place is intensely under surveillance.

Our tour guide gave us an explanation of the high density of the surveillance equipment installation in the area. According to the guide, surveillance cameras, whose purpose are to prevent the crimes, are usually installed in the relatively wealthy neighborhoods, such as West Village, where the crime rate is relatively low compared with that of poor communities. The installation of the cameras, again, according to the tour guide, reflects the fear of the rich, who deeply concern about their own safety and properties. To some extent, the act of installation and monitoring can be read as people’s buying insurance. In this case, the wealthy people’s fear, or lack of a sense of security, has been commodified and transformed into the surveillance safeguard packet selling back to those people who psychologically need such service.

In addition to pointing out the motive of the camera installation, our guide also drew on the events of suicidal bombers in the London subway to reveal the fact that installation of surveillance cameras intending to prevent crimes, terrorist attack, and other anti-social behavior might end up in futility by spending huge amount of money. In this case, the undesirable effect, or affect, of recording the faces of the bombers is that such footage clearly depicted the faces of the bombers and idolized them.

Regardless of the effectiveness of the surveillance camera installation in terms of reducing crime rate, it seems to me that such infrastructure of the park will affect how people distribute their bodies in this place. How people perceive themselves and how they behave in Washington Square Park might also change due to the enforcement of surveillance.

In “Between Geography and Philosophy,” Casey indicates that the philosophical tradition tends to downplay the physical (the body, place, and space), and to privilege the cerebral (awareness, consciousness) when it comes to the discussion on self identity. Casey proposes that we should also take “space,” and “landscape” on broad and recognize the fact that these factors are also influential to the formation of the concept of self. He introduces the concept of geographical self which comes into being through the dialectic between the individual and the space in which s/he is situated. In Casey’s concept, the physical environment leaves traces on the individual who is/was exposed to it and alters his/her cognition as well as body.

Taking on Casey’s idea, it is possible that being surrounded by numerous surveillance cameras, people in Washington Square Park will alter their behavior accordingly in response to such heavy surveillance.

The realization of being watched closely by surveillance devices, people might, on one hand, restrain themselves to behave in a way which fulfills the expectations of the authority/the polices/the camera installers; or, on the other hand, react against such surveillance to break the rules intentionally. It is also likely that some people will take the role as “performers,” doing something that is harmless, yet idiosyncratic, in front the surveillance cameras to embark on an “adventure” (I am using Simmel’s term loosely).

The tour reminds me of the facts I failed to notice. I appreciate our guide’s brief introduction of how surveillance cameras have evolved over time and how the advancement of surveillance technology influence and/or will influence our daily existence. Also, I found the article by Casey resonates with the concepts introduced in another course. I think the interplay between the space and people might be pertinent to my research on movie tour at Central Park.

Posted by Stella Yu-Wen Wang at 6:34 AM

What does it mean to be in the Place-World?

The interrelated tensions that run through of this week’s materials are those of the self versus other, mind versus body, legitimate versus illicit viewing, regulation versus experimentation, and the joy of looking versus the fear of being looked at.

Casey’s discussion of the modernist and postmodernist distinctions/relations between self, place, and space is a good jumping-off point for this idea. Modernist ideas about the inner self that existed independently of the physical location, was vigent during an era characterized by mass migration from the country to the anonymous, homogenizing city and when new kinds of architecture and city planning were transforming what it meant to live in a city. Postmodernist theory of self was inspired by themes of the fragmentation of identity brought about by intensified deterritorialization and the transnational flows of capital, goods, and people. Both moments where characterized by a terror of rootlessness provoked by the rapid changes in attachments selves formed with their material environments.

Both moments generated voluminous writing by the intellectuals and artists of their time who struggled to figure out what the future was of their feelings of disassociation and alienation with their environment. Some modernists like some postmodernists celebrated the changes (like the Futurists), others made social critiques and interventions (like the Situationalists). All contemplated the effects of geography, architecture, or place on people in spite of the purported mind-body split we have cherished since ancient times.

The tourist and flaneur, are modern figures that celebrated the looking that connected people to places. Now web-surfer can be counted among the idle lookers, meandering through new kinds of rationalized ‘scapes. Your body does not even need to leave home to experience and be reciprocally reconstituted in new virtual environments. At the same time, the self whose body that does not venture outside the space of the cubicle must be in some way different than the person whose body experiences physical places, mustn’t it?

Fourcault’s idea of the panopticon reminds us of the nefarious aspect of modernist looking. It is much more pleasurable to be the tourist-looker than the disciplined-lookee. Now a virtual panoipticon regards our every move. Have you ever been given one of those pamphlets that say that at the end of the world, we will all get barcodes and the number 666 tattooed on us? Scary stuff... On the other hand, wouldn’t it be great not to have to flash your NYU ID or worry about losing your credit card?

Credit cards, ATMs, sending email are all electronic transactions that locate you at a particular place in time. Have you ever gotten a call from your credit card company, because you had been spending too much in a place far from home? How do you define surveillance? Is it someone looking at the location of your body? Or could it be the data that records your location in a more much precise way? I sense that for some reason the blind gaze of the mechanical eye looking at your body without seeing is more disturbing to us. Only hackers and “identity thieves” are creatively producing critical “situations” that cause us to reflect on our electronic-environments. However, the moral outrage they produce is often not linked to the victim’s critical awareness of the structures of the place he inhabits. Rather the reaction is more likely to be a bourgeois fury in defense of private property and accumulation.

Casey’s account on current philosophical interests that deconstruct the mind-body divide cause me think of the psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s theories of schizophrenogenisis. According to him, in the healthy individual, the body is the outer-limit between the “self” and “other.” In his modernist model, the self resides inside the body, which is its vehicle that allows it to interact with the outside world. Pathological individuals, however, do not experience reality in this way. Their selves extend past the limits of their bodies into the world, creating for them confusion between self and non-self.

Now it is completely natural for middle class Americans to be cyborgs connected to palm pilots, Ipods, cell phones, and laptops. As Casey notes, our selves (we?) are extending into the world through different “mediatrices” in ways that are unaccounted for by both modernist and postmodernist ways of thinking about the individual and the places s/he occupies. “Despite and affinity for thick places, the contemporary self can flourish even in spaces that are disemobodied, virtualized, and notably thin."

Posted by Pilar Rau at 3:56 AM

Memory on Feet

Edward Casey’s article “between geography and philosophy” provides a wonderful example of a bridge between discipline, or how geography informs philosophy, while philosophy enriches geography. His articulation of the bodily experience in the lived space, of the immediate relation between the self and the place is precisely one of the prisms of study that inspires my research about memorials.

While visiting the Holocaust memorial in Berlin last May, I noticed four different moments, relating to four completely different experiences: the fenced memorial as construction site, closed to the public, and frustrating the need to experience a new space; the memorial opened to a thousand happy-fews on the day of its unveiling, when the limited number of visitors and the light rain falling added to the oppressive and claustrophobic feeling induced by the architectural design; the memorial during the day, open to the public, and right away transformed into a tourism destination and a playground; the memorial at night, populated by rebellious teenagers, drunkards, sex-hunters and other night owls. It is precisely the contextualization, the agency of the body in a given context that performs a variety of things, that makes a memorial sometimes a happy playground and sometimes a solemn space for reflection, sometimes a serious place, sometimes a fun place, sometimes a dangerous place and sometimes an ugly place. By the same token, the body is also touched by the walking on tilted ground, the forbidden climbing, the touching of the cold slabs, and their spiky angles.

Last August, I interviewed an Argentinean mother whose only daughter was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the military dictatorship in 1976. Forty years later, she was able to visit the ESMA, a former detention center where her daughter was last seen alive: “Visiting the ESMA was painful and relieving at the same time. I walked through the rooms and I tried to touch every square inch with my hands, the walls, the doors, the floor, the pillars, thinking that Franca had touched them too. It was a very tactile, physical way of bonding with my dead daughter.” Remembering her daughter was not a matter of intellectual work, it was as much a bodily experience that helped the mourning phase and gave the mother some hope.

