Urban Hacking: Cultural Jamming Strategies in the Risky Spaces of Modernity [1. Aufl.] 9783839415368

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Welcome to the Battlefi eld. Please Make Yourself Comfortable
1. Hacking the City
Urban Hacking as a Practical and Th eoretical Critique of Public Spaces
Urban Hacking as a Strategy for Urban (Re-)Planning/Designing
Spandrel Evolution. Emergent Spaces of Resistance in the 21st Century
Playing with the Built City
Please love Banksy. A retrospective on the options of an art of disruption in public space in Vienna
2. Communication and Creativity
Guerilla.com
Guerrilla Gardening. Political protest, or mainstream-compatible, watered-down, wannabe subculture?
Lenin as Major Urban Hacker in Lviv. From monument to market
Verbal Graffiti. Textures of unoffi cial messages in public space today
Urban Hacking. An artist strategy
The most dangerous thing on the air. Someone broadcasts something
Improv Everywhere. An interview with Charlie Todd
3. Codes and Consequences
P2PFOUND CITIES. Project Proposal for the Reconstruction and the Preservation of Abruzzo
cODE wRITING. On (Artifi cial) Writing
Urban Trash Zone. Notes on the collapsing city in Warren Ellis’ and Ben Templesmiths Fell: Feral City
CONTROL
List of contributors

Citation preview

Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Thomas Ballhausen (eds.) Urban Hacking

Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Thomas Ballhausen (eds.)

Urban Hacking Cultural Jamming Strategies in the Risky Spaces of Modernity

This publication was supported by the Department of Art Funding/ City of Vienna, Austria and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research. This publication is based on the symposium »URBAN HACKING. Cultural Jamming Strategies into the Risky spaces of Modernity.«, which took place 2009 in the context of the paraflows Festival in Vienna.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2010 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Scott Beale Proofread by Heather Kelly, Melinda Richka Translated by Ryan Crawford, David Horn, Odin Kroeger, Andrea Wald Typeset by Anika Kronberger Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-8376-1536-4 Global distribution outside Germany, Austria and Switzerland:

Transaction Publishers Rutgers University 35 Berrue Circle Piscataway, NJ 08854

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Table of Contents

Introduction Welcome to the Battlefield. Please Make Yourself Comfortable Günther Friesinger , Johannes Grenzfurthner, Thomas Ballhausen

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1. Hacking the City Urban Hacking as a Practical and Theoretical Critique of Public Spaces Frank Apunkt Schneider, Günther Friesinger Urban Hacking as a Strategy for Urban (Re-)Planning/Designing Melanie Gadringer Spandrel Evolution. Emergent Spaces of Resistance in the 21st Century Bonni Rambatan Playing with the Built City Eleanor Saitta Please love Banksy. A retrospective on the options of an art of disruption in public space in Vienna. Thomas Edlinger

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35

45

49

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2. Communication and Creativity Guerilla.com Johannes Grenzfurthner Guerrilla Gardening. Political protest, or mainstream-compatible, watered-down, wannabe subculture? Julia Jahnke Lenin as Major Urban Hacker in Lviv. From monument to market. Bohdan Shumylovych

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107

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Verbal Graffiti. Textures of unofficial messages in public space today Thomas Northoff Urban Hacking. An artist strategy Annett Zinsmeister The most dangerous thing on the air. Someone broadcasts something Thomas Thurner Improv Everywhere. An interview with Charlie Todd Johannes Grenzfurthner

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3. Codes and Consequences P2PFOUND CITIES. Project Proposal for the Reconstruction and the Preservation of Abruzzo Agatino Rizzo, Eric Hunting, Michel Bauwens, Cityleft, P2P Foundation cODE wRITING. On (Artificial) Writing Kerstin Ohler Urban Trash Zone. Notes on the collapsing city in Warren Ellis’ and Ben Templesmiths Fell: Feral City Verena-Cathrin Bauer

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187

205

CONTROL Thomas Ballhausen

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List of contributors

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I NTRODUCTION

Welcome to the Battlefield. Please Make Yourself Comfortable Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Thomas Ballhausen

Urban space is a battle field, symbols are appropriated, new structures created. Net culture replaces traditional counter culture and re-focuses its attention to a space of living that is changing at a fast pace: the city. By new means and venturing down new paths, enduring questions are recast, the central question being how cultural resistance is possible and can be lived in times of rising market pressure and conservative cultural policies; a question of enduring importance indeed. Here, at this precarious point in time, this anthology intervenes. We ask questions, we give answers, we take our responsibility seriously. This reader tries to adopt the motto ‘Urban Hacking’, i.e., and attempts to constructively-critically examine the cultural practices of desire, resignification, and subversive appropriation. The urban space and the cultural technique of ‘hacking’ function as pillars for the investigation of historical as well as contemporary strategies of such culturally founded resistance. The topic of Urban Hacking, while appearing vague at first, shall be elucidated by breaking it down into three panels. The examples analyzed in connection therewith will not only reflect the status quo of what exists, but also contribute to a discussion about the options that remain open, i.e., about the possibilities and limitations of that discourse. Experts of respective fields submitted essays, interviews and prose on their areas of specialization in the according thematic groups, thereby

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rendering the positive as well as negative sides of the connection between different approaches and concepts evident. This three-part reader corresponds to the thematic priorities Urban, Hacking, and Risk. The part Urban will discuss, from the perspectives of space theory and media geography, the conditions placed upon and the requirements demanded from the city as venue; e.g., the contributors will deliberate not only about the shift from place to space and its grounds in semiotics but also on space-bound questions of adapting phenomena and artefacts crossing media boundaries. The historical development of Guerrilla Art or the possibilities of art in the public space will be central to this discussion. The next part is dedicated to the multi-facetted notion of Hacking. Hence the second array of texts investigates the origin, structures, and evolutionary elements of that theme. Commencing from questions regarding technique and technology, advanced concepts and theories that are based on hacking and have been seminal for debates on the options of cultural resistance are being examined; e.g., Programme Code Poetry or the use of re-coding strategies in the fine arts. The third and final part will circle around the aspects of Risk and ‘putting-oneself-on-the-line’. Urban space and the discourse of the modern are conditioned by and condition each other, giving rise to approaches inspired by art and informed by philosophy to refuse, to transgress boundaries, and to ignite discussions about that of which we are told that we ought to accept. The conditions of historical and contemporary tactics of the transgressive are being investigated with reference to those aspects.

1. H ACKING

THE

C IT Y

Urban Hacking as a Practical and Theoretical Critique of Public Spaces Frank Apunkt Schneider, Günther Friesinger

Public Space as Text What is generally referred to as ‘public space’ is, in fact, an intricate bundle of cultural-geographic and discursive structures – i.e. a social artifact. Once we have moved away from the perspective according to which late capitalism’s social environment is naturally given, then this statement may very well appear to be rather trivial. But this perspective is nevertheless hegemonic – despite the fact that this supposed naturalness has now been interrupted by a financial crisis, a crisis which, after an appropriate homeopathic meditation, will bail out on us again, leaving only a ruin of individual catastrophes of the individuated subject’s everyday lives in its wake. Perhaps it soothes one’s own suffering as well as everybody’s, the global as well as individual distress from capitalism to picture capitalism as the naturally given environment; as a power of destiny, effacing human lives and the products of their endeavors arbitrarily, unpredictably, and seemingly without affection. This perspective no doubt reconciles us to our late capitalist fate of hopelessness, lack of alternatives and relieves us of guilt feelings generated by our entanglement in social, cultural, and ecological catastrophes, catastrophes that we like to think of as occurring blindly, naturally – not as the consequences of our own actions.

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But the manner in which capitalism presents itself to us as an all so natural environment is, in fact, the effect of social, cultural, economic, and ideological landscaping. This is especially the case in spaces we treat as public in our everyday communicative and cultural lives. Spaces we frequent and use: spaces which absorb and form us and, thus, allow us to appear. So as not to be powerlessly subjected to their formative forces, we need to understand how these spaces – where we communicate, participate, and represent – are constructed. We need to know both how and why they function, as well as who has an interest in their smooth functioning. It is clear from the well-known and tiring lamentations of helplessness crying about the loss of good old publicity that such an understanding is by no means self-evident. These lamentations generally dress themselves up in the language of nature conservation. What this outfit is missing is the fact that this seemingly idyllic public community is also only a product of capitalist dynamics, one that just happens to belong to a productline now discontinued. Classical theories of public space and publicity have failed to provide a critical understanding because they are unable to acknowledge their own ideological position within spatial structuring. Of course the public sphere’s functional relationships cannot be reduced to media’s self-referential mode of production, as Marshall McLuhan would have us believe. Nor can they be deduced solely from systemic inner-worldliness, as Niklas Luhmann and his systems theory claims. And they certainly cannot be grasped through an exploration of the interactional dimension of social communication according to the model of Jürgen Habermas, who regards the unequal political and economic distribution of power exclusively in terms of a distortion of ideal social communication. For the latter, communicative inequality is, at best, a problem to be corrected through social means – not the very condition of possibility of the utilitarian system and the spaces and places produced by its labor. Habermas’ strictly idealist argument, which regards social being as a causal effect of consciousness alone, betrays the analysis of economic relations to liberal practices of self-ascertainment. Such a theory cannot want to know about the economic constraints binding social subjects; it cannot want to see whatever a shirtsleeve meliorism fails to conceal. In contrast to this, an emancipatory theory of social communication must be capable of delineating the way in which the principles of mediality inscribe themselves in the forms and modes of articulation of the subjects

