Filed under brief notes …

Aug 23 2011
6 Comments
brief notes, personal

On plans, on the future

I am thinking about redesigning guerrillasemiotics.com, and quite possible merging it with my other, currently unused, domain, feminaludens.com. Femina ludens (the feminine to homo ludens, the woman who plays), was always tentatively conceived as a folio website, personal website, something along the lines.

I am happy to hear ideas, while I’m thinking about how to approach the task.

What’s made me think about this has been the combination of inspiration and necessity; or, as life often is, a combination. On the one hand, I need a lighter website so deal with, something I can wire more easily into Facebook, something appable, something clouder, something with a more elastic spine. I’ve been on a very slow server for some years now, mainly out of being too busy to move, and I feel GS.com like an obese child under my custody, a being I need to take places and make do things, but who is just hard to move.

On the other hand, I would really like a website that reflects my life, not one that distracts me from it. I have been quite fatigued, definitely this year, and for the larger part of last year, from the enormously wide horizon of my life. As I get older – this happens to everyone – I have become increasingly more qualified to do a wider range of things. But since I started off as a multitasker, that range has been slightly wider to begin with. Keeping specialised websites of this sort, hence, has become a project, not an outlet. I cannot quite reconcile a website that is essentially a long list of Melbourne theatre reviews with the fact that I spend large parts of my life

  • writing scholarly articles on cultural policy
  • researching connections between psychogeography and Situationist Internationale, performance art, flashmobs, Judith Butler, and non-representational theory
  • diagramming urban spaces
  • play-making and play-testing
  • devising participatory performance
  • travelling to Bangkok, Istanbul, and Japan, in order to study their urban environments
  • taking photos
  • making maps of demographic and other data
  • doing web-design, both commercial and of an artistic (goalless) sort
  • researching children’s independent mobility in Australia
  • writing on live art and performance for RealTime, being a member of Green Room Awards for hybrid (etc) performance, and generally being involved in an increasingly specialised part of theatre
  • teaching
  • writing comic book scripts
  • writing fiction and non-fiction that is neither on theatre, nor academic
  • playing piano, and learning to edit sound for radio production
  • spending most of my leisure internet time reading through websites such as cityofsound.com.

This is not necessarily as psychotic as it sounds. In fact, when I don’t worry about fulfilling my obligations to each and every context, there is great harmony and (ouch!) synergy between the different activities. Thinking about space is also thinking about body. Because my discipline puts a lot of emphasis on direct experience as a method of learning (fieldwork etc), having to teach space means structuring information as exercises, which has led me quite naturally into participatory performance-making. And writing about dance and physical performance is about as good an exercise for writing about life in general as one can imagine.

In other words, I basically design experiences, and analyse experiences in order to design them better, for a living. My interest, while reasonably cerebral in style, is largely directed towards physical, non-verbal aspects of life. There is nothing hugely incongruent about any of this…

Except when I get invited to yet another local opening of a recent American play about the middle classes.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy something like that – but it has little real, living interest for me. Quite simply, I am finding myself with less and less energy to go see theatre that isn’t movement-based, that isn’t somehow related to either performer’s live presence or to audience. I actually am more interested in certain kinds of experience design, these days, than I am in many works of theatre. And, having cut that type of activity down to the nth degree by the end of 2009, once I realised I was going to kill myself with having bronchitis, breaking up with my boyfriend, writing up a thesis and teaching young people how to notate space, all the same time, I haven’t gone back.

I have, instead, naturally become more interested in a different kind of work: the kind Mimi Zeiger writes about; I have also become more focused in my explorations of the empirical world, of the sort Dan Hill writes about.

And I keep thinking about how this website needs to reflect this a bit more.

I have recently returned from a fantastic trip around the world (well, almost), which took me to Istanbul and Bangkok, and gave me much to think about. I want the next Guerrilla Semiotics to be a website where I can organically skip between musings on the workings of such cities and the writing on performance and dance that I publish in RealTime. Otherwise, I feel like I’m heading for a major sort of identity crisis, and it really doesn’t need to be that way.

