thanks for coming out this mic is on I
can tell my name is Jason young if you
don't know me I'm the director of the
School of Architecture it's my distinct
pleasure to introduce someone who needs
an introduction but not really because
he's been here at the school for this
year and a little bit of last year but
nonetheless it's always a pleasure to
prepare somewhat of a formal
presentation introduction because I
think that a lot of times you know we
just you know to not know fault of our
own we kind of just take one another for
granted in terms of you know who who we
are and what we where we come from and
what we're doing so we're here tonight
to really to celebrate the Tennessee
architecture fellowship and our second
Tennessee architecture fellow which is
Micah Ruttenberg but the Tennessee
architecture fellowship was started
really as an idea here on the faculty
level three years ago as a mechanism to
bring people to the school people that
are at or near the beginning of their
hoped for academic career and to get
them teaching give them time and space
and resources to do some research and
essentially support you know that kind
of younger generation if you will add a
key moment when they often need support
and then as an institution or as a
school in college we reap the benefit of
having that energy having the expansion
of our network so on by virtue of these
fellows so it's been a great program so
far and each year the fellowship ends
with a lecture or presentation and
exhibition of the work of that fellow
for the year and that's what we're
gathered here tonight for is to hear
from Micah a report from the field
so Micah Ruttenberg grew up in or
again went to the University of Michigan
as a freshman in the year 2002 he
received his Bachelor of Science in
architecture
four years later and in doing so won the
Wallenberg studio award and travel
scholarship which is given to the best
final undergraduate project of that
graduating cohort upon graduating in
2006 Michael went to Spain to work he
worked for four years between his
undergraduate and graduate education in
Barcelona for Korea
mehran architect aura and Akhtar
architect aura in 2008 he returned to
the University of Michigan to work on
his Master of Architecture which he
earned in 2010 and was then immediately
recruited into then newish one year post
professional program the Master of
Science design research or MSD are his
work as a graduate student sought to
understand emergent territorial
conditions of a digital age in which
traditional notions of institutionality
governance and citizenship are brought
into question he was awarded a Master of
Science design research in 2011 and in
doing so one the master science student
award for best project meanwhile as an
EM art candidate he was also awarded the
sarin and swanson essay competition
award so as a student
Micah was celebrated at each level of
his education premiated with the top
award for each degree which is pretty
rare after graduating Micah started
studio Mars along with Mark Stanley
studio Mars is a design research
practice whose work is located at the
convergence of everyday spatial
practices material cultures and digital
discourse soon after they founded the
firm they began winning commissions
to design and build projects in Ann
Arbor before each of them individually
relocated to Los Angeles
while in Los Angeles Micah was teaching
at Woodbury University from 2012 to 2016
and he was doing so both in the School
of Architecture and in the college of
transdisciplinary Studies he took an
active role in the development of the
undergraduate curriculum in the School
of Architecture particularly in the
studio sequence and he also taught in
the fifth year degree program so similar
to our STP or our diploma studios his
pedagogy his teaching which is emerging
emerging but also quite quite strong is
really concerned with technologies of
representation how we make decisions
when to deploy certain kinds of
representations and in what context
narratives of transdisciplinarity is
very much a thinker that thinks
horizontally across multiple topics and
how the digital culture of late
capitalism impacts pacemaking
during his time in LA Micah collaborated
with Katherine Garrison architects and
roto architects which is a collaboration
that he had with Michael Rotundi that
also led to him teaching a studio with
Michael Rotundi at Arizona State
University so over these years Micah has
been writing and researching topics
surrounding the contemporary culture of
architecture and he's had a number of
papers and presentations and conferences
including one entitled territorial
vision algorithmic observers in the 21st
Century City which was presented in the
changing cities conference in 2015 and
another of note for the context tonight
geographies of consumption presented in
Seoul Korea at the ACS a international
are thinkers germane to the work that
Mike has been doing as a fellow here
looking at the landscape of East East
Tennessee and really thinking that
through in terms of computational design
and emerging condition of urbanism with
and without the city and looking at
fantastic specimens of late capitalism
so I'd like to close just with a quote
from his fellowship proposal
we can then test and see if he delivered
on this promise eastern Tennessee is a
region he writes eastern Tennessee is a
region of anthropogenic wonders here the
distinguishing characteristics of old
disciplinary categories have evolved to
produce new containers of knowledge that
are at once original in 
hypertrophied assemblages of the old in
their hypertrophied state the edges of
what distinguishes one category of
thought and discipline disciplinary
discourse from another becomes frayed in
their place other modes of practice in
formation underwrite futures for
architectural production so please help
me welcome Micah Rutenberg
let's see if that does that work sort of
all right of course thanks for the
introduction
that's you all okay thank you Jason of
course for that amazing introduction
it's it's kind of interesting to see
more consistency across the years than I
really expected there to be I don't um I
don't always think of this work as
having such a close relationship but as
previous work but you made me see that
it it kind of does which is pretty
interesting so thank you for that so
welcome all I really appreciate you
being here and taking time out of your
Monday immediately after the break
especially in close to finals time and
whatnot but today I want to talk about
what I call the techno scientific
petting zoo which is this kind of
construct for me to think about to be
able to think about this East Tennessee
region but I need to orient you do a
couple of things that are up here the
one is the costume that I'm wearing
which is modeled after the men in cities
and you'll probably never see me wear
this again because if you know me you
know that I probably won't wear this
again but this is a really interesting
instead of photographs by Robert long
though they were taken in New York City
on a rooftop and basically what he did
is he took a bunch of his friends and
suits onto this rooftop rooftop and
started throwing things at them and
getting these sort of contorted
positions out of them and so it's this
kind of critique if you look at the
original photos where they haven't been
sort of the backgrounds haven't been
photoshopped out you see the the
background of the of the financial
district so it's a lot about what's not
there what's not present which is that
the kind of skyline of the city but what
we do see is the kind of subjectivity or
that contorted body that's produced by
that condition
in the that kind of the condition of the
background expressed in the suit and the
kind of contorted body around that so it
is a costume I had actually planned I
was going to get a what-do-you-call-it
clip-on tie and I was gonna rip it off
at some point but it didn't show up so
maybe it's better that way the other
thing is that so this is not I'm not
joking this is not so this is there's
two films here one that I did which is a
drive down Dolly Parton what I call
Dolly Parton Parkway and it's looking
out the right side from the freeway into
the national park so you're going to see
this kind of section and it's on loop so
it'll repeat and then the top is a
little video that Lauren and Lindsey put
together on I sent them on a trip to go
to what's now a Dolly Parton Stampede
which used to be Dixie Stampede and I
sent them on this trip to photograph for
me I've also been there but I didn't
have time to keep going back to a Dolly
Parton stampede as much as I wanted to
so they did this like is pretty amazing
compilation of their experience filming
so that's also on loop and those two
things I'm not really gonna speak
directly to them but it's to give you a
kind of flavor of what's there as I'm
talking and to just hopefully be
distracted at points as you as you want
and then there are patron saint of East
Tennessee if not the world so I'm going
to talk about the techno scientific
petting zoo so first I'm gonna I'm gonna
have to take you on this tour of what I
call Dolly Parton Parkway I might refer
to it as DPP as well and then I'm gonna
talk a bit about the logic of databases