The mutual enrichment of body, self and place also offers original ways of looking at the performance of the place and at the mediation of the body, and to understand this liminal or transitory state experienced by the body in an usual place (especially places that are typically designed for the brains, such as Berlin). This state in-between refers to Simmel before referring to Victor Turner, as Simmel describes the modern condition of the stranger as someone who “has not belonged to [the group] fro the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself” (1st paragraph). The stranger acts as a trustworthy door that one can open to confide, and at the same time, the stranger keeps a secret key to a backdoor that remains closed, personal and inaccessible. “He is near and far at the same time,” writes Simmel, which could very well come from Casey, or from Debord, who tackles the notion of pushing boundaries and challenging traditional use of spaces. If I look back at my project in the light of Debord and Janelle Brown, I realize that the visitors of memorials belong to different –and often conflicting—categories, from survivor to tourist, from adventurer to stranger, from wanderer to celebrity. Add the delicate question of regulating the space, limiting the bodily experience and imposing rules of contact, and we enter a new world were body, self and space seem all the more polarized rather than join forces to apprehend the world around us. This week’s readings offer a number of original new paths to explore that are extremely inspiring.

Posted by Brigitte Sion at 2:46 AM

Big Brother Blinks

The issues treated in this week’s readings map an intersection between philosophy and geography. Clear parallels can be drawn between Casey’s discussion of the “geographical self”, the human subject oriented and situated in place (683) and the Situationists’ formulation of psychogeography. Whereas the Situationist writings, which intended to incite and provoke action, are more closely linked to the alternative tourism practices of urban exploration, Casey’s analysis of the reciprocal relationship between self and place is more intricate and subtle. A shared phenomenological thread can be traced through all the readings primarily concerned with the experiential aspects of both place and self.

In his interesting essay “Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World?” Casey closely examines the ways in which place and self help to construct and activate each other. The two not only influence each other reciprocally but are also of “constitutive coingredience: each is essential to the being of the other.” (684) Casey uses Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a liaison between place and self. Habitus here represents a product of geography and history, which in turn produces individual and collective practices, and hence history and geography. (686) Casey points to historical moments, such as our own, where places have become attenuated. Because of their interdependence, the process thinning-out is by necessity directly tied to the desiccation and diminishing of self. (686-687) The virtue of the nature of habitus is its improvisatory potential. Habitus, although a condensation of past experiences, comes into being through a skillful application and can be replaced by another habitudinal set of practices. It is in this fluidity, a ceaseless becoming in place that habitus is linked to Situationist practices, which attempt to play with and disorient congealed behavior.

I would be very interested in a further elaboration of the ways in which places imprint themselves differently on different persons. Clearly, the psychogeodynamics have different impacts on different individuals, is this because we come to them with different sets of inculcated habitus? Are there any examples of psychogeographical maps in existence? How was the consensus of these maps established?

The practices of urban exploration and the Situationists both encourage a critical approach to the exploration of our surroundings. The New York Surveillance Camera Players provoke a similar critical investigation of the urban landscape. It is at once fascinating and disquieting to envision the impact that the little eyes of surveillance have on the psychogeography of our world. These eyes poke holes in our universe which may very intensify the perforation and thinning out of the place-world. Big Brother’s eyes blink however. While walking with my son during today’s tour I witnessed several instances of drug solicitation.

Krzysztof Wodiczko 'sreconfiguration of urban sites signal alternative possibilities of remapping cities. Wodiczko's large-scale projections of images (that are often controversial) onto public buildings function to unsettle our relationship to place. His work acts as a disruption to the "routine and passive perception of the ideological theatre of the built environment as well as a disruption of our imaginary place in it." (Wodiczko 1996: 55) Wodiczko's project is to disrupt the "continuous process of reproducing the individual in space." (Wodiczko and Ferguson 1992: 64) Wodiczko sees his projections as the externalization of that which lies hidden beneath the surface, of things unsaid as well as fantasy. Unlike the Situationist dérive, which is primarily focused on the experience of the individual or a small group of individuals, work of artists like Wodiczko has the potential to unhinge the urban experience on a mass scale.

Above, I quote Wodiczko from Nick Kaye's Site Specific Art: Place, Performance and Documentation View image
in the chapter entitled "Performing the City".

http://www.art-for-a-change.com/Krzysztof/krzy.htm

http://www.roland-collection.com/rolandcollection/section/36/666.htm

Posted by Dominika Bennacer at 2:01 AM

Placebo experiences vs. experiencing the real

If ‘psychogeography’ is “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment” (Debord:1) on human emotions and behavior, then the essence of the readings for this week could be generated under the term ‘geopsychology’; how human beings “perceive”, “(in)habit”, “live” and “experience” (Casey), “explore” (Brown), “conquer” (Simmel), “terrain” and “encounter”, “utilize” and “commoditize” (Debord), and “control” (i-SEE) geographical spaces and places. In other words, the essays depict the different ways we reconceptualize the relation between self/body and space/place.

The starting point of all the essays is the opposition between being at home and exploring new places; the ways in which these seemingly contradictory experiences can be resolved. And I cannot help but thinking of MacCannell’s fundamental formula: the tourist travels in order to get away from the predictability and certainty of everyday life. The symptoms are the same, but the antidote is different this time. The prescription is simple: instead of going away, stay home and find a way to perceive and experience your environment in a different way – dérive, adventure or “off-limits tourism”: either of these should be effective for the disease of boredom and habituation.

It is the monotony and – I would say – alienation of the delimited modern urban life that these writers and their protagonists all struggle with. What the case studies demonstrate is that adventure, in the Simmelian sense, as a synthesis of activity and passivity, conquest and self-abandonment is a possible and accessible lifestyle in and escape from contemporary urban society.
Simmel’s, Debord’s, and Brown’s essays are important contributions and counterpoints to the twentieth centuries and contemporary discourses on the alienated urban life. When I first heard the title “Surveillance Camera Players” I expected a similar experience: that the playfulness of a performance would counter-balance the anxious presence of surveillance cameras all over the city. Needless to say, the walking tour turned out to be something very different from what I expected, and after the tour I am sitting here still with doubts and dilemmas that I do not know how to resolve at this point.
I think my main problem is that I find the “pro” and the “con” arguments in the debate around the surveillance cameras equally weak. I understand that those who oppose it claim that it is ineffective, expensive and not worth its price, and turns the city into an Orwellian place of anxiety. I also see that it can be dangerously discriminating and racial. At the same time, I find the ongoing biased and paranoid discourse related to surveillance cameras (such as the i-SEE) dangerous and narrow-minded, too. Despite the negative examples, I still can imagine certain cases, in which the surveillance cameras could be effective devices in tracing down and preventing future crimes and terror attacks.
I am wondering what impact the cameras have on our behavior in reality. How much they do they change our experience of the space/place? Do we indeed perceive the city in a different way? Are we really conscious of these cameras that – as we saw it today – only seemingly follows us everywhere? I am sure that all of us would have different answers to these questions. I personally do not think that I will walk in a different way from now on. Maybe tomorrow I will still think about the cameras Bill pointed out to us. However, I am convinced that eventually my ‘habitus’ will take over and I will hurry without perceiving much of the space as – unfortunately – I most of the time travel in my everyday environment. (The question is what happens, if the presence of the surveillance cameras, the feeling of being watched will become part of our ‘habitus’ one day.)
At this point, I think that surveillance camera is a placebo for people to feel both safe and secure in public and private places. It might not be effective in preventing a crime or terror attack, but it is effective in attenuating fear and anxiety for now.

