Culture and the City Talk at ECU

Audiovisual Architectural Mapping and Catalan Identity

This post contains all of the videos to which I refer in my article “The projection on the wall: what audio-visual architectural mapping says about Catalan identity” recently published in the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies.

What is audiovisual architectural mapping?

Audiovisual architectural mapping transforms the façades of buildings into something completely different. Projectors and speakers combine computer-controlled images and sound in order to impose a visual and audio remapping of the surface. Through the projection of simulated shadows, fixed architectural elements can be made to appear to move.

Who cares?

The practice of superimposing dynamically changing information over city space offers a new way to write and tell stories that inextricably links architecture, technology, public space, and urban planning.

In my article,

I draw on recent studies that have linked urban spectacles, screens and public space (Gotham 2005; Manovich 2006; McQuire, Papastergiadis and Cubitt 2006; Struppek 2006; Broeckmann 2009; Jaschko 2009), and explore the relationship between audiovisual architectural mapping and the production of identity in contemporary Catalonia.

Two creative groups, Telenoika and Nueve Ojos, both based in Barcelona, Spain, produce dazzling audiovisual architectural mappings of site-specific buildings to open or close cultural festivals. I compare Telenoika’s deterritorializing approach to audiovisual architectural mapping in the Festival D’Art Contemporani Ingràvid (2009) in Figueres with Nueve Ojos’ territorializing method in the Mercè Festival (2009) in Barcelona in order to shed light on their political and cultural consequences for contemporary Catalan identity.

Nueve Ojos

Figure 4: La Casa de la Ciudad de Barcelona. Source: Oscar Valencoso (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html or CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Enlluerna’t [Be Dazzled], the audiovisual architectural mapping of La Casa de la Ciudad de Barcelona for the opening of the 2009 Mercè Festival

 

Telenoika

Figure 1: Teatre Jardí in Figueres. Source: Francesc Vernet López (Own work) GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) via Wikimedia Commons

 

 

 

 

 

Creativity in Real Time

Karl Marx views society through the lens of dialectics in which social fields are organized according to the binary opposition base/superstructure or the material/the symbolic. For Marx, economic changes produce transformations in the fields of art, philosophy, morality, science and religion, and not vice versa. Deleuze and Guattari’s social fields (which they refer to as assemblages) also consist of material modifications and symbolic metamorphoses. However, there are several key differences. First, Deleuze and Guattari exchange the terms “base” and “superstructure” for “content” and “expression.” Second, they disagree with Marx that the material moving forces of society are the tools of production. For Deleuze and Guattari, the “intermingling of bodies in a society” (A Thousand Plateaus 90) takes precedence over tools and goods. Borrowing from the Stoics, Deleuze and Guattari understand content to be the actions and passions of bodies “using the word ‘body’ in the broadest sense, as applying to any formed content” (86). Third, they challenge Marx’s contention that the relation between content and expression is dialectical. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari argue that there is a “continual passage from one to the other” (87) made possible by the independence of each form. The independence of content and expression does not mean that there is no relation between the two, just that the relation is not causal. The Stoic notion that the expressed of statements “apply to bodies, and only to bodies” (86) is what links expression to content. In other words, expression can only relate to content and nothing else. Fourth, the form of expression cannot be reduced to a linguistic system in which linguistic factors are treated as constants and considered independently of nonlinguistic factors because, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “if the external pragmatics of nonlinguistic factors must be taken into consideration, it is because linguistics itself is inseparable from an internal pragmatics involving its own factors” (italics in original, 91). That is, if the notion that language as system of constants is called into question, it is impossible to distinguish the variables of expression from the variables of content.

What does that mean for us? Creativity in real time can move bodies to action. Living the image, as Spanish activist Leónidas Martín would say, can disrupt the capitalist system. In this highly entertaining video (in English), Leónidas Martín describes several examples of creative activism in Barcelona that have linked content and expression with material and social consequences.

Works cited

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Print.

The intermingling of labor, politics, and performance art

+Art Collective (Barcelona, May 29, 2009)

The technological network of computers and telecommunication devices such as smart phones is central to the social nature of production characteristic of the era of cognitive capitalism. Every day massive amounts of information in the form of knowledge, science, and culture as well as currency are exchanged via the “image and language machine” that is the personal computer (“Flexible Personality”). A fascinating result of this mode of production based on language and communication, Paolo Virno argues, is the intermingling of labor, politics, and performance art. The activity that takes place between two or more immaterial laborers, between a politician and his/her electorate, and between a performing artist and his/her audience is, at once, a virtuosic performance and a political activity. According to Virno, the activity is a virtuosic performance because it “finds its own fulfillment (that is, its own purpose) in itself” and it is a political activity because it “requires the presence of others” (52). In post-Fordism, labor and politics borrow from performing artists the notion that the goal of real-time interaction is the interaction itself. No end product is produced. Similarly, labor and performing artists acquire the political attitude that, in order to work, a “publicly organized space” is needed (Hannah Arendt qtd. in Virno, 53). Virno points out:

This publicly organized space is called ‘cooperation’ by Marx. One could say: at a certain level in the development of productive social forces, labor cooperation introjects verbal communication into itself, or, more precisely, a complex of political actions. (55)

In post-Fordism, the intellect, the faculty of language and thinking, is brought out into Arendt’s “publicly organized space” for the purpose of exploiting it financially.

Works cited

Holmes, Brian. “The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique.” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies Jan 2002. Web.

Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Los  Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2004. Print.