Justin Pickard

Network Dystopias

Architecture student Keiichi Matsuda’s AR concept video triggered memories of a short vignette posted on a forum by a pseudonymous stranger, back in 2008. Taken together, we get something like Bladerunner with a 2000s sensibility -

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“Nobody has a job. Everybody has a set of contracts. Some keep you in the same place for eight hours with the same coworkers five days a week, but it isn’t a job. A job requires benefits. A job requires taxes be paid by an employer. As a subcontracting entity you’re paid to pay your own taxes, to waive your own minimum wage requirements, your own working time directives. You are management. You don’t rent, you pay fractional reserve interest on a 99-year heritable lease entity that sublets your front room as storage space to a distributed shop. Every Saturday you pack boxes in your hall to tell other people how they can make a fortune out of the new economic climate by packing boxes in their hall. There are more guns in the world than there are people who can read properly. You ride a bus to the building that is your ‘office’. It used to be a hotel, when people could afford to go to other countries that weren’t over the road. You need a passport stamp to visit your mother. You don’t need a passport stamp to visit your father. You have six identity cards. You broke your leg in school and as a result can’t join a library. If there was still a library open near you you couldn’t even go in it. Instead you just can’t login.

Every morning when you get onto the number 27 you sit in the window and watch the UAVs circle over the shanty town in the park. You have extensive scarring on your left shoulder where the man next to you was extrajudicially assassinated when you used to get the number 26. Your ex-boyfriend left a camera in your shower, and you only found out when his ex sued for a share of the earnings, naming you as a witness. Your best friend Jane and you have a tradition. Every new year you buy another lock for her front door, fit it beside the others, then drink vodka until you vomit blood. You fight, and don’t talk again until christmas …”

- erithromycin, ‘Re: Cyberpunk in 2008‘, RPG.net, 28/06/2008

THE PHYSIOCRATS: organic biscuits & the ruins of suburbia

Pitched somewhere between Archigram, the Matrix, The Tripods, and a bacteriophage, this entry to the Reburbia suburban design competition is … all kinds of wonderful.

Whoever Michael Huges & Damien Wake actually are, I’ll hold on to the vague hope that they live in a hollowed-out volcano, and have an army of overall-clad mooks to do their bidding.

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My Winnipeg (2007)

My Winnipeg is a challenging film, in the best possible sense of the word. Despite falling asleep halfway through my first attempt (or perhaps because of it?), I really got on with this noir Canadian autogeography.

It’s a film which – to my mind – shares a lot with, and stands as a companion piece to, something like This is my City. Both take as their subject specific places as filtered through the eyes of specific people. With the latter, it’s this kind of viewer tension between (a) those insiders curating their city’s sights (sites?) & hotspots, and (b) our self-designated heroes, who stumble into existing dramas and unfamiliar landscapes. In My Winnipeg, it’s the eyes of our narrator and filmmaker, Guy Maddin, with the film’s visuals filtered through his melancholic half-memories of  urban legends and familial traumas.

So while the team behind my City aims for authenticity by keeping their curation & mediation to a minimum, presenting things (more or less) as they happen, Maddin’s gone to every effort to simulate and recreate a city which – in reality – may never have existed. A re-enactment of the past which echos, then exorcises. Memory versus documentary … not quite opposites, but – I don’t know – different ways of approaching the same goal, maybe? Of representing a subjective experience of the real? Of the city and its built environment, supposedly external to the body; objective, immune to memory’s holes and biases.

This is my City

(Via Digital Urban)

I’d argue that this is what the internet does better than traditional broadcast media – empowers those with the skills to bypass the gatekeepers, plugging their output straight into an audience. As ever, the watchword is authenticity. Admittedly, I may be carrying a certain nostalgia for my own 6th form-era travel documentary exploits, but from the look of it, these guys deserve an audience.

Capture the Flag & Public Space

These videos (from Ivo Gormley & Matan Rochlitz) make me pretty ruddy cheerful.  There’s a certain vagus nerve-tickling, ludotopian current to this whole thing.  And I like that.  A lot.

Sterling on alter-urbanism

I was re-reading Bruce Sterling’s year-old State of the World, 2008 Q&A over at The WELL – in a lets-see-how-on-the-money-he-actually-was kind of way – and came across a couple of extracts that seemed relevant to the whole alter-urbanism discussion:

*People have been talking about the twilight of national sovereignty for as long as I can remember. The thing that’s different now is those big, scary, non-integrating Gap patches where the Westphalian deal is just frankly dead. Beyond help. Failed states, non-states. People are getting used to failed states, or fake hollow-states. They are starting to talk seriously about a “failed globe.”