Casey points out the significance of places in the process of ‘becoming’: “Place requires human agents to become “primary places,” in Sack’s nomenclature, and these same agents require places to be the selves they are in the process of becoming” (484). Debord, Simmel and Brown explore how the ‘habitus’ of derives, adventurers and urban explorers are transformed by spatial experiences. What we find in these cases are real transformations; triggered by real experiences and perceptions.

I do not know what is the ‘becoming’ that is at stake in the perception of these placebo surveillance cameras. At this point, people’s experience with the cameras relies on what is communicated to them from the outside. It is a prevalent discourse that defines each individual’s attitude, whether he/she feels more secure or more anxious with the cameras. I do not believe that these external arguments can provoke/inspire real ‘becoming’.
At the same time, I do believe that the presence of surveillance cameras will change our ‘habitus’. In what way? I am not sure yet. But perhaps anxiety is not even the right context to look for the answer. Camera is the ultimate power in our society. It is the window to the world, the exclusive channel of canonization, a magic box, in which everything and everybody is transformed through performances. Perhaps it is this new kind of performitivity – that cameras will introduce on the streets – that will change our ‘habitus’. The street becomes a screen – without frames.

Posted by Aniko Szucs at 12:58 AM

Fame

Today’s walking tour of surveillance cameras around the Washington Square area has me thinking about fame. Not the TV show from the 80s (although that dancing in the streets sequence from the credits would, I suppose, be a performance for the NYPD’s CCTV cameras in today’s New York), but your run-of-the-mill (okay, I’m revealing my biases), sort of American/New Yorkish overwhelming desire for your 15 minutes of fame. Getting yours means you have truly arrived (analogous to the body’s physical arrival on the scene, imaged by sensors perhaps).

London, as the world’s most heavily surveilled city, is mostly just ho-hum to me. The more cameras there are, and therefore more footage that is being captured, the less concerned I feel about being watched – with the idea that in the great sea of boring people doing boring things, I am even more insignificant. The possibility of watchers seeing me, or reviewing tapes with me on them, decreases with the vast increase of footage to watch. For Bill Brown, on the other hand, the London scenario seems to pose a nightmarish prototype of what might happen this side of the Atlantic. More cameras mean more cameras watching him. That is, while I feel comfortable being lost in the millions of my everyday travels around New York, Bill Brown is a surveillance performer. And he is the main attraction, the hero, the action star who may even be billed above the film’s title.

With absolutely no attempt to back this up, I would like propose that a lot of people in the media-infused, media-savvy US live their lives according to what would make good TV. It’s a bit like an aching for Simmel’s adventure, a dropping out (or above) the continuity of life. We see this played out in tourism where you can get away from yourself and your life and be someone else, somewhere else. But I am suggesting that there is also an ache to create these moments in/out of daily life – moments of heightened awareness of the geography around you and the self you are playing, where you know what a great story this will be. A sensibility of celebrity or stardom, or just a minor guest stop on an episode of ‘Friends.’ But you know the camera must be nearby catching this, how like a movie is this!… And when Big Brother becomes a global TV phenomenon, things become a little more complicated.

Bill Brown, on his surveillance tour, is a celebrity performer – his awareness of our tour being a performance for the cameras was only just outshone by his awareness of what makes good news on CNN the next day (spray painting camera lenses, putting up signs saying “You are currently being recorded by a CCTV surveillance camera” at appropriate locations), and his performance in the upcoming documentary on the redevelopment of Washington Square Park. And, in turn, this was outshone by his observation of how surveillance in the London underground, far from preventing the July bombings, in fact assisted the bombers’ project of martyrdom by providing CCTV images for the next day’s media coverage.

I suppose this, the ineffectiveness of video surveillance, is the objection I can get most behind. A point made very clear on iSee’s website. Their program for navigating your ‘path of least surveillance’ has resonances with Debord’s ‘maps of influences’ and ‘psychogeographical pivot points.’ (An aside: in strange ways, this virtual walking experience put me more in touch with the body’s agency/constriction in manoeuvring unsurveilled through New York than following Bill Brown today.) And situated in the context of other infiltrations (going places or seeing things that should be unnoticed), the sensibility of the surveillance walking tour aligns itself with the sensibility of Debord’s dérive.

The theory of dérive has obvious implications for my research on Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair, as does Casey’s essay. I am interested in tracing a line originating in the literal translation of dérive, ‘drifting,’ to a chapter of Paul Carter’s ‘Drift Lanes’ dealing with the lie of the land, its folds, vortexes, etc, but this needs further reflection to see where it leads. I am also taken with Casey’s claim to an imaginative, improvisational nature of habitus, linking place and self, and the body as the pivot of the place-world, as I increasingly feel the participation of the body is central in Cardiff's work.

Posted by Justine Shih Pearson at 12:58 AM

How does surveillance limit the conditions of possibility for adventure? Preliminary late-night thoughts ...

While I agree with some of you who align the Surveillance Camera Players tour with dérive, or adventure, in that it brings us into a new relation to our environment, creating an “ambiance” (to use Debord’s terminology) of alternately exasperation and paranoia, I ultimately think that the reality of surveillance is in serious tension with our ability to adventure and experience places in creative ways. On the one hand, knowing that you are being surveilled - and recorded - gives the experience (whether you are picnicking in Washington Square Park or an abandoned subway tunnel) a different “ambiance”, or “flavour”. But what happens when this surveillance pervades nearly every place? It can hardly be just an “ambiance” then. It is a real presence - or is it that we are present in relation to it? It seems that Bill Brown’s goal in the Surveillance Camera Players Tour was to make us consciously present to these surveillance techologies, to these eyes everywhere, and the unpredictable or apathetic or perverted or bored or sleeping ‘I’s that operate them.

To be present to these eyes all the time, espcially in an area as (absurdly) heavily surveilled as Washington Square Park, requires energy that may have otherwise been spent in creative ways. Is it possible to ‘adventure’ the presence of surveillance cameras? Is it possible to do so without addressing their presence? Is it possible to “forget” about them for the duration of an adventure, or is that hopelessly naive? What I’m getting at is that I don’t think surveillance is “just one aspect” of experience, like weather or company. If you are in the presence of them, they are in your presence; and if you explicitly seek places outside of the view of surveillance cameras, (by using isee for example) you are avoiding them; they are therefore directly affecting your behaviour.

I do not know if it matters that the cameras (at least here in NYC) largely fail in their crimefighting mandates/justifications. It is the presence and the fact of being watched that seems to narrow the conditions of possibility for adventure. Not just on the level of “I’d better not do anything illegal”, but also that ‘someone’ may (always) be watching changes the nature of the adventure, makes necessarily into a performance. Most of the time in public space, we behave as though we are not (or do not believe we are) under surveillance. How would this change if A) surveillance were everywhere and B) we all knew about it. For some reason, I am struck with the image of the witch from The Wizard of Oz watching Dorothy and friends make their way up the yellow brick road, using a crystal ball or some such ‘magical’ device. This technology is now widespread; the difference is, we are very unlikely to be the star of the video surveillance footage, and if we are, it is doubtful that the “adventure” as recorded and viewed will accurately reflect the adventure as experienced (psychogeographically). The surveillor may or may not have malicious intent toward the surveilled; but they are probably not your archnemesis. This is for me the central problem of surveillance: it is so pervasive that it seems to demand treament in experiences to which it is present, a change of behaviour; on the other hand, unlike the Wizard of Oz, or 1984, we are not the stars of its narrative, it is largely indifferent to our narratives and adventures. Unless we are breaking the law, foolishly or ignorantly in front of it, or we are playing directly to it. It may have to become central in my narrative (the narrative I make of my adventure before and after it occurs), even if I am marginal to its narrative, if it has one at all.
I want to be able to ignore them as much as I know or suspect that I am ignored by them; but I am unable to. If I do, it is out of forgetfulness - willed or not, ignorance, or naïveté. It isn’t about the paranoia of being arrested or the discomfort with my private moments being penetrated by cameras. It is about the way I feel impelled to address them as presences, and the unevenness and uncertainty of this relationship.