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it organizes; such a theory must lay bare the way in which this mediality is both a function of social power relations, as well as the very form of presentation it inaugurates and arranges. Thus, we would like to suggest that public space be treated as a text. As such, it always has an author: those social relations which constitute, coordinate, and control it: technologically, economically, or juridically. As text, the public space is an articulation of power relations, an ensemble of hegemonic symbols, in which dominance decrees itself and its presence; a conglomerate of forms of custom and conduct, wherein each organizes the desired forms of social practice. Or, to put it differently: the public space is ruled through and through; a formation that is economically and politically pre(infra)structured and which, as such, always already precedes our communication, which always already exposes subjects to power relations. These subjects glide through the text, let themselves be trimmed by it, gain sense and form through it, hand over their voice and all it seeks to express in and through these subjects to its constitutive laws and means of communication In order to obtain a general ‘communicable’ form, our communicative desire must adapt to the public sphere’s mode of presentation. Our wishes, our self-conception and our criticisms must pass through public spaces. But they are not just being forwarded, as the classical model of communication might suggest, a model which regards the realm of mediality as an unproblematic pipeline. And through the concrete form of concrete media concrete content arises, as McLuhan has argued. But because these media do not exist in a vacuum, because they are the result of social production, they themselves are socialized in an ideological way. That is to say, the media that bring our messages (and thus, also, ourselves, as senders) into being are themselves only a product of economic and political relations and it is these relations that are conveyed to the user of such media. We are that function of texts and textual forms through which we appear. At the very least, because the ways in which we speak about ourselves reflect back onto the ways in which we perceive of and construct what we speak about. Therefore, every public space is also a metatext which structures our forms of articulation and communicative behavior. This metatext regulates the specific modes in which communicative desire has to adjust to medial environments. And within medial communicative competition, that communicative desire that best manages to adjust to the functional principles and conditions of expression of the chosen medium (and the

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social form it bears with itself) will succeed. Practically speaking, this will bring the optimization of medial forms of adjustment to the center of one’s own communicative desire, as has been impressively demonstrated by Media Darwinist types (cf. extensively Harald Schmidt). It is from this perspective that a certain type of media careerist comes to dominate the bourgeois public sphere of late modernity. Th is type acts largely indifferent to the contents transmitted through it and are thus able to represent any ideological content on the agenda. But even where we, as the so-called “counter-public sphere,” attempt to articulate our discomfort with existing public structures, through verbal criticism or practical intervention, through democratic participation or opposition to both formal and substantial alienation, as well as the trimming (‘commercialization’ etc.) of our spaces of articulation, we nevertheless affirm and legitimize those structures anew, each and every time. We do this by using them and by exposing their significance through our criticism of their form. And it is compulsory for us to do this in order to be heard. But in doing so, we only become increasingly entangled in those structures. This is the public sphere’s vicious circle we cannot escape: articulation renders it necessary to make use of a prestructured “grammar” and “aesthetic.” But neither this “grammar” and “aesthetic,” nor the text constituted by them, are immutable. Because even though public modes of relations are artifacts, they (as well as those social relations inaugurated by them) are necessarily subject to change. As texts, they continuously write themselves anew and, through this, write themselves forth. They too have to adjust to the changes and expansions of the social structure. This is why a global “financial crisis” (and its newly structured social relations) gives rise to the need for forms of speech and communicative interactions different from those that belonged to times of economic prosperity. The success of bourgeois society – the invisibility and unseizability of its dominance – is due to its integrative dynamics and reactivity, which, historically, have prevailed over totalitarian rigidity (even the theocratic backlashes of the beginning 21st century could not change this). It thereby depends on our willingness to actively participate and improve it, update and optimize it. We, therefore, do not only receive its orders and turn them into our communicative desire’s “natural environment,” we also renew and improve it by adjusting its public spaces to our needs (of articulation).

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For this we need competence. The cry for media competence uttered by bourgeois media is, in this regard, by no means random. They are well aware: the texts’ functioning depends on the cognitive abilities of those who read them. They must be able to understand their demands. Of course, they do not have to “understand” them in the sense of a disenclosure of its hidden intentional meaning, but only in terms of a semiotic competence. Only through this are readers able to participate in the constitution, distribution and writing forth of texts. What presents itself to us as public spaces are therefore composed and continuously changing texts that are, nevertheless, controlled and corrected from certain privileged positions. If we apprehend them as texts we co-produce – whether we want to or not – we thereby enable ourselves to form them by writing them forth differently. But since this is intended, since public spaces have to channel our wish for change, the question of a different, unpredictable access to public spaces presents itself. This is a question of the subversive potential of medial praxis. paraflows 09 aims to once again posit this question. Public spaces are a political issue. They provide unavoidable means of communication through which we relate to texts, institutions, and people. As such, it does not suffice to talk about them theoretically; they must also be appropriated practically. To point this out strikes us as important, especially since our assumption that the public space is to be regarded as a text may sound similar to the academically domesticated jargon prevalent in “cultural studies;” a jargon which offers itself to utilitarian principles in the way of an uncritical but still glamorous salon-poststructuralism. Even with the knowledge of the function of gender, race, and class relations – in the form of footnotes to the general text – this depoliticized jargon of cultural studies long ago put on the uniform of that noncommittal academic critique it once sought to smash. And in doing so, it proudly and devoutly accepts – as a paying off for the abandonment of fundamental critique – those professorships and temporary teaching contracts which the relations of exploitation are willing to afford. We, however, regard the conception of the public space as texts as a challenge: a challenge to rewrite the text. But this, of course, can only work as long as we are aware that the possibility of change is itself precarious, always at risk of being reabsorbed by the monotony of the monologue, a monologue which must, in practice, disguise itself as bourgeois dialogue so as to not endanger its own conditions of possibility.

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Urban Hacking as critical poetics of the public space Paraflows is concerned with presenting and contextualizing the positions and possibilities of intervention within digital culture. Contextualization shall be carried out through the choice of topics. Out of the plethora of arbitrary and plural cultural positions we choose those which take, as their starting point for critique and intervention, the knowledge of the public spaces’ (especially the internet’s) knowledge of their own mode of operation of public spaces; those cultural positions which – just as we do – assume that they are modes in which power represents itself at the same time as they are spaces digital culture must necessarily enter in order to represent their concerns. From this paradoxical position two concerns arise: Firstly, we have to devise a critique of public spaces in terms of spaces of power struggle. And secondly, we have to find ways to articulate our criticisms of what presents itself to us as public space without subjecting ourselves to the processes of standardization and adaptation described above. The present reality of 2009 renders it necessity to deal with these issues and express one’s opinion because the public sphere, especially the digital public sphere, now fi nds itself increasingly confronted with rigid regimentations. Interestingly enough, these restrictions are born from those places where alleged or actual free spaces collide with the economic interests of utilization (especially in questions of copyright). The correlation between repressive interpretations of copyright and the extension and fi ne-tuning of the (digital as well as non-digital) surveillance of communicative spaces within the internet and “real” living environment requires a cohesive theory of the public sphere. In opposition to the connection forged between surveillance and utilitarian standardization, we want to present possibilities of intervention which diverge from the norm and encompass various fields of social praxis. And we want to show why and how they relate to each other. These relations shall be represented via the concept of “Urban Hacking,” which can be applied to the urban spaces we live in as well as to the events taking place in the internet metropolis. Today, both sites have been condensed into a new correlative urban space. Here, real and virtual spaces interrelate in order to form one living environment on account of the fact that the digital space had long ago

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became an integral constituent of the city itself, building its own cities – and not only doing so through second-life-surrogates. “Urban Hacking’s” interventions seek – in specific ways – to access this homogenized global urbanity, connecting cities and people with each other so that they can enter the new relations of a cultural//spacial neighborhood. But the aim of “Urban Hacking” is by no means the mere integration of the local into the global. To defend the local as something which is becoming endangered and displaced by the global generally points towards a regressive schemata of thinking, as we will point out later. What is at stake for us is, instead, the capitalist utilization of newly established forms of relations. Hacking strategies directed at urban spaces defy this utilization, refusing to approach public spaces from the outside and rejecting the public sphere’s forms of legitimation by conceiving of these spaces as already structured from the inside. Approaches like “Cultural Jamming,” “Communication and Media Guerilla,” “Media Disturbance,” and “Hacktivism” share this strategy of “delegitimization.” They are not concerned with the establishment of a “counter” public sphere in order to supplement or correct the bastard form of the existing one. What unites them is that each knows how easily this counter public can be integrated and reabsorbed into a public realm that needs such counter publics in order to update its hegemonic culture. These approaches have come to terms with the structural similarity of the counter and hegemonic public, as well as the tragic cries for political change which already carry within themselves the marks of a compromising reformism capable of transforming counter public spaces into normalized ones. Digital culture should not, therefore, repeat the counter culture’s historical errors and overestimate its own possibilities. Th is will only install a sober disillusionment of its desire and a willingness to foreclose the impossible in order to, at least, get hold of the possible. Its field of influence remains restricted – in spite of several spectacular and well selling media campaigns. And, generally speaking, their interventions do not lead to any deeper political or economical changes. Their greatest possible success remains to – in a symbolic way – damage the public sphere’s medial surface in order to force open its smooth and hidden functioning.

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As a symbolic action and an explicit politics of symbols, Urban Hacking has a principally aesthetic function that refers back to the constructed character of that which has been disrupted in its seamless flow. Urban Hacking is able to represent changes (in the traditional function accorded to artworks), which can only be put to work in a broad social movement. This is the potential specific to the intervention of the artwork. It is, therefore, reasonable to present motivated digital forms of intervention within the framework of a festival for digital art and culture with those forms more closely related to the field of artistic production. Both operate within the realm of the symbolic. The fact that the symbolic can, at times, strike to the core of “the real” becomes evident in several interventions of the Yes Man. To overcome the traditional division separating art from politics has always been a sign of the rise of broader interventionist movements that manage to bring together artistic, musical, and literary producers, as well as those working in the media, in order to articulate their political demands. Together they put a – momentary – counter cultural praxis to work whose common belief did not generally consist of a shared political vision, but rather a temporary agreement that whatever is characteristic of the situation they find themselves thrown into is a mere imposition. The last couple of years rendered visible a timid and difficult reapproximation of political activism, subcultural praxis, the artistic scene, and students as well as theorists. Concepts such as “intervention,” “appropriation,” and “hacking” arose out of that scene independently and point towards a commonly shared praxis. What they hold in common is a novel understanding of the public sphere that follows from those strategies in which they treat – often in quite practical ways – the public sphere as a text, according to the understanding outlined above. Their approaches to this text can often be read as poetic experiments with its materiality. They both address its constitutive foundations and engage with it semiologically. They reappropriate its symbols in order to play with them. Th rough this, they point out the arbitrary character of those elements of our everyday lives that would otherwise only present themselves to us as destiny or doom. Yes, they treat them the same way poetry treats signifiers. Or, more precisely: they treat them the same way as all modern poetics which have, as their starting point, the materiality of the signifier.

