how does that make you feel?
here is an amazing googlemap mashup of the cost of war, with breakdowns by state by mibazaar.

STOREFRONT FILM SERIES 2007
O MORRO/THE HILL
ISSUES OF REPRESENTATION IN THE MODERN-DAY FAVELA

O Morro (The Hill) is a monthly film series that raises questions regarding representation of the favela in Brazilian film and architecture. Cinema’s fascination with the favela is often driven by genuine social concern for its inhabitants, but does it ultimately reinforce existing forms of exploitation and prejudice?

SCREENING III
7.30 PM on Tuesday, December 18, 2007 @ Anthology FIlm Archives

OMNIBUS 174 (Bus 174)
(Directors: José Padilha, Felipe Lacerda)

The film’s subject is the June 12, 2000, bus hijacking that happened in Rio de Janeiro. Sandro do Nascimento, a young man from a poor background, bungled a robbery and ended up holding the passengers on a bus hostage for four hours. The event was caught live on television. The movie examines the incident and what life is like in the slums and favelas of Rio de Janeiro, specifically how the criminal justice system in Brazil treats class.

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue
New York, NY 10001
(212) 505-5181

http://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

Tomorrow evening is the first screening in the film series I am programming through The Storefront for Art and Architecture
in conjunction with Anthology Film Archives.
O Morro (the hill): issues in representation of the favela.

O Morro (the hill) is a monthly series created to raise questions regarding representation of the favela in Brazilian film and architecture.
Is film and architecture’s fascination with the favela helpful, or does it ultimately result in repeating forms of exploitation and prejudice?

The series will feature a small publication, panelists and discussions following the films.

The first screening is this Tuesday, October 23 at 730 pm at Anthology Film Archives.

CINCO VEZES FAVELA (FAVELA FIVE TIMES, 1961)
Directors: Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Leon Hirszman, Miguel Borges, Carlos Diegues e Marcos Farias, 1962, Brasil
92 minutes, English subtitles
Its five episodes, directed by many of the strongest figures in Brazilian cinema, were produced by the Centers for Popular Culture of the National Students’ Union, who’s mission was to create links with and within the working class.

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue
New York, NY 10001
(212) 505-5181

http://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/
http://www.storefrontnews.org

The screening will begin on time, with a discussion to follow at Anthology Film Archives.
Thanks, and I look forward to seeing you there.

a special level of thanks to geoff, joseph, jace, jess, theo, jill and the rest of the storefront for art and archtecture crew for making postopolis a great series of events and lectures. I quite enjoyed listening as well as participating in one serious dance party (yes, architects do dance!) that stands out as a beacon of hope for future block parties in manhattan….

n-ron with dj/rupture courtesy storefront and bldblg

heya, since this is the best thing happening in NYC right now, I thought I’d drop it in.

The lineup for the storefront for art and architecture’s Postopolis ‘conference’ are the heavy-hitters of all the brilliantblogosphere, including BLDGLG, Wigley, Rupture, Abe Burmeister, and a lot of what else I think is good to read/see via rss, and engage with via social soft and hardware.

It is a remarkable chance to actually hear and see these mysterious entities of reportage and criticism in one place.

(fyi, it rumors are flowing that the saturday night closing/party will have N-RON on the dj decks, alongside of the multitasking dj/rupture)

Once, while passing through Seville, I came upon a pair of backpacking college students.
We stopped at a bar inside the train station, shared some bread and jamon and wine, and chatted while waiting for our connections.
“What have you been doing in Europe?” I inquired. I recall that I was genuinely curious (after all, backpackers must have many tales and adventures– from hostels to trains to strange encounters with foreign lands).

One of the two, a pony tailed woman named Julie from Texas, was very outspoken and jumped right in.
“Well, first we did Austria, then we did Prague, then we did France, which was fun, and then we are gonna do Morocco!”
Something struck me as strangely perfect as our chat was interrupted by the loudspeaker calling their train:

What does it mean to do a country?
Can you consume a country?
Can you consume your own country? Or just Others?
Is experience quantifiable?

Over the years, I have had asked these questions many different ways to many different friends, and always been impressed how difficult they are to address.

Generally, there are 2 main sides to the argument for Knowledge as Consumption.

1. Time is limited, so to “do” a place or culture means to see and experience particular aspects of that place or culture in order to know and understand it. Experience is therefore aligned with knowledge of culture or place as an object. A subject knows this object as discreet set of boundaries understandable and finite, as a thing.
Experience = knowing, knowing as consuming.

In other words, it seems that countries, in a sense, like any experience, can be consumed at the great fast food joint of life.

All the Marxist talk of Mcdonaldization seems to apply here:
“McDonaldization seems to equally involve commodification and rationalization, to commodify food production and to rationalize its production and consumption so as to increase profitability.” [Douglas Kellner]

To follow this, we could say, the commodification of experience allows it to be compared for exchange, such that we could easily imagine Julie saying “I’d trade Paris for Barcelona, or Morocco for Prague.”

But what, then, in the consumption of a country, is the profit? What do we “get” when we “do” a country? Is experience (or anything that takes place over time) inevitably instrumentalized into exchange value?

