The Mountain Goat

While the humans strain to find the best position from which to take their photographs, the mountain goats stand silent. One man decides to see how close he can get, camera in hand, prompting the goats to flee. Other visitors let out sounds of disappointment, condemning the man for his selfishness. Yet the goats do slowly return to where the visitors can view them, and their return prompts the same wonderment as before, the same magnetism that pulls the camera.

While the people are in awe of (or perhaps just entertained by) the goats, the goats do not appear to return the sentiment. Mountain goats have strangely expressionless faces for mammals, and their snow-white fur gives them an otherworldly quality, adding to the sense that they do not occupy the same plane of existence as the humans. Who knows how the goat sees the human? They are not even mountain goats unto themselves. How would the goat draw a line that distinguishes its world from that of the humans or even one that could distinguish itself from its environment?

There are other sights to be seen and more images to be taken on Mount Evans, though animal life undoubtedly provokes the most emotion. A marmot is also on the peak until two young visitors chase it away. A pot-bellied man attempts to sit on a ledge on which there is a sign describing facts about the peak in anticipation of visitors. The man fails to mount the ledge and stumbles. He is attempting to capture a photograph.

On top of Mount Evans, one will find the ruins of a modernist structure referred to as Crest House. These ruins represent the highest altitude at which a business structure had been built in the United States. Though it was little more than a gift store and restaurant, known for its coffee and doughnuts, Crest House’s stone ruins evoke an image similar to those of Caspar David Friedrich for visitors accustomed to Tyvek-laden contemporary structures. That Crest House lies in a state of ruins stimulates this feeling of deep time, of man’s transitory existence compared to the quiet relentlessness and integrity of nature. Yet it was not actually “nature” that destroyed the Crest House. The building was destroyed in the late 1970s, an accident in which an employee of the Evergreen propane company left a safety valve unsecured, resulting in a fire. The modernist ruin is the result of clumsy negligence rather than romantic nature. 

A postcard image of Crest House, pre-destruction

Mount Evans is one of Colorado’s tallest peaks and its scenic byway is the highest paved road in North America. The road snakes through the landscape of the Arapahoe National Forest, past Echo Lake. On the day of my visit, it was hard to find good parking. There was an atmosphere of inconvenience, the result of having to continually circle the parking lot, competing for the next available spot. The access granted by technology is undermined only by the presence of those others who also are granted access by the same technology. 

Perhaps it might seem that the solution to this problem of overcrowding would be the building of more parking lots, but this could only be achieved by paving over that which we all drove here to see. One would arrive at Mount Evans only to see the parking lot that it had become. America’s highest altitude parking. The presence of culture disrupts our expectations of nature. Silent thoughts pray for some intervention that would remove the others, no need to know the details. Democracy for me but not for thee. 

Susan Sontag articulates the democratic nature of photography in her canonical On Photography. I consider her declaration that “to collect photographs is to collect the world,” when I see the cameras of Mount Evans, clearly outnumbering the goats. One can just barely take a picture on the peak unimpeded by the presence of others taking pictures. The nature of Mount Evans is seen through the temporary cracks between culture. The image of nature must be stitched together from all these chance views. Nature as collage. Photography becomes a means to write the difference between culture and nature.

Why should we not consider the presence of these human-car-camera hybrids as something natural? Romantic naturalism is tied to an outdated form of ethics that places too much emphasis on individual human agents. We are just as well off elaborating an ethics for the Pine Beetle. Across the Colorado Rockies, Pine Beetles are thriving in the prolonged heat caused by Global Warming, destroying forests. From the perspective of the Pine Beetle, all is well. These are ideal conditions. They are not equipped with the means of recognizing that their consumption outpaces the growth of the trees they consume. The forest exceeds their comprehension. If Pine Beetles are not moral agents, then why assign a morality to the visitors of Mount Evans? Like the Beetles, these agents simply express their agency within a given environment. When Margaret Thatcher tells them that there is no such thing as society, they respond accordingly, anticipating that they should be the only ones who have access to the peak. 

But who is out there warning the visitors of Mount Evans that there is no nature? 

I always experienced nature as something in Colorado, though I wasn’t certain where it was located. I assumed it was located in the mountains. Nature was something advertised. Nature could be experienced in a specific section of Dick’s Sporting Goods. Nature was a product, not an environment. I grew up in the suburbs of Colorado Springs, with an ideal view of the Rockies always in sight but Constitution Ave. in my backyard. I saw more car accidents than goats. I never connected with nature photography until I saw the images of Robert Adams. 

“Newly Completed Tract House, Colorado Springs, Colorado,”
1968
Gelatin silver print,
11 × 14 inches
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
© Robert Adams

Adams does not resist the presence of culture in his images of nature. Not that he is celebratory of this presence. In his book Why People Photograph, he expresses a bitterness at the developments occurring in Colorado in his time, the highways and corporate farms as well the plutonium contamination from the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant (140). He expresses the desire to be alone that characterizes the decedents of those who followed Horace Greeley’s command to “go West young man” as a means of escaping city life. He laments the changes in Rocky Mountain National Park, complaining, “there was more privacy in City Park in the middle of Denver than in walking the high peaks” (158). Adams reads like an old-school environmentalist you’d expect in a nature photographer from the 70s, a type of aging liberal who lives in Colorado and New Mexico, concocting a unique spiritualism founded on the Judeo-Christian tradition, with hints of Zen, a sincere caucasian’s interpretation of Indigenous American culture, and hearty doses of land-art. 