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Therefore, they sometimes succeed in rendering visible the powerful signs and symbols that had been foreclosed through their own omnipresence that ruled social spaces through and through. As they are damaged, highlighted, and rearranged, these signs and symbols are released from their entanglement in a society which appears as naturally given. And they can speak differently and newly about how, for example, the public space constitutes itself; about which class, race, and gender positions sediment and manifest themselves in it; about whom it belongs to and who is deprived of access. In this respect, a poetics of urban space always already carries out the work of poetology, i.e. a hermeneutics and critique of signifying systems. And it is, therefore, fully aware of (local) signs’ and symbols’ molecular significance for the whole of the order. The supremacy of this order’s structures can no longer be attacked by a form of (fantasmatic) revolution. At most, they can be challenged by an aesthetic praxis, in a guerrilla war of representations. By referring to themselves as “city guerillas,” the Sponti-Movement, a faction in Germany’s student revolt of the 1970s, not just exhibited its own, indeed often unreflective, anti-imperialist passion for questionable liberation movements. Its praxis also and more importantly consisted in a symbol-political adaptation of guerrilla warfare that did not seek out a grand exchange of bowls but, instead, pursued a form of micro-political interventionism that articulates itself in local details. As an effect of this, their praxis became unforeseeable and difficult to attack. It is, therefore, hardly a surprise that the concept of “guerrilla” returns in the self-description of urban hackers; this concept corresponds to the superiority and over-presentation of their antagonists, an excess that is then turned – into a weapon – against those antagonists. A number of urban hackers reject the type of uncritical, regressive and tautological revolutionary romanticisms that the historical city guerrilla was willing to accept as the price for its name. In this respect, to understand one’s own praxis as a form of art may be instructive. This allows urban hackers to distinguish themselves from other forms of political activism that confront bourgeois publicity as some kind of interventional event tourism, without having first reflected their own position and function. Even should such a reflection have taken place, it will express nothing but the well-known discontent of modernity and its modes of appearance.

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As a “poeticalization” of public spaces, interventionism needs critique at its side, just as art requires art critique, in order to question the symbolic value of interventionism. This form of critique must not be indifferent to whatever succeeds in breaking through the monologue of the public sphere. It should, instead, be able (and enable others) to question the mediality of intervention’s surfaces – that is, what they have to say, by saying it. This includes the romantic view of the street as a privileged place of social struggle. “The street” is itself a public space and, as such, produced discursively. But again, this is to say that the street cannot be the authentic and realist predicate that activism frequently attributes to it in its dreams and speeches. As is well-known, when art leaves its original place – or, at least, claims to do so – it is in danger of falling prey to a mystic-vitalistic flush of immediacy, i.e. to regress. This is due to the fact that it continuously strives to exchange the museum, which it remains attached to even in its digital articulations, and those forms of net and subculture which function analogously to this museum, for that form of “real life” which melancholic art believes to reside in the “street’s” liveliness. This wish for such a “life” returns periodically on account of the structural lack enclosed in the ideological framework of art; art must pay for its proverbial freedom by accepting a specific form of isolation. It is allowed to depict freedom and criticize bondage, but only if it accepts the symbolic space that has been provided for it. It is here that art performs its specific function as the jester of bourgeois society. As such, its specific form of freedom is to be thought of as part of a system of institutionalized dependency. The forms in which these special spaces hush up art and its artists are then experienced, by the latter, as a loss of vitality. But what is missed is that this procedure should be regarded as integral to the constitution of a functional splitting: on the one side, the economic reality of everyday life and a war of all-against-all; on the other side, an aesthetic exception to reality in the form of a humanity which unfolds in the context of reproduction. Interventionist cultural praxis also seeks to overcome its quarantined state. And when this task is carried out with a theoretical concept of the public sphere in mind, its praxis can become aware of the specific forms that restrict it. In this way, it can reject a concept free vitalism and begin to understand why it demands public spaces different from those it comes across: not because it simply wants to “live” and “return into life,”

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but because in such spaces its interventions have different effects and take different forms (these are, again, aesthetic categories). This can best be achieved wherever such space have not already been a priori identified and waved through as art. A deterritorialization of art in public spaces must not, therefore, seek to compensate for its perceived lifelessness with that surplus of vitality the real seems to promise. Instead, this is the very place where a deterritorialization of art has to be in order to traverse the context of legitimization of its own critique. Its critique must take the form of a direct confrontation. But this can only be achieved illegitimately, through an illegitimate form, because legitimacy and legality have always already internalized bourgeois society’s discursive structure of spaces. The inner workings of such internalization are best demonstrated by a particularly well-known rejoinder: “I do not have to fear surveillance in my own usage of public spaces because I do not do anything illicit.” In this respect, the critique performed by Urban Hacking does not take the form of contemplative opposition towards the criticized, but one of transgression, dismantlement, aggressive reappropriation or sabotage of, for example, those advertising spaces (adbusting) which take over greater and greater areas of the public sphere. To state this in an article – which is itself subject to editorial and non-editorial advertisement – in a critical medium, might record a punctual non-agreement, but it will also illustrate the well-known impotence every legitimized, “embedded” critique is forced to face.

The Political Concept of Urban Hacking As has been stated above, the keyword “Urban Hacking” contains a wide variety of interventionist strategies and (cultural) practices, theoretically binding them to each other and creating a toolbox for an alternative praxis, for a shared action field of political activism and aesthetic-artistic intervention. Its aim is to occupy the public space from within, much like the task of historical models such as the situationist movement, the Sponti-movement, the graffiti-movement and the city guerrilla. These actions must be understood as conscious delimitation of those discursive fields (urbanism/city analysis, media, academic discourse) which – according to their own self-understanding – speak about the public space without wanting to engage with it. They legitimize their

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criticism by claiming that their embeddedness in mediality and institutions allows them to account for the spaces they talk about by taking an exterior position. This external position is, of course, only a fiction because it too is subject to the public sphere’s discriminating allocation of space. And because it transgresses the fictional space of symbolic forms by making use of a language which – in its discursive execution – is then retranslated into relations of dominance and positions of power, it has a real and forceful side. Indeed, its modest speaking only affirms these constellations. But it is not only places where we talk about the public space, but also speaking and language as such that are always already constituted as such a “public space.” This is precisely why the discourses of journalists, scientists and civil society around the question of public spaces are unable to throw into question the diversity of such spaces. In the same way, its questioning of the status quo already accepts, reproduces and – in via own speaking – actualizes the rules and normative behaviors of the public sphere. By contrast, “Urban Hacking” signifies strategies that do not talk about the public space but rather through it, in it and with it, through its disruption, interruption, and opening (or: through disabling its mechanisms of closure). Thus, these strategies consciously recognize the active part they play in designing the public sphere, the part they – as a means of communication – always already (unconsciously) played. Through a conscious transformation of both the spaces and the positions of speech, these strategies reject the consensual form in which bourgeois society imagines itself: in principle, it imagines itself as an emancipated social conversation of everyone with everyone. In The Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere, Habermas calls this an ‘unconstrained discourse’. But even in this benevolent soliloquy of everyone with everyone – in which even those in dissent agree in general – interventions are – in principle – interjections which negate and destroy the semblance of consensus. It follows that these interjections then delineate spaces of articulation and objects of dissent. Looking at matters from this angle, it becomes visible that the public space is by no means congruent with itself, but a battle field of non-pacified and unsatisfied representations. As is generally known, each representation comprises and verbalizes the writing-over and displacement of another.

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In this respect, the idealism of “consensus” is opposed by a realism of “dissent,” whose aggression depicts, i.e. represents in the afore mentioned sense, the aggressiveness of social, gender, and ethnic positions. Power is always a succession of representations and non-representations whose everyday praxis depicts this in various ways (for example, in the form of the command for women to veil themselves in Islamic regimes). In this respect, the public space is the field wherein power decrees itself. But this is the very reason why opposition, critique, or at least a subversive pleasure principle can – even here – come into being. Attempts to monitor public spaces and document the data traces of its subjects’ movements as completely as possible demonstrate that the public sphere is perceived to be an element of power’s uncertainty which is – at the same time – dependent on that very power in order to anchor itself within the consciousness of its subjects. Security, cameras and data collection are embodiments of the wish to monitor the subjects’ every movement. Not until the rise of the internet was it possible to record and track cases of copyright breaches to the extent witnessed today. The publicity of spaces is, therefore, an effective way of reading the subjects’ desires, desires that manifest themselves “in the ways in which they use public spaces.” And in order to produce the desired information about the subjects who “frequent” them, public spaces need to promise a certain form of “freedom” in order to be frequented at all. It is for this reason that the possibility of a preventive constraint of mobility is already inscribed in the public sphere’s structure, just as, according to Foucault, the architecture of the prison was designed to monitor the movement of subjects by way of a hidden and non-moving observation post in its center. Yes, the modern public sphere is nothing other than appearing for an O/other. In the interventions of Urban Hacking, the public space is no longer conceived of as a social given where democratic (and sometimes: undemocratic) decision-making takes place. And it no longer aims at influencing or reconfiguring that public space via a detour in which an attempt is made to influence these forms of decision-making. Urban Hacking is, in fact, concerned with generating signs of dissent that express forms of (symbolic) resistance. The rights to speak and form are no longer demanded through institutionalized negotiations within the bourgeois public sphere. Instead, these demands directly appear on the public space’s body: they take the form of disruptions, disseminations, creative reconceptualizations as self-empowerment and reappropriations. To evoke a concept

