Programming Streams
Maps and Memes
Mapping marks the intersections and exchanges between the real and the virtual, the material and the abstract, the environment and the conceptual, the colonial and the emancipatory, the lost and the locatable, the lived and the imagined. Maps and mapping stage power relations, control and surveillance but they also can create trajectories for resistance, subversion, detours, reorientations. Maps render abstractions as visual artifacts, but also find patterns in invisible and sometimes ineffable lived relations. Cartography expands beyond landscapes, cities, and roads. It can chart ideas, social spaces, capital, datastreams, internet usage, technologies, psychic states. Maps render space navigable and knowable. Maps now exceed their origins on paper, populating multiple platforms such as the landscape itself, computers, satellites, GPS, GIS, PDAs, Ipods, locative media, RFID, search engines and power point. A meme is a contagious idea that travels through social networks and spaces--often without a map.
Metropoli
The 20th-century city was a confined but messy heterogeneity: neighborhoods, class systems, riots, suspension bridges, skyscrapers, slums, coffee shops, jazz clubs, sports stadiums, the glamorous, the homeless, the underground, the promenade, the tourist trap, the park, the bomb shelter, ethnic enclaves, segregated schools, labor unions, zoning boards, street gangs, political machines, bus stops, police patrols, five-lane freeways. Fostered by violence, enclosure, and the ruthless manipulation of nature, the early modern European city personified capitalist ascendancy, imperial ambition, and utopian fantasy. Twentieth-century metropoli were Brooklyn, Harlem, Paris, Leningrad, Warsaw, Hiroshima, Soweto, and Arcosanti. Twenty-first century metropoli are shifting outposts in the global imaginary-sprawling, fractured, unmappable, unsustainable, hypercapitalized, terrorized, transfrontiered, post-suburban, subtopian, exurban, new urban, eco-urban, anarcho-urban, cyber-urban, megalopic. Welcome to the 21st century; welcome to Manhattan, Caracas, Bangalore, Brussels, Lagos, Singapore, Baghdad, and Ithaca.
Panic Attacks
The exploitation of panic serves profit and power. In its psychic and social operations, panic establishes boundaries between those experiencing it and those generating it. As a social process, panic polices the territories of morality, propriety, sexuality, and racial and gender difference. Panic radiates from streets, nips at borders, surges through HVAC systems, stokes conflagrations, and muddies horizons. Panic undermines our faith in the legitimate fear of calamity. Why do we court panic at amusement parks and horror flicks, on cliff sides, in gambling casinos, and via psychotropic drugs? Panic is systemic, corporate, and indeterminate. Panic attacks draw interest from drug cartels, ambitious politicians, terror networks, intelligence services, advertising agencies, and medical professionals. Panic engenders suffocation, overreaction, irrationality, intense misperception, and loss of self. Yet panic reminds us that we're still alive and still want to be.
Soundscaping
Sound is an endlessly mutating, mobile, ephemeral experiential environment. Sound inscribes our bodies through rhythm, pitch, tonality, and dynamism. Soundscaping reconsiders sound as a sensual, interactive process beyond sight, beyond the measurably empirical. Soundscaping reorganizes our relationships to sound. It immerses us in material, natural, and social environments. Soundscaping transforms the aural landscape. Produced sounds chart soundscaping in hip-hop, remix, soundtracks, audio art, radio, bombs, experimental music, postminimalism, classical music, jazz, blues, rock, post-rock, film scores, drumming, beating, and MP3s. Natural sounds also reveal underrecognized polyphonies such as wind, thunder, insects, voices, animals, weather, waterfalls, coughing, cracking, yelling, screeching, slapping, dripping, and clapping. Soundscaping confronts the politics of noise-those banned pitches and dissonances disrupting the normative, the acceptable, and the quiet.
Maps and Memes
Mapping marks the intersections and exchanges between the real and the virtual, the material and the abstract, the environment and the conceptual, the colonial and the emancipatory, the lost and the locatable, the lived and the imagined. Maps and mapping stage power relations, control and surveillance but they also can create trajectories for resistance, subversion, detours, reorientations. Maps render abstractions as visual artifacts, but also find patterns in invisible and sometimes ineffable lived relations. Cartography expands beyond landscapes, cities, and roads. It can chart ideas, social spaces, capital, datastreams, internet usage, technologies, psychic states. Maps render space navigable and knowable. Maps now exceed their origins on paper, populating multiple platforms such as the landscape itself, computers, satellites, GPS, GIS, PDAs, Ipods, locative media, RFID, search engines and power point. A meme is a contagious idea that travels through social networks and spaces--often without a map.
Metropoli
The 20th-century city was a confined but messy heterogeneity: neighborhoods, class systems, riots, suspension bridges, skyscrapers, slums, coffee shops, jazz clubs, sports stadiums, the glamorous, the homeless, the underground, the promenade, the tourist trap, the park, the bomb shelter, ethnic enclaves, segregated schools, labor unions, zoning boards, street gangs, political machines, bus stops, police patrols, five-lane freeways. Fostered by violence, enclosure, and the ruthless manipulation of nature, the early modern European city personified capitalist ascendancy, imperial ambition, and utopian fantasy. Twentieth-century metropoli were Brooklyn, Harlem, Paris, Leningrad, Warsaw, Hiroshima, Soweto, and Arcosanti. Twenty-first century metropoli are shifting outposts in the global imaginary-sprawling, fractured, unmappable, unsustainable, hypercapitalized, terrorized, transfrontiered, post-suburban, subtopian, exurban, new urban, eco-urban, anarcho-urban, cyber-urban, megalopic. Welcome to the 21st century; welcome to Manhattan, Caracas, Bangalore, Brussels, Lagos, Singapore, Baghdad, and Ithaca.
Panic Attacks
The exploitation of panic serves profit and power. In its psychic and social operations, panic establishes boundaries between those experiencing it and those generating it. As a social process, panic polices the territories of morality, propriety, sexuality, and racial and gender difference. Panic radiates from streets, nips at borders, surges through HVAC systems, stokes conflagrations, and muddies horizons. Panic undermines our faith in the legitimate fear of calamity. Why do we court panic at amusement parks and horror flicks, on cliff sides, in gambling casinos, and via psychotropic drugs? Panic is systemic, corporate, and indeterminate. Panic attacks draw interest from drug cartels, ambitious politicians, terror networks, intelligence services, advertising agencies, and medical professionals. Panic engenders suffocation, overreaction, irrationality, intense misperception, and loss of self. Yet panic reminds us that we're still alive and still want to be.
Soundscaping
Sound is an endlessly mutating, mobile, ephemeral experiential environment. Sound inscribes our bodies through rhythm, pitch, tonality, and dynamism. Soundscaping reconsiders sound as a sensual, interactive process beyond sight, beyond the measurably empirical. Soundscaping reorganizes our relationships to sound. It immerses us in material, natural, and social environments. Soundscaping transforms the aural landscape. Produced sounds chart soundscaping in hip-hop, remix, soundtracks, audio art, radio, bombs, experimental music, postminimalism, classical music, jazz, blues, rock, post-rock, film scores, drumming, beating, and MP3s. Natural sounds also reveal underrecognized polyphonies such as wind, thunder, insects, voices, animals, weather, waterfalls, coughing, cracking, yelling, screeching, slapping, dripping, and clapping. Soundscaping confronts the politics of noise-those banned pitches and dissonances disrupting the normative, the acceptable, and the quiet.