So why did Adams seem to so frequently make culture’s intervention into nature a theme? Why the images of Colorado Spring’s suburbs? Adams briefly comments, “the condition of the western space now does raise questions, nonetheless, about our nature” (140). I think those questions are principally what Adam’s photographs try to answer. I can’t tell whether, in referring to “our” nature, he is writing about so-called human nature or the state of nature we collectively imagine to exist outside ourselves, particularly in places like Colorado, and I prefer this ambiguity. It was in Adam’s photography that I first saw a recognizable “nature”. These photographs just barely predate me. Adam’s pictures are about the loss of his world and the origin of mine. These were the first images I had seen that situated me in a place and a history.

A Jeff Mitchum photograph

Contrast the photographs of Adams with those of Jeff Mitchum. Mitchum is a contemporary nature photographer who, though he might never be seriously considered a figure of historical relevance, absolutely can be described as successful in economic terms. I only heard about him due to my working at a company that photoshop-enhances, prints, and frames Mitchum’s images. Hundreds of his prints passed through my hands, as if I were destined to pay attention whether I wanted or not. 

I absolutely connect these images and those of photoshopped models. Mitchum’s is a nature compensating for lack. It’s as if his camera somehow reveals that the world isn’t as beautiful as it should be. Photoshop is Mitchum’s Viagra. His is a nature that does not exist except as an image. It’s a nature that is desirable because it cannot be had. Yet because it can be imagined in digitally-modified “photography”, it can be sought after, and when it isn’t found, its absence is blamed on the presence of humanity. 

Who has been left unaware that the bodies in advertisement are often biological impossibilities? Yet just because it is an obvious and easy point of criticism doesn’t make it irrelevant. Our comfort with manipulated photographs seems akin to our acceptance that “politicians lie” as a mundane truism. Furthermore, increasing awareness of the proliferation of manipulated photographs does not result, necessarily, in making these images less attractive. One can now masturbate to CGI anime girls and deepfake celebrity porn. The limbic system doesn’t care about the difference between real and false. Rather than turning us off, photo-manipulation stimulates a lust for technologies that might exponentially construct ever more attractive images of nature. Nature photography in the style of Mitchum is just barely about nature. It’s rather a spectacle of technology, of HD digital cameras, RAW files, high chroma pigment prints, and of plexiglass finishes. 

This nature cannot be seen from atop Mount Evans. The mundane thusness of the peak remains, attractive or unattractive as the case may be. The mountain goat might look you in the eye with barely a spark of acknowledgement. The ancient adaptations, the twisted shapes of 1,700-year-old Bristlecone pines, the patterns of climate all go on without attention paid to the iPhones and Hondas that set up temporary camp. The mountain goat does not appear offended. Instead of bitterness, I feel curiosity at the transformation brought on by the consumer camera, the democratic road, and the mass distribution of nature.

It seems a capitalism-democracy hybrid is implicitly secular. It grants access to the peak to all those who can can afford a car. It grants the means to “collect” the peak to those who can afford a camera. The idea that a pilgrimage might be demanded, that the peak might expect a cost is almost eliminated. If a pilgrimage does remain, it is that of overcoming an economic barrier, of affording access to technology, and in such cultural products as The Pursuit of Happiness this process appears sacred. Otherwise the peak has been brought low and domesticated. This democratization might be offensive to individual visitors who all believe themselves to be exceptional and thus worthy of the peak in ways that should be denied to others. But the full parking lot attests to the expectation that the mountain should be as accessible as the mall.

A visitor falls off a cliff, is struck by lightning, or is attacked by an animal on occasion. This is the sacrifice the mountain demands so that it might retain at least the potential of being enchanted. It’s the evidence that nature, in the Heart of Darkness sense, potentially is out there. The misfortune always happens to someone you don’t know, lending evidence to the sheer massiveness of humanity. Regardless, we enter the mountains knowing we could, though most likely will not, be its victim. That something terrifying could happen means that something beyond the image remains. The mountain retains a potential that exceeds human comprehension. Awareness is on the faces of those who die taking selfies next to steep edges. 

Works Cited 

Adams, Robert. Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews. New York, NY: Aperture, 1994. 

Susan Sontag, “On Photography (Excerpt),” 2010, http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyExerpt.shtml.

Walmart-Sublime

We are Olympians to the bacteria we mercilessly eliminate with the power of Mr. Clean. We are proportionately scaled to the size of bacteria when contrasted with the corporations from which we purchase this weapon of mass sanitation. Consider the scale of the human body in the context of the aisles of Walmart, how the geometry of the aisle orients activity. Walmart compels a particular mode of habitation, which entails seeing oneself as if from above, the plan view from which the organization of space reveals the spatial logic of files on one’s desktop. While the head is floating in this position, the body is immersed in a world of sheer verticality, of skeleton crushing bulk, of bottleneck urgency, a battleground of logotypes and of SKUs not meant for human eyes. Walmart does anticipate human occupation, but the mode of occupation it stimulates reveals what humans are to Walmart. To see the human from this perspective is to witness the aesthetics of the Walmart-sublime.

