[mf2012] Mapping moving forests

[Saul Albert]

Hi MF,

I've really enjoyed the discussions so far, especially chasing up some
of the reading people pointed to. However, last week's discussion about
guerilla terminology, minor politics and the opacity of Capitalism's
transparency left me feeling a bit stuck and, well, melancholic - mostly
because I agree with many of your criticisms Anthony, but I wonder if
maybe some of them weighed in a bit too soon.

In fact it reminded me of a write-up you did of the Undoing The City
event in Copenhagen that we attended together:
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/undoing-city-and-ourselves
during which 'critical urbanism', autonomist-Marxist economic/cultural
analysis, various forms of social activism, vanguardist art, and
somewhat anachronistic 'culture-jamming' practices sat uncomfortably
alongside each other for a weekend, culminating in a spectacular evening
of property damage that hit the headlines and is still very visibly
imprinted on the 'net if you search for the name of the Central
Copenhagen shopping street where it kicked off:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?tbm=isch&q=Hyskenstraede

In that article you recount a few stories I'm familiar with: the
immediate purchase of the graffiti-damaged furniture from the trashed
store in central Copehnagen, and the spectacle of a diverse, vigorous
group of impressive-looking young people engaged in neighbourhood
activism in order to raise their own property prices. A reflexive
critique of anti-gentrification-led gentrification, I read your piece as
illustrating the contradictions of activist identity and the need for a
more critical look at ones own ends and affinity group composition. So,
I can understand your attention in emails to this list to the group and
its activities name themselves.

I find your care and critical attention to this issue in your write-up
of Undoing the City much more compelling and enthusing than the appeal
in your last email to Horowitz quoting Kant on the 'manufacturing of
freedom' being an issue of the 'work' as in labour of art. There's so
much bound up in this rhetoric that seems as slippery and uncritical to
me as the use of 'insurgent' or 'guerilla' terminology used to describe
a vanguardist practice.

Re-reading your Copenhagen text, I looked back at the 'work' that Jakob
invited me to help with that day: a mapping of the informally privatised
mini greens and courtyards in the Nørrebro neighbourhood using
OpenStreetMap (OSM) to record a day of group walking, talking,
negotiating access to squares and inscribing our routes via OSM's
copyleft geodata repository. I remembered that I had written up a diary
note about it at the time on the OpenStreetMap user blog:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Saul%20Albert/diary/6584 and I was
pleased to discover that I has taken screengrabs of 'before' and 'after'
the mapping process on openstreetmap.

before: http://www.flickr.com/photos/saulalbert/3607306730
after: http://www.flickr.com/photos/saulalbert/3606486983/

Then I checked what OSM had to say about the same street today:
now: http://www.flickr.com/photos/saulalbert/6956389320
on osm: http://osm.org/go/0NWtrQ9Wn-

I'm smugly pleased that none of these micro green spaces are visible on
Google Maps, although I suppose you could check out their satellite
images ;).

What surprised me most about the 'before', 'after' and '2 years later'
images was how persistent the green spaces we mapped that day were in
the fluctuating landscape of OSM, even though OpenStreetMap had
developed, ingested new large geodata sets, and changed so much since
then. Also, it was interesting to note that the little greens in between
the houses seemed to have spread into the surrounding area. Even though
this was a one-off workshop, it must have inspired some people nearby to
continue mapping Nørrebro's private courtyards which stand out from the
otherwise grey spaces around them.

I wanted to bring up these two events and the traces they left on the
'net, in the city, and with the participants for a few reasons that I
think are pertinent to the MF discussions so far.

Firstly, for the participants, the experience of the street party-cum
riot had a certain situational quality to it that, as you say (with
careful qualification in your write up), manifested a 'temporary
breach', (I'm assuming this breach is in the same 'neoliberal landscape'
you and Rachel were arguing about earlier on this list). John Ploger has
since written about this event in an academic context (pirate pdf here:
http://bit.ly/IJxZCI) arguing that its 'eventalisation' of space was -
as you suggested - quickly capitalised on by 'creative copenhagen'.

