participants
Theoretical and empirical contributions as well as projectdocumentaries by creative people
of various disciplines and nationalities show different approaches on how cities can be seen and mobility can
be lived
Here you can find abstracts of upcoming essays published in the book (cyan rectangle to scroll down):
YASMINE ABBAS
Sampling
The twitter line definition of neo-nomads is that neo-nomads are individuals constantly on the move who construct and reclaim a sense of belonging to places through digital means. One of their strategies to formulate home is sampling. In (electronic) musical terms, sampling is the appropriation—selection and recording—of sound and music bits (often part of a precedent creation by another artist) for reuse in a new musical piece. The musical analogy holds true for neo-nomads as they sample cultures and the urban environments they roam in to reuse in the creation of a comfortable, personal and movable space. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have amplified the phenomenon. This piece is an adaptation of the research on the technologically mediated relation between people and space when always on the move.
Parts of the collected data from the questionnaire (see CALL) will be used for the contribution.
BRAM CREVITS
Nomadic node
Urban/new nomadism is the result of the combination of developments in the field of information and communication technologies combined with the total set of urban rules.
My interest lays in the relation between this emerging and groundbreaking economical, cultural and sociological phenomenon and a possible bottom-up cultural globalisation. Crucial in this is a participation-based media literacy, which brings the growing group of new nomads - as super-users and test-pilots - in the forefront.
The survey will be based on a very personal and artistic 'life style practice' approach (as described by M. Amerika in Meta/Data) focusing on the juxtaposition and superimposition of the related terms 'habitat' and 'habitude'.
ANNE-LAURE FAYARD and AILEEN WILSON
Promenade(s)
The urban imaginary "is an embodied material fact. Urban imaginaries are thus part of any city’s reality rather than only figments of the imagination. What we think about a city and how we perceive it informs the ways we act in it." (Andreas Huyssen)
Through describing city walks, urban promenades - real and imaginary, shared and virtual - in different cities where we have lived, we will suggest that our perceptions, practices and memories of previous places are intertwined with the present constructing a sense of place which is never completely here or elsewhere We will suggest too that one’s perception of a city is always a collage of all previous experiences of cities, in the same way that our perceptions in general are always imbued with our memories.
We will present ‘promenades’ across cities in the style of walking tours or travel books. Through these promenades we will investigate our sense of place, of “home”. We will explore a central issue for neo-nomads - how we have connected to our space through objects, memories, relationships, rituals and digital technologies. We will ask whether home is where we actually live, or is actually a sense of place that is carried within us where ever we live, work and play, and which allows us to feel connected, ‘an embodied material fact.’ (Huyssen)
NIKOLAUS GANSTERER
Drawn to Nowhere. Memorizing the Stone Road Code
Nikolaus Gansterers' contribution deals with the possibility of the readability of space and is part of a long term research project along the N6 route departing from Brussels towards Paris. In various trips - either by hitch-hiking, by bike but mainly by feet - he was exploring the “Chaussee de Mons” and its various zones of acceleration and deceleration. Interested in how different modes of transportation are influencing thoughts and ways of perceiving the surrounding - he literally started reading the landscape as a book.
On the one hand he meticulously began collecting all the words, numbers and characters he found along selected stretches of the road: neon signs, name plates, advertisements, street names, signposts and little notes were transcribed and retyped into text-images forming the body of “The Stone Road Code”. On the other hand he compiled a huge collection of drawings of found objects, situations and constellations. Thus he developed two contrasting methods of mapping the borders between ego-graphy and geo-graphy.
Gansterers' work is accessible as an open archive consisting of models, books, text-images, drawings, video loops and spoken text - this assemblage of elements builds broken visual narratives of the urban countryside.
KATHARINA HOLAS
Heterogeneous Urban Actors
From Urban Nomads to Subject-Object Networks in Urban Space
According to Vilém Flusser, man’s sedentariness has only been temporary, it has been a very long interruption of nomadic life. Information, as opposed to possession, has become a new paradigm that transforms men’s lives and shapes urban space. Urban nomads are situated in a „space of flows“ (Manuel Castells) that consists of material and immaterial components of information networks.