I propose Walmart-sublime in response to Rem Koolhaas’s observations on mega structures, such as server farms like the Tesla Gigafactory. He describes the development of these structures in the Nevada desert as a type of urbanization “almost without people”, robotic urbanization that does not need humans, though upon which humans have grown to depend. Koolhaas relates the vastness, an almost overwhelming sense of scale of these structures, something usually connected to the sublime, though the original sublime overwhelming emphasized nature. This is obviously not J.M.W. Turner’s sublime.

What these structures might be said to have in common with nature is this sense of not being for the human body, indifference to the scale of human existence. Traditionally, it is in the face of dissolution, when humans attempt to confront this indifferent environment and are overwhelmed by the awesome mass of nature that the sublime is experienced. Walmart, by contrast, is designed for humans, or at least a mode a being that anticipates an aspect of the human. It is questionable if the physical structure of any one Walmart is designed for humans at the individual scale.

Walmart is not a place, it is a corporation, which is to say a body composed of bodies, of which the individual locations, the physical structures, employees, and customers, participate. The design of Walmart, physically or economically, is predicated on mass. It is overwhelming, the number of transactions, the logistics, the sheer mass of products. All products ultimately pass through the same point, the non-localized corporate anus that is the checkout. This structure represents something of a net in which something is filtered out while something else is allowed to pass. The physical structure of the Walmart superstore is not a habitat to be equated with a home or some other body-accommodating structure. It is a machine, designed to separate humans from their stored value. Walmart accommodates the consumer-being of the human primarily, and the human body out of necessity.

Unlike a friendly-neighborhood concept of commerce in which a good is exchanged for something of proportionate value, in which competition sustains community, Walmart works to perpetually devalue their market, to sell objects, whatever they may be, at a significantly lower price than their competitors (so as to drive them out of business) while still overcharging the consumer and underpaying their employees. It is an effective capitalist business model; it does what it is supposed to do. The Walmart structure is a money-collecting machine in which humans serve as a resource for a larger entity. It metabolizes humans to sustain the corporate body. The human passes through Walmart as if it is food and then is excreted after the corporate body has received its nourishment. Walmart-sublime shares in nature’s immensity and indifference to the individual human body, yet while nature is simply indifferent to humans, Walmart transubstantiates them.

What is more unique in the Walmart-sublime is that it is mundane, that it is expressed in fluorescent lights and single use plastics as much as in the scale of its physical structures. Walmart sublime is not something one remembers as a transformative life experience, but presents itself as the experience of life, as sane, healthy, normal. This normality expresses something of a momentum that we are compelled to contribute to, something composed out of us, whoever “us” is. It is comparable to Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, exemplified by global warming and our small, mundane contributions to its existence.

We’ve grown accustomed to living with an enormous shoe posed perpetually over our collective heads. Extinction, global warming, plastics polluting the ocean, the invisible infrastructure of the internet, the overlooked system of exploited labour that brings us our cell phones, all represent only a portion of the terrifying momentum of our massive humanity. Walmart-sublime is also our ambiguous individual relationships to these hyper-objects. The ambiguity of the extent of an individual’s participation. The ambiguity of if whether or not the tuna in my sandwich, through a process invisible to me, contains a piece of plastic I threw away in 1998.  The transformation of scale, experienced, for example, when we enter a vehicle and use it as a prosthetic to occupy the car-oriented environment. How does my body relate to this environment? Am I now a composite human-car being? Am I an individual? Am I my image? Am I a consumer? Am I food for giants? Am I a giant in which small entities survive? How can I cope with being all these simultaneously?

Hieronymus Bosch right panel of Garden of Earthly Delights

This condition is anticipated as a sort of hell in the work of Hieronymus Bosch. What makes Bosch disturbing is not only the unique forms of torture depicted in his images, but the way the images sit between icon and naturalism. Bosch’s style is ambiguously descriptive of space as well as illustrative of a text. His is a landscape in which torture of the mind and torture of the body are not distinct. Bodies are ambiguous in scale, depicted as environment and as food for inhuman creatures. The individual body’s participation in the system in which it is instilled is still more ambiguous. The agency of individual humans is obviously indeterminate as they are chewed up or occupied according to what only appears to be an invisible, cruel governing agency. It is even unclear if the humans subject themselves to their own tortures. They simply seem compelled to participate in a larger system, as if enchanted by the environment.

Mark Leckey is a contemporary master of the Walmart-sublime. I had the opportunity to experience his Containers and their Drivers, a title that reminds me of Grime’s (another master of the Walmart-sublime) Be a Body. GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (2010) presented me with an anthropomorphized consumer object, a refrigerator, which compelled me to empathy. It spoke through its prosthetic voice-box, its speakers, in a small, anxious, sedated voice, reminiscent of the first human being to achieve consciousness, or HAL singing the daisy song in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Its green screen environment served as a void, emphasizing its virtually mediated nature. The refrigerator’s sheer vulnerability was heartbreaking, and there was a real sense that my viewership implicated me in something cruel. The world of the refrigerator entitled being consumed, being occupied, and now, apparently consciousness. As we approach the internet of things and AI, the parallel between the human and the refrigerator, the mundanity of consciousness and the suffering it entails, became too real.