in new and new media which is a kind of
technological paradigm that influences a
lot of my thinking and a lot about how
this condition plays out around Pigeon
Forge and Gatlinburg and then I'm going
to talk about the the techno scientific
petting zoo itself which is composed of
these
these animals so I did come here last
year and something that was really
immediately impactful was this condition
so the map sort of behind is the
Tennessee Valley Authority region as
well as Oak Ridge in the purple and then
Great Smoky Mountains National Park and
so there's these kind of three there
these three federal projects that are
operating at different scales and they
have different concerns but they're all
constructed within a certain
technological paradigm and while of
course I'd like to talk about all three
of them and in fact I do often think
about all three of them as that kind of
composed specimen I I've been thinking
more deeply about a Great Smoky
Mountains National Park because it's
this intersection between a tech no
scientific paradigm of the 30s that's
intersected with this kind of wild feral
capitalism and media culture of late
post modernity and it's produced these
really interesting kind of situations
and architectural and urban conditions
so the the park itself and the urbanism
that extends from it is constructed
within a series of these kind of
technological paradigms as well so first
from technology as nature infrastructure
in the park and then moving outward to
technology as industry and machine that
will see in Gatlinburg and then to
technology as database and media which
we'll look at a bit in Pigeon Forge and
then technology as information and
logistical space at exit 407 so I'm
gonna be this is that red line is what I
call Dolly Parton Parkway which is that
umbilical that extends from the interior
of the park and I've just marked out F
Ryan bells as cabin which stands in for
a whole series of other cabins like it
and extends outward to exit 407 and
connects to the freeway so I'm gonna
take you through a kind of quick tour
so the towns were there before actually
before the park but their history is
essentially the
with the establishment of the park in
1934 and it caused this kind of growth
spurt in all of those smaller towns to
which needed to grow in order to
anticipate the the tourist industry that
was about to arrive so we're gonna move
outward to exit 407 a little bit of the
irony here is that when you go there you
experience it exactly in Reverse so on
the one hand you experience it from exit
401 in but I'm gonna look at it as a
kind of history that leaks out of the
Great Smoky Mountains National Park and
towards exit 407 so I'm gonna start at
the Orchard Road loop with Ephraim bells
his cabin and so prior to the
establishment of the Smokies a huge
effort was needed to document and
catalog the existing communities that
were composed both Native American
communities and also rural homesteaders
that were dispersed through what is now
the park so the cartographic work
necessary to establish the park was
carried out by the US Geological Survey
and also the Tennessee Valley Authority
while the cataloguing of organic
specimens and anthropological specimens
was done by the historic American
building survey and the Civilian
Conservation Corps so that's what you
can see on the right and interesting one
of the interesting things is that they
documented in there in its ruined State
as a way and and sort of locked in that
historical narrative in that moment so
it's a kind of momentary slice that they
documented but the other thing is that
they weren't documenting everything they
were only documenting certain
architectural examples that they deemed
according to their own criteria as being
worthy of being preserved and if you
look at how the historic American
building survey documentation works
they're actually looking for unique
specimens so it's not the generic it's
it's actually the idiosyncratic in many
ways so what they encountered in this
landscape was a landscape that had been
heavily worked and instrumentalized so
local populations had cleared pastures
for livestock and to cultivate small
plots and at the same time logging
companies had a
bushed operations so there's a lot of
industrial scale mills heavy machinery
train tracks and also there are some
dams in the park so the aspiration for
this particular National Park in
contrast to others was that it was meant
to provide an eastern wilderness so that
one that would restore an ideology of
the wilderness and frontier to the
east of the country so there's a clear
historical narrative that the Park
Service wanted to reproduce in that but
this history was basically an image so
it was not intended to represent the
deeply variable reality that was
actually occurring but instead a kind of
coherent myth of American wilderness and
a reproduction of the pastoral aesthetic
that was a dominant in the early 1900s
so while the narrative reproduced within
the park was fraught with these
historical myths its methods of
production followed a heavily scientific
paradigm which went authority to the
narrative that they were constructing so
the park was categorically surveyed and
rationalized into digestible and code
into a digestible and coherent narrative
so rather than that kind of fraud and
habitation of nature the Park Service
composed this pastoral image of a
sanitized and picturesque existence so
the purpose of the park was not only to
provide an image of man's relationship
to nature but to to allow visitors to
experience it so if the goal is to
provide a wilderness for the east one
might think that they would privilege
footpaths and trail systems as the
primary form of mobility which they did
and there are those too but it was not
actually for real outdoorsman or real
explorers so instead it was designed to
provide a mass public with a secure
environment in which to act like
outdoorsmen not to be one so in other
words the park was meant to provide and
close encountered in nature but without
the risks of nature so instead of boat
it was an automotive logic that provided
the armature from for mobility in the
park so they they created these loops
and scenic roads that
designed to make homesteads and other
natural and anthropological scenes
accessible so they're more like scenes
than they were sites so they produced
these clearings and pull-off to provide
scenic views such as you see on the left
and overlooks that didn't previously
exist but that supplemented the
landscape with a sort of sublime sublime
quality so roads and parking lots
connected these short nature trails and
allowed people to experience nature on
foot but for short periods of time
before the they can then quickly move
along to the next the next site so the
essentially the park became a theme park
composed of a series of rides
however in theme parks as we tend to
think of them part of the the legibility
of technological genius is oftentimes
part of the allure but in the Smokies
technology is covert so it's not
expressed by machines but in the
scientific processes and information
technologies necessary for surveying
cartography as well as indexing and
cataloguing of anthropological and
organic specimens in other words the
industrial technologies and
informational capacities afforded the
Park Service the ability to organize and
execute the parks infrastructure at a
large scale without disrupting the
illusion of nature so compared to other
parks the Smokies is accessible within a
close proximity of a huge population in
fact and additionally it's the only Park
where they don't require an entry fee so
it's not only the most visited but also
the most connected park to the country
and Gatlinburg is the where we'll start
is the main entrance to the park from at
least from Tennessee and it's the
primary entrance for the part the bulk
of visitors to pass through Gatlinburg
so when the park was founded
Gatlinburg had to grow to supply hotels
and restaurants and other tourist
infrastructure so it essentially became
an extension of the park and the values
of the park began to leak out and to
Gatlinburg as a series of somatic and
aesthetic values of history nature and
culture within a similar
kind of pseudo-scientific paradigm so
like the manuals of the Park Service
they have their own version of that in
the architectural design guidelines that
proposes a quote unquote mountain
village aesthetic but it's actually an
aesthetic that's pieced from a lot of
different different architectural
examples that they found from around the
southeast so it's this kind of it's it's
it's a kind of mix of a fictional and
real aesthetic and it's so Gatlinburg is
not actually much about the natural
spectacle but more than through logical
one
so the historic the historical fiction
of human settlement in the park leaks
out into Gatlinburg and intersects with
tourism and materializes the
idiosyncrasies of abstract capital so
you get a kind of bucolic capitalism
that replicates distorted versions of
Efrain build his cabin and others much
like it and whereas in the Smokies
technology was embedded in covert like I
mentioned in Gatlinburg technology
begins to be expressed and these
mechanical artifacts that get you off