Flusser has already pointed out that in urban space, individuals don’t exist anymore: men become nodes in which different fields (cultural, political, ecological fields, etc.) intersect. The second part of this article, informed by actor-network theory, takes a further step: the modern subject, as well as the distinction between subject and object will vanish. This section explores urban space as an assembly of heterogeneous actors and networks: Urban space is not only populated by human actors, it is also constituted by non-human actors. As Bruno Latour has demonstrated in his actor-network analysis of the city of Paris (Paris ville invisible, 1998), urban space is equally constituted by human and nonhuman actors that form sociotechnical networks, and it is shaped and transformed by the multitude of translations between these entities.
ELKE KRASNY
Found Words: Nomadic Urban Writings
Small scraps of paper, meticulously cut, complete with phone numers or small homemade stickers are attached to urban infrastructures, such as pipes, poles, posts or telephone boots, and communicate the search for work opportunities, career offerings or other personal messages to the world at large. They communicate the state of the urban at a certain moment in time, they are continuously changing and also allow deep insights into the social urban fabric and its melting with the public urban fabric. The social urban fabric speaking with and through the small messages represents the big movements and the big flows of individuals.
The nomadic will appear as a strong and viable strategy in different realms:
1) a survival technique of a workforce pressed to be more flexible, more mobile and more adaptable
and
2) a strategy of inspiration how to use and read the urban environment that can be traced back to Surrealism and Situationism and even older layers of Baudelaire's and Benjamin's flaneur.
MICHAEL LANGEDER
The Chronicles of Dirk
What the hell! I recognized it for the first time during reorganizing my private images - by accident. All these files. I was about to delete them, thinking they were the sort of temporary system generated stuff, the usual crap that’s messing up your hard drive after all those years. It’s really years since I performed one of those mind blowing tabula rasa sessions. ‘format c:’ - what a beautiful phrase I thought - poetic - almost. Typing those letters was every time again a deep pleasure. First the fear, the typical moment of doubt: did i backup all the important stuff? Did I forget something? Fantastic! One asks himself if the screenshots of a beautiful windows arrangement is worth saving for the afterworld, if one should better get rid of the illegally downloaded Hitchcock collection or if thumbnails of holiday images are big enough for keeping your own past in the picture. Anyway, there were all these files, numbered and indexed and I don’t know why, mere curiosity or simple boredom I suppose, but I double-clicked one of them. There is always the possibility of remembering something long forgotten with those lost on disk things. QuickTime opening - interesting, I thought, and then this short sequence of a dining room - a cafetaria - the cafetaria, it came back in a flash. The plastic chairs, the rows of people in front of the big sandwich cupboard, the coffee-machine and fuck - me - myself - passing by with a bocadillo francesa. Then it stopped. I played it again and tried to remember. It must have been recorded sometime in October 2005. But as deep as I dig, there is no memo of whatsoever friend or college ever filming in there, back in the time at the University Campus in Valencia. Loose end, lets open another _le...
MOVINGCITIES (Mónica Carriço and Bert de Muynck)
Moving in-between cities, architectures and rooftops
“Today’s traveller can say: I am an inhabitant of earth, just as if he were saying: I am inhabitant of Asnières… There are travellers who no longer even know they’re travelling.” Georges Rageot (1902) in Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1991)
The ability to abstract ourselves from so-called everyday life keeps us sane in cities. To merge into its margins, to temporarily occupy its centres, to observe its form, sprawl and density from rooftops, hills, airplane windows… While we are haunted by observation and interpretation the camera freezes flows into frames, progress into pictures.
In dealing with rapidly changing urban spaces, we have developed throughout the past year, unsolicited strategies of urban mapping in two different locations: the rooftop and the airplane cabin.
By scanning the city, from its hills and rooftops, while desiring to do so in blimps, we want to rethink urban experience so to read beyond the formal layers of the city.
BERNARDO RISQUEZ
Rhythm Analysis
Rhythm is primarily an action that occurs in time, without this dimension it lacks definition. Tone is an action in space.
