Outside In

Outside In was a two-day forum at Röda Sten in Gothenburg on 14–15 June 2004, about new voices, media and practices in the design and use of public space. The venue is extraordinary: below a suspension bridge, surrounded by huge concrete creations. Really windy outside, calm inside the lecture space.

These are my notes from the talks, written on the day. Occasional asides in italics are things I’ve added looking back. I’ve left the note form mostly as-is.

Day 1, Session 2: Hacking the streets

(I missed the first workshop of the day.)

Space Hijackers

• Putting memories in spaces. Spaces aren’t the same after having been disrupted. After ‘Reclaim the Streets’ or a Circle Line party you can’t see the space in the same way.
• Distinction between public and private. What is it?
• Public space doesn’t exist anymore.
• Ken Livingstone’s new City Hall is half-private, half-public, private investment was involved in the building, so protests cannot happen outside.
• Do we need institutions in order to do events? Is that the only way to do them legally?
• What’s stopping people from doing these things is not necessarily capitalism but the fear of looking like a pillock. Self-regulation is a big factor. Can spark things to let down inhibitions or shackles. Example of the scooter, became a kids’ toy and then it wasn’t cool anymore.
• What’s the connection between anarchism and these spontaneous events? Emergent order is interesting, so much control over actions and the ways people move through the city. How does this relate to anarchy? Is this anarchy?

Zevs

• The city is a workshop, not just walls to tag.
• Shadows of urban furniture: really good.
• Visual kidnapping: the Lavazza woman gets cut out of the frame.
• Big poster with bleeding eyes.
• Uses a high-pressure water jet to clean the city, but also to write at the same time.
• Digs at the notion of authorship. A site where people find work on the streets.
• The work is anonymous, but there is the projection of authorial control behind it, it’s individual and definitely authored.
• Would be interesting to explore graffiti authorship more: how do public artists want to be recognised?
• Managing the mystique around the work and the author.
• Difference between author and instigator.
• Interview.
• Visual Kidnapping.

Akim (3D Bombing)

• Polystyrene models, matched to fit specific city spaces.
• City of names: what if the writers are the ones who build the houses?

Day 2, Session 3: Network experience

Jonah Brucker-Cohen

• Wants to deconstruct network context.
• Context is the physical and social situation in which computation sits.
• How does the network affect the output and experience?
• Companies are claiming ownership of space through signal strength, strengthening signals to drown out free competition.
• WiFiHog: saps all WiFi bandwidth.
• LAN party versus flash mob.
• Simpletext: collaborative SMS image-searching on large screens.
• Re-mapping and changing the context of interfaces: what about shifting consequences, changing the input/output relationship?
• Assigns an image search to inputted text messages and displays via Jitter/Max.
• Steven Levy quote on hackers.

Katherine Moriwaki

• Altering space by altering the body.
• The character of a space.
• Remnants of things, people, individuals.
• Put magnets on wrists and fingers and bodies to reveal the proximity of electronic devices: unexpected connections to other people and lampposts. Nice.

Pedro Sepúlveda Sandoval. Data Climates

• Living in a scanscape city.
• Electronic space, synthetic city.
• The congestion charge as a walled city, in electronic space.
• London has the highest density of CCTV in the world.
• Will we decide to travel to areas based on the quality of electronic space?
• A new architectural language for electronic space.
• Houses without windows, just cameras, you can start to control life inside, or choose to use the weather channel as windows.
• Pay a fee for personal surveillance: ask them to watch you all the way to the supermarket.
• The city of Yokohama was brought down by the coming-of-age party for 40,000 teenagers: the networks were overloaded with messages, because the teenagers didn’t want to talk face to face.
• Palm trees as cell towers (seen in South Africa).
• Looked at a community in Hackney that were campaigning not to have a cell phone tower.
• Designed a house for them that would shield them from the signals, but they’d have to give up cell connectivity. Designed so that windows would open and close based on calls being made, or would give them 10-minute windows to make calls every 2 hours.
• Digital shelter: stand inside the line.

Round up

• These presentations all use the strategy of showing ‘hypothetical products’ that are really non-products. They’re doing this rather than providing platforms or design methodologies, or distributing resources and infrastructures for people to design their own systems. I understand the need for designers as visionaries, but this could be more valuable and useful.
• Specialists in electronic space could be similar to lighting design specialists in the ’70s: will grow into a general field of understanding.
• Platforms and infrastructure for technology is beyond architects, but understanding the use and consequences is really important.

Session 4

Jocko Weyland

• Skateboarding as adaptive design: difference between skate parks and the street. Skate parks become designed over time to mimic certain aspects of streets, but also according to innate, human skaters’ needs. A combination of factors goes into a good skateboarding space: free, alcohol, quality, location.

Swoon

• New to New York. Wanted to work outside gallery space, inspired by the collage of city streets. Not from a graffiti background, and being female, can do certain things outside the norms of graffiti.
• Changes billboards during the day, looks official.
• Open democratic visual space.
• A visual direct democracy.
• Cuba used to have street art as a means of free expression, outlawed by dictatorship.
• Makes lightboxes with imagined cities and mounts them on the reverse side of construction site walls, with peepholes, ‘peer here’.
• Interesting mix of opportunism and ‘designed intervention’.
• Sometimes driven purely by visual interest.

Michael Rakowitz

• Mike Davis: “Public is phantom.”
• Bedouin as a model of sustainable nomadic communities.
• Homeless use waste air from air conditioning (airvac exhaust ports) to stay warm and dry.
• Homeless have receded to the peripheral vision of the public, want to see and be seen.
• Seeing is important for living nomadically in the city.
• Started to map the heat and the power of the exhaust fans in the city. Found a high one at MIT plasma lab.
• Re-routed smell from a bakery to an art gallery, to subvert a ‘high art’ re-appropriation of space.

Workshop: Loop City

• Dietmar Offenhuber & Sara Hodges.
• Showed Zbigniew Rybczynski’s film New Book using 9 frames: a good way of mapping space in the city. Starts off and the viewer is not sure if each frame is occurring synchronously or in the same space, but a bus passes between all of the frames and the spatial link is made immediately. There’s also a point where a plane flies overhead and all the actors look up, showing time synchronicity too.

Looking at the city

• as a set of repeated actions
• as a playground (situationists)
• as a balance of social as well as physical architectures