the ground so they have various chair
lifts and gondolas that take you to
viewpoints and they also have the
omnipresent Gatlinburg Space Needle that
creates a new type of viewpoint which is
the 360 degree view which is only made
possible by this one particular
architecture so in the park the subject
of mobility and experience is based on
being on the ground and in the landscape
but in Gatlinburg forms of mobility
actually try to get you off the ground
and essentially make the landscape the
subject of the view so now I'm going to
move into a pigeon forge so when we
arrive to Pigeon Forge what we see is
the kind of juxtaposition of the generic
American roadside city with motel of
motel chains and franchises and then
also the hyper capitalized spectacle of
media nature and culture and I'm just
going to pause to apologize for those
little
things that I couldn't get off which is
just another thing so the American
roadside City on the right is driven by
this kind of place lessness of highway
infrastructure and other physical
infrastructures of the automobile
while the city on the left is a kind of
amplified derivative of the spectacle
that's created within the Smokies but
one that's mostly ambivalent to the
specificities of its context these two
cities coexist simultaneously in Pigeon
Forge so as a result we find this series
of adjacencies that defy the kind of
Cartesian logic of context and causality
in other words I always ask myself like
how do all these unrelated experiences
and categories of things arrive in the
same place in this one spot specifically
here this kind of one spot in Pigeon
Forge so in this one site this larger
site you have the Titanic Museum you
have the Hatfields McCoy's dinner show
wonder works and also the Hard Rock Cafe
in Smoky Mountain Opry so they occupy
this kind of larger urbanism of not only
unrelated amongst themselves but also
basically unrelated to the things around
them anyway having little to do
obviously with the Smokies but that kind
of question was largely what led to a
lot of the thinking that I've been doing
anyway
so then we get into Sevierville and exit
407 which is basically the terminus of
that long section that that opposes
Ephraim builds his cabin and so on the
one hand Sevierville is a kind of
nationally franchised space and
primarily configured to the logistical
movements of goods and services but it's
also a kind of gateway another type of
gateway to the Smokies so on the one
hand it's another gateway and it's also
the first place that the Smokies arrives
to you in real space so you get to the
exit and the Smokies are already kind of
there but it's also an infrastructural
exchange and a place for exchange for
the nature consumer where they can get
equipped to kind of fully exploit the
wilderness experience that they're about
to have
so in here at exit 407 urbanism is
constructed by the logistical regimes
delivery and distribution networks while
also supplying the effective and
aesthetic experiences of nature so by
the time we get to exit 407 407
technology is back to being embedded
within the organization of information
and delivery networks but unlike in the
smokies here nature arrives through
consumer capital and reshapes us rather
than us reshaping nature so you can see
on the Left we have Bass Pro Shop which
takes on a kind of industrialized cabin
aesthetic you might call it it's
basically a shed and then on the right
as its parking lot which anticipates
much larger systems then then one might
think for Bass Pro Shop but it's also
because it's actually a storage space
you can see they're storing they're
storing boats and they're also storing
shipping containers so I'm going to
start to get into the techno scientific
petting zoo now but before I can
actually do that I'm gonna talk a bit
about databases and new media which
forms a lot of the kind of undercurrent
of what's going on in that in that
urbanism in that space but the techno
scientific petting zoo for me is
essentially a conceptual contract
construct and metaphor that I'll use to
connect the specificity of Dolly Parton
Parkway to its emergence as a virtual
place as much as a real one and exempt
exemplary anthropogenic urbanism in
which technology nature and culture
become inextricably intertwined so we
can think of Dolly Parton Parkway as a
series of databases one might say that
have essentially been materialized in
real and virtual spaces and vary in
various ways so I'll take a look at some
of these deeper structures and spatial
consequences of the non Cartesian logic
of new media and databases and how they
hybridize technology nature and culture
so first I want to define a bit for you
databases and
Media which which for me is the kind of
context that's another site for the
techno scientific petting zoo and then
I'll describe the animals in the petting
zoo and unpack some of their themes so
the first thing is on the left you have
the the card catalog at the Library of
Congress and that images from 1919 so
that's the kind of the modernist
database you can say the physical
tangible database and the way that that
database worked is that you had two
categories of knowledge needed to be
distinct and searchable through linear
rational logic so there had to be a
hierarchy of knowledge because obviously
if you wanted to get something three
layers deep you needed a way to navigate
through them so there had to be a kind
of linear logic on the other hand new
media which you see in this kind of
scrolling image is and this is a sort of
quintessential example which is a Google
image search so we probably are are all
fairly familiar with it so in new media
it's basically under written by a
database so what we experienced is not
the database like in the card catalog or
it's but what we experience is the kind
of interface to that and so instead of
so through these series of interfaces we
can search and recombine categories and
knowledge in different ways and because
it doesn't need to follow a linear logic
you can get multiple categories of
knowledge appearing simultaneously to
produce new adjacencies and additionally
because adjacencies don't have to be
local and causal like they do in the in
the search ability of the card catalog
new paradigmatic structures can be
foregrounded and by paradigmatic I mean
those kind of latent abstract categories
of knowledge that are shared by things
that become foregrounded in their
co-presence so for example in this
particular search I just searched the
Smokies
but what we get is not only the
mountains but also building's interiors
months of the year Christmas Appalachian
mountain leconte etc so within that we
get both specific
contexts as well as general ones and we
also get conditions of time culture
nature etc another another example is
that databases and new media allow for
new forms of arrival that did not follow
the linear progressions of real space so
for example the Smokies in this case
arrived to me in the lower left corner
while I was listening to my KEXP top 500
songs of all time so while you're kind
of doing something you're at home you're
doing something else like listening to
music and then all of a sudden Google ad
services approaches you with something
like that and presumably it's because I
was you know searching for Pigeon Forge
a lot you know I don't even like the
place that much no I love it so now I'm
gonna go through some examples where
where meaning is constructed within this
non Cartesian logic of databases and
media and then it becomes materialized
in real space and specifically along
Dolly Parton Parkway so a common theme
within these next ones that I'm about to
show you is that they that they follow
examples that are formed within the
logic of events and media itself as an
event so if you're like me or like what
was a Jay Simpson really have to do with
Pigeon Forge which is an interesting
question it was one of the largest media
events of all time and this was his this
is all rep this is all media from his
high speed chase in 1994 and that that
now infamous white Bronco and it was he
he was basically chased by the police
for two hours and seventy five miles
through the freeways of Los Angeles and
it was completely sensationalized by OJ
Simpson's Fame but also because the
images of the of the chase were
proliferated across all media platforms
not only in Los Angeles but nationally
as well and so one of the contributions
to this sensationalism is part in part
because Los Angeles is police
by the air so there were tons of police
helicopters on that day that we're all
filming this as there were also media
outlets with their own helicopters
filming so you got this kind of
multivalent multifaceted view of this
chase for a whole two hours so you get
this kind of this massive database of
this event and it's not only within a
kind of logic of filming and media but
it's also within then a kind of category
of events that are made possible by the
city by the freeway system and its
infrastructure because as you can see
there's a lot of nice gray background
for this white Bronco so there's a kind
of discourse about the city that's also
about policing from the air and etc etc
so this Bronco is here in Pigeon Forge
so I've seen it it exists and it's