Mark Leckey, GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction

The desacralizing of the boundaries that define the human body in humanist terms remained a persistent theme of the exhibition. Bodies melted and merged into a fleshy puddle or mutated into animals and cyborgs. Parts of the body were isolated from the whole and installed with individual personality. Mundane examples from daily life and pop culture were put into museum-display relation with art objects, perpetually estranging the mundane, emphasizing the relevance of Leckey’s discourse.

The aesthetic of the Walmart-sublime is the anthropology of anthropology, the museum of museums, the head looking at the head. We are becoming estranged from our own bodies as we become aware of the scales of the various systems in which it simultaneously, often unknowingly, participates. Art no longer orients itself toward beauty or the sublime, but to the unique feeling of being lost in Walmart. What Walmart-sublime is indicative of is an identity crisis brought on not by the size of buildings, but  ambiguous scaling and the body’s participation as an organ in larger bodies. We are becoming conscious of ourselves as existing within a corporate body, Hobbe’s Leviathan as depicted on the cover of the original print, or the human centipede.

Detail of the cover of Leviathan

It is a sort of inverted alienation, a lingering feeling that drives one to suicidal thoughts, best expressed by my wife when she exited Lecky’s exhibition, stating, “I no longer have to prove to myself that I can endure that type of work”. Why is there an impulse to make depressing art? Perhaps because the rest of society is oriented toward profit and utility, pursuits that must operate under positive pretenses (“never mind the homeless, the economy is doing great”). It is only in the separate sphere of art that we seem to be able to gaze upon the zeitgeist. Doing so affirms that we will agree that this thing is real. It resolves the identity crisis. Yet it does also beg the question, as relevant now as ever: what is the role of the artist in light of this zeitgeist? S/he must, in some way, grapple with the Walmart-sublime, but what is the ethical approach to praxis?

I had written about the work of Dmitri Obergfell describing my experience at an opening of his 2017 solo exhibition, Man is a Bubble, Time is a Place, as disconcerting. My main concern was that visitors were not taking the work to heart, which is to say being affected. Instead they exhibited indifference. I suggested that the nature of this work is not to promote an ethical position, but to simply serve as a signpost of these massive objects which we currently find ourselves encountering in mundane existence. They provide a foil against which viewers can demonstrate (for social media if not each other) cool affect-less-ness. It is in the presence of the Walmart-sublime that we demonstrate our indifference. It has become a statement of individuality to exhibit one’s unique coping mechanisms, one’s persona as a shield against the psychic impact of living constantly in the shadow of hyper objects. This is not unique to Obergfell, of course, but is systemic. I recall having a similar feeling at the opening of a Neo Rauch’s 2014 exhibition at David Zwirner, At the Well.

Stephanie Kantor, from Noontime

The polar opposite of such signpost work is expressed in the Etruscan spirit. The sense of comfort, the ease with which the individual exists within his or her universe contrasts sharply with the void-like ambiguity of the Walmart-sublime. The unpretentious humanism, the relaxed confidence presents a mode of inhabiting the world that appears entirely foreign to me. Yet that the Etruscan spirit exists demonstrates that such a mode of habitation is absolutely possible. I wonder if it also necessary. Is there not something of a tonic in the work of David Hockney, who has asserted his ambition to assert that “life is beautiful”? Is there not something rebellious in the work of Stephanie Kantor? Does she stand in opposition to a trend of signposting that which is depressing in the contemporary condition by advocating a relentlessly life-affirming, celebratory ethical position. Or could it be argued that these artists are insulating themselves from the Walmart-sublime, rather than confronting it?

The role of artist in relation to the mega structures, corporate mediation, and hyper objects of mundane existence is indeterminate. Mark Lecky and David Hockney or Dmitri Obergfell and Stephanie Kantor are contrasted to represent polar dispositions, but they are not inherently binary nor exhaustive of the potential tactics for addressing the Walmart-sublime. Here is employed the term tactic to intentionally refer to Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. Certeau identifies strategies with the plan-view powers of institution and tactics with the street-level mode of inhabiting those spaces formed by institutions. He opposes the absolutism of such social theorists as Michelle Foucault who present an image of daily life in which the average individual is subject to the absolute power of the panopticon. Rather, Certeau holds that there are individual movements that escape the awareness of the powers that be, that the average individual finds unique ways of adapting the system to his or herself: tactics. These tactics manifest in everyday life, in subtle appropriations, in using time spent on the clock for one’s personal interests, in using what is available in the kitchen to prepare a meal. We could also compare it to the practice of remix artists appropriating pop music (the use of law to stifle this productive activity is topic for another time.)

If the Walmart-Sublime is produced at least in large part by the strategies of corporate institutions, is there not a tactic by which we can reconstitute our individual sovereignty in relation to these institutions, to appropriate the culture that arrives on the doorstep via Amazon? Is it not within the dominion of the artist to develop such tactics? Can we achieve Etruscan-like ease in an environment of corporate dominion? Is there a possibility that something can actually still grow in the aisles of Walmart?

An Appeal to You

I was taught in school not to use the second person “you” in writing and I did not know at the time why. When I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I understood. The general whininess of the novel is irritating enough, but the way it is book-ended with segments addressed toward “you” pushed me past my tolerance at a point when I didn’t even have the privilege of abandoning the reading. I felt the author or narrator or whoever was assuming too much in his address to me, was assuming to know my interests and with that assumption decided to interpolate me into his text.