Aug 23 2011
2 Comments
brief notes

Smell

“Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few who hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognise by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.”

May 22 2011
2 Comments
brief notes, CITIES, ugliness

Riding a bike as experience

I am very interested in the interplay between one’s experiential reality and their ethics, as you might know. And, while writing the previous post (about the experience of performance from the point of view of someone who has to reflect on it), I came across this very interesting short article, titled ‘why riding bikes is the key to better cities‘.

This should be of interest to anyone creating experiential performance, but it’s also immensely interested to someone who tries to teach people to understand their cities. At a level of sufficient abstraction, I don’t think there’s much difference in the approaches.

The most vital element for the future of our cities is that the bicycle is an instrument of experiential understanding.

On a bicycle, citizens experience their city with deep intimacy, often for the first time. For a regular motorist to take that two or three mile trip by bicycle instead is to decimate an enormous wall between them and their communities.

In a car, the world is reduced to mere equation; “What is the fastest route from A to B?” one will ask as they start their engine. This invariably leads to a cascade of freeway concrete flying by at incomprehensible speeds. Their environment, the neighborhoods that compose their communities, the beauty of architecture, the immense societal problems in distressed areas, the faces of neighbors… all of this becomes a conceptually abstract blur from the driver’s seat.

Yes, the bicycle is a stunningly efficient machine of transportation, but in the city it is so much more. The bicycle is new vision for the blind man. It is a thrilling tool of communication, an experiential device for the beauty and the ills of the urban context. One cannot turn a blind eye on a bicycle – they must acknowledge their community, all of it.

+++

Invite a motorist for a bike ride through your city and you’ll be cycling with an urbanist by the end of the day. Even the most eloquent of lectures about livable cities and sustainable design can’t compete with the experience from atop a bicycle saddle.

“These cars are going way too fast,” they may mutter beneath their breath.

“How are we supposed to get across the highway?”

“Wow, look at that cathedral! I didn’t know that was there.”

“I didn’t realize there were so many vacant lots in this part of town.”

“Hey, let’s stop at this cafe for a drink.”

This is something we both know and don’t know. Many people (James Kunstler, Robin Boyd, Dan Hill) have noted that the ugliness of suburban sprawl is largely caused by its need to be legible at 50km/h:

sprawl01

sprawl02

Compare and contrast.

But, at the same time, we (all of us) do forget the importance of lived experience in making people care. Barrie Shelton, in one of my classes, showed a series of mental maps he had the residents of a small British town make. The men, who drove, made large-scale maps of streets and sports facilities. The women, who took public transport, drew detailed maps of the town centre, with names of all the shops. The teenagers, who weren’t allowed out much, had a very fuzzy sense of town outside of the main train station and the few bottle shops around it. Had there been a proposal to demolish a 19th-century shopping arcade in the centre of town, how many do you think would care?

We learn the world by experiencing it. The more I try to teach young Melburnians about the world around us, the more I crave the ability to set them experiential exercises of the bike-riding sort. In geography and built environment disciplines, we already put a lot of emphasis on fieldwork and mapping, both kinds of travel to a place for the purpose of recording information. I wonder if these shouldn’t be enriched with tasks of way-finding, game-playing, and similar.

May 21 2011
Leave a comment
bookmarks, brief notes, personal

Cities, or the missing vision for ‘em in Australia

Dear reader, I have been busy beyond description. I have had no time to tweet, let alone post considered long-form writing on this blog, which is still incredibly dear to me. Instead, I have placeholders in my mind, things I think about when I’m running up and down Melbourne (literally, physically running), and things I can list here as a sort of physical placeholder:

- criticism as judgement and as philology;
- the role of the audience, and critic as an audience member;
- short taxonomy of live art;
- on Christoph Schlingensief (I have recently submitted by interview with Anna Teresa Scheer on the book she has edited with Tara Forrest on Schlingensief, of which I am tremendously proud – I will re-post here when RealTime publishes it, but I was going to write a few other things too).