Urban intervals of time, mark events, defining points of space-time.
This phenomenon is the starting point for identifying rhythmic patterns in cities, that sometimes are able to describe proper cultural aspects of it.
When traveling and arriving to a new city, you are able to perceive lucidly some things, in the best cases, without contaminated, noisy viewpoints. The rhythmic patterns are always happening, even in the way I structure this text, there are numbers defining relations, sometimes it is too obscure to see, sometimes they are as clear as Caracas' daylight, though this city is so close to myself for me to sense proper patterns. Paris, for example, is so easy to grasp, it is a whole and the sum of its parts somehow are rhythmically designed, wonder how it all could sound if structured under well studied interpretation lines. Another example, really obvious to me, is Berlin's precise time structure, it is all over the culture, like a perfume that smells like time spirit. Whenever you spot something that can get a hold of a city and define a kind of universal pattern in it, it is through rhythm that I think is best experienced. Cities speak to you...
ANNA WACHTMEISTER
There are 2 voyages:
When you are frequently on the move and live through constantly shifting ambiences, cultures and places, the internal voyage is maybe more demanding than the physical journey. You are continually redefining and developing “the self” while at the same time developing the required tools to deal with constantly shifting realities.
As I continue my migratory life; I have until now lived and worked in seven cities as diverse as Caracas/Venezuela, Stuttgart/Germany, Nairobi/Kenya and at present Erbil/Iraq, I can feel my identity becoming more and more transnational, fragmented, matchless, disassociated, non-linear, unaffiliated even contradictory and unbounded. It is a constant challenge and joy to have such a complex and ever developing relationship with yourself, yes it is a solitary lifestyle, in the ever emergent world.
Then there is of course the realism and practicalities of rooting and uprooting one self over and over again in diverse cities around the globe. I describe the tools I use to ‘enter’ and leave cities behind and what I make sure to carry with me.
It is after all my fascination for cities and consequent work in the field of urban poverty alleviation that drives me to this lifestyle. It is the projects and jobs which facilitate my interaction with the various cities and have sustained this lifestyle. It is the mode of interaction with which i can interact with the city what draws me forward and to the next location, leaving the selection of city secondary.
http://blog.neo-nomad.net
Sampling
The twitter line definition of neo-nomads is that neo-nomads are individuals constantly on the move who construct and reclaim a sense of belonging to places through digital means. One of their strategies to formulate home is sampling. In (electronic) musical terms, sampling is the appropriation—selection and recording—of sound and music bits (often part of a precedent creation by another artist) for reuse in a new musical piece. The musical analogy holds true for neo-nomads as they sample cultures and the urban environments they roam in to reuse in the creation of a comfortable, personal and movable space. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have amplified the phenomenon. This piece is an adaptation of the research on the technologically mediated relation between people and space when always on the move.
Parts of the collected data from the questionnaire (see CALL) will be used for the contribution.
http://www.cimatics.com
Nomadic node
Urban/new nomadism is the result of the combination of developments in the field of information and communication technologies combined with the total set of urban rules.
My interest lays in the relation between this emerging and groundbreaking economical, cultural and sociological phenomenon and a possible bottom-up cultural globalisation. Crucial in this is a participation-based media literacy, which brings the growing group of new nomads - as super-users and test-pilots - in the forefront.
The survey will be based on a very personal and artistic 'life style practice' approach (as described by M. Amerika in Meta/Data) focusing on the juxtaposition and superimposition of the related terms 'habitat' and 'habitude'.
http://www.bazartropicando.com/alfwebsite/index.html
http://www.aileenwilson.com
Promenade(s)
The urban imaginary "is an embodied material fact. Urban imaginaries are thus part of any city’s reality rather than only figments of the imagination. What we think about a city and how we perceive it informs the ways we act in it." (Andreas Huyssen)
Through describing city walks, urban promenades - real and imaginary, shared and virtual - in different cities where we have lived, we will suggest that our perceptions, practices and memories of previous places are intertwined with the present constructing a sense of place which is never completely here or elsewhere We will suggest too that one’s perception of a city is always a collage of all previous experiences of cities, in the same way that our perceptions in general are always imbued with our memories.