I noticed this whiny presumption carried over into the world of social media, where people would express their frustrations with some individual by writing a message to “you”. “You left me when I needed you most and I can never forgive you” “you knew what it meant to me, but you did it anyways,” kind of status updates. I called these updates “ambiguous you” posts. It was always charming to see one or two of that user’s friends ask “is this addressed to me?”, maybe even the user’s mom would write an apology, where after the user would respond, “no, of course I’m not talking about you.”

More omnipresent is the use of “you” in advertising. “Now you can play your favorite song on repeat.” “You have three kids you have to get to soccer practice.” “You ate fifty hot wings and now you need to handle the battle going on in your stomach.” “Your parents are aging and now you’re the one who has to hold their hand.” “Your hair is the most important thing about you.” “Are you beach body ready?” “Luckily you have…”

I often feel they guessed wrong when trying to figure out how to appeal to me as an individual. I scoff and roll my eyes, “Who is the person that falls for this?” Yet these marketing campaigns must work or else they wouldn’t be so common. When they say “you”, they are talking to a majority of people who have been by-and-large conditioned to all think alike. A mass of people who that “you” sticks to. Like some person a politician at a rally waves at, this ideal “you” is tricked into thinking he or she is being treated as an individual, is being understood or empathized with as an individual. By design, this is a deception.

It’s easy to see how this deception works in advertising now that we’ve become aware of how our data is farmed online for the purpose of generating more accurate “you” appeals, and it’s easy to get frustrated at the insincerity of advertisers, the feeling of repulsion triggered by the realization that one is so easily identifiable as a type. It’s worth noting how this hyper-individuation is only now made more accurate by being hooked to a giant data collecting system that once was the internet. Yet, even before the turn of the century, this “you”-ing was going on. This appeal to you is not only designed into radio ads and billboards, but into city streets.

Grandpa’s “in my day” might sound like it refers to a long lost sepia-tone epoch, but his day was less than one hundred years ago. His day was post-war America, the beginning of the rapid transformation, the handing over of the keys to culture by shell-shocked kids, who went from the dislocation of the Great Depression to the chaos of war and then to the newly blossoming suburbs, over to big business. A time when Americanism increasingly needed to be defined rigidly against the threat of Russian “communism”.

It’s around this time that the car enters into the American narrative as a central motif. True, the car had been around prior to the 1950s by several decades, but it was hardly a motif of the American way of life. Cars were seen as an encroachment on public space where they entered the city. Further, the city was not adapted to accommodate the car. Streets were places where people gathered, where civic life and commerce occurred. The street car was the oft-preferred mode of transportation.

Just because someone refers to him or herself as “conservative” does not mean s/he is conserving some long held value or cultural narrative. A product of the Ford company might now be advertised for its masculine stoicism and as a symbol of working class values, but Henry Ford was a man of the future, constantly obsessed with his utopian aspirations, constantly looking for new ways to make farm animals obsolete and to find uses for the soy bean. When he finished building the modern age, the place referred to when Donald Trump says “make America great again”, he got all nostalgic on us and only then began trying to recreate a bucolic America of the past (specifically the past as he imagined it to be, without the parts he did not like).

Henry Ford’s Soybean Car

The car did not rise to prominence as a defining feature of American life via an organic process. It was subsidized as well as advertised. The market did not “demand it” until the design of the city of the future made it a virtual necessity. This city of the future, the city of modernist aspiration, was one dialectically opposed to the city of the past with its agoras and chapels and streets full of messy humans.

Despite the fact that Grandpa was born a little closer to the date when the Declaration of Independence was signed, he might not actually be an authority on what it means to be American. The past he comes from was one obsessed with the future, when the future was the only solace for having been so radically severed from tradition. A past that increasingly changed culture from an “us” experience to one where companies serve “you”.

The problem with this culture of “you” is that it causes this “you” to make decisions as if s/he lives in a vacuum. These decisions are often expressed in the form of consumption, as intended. You buying a foot long sub or a Star Wars: The Force Awakens hoodie for you. However, it happens every so often that consumers also express decisions in the form of democracy. Given phrases like “vote with your dollar”, its possible that we have taken the two processes, consuming and voting, to be basically different means of reaching the same end. They’re fundamentally just ways for you to get what you want.

Canal Street in lower Manhattan is renown for its lines of knock-off brand and low quality product stores, where owners accost pedestrians in an attempt to make a sell

So how has traffic been effecting you? You, there, in your car that had been selected and purchased because of what it says about you. You in the massive projectile on wheels, designed to protect you if you hit someone. You, listening to your favorite station while adjusting the temperature to make yourself comfortable. Are you tired of being stuck behind someone else’s car? Are you tired of being punished by gas prices? Are you frustrated by the lack of parking? Does other people’s driving make you mad? What is the solution? How can your representatives help you?

It might seem intuitive to solve your problems behind the wheel by demanding more. More parking (about ten stories of parking spots sound nice?) or more, bigger roads. It’s intuitive to imagine this increased capacity will help you. It’s intuitive to consume because those roads and that parking will help you out.