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developed in anarchist theory, we could say that these newly reconfigured demands are now “direct actions,” which do not merely mourn an incorrect, contorted or ruined form of the public sphere but, instead, deconstruct those very forms. Such actions not only seek to re-conquer the definitional monopoly established by local and global environments. They are, instead, primarily concerned with producing signals and establishing symbolic forms within these environments that oppose the late capitalist fatum of immutability with practical changes. These changes need not have the consistency of either a revolution or a reformation. Confi ned in space and time, these revolts point towards the subjects’ need to exorcise the status quo’s superiority. They are spontaneous articulations of antagonism which do not want to exhaust themselves in the complex actions of consensual social constitutions. They are acts of spontaneous, creative self-realization and joyous dissent which cannot easily be frustrated by social integrative mechanisms. Their critique realizes itself in the medium of sabotage (in contrast to the medium of constructive, serious, and well-reasoned critique), they do not offer themselves to dialogue. Although their critique may be well-articulated, it always carries with it a non-articulated remainder: desire in the form of a desire to revolt. “Urban Hacking’s” specific form of resistance, therefore, entails a modified concept of the political. It rejects the system stabilizing actions taken by “official” and legitimate politics as well as those claims which simply bow down in front of social relations of order (the concepts of property, communicative morality, reformist role models, political morals). By contrast, “Urban Hacking” tries to escape this political paradox of participation through critique.

The Difficult Relationship of Urban Hacking and Advertisement To regard environments as constructed may appear – as has already been noted – a merely trivial insight for the realm of reflective understanding. But our apperception of and orientation in everyday life, which proceeds preconsciously and is structured unconsciously, tends to naturalize our environment, making us accept it as a given. This becomes apparent in experiences which point towards the artificiality of our “nature,” when, all of a sudden, we fi nd it changed, interrupted or disrupted. Th is can happen through either systematic intervention (graffiti, vandalism,

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dismantlement of structural attributes) or by a “higher power.” Only the lack and loss of familiar surroundings and conventions renders these constructions tangible. By scratching and fracturing the smooth surface of the symbolic order, the strategies of “Urban Hacking” direct us to an understanding according to which this order is no longer an irrevocable cultural fate, a fate that may very well have seemed unavoidable given the ubiquity of commercial and political symbols of annexation and economic symbols of valorization. These are the symbols that give the public sphere its familiar face. The experience of helplessness is written onto the faces of those who pass through rather than linger in the degraded spaces of a public sphere reduced to mere advertising and administrative space. Generally speaking, this feeling is experienced as either resignation or inner emigration, as when one claims, for example, that, of course, we are able to block out advertising messages even though we are well aware that this is nothing but a (white) lie. As an illegitimate form of resistance, Urban Hacktivism legitimizes itself via the dispossession to be found at the core of this structure. But it does so without spreading the word of a better, alternative space; a space exterior to capitalism’s utilitarian relations. Bourgeois society can comfortably snuggle up to such a space. In spite of this, this form of intervention should still be able to accurately measure the gradual changes within the distribution of the public sphere. Advertisement’s aggressive appropriation of niches and free spaces is an indicator of the way in which all that once belonged to, if not to everyone, then at least the great majority, was broken and pocketed. In this way, the depressing and degrading nature of advertisement is a political issue because it is there that the mindless monotony of bourgeois society and culture are to be found in its most concentrated form. At the same time, advertising clearly illustrates the fact that the design of public spaces is by no means the result of collective negotiations. Advertising’s pretense thus raises questions about the ownership of public spaces, urban structures, the media and the internet. In the case of advertisements, it is clear that the public space, as a fundamental sphere of articulations and projections, is always already occupied. All those spaces which offer themselves to communication are already owned by PR companies. The diversified and formative power of advertisement displaces and marginalizes all other messages. And even if they are not blocked out, these messages are forced to rely – if they want to be heard – on the form and symbolic language of advertisement. The

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struggle against the public and communicative monopoly is always already a struggle against aesthetic and discursive impositions (sexism, racism, stereotyping of certain societal groups, specific forms of value transmission through advertisement, clichéing of almost all aspects of social life). Digital culture has always been sensitive to the problems the public sphere has to face within a capitalist structure of society because it takes as its working material the specific forms and spaces of social communication. Most of the time, it concerns itself with those trendsetting and contemporary fields which – in the not yet closed digital epoch – are especially endangered by economic mechanisms of closure. Fields which are often gawkily referred to as especially subject to “commercialization,” as if – within capitalism – there could be something not subject to such a process. In this way, the struggle to re-seize the monopoly held over public spaces has always been its concern. This fact is reflected in the forms of intervention proper to digital culture and can, for example, be illustrated by the work of the Graffiti Research Lab, which now has a branch in Vienna: for example, its activists use Laser Tags and mobile projection units to project dissident messages on suitable urban surfaces (skyscrapers, for example) from a great distance. They thus recall the classical graffiti movement, whose nightly spraying actions re-politicized urban spaces through sloganeering (which, in fact, outmatched advertisement’s slogans in their continuous repetition of the same), images or the secret language of so-called “tags” (an endless, monotonous and uncontrollable novel of minority movements within the public space) from the end of the 1970s on. But graffiti’s traditional repertoire and material aesthetic are altered through digitalization. Projected messages are temporary. They reject graffitis’ static form which can only too easily become an object of exploitation within the culture industry. Additionally, governmental mechanisms of repression aimed at stopping sprayers no longer have a hold. The LED-Throwies developed by the Graffiti Research Lab are thus regarded as a simple, “illuminating,” and successful means of intervention. In its deployment of “Open Source Tools,” the Graffiti Research Lab links its own forms of intervention to the general demands of Hacktivism in a way that points towards the self-understanding of the scene in general: its adopted means and aesthetics are part of a broader solidarity movement which treats city space and net space as principally congeneric places that have to be re-claimed in exactly the same way. The “Open Source” approach does for the realm of digital allocation and processing of information what graffiti does for the city space: like traditional public space,

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digital technologies are by no means free to access; they must become so. At the same time, this approach is – in its intended manner of usage – subject to economic limitations that have a tremendous impact on digital culture – and, subsequently: for the entire culture of our digital times as such. But the communication guerrilla’s strategies have already been taken over by advertisement. They themselves embody the reshaping advertisement has undergone; they are a mere mimicry of marketing, a signifying of those desiring machines which try to recalibrate our desire every time we use the internet, every time we go for a walk, etc. Th rough “viral” or “guerilla marketing,” they themselves are now subject to torsion and dispossession. This homonymy is also borne out by the fact that those working in public relations often have a biographical relation to counter cultures. In this way, the advertising industry is able to draw ideas from an inexhaustible reserve of creative workers who – by false promises of artistic freedom – were led into the afflictions of the ‘creative’ industry. Their experiences and abilities in relation to “Urban Hacking” – as a daily component of digital cultural praxis – are the human capital they can now sale. The above mentioned usability of counter culture grounds itself in this appropriation of human capital: the capitalist near-impossibility of not selling one’s labor to the highest bidder.

Which Space Has to Be Opened: Regressive and Emancipatory Perceptions of Space Linking concrete interventions with the general idea of “Open Source” is an important move beyond the, often deliberately, limited spheres of agency and responsibility proper to the historic paragons of the 1970s (city guerilla, etc.). These paragons often understood their work as legitimate forms of articulation in a regionally defined resistance. As such, they either tried to repeat the liberation movements of Africa, Asia, and South America within Western European urban spaces (Tupamaros, “City Indians”) or sought to identify seemingly authentic projects of resistance in rural spaces (for example, the wine grower initiative against the nuclear power plant Whyl am Rhein). But their increased interest in local and site-specific markers of difference (for example, dialect as a counter-position to standard language) gave way, in most cases, to identitarian references and authentic folk cultural projections. And, in some cases, even led to an unreflected idealization of folkish-separatist movements: the step from “Volk,” the German

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notion of people, which bears connotations of servitude and race, to folk often was not taken at all and the reactionary concept of “rootedness” remained exclusively positive within the left ist communities of the 1970s. All this secretly contributed to the institutionalization of anti-Americanism in left ist circles during the Vietnam War era. Americanism was taken as the law, as a globalized, culture-industrial form of adjustment, leveling differences and idiosyncrasies of local life, replacing them with standardized paradigms. These paradigms were identified, without further ado, with “American culture.” The fact that such ideological premises often translate into questionable (and sometimes even neo-right-wing) concepts of Heimat, the German word for homeland, the connotations of which are quite similar to that of “Volk,” or into the idea of a multiculturalism of pure ethnical collective subjects, is a result of the momentum of their conceptual setting. Where theory formation, as a corrective procedure, was finally dismissed, a vacuum-like revolutionary or alternative pragmatism arose: through an idealization of “direct action,” one’s own “anger,” as well as other sentimental witherings of the political (as Sponti-slogans such as “Sentiment and Relentlessness” or “Tenderness and Wrath” illustrate). Replacing the old dialectic, a new jargon of leftist authenticity established itself, which began to long for, as “Heimat,” that long fought after space. No longer was it claimed to be a place of articulation; instead, these leftists sought to preserve it as a space for regressively unarticulated identity. Th is is how that nature, which was later taken up by social-ecologism as necessary for preservation, was produced. This idealization of authenticity was constitutive of the bourgeois movement that transformed alternatives into strictly green alternatives: in most cases, those local references that had become detached from any meaning led to a romanticization of fictive or empirically given traditions. In the decadence of their history, many (formerly) left ist activists found themselves in projects of resistance that tried to escape from the ruthless praxis of modernization of the public realm, turning, instead, towards a fantasmatic “once upon a time” (e.g. the Berlin initiative “Sink Media Spree!”). These left ists made an – historically untenable – deduction from the current state of urban spaces that there must have been a pre-capitalist or early-bourgeois city-publicity where all subjects were able to equally participate in. Back then, “once upon a time,” when even lemonade and rock music were better, forms of human interaction must also, somehow, have been better.