However, I’ve been also itching to write more about cities. I’ve realised I don’t publicise the other half of my life enough – many people don’t know that I have spent 14,600 hours (I calculated tonight) studying and working on cities, which makes me at least fluent in urbanism. I am a geographer, there’s about half of an urban planner in me, and I’m also being trained in urban design. I research, I design, and I write about urban problems to almost the same degree as I write about theatre. And it was only recently, when I realised that my ex-boyfriend had somehow managed to sell himself to the world as the theatre and urbanism expert who just happened to be going out with me, that I started wondering about whether I am perhaps too reticent about these things. I mean, I do have this whole other area of interest, if not exactly expertise.

So, I’ve spent the best part of this semester completely engulfed in urban design (when I wasn’t completely engulfed in the break-up with the said ex-boyfriend) – urban design which, in Anglophone countries, has been detached from urban planning since about the 1960s, which has resulted in some important problems. I’ve been grappling with those problems, as well as learning to master the expectations, the tasks, the problems and the opportunities of the design-based teaching process. It has been absolutely hectic, but extraordinarily rewarding so far. I am very fond of the design teaching process, which is studio-based, which is to say problem-solving and creatively oriented, but at the same time homework-driven and hugely demanding of the student. It seems to me that almost any discipline or area of knowledge could be taught that way, and that the practical component (the having to make something and present it in class twice a week) enhances one’s knowledge in a fairly significant way.

I have also been offered to teach studio-based subjects, which is humbling and incredibly exciting at the same time. I am getting interested, very interested, in combining performance training practices with design practices, in one way or the other (in performance exercises being used to generate design, or design exercises being used to generate performance). And when I say design, I really do not mean buildings, but solutions.

You see, the divorce between urban planning and urban design in the Anglophone countries has resulted in a peculiar state in which neither the left nor the right hand have the tools to effect change, and are, on top, working in mutual hostility. Urban design has gone the way of architecture (on which I will say only: I am yet to meet an architect who isn’t incredibly ignorant of most of the world, yet smugly convinced of the superiority of his discipline over all others – other than my friend Pouria, who doesn’t count because he’s Iranian). Urban planning has gone into public policy. The result is that urban design is only interested in shapes from bird’s eye perspective, and urban planning in equitable processes of consultation, and policies. The latter has no interest in Really Existing urban conditions, not as far as I can see. The former, while it has an appreciation for Really Existing urban conditions, has no understanding of the social processes that form and perpetuate such conditions – which makes it essentially unable to replicate them through design. The result is the deep stasis we see in Australian cities, a failure of imagination and governance.

Dan Hill has recently published an extraordinary article on this failure of imagination and governance in Architecture Australia, and re-published it on his excellent blog, City of Sound. I recommend the article even if you never cared about a city in your life: it’s very thought-provoking. Dan makes a point that governance isn’t simply management, that it needs a vision for the future (which is what design could give urban planning); but also that ocularcentric (pretty-pictures) design, of which we currently have bucketfuls, cannot give us the solution. This is why I previously made a distinction between designing an object and designing a solution: the latter can be invisible, yet it has to work. At the same time, paradoxically, it is urban planning in Australia that has the ‘strategic’ epithet in front of it, the long-term thinking and acting. Design is short-term and product-oriented, while strategic planning is without vision. No wonder we’re fucked.

In another, recent blog post, Dan also addresses this, somewhat obliquely:

Strategic Design is, to me, potentially the most interesting recent development in design. It’s neatly defined at the Helsinki Design Lab site:

“Helsinki Design Lab helps government leaders see the “architecture of problems.” We assist decision-makers to view challenges from a big-picture perspective, and provide guidance toward more complete solutions that consider all aspects of a problem. Our mission is to advance this way of working—we call it strategic design.”