Of course it will help out a lot of other yous in the process. And these yous will be on those new roads, in your way, causing traffic (because you are not causing the traffic, since you are suffering it). It might seem counterintuitive, but those extra accommodations to the car will actually increase traffic. The phenomenon is called induced demand and it is something so many city planers know about, know how to fix, yet wont fix because people who are not city planners and do not care how the organization of the city affects all its inhabitants get to influence the democratic process.

Perhaps making decisions for one’s city from the perspective of a consumer, a “you” to whom businesses offer products and services, is not the best strategy. Perhaps the message of consumerism inherently conflicts with the needs of a democracy. Perhaps, in fact, when the people stop voting as a people, when the people stop voting for us, democracy descends into the tyranny of the largest group to whom the appeal to “you” most applies.

The city is fundamentally a social project. The social philosophy of the city is expressed in concrete manifestations. One does not need to get a degree in architecture or in city planning to learn to read the text inscribed upon the city. One needs only to inhabit the city, and one cannot do this while simultaneously inhabiting one’s vehicle. This is a call to get out of your car and to start walking around the city. Start riding the bus, despite what you might have heard about its dangers. If you do not like what you see, know that you will not find solutions behind a shield of glossy plastic and metal. Solutions will be found together in a community of us.

history of a game environment

There are environments.

There are objects.

There are agents.

The boundaries between these categories are porous. For example, a human body is an environment for bacteria. A human hand is an object when cut off from an arm. Wind is both ambient environment and agent (it acts upon the sail of a boat), though not a willing agent.

This is a response to the illusion of messiness in the environment of a video game I was playing. A real mess is a hard thing to imitate. It is something that evolves out of a relationship between agent(s), objects, and environment. A virtual mess is entirely intentional, a mess only in appearance.

The player’s ability to alter the environment identifies him/her as a willing agent. The designer and the player are both willing agents, compromising in how the game is played.

(An object might “exude” a suggestiveness that is comparable to the active nature of an agent, but this agent-object is beyond the scope of the present meditation.)

An object might be a “shell”.  An object in which form is consequent of utility or the properties and history of the parts of which the object is composed is not shell. Objects that only have an appearance of utility or history are shell. A radio that plays music is not a shell. Clay modeled to perfectly imitate a radio in form but does not play music is shell. Of course, an object that looks like a radio might have played music, but was broken. This object is not shell, because the “broken” is part of the object’s history. Yet it is no longer a radio. It is a broken radio. The “broken” takes precedence. Its other attributes besides those that made it play music now manifest as the object’s defining attributes. These attributes include attributes that are invisible to humans.

Anyways, a broken radio might make a great doorstop.

The radio might also effect a change if it falls off a shelf and hits a man in the head, killing him. In this case, the property of the radio as blunt object of dangerous potential is made manifest. It was always there, though unrecognized, yet it is manifest due to a relationship. An earthquake jiggles the radio off the shelf or a poorly installed shelf gives out over time. The relationship of the radio to the environment creates a hybrid object (radio+earthquake=dangerous blunt object). In identifying the agent that killed the man, we might say it was the radio or the earthquake, but really, it was the property of the radio made manifest by the alteration in the environment provided by the earthquake.

A radio might be an environment for insects. A dead body might also be an environment for insects. In these ways, the boundaries between object, environment, and agents are porous. Yet they are great conceptual aides. There are things that act, things acted upon, and environments in which the exchange occurs. The same thing might fit in all categories at once.

This is the compelling thing about a mess.

 

Fall in Love in an Airport City

New Songdo City is not a city that has outlasted the global conflicts of the World Wars nor the tensions of the Cold War. Its inhabitants did not sit around the the television to watch the lunar landing, nor did they witness the fall of the World Trade Center. New Songdo City, South Korea, is a city that did not exist in the 20th century. Began in 2001 and recently “finished”, New Songdo was built on a man-made island in the middle of the Yellow Sea. It was commissioned by the government of Korea to be an aerotropolis, granting easy access to cities in China and beyond.

The term “aerotropolis” is perhaps new to you, as it was to me, and though it sounds like the title to a low quality graphic novel, it is actually pretty descriptive. It is the term designated to a city built around an airport.

The building of a city around a port is nothing new. Cities have been built around harbors and train stations without being called “naval-tropolis” or “loco-tropolis”, but are simply referred to as cities. The contrived nature of the title is a reflection of the contrived nature of the aerotropolis, and is perhaps the thing which most distinguishes it from other port cities. While the traditional city has developed organically, often by the hands of its generations of inhabitants, the aerotropolis is ideally planned from the beginning, often from some centralized organizing force. It’s a natural cousin of the city of New Urbanism.

New Songdo was built by an American firm, Gale International, and is in many respects a collage of the best features of other cities. A little bit of New York here, a little bit of Venice there. What is unique about New Songdo is that it is the first aerotroplois proper. Other aerotroplois are more make-shift, a consequence of shifting economic factors augmenting the shape of a pre-established city, part of a city, or cities. While New Songdo was built from scratch, other aerotroplois were built out of, or on top of, other cities.