completely amazing it's one of my
favorite things about East Tennessee so
it's here and it's maybe the most
mediatized vehicle of all time and it's
also the centerpiece of alcatraz crime
museum which originally was in
washington DC but was relocated in
Pigeon Forge about two years ago I think
and when the CIO's was the CEO was asked
why Pigeon Forge he said well you know
it's America's favorite subject and it's
near the Smokies right so Alcatraz is
crime Museum which is the building on
the top it's the building all the way to
the left in that top image which is also
adjacent to stage West which is a kind
of cowboy outfitter and also the comedy
barn it's modeled after Alcatraz in San
Francisco Bay so just like this I just
put that image on the lower left because
that's a mark that's Mark's mouth and
he's doing a police training simulation
at the Museum so then we have the the
Hatfields and McCoy feud which was a
feud between two rural moonshining
families along the Kentucky and West
Virginia border and it lasted from 8
1863 to 1891 and so this is a real I mean
this is a historical event but it's also
one that's been replicated and as a
Hollywood drama as a as a reality TV
series you see in the upper right and
then it's also been kind of materialized
and realized as a dinner theater in
Pigeon Forge so it not only materializes
the database as history but also a
history of media that collapses both
these kind of real and fictional
situations onto one another and it's
next to the Titanic and it has a farm in
front of it you know so this this is a
real-time weather weather globe and so
it's a representation that's made
possible by active weather databases
that are happening in real-time and also
new forms of media interfaces so it
makes the omnipresence of weather
visible while also forward rounding it
as a global dynamic an unstable
condition and specifically one in which
storms are always information so this
database exists within a database of
weather events and other disasters so
then we get WonderWorks
which is an upside-down building and
Pigeon Forge which is a this they call
it a kind of science learning experience
but it's it's meant to represent or be
like a building that's been upended by a
hurricane and lands upside down in
Pigeon Forge but to me that's actually
not the most interesting thing about it
that's just the kind of funny thing
about it that we can you know laugh and
enjoy about but its owner the owner of
it is John Morgan of Morgan and Morgan
personal injury attorneys which operates
a whole series of law offices around the
southeast so he operates within the lot
within the politics of the general
accident of the weather as well as the
everyday accident and the media he's a
he is also an advocate for medical
marijuana
he's a he's I think he's trying to push
for a I think he's trying to run for
Congress or something he has this really
amazing Twitter feed so anyway if you
look at all these examples through a
kind of linear Cartesian logic and a
sort of logic of context as being only
in real space these places seem to be
completely uncontestable and incoherent
and foreign and they they don't make
sense as urban spaces or situations but
if you look at them through the paradigm
of databases and new media you start to
see that their context is as much about
the virtual space of databases and new
media as it is about Dolly Parton
Parkway itself so I just like to use
this quote to kind of capture and
illustrate a lot of these points so I'm
gonna read not the whole thing through
but but a chunk of it so it's this quote
from by jorge luis borges and it's in
the this story called the integral the
local language of john wilkins which is
actually considered a nonfiction story
but this particular quote is a fiction
that he's inserted into that nonfiction
but anyway so what he's what he writes
is that these ambiguities redundancies
and deficiencies recall those attributed
by dr. franz kuhn to a certain chinese
encyclopedia called the heavenly
emporium of benevolent knowledge so in
its distant pages it is written that
animals are divided into a those that
belong to the emperor be embalmed ones
see those that are trained then he goes
on i'm gonna jump to k those drawn with
a very fine camels hairbrush l etc em
those that have just broken the flower
pots and those that adult distance
resemble flies so for me this quote
emphasizes one the abstract regime of
categories of knowledge but it also
destabilizes how meaning is constructed
and in doing so implicit adjacencies and
narrative structures are foregrounded so
this is not a definitive
scientific encyclopedia as we might
realize but it's a cultural one that
produces certain exposures and
inclusions that collapse both real and
imagined animals and situations without
mutual exclusion so things can be
captured within other categories of
things that cohabit this list so now I'm
gonna start to talk about the pets the
pets that we can pet in the petting zoo
so we have the electric chickens the
paradigmatic sheep the virtual bear
emotional support peacock and then the
transgenic cow okay I don't know if this
sound there was some sound there we'll
have to see how that goes
so anyway if you follow the news really
really closely this will have you will
have seen this on your radar but the
first specimen the the electric chicken
is grounded in this narrative oh and by
the way I'll mention that each each
animal comes with a kind of anecdote or
narrative and then I'm gonna connect it
to a Dolly Parton Parkway in some way so
this is the kind of narrative of the
electorate chicken which is that
recently all 900 of the KFC stores in in
England had to be shut down because they
had switched their their logistical
supply company to DHL and something
happened in the supply chain and DHL
couldn't provide all the fresh chicken
that was necessary to run all 900 stores
so they had to shut down and it would it
became such a kind of cultural event
apparently that people were contacting
their local police stations to say that
the KFC was shut down and so the police
had to issue a statement on various
media outlets and through Twitter to say
that if
your local eatery doesn't have the food
you want it's really not our problem so
what we learn is not only that chicken
is chicken and it's weird but that
chicken is a logistical problem and also
a media artifact in addition to being a
natural and cultural one so chickens as
we think of them today diverge from the
pre anthropogenic relatives back in
about 1948 when the Great America great
Atlantic and Pacific tea company which
was the largest supermarket chain at the
time partnered with the USDA to hold the
chicken of tomorrow competition so the
goal was to develop a quote-unquote
superior meat type chicken with broader
breasts bigger drumsticks plumper thighs
and above all more white meat that would
grow faster and provide a more
dependable protein and the backdrop to
this competition is World War two when
the chicken was the only non rationed
protein so the winner was broad acres a
small family farm that was eventually
bought out by Nelson Rockefeller and so
he took the breed global essentially and
as of 2013 over half the chickens raised
in China have a genetic link to the
Arbor Acres chicken so not only are the
chickens broken down into their
constituent parts but as a result of
agricultural technology data-driven
production methods and efficiencies they
increase radically in size while needing
less space to be raised they also gain
new anatomical features like the bell
the ball the bone and the boot which are
the four shapes of the MacDonalds
McNugget so the change in their Anatomy
is not only a result of scientific and
technological advances but also a
consequence of consumer culture and the
magnitude of our appetite meaning our
desire to consume in new ways and at
speed so the chicken is not just a
natural thing but an artefact that
indexes the evolutionary entanglements
of nature techno technology and culture
on further late capitalism
fashion the chicken into a media actor
with collective intelligence and how
effective experience so electric
chickens are from Dolly Parton's
Stampede which is a family friendly
dinner show spectacle and competition
that's very loosely based on the civil
war with the Smokies as a backdrop so
dinner is a quintessential American meal
and essentially a farm in miniature that
consists of corn potatoes cream of
vegetable soup pork bottomless coke of
course and and also of course a whole
chicken a Cornish hen which is just a
chicken that hasn't been raised as long
as the other chickens so the arena has a
maximum capacity this is the interior
there's Smoky Mountains proscenium
there's actually a digital screen or an
LED screen behind that that also
projects further into the virtual space
of the Smokies but the this the arena
has a maximum capacity of 1,100 people
so with five shows running a day on the
weekends and three a day on the week the
weekdays that means that on the weekend
up to 5500 chickens are being consumed a
day which is 11,000 in a weekend and
that's just that's just at this one
place right so as it turns out the US
alone produces nine billion meat type
chickens a year and that's just the u.s.
