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Abstract:
This paper discusses a project that explores the convergence of
technological and social space in six urban centers in the Americas
and Europe. It investigates the public sphere around issues of
migration, nomadism and notions of a better life. It sketches
a genealogy of media practices that are a backdrop for the project,
and draws attention to how new media forms amplify these traditions.
It concludes by addressing some of the difficulties of integrating
technological and social space across contemporary global sites,
due to the digital divide between technologically developed and
developing zones.
Keywords:
global media spaces, online video, webcasting, database, public
sphere, visual ethnography, cultures/languages/identities, migration,
nomadism, better life.
Introduction
"Where are you from?"
synthesises many of my explorations regarding translocality, the
hybridisation of media, and the convergence of technological and
social space in the urban environment. It received a Canada Council
Media Arts Research Grant in 2002.
The project is entwined with a set
of existential concerns encapsulated in the title of Paul Gauguin’s
1897 painting: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we
going? [1] It juxtaposes culture and technology to explore the
boundaries between how we imagine the world and our place within
it. Information and communication technology is used to explore
aspects of globalization such as migration, nomadism, hybrid identities,
language convergence, and electronic mediation. Stories from transitional
human subjects in six world cities are video taped during public
performances, Webcast Live (when possible) and stored in a growing
database. The stories tell where people come from and where they
go to in search of a "better life", and reveal that
contemporary notions of place and belonging are complex, hybrid
and in a continual state flux.
I frame the project around my nomadic
personal geography in six cities: Montreal, Toronto, Chicago,
Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Paris. These cities I have lived
in occupy a position of centrality or periphery that are relative
in the cultural universe. For example, Buenos Aires may be a center
in the imagination of a migrant from Peru, but a periphery for
a nomad/passer-by from Tokyo, itself a globalised center containing
numerous local peripheries. I am interested in the complex relationships
between centers and peripheries found in both local and global
environments, specifically within the context of the emerging
"networked city" that impacts traditional analog urban
networks. "Virtual" spaces enabled by the telephone,
television and the Internet, influence and interact with "real"
urban places creating new zones that combine architecture, media
spaces and information/communication technologies. As a result,
cities, or certain parts of these cities, gain in symbolic centrality,
thus in importance, while other cities -or parts of them- lose
in relevance and even disappear from mental maps. It appears that
the emerging information/communication networks correspond to
the given logic of economic expansion of urban structures to which
they are attracted, and that they are thus enhancing, to some
extent, existing centralities. (Sikiaridi & Vogellar, 2000)
[2]
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In the "Where are you from?"
project, I seek to reveal these dynamic, complex relationships
between people and places. To this end, I create communicational
spaces in carefully selected public urban locations where citizens-at-large
share personal stories that integrate images of self and translocal
experiences. I launch conversations with a simple question that
everyone can relate to: "Where are you from?" I then
involve participants in a discussion about where they come from
and where they are going, presumably to seek a "better life."
The online environment used for
broadcasting as well as for archiving stories, is a transcultural
possibility space of dialogue and conversation (Hayles 2005) [3],
a space of reception and exchange where viewers may not only see
and hear (Live) video taped strangers telling stories on the Internet,
they may also participate by contributing a story of their own.
Thus, the project converges the movement of populations and technologically
mediated stories of these populations on the Internet with the
aim of exploring cultural identity issues around contemporary
notions of a "better life".
Locating and archiving culture
The quest for a better life -- often
located elsewhere -- is endemic of modern living where "home"
is no longer a fixed place. In his book The Location of Culture,
Homi K. Bhabha (1996) claims that: "It is the trope of our
times to locate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond,
" [4] a word that marks progress by promising the future.
Bhahba claims that for many, the promise of a better life allows
for the re-definition of place and belonging in a hybrid site
often located between cultural traditions and historical periods.
Along similar lines, social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996)
views electronic mediation and migration as the most important
factors defining today’s global world. He claims that territoriality
is replaced by translocalities, thanks to migrating peoples as
well as to the electronically mediated movement of ideas, values,
life-styles, and everyday lives that modify cultural spaces and
cultural worlds [5]. My interviews conducted between 2002 and
2005, support Bhabha’s and Appadurai’s arguments by
presenting "social actors" that negotiate hybrid identities
and multilevel affiliations to home and nation.