There’s something of a areotropolis between Washington Dulles International Airport, for example. and the Pentagon, in an area called Fairfax County. Fairfax County, Virginia can claim a median annual household income of $105,416 according to forbes.com and is one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. The federal government pumps money into the economy of Fairfax county, where many corporations have set up camp. SpaceQuest, Ltd., which focuses on producing satellites and spacecraft components, BARE Associates International, Inc. which specializes in mystery customer research (that stuff where leaders of a company can spy on, or evaluate if you prefer, their separate facilities), ThinkGeek, government contractors such as Argon ST (a subsidiary of Boeing), Edge Technologies Inc., Inhalt Corporation, ManTech International, Nortel Government Solutions, CSRA Inc., The Vinnell Corporation, Software and internet companies such as Geeknet, Invincea Inc, Capitol Advantage…. Don’t worry if you don’t know who these corporations are. You can research if interested.

These corporations are located here because of the access to two things: the federal government down one street and the airport down the other. The presence of Dulles International has resulted in the springing up of this pseudo-city of affluence.

Another de facto areotroplis is Memphis TN, where the presence of one company has radically altered the local economy: FedEx. FedEx has generated enormous wealth as a consequence of an increased demand for speed, it responds to the need to have it, whatever it is, as soon as possible. FedEx, transformed the Memphis International Airport into the the largest airfreight terminal in the world, reshaping the image of Memphis into one of the most economically globalized cities in America. Prior to FedEx, Memphis made its wealth off the cotton industry, an industry that relies heavily upon the rural and stimulates an sepia tone image of old-America.

While FedEx reshaped Memphis, UPS similarly reshaped Luoisville Kentucky, which houses it’s massive WorldPort, which handles over a million packages daily while improving productivity by removing the human from the process. WorldPort is a masterpiece of automation. And while automation is the notorious source of job-loss for humans, one must note how businesses benefit from opening locations near WorldPort, producing competitive advantage. While UPS increasingly automatizes, companies open facilities within an hours drive. Those companies, in turn, stimulate the development of other forms of employment. One might question, however, how attractive the jobs near the lower end of the economic ladder are. UPS attracts a hardware company, and the hardware company in turn attracts a Starbucks (or maybe a Little Caesars Pizza, one of which is located at 5751 Preston Hwy, under an hours walk) so that it can be said that UPS stimulated the economy of the area, that it “created” jobs. But stimulated best for whom? The land WorldPort is built on would once have been farmland. Farmland, in general, has proven good land upon which to build an aerotropolis. Families that might have produced farmers end up producing wage-labor baristas.

Many of the major cities so often featured in Hollywood films such as New York and Los Angeles are not aerotropolis and cannot be as the land they occupy is already too congested. The airports have no space to grow. Interestingly, the aerotropolis asks for the open fields of what were once the farmland of rural America, the landlocked cities in which the word “globalization” would have sounded enigmatic only a few decades earlier. These were notoriously not global cities, not the hosts to a constant influx of immigrants that coast cities so naturally were. These are the cities silently experiencing the most transformative effects of globalization in its contemporary, airport-centric form.

All this while national discourse is still generated from the coasts. No wonder there appears to be such a massive disconnect between the America of the costal cities and the America of the landlocked cities. It seems the globalization and the impact of the areotropolis is effecting these two Americas differently.

This matter has special interest in me, as I claim Denver as my home. I say Denver instead of Colorado for a reason. I do not experience Colorado in the same way I experience Denver, my more immediate reality. In 2013, there was an effort on the part of some counties in Northern Colorado to succeed from the rest of Colorado to become its own state. Obviously they failed, but their efforts revealed something important about the relationship between these rural regions and the single city in which so much power is concentrated. It’s a trend the world over. I met a girl from Northern England, rural land, who pointed out to me how much money is invested in London at the rest of England’s expense and the animosity this relationship breeds. The same relationship exists in Chile, where the northern and southern parts of the long, geographically diverse country must be represented by a single city at the center. This trend can be scoffed at by city dwellers right up until those who live outside the city actually do something radical and vote for people and policies city-dwellers wont like.

According to metro denver.org, approximately 683,096 people live in Denver while 617,708 live in the northern Colorado counties of Larimer and Weld. I can say from firsthand experience, having lived in both northern Colorado and Denver, the people in either area do not experience the reality of living in the other. In Weld county, the smell of livestock is permanently in the air to the point where one stops noticing it. In Denver, enough people yell at carless pedestrians from moving vehicles just for entertainment that one eventually has to stop noticing it. The drive between Denver and the cities of Northern Colorado are covered with farm lands, spaces that have contributed to Colorado, and thus, Denver’s economy for years. In the midst of various complaints unique to the city dweller, I’ve hardly heard any mention of the concerns of these workers of the land.

The point of all of this is to say that in many ways, someone from Denver has more in common with someone from London or Tokyo than with someone from his or her own state, and the discomfort of trying to share a space that language has deemed one territory is difficult when half the people belong to a global culture and the other half must live in relation to the land, the real physical stuff of the place.

It is Denver’s airport that increasingly transforms it into what Marshal McLuhan has referred to as the City. By the City, McLuhan means the one, a-geographic city that exists as the same city in Toronto, Sao Paolo, Istanbul, Beijing, or perhaps most fully, New Songdo City, because while all the other cities are having the City built over it, New Songdo was built as the City from scratch.