Posted by Sarah Klein at 12:45 AM

October 23, 2005

What gets left

This week’s reading’s dealt with the relationships between space, place, geography, and the body. The convergence of all these factors, psychogeography, looks at the way characteristics of a space and geography affects human emotions and actions. More than in previous readings which maintained tourist theories in an external realm, these readings enter the affects of place and exchange into the human body. The tourist acts looked at and participated in during the Surveillance Camera Players tour demonstrate performances of real life where everyday people and everyday life becomes a stage for exchange between participants and viewers, mostly non-consensual.

Throughout our previous readings, we have looked relationships between two parties: the tourist and the toured, the viewer and the viewed, the performer and the recipient. In this group of readings, the two parties involved are organized slightly different with one party highly visible and physical and the other party represented, not present, less visible, and through this lack of presentation on a plane of higher power; the relationship is then between the controller and the controlled. Implied in most of the readings yet stated by Guy-Ernest Debord’s articles, the two parties involved describe a power relationship, recognizing those that control our spaces (more specifically our urban spaces) control our interaction with and feelings about the place. Some individuals determine the space and some are merely affected by others determinations.

Such power relationships, introduced by MacCannell, clarified by Bruner, and interpreted artistically by Lippard, revealed themselves in today’s Surveillance Camera Players’ tour. When writing about the Derive, Debord describes a technique through which place can be neutralized and experienced freshly. The act of “adventure” subverts the power dynamic inscribed in the everyday society of the governed. Simmel’s “The Adventure” like the Derive urges an awareness of our psychic and emotional presence in a space. Simmel defines the adventure by contrast to the everyday experience (of being controlled). Drawing comparisons between an adventure, a gambler, works of art, falling in love, and dreams, the common thread of each is a lack of continuity, an act that goes beyond the everyday by breaking away from a temporal or physical chain. Simmel synthesizes external, internal, chance and necessity to explain the state of adventure in our life.

“Between Geography and Philosophy” explores the relationships between place, space, self, geography, and agency. Casey references Proust’s theories on the ability of place to record itself onto the self, the ability of place to record itself onto our body by way of sensory memory. Kant’s view that we are the subjects of place or subjects to place was clearly demonstrated in today’s tour. The SCP tour exposed the not-so-invisible characteristic of surveillance within a delineated urban space. Within our “free” society, without our “public” spaces, we are constantly being observed for purposes of control and through this observation we become subject to the place. Although it appears to be people in power who control a surveyed environment, we observed today through Bill that it is actually a “manipulation of perception” and with instances of no people behind the cameras, the buildings, cameras, corners, wires and the place, independent of people, become the modus of control. In this stage of the real, where people performing perfunctory acts are being watched by mechanical eyes, there is a layer of inanimate material between the viewer and the viewed creating a scenario where man made objects end up controlling man.

In common with the Surveillance players, the Urban Exploration movement written about by Janelle Brown discusses the anti-establishment desire to overcome boundaries not always visible. Describing the practice of “infiltrating” remnants of buildings, Brown describes social and government established imagined barriers that people ritually break, The way in which people know of these boundaries is similar to the way in which people accept surveillance cameras. From this article, I visited the site of Sean O’Boyle’s photographs that document abandoned places and spaces from insane asylums to nuclear laboratories. In these photographs the buildings were disintegrating, paint peeling, empty of all human element yet full of the human energy of abandonment. In these images the ability of place to burn onto person reverses and we see how human presence burns itself onto place. The photos were beautifully balanced, highlighting aesthetic qualities in the remains of civilization. The spaces themselves became bodies, doorways morphing into eyes, peeling paint referencing skin, and hallways functioning visually as limbs.

Debord describes the ways in which space and geography is sculpted by human concerns which in turn affect human feelings as they navigate through the geography. The urban explorers participate in physically engaging body practice where participants inscribe their entire beings within a strange space. I am intrigued by this desire to place oneself within such extreme environments. What does this act of penetrating a left behind space do for humans? It seems as if they are drawn to the remains of human energy. The space within which these highly dimensional routines intersect with the flattened lack of dimensionality of the performers in surveillance cameras is the relationship between urban place and human emotion. To connect today’s tour to the readings; one would have to examine the affect of knowing you are being surveyed on emotional responses to a place. I look forward to discussing the psychogeography of surveyed spaces with class.

To apply the study of the affects of geography on emotions and behaviors of individuals to Sepharad ’92, I would examine issues of historical memory and tragic memory and its ability to resonate within a space and affect bodily interaction with the space. There appears to be a connection between the infiltrators and tragic tourism, or the act of visiting spaces with unfavorable pasts. I’m interested in the psychic quality of a space. The ability of human pasts to mark buildings and spaces and the memory to breathe upon visitors well after events have passed.

Posted by Erin Madorsky at 11:47 PM

Scott's Response #6 Surveillance

As a psychiatric social worker I would employ something called the “ecological perspective” in my clinical approach to assessing and diagnosing patients. This basically meant that along with considering biological, psychological, and social factors informing the patient’s level of functioning and health, I would also take into consideration environmental factors. For example, if a client lived in a Single Room Occupancy hotel in a dangerous, poverty-stricken, and unstructured part of town how would this impact her day-to-day emotions and cognitive processes? This environmental inclusion in an approach to the human experience is how I basically interpret Debord’s and Casey’s ideas of “psychogeography.”

Casey asks, “Just how is place constitutive of the self? How does is insinuate itself into the very heart of personal identity?” (2001) He proposes that an individual’s movement in space is the “mediatrix” between the concepts of self-identity and space. As this occurs, space becomes “place,” an “arena of action that is at once physical and historical, social and cultural.” He also proposes that an individual’s identity outside of “place” becomes meaningless, much like a diagnosis ignoring a patient’s physical environment is incomplete.

How does this engagement of geography and philosophy, phenomenology and identity inform any approach to tourist productions? It recognizes that human beings are animals to be viewed in relationship with our environments. Such a view proposes that experience and actual identity are connected to one’s environment and phenomenological experience. In such a view, site-specific tours become more about the experience of walking through space and interacting with it in a biopsychosocial manner than conceiving the tourist production as something to be watched or consumed as a separate entity. This is particularly salient when I look at examples of urban exploration. Individuals who explore “out of bounds” environments reportedly do so for the body experience:

“Urban explorers admit that the appeal of infiltration is often about the thrill of being somewhere you are not supposed to be – or…confronting your fears, going into spaces that are dangerous and very creepy. But despite the adrenaline rushes, many explorers say that it is also the poetry of this pursuit that draws them in.” (Brown, 2001)

The “poetry” of the pursuit echoes Debord’s description of derive, where the individual delves into a liminoid space for a time, engaging with her environment, allowing it to literally and figuratively move her in a certain path and dance.

This parallels my personal approach to environmental theater, where space becomes an integral role in the production, informing the performance as much as text and human action. This approach of human action-and-experience-in-space will be a main component of my research project where “place” and the visitor’s whole body experience is meant to shape perceptions and viewpoints towards the issue of immigration, cultural diversity, and community.

Today’s Surveillance Camera Players’ tour in Washington Square Park can be seen through this lens of human experience in “place.” Integral to the tour was the feeling one gets standing on the park’s corner and being regarded by the impassive eye of a dark bubble camera above. I couldn’t quite decide how I felt about the tour. In one sense, I found various information about cameras and their purported lack of efficacy interesting. I also found Bill’s eccentric obsession amusing. A piece of me also recognized the general seriousness of the topic and appreciated the fact that someone is willing to take the time to bring issues of personal behavior data collection to discussion. I also found myself partly responding to the tour with a “So what? Who cares?” Finally, I found it interesting to think about the meaning of human behavior in collecting and utilizing the vast quantities of electronic surveillance. It is for deterrence? For insurance? For emotional peace of mind? Or simply something to do because everyone else does it?