As I remember, the mapping party had a similar 'breach' effect -
conversations between people as they walked through private squares, and
conversations with people living in them who were curious about this
travelling survey group constituted, in the interactions themselves, a
breach of the socially inscribed codes of private space.  People talked,
exchanged, invited us in for coffee, local kids sold us home-made cake
and odd bits of jumble. There was a lot to be said for the 'situation'
that - even if we had blogged, flickred or otherwise cognitively
capitalised on the experience after the fact - did not feel like the
traversal of the kind of desert you describe in 'Spectures of Opacity'
at the time.

So I wanted to make the case that Lefebvre made about the catch 22 of
situationist subversion and its inevitable assimilation into - as you
put it in your write up - "the spectacle of antagonism", that on some
very basic, everyday level, people are smart enough to relate to one
another without immediately collapsing their interaction under the
stultifying (thanks Josie) logic of capital. After years of working with
Mikey, making a spectacle (in all senses) of ourselves and other people
inside and around the Talkaoke table, I feel the empirical weight of
Lefebvre's argument.

Secondly, in relation to the longer term impact of both Jakob's workshop
and the street party, it's intriguing to me to see how persistent the
impact on some prominent inscriptions of the city (Google Images and
OSM) has been. I'd argue that Google's images of graffed-up walls and
slogans like "capitalism is boring" in a downtown Copenhagen shopping
street, alongside pictures of smart racks of expensive clothes,
sculptures and fancy food have a certain prêt-à-récupérer chic to them.

You could say that OSM's geodata is even more conveniently available (in
multiple data formats) for any number of spectacular uses: as
participatory art commodity, as the 'crowdsourced' geospatial
information infrastructure for affectively avaricious social networks,
or even more directly for surveillance or even missile guidance, should
you ever want to take out some small bohemian courtyards in a relatively
left-leaning social democracy.

But, with apologies to those who are over-sensitive to technologically
deterministic undertones, I do think there's an inherent consistency in
form, context and political bent to the situational 'breach' effect of
the conversations had in and around people's courtyards and the
information infrastructures (OSM) used to inscribe and disseminate the
traces of those events. I think that consistency can be described as
'conversational' - a term I far prefer to the vagueness of 'open' or
'free', at least in the way I use it - to describe an interactional
situation involving certain basic characteristics including turn-taking,
contingency and a mutually acknowledged effort to overcome the ambiguity
of human communication. This kind of conversationality I'm talking about
is related to Lefebvre's take on people's innate ability to overcome
deterministic political relations in their everyday interactions,
although the ontologies of human interaction and OSM are obviously very
different (I'm working on it).

Soren Pold and Christian Ulrik Andersen develop a useful way of talking
about the "Scripted Spaces of Urban Ubiquitous computing"
(http://nineteen.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-133-the-scripted-spaces-of-urban-ubiquitous-computing-the-experience-poetics-and-politics-of-public-scripted-space/),
and although the 'permissions' structure they use to describe this space
does not map easily onto the critique of neoliberal landscape you're
talking about Anthony, (again, different ontologies, plus it's a bit
crude for describing the different modes of being together in spaces
that people have and the ways they mediate them), I think their reading
of the techno-social situation of public urban space is convincing and
recognisable.

So finally, my point is that although it might be seen as an act of
self-sabotage in the political long term, Rachel's vanguardist approach
has an immediacy to it that is worth pursuing *and* critiqing, but maybe
in that order - do first - then try to figure out the implications, in
the way that Os der ikke findes were doing in their post-mortem
discussions and missives after the street party in Copenhagen:
http://www.metamute.org/community/your-posts/explosive-force-freedom

And echoing Shu-lea's early call for some kind of involvement with OSM,
I think that's a very good idea - possibly using similar strategies to
Jakob's workshop - or otherwise allying the project with an information
infrastructure that has a form that is recognisably conversational.  At
least then, the labour that goes into the production of the artwork,
though it may be captured and converted in various different ways by
different interests, at least remains available for further uses and
co-options by those who produced it.



-- 
mob: +44(0)7941255210 / @saul 
sip: +44(0)2071007915 / skype:saulalbert