so that the kind of scalar magnitude of
that is pretty astounding and the way
that that starts to kind of converge in
and habit the space of
yeah so while you're tearing into this
chicken other other chickens being
played out in front of you so an actor
in a chicken costume who lays a giant
egg and a chicken chase we're children
from the audience run after live
chickens and at the same time the kind
of logistical space and the scale of the
chicken is working on you as well in the
background so this convergence of scale
space media and atmosphere is what
Gregory Omer
terms electricity so what he says is
that what literacy is to the analytical
mind electricity is to the affective
body a prosthesis that enhances and
augments a natural organic human
potential alphabetic writing is an
artificial memory that supports long
complex chains of reasoning impossible
to sustain within the organic mind and
digital imaging similarly supports long
complexes of mood atmospheres beyond
organic capacity electorate logic
proposes to design these atmospheres
into effective group intelligence oops
so the moment around the electorate
chicken ripples out from the interior of
the arena to the entry sequence even
which Prime's the body and collective
eyes it both physically and digitally
producing this this collective mood
atmosphere that Omer talks about so once
you pass through the ticketing booth you
immediately turn a corner which leads
you to a series of photo booths with
green screens and western themed props
where your image is photographically
digitized and archived in a database you
then enter the saloon which is the image
on the top which is essentially a
holding pen whose purpose is to collect
all of the spectators to then enter the
arena and so shows are there about an
hour and 45 minutes long and shows our
space two and a half hours apart so the
organization of the architecture not
only serves to prime you for the
experience but also to time your
movements precisely from the parking lot
into the space through the show and meal
and back out again exactly so that the
process can begin again immediately so
this is the electric chicken here
so it's the convergence of experiences
on to an artifact that indexes the deep
evolutionary entanglements of nature
technology and culture so this is just
the kind of the deep history the deep
timeline that builds up through the
through the chicken and accumulates all
of these discourses Hello Dolly was that
loud enough okay so this is Dolly the
sheep
so Dolly the sheep is uh she's that
she's a clone sheep that was cloned in
1997 and her significance is as the
first adult mammal to be cloned and so
for me this is a way to think about the
genome as a database and bioinformatics
as a paradigm for looking at culture so
clones might often be talked about as
replicas but they actually have multiple
authors that I'll just use I'll turn
them mothers and fathers
so Dolly the sheep actually has three
mothers so there was the the sheep that
donated the knew the nucleus there's the
sheep that donated the mammary cells and
then there's a sheep that brought dolly
the cloned to term and I also like that
there's a direct current pulse so
electricity is kind of inseminating this
this situation so those are her mothers
and then her father's for this purposes
of this I'll just say that they're
scientists all the institutions and all
the technologies that made Dolly the
sheep possible so in other words she's
not just a clone but a kind of hybrid of
Technology nature and culture she's also
a media event as much as she is an
animal and part of that part of her
situation is that she's political and
she she also brings up ethical
situations about media both in terms of
a kind of technology and also in terms
of a cultural situation so as you as you
as I mentioned a couple times there's
the Titanic Museum and at Pigeon
Forge and it's not just a replica of the
ship
but it's also a media artifact and one
instance of a database that's been
materialized in real space so the museum
reconstructs a composite of historical
and media events and by that I mean the
movie all of the documentaries on the
History Channel and Discovery Channel
etc etcetera all the ways that the
Titanic has been reconstructed in
various forms of media but at the same
time the museum recalls the implicit and
paradigmatic rhetoric of technological
failure in the face of natural phenomena
which is hitting the iceberg but this is
one of various in real space so there
were the two that were made for the
Hollywood movie and then there's another
Titanic Museum in Branson Missouri and
there's currently one being built in
China so this the one that's being built
in China is as budgeted to cost 105
million pounds which is somewhere in the
in the field of 104 or 140 million
dollars what's interesting about this
ship is that it's gonna be a full-size
replica of one to one and it's not just
going to be a general representation of
replicas it's meant to they're going to
reconstruct everything down to the last
detail
which includes the hardware the handles
and even the the engine so oh and I
should also include that they're even
going to reconstruct the meals that were
constructed on the ship their limit
apparently is that they wouldn't
reproduce the iceberg experience because
that would be too traumatic for people
but within the the kind of one of the
reasons that they gave for doing this
the person or the group of people who
are constructing it is that they wanted
to put something in this place that had
cultural impact and I'm going to talk
about the kind of double meaning of that
of that impact in a minute but something
to note is that this ship is not a
seafaring ship despite reconstructing
the engine and all of the hardware it's
actually going to be located on a river
in a rural part of Sichuan province
in China and it's it's just gonna be
moved from here over a bit and it's
gonna sit in the river and it's gonna be
parked there and it's gonna be a hotel a
themed hotel but something to note is
that when it gets put in that river and
never moves it's going to displace so
much water that a village down river is
going to be flooded so when we talk
about cultural impact it means that the
cultural impact of the Titanic as the
kind of media artifact in both virtual
and real space is also quite literal in
the sense that it changes human and
habitation settlement and it also
changes the environment this of course
is a kind of huge I mean this is a big
ethical crisis probably for lots of us
but I want to contrast I think it
embodies that are kind of thinking about
disaster and in in pretty impactful ways
and what it means to be impactful and so
I want to contrast it to another thing
that we would probably think of as it's
quite beautiful and a lot maybe some of
us know about it and enjoy it but the
example on the left is Dan Walter dam
ideas Lightning field which is a series
of 20-foot stainless steel rods that are
rated a 1 mile by 1 kilometer grid in
the New Mexican desert
so these rods delimit this kind of
modernist space and measurement within
the desert and they're lightning rods
that both elicit and index lightning and
in doing so the Lightning is always
present it's always there but in in its
implied state and within embodied within
the rods but maybe more importantly than
implying the Lightning itself the rods
implied the lightning strike and its
violence so they don't resist they're
disarmed lightning in any way as a
natural phenomenon instead by
instantiating the lightning both
literally and sexually the Lightning
field makes it inevitable and disarms it
as even an accident
so now I'm gonna talk about dolly which
last time I did this it took 20 minutes
but I'm gonna try and do it in five or
so
so anyway dolly Dolly the sheep so the
paradigmatic dolly and the real dolly is
named after Dolly Parton and so as I
mentioned her selves the the cloned
sheep are come from the mammary cells
and so the scientists who ian wilmuth
who is the one was the lead scientist on
the project that cloned Dolly the sheep
and then interview someone asked them so
why did you why did you name Dolly the
sheep
after Dolly Parton and he said whoa you
know we took the cells from memory cells
and you know what better what more
impressive memory cells are there in the
world and that's not like he says this
on TV and you know anyway so
Dolly Parton herself for me is a
distribution of real and virtual
identities that that's constructed
within the logic of media so she's
essentially a media meme made flesh and
an identity that has himself replicated
and mutated in response to selective
pressures so not only has their identity
been distributed but has become
collectivized within both normative and
non normative identities so for me this
points to a moment of subversion and
trends transgression that Dolly Parton
and the paradigmatic dolly brings forth
that her identity genome as we might
think of it as fragments of information
and code fed through virtual networks
converge multiple sometimes incompatible
authors partners and agents so as a
media artifact with impacts in virtual
and real space she destabilizes the
rhetoric of normative identity and it's