It feels (and is) quite different to design thinking, which is a term and way of thinking I think will fade quite rapidly, for some good reasons (the incorporation of its basic tenets into everyday processes) and bad reasons (the lack of rigor, awareness and responsibility on the part of many who have been actively pushing it in recent years). Either way, strategic design feels like something else, and its careful, integrated and thoughtful focus on meaningful, systemic challenges like health care, education, and climate change is particularly relevant. It’s also sketched out well here.

I have seen ‘design thinking’ appear in many places recently, even creeping into the world of theatre (through people such as Esther Anatolitis and Ming-Zhu Hii, who are very interested in design). I am quite wary of the term, because I am under no illusion that designers have the general knowledge needed to find solutions to problems. I work with designers, and I can attest to the inordinate focus they place on packaging, as opposed to function. But what design disciplines do have is a method of ploughing through a problem – a process.

What is needed, however, is greater emphasis on learning how a city works, what a city needs, how a city changes – in an abstract, non-targeted way – before a designer has actually gained enough knowledge to put their drawing skills to good use. See, for example, the eminently reasonable curriculum offered at Delft university (the Dutch are particularly good at teaching this stuff right). (ADDENDUM: I didn’t want to be mean when I original wrote this, but now I think it may make sense to compare this to the similar curriculum at Melbourne University. As you can see, the design subjects are strongly focused on design methods, such as digital modelling; while the planning subjects are mainly concerned with legislation. The focus on actual processes shaping the city is just about negligible.)

On a related note, I saw Timothy Morton give a lecture last week, at Melbourne University. The gist of it seemed to be that the age of theory is over, and the age of doing has begun. This is a peculiar thing, coming from a theorist, who in the question time admitted that all he knows how to do is sit in libraries and think, and that there must be a place for such activity too. Of course, yes. But I’m finding it interesting that this sort of thinking has been creeping into humanities and philosophy: a sort of glorification of the doing, of labour, of the physical, unthinking world, over abstract synthesizing of the world. The problem is that it very easily slips into glorification, precisely because it comes from people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

Similarly, there has long been an interest among designers in philosophy; but this is always in the most utilitarian, de-abstracted terms: ‘let’s design smooth and striated space, as theorised by Deleuze and Guattari’.

It seems to me that neither of the two is particularly smart as an approach, and that the trouble comes from a certain lack of general knowledge, or specific knowledge, on both ends. There is a place in this world for abstract thought, and for creative problem-solving. They can be immensely useful to each other. But it is only in their non-compromised forms that they are actually what they are, and only as such can they be useful to each other…

May 01 2011
Leave a comment
brief notes, Croatia, GRAPHIC NOVELS

Trivia: Croatian Vacation

From Dustinland.

Apr 25 2011
2 Comments
brief notes, war

A single note on ANZAC Day

From Wikipedia

I wouldn’t mind ANZAC Day one bit, if there was ever any mention of the other dead, of the dead that weren’t ours. If there was ever any mention of the fact that Gallipoli was a carnage, not just a demonstration of the valiant spirit of young Australian men. That contemporary young Australians, indeed, throw their mourning party on the land of those who have suffered ten times as many victims.

As it stands, the discourse surrounding Gallipoli throws a shadow of doubt on all the usual claims about the magnanimous and even-handed spirit of Australians.

Apr 23 2011
Leave a comment
brief notes, Christoph Schlingensief, illness

Preparing: Schlingensief and cancer

The tendency to keep one’s own illness secret, as if it were something scandalous, remains quite common – particularly in relation to cancer – although less so than at the time of Susan Sontag’s assessment of the disease. Schlingensief, who has always treated the private realm as an object of artistic inquiry, again chose to go public:

I can of course remain silent about my illness, my fear of death, but I don’t want to. I want to talk about sickness, dying and death. To talk against this culture of ostracism that bans the ill from speaking. I am moulding a social sculpture from my illness. And I am working on an extended concept of illness. It isn’t about being a delegate for the suffering: it is simply about [generating] visibility.