Arriving home after the tour, I entered my loft building and looked up to see a private security camera tucked away in the upper corner. I looked at it, and sarcastically waved, feeling somewhat different than if I had waved at a blank wall or at an actually person. Perhaps no one would ever watch the tape. Perhaps it wasn’t even taping. Or perhaps someone somewhere would soon be audience to my little performance.

Posted by Scott Wallin at 10:01 PM

Adventures in Baby-Sitting . . . Or Walking, Although I Am Listening To "And Then He Kissed Me" Right Now (And, Yes, I Officially Know WAY Too Much Pop Culture)

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
“This is it. If I take one more step, it’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.”
“Moving in silent desperation / Keeping an eye on the holy land / A hypothetical destination / say, who is this walking man?”

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
“This is it. If I take one more step, it’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.”
“Moving in silent desperation / Keeping an eye on the holy land / A hypothetical destination / say, who is this walking man?”

For me, the central pillar of this week’s readings (including the New York Surveillance Camera Tour experience) is Georg Simmel’s deliciously-written essay, The Adventure. Although he teases it out to its fullest extent, Simmel’s elegant and simple premise is that an adventure is something outside of the normal, linear, cause-and-effect flow of everyday life, “a foreign body in our existence which is yet somehow connected with the center.” It is, in many ways, like a piece of art, taking an object – in this case, the world, or whatever aspect of it the adventurer encounters – and finding a new, interesting, and unique way to explore and experience in it (which brings us back to Lucy Lippard – HAH, see, all of you doubters? I DID make her useful again later in the course – and her connection, through the “alternate-angle” way of looking at things, between art and tourism). In the context of this class, of course, we can associate the adventure with travel, with tourism, with encountering “the new,” whatever/wherever that may be. More specifically, though, in the context of this week’s readings, the adventure is associated with walking, with the body propelling itself physically through a space/place/habitude, to borrow from Casey’s Between Geography and Philosophy.

To bring in walking, of course, brings up the walking tour that we experienced as a class – one which, unfortunately, seemed rather light on the walking, and was perhaps more of a “standing around on the corner learning things” tour. However, even if the tour itself wasn’t a very bodily experience, it was entirely about embodied experience. The walking body, the playing body, the sitting body, the love-making body, all under the watchful eye of the NYPD, NYU, and a million other alphabet-agencies forming a giant Big Brother eye-in-the-sky. Although none of the readings for this week directly approach this question, Casey’s article, focusing on how the body and the geographical locale can, indeed must, be brought together, makes me wonder just what resonance there is between the individual physical body and the removed, cold, digital technology. I was extremely taken by the story told on the tour of the couple making love on their rooftop, and how the police voyeuristically spied on them (one – or at least one who is as unafraid of public embarrassment as I am - is reminded of a massive amount of pornographic web-sites specializing in voyeurism, either “real” or staged for the camera). What especially interested me in this story was that the camera in question was utilizing infrared – meaning that it was the heat of the couple, the warmth of their passion, which enabled them to be seen by the police. The erotic sense of this body heat is palpable, and it is almost heart-breaking to know that this private heat is shared, unknowingly, with police officers miles away. What place is there to share and mingle warm bodies when the world is inundated with cold machines? Perhaps iSee gives us the answer to that, but a surveillance helicopter or plane could easily overcome those gaps in permanent camera stations. . .

To take a step back from my sudden (and disturbingly sexual) paranoia, in reading Guy-Ernst Debord’s two essays on this week’s syllabus (again, such great writing this week!), and in devouring the concepts of psychogeography and of the derive, I realized that I had read a lot of these ideas before, in interviews with the author (well, all right, “comic book scribe”) Alan Moore, who penned such literary giants in the “graphic novel” field as Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and From Hell. It was in reading interviews with him about From Hell – which includes a “psychogeographic” walk in chapter 5, in which the soon-to-be Jack-the-Ripper goes on a full-day tour of London, tracing its hidden histories and connections to the arcane mysticism of the Masons, ultimately tracing the path of a pentagram and completing a necessary magic and psychological ritual to prepare for the murders that are to come – that Moore mentioned the concept of psychogeography, tying it most strongly with the writer and novelist Ian Sinclair. I then went on to read some of Sinclair’s work, and I highly recommend it if you are at all interested in psychogeography – he comes the closest to representing the term in a beautiful and amazing collection of amassed verbiage (I’m struggling to avoid calling it “prose,” since I think that flattens out what he’s doing) than anything else I’ve read, including the Debord readings.

Hm . . . comic books, Ian Sinclair, porn, James Taylor, and a Lord of the Rings reference – I’m having a bit too much fun doing these responses

Posted by Andrew Friedenthal at 9:54 PM

Becoming adventurers in a new old place

Washington Square Park can be understood in Edward Casey’s terms as a space, “an encompassing volumetric void” (683), a chunk of landscape delimited by four vectors that are clearly traced and mapped out. However, it can also be understood, especially as members of a community that lives and revolves around this space, as a place, “an arena of action that is at once physical and historical, social and cultural” (683). The fact that the park functions as our “place-world”, a place that we inhabit, have and hold in an embodied way when we cross it every day to get to class, to smoke a cigarette, or to sit on a bench and contemplate passersby, a place that is inevitably liked to our sense of selves, that is constitutive of us and constituted by us as NYU students, a place that is so embedded in our habitus and habitudes, made the Surveillance Camera Players’ Tour all the more intriguing.

The tour aimed to recreate place, to re-contextualize the familiar and the everyday and turn it upside down and inside out. Their project does not seem dissimilar to Guy Debord’s proposal to use psychogeography or dérive as a way to understand people’s emotional relationship to their environment. By focusing our gaze on the eyes of “Big Brother,” the players hope to profoundly alter our relationship to place. They are literally creating a “renovated cartography” (Debord 1955: 3), essentially basing our sense of place on our fear of, discomfort with, or anger at being watched. They displace us by transforming our everyday environment or urban décor (and here perhaps our own relationship to Washington Square Park as its daily inhabitants is all the more meaningful) into a new place-world based on the surveillance cameras located around the square. In many ways, I imagine that Washington Square as place will never be experienced by us in the same way now that we know where the eyes that watch us are placed, as well as how to avoid their gaze. The place has been inscribed in our bodies in a completely new way. A way that will leave its mark on us indefinitely. This echoes Casey’s discussion on the “impressionism of place” beyond our lived experience of place. Indeed, our memory of how it felt to discover that we were being watched, to listen to our tour guide’s anxious and often angry critique of the surveillance system as a warped way of ensuring our security, will remain in us, in our body, beyond the experience of the tour itself. The possibility of being subjected to the misuses of the system will also linger on in us, walking uncomfortably through the square, imagining some bored police officer using the park’s or the buildings’ eyes to direct fleeting glances at our bodies, at our physical markers of self.

Beyond a sense of the tenacity this recontextualization of a familiar place, the tour brought to light the possibility of transgression, of adventure. Perhaps the most obvious place where Simmel’s text came to life is when we were standing in front of the police booth looking at the graffiti on its walls. Our tour guide spoke of the subjection to surveillance as a possibility for play, for game, for gambling and retaliation, but also for subversion through performance. You place a camera, I use the dark of night, you place a sensor, I make a map of where I can escape its reach, you look at me, I look at you. By the very act of taking us on tour, or by going on the tour for that matter, we are offered the chance to be empowered through adventure and exploration. A part of the everyday, our landscape or place-world, is taken outside of that everyday while remaining central to it (Simmel 1). Whether by tagging the police booth, having a costumed dinner party in the subway tunnels, climbing the Brooklyn Bridge, or documenting modern ruins of hospitals and torn down buildings, we are given the opportunity of placing a bet, of gambling, of creating a work of art (in this sense, it is not a coincidence that the work of many of the urban explorers, as well as the Camera Players themselves, have been featured in galleries and art exhibitions), of passively surrendering to chance while simultaneously taking action. In Simmel’s terms, the “constallation of the adventure” has been performed (4). Through becoming tourists in our own stomping grounds, and through recreating our perception of place, we have all become adventurers.

