New book - SYDNEY WE NEED TO TALK!

I'm excited (and proud!) to announce the publication of a new book that I've been involved in pulling together.

It's called Sydney -- We Need to Talk!

It has been written by a group of folks at the University of Sydney -- geographers, plannings, political scientists, visual artists, staff and students -- who have been meeting every week to talk about our work on the politics of urbanisation. We're all either thinking about Sydney and/or thinking from Sydney. There are essays on decommodification, dispossession, democratisation, degrees, domains, dimensions, domesticity and digitalisation (we started riffing with d-words, and couldn't stop).

Each essay is co-authored, and while each essay features work on Sydney, it also travels somewhere else. We bring Sydney into dialogue into other cities where we're working, including Jakarta, London, Barcelona, Hong Kong, New York and beyond.

The book was designed by artist Wendy Murray, who has also responded to each essay with a series of illustrations.

You can find out more about the book and its making, and download a free copy of the book, at the website we've set up here.

The list of contributors is: Brittany Betteridge, Pratichi Chatterjee, Leah Emmanuel, Amy Fairall, Bradley Garrett, Mini Graff, Kurt Iveson, Rupert Legg, Sophia Maalsen, Marilu Melo, Wendy Murray, Madeleine Pill, Dallas Rogers, Jathan Sadowski, Alistair Sisson, Amanda Tattersall, Sophie Webber

Cities of Equals? Rethinking Urban Politics with Jacques Rancière (... and my buddy Mark Davidson)

For quite a while, I've been wanting to write a post about Jacques Rancière's work on politics and its potential usefulness for those of us interested in the relationship between cities and citizenship. Most of that material has subsequently ended up in stuff I've written elsewhere, so rather than write a long post here, I figured I could at least say a few brief things about why I've found his work so interesting, and what I've tried to do with it...

I first encountered Rancière's work while reading Kristin Ross's awesome book May '68 and its Afterlives. There, she used some of Rancière's work on politics and police in two ways. First, her analysis of the politics of  '68 is heavily influenced by the notion that these events involved a radical form of 'displacement' in which people refused to be reduced to the 'proper' activities associated with their identification as 'students', 'workers', 'farmers, etc. Second, she draws on Rancière to analyse the ways in which revisionist accounts of the events tended to 'police' them by insisting that they were part of an emergent consensus about the need to modernise French society, rather than events which introduced dissensus about the nature of French society. Mustafa Dikeç's book Badlands of the Republic also used Rancière to demonstrate the ways in which people from the banlieue were denied a political voice in French society.

So, for a little background on Rancière, I can highly recommend this piece from the Critical Theory blog: Who the fuck is Jacques Rancière? Rancière's particular approach to politics developed out of frustration with the 'laughable' distance he perceived between the events of May 1968 in Paris and the structural Marxism associated with Althusser (with whom Rancière worked on Reading Capital). This frustration initially sent him into the archives, looking for the ways in which working people had confronted their circumstances in nineteenth century France.

Two key ideas that emerged out of this work were his particular approach to equality and democratic politics, and the associated notion of politics as challenging the 'partition of the perceptible'. To explain briefly (and probably badly!), a key claim now associated with Rancière is the notion that in democratic politics, equality is not so much something that one strives towards (as in, "the world is unequal, so we need equality!"), but something that we enact in a given situation (as in, "we are equals, and society isn't recognising our equality, so we are going to make another world that does!"). By tracing the meaning and consequences of equality in a situation, democratic politics involves a confrontation with the 'partition of the perceptible' that polices the social. The 'partition of the perceptible' describes the situation in which only some things seem to be 'sayable' or 'doable' in any given society. Of course, this concept is not something original to Rancière! But I do kinda like the particular way he discusses this, and the challenge it poses for politics. His emphasis on politics as a process in which people manage to make "another time with that time, another space within that space" sits nicely with the ways in which I understand the challenging of making counter-public spaces and spheres.

Anyways ... I'm excited to say that the fruits of some of this reading, thinking, talking and research are making it into print. Mark Davidson and I have written two papers together, both of which are now available. And I've done a few more on my own. So, in an act of shameless self-promotion (but hey, it's my blog I guess...!), here's some brief info about the papers and what they are trying to achieve.

1. "Recovering the politics of the city: from the 'post-political city' to a 'method of equality' for critical urban theory", Progress in Human Geography (with Mark Davidson).

