While tooling around on the internet yesterday, as I am wont to do, I came across these lovely paintings by Canadian artist Erin McSavaney. Part of her INLAND exhibit at Vancouver's Equinox Gallery, the paintings move away from McSavaney's previous engagement with the lost urban spaces of back alleys and loading bays, and toward and exploration of the relationship between nature and rural architecture:
Crows Nest Highway - Nursery, acrylic on canvas, 2010
Trans Canada Highway - Laidlaw, acrylrc on canvas, 2010
My least favourite part of the end of winter break -- besides the fact that work looms eternal -- is leaving Toronto for the Midwest. Ann Arbor has grown on me over the past few years, but being in Toronto still gives me a thrill that can't be matched, even in big American cities. BlogTO has been doing a wonderful series on Toronto throughout the decades, and these photos of the city in the 1940s have me longing to get back as soon as possible:
Every once in a while, especially when I'm in the generally stressed out state that grading puts me in, I like to turn on a documentary on good ol' Netflix. I've been a documentary hound for as long as I've been a non-fiction reader, but the stressed-out documentary choice has one very specific requirement: it can be about anything, as long as it's quiet.
Two nights ago, I found the perfect film for this purpose. Rivers and Tides is a joint Irish-German production about Andy Goldsworthy, a sculptor and environmentalist whose site-specific land art is some of the most beautiful I've ever seen. Working only with natural elements, Goldsworthy creates pieces that explore the ephemerality of nature and time, and often end up consumed by very environments from which he draws his inspiration:
As a sociologist who works primarily in the realm of the digital--and certainly in the realm of the modern--I don't often get the opportunity to think rigorously about nature. About the closest I manage is reading about mediated landscapes, or the social construction of frontiers. I also don't get a lot of time to think about art, although it comes up slightly more often. In spite of--or perhaps because of--this, I found myself riveted for the full two hour exploration of Goldsworthy's art. Early on in the film there is a sequence in which he attempts repeatedly to build one of his famous stone seeds, conical structures build from flat rocks. Three times in a row, the sculpture falls apart, and each time the tide on the beach where he is working comes closer to where he sits. The final product, eventually completed, ends up completely subsumed by the water of the bay, only to be revealed again when the tide recedes. It is both an astonishingly slow process and one in which we are reminded of constant movement of time.
Much of Goldsworthy's work is less permanent; he often works in ice, in leaves, and in sticks, in places not amenable to permanent structures. This type of impermanence in art can often come across as whimsical, but Goldsworthy's commentary throughout the film shows that he is interested in the ephemeral not because it is pretty, but because it is a window into collaboration with nature.
In a week where I've spent the majority of my work time thinking about technology, risk, and retaining a sense of 'place'-fulness in theories of the virtual, and most of my play time reading Rutsky's High Techne and Tichi's Shifting Gears (both about technology and art), Rivers and Tides was a profoundly beautiful reminder that the modern can be natural, and that the ephemeral and the eternal are as present in nature as they are in culture.
As a temporary Michigander, I often hear a lot about the racial divide in Detroit. Even folks who have never been to Detroit know about the infamous Eight Mile divide between the white suburbs and the black inner city. But never have I seen it so starkly illustrated as in this map:
Racial segregation in Detroit. The blank area to the right of the middle
is Dearborn. The artist clearly didn't choose a colour for Arab-Americans.
Some of the other maps created have interesting anomalies. This map of San Francisco and the Bay Area has a small circle of dense Black and White (blue and pink dots) in the upper right corner:
Racial segregation in San Francisco & the Bay Area.
That dot represents San Quentin State Prison, California's oldest prison and only death row for male inmates -- the largest in America.
These maps provide the same information as Census date, but because of the mode they use to present it, they impact the viewer in a very different way. I'm a big proponent of information aesthetics -- I hate bad infographics more than I hate PowerPoint. Sometimes I just like graphs because they're beautiful, or because they're useful. These maps are both, but they're also something else -- political. Projects like Radical Cartography redefine our understanding of what maps are for in a way that challenges our ideas about what demographic data (among other types) can tell us about our society at large. Maps like these challenge us to understand neighbourhood segregation that takes into account the particular histories of different cities, while still demanding that we sit up and pay attention.