Schlingensief has discussed his ordeal in three theatre pieces, the book version of his dictaphone diary entries, and in numerous interviews (some on lightweight television talk shows), and, in doing so, he has successfully retained a sense of control over its reception (after initially forbidding his lawyers to report in any way on his illness). If, at first, the tape recordings had a primarily therapeutic function, the theatre performances and the diary that appeared in early 2009 are not simply gushing confessions, but clearly formed works that are an attempt to stay above water in the face of an illness that Schlingensief – along with so many others – experienced as a fundamental affront: “I’m so insulted, so insulted and hurt by this thing. At forty-seven. It really is an unbelievable insult!”

Florian Malzacher: Citizen of the Other Place: A Trilogy of Fear and Hope, in Forrest, T., and Scheer, A. T., 2011. Christoph Schlingensief: Art Without Borders. Bristol: Intellect; p.190.

Dec 22 2010
Leave a comment
brief notes

Friendship

They made me look ridiculous to myself and they made me laugh about it. And for that I will always be grateful to them, because anybody who does that for you is a true and great friend.

Norah Vincent, Self-Made Man (p.61)

Nov 01 2010
8 Comments
brief notes, GRAPHIC NOVELS, women

How Every Single Discussion About Sexism and Woman-Type Stuff on the Internet (and real life) Has Ever Happened And Ever Will Happen, Always, Forever, Until the Earth Finally Falls Into The Sun. (Or until the patriarchy is finally dismantled.)

By Gabby’s Playhouse, via scans daily.

Sep 19 2010
Leave a comment
brief notes, FILM, GRAPHIC NOVELS, multiculturalism, women

Scott Pilgrim; musings on misogyny

After enthusiastic recommendations of the film by at least three men very dear to me, I’ve finally given in and seen Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

Having a mountain of work to catch up on, I don’t think I have time nor energy for an in-depth analysis, but the film did leave me with one very pointed question mark hanging above my head, and it is the question ethics and pop culture.

Abigail Nussbaum completely seconds my opinion when she writes, on her blog, that Scott Pilgrim is both a fun movie, and an indisputably misogynist movie. Giving herself more time and space to analyse how and why, and also to wrestle with a number of Pilgrim fans who loudly disagree in the comments’ section, Nussbaum gives a very rounded overview of the film, equally critical and generous: it is both a fun piece of cinematic fluff, and one more brick in the general misogyny of the American (Canadian-American?) pop culture.

To both the fans and the critics of the film, this bias may be even more tragic when considering that, by all accounts, the original graphic novel works hard to unwind precisely the cliches that the film perpetuates. What appears to have been a subtle(r) and (more) nuanced critique of a certain kind of narcissistic, young slacker male, has here turned into a largely positive portrait in which, in the end, all faults are forgiven, some personal growth detected, and the loser gets the patient, mature and beautiful girl. There is a passage, it seems, between the subculture and the pop culture that flattens nuance, as registered in the fact that the Bechdel test would pass the comic, but fail the film.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Left: the flawed but lowable protagonist. Right: the romantic lead with a bit of personality, but no character.

(What is the Bechdel test? First divulged to me by one of those same men who invited me to see this film, Bechdel test is named after Alison Bechdel, an American graphic novelist. It both demonstrates the comparative progressiveness of the American graphic novels when compared to the movies, and is a one-size-fits-all detector of misogyny in any narrative. To pass the Bechdel test, a movie:

1. has to have at least two women in it,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something besides a man.
Whether this detects merely misogyny, or the complete inability of our popular art to portray women as human beings is a pertinent question, but let’s leave it aside. Let’s also leave aside the fact that many, many other films, TV shows, and comics fail this test together with Scott Pilgrim, including such beacons of feminism as Sex and the City, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Frida. The point is, Scott Pilgrim fails.)