We will present ‘promenades’ across cities in the style of walking tours or travel books. Through these promenades we will investigate our sense of place, of “home”. We will explore a central issue for neo-nomads - how we have connected to our space through objects, memories, relationships, rituals and digital technologies. We will ask whether home is where we actually live, or is actually a sense of place that is carried within us where ever we live, work and play, and which allows us to feel connected, ‘an embodied material fact.’ (Huyssen)
www.gansterer.org
Drawn to Nowhere. Memorizing the Stone Road Code
Nikolaus Gansterers' contribution deals with the possibility of the readability of space and is part of a long term research project along the N6 route departing from Brussels towards Paris. In various trips - either by hitch-hiking, by bike but mainly by feet - he was exploring the “Chaussee de Mons” and its various zones of acceleration and deceleration. Interested in how different modes of transportation are influencing thoughts and ways of perceiving the surrounding - he literally started reading the landscape as a book.
On the one hand he meticulously began collecting all the words, numbers and characters he found along selected stretches of the road: neon signs, name plates, advertisements, street names, signposts and little notes were transcribed and retyped into text-images forming the body of “The Stone Road Code”. On the other hand he compiled a huge collection of drawings of found objects, situations and constellations. Thus he developed two contrasting methods of mapping the borders between ego-graphy and geo-graphy.
Gansterers' work is accessible as an open archive consisting of models, books, text-images, drawings, video loops and spoken text - this assemblage of elements builds broken visual narratives of the urban countryside.
Heterogeneous Urban Actors
From Urban Nomads to Subject-Object Networks in Urban Space
According to Vilém Flusser, man’s sedentariness has only been temporary, it has been a very long interruption of nomadic life. Information, as opposed to possession, has become a new paradigm that transforms men’s lives and shapes urban space. Urban nomads are situated in a „space of flows“ (Manuel Castells) that consists of material and immaterial components of information networks.
Flusser has already pointed out that in urban space, individuals don’t exist anymore: men become nodes in which different fields (cultural, political, ecological fields, etc.) intersect. The second part of this article, informed by actor-network theory, takes a further step: the modern subject, as well as the distinction between subject and object will vanish. This section explores urban space as an assembly of heterogeneous actors and networks: Urban space is not only populated by human actors, it is also constituted by non-human actors. As Bruno Latour has demonstrated in his actor-network analysis of the city of Paris (Paris ville invisible, 1998), urban space is equally constituted by human and nonhuman actors that form sociotechnical networks, and it is shaped and transformed by the multitude of translations between these entities.
Found Words: Nomadic Urban Writings
Small scraps of paper, meticulously cut, complete with phone numers or small homemade stickers are attached to urban infrastructures, such as pipes, poles, posts or telephone boots, and communicate the search for work opportunities, career offerings or other personal messages to the world at large. They communicate the state of the urban at a certain moment in time, they are continuously changing and also allow deep insights into the social urban fabric and its melting with the public urban fabric. The social urban fabric speaking with and through the small messages represents the big movements and the big flows of individuals.
The nomadic will appear as a strong and viable strategy in different realms:
1) a survival technique of a workforce pressed to be more flexible, more mobile and more adaptable
and
2) a strategy of inspiration how to use and read the urban environment that can be traced back to Surrealism and Situationism and even older layers of Baudelaire's and Benjamin's flaneur.
