Junk for Code

[grid::brand] Comments on Others#1

After I finished my grid blog on 'the brand' I began exploring the work of others in the network . I found some of the grid blogging to be of great interest to my obsesssions.

I will comment on some of them---pretty much doing what Jean over at Creativity Machine is doing. I will highlight those in the network that overlap with the thematic concerns of junk for code.

The material on Glowlab by Heidi Cody caught my interest. It was about Times Square. She says:

"The ultimate American example of brand mania capitalizing on urban space, for better or worse, is Times Square in Manhattan...Times Square is the spectacular, mega-watt collision of real estate and corporate branding....Starting from the second story and extending up sometimes eight or more floors, Times Square's signs effectively dazzle in a collective sensory overload."

You can say that again! It is sensory overload in the society of the spectacle. It is a mediascape that enframes us. It is neither Le Corbusier's dream city, nor Jane Jacob's urban street life of the neighbourhood. That was yesterday. This is today.

How in the hell do you come to grips with that spectacle?

You dump all concepts about language representing a world that's what you do. You can hang onto language representing the reality with natural or social science, but not with the mediascape of Times Square.

Do we have the tools to make sense of it? Or is it--the image-forces of the deregulated market--- senseless?

Even Derrida's concerns about language seem tame. You know, the early writings on the philosophy of language, presence, and difference. The work in which he deconstructed the discussing the tradition that speech is somehow more basic than writing; undoes the binary opposition in which speech and writing are opposed to one another and speech is then valorized over writing.

I was much taken with this deconstruction of the privileging of speech over writing. I accepted that it presupposed a metaphysics of presence; whether in the form of the rationalists presence of meaning to the mind (as with Descartes' clear and distinct ideas) or the empiricist's presence of objects to the senses (so the mind can transparently mirror the world).

There is no metaphysics of presence in Times Square. Nor even the pretence of one. That metaphysics is old hat. The stuff for old scholars when you are walking Times Square at night with a digital camera. It's a dazzling heap of pulsating visual signs that "point" to other signs.

There is no real behind these images. This urbanscape is just layers and layers and layers of images. A jumble. This is the postmodern world of flattened out multiplicity, mixture, without a unifying theme or centre other than mulitplicity.

Do the meanings of these "texts" only arise through the articulation of the difference among images and other "texts"? Can we say that meaning is continually being deferred as it plays itself in relation to other absent texts; absent texts that are present in the traces registered by their absence?

I don't know. Derrida was talking about words and written texts not signs as images in a mediascape.

Digging deeper into Glowlab I discovered this walking Times Square project. One of the walking projects:

"....mapped Times Square from the perspective of alien anthropologists. Pretending they knew no terrestrial languages, they read the architecture. They found the landscape to be bleak, filled with symbols of authority and punishment. If they had arrived as aliens, they imagined, they might have thought the bars, grills and grids covering the building facades and windows indicated jails or courts. The giant head in a store window could be the Panopticon, and Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum a kind of holding cell or torture chamber. On a more optimistic note, they considered that the various towers of lights and glowing signs could represent luminous transporters they could use to escape this place."

This walking Times Square is part of the PDPAL public art project that encourages individuals to stake a personal claim on urban experience. The detached ironic subjectivity of the modernists can only be adopted for an art project. It is not liveable comportment because the data flow of the mediascape are too overwhelming.

Even the trace of history in the jumble of signs is gone.

Should we learn to love Times Square? Just go along with the data flow?

Nicolas over at Nicolas Nova suggests a technique from the Situationists called psychogeography:

'According to Guy Debord, “Psychogeography is the study of the effects of geographical settings, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behaviour of the individual". That is to say, "a rather pleasing vagueness" bounded with so-called derive (i.e. drift). The dérive is an example of a situation-creating technique in which one navigate among cities and places. In addition, navigation is just based on our feelings.Lots of drifting games or scenarios have been invented, like cruising around in Paris with a map of London.'

I 'm not sure that aimless drifting through Times Square, trying to record the emotions given by a particular space, would be enough to resolve the sensory overload. Or do we just soak up the sensory overload and lose all sense of self?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 2, 2003 01:54 PM | TrackBack