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This belief is omnipresent in debates concerning the modification of urban environments and usually takes the form of that well-known culturepessimist dirge about the bereavement of the public space. What is deliberately overlooked in all this is the fact that such a public space – understood as a structure free from domination – never existed, because there is no such thing. As “public,” space has always already been subject to relations of domination. Th is even holds true for the agora and its ancient slave-owner-societies. The public space always appeared to its subjects as a distributed and – via specific relations of ownership and permission – preselected structure, which constituted itself through mechanisms of in- and exclusion. All historical concepts of urbanity contain such restrictive elements concerning usage, patterns and forms of movement, city access and structural markers for specific social groups or individuals (for example “women,” “people without residence,” certain ethnic groups). To try to save the “good old city” from a vaguely understood commercialization is traditionalism proper. By revitalizing the “old,” it only seeks to save the warranted identity and cultural competence it gained there. Such a critique does not deal with the economic foundation of capitalist society – i.e. the market; instead, it is preoccupied with the aesthetic user interface that this specific historical form of the market takes: what, in the form of a medieval market, appears as a contemplative event of lost intimacy of pre-bourgeois social relations, becomes threatening when it presents itself in the form of a single store within a supermarket chain. The fact that both follow the same principle and that, historically speaking, one would not be possible without the other, is deliberately ignored. As such, it is not capitalism as the social form of trafficking of goods and producers that disturbs the image of a city engulfed by advertising; instead, it seems to be this very form of annoyance that brings capitalism to mind. But this annoyance cannot, in turn, be separated from capitalism because it embodies the necessary historic state of its development. Only in the regressive wish for bourgeois Heimatpflege, the preservation of the homeland in its purported authenticity, can the two appear as distinct. Every bourgeois city has always been – in proportion to its time – a reification of the current development status of capitalist socialization. And the retrospective phantasmagoria of free accessibility remains, at best, a vague idea of utopian bourgeois theory formation that has never corresponded to any form of reality and will never do so. This is the core problem of bourgeois utopias, which cannot, in principle, take their

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fundamental ground into consideration. They are nothing but a traditional comedy of mistaken concepts in which the left ist-liberal “urbanism discourse” masks the necessary theoretical analysis of changed relations of ownership within the public sphere by – in the tone of tourism brochures – mourning the traditional city’s disappearance, producing the kitschy image of an all so beloved “Heimat.” If “Urban Hacking” wants to pursue its emancipatory agenda, its interventions must avoid this identity trap in two ways: Firstly, in the perspective in which it grounds itself. Although “Urban Hacking” occasionally has to orient itself towards local conditions and characteristics, it should still seek to develop the supra-local consciousness that necessarily arises out of its anchoring in the field of a globalized digital culture. The “World Wide Web” serves as “Urban Hacking’s” most important referential space. Yes, the internet’s globalism is recognized as a correlate of local environments. Both are subject to a wide variety of practical relations of dependency. The net, as a universal public space where long ago local specificities entered the public sphere, has given way to the imperative for a universalism of demand. The internet is equal to the universality of what is to be fought: because advertising strategies are, in most cases, similar in principle, whether they manifest themselves in street appearances, cultural forms of presentation (Product Placement, Event Sponsoring, editorial advertisement), the email inbox or a pop-up. Global harassment through optic, acoustic, and electronic spamming sharpens the consciousness of a global difficulty that “Urban Hacking” displays as constitutive of a “globalized movement” which is not, after all, preoccupied with “Heimatschutz” of endangered local forms of articulation but with a universal that should also be treated as local. Secondly, “Urban Hacking” conceptually refers to “Hacking” as a genuine form of resistance within the digital age, which manages to keep pace with its globalization. Hacking (in the narrow sense of a computerized attack on the knowledge of domination which has become inaccessible in computers and networks), in this context, refers to the following: the shaping of a new public space corresponding to digital environments. paraflows 09 seeks to realize these insights through the ways in which we present digital culture – as a (counter) public space and possibility of intervention. The form we chose in order to achieve this is a container installation at Karlsplatz, a central place in Vienna’s inner city. Karlsplatz

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has a long history of being a site for interventionist art and counter culture as part of tradition of interventionist projects that have taken place there. We want to follow this tradition and write it forth. Karlsplatz, as one of those historic places which are inseparably connected to the associational field “Vienna,” shall be disentangled from its local (e.g. touristic and identitarian) utilitarian relations. We already fi nd it linked. And we want to strengthen this link. This place is linked in the same way in which the local – fetishized in Austria already long before the ÖVP-FPÖ government – can be integrated in global reference systems, thus able to posit a universal demand. This is the genuine demand of digital art and culture. At Karlsplatz, we want to posit it anew.

Urban Hacking as a Strategy for Urban (Re-)Planning/Designing Melanie Gadringer

The term urban hacking is one of the many attempts to name a phenomenon that has been proven hard to pin down. Numerous, partly diff used terms like Adbusting, cultural jamming, cultural hacking manage to cover a lot and exclude little, revolving around an issue which even might be indefinable. It is possible and reasonable to have a description that limits yet does not exclude, and which describes the current state. Actions and activities by Hackers, such as actively reshaping urban spaces, open up possibilities, strategies and functions of Urban Hacking, a phenomenon that basically requests a creative reaction to the current urban realities. Literally speaking, urban hacking means the destruction of the urban and the rupture of the environment as well as its rules and systems. Something new is created by the deconstructions of the common surroundings and its symbols while a certain distance to the familiar arises. Given paradigms become defused and offer a completely new perspective on seemingly factual things. The concept of Hacking questions the city as a habitat and as an architectural construction, using modification, reinterpretation, over-identification and alienation.

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Alienation is based on the subtle adjustment of the portrayal of the familiar that illuminates new aspects of an issue, generates space for an unusual interpretation of ordinary events, or by means of shift ing perspectives, creates meanings that were neither predictable nor expected. In contrast, over-identification involves talking openly about familiar aspects that are considered taboo despite being common knowledge. As part of over-identification, the logic of prevailing paradigms, values, and standards with all their consequences and implications are only taken seriously at the point where such consequences are not (allowed to be) stated, and always swept under the carpet. Where alienation aims to create distance to an existing set of conditions, over-identification tries to dissipate the deliberate distance of individuals from a topic through discourse. (autonome a.f.r.i.ka. gruppe, Blissett & Brünzels 2001: 46)1 Urban Hacking creates a platform for thoughts and actions that have not been apparent before.

Urban Space as a Concept The city is a conglomerate of regulations, surveillance systems and structural guidelines of behaviour. A city planner is tasked with the duty of creating an environment, which is consequently presented to residents as a fait accompli. The aim is to design public and semi-private spaces in a way that provides the least amount of freedom for individual usage to the residents. Residents are guided by architecture, design and street furniture in order to interact with the urban environment in a certain way. A normative and simultaneously standardised behaviour is enforced with the intent of improving public security. Elements of urban planning, architecture as well as awareness of a continuous surveillance by video cameras is supposed to control and regulate social behaviour.

1 | autonome a.f.r.i.k.a. gruppe; Blissett, Luther & Brünzels, Sonja (2001):

Handbuch der Kommunikationsguerilla. Berlin, Hamburg, Göttingen: assoziation a

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This equates the development from the Foucaultesque Disciplinarian Society, in which one is surveyed and even punished for one’s deeds when necessary, to the Society of Control by Gilles Deleuze, where control is relied on for prevention. The International CPTED Association (ICA) was formed in 1996 with the specific purpose of controlling social behaviour in order to suppress crime. A team of town planners, architects, security experts and researchers worked on establishing the concept of CPTED – originally described in the 1970s by C. Ray Jeffery – and ensuring it was put into practice. (Stummvoll 2002: 123)2 CPTED stands for crime prevention through environmental design. It does not merely concern suppressing crime and avoiding architectural black spots, but also tries to control social interaction and prevent undesirable activity, as it is a clear fact that the design of space influences human behaviour. CPTED is primarily based on three basic principles: the territorial instinct, natural guidance systems and social control. (Stummvoll 2002: 124)3 The first principle, the production of territorial instincts and organisation, concentrates on the idea of assigning an identity to spaces, city squares or apartment buildings. Residents should feel territorial and gain with this a sense of responsibility. The design should convey the idea that there are indeed people responsible for certain locations. Ownership is clearly demarcated – public, semi-public and private areas are carefully determined. The approach is clear: whoever feels responsible acts accordingly. (Stummvoll 2002: 124)4 Another principle describes natural guidance: systems that consist of symbols, street signs and structural indicators that provide information on how residents should behave. Also street furniture, a feature familiar to all city-dwellers, demands that behaviour conforms whilst excluding any possibility of deviation from this pattern. For instance, benches are too short to lie on, sprinklers are timed in short intervals to drive people

2 | Stummvoll, Günter (2002). CPTED. Kriminalprävention durch Gestaltung des öffentlichen Raumes. Neue Kriminalpolitik. 14(4): 123-126 3 | Ibid. 4 | Ibid.

