Entr'acte

Performing Publics, Pervasive Media, and Architecture

J. Geiger

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349492800, 9781137433947
• eBook ISBN: 9781137414182
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Generally taking place in front of closed curtains during set changes between acts, the entr'acte delivers a fleeting new purpose and event to the otherwise sometimes inert space between stage and pit. This collection employs the entr'acte as a model for conceptualizing emerging formations of publics and of public space.

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ENTR’ACTE, INTERIM, INTERSTICE: PERFORMING PUBLICS AND MEDIA ACROSS SCALES OF TIME AND SPACE

JORDAN GEIGER

CONTEXTS, WORLDS

How to enter into a collection of writings about the interval, about interstitial spaces and interim periods of time? An introduction, like the very cardboard of the binding that assures a hard boundary and a sequence to the volume, seems inherently ill suited, misguided. This book has ordering systems that refer to its subject matter by scales, yet the range is infinitely extensible as a grid and promises to frustrate any hope for its completion or arrival, as Zeno’s dichotomy paradox.¹ Rather, it invites entry at any point and for any duration; its enclosing form might more appropriately be found on a cylinder, or held together by loose rings or as a deck of cards. The essays herein and the book itself are both strictly bound up with their moments in time and space—moot by the time they hit the press, one might say—yet describing phenomena of time and space that endure for variously imperceptible periods, that repeat with such regularity as to seem a permanent status, or that appear more and more frequently and seem to backfill spaces heretofore thought of as unoccupiable: a flower, an orbit.

Here is the interval, colloquially understood as denoting a period of time but also a space: in middle English, “interval” referred to the space between urban ramparts, and since the theory of relativity, the word describes space-time relations.² The interval comprises both interim and interstice, linkage and gap. These latter notions, in turn, underlie much of what becomes now the discourse around human-computer interaction (HCI) and physical space. Since 1991, when Mark Weiser coined the term “ubiquitous computing,”³ we have seen neologisms to name the evolving forms and performances of computing as it propagates new situations beyond a desktop model and proceeds into so many moments and spaces: calm computing,⁴ urban computing,⁵ and the deluge of writings on and innovations for an internet of things, to name but a few.

Roughly parallel with this, a vast body of scholarship has considered the architectural, urban, and global construction fallout of information networks as economic engines and re-scripting agents for labor relations. Seminal contributions in this lineage have included Manuel Castells’ notion of the “space of flows” within his work The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process.⁶ Its first page opens with a declaration that joins the book’s contents to our very experience and even consciousness: “A technological revolution of historic proportions is transforming the fundamental dimensions of human life: time and space.” Castells traces what he calls an “informational mode” of development⁷ and the underlying rise of an information economy⁸ as socioeconomic phenomena that affected unprecedented scales of population and whose physical medium could be found in the built environment.

Scholarship since then has observed the continued results of a space of flows as increasingly under the purview of networked organizations⁹ and manifesting itself in the built environment with ever more diverse and widespread results.¹⁰ These are some of the conditions that gesture for over 20 years toward the emergence of what I am calling “Very Large Organizations” and its attendant architectures (see below).

Since around 2000, and with the rapid development of responsive and networked things, these forms and performances of HCI have either influenced or given rise to new formations of publics marked by increasingly visible popular concerns for issues like citizen engagement¹¹ and participation¹² and responding to place and time with tactical uses of ubiquitous computing technologies.¹³ In each instance, time and place specificity¹⁴ reasserts itself in local moments but often rapidly joins or catalyzes events around the world, yielding what is sometimes recognizable as networked publics.¹⁵ These sorts of formations of publics are decidedly human, but we also observe relatively rapid architectural and urban formations that, not surprisingly, take on different priorities and with different language. Here, we particularly encounter the increasingly fraught use of the word “smart.”

The recent history of the “smart” is itself subject to numerous books and contested definitions, as the word’s instrumentalization toward marketing campaigns has brought it further and further from some of its initial understandings with activist thinkers. This shift might be best exemplified in the short span of years between the publication of Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs¹⁶ and the widespread adoption of “smart city” to describe the array of urban places seemingly imbibed with ubiquitous computing technologies at every scale of experience. While Rheingold took the availability of Internet-ready cellular phones and related technologies as playing a liberatory role in bringing about democracy and enabling peaceful dissent in the Philippines—presaging later events of the Arab Spring, back in 2001—so-called smart cities like Songdo, Korea, herald themselves now as centers of convenience and optimization. Yet these new constructions are planned and enabled by an amalgam of private concerns and special free-trade zone authorizations, all at the behest of colocating development with the most contemporary proclivities of business travelers.¹⁷ Writings on the “smart city” abound, and increasingly call for recovery of priorities with the “smart citizen.”¹⁸ The goal here is neither to fully account for these phenomena nor to place judgment on their changing stakeholders and power dynamics, but first to identify the essentially fleeting states of urban publics with ubiquitous computing technologies, and then to call out the fraught, co-optable language that attends these states. In a different context, and discussing older constructs like highways and the Appalachian Trail, Keller Easterling offers an alternate notion of smarts that may apply to provisional and learning constructs that affect larger order organizations: “eccentricities or wild cards … smart in their own way … produce space by adjusting organization. They are the sites of organization space in America.”¹⁹ This passage provides another notion of smarts that may help us to gain distance either from the hopeful promise of technology as the de facto means for grassroots organizing, or from any false comfort to be found in oligarchic capital speculation and development.