It’s interesting, however, that a few web-commentators have remarked on the misogyny, but no one to my knowledge has mentioned racism *. Yet Scott Pilgrim is also an undeniably racist film. From the first moment the only Asian character faints, clearly too anime to do anything better, I wondered how the portrayal of gay characters has managed to shoot up from caricature to respect, leaving behind such comparatively more frequent behaviour as being of non-Anglo-Saxon ethnicity.

Yes, it is possible to give a hundred reasons for why Knives Chau behaves the way she does: she is only 17, meant to be a boy-fantasy girlfriend, the most immature character, etc. But I watched the film thinking of all the young Chinese Australians I know, all wonderfully rounded and complex people, and wondered how annoying it must be for them to never see faces like their own in any more central, more complex, more rounded role than the screaming sidekick caricature. Yes, the immature 17-year-old girlfriend swoons and says OMG. But why is only the 17-year-old girlfriend a Chinese-Canadian? Why not the romantic interest, the lead, the mature best friend?

At the same time, I’ve always found it annoying that this question is treated with such seriousness by feminists, post-colonialists, and Left-leaning liberal people in general. How serious can this issue really be? Is it really on par with slavery and Hiroshima? I don’t think so.

But today, I’m wondering if we could compare this pop-cultural treatment of women and races with smoking – not least because I’m reading That Book That Makes People Quit Smoking.

Namely: every smoker tells herself and her friends the same story. It goes like this: “I am not addicted. I just enjoy it. I could stop any time. If I’m not stopping, it’s because I like smoking/it relaxes me/it helps my concentration/I only smoke socially.” But what happens when someone asked the smoker, given the absence of serious addiction, to stop smoking for a week to demonstrate that she could quit any time? Ah, now it’s impossible. The smoker realises she is unable to, but will come up with a host of reasons for why now is not the right time to try this: “it’s a stressful period/it’s a period of socialising/I am still enjoying it too much/I’ll quit next week.” Because each cigarette is perceived as only one cigarette, not one in a long chain, not one small perpetuation of an unhealthy addiction, it is very hard to make the smoker acknowledge that the addiction is there. But, just like the cat doesn’t need to know where the hot-water pipes lie under the floor, to know that sitting in certain places is nice and warm, so the smoker doesn’t need to understand the mechanics of the nicotine addiction to enjoy the familiar relaxation of satisfying it.

The low-level, low-intensity racism and sexism of pop culture is, I think, very similar to the low-intensity nicotine addiction. It provides so little palpable pleasure that neither is perceived as a conscious act of satisfying a deep desire, either for nicotine, or to humiliate women/other races. Each act of misogyny and racism, just like a cigarette, is perceived as a single act of satisfying something else (humour, narrative cliché, shorthand, simplifying for greater clarity). But when you ask a question that would reasonably follows from such disawoval, such as: why not have a Chinese girl as the romantic interest?, or why not have multiple developed female characters who talk to each other about music, politics or cars? (the equivalent of quitting smoking for a week), it becomes obvious that these disparate actions, however unintentional and unperceived, form a long chain of habit, in this case a habit of portraying other races as inferior, or women as nothing but love interests.

Taken separately, each instance of a female character with barely a trace of interior life (like Ramona Flowers in Scott Pilgrim is a perfectly excusable artistic error – just like, taken separately, each cigarette is just one tiny little mistake in a very long life. But, cumulatively, one kills you and the other one builds a world in which all Chinese girls say OMG and swoon whenever they’re supposed to make a rational decision.

* This is actually incorrect, as I’ve discovered now. Prof. Susurro, a cinema/cultural studies academic, discusses precisely the racism of Scott Pilgrim on her extraordinary blog Like a Whisper **.
** This leads to another question: what would the Bechdel test for racism look like? Clearly, two people of colour talking to each other, but about what..?

← Older posts
Newer posts →