David McCandless, author of Information is Beautiful and The Visual Miscellaneum, recently gave a TED Talk on the possibilities of data visualization in a world where we are often threatened with 'information overload'. Check it out:
A lot of early writing about digital environments worked through the idiom of 'cyberspace'. Cyberspace -- a word coined by author of Neuromancer and all-around badass William Gibson -- is one of those slippery words you come across quite often when people talk about digitial technologies and new media. It means a lot of things to a lot of people, but generally, if you hear someone talking about cyberspace, they're talking about the sphere of activity created by communications technologies, specifically activity on the internet. Cyberspace, as a term, has fallen out of vogue, but virtual space comes up with relative frequency, and so is still worth addressing, I think.
Why do we hear so much about virtual space and not about virtual place? It seems to have something to do with the slippage in meaning between place and space. Places are not just bounded portions of space. Rather, they are spaces that are imbued with meaning. What makes a place a place is it's specificity, not only in geography but also in networks of meaning and imagination. Our homes and schools are places only insofar as they carry with them our memories and interactions. Without these associated meanings, they fall into the category of locations. Without names or meaningful structures, they become simply portions of space.
Transferring this distinction to the realm of the virtual, it is easy to understand what we mean by virtual space, and even by virtual location. Virtual space (or spaces) are bounded only by the fact that they exist within the sphere of the virtual. Virtual locations are denoted by URLs and website infrastructures. But what is a virtual place?
One of the easiest ways to think about virtual place is in the context of video games/virtual worlds, like World of Warcraft and Second Life. These environments recreate our experience of place by mimicking the aspects of place that we rely on in the real world -- landscapes, buildings, neighbourhoods, etc, are used to denote this place from that. But if our notion of place in the virtual world is restricted solely to digitally rendered environments, then it is sorely lacking in its ability to adequately describe all aspects of online experience.
A better example of what I mean when I talk about a virtual place over a virtual space is the interlocking places and sites that make up media fandom. Sites like Fandom Wank, Metafandom, and the various archives, LiveJournal communities, personal journals and message boards that see a variety of fannish activities take on the role of places, rather than simply locations. They are places that attract certain types of people, certain modes of conversation, and carry with them particular histories that embed them in networks of meaning that extend through time. But they don't have the traditional markers of place -- all of the geographical, topographical, and architectural touchstones that we use to describe or delineate one place from another. How can we represent virtual place to ourselves and to others, for whom the place may be simply a location, or an unbounded part of cyberspace? How does thinking through the difference between virtual space and virtual place allow us a more nuanced understanding of what online communities and interactions look like?
These questions point towards a need for internet-centered research that focuses on the historically-sensitive nature of virtual communities, and the places they make for themselves. We need a new vocabulary in order to talk about digital infrastructures -- what makes some online spaces more amenable to "place"-ification than others? But we also need a new language to talk about virtual communities. All too often the language of networks dislocates online communities from their spatial and temporal settings. Representations of online communities too often look like this:
These types of images tell us about connections between people, but not abut connections between people and the places they occupy and make meaningful to themselves and their communities. We need to come up with better ways of describing, studying, representing, and building virtual places if we are going to come to a fuller understanding of what virtual communities and relationships look like. We need better ethnographies of the virtual, and better anthropologies of the digital. Over the last decade we've come to understand that the virtual does not transcend or erase the body, despite the predictions of (mostly white, mostly male) digital utopians. But neither does the virtual transcend the historical or the spatial. If we are going to talk about the Internet in a way that makes sense for people who have real relationships and real attachments to online communities, we need to develop a conceptual vocabulary that acknowledges and upholds the placefulness, rather than the spaciousness, of the virtual world.