The past several years have seen new conditions for new intervals of change, new “worlds.” The conditions have been manifest in different ways, including the appearance of sudden and rapidly spreading cases of social unrest and “insurgent public space” and “guerrilla urbanism” at phenomena like Occupy Wall Street.²⁰ Jeffrey Hou describes these, writing that the “rubric ‘insurgent public space’ provides a way for us to define and articulate … expressions of alternative social and spatial relationships.” He sees an essential importance of place in each occurrence: “while new technologies in telecommunication and media have undermined the importance of place-based public space, they have also enabled new types of actions and means of public dissent.”²¹ These sorts of formations correspond closely to what David Harvey has described as “claims to the city,” including to an open and distributed say in its physical making.²² Claims are diverse, and correspond to emerging popular recognitions of relations between HCI and many areas of public concern such as food production and consumption,²³ or machine vision and mapping as it relates to privacy and information freedom,²⁴ or the new spaces and flows of “urban data”²⁵ and the need to study “urban informatics.”²⁶ Familiar notions of digital divides, the rift between promises of new equities found in new mass communications technologies, persist and diversify.²⁷ Roles of global finance and digital technologies have been shown to have a literal spatial role of concern to the public²⁸ as has the related and evolving phenomenon that goes under globalization.²⁹ This familiar ground shifts with the changing relations between law, finance, technology, climate, and other concerns of a planetary scale, as they re-form into large organizations, which, in turn, bear influence on the built environment.³⁰

After all this time, we can now also begin to recognize some relationships between material and scalar orders in the behavior of Very Large Organizations (VLOs). VLOs are a phenomenon of our day and subject to further elaboration, as the built environments of public assembly, work, agriculture, incarceration, trade, travel, education, and even death join global financial and communications networks. The planning and infrastructure for these coordinate logistics, capital, and a new order of population magnitude that all must accommodate volatile shifts with spatial and computational stability. Adaptability is at the crux of dealing with diverse users or publics and unprecedented technical, cultural, social, and ecological challenges. Very Large Organizations occupy spatial, cultural, and technological interstices of things like satellite networks³¹ and the place-based sensors that they serve. The era of sentient things was, as described by Howard Rheingold, traced some ten years ago,³² and the sentient city is widely studied now,³³ but we may also pause to consider entire worlds of sentience—worlds of influence, of matter, and of planetary and temporal scales.³⁴

Worlds demand nonoverlapping performance from their human and nonhuman occupants. At the juncture between these, the notion of a “commons” reappears more frequently in recent literature as conditioned by supporting terms: take, for example, Malcolm McCullough’s notion of the “ambient commons”³⁵ or David Harvey’s populist, possibly nostalgic call for an “urban commons.”^36,37 The commons plays out not only on the ground, but in spaces not physically occupiable in a familiar sense, as in the Earth’s atmosphere.^38,39 David Bollier and Silke Helfrich describe a contrasting notion of “common pool resources” in things like outer space, the oceans, or the Internet.⁴⁰ Each of these are clearly subject to claims by broad global publics today as shared territory—and sometimes understood as both public space and discourse—beyond the legitimate purview or regulation of any single body; these claims are made in frequent reference to commonly accessible databases, sensor networks, or whistle-blowing cases like the events set in motion by Edward Snowden.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put forth an optimistic idea of “multitude” as underlying no less than the “possibility of democracy on a global scale.”⁴¹ This they contrast with an idea of “the people” as a product of usurpation and embedded in guerrilla models of action. They write:

“The people” is a form of sovereignty contending to replace the ruling state authority and take power … To contrast the concept of the multitude in its most general and abstract form, let us contrast it first with that of the people. The people is one … The multitude, by contrast, is not unified but remains plural and multiple.

Multiplicities and multitudes, worlds and diversities: these are the hallmark to the many formations of publics found today as they engage with new technologies and act. This was also an underlying conviction at the heart of my co-organizing a 2013 conference and related outcomes under the banner “MediaCities.”^42,43

Action, in turn, calls for definitions for both performance and publics. As we shall see below, these roles become hazy and overlap. But first we may turn to recent descriptions that I would like to recognize in Performance Studies proper. In Perform or Else, Jon McKenzie declares a kind of performance: “fields of organizational, cultural, and technological performance, when taken together, form an immense performance site, one that potentially encompasses the spheres of human labor and leisure activities and the behaviors of all industrially and electronically produced technologies.”⁴⁴ Dorita Hannah and Olav Harslof, in turn, write that “Performance is a complex socio-political phenomenon, which could be summed up as any public demonstration of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: Mise-en-scène
• 1. Entr’acte, Interim, Interstice: Performing Publics and Media across Scales of Time and Space
• Interval 1: Supranational
• Interval 2: Interurban
• Interval 3: Transindividual
• Afterword
• Notes on Contributors
• Index