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away from lawns, and pungent cleaning agents are supposed to prevent the homeless from sleeping on the ground. (Wehrheim 2006: 112)5 While city inhabitants are calling for stronger measures to protect their privacy regarding the increasing levels of monitoring mechanisms, the CPTED recommends the expansion of technical equipment with social control. Observing and being observed implies an important mechanism of crime prevention and conveys a feeling of security. Visibly ‘open’ architecture is a clear example: glass as a construction material supports a natural system of control. It is not possible to conceal behind it. People can see each other, observe each other and thus, due to the possible scrutiny of others, are compelled to follow what is considered normal behaviour. CPTED works and many of the locations which have been produced in line with the criteria are pleasant and popular places that are distinguished by their clear arrangement. Nevertheless, one should be aware that the security and order gained with such an organisation is always associated with limitations to the personal freedom of the individual. Therein lays the rub of this concept: available room for manoeuvre is minimal and the residents become consumers of their own city. So it seems this is how the glut of regulations prompts some residents to infi ltrate, subvert and hack into these rules.

Hackers as Producers Hackers do not accept the given consumer’s position attached to their urban space. Instead of tolerating being a consumer of the city, the billboards or posters, they prefer acting themselves and modify to their likings. The term hacker has been borrowed from computer lingo. In everyday use the expression is used to describe someone who breaks into a computer system; decoding and often recoding it. Gaps in security are discovered, exploited and hence revealed. Hackers have to orient themselves within a system in order to create dis- or reorientation. They create similarities by means of small but significant interferences within the structure. These modifications are however responsible for fundamental changes in the system and can lead to total chaos. (Liebl, Düllo & Kiel 2005: 28)6 5 | Wehrheim, Jan (2006). Die überwachte Stadt – Sicherheit, Segregation und Ausgrenzung. Opladen: Barbara Budrich 6 | Liebl, Franz; Düllo, Thomas & Kiel, Martin (2005): “Before and After Situationism – Before and After Cultural Studies. The Secret History of Cultural Hacking” In: Düllo, Thomas & Liebl, Franz (eds.) (2005). Cultural Hacking. Kunst des strategischen Handelns. Wien, New York: Springer 13-47

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This is also the modus operandi of urban hackers, who change the structure of a city through seemingly subtle modifications. The changes, whilst understated, are not limited to the physical surfaces, rather they expose new levels of meaning decided on by the hackers. It seems as if Walter Benjamin’s flâneur has finally relinquished his role of a distanced observer in order to critically and actively intervene in city life. These interventions are unexpected. Urban Hackers position their comments in unusual places or unconventional contexts, forcing passers-by to deal with them. Whether one is held up in the morning rush due to a flashmob or is a lover or a hater of graffiti – through the reconfiguration of urban space, everyone who operates in this environment becomes a recipient, and hacking a “cultural occupation” (Kiel 2005: 331)7. Hackers are astute individuals who are passionately driven to dig beneath the surface. They establish networks, create new things, shape style and expertly dismantle a given thing, [...] simultaneously reassembling it and making it productive. Interaction is Hacking. Hacking is wild pleasure. (Kiel 2005: 331)8 However, Hacking remains an experimental discipline. Hackers are amateurs who cannot always be certain whether their handiwork will be a success, how their ‘audience’ will react or how they themselves will be involved in the crucial moment. (Liebl, Düllo & Kiel 2005: 29)9 Hacking is practice, interaction, performance and, at the same time, an exploration of one’s personal limits and those of the social environment. The urban mass media commonly found in public space is the main target of urban hackers. Billboards, info screens, newspapers and transport are all manipulated and made use of. These media forms mostly transmit oneway information that does not deign to allow passers-by the possibility toreact or exert an influence over the communication. Hackers take the

7 | Kiel, Martin (2005): “Hacking Is Wild Pleasure – Lexikalitäten und Stigmatisierungen” In: Düllo, Thomas & Liebl, Franz (eds.) (2005). Cultural Hacking. Kunst des strategischen Handelns. Wien, New York: Springer 329332 8 | Ibid. 9 | Liebl, Franz; Düllo, Thomas & Kiel, Martin (2005): “Before and After Situationism – Before and After Cultural Studies. The Secret History of Cultural Hacking” In: Düllo, Thomas & Liebl, Franz (eds.) (2005). Cultural Hacking. Kunst des strategischen Handelns. Wien, New York: Springer 13-47

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time and regard it as their right to contemplate on the aforementioned, also posting their commentary. Otto Mittmannsgruber and Martin Strauß hung posters in January 1999 that questioned the purpose of the adverts encountered in the street and confronted passers-by with questions that they themselves would not otherwise have posed: Does this advert disturb you? Does this poster influence your children? Does this advert deserve your attention? Articles and images in the daily newspaper Der Standard were also commented on in a similar manner. In their project, the artists got the media to scrutinise themselves and, by means of this action, highlight the issue of the unconsidered intake of the passers-by, who blindly accept what the media portrays.

Methods and Strategies The degree of seriousness in which cultural jamming is carried out is as varied as the interventions, regardless of whether the event serves to flippantly provoke or is a serious political protest. In all cases the consumer plays an active role, becoming a producer and redefining the public space according to their personal expectations. Their comments are manifested through the modification of existing objects, by the addition of something or someone, or by interfering with space and time, and using their own body as a tool for expression. (Liebl, Düllo & Kiel 2005: 25-26)10

Making a Mark The focus of the simplest form of cultural jamming concerns itself with leaving a mark on the city. The anonymity offered by a big city is exploited but also emphasised: the work, the legacy of the hacker, is written into the cityscape and intended to be clearly visible. The individual on the other hand, disappears behind their statement into obscurity, going into hiding in the city, remaining invisible. Some maybe banal, but nonetheless fundamental, examples of the above are the modifications made to advertisements with markers, something every one of us has seen before. Black teeth instead of a gleaming white smile; a supermodel who suddenly exhibits body hair, or a beard on the 10 | Liebl, Franz; Düllo, Thomas & Kiel, Martin (2005): “Before and After Situationism – Before and After Cultural Studies. The Secret History of Cultural Hacking” In: Düllo, Thomas & Liebl, Franz (eds.) (2005). Cultural Hacking. Kunst des strategischen Handelns. Wien, New York: Springer 13-47

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smooth face of a politician: these meddlings can be regarded as comments and statements: the personal business card that urban hackers leave in places of public communication. This activity can be regarded as an assault on the surfaces of the city and inferring from this, a critique of the superficiality of society. The hacker refuses to accept the flawless world of advertising. With a few lines in the right place, they expose its empty promises. They give short shrift to perfection that only works on billboards. A favoured strategy in the quest to leave a mark and make their presence felt is the use of tagging and stickers. Leaving behind a pseudonym, logo or self-appointed nickname corresponds even more directly with the urge to impress oneself upon the city; make the city one’s own, peg out a territory, leave a personal token. I was here, this is my domain, this is where I live and operate. The individual attempts to stand out from the crowd in order to guarantee a place for his- or herself in the metropolis. As soon as they have registered their mark in the cityscape, they take shelter in anonymity. The product is lasting and visible, whilst the individual has already been swallowed up by the urban masses to continue living their life as before. Within the subcultural scene, tags serve the purpose of asserting one’s identity by means of a creative ‘logo’.

Subjective Urban Beautification Graffiti and stencils are generally widely accepted, and are sometimes even regarded as works of art. Even more interesting than the graffitied images themselves, which are more or less successfully integrated as features of cityscapes, is the history of the perception. As graffiti gained popularity at the beginning of the 1980s, the struggle against sprayers was initiated. Often following the Broken Windows Theory, which the social scientists George Kelling and James Wilson described in 1982, Graffiti was doomed as criminal damage. This theory states that minor offences such as smashing in a window or graffiti could be regarded as the basis for vandalism. The space surrounding the broken window would be eschewed, leading to further deterioration. Small offences consolidate into a climate where crime – also serious crime – thrives. [It has been found that] previously damaged objects provoked further damage or theft, or at least proved to have a disinhibitory ef-

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fect. In a certain sense, a vandalised item paves the way for further defacement. (Streng 1999: 6)11 The temporary solution that has been arrived at nowadays is to allocate sprayers a zone in which they can legally work. The majority of large cities even have their own street art galleries. Th is has without a doubt not only aided the containment of wild sprayings, but also contributed to the perception of graffiti as an art form. These galleries are public exhibition spaces consisting of facades and walls for legal use. A pleasant movement, which has therefore met with little resistance, is Richard Reynolds’s blossoming Guerrilla Gardening Movement. Followers of the movement have devoted themselves to the beautification of their city, planting flowers on traffic islands, next to pavements, in concreted areas and grey housing estates, creating gardens or laying lawns. Seemingly overnight, green oases spring up in the concrete jungle. Green areas are generally considered to offer an intrinsically better standard of living, especially in cities. Yet officially one may only create a “high standard of living” where it is supposed to be: many guerrilla gardens are allowed to lie fallow and are subsequently removed.

Subtle Subversion With flashmobs, zombie walks and mass pillow fights, the body of the urban hacker gains significance, even when this body is no more than an anonymous shell that disappears into the city as quickly as it came. The interventions that celebrate the dynamics of physicality and masses of people are temporary instants free from municipal law, space and time. A flashmob is basically understood to be a get-together, at a certain time, of a mass of people, carrying out simultaneous actions. Mostly those actions in itself seem rather ordinary and gain their uniqueness through synchronism. Flashmobs take place in a public space and can transmit an array of messages. The choice of intervention, time or setting may provide social or political statements – or plain entertainment for the passers-by, and a stimulus to consciously observe and confront one’s surroundings. 11 | Streng, Franz (1999): Das “broken windows”-Paradigma – Kriminologische Anmerkungen zu einem neuen Präventionsansatz (=Erlanger Universitätsreden 57) Erlangen-Nürnberg: Friedrich-Alexander-Universität

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Time and space are occupied and modified, like for example with a freeze flashmob, where everyone freezes and time appears to stand still. Th is is particularly effective in situations when nobody actually has any time to spare: in February 2007, 200 people in New York’s Grand Central Station, a spot where nothing actually ever stops, stood still for five minutes.