http://www.michaellangeder.com
The Chronicles of Dirk
What the hell! I recognized it for the first time during reorganizing my private images - by accident. All these files. I was about to delete them, thinking they were the sort of temporary system generated stuff, the usual crap that’s messing up your hard drive after all those years. It’s really years since I performed one of those mind blowing tabula rasa sessions. ‘format c:’ - what a beautiful phrase I thought - poetic - almost. Typing those letters was every time again a deep pleasure. First the fear, the typical moment of doubt: did i backup all the important stuff? Did I forget something? Fantastic! One asks himself if the screenshots of a beautiful windows arrangement is worth saving for the afterworld, if one should better get rid of the illegally downloaded Hitchcock collection or if thumbnails of holiday images are big enough for keeping your own past in the picture. Anyway, there were all these files, numbered and indexed and I don’t know why, mere curiosity or simple boredom I suppose, but I double-clicked one of them. There is always the possibility of remembering something long forgotten with those lost on disk things. QuickTime opening - interesting, I thought, and then this short sequence of a dining room - a cafetaria - the cafetaria, it came back in a flash. The plastic chairs, the rows of people in front of the big sandwich cupboard, the coffee-machine and fuck - me - myself - passing by with a bocadillo francesa. Then it stopped. I played it again and tried to remember. It must have been recorded sometime in October 2005. But as deep as I dig, there is no memo of whatsoever friend or college ever filming in there, back in the time at the University Campus in Valencia. Loose end, lets open another _le...
http://movingcities.org
Moving in-between cities, architectures and rooftops
“Today’s traveller can say: I am an inhabitant of earth, just as if he were saying: I am inhabitant of Asnières… There are travellers who no longer even know they’re travelling.” Georges Rageot (1902) in Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1991)
The ability to abstract ourselves from so-called everyday life keeps us sane in cities. To merge into its margins, to temporarily occupy its centres, to observe its form, sprawl and density from rooftops, hills, airplane windows… While we are haunted by observation and interpretation the camera freezes flows into frames, progress into pictures.
In dealing with rapidly changing urban spaces, we have developed throughout the past year, unsolicited strategies of urban mapping in two different locations: the rooftop and the airplane cabin.
By scanning the city, from its hills and rooftops, while desiring to do so in blimps, we want to rethink urban experience so to read beyond the formal layers of the city.
http://www.bernardorisquez.com
Rhythm Analysis
Rhythm is primarily an action that occurs in time, without this dimension it lacks definition. Tone is an action in space.
Urban intervals of time, mark events, defining points of space-time.
This phenomenon is the starting point for identifying rhythmic patterns in cities, that sometimes are able to describe proper cultural aspects of it.
When traveling and arriving to a new city, you are able to perceive lucidly some things, in the best cases, without contaminated, noisy viewpoints. The rhythmic patterns are always happening, even in the way I structure this text, there are numbers defining relations, sometimes it is too obscure to see, sometimes they are as clear as Caracas' daylight, though this city is so close to myself for me to sense proper patterns. Paris, for example, is so easy to grasp, it is a whole and the sum of its parts somehow are rhythmically designed, wonder how it all could sound if structured under well studied interpretation lines. Another example, really obvious to me, is Berlin's precise time structure, it is all over the culture, like a perfume that smells like time spirit. Whenever you spot something that can get a hold of a city and define a kind of universal pattern in it, it is through rhythm that I think is best experienced. Cities speak to you...
http://www.disturbance.cc
There are 2 voyages:
When you are frequently on the move and live through constantly shifting ambiences, cultures and places, the internal voyage is maybe more demanding than the physical journey. You are continually redefining and developing “the self” while at the same time developing the required tools to deal with constantly shifting realities.
As I continue my migratory life; I have until now lived and worked in seven cities as diverse as Caracas/Venezuela, Stuttgart/Germany, Nairobi/Kenya and at present Erbil/Iraq, I can feel my identity becoming more and more transnational, fragmented, matchless, disassociated, non-linear, unaffiliated even contradictory and unbounded. It is a constant challenge and joy to have such a complex and ever developing relationship with yourself, yes it is a solitary lifestyle, in the ever emergent world.
Then there is of course the realism and practicalities of rooting and uprooting one self over and over again in diverse cities around the globe. I describe the tools I use to ‘enter’ and leave cities behind and what I make sure to carry with me.
It is after all my fascination for cities and consequent work in the field of urban poverty alleviation that drives me to this lifestyle. It is the projects and jobs which facilitate my interaction with the various cities and have sustained this lifestyle. It is the mode of interaction with which i can interact with the city what draws me forward and to the next location, leaving the selection of city secondary.