This piece was written Mark and I were getting deeper into some of Rancière's work, and finding it really exciting because we felt that it helped us chart a path between 'politics is everywhere' and 'politics is nowhere'. In this particular paper, we warn against the idea of the 'post-political city' ... not by saying that 'hey, everything's political, and there's politics everywhere!', but rather by focusing on  situated enactments of equality through processes of political subjectification as the basis of democratic politics. Rancière suggests his approach can be defined as a 'method of equality', one that seeks to draw out the connections between enactments of equality that take place in different historical and geographical contexts.

2. "Occupations, Mediations, Subjectifications: Fabricating Politics", Space and Polity (with Mark Davidson).

This one is part of a collection of papers on Rancière. We were really excited to be asked to contribute, and it was a great opportunity to apply (and extend) some of the thinking we'd done for our other paper to engage with the inspiring political mobilisations that have been going on in several cities over the past few years. The article draws on Rancière to examine the relationship between urban space and politics in these events ... both to help us make sense of the events, but also to build on Rancière's work to trace out the geographical dimensions of politics.

3. "Policing the City", in Urban Politics: Critical Approaches, edited by Mark Davidson and Deborah Martin.

This chapter riffs on the relationship between politics and police (a central relationship in Rancière's work), but unlike the two pieces above, this one is focused on the 'police' end of the spectrum. Thinking through the practice of graffiti (I can't help myself!), the chapter draws on Rancière's approach to policing to demonstrate the broad range of actors involved in efforts to put graffiti in its 'proper' place, from urban authorities like police and urban designers to youth workers and graffiti artists themselves. Rancière, Rudy Giuliani, Banksy and Robbo all make appearances. This one was fun to write too ... and hopefully illustrates the usefulness of Rancière's work in helping us to think through the practice of policing beyond the actions of the uniformed police.

4. "Cities within the City: Do-It-Yourself Urbanism and the Right to the City", International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 

This one came out of a presentation I gave ages ago at a conference on the right to the city organised by Lee Stickells and Zanny Begg. With all the excitement about the 'micro-spatial' interventions of DIY urbanists in hacking and reclaiming urban spaces, the paper sets out to ask about the kinds of 'right to the city' that are being enacted. Conceptually, the paper draws on both Rancière and Lefebvre to develop a framework for interrogating the politics of DIY practices. Empirically, I discuss both BUGAUP and the Public Ad Campaign as examples of DIY urbanism that enact a democratic right to the city premised on the equality of urban inhabitants. There's some hopeful speculation at the end about how various DIY practices might begin to add up to more than the sum of their parts, through a shared commitment to democratic urban politics.

5. "Building a City for 'The People': the politics of alliance building in the Sydney green ban movement", Antipode.

I've already mentioned on the blog that I have a piece included in a special issue of Antipode on Grammars of Urban Injustice. I kinda feel like I've had Rancière hovering over my shoulder while in the archives doing this project - as noted above, his 'method of equality' emerged from archival research. While the paper takes issue with some of Rancière's blind spots (especially on the question of political organisation), this paper is particularly influenced by his work in its content and its form. In particular, I was really keen to structure the paper around the voices of diverse green ban activists, who had their own analysis of the forms of politics they practiced.

As ever, if you'd like copies of any of these and can't get hold of them, drop me a line...

Unrequited Art: Documentary on Graffiti and Street Art in Sydney

The full-length version of Jake Lloyd Jones and and Merryn Calear's doco Unrequited Art, about graffiti and street art in Sydney, has just been made available on YouTube. It was shot a couple of years ago, and bits of it appeared on ABC Television a little while back ... but it's nice to see the final  full cut. Interviews with artists, graffiti removalists, Council staff, local politicians, even dodgy academics...

Review of Alice Arnold Film 'Electric Signs'

OK, so ... it's been a while between posts. I'm mostly blaming industrial action (which kept me too busy to actually write about politics for a while!) and holidays. And a little inertia. But it's time to get things rolling again.

First up, then, a quick link to something I've written elsewhere that might be of interest here -- it's a review of Alice Arnold's documentary film Electric Signs, which is coming out in the journal Antipode and (like all their book reviews) is available free online here.




It's a great film, which explores the ways in which new forms of screen-based signage are transforming the public domain in cities around the world. Given my on-going fascination with outdoor advertising and its impact on the possibilities of urban public address, I found the film really interesting.

And as I say in the review, one of my favourite scenes in the movie features New York artist Jason Eppink, who has found a beautiful way to hack the screen advertising on the New York subway ... check out a video about his pixelator project below.

Anti-Graffiti, Part 1: Aesthetics

[This is the first of what I hope will be a series of posts about anti-graffiti in cities. Part 1 here looks at aesthetics, part 2 will dig into the anti-graffiti industry...]