discourse so the paradigmatic sheep is
not the original Dolly but the
proliferation and distribution of her
abstract identity which cultivates
cultural collectives affinities and
adjacencies of other nests within a new
media paradigm what would you do if you
saw a black bear walking down the street
well in Gatlinburg Tennessee folks
chased the bear
to take pictures in an understatement a
wildlife officer said they shouldn't do
that the bear seemed more nervous than
the humans but somehow it knew to use
the crosswalk and went back into the
woods leaving a question of which
species is smarter been better off just
taking the trash and dumped it on the
ground so the virtual bears the database
of bear sightings and the particular
bear that enter Gatlinburg but also how
the notion of the wild intersects with
urbanism so it's not the virtual bear is
not the real wild but the database of
wilderness and its cultural contours
that is as it is reconstituted and in
real space those artifacts and interiors
so example is here for me our Smokey
Mountains mountain knife works which is
the largest knife showcase as well as
the Bass Pro Shop and both of them are
at or around exit 407 and this is where
one gets equipped to go out into nature
so here the wilderness is not only
simulated in miniature and brought into
the interior but is expressed in the
cultural if aesthetics of fashion and
preformed identity so in the Bass Pro
Shop which you see here artifacts and
spaces simulate the myth of the
wilderness at a grander scale while
accumulating cultural aesthetics of
high-tech gear survivalism hunting etc
so in both of these cases the virtual
bear turns the wilderness into arable
and produces a series of interiors and
aesthetic experiences that you can then
take with you so importantly you don't
have to choose one relationship with the
wilderness you can actually inhabit many
relationships and so you can choose from
identities that are constructed within
the database that are not only
affiliated with other identities but
connected to objects material cultures
and their landscapes so the objects you
choose to associate live with live
within a cultural ecology of media
identity and implied landscapes so the
object anticipates how you want to get
with
so if you want to get tactical with it
survive in it or even Whittle with
from it you can so the immediacy
and recombinant access to the ecology of
this object and this image culture is
made possible by the logic of databases
as new media so the virtual bear is not
only the myth of wilderness as it
intersects with urbanism but the entire
ecology the virtual bear both produces
and navigates
so an emotional support animal is a
companion it's a companion animal and
they're commonly brought on two flights
to ease anxieties of their human
companions and so it has a lot to do
with air travel in this case and this is
a situation where a woman tried to bring
an emotional support peacock on to the
plane and was denied it was too exotic
of the species I suppose so not only
here is there a coupling of human and
nature in the context of modern
technology which is the airplane and air
travel and not to mention also confining
comfort in the face of airline disasters
but as an instance in which this
coupling is happening in more exotic and
strange ways so for me this is a way to
look at a couple exotic ways in which
Dolly Parton Parkway provides with
what's often called the recurrence of
reassurance in the face of risk and
serves as an emotional support urbanism
so first in the context of the emotional
support peacock is not only the need for
comfort in the face of risks of modern
technology and urbanism
but also the need for new assurances in
the face of risky products and
situations so this is all the smokey
moonshine here on the left and then on
the right is what's it called sugar
Mountain moonshine or something like
that they're both in they both have
spaces real spaces in Gatlinburg so old
smokey moonshine which you see on the
Left introduces a range of both familiar
and exotic flavors to ease the consumers
anxiety about either the harsh taste of
real moonshine or its origins as an
illicit substance so rather than a
select few bold taker
with the introduction of supplementary
flavours and extra sweetening moonshine
now has a mass appeal that normalizes it
and locates it in the same space as
other equally tame drinks and by that I
mean all real space the consumption of a
liquid in real space but also on the
left you can see within the database
it's just one of another drinks that
coexist with wine with all the wines and
all the other drinks that to us seem
quite normal and usual so they not only
make the moonshine palatable but they
create new cultural situations in which
it can be consumed so in disarming the
riskiness of moonshine with flavours its
history as an extra legal concealed
activity is also disarmed
so flavors create an abstract drink that
becomes public and around which new
collectives and spatial practices are
formed so these new cultural rays and
collective experiences are other virtual
additives to the moonshine that coupled
with other objects and spaces such as
the rocking chair and the urban plaza as
it is seen in old smokey moonshine
holler and I have to thank Lindsey
Lindsey Clarke because she she a lot of
these conversations happened with her in
the context of what was the flavor
pumpkin spice pumpkin spice moonshine I
could only find Tennessee orange so
relative of old smokey moonshine but
also an emotional support peacock in its
own right is NASCAR speed Park in
Sevierville so here you can choose from
a series of miniaturized NASCAR tracks
to go kart on but of course it's
controlled delimited space doesn't have
any real risk of the spectacle of the
fiery crash instead it has the illusion
and allure of risk that's derived from
the micro pleasure of feeling the same
curve as your favorite NASCAR track so
unsurprisingly the micro
pleasure of speed is surrounded by the
comfort and emotional support of
franchise space and the potential to
engage was familiar familiar brands
that one doesn't have sound just case
you're wondering so this last one the
transgenic cow is gonna be a bit a bit
different than the other four so the
other four I've I've thought about in
various ways and thought through quite a
bit but the actual the last one is not
so much about a kind of specific example
but instead it's a way it's it's looking
at a ways of analysing and representing
territory so that's what I'm gonna share
as the kind of conclusion so the
transgenic cow is a line of thinking
that's been unfolding for me and it's
still a bit speculative but it begins to
see Dolly Parton Parkway through methods
and techniques I've been experimenting
with recently and that are gonna show up
in the exhibition on April 23rd and
these are a lot of this the actual work
is behind what I'm going to show you so
I'm looking at more than the actual
methods and the technologies that are at
play so the transgenic cow the actual
kind of narrative is that it's a real
thing as well and so it's it's these
cows that have been their DNA has been
altered so that to be able to accept
human human DNA so they're proper
chimeras and so what the medical and
agricultural industry has been pairing
up to do is group grow human proteins in
cows and then they extract it via the
milk and then they use the human
proteins for nutritional and therapeutic
purposes so the transgenic cow is it's a
bioinformatics body and it's a body in
which data has been made flesh
so as data can be cut and pasted
recombined or substituted to produce new
data and new flesh so it is not
concerned for the delimitation of
species but rather how to diversify and
this is actually that it's a kind of
visualization of that process so this is
a the genome of various cows so first I
wanted I'm gonna discuss two
cartographic technologies that are
becoming
more common and I've been playing around
a bit with these and and trying to think
about them so the first is
photogrammetry which which you see here
and the second is lidar so I'll talk
about photogrammetry first and then and
then go into lidar so photogrammetry is
some of you might be familiar with this
actually it's a way of producing
three-dimensional models using digital
photography so you might have you might
know it as clone on your on your cell
phone or what is it 1 2 3 D catch or
capture there's another Autodesk product
that that uses your cell phone to do
this and what I'm doing the same thing
but this is a kind of proprietary or
this is another kind of professional
software that's that's designed to be
used for drone photography and the
origin of this whole for array was
actually my need to get a I wanted to
get a a model of the entirety of a
pigeon or of Dolly Parton Parkway but
the problem is that Google Earth you can
in Google Earth you can get the
topography but you can't get all of the
kind of three-dimensional buildings and
they're those three-dimensional
buildings so that's proprietary data and
it's derived from a series of algorithms
that they use to combine to combine
aerial photography and orthographic
photography and also street views and
