1 The weather of catastrophe and the vertical field
Every autumn Los Angeles and the bulk of Southern California are pummeled by the caustically dry Santa Ana winds. Carrying dust and fire-starting heat, these annual winds have their own mythology in the city, where this book first began to germinate many years ago. Sometimes called “the devil winds,” the Santa Ana have been said to drive people mad, to induce rage, to spark violence among the city of angels’ overheated, world-weary inhabitants. Joan Didion saw them as directly linked to the city’s ethos:
Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the
reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there,
so the violence and unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in
Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how
close to the edge we are.1
This is not a book about the Santa Ana winds, but it is a book about catastrophe and the city, as it is imagined by artists, scholars, activists, and other urban wanderers across three cities of the Americas: Buenos Aires, Miami, and Los Angeles. It is a book about the catastrophes already unfolding in these cities, and those so many of us imagine, or perhaps know, are coming.
The impermanence and unreliability Didion understood to be a quality of life specific to Los Angeles has become (if it was not already) the quality of a trans-American urban ethos. Cities are consistently understood to be in dangerously precarious positions in terms not only of shifting and severe weather in the age of anthropogenic climate change, but also in political, social, spatial, and economic terms. When we see the next economic crash on the horizon, we know what it will look like in the city: packed slums, abandoned construction sites, blight in once thriving neighborhoods. We have already seen flood waters rush through urban areas to devastating effect, and hurricanes strengthened by warming ocean waters inundate cities in the Caribbean and across the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Catastrophe is not just a future possibility for cities like New Orleans or San Juan. Nor for the other cities that are the triangulated sites explored over the course of this book. We’ve already lived through it, are living through it, or at the very least, have seen the footage. Where there is the city, there is catastrophe, or risk of catastrophe, or certainty about a coming catastrophe. There is also, though, great pleasure and play, sometimes even enmeshed with a vision of the city’s dark futures, or its precarious present. The relationships between catastrophe and play in the 21st-century city also occupy my explorations here.
As I began to think through these relationships, I found that much of the compelling work being done by urban activists, artists, and scholars share a common interest in challenging one-directional spatial forms and metaphors. They complicate notions of perspective and point-of-view and instead seek what Stephen Graham has called “the vertical and volumetric geographies of our world.”2 To grasp the city and its perils and pleasures requires not only moving across the skyline or the city street but also upward and outward.
In the early 2000s, I was doing field research in Buenos Aires with a group of artists, activists, and technophiles working under the banner of Buenos Aires Libre (the group and the autonomous network they built are the focus of the case study presented in Chapter 2). As part of that research, I climbed a rickety ladder to the rooftop of an office building in the Once neighborhood of the city where the group was installing a directional satellite dish to form a node in their network. The view of the city from above, the way in which the group sent their signals through the air to meet other dishes installed on other rooftops by other members across Buenos Aires, and the sheer pleasure of climbing itself, all indicated that playing in the city can and does take place on vertical trajectories, and more important, that political contestation can and does as well. Part of the logic behind building this autonomous network was to circumvent the policing of information on the Internet, and to perform the hopeful work that ensured that if catastrophe destroyed the formal network, Buenos Aires Libre’s own homemade one could sprawl across the city, ready to more sustainably and equitably take its place. Playing with and refiguring the vertical by sending signals from rooftop to rooftop, by revaluing the horizontal through a charging of sprawl as a site of communal informational exchange, allowed Buenos Aires Libre to build a richer view of the city. Their vision of catastrophe was, too, a part of their contestation of certain vertical forms of power.
The other case studies in this book affirm the possibilities afforded by a refiguration of and play with the vertical. In Miami, the graffiti artist (or artists) who scaled the abandoned hospital building in South Beach to write in enormous, black letters the following sentence: “YOUR MILLION DOLLAR HOUSES WILL SOON BE UNDER WATER,” (hereafter, YOUR, Chapter 3) likely found some pleasure in the precarious climb and the bold trace she left, anonymously, at the top of the building. The work also points toward another vertical arrangement that might yet be altered: class stratification, in which those with substantial capital are positioned, sometimes literally, above those without. And, of course, the graffiti piece points to the slowly shifting encroachment on the city’s borders (both those underground at the water table and those at the city’s coasts) of warming saltwater. Pigeonblog, a participatory lay science project designed by Beatriz da Costa and both human and non-human collaborators, used carrier pigeons to monitor pollution in Los Angeles and Southern California (treated in Chapter 4). The project clearly understood the fun that could be had in the air, even as it located the vertical field as the seat of certain forms of surveillance, control, and biological risk. Da Costa, whom I interviewed shortly after the project was completed, discussed both cell towers and bird’s-eye views as essential to both her unruly intervention and to some of the forms of power against which it was aimed. That the project piggybacked on networked telecommunications meant it reached both into the air and into the ground below, leveraging SMS technology, on the one hand, and terrestrial Internet infrastructure on the other.
Lisa Parks’ recent work, Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediations and the War on Terror, informs my own here. Parks argues that the vertical field has become valuable terrain through which power moves. “Vertical hegemony,” she writes, is
the ongoing struggle for dominance or control over the vertical field, which here includes combinations of terrestrial, aerial, spectral, and/or orbital domains. [...It] cannot simply be achieved ‘out there’ in open skies. To register or take effect, it must be communicated through and materialized as part of culture on earth.”3
My intent is to answer her call to “foreground the constructedness of vertical forms of power,”4,5 by examining the ways in which aesthetic and material interventions in the city, like those performed by the projects discussed in this book, are already working on upending and reforming the vertical in novel and resistant ways.
Both Parks and Graham have made great contributions to thinking through verticality as both a problematic and material phenomena essential to understanding power. Graham’s work is an exhaustive read of verticality in the city. Parks’ of the nature of vertical power and mediation in the post-9/11 era. Both point to some full-fledged catastrophes attached to verticality. But neither have been invested in the kinds of aesthetic interventions this book explores. It is my contention that such interventions offer not only complex models of the city itself, and of contemporary forces of surveillance and control within and through it, but also leverage their play toward novel forms of being in and reshaping the city.
On methodology
In exploring the three works that are the case studies of this book in their specific urban contexts, my methodology has been in part ethnographic. I conducted interviews with participants and creators, attended meetings and workshops, wandered through website as a user, and participated in events hosted by the artists and activists behind these objects and practices. I lived and worked in all three cities during the research and writing process and thus have, like all city dwellers, been a material participant in the production of these urban ecologies. Pigeonblog, Buenos Aires Libre, and YOUR are invested in the relationships between aesthetics, objects, places, and viewer or user practices and experiences in the cities they explore, and part of the practice of this book is to plug in, so to speak, to these relationships as one means of understanding them.
Nicolas Bourriaud's writing in Relational Aesthetics argues that works of art that engage relationships between and among people and things, creating linkages between rather than maintaining distances, have the capacity to produce critical relationships to the worlds we inhabit. “The reigning ideology would have the artist be a loner, imagining him solitary and irredentist [...],” he writes.
This rather naive imagery muddles two quite different notions: the artist's refusal of the communal rules currently in force, and the refusal of the collective. If we must reject all manner of imposed communalism, it is precisely to replace it by invented relational networks.”6
The objects of this study are all aiming at the production of new “relational networks.” Their play in the vertical field helps them do so. In my view, it is very difficult to critically understand such works without entering into the new networks they produce and imagine. That is, after all, precisely what they are asking viewers and participants to do and how they manage to work, particularly when they so publicly move within the space of the cit...