So, graffiti is "ugly", a "blight on the urban landscape", it makes places "dirty", it is just like a "broken window", right? These are typical of the terms used to justify the on-going wars on graffiti.

I guess regular readers of this blog will know my response to this -- for reasons I've got into elsewhere, I think these aesthetic critiques of graffiti are highly problematic. But I've been thinking lately about the fact that anti-graffiti efforts are not only based on a flawed aesthetic critique, but they have their own aesthetics. Here, I want to break down some of the different kinds of urban landscape that we can associate with the on-going wars on graffiti.

As we'll see, what is most interesting about many of the anti-graffiti interventions that I'm about to discuss is how closely they actually resemble graffiti, if considered from a purely visual standpoint...

The new urban swatchwork

Countless walls in countless cities now look like examples of some particularly large-scale paint preparation site ... it's as though someone is agonising over just the right shade of brown or beige to paint the city, and is obsessively testing out different shades all over town.

Urban swatchwork, Enmore (Sydney)

I've actually come to love this swatchwork, in a strange way. As with ghost graffiti (see below), the patches each speak to the hollowness of 'victory' in the battle over some wall or other. The cleansing of graffiti does not produce any aesthetic integrity or purity of its own, just a visible indicator of the desperation of authorities to assert their authority. They're not actually too fussed what the wall looks like, so long as it doesn't have graffiti. And like the swatches of an aspiring domestic decorator, they suggest to me a wall that is not yet finished, still awaiting a decision on its status.

Graffiti and the Arab Spring

There was a great article in the Guardian last weekend, reporting on a talk given by Charles Tripp about the role of graffiti and other forms of political art in the recent revolutions in the Arab world:

Perhaps the most powerful form of art in the Middle East is graffiti. For Prof Tripp, its potency lies in its "reclamation of public space" and he argued that as well as creating a sense of solidarity, graffiti can powerfully represent the public's hold over territories: "The infrastructure is not enormous – as long as the spray can holds out". While the Israeli West Bank wall has long been a target for street artists, the open space of Tahrir Square has demanded further inventiveness. Children became billboards for scrawled messages, as did carefully arranged plastic cups. According to Tripp, this effected a psychological change – the square became a place of "everyday public, rather than an everyday police state".

The rest of the article is worth checking out: you can find it here. You can catch some of the talk on video here:

He notes in this talk that these forms of politicised public art are not new to the 'Arab Spring', and traces some of the longer histories of these kinds of interventions in different parts of the Arab world before 2011.

Meanwhile, here's some nice video of an art installation in Tunisian city La Goulette that accompanies the Guardian article:

"The street finds its own uses for things": William Gibson, technology and the city

I've just been reading Distrust That Particular Flavor, a collection of non-fiction pieces by William Gibson that has been published recently by Putnam.

I do love me some William Gibson, and it was a real pleasure to come across this particular passage in a piece called "Rocket Radio" that was first published in 1989.

The Street finds its own uses for things - uses the manufacturers never imagined. The microcassette recorder, originally intended for on-the-jump executive dictation, becomes the revolutionary medium of magnitizdat, allowing the covert spread of suppressed political speeches in Poland and China. The beeper and the cellular telephone become tools in an increasingly competitive market in illicit drugs. Other technological artifacts unexpectedly become means of communication, either through opportunity or necessity. The aerosol can gives birth to the graffiti matrix. Soviet rockers press homemade flexi-disks out of used chest X rays.

The line "The street finds its own uses for things" is one of Gibson's most quoted phrases, and had first appeared in his book Burning Chrome. The idea infuses most of his work, and certainly informs the plotlines of his most recent trilogy of Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History. In that series of books, Gibson's various characters make all sorts of different and unintended uses of a whole variety of techno-gizmos that are all commonly available today -- mobile phones, laptop computers, RFID chips, iPods, GPS devices, and the like.

Gibson is a strong believer in the role of technology in shaping society, but as the essays in this book make very clear, his fiction is not crafted or intended as an exercise in techo-determinist futurology. For me, it's Gibson's insistence on the potentials of new technologies to be modified, hacked, twisted and contorted that is one of the things that makes his writing so thrilling. Indeed, my current research on location-aware mobile media and the city has been heavily inspired by his recent set of novels. I especially love the interaction in those books between state agencies (both overt and covert), crime networks, subcultures, artists, corporations and advertising agencies, each paying close attention to the others as they try to adapt their practices to new circumstances. I also love the persistence, combination and mutation of 'old' technologies in his stories. And Gibson's urban imagination is also really interesting. Places like Tokyo and Moscow are every bit as crucial to his vision as London and New York, which is certainly an inversion of the dominant urban imaginary of English-speaking urban studies.