stitch them together essentially
following a similar photogrammetric prep
practice
so essentially you know in
photogrammetry you'd photograph around
an object and see all of its viewpoints
and then the software algorithms will
read will take the light readings from
from those images and will stitch the
multiple images together and then use
distance as a function of light to to
compose the 3d model so I'm essentially
hacking Google Earth in the sense that
I'm pretending like I'm a drone inside
Google Earth and moving around space or
I'm not doing it my research assistants
are
so thanks for that and so this is the
Titanic and you get you get a pretty a
pretty solid solid picture I think it's
it's limited by what Google Earth is
anyway which is a series of distortions
and interferences so something that's
important to me is that it's all non
hierarchical data so even though on the
image in the right you actually see
color which has meaning to you as
certain materials it's actually just the
value that's in excess of XY and Z so
rather than meaning the image of
territory that you see on the left is
based on resolutions and interferences
so how the data image produces a reading
or miss reading of space and how it can
become differentiated within the
interface or through its intersections
with other with other data so this is a
case where actually you can align
different chunks and so you see two
chunks where the where the program
messed up and flipping them relative to
one another but also I'm interested in
not in how well one can reproduce an
image so I'm actually interested in
these interference patterns between how
we see an experience space and how
technology sees an experience see space
so what registers and what doesn't
register so more often than not we think
of these technologies like Google Earth
as stable cohesive models because of
their high resolution or the appearance
of high resolution but they're actually
quite unstable variable and fragmented
so this is a little foray I did in in
this area which you might now be
familiar with you have the Titanic on
the Left hatfields and mccoys down there
towards the right side of the image and
wonder works even further so I I tried
the kind of ed rachet every building on
the Sunset Strip where you just
photograph every building so I walked
the street which nobody of course ever
does I don't know why they have a
sidewalk but I photographed frontally at
equal increments
which was a project that was bound to
fail because none of these buildings are
frontal in in the sense they're only
frontal relative to the speed of the car
and relative to the windshield so that
distortion was already interesting to me
and then I fed those images into the
photogrammetry software which didn't
know what to do with it and spit out
somehow hatfields and mccoys was really
I mean it got it right and then also it
really got the iceberg but not the ship
so now this is a kind of lidar image
here so what lidar is is essentially
it's essentially a piece of technology
that shoots a beam of light down to the
ground and it bounces back and then it
measures the the time as a function of
distance relative to the speed of light
and so it essentially a plane will just
fly over a territory and these beams of
light will be pulsing down and it will
map the surface and produce a model so
on the right you see the model of North
America so pretty much everything has
been mapped to some degree but there's
different resolutions within that and so
what's interesting about what you're
seeing here is that it's not it's not
really an abstraction of real space it's
an abstraction of the data so behind
this image is actually a model it's
actually a point cloud but that point
cloud is so massive that we have to
produce kind of visualizations that
allow us to piece it together and on the
upper left is a series of those tiles
and again those tiles are not
abstractions of the data
there's simply tiles that represent a
key or an index so that you can find the
actual information you need and there's
such a kind of massive part of the
that's a one way to deal with the kind
of massive quantity of data that this
has so this is actually a three
dimensional point cloud or a
representation of that three dimensional
point cloud and it's at one to one we
could call it one to one or we could
call it scaleless potentially
but this is kind of modern cartography
which relies on the eye and the lens the
mechanical lens and the sensibility of
light and by that I mean it's the kind
of physical and mechanical eye that
perceives light as a series of photons
so here we have the map a kind of
projection map of the United States
which is an abstraction of space so when
you look at a map what you're seeing is
a kind of abstraction of territory
that's been scaled and which refers to a
real space but with lidar
territorial territory is actually
materialized as a function of speed of
light so that that kind of time
differential differential between light
being sent out and returning so the map
on the right is the resolutions of lidar
so where you see the kind of middle gray
and that dark gray the dark gray is the
highest resolution so you can see
territory at a 1 meter by 1 meter square
and then the the lighter or the middle
gray is I can't remember exactly I think
it's 3 meters by 3 meters and then
wherever there's no kind of funny thing
where you just see the kind of grid in
the background that's all at a lower
resolution and so part of this so each
of these part of the reason why the the
boundaries don't seem to follow any
geological boundaries or state
boundaries is that the airplane doesn't
really care about what those boundaries
are it doesn't really care about
Geographic limits or other boundaries
it's able to pass over all of those so
in in place of those sorts of
delimitations and boundaries that's a
function of the kind of on the ground
Cartesian space it's actually a series
of partnerships between local
organizations and state organizations
that are applying for grants through the
US Geological Survey and more often than
not these are actually related to to
agricultural concerns so the the primary
role of lidar or the primary application
currently is for precision farming which
you see
on the left which is this kind of super
high-resolution mapping of field so that
so that farmers can get really really
targeted about how they're responding to
the conditions on the ground so it's
it's generally about they're generally
kind of about precision farming about
resource management and then does
generally its disaster management as
well so a lot of the mapping follows
rivers and floodplains that's that seems
to be the primary concern
so lidar rather than a technology that's
situated by abstract geometry topography
and physical boundaries as well as
projected space it's situated within
regimes of phenomena and the spatial
governance of economic production
resource management and disaster
mitigation so the images here represent
an emergent geopolitical body operating
at the Nexus of Technology in nature and
culture
so this is a this is an animation that
shows the kind of composite overlay of
first the first the projected grid 1983
grid which is the the projection that's
used by paper maps and then the lidar
grid that like I said is are these cells
of of data and then the the kind of the
actual data is starting to appear and it
was kind of flicker and then it's about
to show a bit of the different
resolutions that come about and it's now
showing the cell that Pigeon Forge
Gatlinburg Smoky Mountains or one of
them
so this is the high thing this is the
high resolution
that maybe that's the end
we did an awesome job with that and
then this is another another kind of
framing I have for this kind of new
territory this new type of
infrastructure so this is a clip from a
website called surfacing and it's
representing the heart infrastructure of
data at the speed of light so this is
all the this is a network of submarine
fiber-optic cables throughout the world
that deliver all of our digital
infrastructure that make all of our all
of our phones and networks possible and
so what I like about this is not only
the the kind of representation and the
the kind of materialization of that hard
infrastructure that we don't see and
that network that we don't see but it's
deploying this kind of logic of new
media the possibilities of web
interfaces to collapse both the kind of
large infrastructure the large physical
infrastructure to an infrastructure and
discourse of ideas but also situations
and experiences on the ground so like
here you'll see that that it's it's just
picking up on different themes and
connecting those to other types of
networks and this is all made possible
and because of the speed of light so the
transgenic cow and new cartographic
technologies suggest a new paradigm for
reading and thinking about space so
generally when we look at this image we
see electric light emanating from cities
and it becomes a way of measuring and
visualizing human settlement but there
are actually two forms of light in this
image there's electric light as a
sensible phenomenon and then light as
speed so they're mutually constructed in