Doing a country means that you are a tourist, a global flaneur walking through the arcades. As Benjamin has pointed out, capitalism has expanded the privilege of the flaneur to a growing middle consumer class, and normalized this privilege to the point of extinction of category itself. This leveling of the role of the flaneur into a middle class has been discussed (ad nauseum?). In a sense, the playing field of experience has been reduced to a shopping mall. Just as, at least in the United States, almost all middle income people can think about getting a Macchiato from Starbucks, so too can the tourist prefer their churros over croissants. The flaneur, the dandy, is gone, and as the tourist impulse has created a new globe-traveling middle class in the 20th century (and now the 21st), so too has the privilege of the dandy tourist been evacuated.

However, a real question is, if the seeer-as-knower-as-consumer is “getting” something, what is the “profit?” Perhaps the profit is the ability to consume and see more as an individual. In this model, individual experience as quantifiable knowledge is seen as a good thing, to enable the exchange of ideas in a marketplace of determined and instrumentalized experience-objects. “My trip to Paris was better than my trip to California. I want more Paris and less California.” On the one hand, this quantification allows for a certain kind of judgment of epistemological claims based upon empiricism. We find this problem as the quintessential modern debates about aesthetics and experience (al la Greenberg and others), and it certainly cannot be addressed adequately here.

However, we can say that there is some kind of judgment that can result from this leveling-out, both of the playing field of the flaneur as traveler as well as the knower-as-consumer. One can judge experience as “better”, “worse” etc. based on specific individual criteria, usually based on a language of implicit mono-cultural understanding: “the food was bad, but the weather was great” or “the people were cold, but the music was fantastic” are example phrases of cultural comparisons based on such travel-experience.
2. The second argument dovetails with the first. Is this quantification ‘bad’? As Brett once pointed out, he prefers a “pleasurable” online experience with a better product (browser) than to one, which does not provide a “rich” and “enjoyable” experience.

The critical points of interjection seem to float around three very broad and difficult terms:
1. Experience
2. Judgment
3. Knowledge
Is it wrong for me to judge my knowing of Paris against my Knowing of Barcelona? By what criteria should we reduce experience in order to know it? I am plagued by these questions as I struggle to come up with a language for articulating sound. I struggle with these issues as I come up with the sounds for language. I struggle with sounds. The sounds of struggle seem to everywhere these days.

I do know that when I hear that someone “does a country”, the sounds of struggle seems to be missing from my ears. Can experience be fungible, and is this desire for the fungability of experience a desire to repress or sublimate struggle? Does the plasticine sheen of the exchange commodity of consumed experience level the field, or are we again forced to acknowledge the combined and uneven development of experience, that some have and some don’t.

This is, it seems, the precarious zone that post-structural critique leaves us in, the area of relativism. Does judgment itself fail to do its job? Has judgment been hijacked for the purposes of better exchange?

Maybe a visit to the Whitney ISP show up now at Artist’s Space will help, or the curatorial program exhibit on coming up at CUNY grad center, called “The Price of Everything…perspectives on the art market” will point some new directions. However, for now, I have to confess, the trend seems to point to complete branding of the bodies of experience as both inevitable and largely accepted by both the left and the right. Freedom of choice is equated to the starbucksification of nation-states? Experience as consumption. Consumption as pleasure. Pleasure as freedom.

I have been interested in locative sound and locative media for awhile now. But it occurred to me that I had not really addressed the most fundamental issue regarding location. Is there an implicit desire for a modernist “all-knowing, all seeing” in such work (e.g. Magellan or google earth ), or is there room for an alternative individual psycho-geography (eg. Debord) that could take place? Clearly, projects using GPS fall into a dangerous zone of triangulation and surveillance. But harnessing these powers seems possible. The debates concerning technology are longstanding, and the totalizing desires of modernity to control and subject itself seem to only fuel these debates. Still, could this new, explicit form of categorzation of site be a potential site for unfolding and exposing these desires?

Certain projects have come to the fore in recent years that bring such questions into a zone of debate, as well as interesting conferences (such as the tactical urban map hack workshop and others at V_2 ). But if we are to attempt destabilize zones of totality in favor of local production, are there ways of linking these local sites without eventually falling prey to their very goals (oh my!). Not a small question, and certainly texts as beautifully flawed as Empire and critically infused as mike davis’ offer suggestions. But if the real issues regarding combined and uneven development are now being left for local solutions (and in the extreme, micro-politics of the body), is there a way to link these struggles?

Map Office spoke at Engaging the City here in New York recently, and I found their projects to be both challenging in their locality (they called individual zones Pixels) as well as radical in their emphasis upon informal economies and interstitial space use. In China’s Pearl River Delta, beneath bridges and highways are entire societies and industries, harnessing the power (literally, the electricity) and structure of the highways, entire non-cities grow and blossom. Should we categorize them? Does acknowledging them suffice? What can we learn from the in between spaces, without totalizing them. The Derives suggested by map office, who often walks or bikes for miles, learning new geographies, propose that there are certain structures of habitation that these sites have in common. However, there are many differences as well. Map Office noted one manufacturing plant in a “Pixel” that used water lillies to purify the company’s waste water, while others are so bland that they blend into one another to provide a new sort of generic horizon.

In this compulsion for commonality and complete understanding, it seems that informal zones of exchange and interaction are thriving as well. Perhaps simply siting these, that is, mapping them, does not destroy them per se, but allows a potential linking of these interstitial zones for new forms and constallations.Perhaps.