It is the airport upon which we are planning Denver’s future. One can visit https://www.codot.gov/projects/aerotropolis to find the summery of a federally funded study concerning the benefits of building an aerotropolis around the Denver International Airport. A quote from it states, “Today there are still thousands of acres of undeveloped land surrounding DIA that represent one of the most unrealized economic opportunities in the world.” I almost agree with this assessment, but I’ve begun to wonder who this economic opportunity would benefit. Denver’s economy is doing well, apparently, which is why one might feel confused to see a community of homeless people in permanent encampment around the central city park and library.

I once had confidence that growing DIA and connecting it more and more with downtown would help the Denver economy grow while also making Denver more accessible to other countries, inviting more cultural exchange. When I see the development in the part of Denver most connect with DIA by public transportation, Union Station, I begin to understand what New Songdo City naturally negates. One of the difficulties facing New Songdo is attracting creative workers: artists, writers, and designers, those people who contributed to the growth of cities like New York City and Paris. When one sees what the aerotropolis does attract, global corporations, big name brands, federal grants, one understands the allure of the aerotropolis. It is a natural response to a changing global economy in which a nation’s affluence is dependent upon corporations’ ability to appeal to newly forming consumer classes, an economy that will favor places like China that can and are willing to build numerous aerotropolis in previously rural areas. However, that elusive thing that might be called the soul of the city cannot be built from scratch. It seems that the centralized planning of the Aerotropolis naturally negates community participation, that it concentrates the control of the development of the city in the hands of the few.

One thing concerns me about cities like Memphis and Louisville. Their reliance on one industry, in this case the shipping industry, seems no different than Detroit’s reliance on one industry: the car industry. Detroit is perhaps the most important American city to learn from because while it was once a major American city, benefiting from an apparently unstoppable economic trend (the artificially imposed need for an individual vehicle), it is now renown for being the victim of economic collapse. All the investment in infrastructure is still there, in empty buildings and lots slowly being converted back into rural land.

Most of the information comes from a book titled Aerotropolis: The Way we’ll live next by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay.

“I never knew you”

I had a dream I was at an art exhibition, a solo show of a young artist. The work in the exhibition was some of the most inspiring I’ve ever seen. I was in awe of this guy. He was beyond me in understanding of something true, undeniably aware of and a contributor to the current zeitgeist. He had a flatness to his work, meaning there was no hierarchy to his practice. A sketch was treated with the same degree of reverence or irreverence as an object of clearly high production, and the connections between these objects seemed hyperlinked, “over” connected, or somehow connected in terms that seemed outside of spatial metaphors. There was also no commitment to style.

I felt I needed to respond to his work. To be honest, I desired to straight-up copy his work. Yet I also felt there was something wrong with me copying his work, like I needed to author something original. Copying these works was a cheap maneuver. I’d only be pathetically derivative of a superior artist.

Some instinct compelled me to try to commit to memory five or six works. When I woke from this dream in the middle of the night, I could only recall two works, which I quickly recorded on my hand with a ball-point pen before falling asleep once more. When I awoke to daylight, I reviewed my drawings. The two works seemed completely irrelevant outside of the context of the larger show, leaving me feeling disappointed, as if I missed an opportunity. Perhaps if I had not refused to see his work as my work in the dream, I would be that artist in waking life.

What disturbs me is that the show was clear to my mind in dream, detailed even, possibly originating from me. Thus it seems I am the author of those images, however unrealized in physical form. Yet the inaccessibility to me of the details of the works now leads me to believe that I was the recipient of their image, not the author. I am almost certain other people have received similar images in dream, or in waking life if they are receptive enough. If they are more receptive, these people see the images as their own work (or as nobody’s property, rather) and they will proceed to bring the images into physical form. I, however, need to change in order to participate.

That morning, I also felt that I am only one of the possible selves I could be. I have chosen to be just one, or at least just one at a time. I have chosen to fit into given social roles. In particular, being married and having a full time job have emphasized the importance of consolidating personality. I don’t want my wife to recognize me one day and feel me to be a stranger another. I also don’t feel the context of a job encourages the expressing of diverse personalities. The context of work has lead me to develop my personality in a way that has no potential. I am near-machine, which is a common enough condition for the manual laborer. I feel the loss of the spirit. Yet it is perhaps this flexibility of personality that enables us to receive visions. To not be committed to one self. To actually see one’s ideas manifested in the works of apparent others, especially in dreams where others are only imagined.

I don’t know how to balance these things. I want to fulfill the social expectations I have established for myself, yet I miss the potential provided by flexibility. I have not been seriously making work for the passed year. Recently, I’ve slowed down in even doodling ideas in my sketch book.

When I was in school, I often heard criticism that I was in a bubble, that the school-context is not the “real” world. I’ve come to realize that this type of thinking misses the point. One is never in the “real” world. Work-world, for example, is not the “real” world. One is usually in a context that advocates one potential self while negating the others. Artists or makers of any type need to create contexts in which they can be any self, perhaps more than one at a time, which is a state of play. Without this context, the work will either not flow or will be derivative of work made thus far.

Anyways, I hope someone recognizes him or herself in that dream artist. I think it would be a shame if those ideas went to waste. One day I’ll be at the solo show of some inspirational artist with the uncanny felling that I’ve seen all of this before.