this image we see the Cartesian space of
urbanism formed by electric light but
what we don't see visibly but as equally
or maybe more present in the producing
urbanism is light as speed so the
nonlinear informational logics
logistical regimes databases and new
media that form a new context for
urbanism and within this urbanism
technology nature and culture are not
distinct categories
instead they become mutually captured
conditions that explicitly and
implicitly govern how we read and
inhabit space so thank you all very much
for hanging out and looking at this
stuff
a sure okay yes please
yeah all right anything yeah yeah
yeah I think that's I mean there's a
there's loops there's obviously a
politics to that question that is I mean
that's like a huge a huge conversation
something that we've had in in the in my
seminar in fact but so that's something
that well there's two things one is that
for me that's a kind of interesting
condition where the obviously light
doesn't differentiate between materials
it's just the kind of function of the
distance so you're right it's like kind
of it's a gap it's it's actually a gap
in our knowledge and for me so I don't
know what to say about your question
other than that is one of the main
questions right that's that's up for
debate and discussion but it certainly
it's certainly a void right meaning
that's that that's the thing about it
being the surface is that it doesn't
have actual it's not a solid it's a
surface and that that point that you're
making leads to a whole series of of
decisions by governments local national
all kinds of things and that is lidar is
the primary source I mean that's the
kind of future of mapping and so it's my
personal I don't have a kind of ethical
position around that other than that I
think that's the emergent discourse
that's emerging debate I think that it
implies
yeah
mm-hmm
so which you're saying have I but which
images are you referring to I see yeah
so that's another kind of so I think
that that's like a so the end user as a
kind of well one is that I think that
the end user as a kind of figured
figured subjectivity meaning like there
there is no singular end user which I
think is a kind of lighting narrative of
the of what I'm what I've been thinking
about is that it's actually multivalent
like we inhabit there can't be a
singular purpose or end user because
that were kind of constantly moving
between different different spatial and
habitations and identities but the other
thing is so there's this so I don't in
other words that's a hard a really
difficult question I would say have I
thought about it a lot but do I know
what to do with it maybe less so but one
way I kind of have framed that is to is
this idea that there's a that there's a
politics of having a promiscuous
identity and one way you can approach
that is that you are constantly like in
the you're constantly within the regime
that you're inhabiting so you go to you
can go to Pigeon Forge in various ways
right
I can go to Pigeon Forge as a kind of as
one of the people as one of the people
who's participating which is which I've
done and it's a lot of fun right but I
can also go is more like the kind of
Flenory the Flener subjectivity which is
essentially going as a kind of foreigner
and looking at it from the outside and I
think that that's those are two critical
positions like being within it and
participating it participating in it
from the outside and I've done both and
I
I think that we should do both and I
don't think that so that's the thing as
part of the the critical aspect of that
is that the space inherently like it
might anticipate or it might suggest one
of those forms but it's not it's not
necessarily beholden to it or we are not
beholden to it because of this notion of
the kind of multiple authorships of
identity so you can go in as a kind of
critical subject or a critical user you
can go and just enjoy the experience we
can do all this and it's great to do all
of them yeah yeah
yeah the second one now I think yet so
it's it's interesting because part of
part of the challenge is taking
something that's so highly unique and
idiosyncratic like Dolly Parton Parkway
and it seems like it's a one-off
experience which in a lot of ways it is
as a kind of real place but it's also a
global situation meaning that all of the
mechanisms that are at play and
operating operate in all cities in all
urban conditions it's just in other
cities they're often not as obvious or
as explicit so the kind of counter
example to Pigeon Forge is the kind of
smart city that shannon madden has
talked about when she came to lecture
the one that's all glass and kind of
modernist skyscrapers the exact same
logistical logics the exact same forms
of consumerism are at play it's just
that they're not they're not overt in
theme spaces and they're not overt as
kind of nature right that's the that's
the kind of overlay that's unique to
Dolly Parton Parkway so that part is
kind of specific but to me it's a way of
it's a kind of paradigm it's a way of
looking and reading at all potentially
all spaces so like I said in the
beginning I was actually interested in
the whole condition and so this reading
is a reading that in my head is actually
looking at not just a Dolly Parton
Parkway but also looking at the
Tennessee Valley Authority and it's also
a way of looking at Oak Ridge and Oak
Ridge National Labs and the themes might
be slightly different but the kind of
overall paradigm is is different I mean
they don't have like the kind of feral
capitalism as expressed overtly like
Dolly Parton Parkway does
yeah yeah I think it needs more I don't
think it's missing anything yeah it just
needs a way more of that you know that's
a so the way I framed that question in
studio last semester is not to look at a
series of deficiencies or gaps but
actually to say like what to take a kind
of seam another type of theme that's
maybe a counter discourse to capitalism
which is civic space right but not as a
kind of antidote because it already
exists like there's tons of civic space
all the same all of the same types of
institutions are in all of these cities
just like anywhere else but again
they're they're just kind of hidden by
the kind of spectacle that's there but
the question is not to me not like how
you can use that as an antidote but how
you start to stitch that into a fabric
and I don't mean that as just like real
space but also that kind of paradigmatic
space where you're trying to where it's
it's much more kind of sneaky right that
it that it could be stitched into a
situation like that by addressing some
of the same kind of larger abstract
categories of like everyday disasters
for example where the kind of accident
as a way to think about a civic space
and I'm just making that up so I don't
know what that looks like or what that
means exactly but but I think that's to
me that's that's a pretty interesting
prompt is when you when you say okay so
this
this is the same this is the thing and
again it happens everywhere and it has
the same mechanism so how do you use the
same mechanisms on something like the
Civic and what would that look like
the kind of speculative like but the
kind of speculative imaginative quality
to that thing
yeah
I think the themes would be different
but the same I think it like I sort of
mentioned before is that it's a global
situation as much as it is yeah yeah
yeah I mean I think it's a question of
what the thematics so I think it's a
question of what the thematics might be
but so another example an interesting
example that to me is actually like not
foreign or exotic to Pigeon Forge which
would be something I was just talking
about earlier with Mark in fact which is
a 101 Wilshire Avenue in Los Angeles
which is well not the tower so it's
actually for me the tower right which is
the condensation of all of the kind of
network infrastructure for the entire
western seaboard so that I mean that as
itself is a kind of condensation of
urbanism that's I mean it's the kind of
hard infrastructure but also I think I
mean I like I guess one way I could
respond to that to say well yeah I
wanted to that I want to do that project
to like want to go to Singapore and test
it out in a lot of ways like that would
be that would be a really interesting
project to do the other ways that is is
to look at it as as a series of which is
sort of what Manavich  talks
about and in terms of new media is that
there are just a series of
redistributions of data so whereas one
kind of one type of urbanism might be
might become expansive due to a whole
series of local contexts which are not
erased by data logics right they're
still present there just co-president
with other things while some things
might be distributed and become
extensive other things get condensed
even more so like you get an S the one
Wilshire as one type of that yeah okay
well then I'll stop there but another
one is like the SUVs and in China
right that are just the they become the
most densely populated places in the
world and they're they're basically
built in a few number of years out of
from like the ground up and so that's a
place where urbanism has condensed so
that Pigeon Forge can be expansive
thanks guys