I would like to end my response by expressing a certain dissatisfaction with the tour. As I have described above, I certainly appreciated the experience and do think that it was effective in recreating place and generating a new psychogeography of Washington Square, but I did feel that the Players could have taken this a step further through performance. At the end of our tour, we were thanked for being performers, for using performance as a means to subvert the system, but I felt more like a spectator than a performer. The square was recreated as a spectacle, but I felt that more could have been done to recreate us as actors, as performers, as agents, rather than as viewers with guided gazes. Perhaps I am being too demanding, but the knowledge that the Players have accumulated and recorded, their maps, their performances could certainly go beyond creating awareness. It seems that a project like iSee is doing more with a very similar vantage point, offering alternative maps, giving us agency over our visibility, rather than merely making us aware of it.

Posted by Sandra Rozental at 9:50 PM

You can't be taped playing in the dark

A sacred cave near the city of Takachiho, Kyushu, Japan. The gate separates the inner sanctum of the Shinto shrine—a barrier between the human world and where goddesses like Amaterasu Omikami hide.

Although it is not directly mentioned, one of the key elements in Georg Simmel’s article on adventure is dark play. Simmel writes that in order to have an adventure, one must abandon oneself “to the world with fewer defenses and reserves than in any other relation.” There are multiple ways of abandoning oneself, such as running down a steep hill or going on a date. Yet, in order for adventure to occur, it requires the “complete self-abandonment to the powers and accidents of the world, which can delight us, but in the same breath can also destroy us” (ibid). The possibility of destruction is the key notion in dark play, just as it seems to be in adventure. Yet, let us not forget the inclusion of the word play

Adventure, as defined by Simmel, does not require play.Adventure is far too precious. Beyond abandonment, it requires the enactment of a change. “Only when a stream flowing between the minutest externalities of life and the central source of strength drags them into itself; when the peculiar color, ardor, and rhythm of the life-process become decisive and, as it were, transform its substance—only then does an event change from mere experience to adventure” (ibid).

Play, of course, can be involved, but it is not imperative. What does seem to be necessary is the existence of a liminal state. Play, of course, is a type of liminal state, but so, too, are many other
activities. If adventure is looked at as occurring in liminal states, then it becomes far less precious and rare than the notion of adventure advanced by Simmel. Adventure becomes something that not only an individual can perceive within himself, but also something that whole communities can observe or participate in.

Although Janelle Brown does not mention dark play in the article on the Urban Exploration movement, it perhaps is the main draw for those who go into forbidden areas. Even if the area is not seemingly dangerous, people get a rush from climbing into drainage systems. Why is this satisfying? L. B. Deyo says that, "we don't break locks or bolts or climb over fences; what we're really overcoming is imaginary barriers that are just understood but barely questioned" (qtd. in http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/01/16/infiltration/print.html) It is this crossing of barriers that not only defines Urban Exploration, but also provides its allure of dark play. However, if this kind of activity is so appealing, why aren’t more people involved?

Dean MacCannell writes in his book, The Tourist, that “the possibility that a stranger might penetrate a back region is one major source of social concern in everyday life, as much a concern to the strangers who might do the violating as to the violated” (93). For most people, it would seem, entering into a back area is more uncomfortable for themselves than it is for those who are in control of the back region. People tend to be extremely socially conditioned to uphold the barriers between back and front, public and private. This perhaps explains some of the concerns people have over the inclusion of surveillance cameras that patrol both inside private property, as well as outside, into the public domain.

Cameras, such as the ones inside the Kimmel Center, violate the back/front barrier, in a way that privileges the back. Beyond this, it blurs and creates confusion as to what is back and front, and what is the line between the two. Anxiety is created within the individual, as there is always the possibility of crossing into this back area without being aware. Then again, there are those intrepid adventurers who purposely seek the areas beyond the barriers. Perhaps it will be these people who will re-establish where the lost or blurred barriers exist.

Posted by Lisa Reinke at 9:28 PM

As Maxwell Said, "Somebody's Watching Me!"

This week’s readings and the Surveillance Camera Player’s tour present a wide array of perspectives from a number of disciplines ranging from journalism to social theory and art. Disparate as they might at first appear, a common through-line runs unifies all of these categories, this being an examination of the individual’s relation to social space and the individual and group potential to subvert conventional relationships to social space through alterations in perception and physical movement. What Debord would call a “dérive,” Simmel might term an “adventure,” while Casey would employ the phrase “breaking of habitus, Janelle Brown, “urban exploring,” and Bill Brown “playing.”

The major difference between these texts other than methodology and superficial subject matter is the guiding impetus behind deviations from the norm. While Janelle Brown poses thrill seeking or personal challenge and curiosity, Debord, always politically minded, sees potential on a grander scale with reverberations effecting communities as opposed to the active group or individual alone. Despite his commitment to social change, however, even Debord falls in line with Brown and the rest, as at root his interest lies in steering the individual (and subsequently the masses) towards new perceptions of themselves, their surroundings, and their relationship to their surroundings. Bearing this in mind, I don’t think it unreasonable to suggest that each of these writers is obliquely urging us to become tourists. By altering our relationship to our quotidian surroundings, we can create an increased distance and introduce a strangeness to the familiar that places us in the role of tourist, employing the tourist’s probing, voyeuristic gaze, accompanied by a lack of true inclusion in, and understanding of, the spaces we habitually move through, and the individuals we encounter along the way.

If we accept the notion that we can become tourists in our own homes, so to speak, a number of questions quickly present themselves. If this is the case, why then do we go to such great lengths to find the “other” in faraway places? Is there a fundamental difference between traveling abroad and going on an “adventure” or a “dérive” in one’s hometown, or is this merely a matter of perception? Recalling the writing of DeCerteau as well as the readings for today’s class, if we have the ability to affect others through our choices in social space, what moral responsibilities (if any) do we have towards others, besides those enforced by legislation?

To move back from the general to the specific, I return to Debord’s essay “Introduction to a Critique….” Do we believe that a psychogeographic hermeneutic system could ever be developed? The major problem I see with this is the supposition of a consistent causal link between geography and psychology that ignores subjectivity, the unconscious, and the entire phenomenological project. Ignoring this glaring issue, Debord’s call for a psychogeographic methodology still presupposes that even if an objective causal chain could be determined, that it could, moreover, account for the infinite number of variables present in any interaction between subject and environment, which taxes the capabilities of the scientific method to the extreme.

In closing, I return to today’s tour. While I found Brown’s presentation fascinating (though I must admit, I felt that he sometimes bordered on exhibiting the symptoms of a conspiracy theory paranoiac…did anyone else share this feeling?) Two things struck me most. First, there persisted a major contradiction in his thinking. On the one hand, he was bemoaning the fact that we are constantly being watched and making predictions as to the possibly horrific ramifications of such surveillance systems. On the other hand, he repeatedly made statements pointing to the failings and inadequacies of the surveillance system. The camera aimed at the bush “for years” is a good example. It would seem then, that other than in principle (our civil liberties being infringed upon) we shouldn’t have much concern whatsoever that we’re being watched. In addition, though I’m loath to say it, the contents of the tour speak largely against the efficacy of “playing” to surveillance cameras, as more than likely no one is watching. However, Brown stays committed to his cause. This leads me to wonder if there isn’t some delicious, voyeuristic pleasure not only in watching, but also even in the mere idea that one is being watched, which leads me to consider the reverse of the tourist gaze. Maybe in addition to the pleasure of watching, the tourist seeks out foreign places where she’ll stick out in order to enjoy being watched as well.