As Gibson is the first to emphasise, the near-futures imagined in his various books have certainly been overtaken by unexpected events. In the first book of his current trilogy, one of the key plot-lines concerns the circulation of mysterious snippets of video via internet bulletin boards. As he points out in an essay in Distrust That Particular Flavor, he might have written this kinda differently if he'd anticipated something like YouTube. Likewise, in his his first novel Neuromancer, "there's something like the Internet, but called 'cyberspace', and a complete absence of cell phones"!

But these novels don't stand or fall by their predictions. They're still compelling reading for the insights they offer into the times in which they were written. As he puts it in one essay:

The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive postnuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely ... more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.

Please don't mistake this for one of those 'after us, the deluge' moments on my part. I've always found those appalling, and most particularly when uttered by aging futurists, who of all people should know better. This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else's past, every present someone else's future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now.

The best science fiction has always known that, but is was a sort of cultural secret. When I began to write fiction, at the very end of the Seventies, I was fortunate to have been taught, as an undergraduate, that imaginary futures are always, regardless of what the authors might think, about the day in which they're written. Orwell knew it, writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1948, and I knew it writing Neuromancer, my first novel, which was published in 1984.

Indeed, the title of the this collection comes from a passage in an essay which riffs on the relationship between science fiction, history and the future. He expresses a distrust for that flavor of science fiction which is all about the capital-F future, and which in order to get there must literally destroy the present and all its messy possibilities.

Likewise, I'm very much hoping to avoid the utopian 'crystalline city on the hill' which characterises so much contemporary talk on the so-called 'smart city', as well steering clear of the dystopian 'wasteland' envisioned by critics of these new technologies who consider them only ever as agents of the military and/or capital. I'm more interested in what kind of stuff is happening. Of course, some of this stuff will no doubt be good or bad, and I certainly want to offer some judgements here. But I'm less interested in judging the technologies, and way more interested in critically exploring their uses as they become caught up in various habits and projects that are taking shape in cities.

Contesting the war on graffiti: Zero Tolerance, Uprock and Outpost

OK, so this is my first post here for ages ... it's been a crazy few weeks! Hopefully I've now got some time to catch up on various things that have been going on around the place.

First up, graffiti stuff. Back in October and November, I ended up talking on graffiti and street art at three different events. These three events were really interesting examples of different approaches to trying to contest the escalating war on graffiti -- one was the launch of a book documenting a legal graffiti project trying to advocate on behalf of alternative policy approaches, one was a group small of graffiti writers at a hip hop summit trying to figure out collective strategies, and one was at a giant state-sponsored exhibition of graffiti and street art in Sydney which attracted over 50,000 visitors. So, here are some extended reflections on it all...

Zero Tolerance - The Blue Mountains Street Art Collaborative

The first event was the launch of Zero Tolerance, a book published by the Moutains Youth Service Team about the Blue Mountains Street Art Collaborative (BMSAC). BMSAC is a collective of Blue Mountains street artists that has sought to negotiate legal opportunities for large-scale graffiti and street art. The project was coordinated by Jarrod Wheatley, and it has had quite a bit of success. As the book shows, BMSAC has produced lots of terrific work, and in the process it has gained positive press in the local newspapers and won a Greater Western Sydney Community Services Award.

How to get more graffiti on trains...

Along with taking on the public sector unions, here in Sydney the NSW State Government is also planning to introduce yet another round of tougher penalties for graffiti offences, including the removal of driver's licenses for repeat offenders.

N4T4, May Lane

As I've argued elsewhere, anyone who knew anything about graffiti would probably not think that forcing more graffiti writers onto public transport is the best way to reduce graffiti!

Anyways, ABC Television screened a story on the issue tonite, featuring an edited version of a short film called 'Unrequited Art' made by Merryn Calear and Jake Lloyd Jones.

It features some great pics and interviews, and a bit of footage of some middle-aged academic trying to sound like he's down with the kids (... yes, that's me ... cringe!).

Various bits and pieces, May Lane

Here's hoping that Labor and the minor parties stick to their guns, and reject this legislation for the second time next week.

Augmented Reality Ad Takeover, NYC

I'm getting increasingly interested in the various possibilities afforded by new mobile media technologies for different forms of public address.

Here's an application of augmented reality that I can get behind!

A little over a week ago PublicAdCampaign and The Heavy Projects launched the AR I AD Takeover in Times Square, NY. The Augmented Reality Junaio channel used 5 separate ad campaigns to trigger their own replacement with the artwork of 5 of our favorite public space artists including, Ron English, John Fekner, PosterBoy, OX, and Dr. D.