Public Space as Cultural Space Cultural hacking in public spaces is indeed a more-than-adequate form of criticism and self-expression. Ultimately, it is also a presentation of a contemporary 21st century art form. The term ‘public’ not only refers to the non-museum venue, but also includes the audience that often without prior knowledge and even without any particular interest, are asked to interact with an artistic intervention. At very least, the public must relate to these interventions in the same manner that advertising and architecture are consumed as matter of fact. The project Subway Gallery by the group ImprovEverywhere not only demonstrated that art shifts into public space, but also public space can be declared and understood as art. ImprovEverywhere presented an ordinary underground station, something that has already been there and displayed that art is sometimes just a question of a relevant setting. The group converted a subway station into a gallery and consequently continued Marcel Duchamp’s idea of raising everyday objects to the level of art. Whilst Duchamp attempted to eliminate the object from everyday life at the beginning of the 20th century by placing it in a museum, almost 100 years later nothing had to move an inch and could stay right where it was. A bar, a coat stand, a cellist and tags, which displayed the objects of daily live as pieces of art: bins, fuse boxes and billboards became objéts d’art. Just like the incoming train was declared an art performance, repeating every four minutes. Hacking takes place wherever everyday life occurs, and whenever artistic intervention can make the highest possible impact as a cultural statement.

Literature Wehrheim, Jan (2006). Die überwachte Stadt – Sicherheit, Segregation und Ausgrenzung. Opladen: Barbara Budrich Stummvoll, Günter (2002). CPTED. Kriminalprävention durch Gestaltung des öffentlichen Raumes. Neue Kriminalpolitik. 14(4): 123-126

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Jefferey, C. Ray (1971). Crime Prevention through Environmental Design. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Liebl, Franz; Düllo, Thomas & Kiel, Martin (2005): “Before and After Situationism – Before and After Cultural Studies. The Secret History of Cultural Hacking” In: Düllo, Thomas & Liebl, Franz (eds.) (2005). Cultural Hacking. Kunst des strategischen Handelns. Wien, New York: Springer 13-47 Kiel, Martin (2005): “Hacking Is Wild Pleasure – Lexikalitäten und Stigmatisierungen” In: Düllo, Thomas & Liebl, Franz (eds.) (2005). Cultural Hacking. Kunst des strategischen Handelns. Wien, New York: Springer 329-332 autonome a.f.r.i.k.a. gruppe; Blissett, Luther & Brünzels, Sonja (2001): Handbuch der Kommunikationsguerilla. Berlin, Hamburg, Göttingen: assoziation a Streng, Franz (1999): Das “broken windows”-Paradigma – Kriminologische Anmerkungen zu einem neuen Präventionsansatz (=Erlanger Universitätsreden 57) Erlangen-Nürnberg: Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Eschbach, Achim & Walter A. Koch (eds.) (1987). A Plea for Cultural Semiotics (=Bochum Publications in Evolutionary Cultural Semiotics 2). Bochum: Brockmeyer

Spandrel Evolution. Emergent Spaces of Resistance in the 21st Century Bonni Rambatan

The theme of this year’s Paraflows is “urban hacking”. If anything, it paints an a priori image of hackable spaces and urbanities – or, more precisely, the problematization of the dynamic relations of spaces and people; the dialectics of the public, private, and everything in between. I started my investigation of spaces by conducting a Google search of certain images. I searched many things, from “teenage boy’s bedroom” to “Hong Kong”. The mighty G returned to me with various images: many are similar, but some stand out being different. And I mean really different, as different as – as many would have it – ads versus real life. But wait. Ads versus real life? We must be very careful here. It is now an all-too-common and even corny notion to contrast the two; as if the glitzy, never-sleeping, beautiful-dirty-rich Hong Kong is a simulacra and their numerous rooftop slums a reality. The fact of the matter is that they are both “reality”, they are both experienced as real, in real people’s daily lives – and, of course, being the good Lacanian that I am, they are both a fantasy, since it is only through fantasy that one experience reality. But we’ll leave the fantasy aside for now. If both are on the same level, neither “more real” than the other, the question to ask is rather: whose reality? So now instead of seeing the problem as representations of the same object with different degrees of reality, we see the problem as various presentations of that same object in the same level of fantasy-reality circuit. Th is is

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a crucial move: we have just passed from the general notion of “the ruling class controls the media through industrial reproduction of hyperreality” to “objects appear differently in space to different classes”. We have disrupted the perceived common notion of an all-powerful ideology and enabled the possibility, qua appearance in space, of true resistance. Hence our next question: how do things appear in space? We can digress from the previous paragraph that appearance is always already politicized. But how does it do so, exactly? Fortunately a starting point to answer this question can be found in your basic design 101 handbooks: when you design something (i.e. produce something, make it appear in space, or make it appear differently, as in the case of packaging, branding, etc), you are usually told to be wary of two different aspects of design: function and aesthetic. Let us now put our design 101 handbook next to your Kierkegaard collection. See any resemblance? For one thing, we find an explicit use of the word “aesthetic”, and an implicit similarity of the ethical and the functional (both involve deploying logical calculations about good and bad, etc). Could this be more than a coincidence? Let us set a third row consisting of Lacan. Is not the functional a Symbolic aspect (practical realities, signs that has been commonly agreed upon, etc), while the aesthetic an Imaginary aspect (notions of beauty, atmospheres reminding us of certain conditions and places, etc)? Hence the question: what corresponds to the religious phase of existence, the Real order of presentation? Th is is what does not exist in our design 101 handbook, and what I attempt to theorize in this essay. I’d first like to draw attention to the phrase “taking place”. Now, there is a difference between “space” and “place”, which can lead us a whole new philosophical discussion going back to Aristotle and beyond, but we can leave that aside for now. For the time being, suffice it to say that “place” connotes more of a containing function in relation to the objects that present themselves within it. But instead of just being present in a place, we sometimes talk of things “taking place”. And when things take place, they are usually called “events” and not “objects” (hence the potential of a Badiouvian resonance with theories of spatiality). But what does it mean, exactly? “Taking place” indicates dynamic, action. But it also indicates that a minimum traumatic effect is maintained. An accident took place while you had lunch, but it cannot be said that your lunch took place while there was an accident (unless we are dealing with a place in which accidents are very common and your lunch consisted of world-breaking live octopus consumption). Thus here we find the third aspect, the equivalent of the Kierkegaardian Religious and the Lacanian Real: I call it: the traumatic function; the taking place of an event which

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shifts the coordinates of daily reality. It is a function of space in which what appears are neither practical functionalities nor aesthetic decorations, but new possibilities. This, then, is the key to ideological resistance in its spatiality. Resistance must introduce trauma in such a way that new things – new possibilities of constellations, arrangements, systems, etc, be it from old or new objects – can appear. I also believe that this is what “urban hacking” is all about: tampering with space to expose its artificiality, its historicity, the class antagonism that lie beneath its apparent stability, to strip its objects bare of any hitherto perceived “natural” connections and “meant-to-be” functions. Urban hacking creates new spaces of emergence for new multiplicities, thus new possibilities, to appear. This leads to the definition of spandrels. Spandrels are excess space created by the tension between functionality and design, for example those triangular spaces between an arched door and its frame or between forked roads. Usually, spandrels have nothing to do with trauma, since they are most often dedicated towards an aesthetic function (carvings above doors, gardens on road forks). However, what I wish to problematize here is the notion of “excess space” – the phrase assumes an a priori condition that the usage of space is a natural one, in which excesses are given, fi xed, and measured by this naturalness. Antagonisms, however, speak differently: from – for lack of a better term – “object antagonisms” which forces you to pile up books where they should not be (they clash with other objects due to lack of space, etc), to class antagonisms, which spawns slums, favelas, and so on, all expose and question this seemingly natural relation of what is fitting and what is excessive, and furthermore who decides such rules. Urban hacking is merely a conscious effort to ask – through action or art, and as loudly as possible – such questions. What about the 21st century? We should take note that the possibilities of hacking itself evolves, because so does our notions of space itself. One can easily cite examples of the evolving concept of space throughout societies, from Roman city-states to industrial work-home axis. In the 21st century, our lives are more and more integrated with information technologies and the Internet, and thus a new concept of space begins to form itself. The private and the public blend together in the virtual, connections are practically instantaneous, and new forms of play from activism to vandalism begin to present themselves. From flash mobs, billboard liberations, guerilla gardening, Project Chanology, to the Habbo Hotel and various other 4chan raids, Wikileaks, and P2P legal battles, are but wonderful examples of new modes of resistance, of how these technologies influence space and its hacking possibilities. Will it solve real and actual problems,

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or will it just be another fad, another insignificant playful gesture not only incapable but distracting us away from true ideological resistance? There is unfortunately no correct universal and precise answer to this question, as it is very much like asking why an infant is playing with his Duplo instead of learning to read. Granted, reading is of much importance, but so is getting to know your space and the possibilities it presents to your existence. Progress is about discovering the provisional nature of space (structures of existence) and ownership (structures of authority), about hacking and playing around. For while it may not lead to direct solutions, it encourages new thinking and revitalizes old thinking with new realms of possibilities. Technology is never merely the development of new tools; it is at the same time the development of new perceptions of environment, society, and self/body. It is an ontological horizon, since it deals directly with how things present themselves in space. Hence the importance of urban hacking: it realizes, qua its effects, space in its raw, distilled, uncharted form, in which power is suspended and play is the main dynamic. The 20th century has been one of representations: the problem was that of oppression and discrimination, of imbalance in representations, both in degrees of reality and vocal volume. The method was to expose power mechanisms that lie behind the industrial societies that produce those representations. Solution in those days still meant a classical revolution: either taking back the means of production, picketing on the streets, exposing scandals, or going on a strike. This new century, as has been evoked in the beginning, is one of presentations: the problem is that of producing the right stuff – of presenting the right stuff – by making the best out of these new, hybrid spaces created by information technology and the Internet. It is a century of cynicism in which scandals are always-already exposed and taking to the streets becomes a favorite sport, and thus a century in which old ways of revolutions no longer work. It is the quintessential Foucauldian society of control at its finest – this much is clear to anyone who tries to protest today, only to fi nd that ideology itself already expects you to subvert it. How, then, to conduct revolutions? The thesis I offer from examining these spatial phenomena is that the method today has to deal directly with spatiality, exposing not only power mechanisms that produce representations but the raw form of presentations themselves. For with these new technologies, we are already the creators of our representations. In this century, with these new emergent, hybrid spaces, resistance no longer means taking back the means of production, but taking place as a means of production.