Posted by Tyler Sinclair at 9:07 PM

Michelle responds...

These readings provided a terrific framework for my advocacy tourism proposal for the Seward Park Urban Renewal district in the Lower East Side. I have decided to primarily utilize Casey’s piece Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World? In an attempt to focus the enormous implications of a project such as this, I realized that I am deeply interested in what Casey’s essay refers to as the “geographical self.” In other words, I want to analyze/study how the residents of this area on the Lower East Side experience this place. My focus is solely on the experience of those low-income residents in the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area and “the immediate environment of the lived body” (Casey 683). Therefore, my analysis highlights the implications of the place/self relation.

In this project I follow suit with Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and view the failed project of the Seward Park Urban Renewal district as a liminal place, an in-between place. This is further supported by Casey’s use of the term habitus, which he took from Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice. I view Seward Park as a habitus of sorts, as “something improvisational and open to innovation” (Casey 686). This area has the potential to become something wonderful for its low-income residents, and it is them for whom I am advocating for. This advocacy was really illuminated for me during the surveillance tour today. Of course it was not surprising to be reminded that “capitalism does not seek to protect the poor. I pose the question, how can the low-income residents experience this place through economic and residential development and improvement? Thus, how can this place be experienced so that the most intimate relationship between place and self is created?

Newspaper articles that I read concerning the failed project in 2003 clearly reflect Casey’s ideology that “each [self and place] are essential to the being of the other” or that “there is no place without self and no self without place” (Casey 684). Plainly stated, I investigate how one’s place (Seward Park Renewal district) is relational to one’s (low-income residents) personal identity. I propose that this district can increase a positive personal identity to it through the construction of residential and commercial development. The commercial development will provide job opportunity for low-income residents and bring money into this area on the Lower East Side.

My proposal is further strengthened by psychogeographical methods and Debord’s essay on the Theory of the Dérive. Debord states that Chombart de Lauwe’s study paParis et l’agglomération parisienne noted that ‘an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it’ (1958). This idea provides support for my proposal and a happy marriage between self and place relational to personal identity. The broad definition and implications given for the psycho-geographical method opens a huge realm of possibilities for the Seward Park Urban renewal district. I intend to check out the New York Psychogeographical Associations work in relation to the practice of psychogeography.

Tentative Biography for Proposal:
Casey, Edward S. “Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World?”, 2001.
Casey, Edward S. Getting back into place: Toward a renewed understanding of the place-world. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1993.
Debord, “Theory of the Dérive.” Internationale Situationniste #2, 1958.

Posted by Michelle Brown at 8:54 PM

Surveillance: Legal issues

For an interesting discussion of the legal issues (4th amendment)and effectiveness of video surveillance, see Marcus Nieto, Public Video Surveillance: Is It An Effective Crime Prevention Tool? (1997). Nieto offers an historical perspective, as well as considering various cities and countries, their practices, attitudes, and degree to which video surveillance is effective.

Posted by BKG at 8:35 PM

Mysterious Cities

A few different thematic strands can be traced through this week's reading selections: (1) the "sacralization" of city space, (2) an emphasis on de-alienating the individual, and (3) a focus on mystery, unpredictability, and danger. These themes inform studies in urban tourism by implicitly proposing a new mode of experiencing city life as a tourist.

Simmel's "Adventure" begins by musing on the form of the adventure, counters it to the “everyday” and applies this dichotomy to a variety of other forms: art, life, gambling, love. Because I am looking at the creative, spontaneous spaces of interaction made possible by the soundwalk tour, Simmel’s juxtaposition of art and adventure was a helpful conceptual device. For him, the adventurer and the artist are both producing experiences and pieces that are bounded yet complete expressions of depth and perceived “Truth.” The work of art and the adventure stand timelessly “over and against life” yet are often assumed to express something essential about life itself. I’m wondering if the same can be said for the tourist and the experience of touring. If tourism is viewed as a kind of adventure – in that it is a “break” from the daily structures of living – then the tourist can be said to be participating in an artistic project.

I am thinking specifically of the Cardiff walk and the soundwalk, both of which center on the individual’s relationship to her scenic surroundings and offer up a kind of alternate, non-everyday experience of urban architecture.

Yet, Simmel’s message in “The Adventure” goes beyond a formal comparison of art and adventuring. After all, he claims to be speaking about “each segment of our conduct and experience.” Life is an adventure, especially for those of us who “sense above its totality a higher unity.” Here, “religious moods” collide with artistic modes, dream states, gambling tendencies and, possibly, tourism. Each site, each moment of our existence is shot through with multiple meanings – religious, aesthetic, political, etc. This is helpful for me in thinking through the relationship between pilgrimage and tourism, especially in regards to a site like ground zero, one that is “crowded” with meanings. Nonetheless, Simmel’s mode of adventuring does seem to assume a willful, privileged, independent masculine figure (a modern man?) which makes one wonder what sorts of “adventuring” Simmel had in mind when constructing this ideal-type. Life, for many, is not best described as an adventure. Despite that fact, the form is helpful for a project on tourism, a voluntary (not coerced) type of traveling filled with life, uncertainty, and a willful desire.

Simmel’s mode of adventuring is supplemented by Debord’s understanding of the derive. Debord focuses in on the urban drifter who passes through the cityscape while remaining aware of the space’s psychogeographical effects. This process seems to amount a profound de-alienation with one’s urban context and a reconstitution of the space as constructed (yet alive!) and infused with meanings, influences, emotions and possibilities, most of which are not charted on the typical city map. This “psychogeographical mapping” is a revolutionary mode in itself, re-visioning the Paris metro map as filled with life, beauty, and possibility, and moving the cityscape forward, away from its original military-minded planning. The city becomes an environment (a term that conjures connotations of “aliveness”) to be sensed. In some ways, it becomes as mysterious and sacred as the “monotheistic desert” of which Debord speaks – urban space is sacralized. And new modes of tourism like the soundwalk seem to build on this model of the derive: one drifts through the space, maps it with the senses, experiences it anew.

Both Debord and Simmel posit an intimate connection between the world and the self; Casey’s piece does something similar, but writes from a more formal philosophical platform and does away with a-historical types. Place and self are mutually constitutive, and the body is the locus of incorporation. I wondered if Casey was exclusively speaking of the post-industrial urban city when referring to “glocalized” thinly-lived spaces, those spaces that put the self to the test. As with Debord, a loss of morality, god, or “determined resolute action” is assumed to occur in these places of postmodern disarray. Therefore, a sort of de-alienation is sought. Like the authors before, Casey re-infuses places and landscapes with “liveness” and sensuality: the body becomes “the vehicle of lived and lively third space between place and self” (687). His concept of “idiolocalization” will become useful in my project since I am interested in the way the site is incorporated and expressed through the senses.

Lastly, Janelle Brown’s article on infiltration brings together the ideas of exploration, city psychogeography, and bodily experience. The fact that most of the places that have become destinations for urban explorers are “off the map” and secret contrasted nicely to our guided tour of those spaces that were heavily watched. Infiltrators are bringing their lives – and, subsequently, “breathing life” – into abandoned buildings, bridges and subway tunnels, marking the mundane and mechanical city with their power and will. One can argue that government and private corporations are doing the same with their surveillance technology. Soon, nothing will be unseen or unmarked. The city is watching, and we are watching it back. The handout we received today from Bill (?) even had a “guide to mapping surveillance” so that you or I could start surveying the surveillance cameras, and map the watchers, so to speak. Also, as I was watching Bill being filmed by the documentary maker, it occurred to me that we, too, are part of the technology of surveillance. Yet, at the same time, we aren’t comfortable being watched – the panopticon and “big brother” are constricting concepts. It seems that urban explorers are pushing the boundaries posited by this age of surveillance society, freeing the body, and flirting with the depths and heights of danger. On a last note, today’s tour also illuminated the fact that city infrastructure is never neutral or static. The surveillance has not necessarily done what it was commissioned to do (i.e., deter crime, watch the world precisely), yet it has inspired groups like the Players to perform in protest in front of them, further demonstrating the dynamic, dangerous, artful, and unpredictable nature of city life.