Check out the short project video here...


Augmented Reality Advertising Takeover (AR | AD) from The Heavy Projects on Vimeo.

For more details, see the PublicAd Campaign website:

http://daily.publicadcampaign.com/

Keep Australia Colourful this Sunday...!

[this one's a bit Sydney-centric ... apologies to non-Sydney readers]

This coming Sunday is the second installment of Keep Australia Colourful, a pro-graffiti event that I'm involved in organising in Sydney. It's timed to coincide with Graffiti Action Day, an anti-graffiti event organised jointly by Keep Australia Beautiful and the NSW State Government. We painted some nice walls, a truck, and got some good media coverage for our efforts last year, so we figured it was worth trying this on again ... especially with the new NSW Government proposing to confiscate driver's licenses of those convicted of graffiti offences, and to introduce mandatory jail sentences for repeat offenders. (Yes, they actually think putting graffiti writers on the trains and buses is going to stop graffiti ... brilliant!!)  The futile and expensive war on graffiti shows no sign of letting up...

For a short version of my take on what we ought to be doing instead, you could look here -- a longer version of this was published as "War is over (if you want it): rethinking the graffiti problem" in Australian Planner, 2009, vol 46 (3) ... with all apologies to John Lennon for the title.

So, here's the announcement for this year's event ...

*****

On May 15, Keep Australia Beautiful is teaming up with the NSW State Government for their second 'Graffiti Action Day'. Their aim is to mobilise volunteers all over the state to paint over as much graffiti as they can.

On the same day, we urge you to join us and take a stand on behalf of Graffiti and Street Art as valuable forms of art and culture. The government wants to 'Keep Australia Beautiful' by painting our streets, lanes and public spaces various shades of beige - but we want to Keep Australia Colourful! Let's show people how great our cities could look if there were more places for artists to create pieces legally.

If you want to join us, here's what to do...

Graffiti/Street Artists: find a space, and make it look colouful on May 15.

Whatever you decide to paint, poster, stencil, knit, sticker ... be sure to include a reference to Keep Australia Colourful in your piece. Yes, people ... you can put aside your ego for one day and join the KAC crew, we know you can do it!! :-)  Of course, we are not encouraging you to do anything illegal! Then, upload your flicks on our website:http://www.keepaustraliacolourful.org/

If you can tell us where you are going to be painting beforehand, even better - we can plug your session on the website/facebook too. And if you want to be available for media comment on the day, send us your details, and we will add them to our press release.

Graffit/Street Art Lovers: write a letter to your local council, and/or to the NSW Attorney General Greg Smith (office@smith.minister.nsw.gov.au), telling them why you love graffiti and street art and why you want to see more of it.

PLEASE CIRCULATE THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!!

http://www.keepaustraliacolourful.org
http://www.facebook.com/keepaustraliacolourful


A community service announcement, brought to you by Kurt Iveson, Cameron McAuliffe, Spice, Pudl, Mini Graff, Mistery, Roach, Numskull, Saynt

 

Real Estate: Mini Graff and Jason Wing

I just managed to catch Mini Graff and Jason Wing's exhibition Real Estate at the Cross Art Projects before it closed. Small but cool.

I especially loved Mini Graff's Superhero Poster. Quite rightly, Mini has a bee in her bonnet about the City of Sydney's approach to graffiti and street art. As the exhibition flyer tells it:

She parodies and challenges the might of the advertising industry and the brand names that invade and claim streetscapes, parks, and schools. While corporations gloat, artists are forced into humiliations of form filling and attending to overseers of 'official' artworks, a censorship not tolerated by any other professional group. Councils wage a continuous censorship vigil and veto art on our streets, temporary hoardings, nooks and crannies - unless deemed 'decorative' or de-facto advertorial for municipal fiat. Mini Graff champions the paste-up brush of street art as an act of daily civil libertarian heroism.

'Humiliation' might be just a little strong as a description of what it's like to fill in a bunch of forms to be assessed by a faceless panel of bureaucrats to put up a work of art ... but I get her point! The City is Sydney talks a lot of talk about creativity etc, and commissions lots of temporary street art if it's part of some event promoting the city, but its processes are overly bureaucratic, and it simply refuses to allow the streets to be mobilised independently of official place-promotion projects.

With its critique of the Council, the poster also reminds me of another great performative critique of the City of Sydney's street art hypocrisy ... check out this video of the 'Scratching the Surface' performance piece by Beastman, Max Berry, Numskull, Phibs and Roach at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Watch until the end. So brilliant.


Scratching the Surface from [weAREtheIMAGEmakers] on Vimeo.