"Where are you from?"
creates a forum for discussion and a live archive on contemporary
notions of a "better life". The work is inscribed at
the crossroads between current documentary ethnographic practices,
and new media forms in order to capture, disseminate and archive
cultural content. The capturing of information occurs during Live
events in 6 cities and in 3 languages. I incorporate techniques
of investigation and recording used by visual ethnographers who
acknowledge the importance of understanding people’s cultural
practice from within the everyday settings in which they take
place (eg. Janet Cool’s Home Economics, 1994). This cultural
material is disseminated in two ways. Firstly, as "raw data"
(or raw material) through Live Webcasts that follow the logic
of immaterial memory systems pertaining to oral culture. Secondly,
as an online "digital database" of Video on Demand.
This archive is made up of video taped material that has been
reprocessed, stored and linked in a non-hierarchical and non-linear
fashion. Visitors may access these stories randomly through an
interface composed of a vocabulary of frequently used words extracted
from the interviews. This feature reflects the flexible and labyrinthine
structure of oral culture, as opposed to the linear, hierarchical
structure of written records: archives aimed at control both of
the recorded items and of the people and processes that these
recorded items stand for, as in the case of historical archives
and national administrative records. (Brouwer & Mulder, 2003)
[6]
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(Screenshots of "Where
Are You From") |
Both Webcasting and VOD databases,
provide the artist with a new platform for the free distribution
of video content. In this sense, it allows for the re-appropriation
of personal power within the context of the public sphere and
the dissemination of a more eclectic range of views. These factors
are significant because by subverting institutional power systems,
such as those imposed by traditional broadcasting and administrative
archival methods, the artist can contribute to the transformation
of how knowledge is produced, exchanged and stored, so that information
may be reused and recombined to create the world in a different
light.
The evolving "Where are you
from?" project is intended as a heterogeneous, mutable, interactive
and open-ended one, allowing participants drawn from different
cultures to inscribe meaning. The project can incorporate image
and text-based exchange made possible by emerging technologies
(mobile, wireless devices with video-capture capabilities) where
multiple threads from participants may coexist. In all of these
instances, "virtual/real communication allows users to coexist/operate
in several ‘worlds’, to be ‘atHome’ and
at the same time itinerant and ‘distributed’, offering
alternative possibilities of presence and encounters." (Paraguai
/ Pardo, 2001) [7]
Mediated encounters and
the networked city
Connectivity has become the defining
characteristic of our times, with nodes where electronic information
flows, mobile bodies, and physical places intersect. William Mitchell
(2003) postulates that in the past, "networks would mostly
have been maintained by face-to-face contact within a contiguous
locality - a compact, place-based community. Today, they are maintained
through a complex mix of local face-to-face interactions, travel,
mail systems, synchronous electronic contact through email, and
similar media." [8] He argues that increasingly, our sense
of continuity and belonging derives from being electronically
networked to widely scattered people and places. The electronically
wired city is quickly becoming a prosthetic extension of the human
body. But, despite claims about decentralisation brought about
by the emerging networked society, parallel contradictory tendencies
of concentration and deconcentration still apply today. The city
is still seen as brain or centralised communal ‘thinking
space’ because power and skill concentrates in a few central
nodes that are major international financial and business centres.
One cannot overlook the fact that market forces mainly drive the
expansion of information and communication technologies. "Particular
combinations of fixed capital and human expertise enable specific
nodes within the global urban system, to play enhanced roles in
the arena of cultural and economic production." (Grandy,
2004) [9] That is to say, these electronically networked spaces
-- the networked spaces that would enable the Webcast of "Where
are you from?"-- happen to have a geographic shape and result
from a marketing synergy -- investments in specific places --
made by institutional and corporate interests that establish and
maintain them. In addition, these entities can control the form
these networks take, as well as their content. This is a matter
of concern because media networks have a tendency of being segregative
spaces that are but the magnification of tendencies already visible
in "real" space.