Posted by Brynn Noelle Saito at 8:15 PM

Eyes Everywhere on the Street, from Leah

It seems to me that our experience on this tour should be considered “psychogeography” but the environment we studied was not simply geographical, by which I mean focused on the earth itself, as the most important elements considered were man-made: different forms of technology and architecture as well as the union of the two.

I was most intrigued and alarmed by the content of the “advanced” tour and the ideas of where surveillance might go next, really is already going, with new wireless capabilities. I have long been interested in the idea that cell phones erase place by making a person accessible or easily located anywhere they happen to be – anywhere, that is, that has cell phone reception. In this sense cell phones obviate the “geographical self.” When we carry cell phones we carry tags that identify us and communication tools that are hard to ignore when others are trying to reach us. This last part of the tour made clear that the expanding capacities of cell phones (or whatever we might eventually call these gadgets, with their multiple capabilities) increase their power not only as tools but as tags; we can be identified and located and connected to key information about ourselves from almost any place on earth. (Identification cards, such as the one Bill was wearing, can function in similar ways.) I am also struck by how successive generations of surveillance technology require less material and fewer connecting wires; this means that there are fewer physical clues in the environment that the surveillance is occurring. Imagine archeologists of the future – how will they be able to reconstruct the surveillance patterns of video cell phones?

Many of our readings emphasized the adventurous, even risqué or forbidden nature of psychogeographical exploration. After this tour I felt that the real inheritors of this philosophy might be the people hired to serve as the human eyes behind the cameras. They are sanctioned by the government or their private employers and, as was so clearly illustrated for us by our tour guide, they may use their secret powers of observation to look where they are not supposed to be looking – infiltration indeed. Even odder, rather than exploring the forgotten or decrepit, they have expanded powers to more closely study and peek into the most mundane, normal and yet private moments of people, including those moments when individuals feel comfortably anonymous in the public streets and spaces of the big city. Still, the activities of these observers are not truly adventures in my mind, since they do not explore these sites so much as spy on them and the people passing through them.

I looked up the definition of the word “player” online at www.m-w.com (Merriam Webster Dictionary) and found the following two definitions (#s 4 and 5 out of 5): 1) a device that produces recorded material from a usually specified medium, 2) one actively involved especially in a competitive field or process. [http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=players, accessed 10-23-05] These definitions contrast with the passivity I felt after the tour as I thought of myself as a pedestrian in the city, a passive participant in the ubiquitous filming and a marked denizen because of the uniqueness of my personal data and the ubiquity of cell phones which could allow for information about myself to be “played” by others, unbeknownst to myself. A final word on “habitus”: what is left of adventure when technology allows us to see anyplace at any time in an instant? And how do we experience place when we sense that we might never be truly anonymous, able to “lose ourselves” for a moment in a particular place?

Posted by BKG at 8:09 PM

Yochi's Response

Observing through the surveillance camera
It was a pleasant experience to join the surveillance tour in the chilly autumn afternoon. The tour also helped me in realizing how fragile and useless the surveillance camera systems are. At the beginning of the tour, I kept on thinking the question that the use of surveillance cameras as a tool which could possibly predict crime and even stop it before it actually take place, however, this function can fail due to personal reasons (like the police officers feel bad about going out of the booth because of the weather condition, or the prejudice/misread of the people who watch the camera images.) After Bill’s introduction about the Kimmel Center, as the example of post-911 building, more questions popped out of my head, including relationship between the price tag of the insurance and the amount of the surveillance cameras, or the distinction between private area and public area in the sense of the using the web-cam.

After reading Edward S. Casey’s essay of Between Geography and Philosophy, Kimmel Centre, as a key site in our surveillance tour, presents the characteristic of the post-911 syndrome led me back to think the building as an object that carries the “outgoing” and “incoming” qualities. Located around the Washington Square Park as a private building of New York University, the density of the surveillance cameras reflected its response to the terrorist action, but also the power of Capitalism as Bill mentioned. The surveillance cameras along the walls present the trace after interacting with the social incidence, while at the same time the ridiculous disposition from one wall to the other also tells the stupidity of the coordination.

The cameras set up by the government can certainly look into the big glass buildings and invade the private space, while the private area can also set up the camera under the name of security and watch over the public places, the blur line between privacy and public in the scoop of the cameras of the ground equipments already created an interesting issue, not even mention the problems of the moving camera installations in the sky. Other than the equipments I mentioned above, the web-cams also made the private area and the public area even more ambiguous in the virtual world. Web-cams on Time Square or Champs Elysees can be grabbed from internet 24 hours a day and become a living picture in a private bedroom, while by simple equipments, anyone can broadcast and exhibit his/her private living space to the public. The power of seeing usually implies the power of knowing, however, while more and more people willing to exhibit their private life to the public, is the power still holds in the hands of those watchers or the power relationship also shifted a little bit to those who is welling to perform in front of the camera, like the individual web-cam owners or the surveillance camera performers?

At our final spot, Bill sketched a future of highly surveillance society, which by using the cell phones or modern monitoring techniques in order to identify the activities of individuals that may come true in the following years. Concerning the issue of the identity theft, it is very fascinating that by looking into the unlimited wireless area through the frequency of the cell phones without the permission of the owner or under the name of the law that protect the tranquility of the society, the government is also acting as the thief, which steals the privacy and identity from individuals. This psychogeogrphic experience of the surveillance camara tour certainly changes my pedestrian knowledge, I do have anxiety after knowing that the stories in the movies of the world is under surveillance is indeed existing around me, and the whole system is operating not under the premises of necessity of security but more related to the insurance bill, however, I have to admit that after knowing we are surrounded by all these cameras, it is a relieve of realizing that most of them are controlled by mal-functioned system and basically useless in most of the time.

Posted by Yo-Chi Li at 7:15 PM

Siobhan's Response

During the tour and throughout the readings I kept thinking, “How is this legal?” I mean I know how, but why. Why can “whoever it is” who controls surveillance get away with what they do? The discrimination, racism, and racial profiling in general that dictates so many cameras (or the men behind the cameras) frustrates me in the highest degree.

It is no shock to me that these cameras pinpoint women, minorities, outsiders, black youth etc. But I was shocked by the piece of information I received today during the tour. Though it makes so much sense that less surveillance cameras are in areas that are heavy populated by the poor (a euphemism for minorities), it scares me to think about the real use of those cameras. It seems like it has less to do with protecting people and more to do with investment in capitalism. The $400,000.00 used to install these cameras could go to actually preventing crimes in areas that are underrepresented. If only ten arrests were made in a 22-month time period of surveillance use in Times Square, imagine how many are made in neighborhoods and cities where there is absolutely no surveillance. Imagine how many people, children, and babies, are killed, raped, robbed etc. in landscapes like Harlem or East Flatbush where I live. I find it even more outraging that when crimes, such as harassment and police brutality are captured on tape; it is ignored when it involves minorities. As a Black woman or the self (two areas of least concern,) I feel the compelling need to become an adventurer, and go to those places that are forbidden, where no cameras can survey me.

Also, I am not sure that I entirely agree with the modernist view of there being no relationship between self and place. I feel that one’s self can be a place. Self like place can be viewed as a sensuous self-presentation as a whole. For example, in previous examples I have discussed how crime is ignored when it involves crimes against minorities. I look at those “minorities” as a presentation, a presentation of self not worthy of protection.

Posted by Siobhan Robinson at 6:11 PM

New York Surveillance Camera Players

Click here for more images of our New York Surveillance Camera tour.

Posted by BKG at 5:47 PM