Sound familiar?

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The Buckminster Fuller Challenge

Alter-Urbanism | Chernobyl, Ukraine

[Part of the alter-urbanism project]

In the aftermath of the 1986 nuclear reactor disaster, Chernobyl has been cast as a city reclaimed by nature. As to whether this portrayal is justified by the evidence, the jury’s still out … but whatever the truth, it certainly hasn’t been allowed to stand in the way of a good story.  Take the first-person shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (based loosely on Stalker (1979), a film by Andrei Tarkovsky).  The game and its 2008 prequel – S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky – are both set in an alternate reality where a second nuclear disaster caused strange changes in the zone of alienation.

We’re talking a strange mix of historical fact, malevolent alien hive minds, and a multitude of mutant beasties. A reflection, then, of the symbolism lashed to Chernobyl in popular culture, public memory, and the collective unconscious?

So, what does this tell us about the alter-urban typology? This wild city isn’t simply anarchic, chaotic (as a “feral city”), or organised in a way which ignores / subverts the precepts of “Western” urbanism (as a “rogue city”) … instead, it actively endangers the bodies of those who would seek entry. Rather than amorality and ambivalence, the “wild” of the physical environment and its perverted forms of (un)nature approach the human intruders with absolute emnity.  For a better sense of this reading of the setting, have a look at this trailer for Clear Sky.

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(Image courtesy of Vivo (Ben))

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Notes toward a genealogy of alter-urbanism

On the last Wednesday of November, I took a train up to London, meeting Paul at the Tate Modern, with the ultimate intent of attending a public Battlespace/s lecture, Feral Cities and the Scientific Way of Warfare. A tight bundle of peculiar and fascinating tangents from the mouths of Geoff Manaugh and Antoine Bousquet, the lecture was run under the aegis of the Complex Terrain Laboratory (blog) and publicised with the following description:

Contemporary political discourse on armed violence and insecurity has been largely shaped by references to spatial knowledge, simulation, and control: “human terrain”, “urban clutter”, “terrorist sanctuaries”, “failed states”, “core-periphery”. The historical counterpoint to this is to be found in the key role the successive technologies of clock, engine, computer, and network have all played in spatializing the practice of warfare. In this context, what implications do “feral” Third World cities, “rogue” cities organized along non-Western ideas of urban space and infrastructure, and “wild” cities reclaimed by nature, have for the battlespaces of today and tomorrow?

A substantial ramble follows beneath the cut. Brace yourselves!

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Superstructing

Last month, the California-based Institute for the Future annouced Superstruct, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. Here’s the (in game) press release;

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SEPTEMBER 22, 2019

Humans have 23 years to go

Global Extinction Awareness System starts the countdown for Homo sapiens.

PALO ALTO, CA — Based on the results of a year-long supercomputer simulation, the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has reset the “survival horizon” for Homo sapiens – the human race – from “indefinite” to 23 years.

“The survival horizon identifies the point in time after which a threatened population is expected to experience a catastrophic collapse,” GEAS president Audrey Chen said. “It is the point from which a species is unlikely to recover. By identifying a survival horizon of 2042, GEAS has given human civilization a definite deadline for making substantive changes to planet and practices.”

According to Chen, the latest GEAS simulation harnessed over 70 petabytes of environmental, economic, and demographic data, and was cross-validated by ten different probabilistic models. The GEAS models revealed a potentially terminal combination of five so-called “super-threats”, which represent a collision of environmental, economic, and social risks. “Each super-threat on its own poses a serious challenge to the world’s adaptive capacity,” said GEAS research director Hernandez Garcia. “Acting together, the five super-threats may irreversibly overwhelm our species’ ability to survive.”Garcia said, “Previous GEAS simulations with significantly less data and cross-validation correctly forecasted the most surprising species collapses of the past decade: Sciurus carolinenis and Sciurus vulgaris, for example, and Anatidae chen. So we have very good reason to believe that these simulation results, while shocking, do accurately represent the rapidly growing threats to the viability of the human species.”

GEAS notified the United Nations prior to making a public announcement. The spokesperson for United Nations Secretary General Vaira Vike-Freiberga released the following statement: “We are grateful for GEAS’ work, and we treat their latest forecast with seriousness and profound gravity.”

GEAS urges concerned citizens, families, corporations, institutions, and governments to talk to each other and begin making plans to deal with the super-threats.

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Superstruct! Play the game, invent the future.

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