It is fruitful to notice the emerging
fusions of analog space and digital networks, and how these electronically
networked sites impact public space. Wired as well as wireless-enabled
urban spaces attract new social formations in specific physical
structures: "stable institutions of hospitality" (Raqs
Media Collective, 2003) [10] such as universities and libraries,
corporate and commercial spaces -- "Starbucks" being
one example. These sites where technological and social space
converge, contribute to the evolution of new communities, social
systems and cultural meanings. But, while such electronically
networked spaces in cities are quickly becoming a reality that
affect small pockets within certain urban centers, one cannot
ignore the real state of global media spaces: the fact that there
exist devastating polarities and exclusions determined by economic
disparity and access to technology in different world cities (and
zones within them). The increasing divide between networked and
non-networked spaces within cities as well as globally, will result
in increasing polarities in social formations and cultural meanings.
I witnessed such polarities in the process of working on "Where
are you from?" in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Chicago, Paris,
Montreal and Toronto. Interestingly, this project has brought
to light the dichotomy between urban social space and technology.
In their book Mapping Cyberpace, Dodge and Kitchin (2001) explain
that a new urban spatial logic designed around electronic networks,
has not replaced the old one around which many diverse social
relations are built. In their words: "geography continues
to matter – as an organising principle and as a constituent
of social relations." [11] I prefer to see the new spatial
logic as an extension rather than as a replacement, as an amplifier
that can generate new hybrid social spaces. In my project, I am
interested in seeking out the urban locations where networked
spaces, old and new, geographic and electronic, intersect. The
problem is that, as it stands right now, the sites where technological
space and face-to-face social space intersect in interesting ways,
are still few and far between. Interests that do not attract a
hybrid population across different constituencies and age groups,
control these new spaces that are, in turn, scripted by the nature
of the homogeneous inhabitants they attract. In the majority of
the cities I researched, this audience tends to be predominantly
young, affluent, male, and white. This is not at all the type
of population that would shed light on cultural identity across
differences of race, class, gender and historical traditions,
as cited earlier in reference to Homi Bhabha’s viewpoints.
Cities continually adapt to the movement of ideas, values, life-styles,
and influences that are brought in by migrants (people who immigrate),
nomads (passers-by between places), locals who travel and return,
by electronic mediation, and by an economic and technological
synergy that takes advantage of urban resources. But, because
technological development is linked to economic production, and
because there exists an economic disparity between developing
and developed cities, change happens at different speeds in different
local and global zones. I have witnessed such a phenomenon while
living in six cities in the Americas and Europe over a couple
of decades, and confirmed it recently while conducting the "Where
are you from?" project. Access to technology throughout global
sites is still unbalanced. This phenomenon is inhibiting the development
of electronically networked spaces, as well as the social systems
and cultural meanings that can evolve from them. Finally, transformations
will inevitably happen, but they will happen at different rhythms,
implicating initial polarities and exclusions. I think that one
should take advantage of the fact that a new spatial logic is
in the making and take measures to influence its shape by creating
networks of communication where new and old forms and modalities
can co-exist in diverse ways. To counterbalance the privatisation
of spaces of social interaction, urban and regional planners should
work on the development of public spaces that are "hybrid",
combining "real" and media networks with a public concern
in mind (the efforts made by New York City Wireless being one
example). These could be visible or invisible networks, small
group or large group networks, linking geographic and electronic
environments. Whatever their form or scale, I think that they
would function more equitably if they embodied restorative communal
strategies that circumvent established power relations. In spite
of the impact of globalisation (and the electronically networked
city is a contributing factor), old social networks around which
the functioning of cities depend: community and its rules, its
language, its exchanges, its behaviours, and its memories, can
and should influence the way in that new electronic networks intersect
with them. It is my belief -- and I do not think that this is
an impractical utopian wish -- that the new spatial logic should
be inclusive and hybrid, and should create a culture that people
will want to be a part of because it is woven into the rhythm
of the everyday, with its variability and plurality, respectful
of the specific relationships between the local and the global
that make up the cultural landscape of each place.
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