Playing with the Built City Eleanor Saitta

The human race is an urban race. We live in cities in ever-increasing numbers – as of the end of 2008, more than half the world’s population is urban. Cities unavoidably represent huge conglomerations of wealth and embed and reproduce the socioeconomic hierarchies of the societies that build them. Life in the city changes us, necessarily – our environment feeds back into our actions, defi nes what we can and cannot do, and shapes our desires. The postmodern city of post-Fordist capitalism frequently changes us in ways which we do not like. We may find many good things in the city – community, culture, friends, and resources, just to name a few, but we also find a totalizing schema of consumption, social alienation, hypernormativity, and disengagement. As individual citizens and residents, we frequently think of ourselves as having little or no control over our environment. Cities, as reproductions of power structures, are often hostile to the changes we wish to see in them. Cities are also systems, however, and within the hacker culture we understand how to change systems, whether or not they wish to be changed. This paper is addressed to people, potentially but not necessarily members of this culture, who are interested in directly improving the places they live on any level. In this paper, we will examine schemas that can help us understand cities as systems, understand the structure of control embodied in the functioning of those systems, and see how we can respond to those systems. Given the nature of cities as embodiments of power structures, it should be obvious that an apolitical urbanism is impossible by definition – the left and the right view those embodied power structures very different-

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ly and react to them in different ways. Above and beyond this, the tools we use for understanding – sociology, history, geography, and economics, among others – are not neutral and demand a political interpretation. As we explore the city and our responses to it, we are interested in quality of life for all citizens. The specific quality we care about is not the more traditional efficiency-based criterion used in most urban planning, but a more human one. Is the city alive? Do the people enjoy it, not in a shallow, consumptive, Dubai-hedonism sense, but in a deeper way, the quiet pleasure of time well lived? Does the city support play and spontaneity? These questions are opposed to a mindset of urban planning based on the maximization of extracted value and efficient conduction of business. Thus, we are necessarily opposed to the core processes of capitalism. Moreover, by acting as individuals instead of through commercially entrenched governance, we take another political stand. Traditional civic engagement is a good thing, but we want to poke cities in the ribs and make them squawk.

How We Understand the City Architects and urban planners have created many systems to represent how we see the city. Most of these traditional constructions provide an inhuman view of space. Th is is useful for urban planning, where planners need a theoretically unbiased statistical vehicle for policy decisions, but they do not help us see the subjective and the human. Instead, we will use three less concrete but more appropriate concepts as tools for examining how we interact with the world around us and how specific interventions can change that. If we are to intervene in the city, we need a rubric to evaluate the potential of our interventions, and these tools can help provide that.

The City We See The city you live in is not the same as the concrete, factual city; it is not the city outlined on the map, which is also not the real city. When you interact with the city, you deal with one small corner of it – for me, the apartment where I live when in Seattle, the cafe where I write, the local hackerspace where I work on projects, etc. I see one facet of the city, but miss many, many others; the same is true for everyone else. Moreover, the significance I attribute to the spaces I interact with and the actions I take, their affect and meaning, is not the same as that attributed by others. While we may walk down objectively identical streets, their subjective identity is different.

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This difference extends further, to the literal structure of our subjective cities. When people navigate, they construct a mental map, with some set of nodes connected by paths. Nodes are chosen by a combination of relevance to the navigational problem (in terms of how they identify a branch in a path, define a portion of a path, or mark a region or its boundary), and their subjective importance. While the nodes, paths, and regions identified by different people will share features, there will also be differences; different people habituate different paths. One person chooses one route between two points, someone else another, and they each may not realize that the other route is even possible – their cities have different shapes. One person walks by the cafe on the way to the office, another by the grocery store, despite walking down the same physical street. One person may experience the boundary of a neighborhood in one place, someone else in another; a map may record yet a third line. Boundaries, especially, are messy, conflicted objects, and here maps are fictions more often than not, except in a purely legal sense. These literal differences reinforce the subjective differences of how people understand their cities. This understanding of an environment is called an “imaginary”. The scope of the imaginary is not only personal understanding of the shape of an environment but also the myths and stories people tell about their city and its emotional character. The production of a common imaginary that is unified to any extent is a cultural process. People talk about their experience of the city; they share experiences. The city exists in conversation, writing, image, and music, all of which shape the shared imaginary. To a great degree, the imaginary is the city. Change the imaginary and you change the city.

Affordances The notion of an affordance, or “how the perceived and actual properties of an object. . . determine how it can be used”, is an idea used in industrial design. The classic example is the hardware on doors – a flat plate affords pushing a door open, while a handle which can be grasped affords pulling. Affordance mismatch occurs when an object works differently than its appearance suggests or when the object does not satisfy user desires for objects of its type. In the first (more common) case, a door has a handle which affords pulling but which the user must push in order to open the door. In the second case, they might wish to shut the door for privacy, but it is transparent. Affordances as an idea are rarely applied to city design, but the concept can be very useful. Specifically, we can think about affordances for living, or the perceived and real properties of a space that determine how it can

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be lived in, in a fully contextual manner. A bench on a city street has one immediately obvious affordance, sitting. If we build a bench which is more comfortable to sit on, more durable, or that uses less material, this is just industrial design. To move beyond industrial design we need to examine the context people will use the bench in. Many urban benches are designed to meet a bare minimum specification – they provide a place to sit and wait, where one is off the ground and marginally comfortable. In especially beneficent cases, the bench may even be partially shielded from the elements. These benches are often fairly hostile to their users, actively discouraging long stays with relative discomfort. They may even require active work on behalf of the user to stay on the bench. It is rarely possible to lie down on a public bench. This only permits a single use context. What if, instead of only waiting briefly, we want to sit for a while and enjoy the sunshine? Or eat lunch? What about having a conversation with a friend? These are all reasonable actions, and they imply different considerations for the arrangement of the bench in each case. Perhaps instead of sitting the bench to face the street directly, it could face down the street toward oncoming traffic, still allowing a user to watch for a bus but also providing a more hospitable context, inclusive of the life of the sidewalk, so they can sit and people-watch. A bench might include a thickened armrest, to make balancing a drink and a sandwich less precarious. If we look at how benches are used, other affordances appear – people frequently use them as ad-hoc signboards and bike racks, for instance. We can improve their functionality in these respects and shape how that use is made, e.g. by building a bench where a bike can easily be locked to the back, but not the front, which avoids obstructing people sitting on the bench and encourages users with different needs to share the resource. And so on; a simple bus stop bench can be altered to afford a much wider variety of activity. In short, new affordances for life can be created.

The Liveness of Spaces Because we are concerned about the quality of the experience of the city, as shaped by its built form, we need some kind of evaluation criteria for that form. Functional efficiency, while technically part of our evaluation criteria, is not our main concern. We are also not interested in a purely aesthetic judgment. The quality we are looking for is not defi ned by architectural style or even beauty. Instead, we are interested in the degree to which a space supports everyday life. Th is concept, originally due to Christopher

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Alexander1, is fairly subtle and complicated. There is no single objective scale on which we can rate the life of a space, but we can reliably (and generally cross-culturally) compare spaces and come to an understanding which most people will agree with, after some consideration. Th is suggests that some degree of commonality of human experience affects the universal impression of space. Spaces which better support life allow people to more readily experience the kind of pleasure that we want in our cities. The liveness of a space is not the same as the delightfulness of a space; the space may cause delight, but this is not the goal. Take, as an example, two open squares between buildings. They are each about 25m across and surrounded on all sides by three or four story buildings. One of them is a perfect square, a flat expanse of asphalt with openings exactly at each corner. The other is irregular, the front of some buildings pushed in a bit and others stepped back. Its surface is cobbled, except for a band defining a path around the edge 2m back from the buildings and 3m wide. In the center, a small stone plinth 3m across is slightly raised. Neither square is otherwise distinguished and yet, if there are half a dozen tables with chairs and umbrellas sitting out in each square on a nice summer day, the second square will be much more populated. Some people may see the second square as more beautiful, but the difference is more subtle than that. The irregularity and the differentiation of the space directly make it feel more alive, and this liveness makes the space more habitable. The humanity of a space is a concrete aspect of that space; it is closer to the engineering considerations of a building than to the cultural meaning ascribed to the completed space. A positive imaginary can help dead space a little, but no amount of positive association will make people want to spend time in a dismal and uninteresting alleyway when other, more living options are available. On the other hand, a more living space provides a richer surface for the imagination. A more complex imaginary can take root there. Liveness is no more optional in good space than any other more traditionally functional criterion is if people are to use the space. The study of what makes a space more alive is complex, but small changes can make large differences. It is not necessary to rebuild spaces from scratch to repair them.

1 | Christian Alexander: The Phenomenon of Life: Nature of Order, Book 1: AnEssay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, CESPublishing, 2001

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Capitalism and the City With this set of tools, we can begin to frame actions in their context. To act, however, we need to understand why cities take the forms they do. We will first look at macro-scale economic pressures, and then in the next section at their more concrete ramifications. An understanding of the forces that have historically shaped urban space will help us obtain a meaningful context for the modern cities we work in. A city can be defined by the economic activity it supports. The city supports this activity, and this activity generates the city. People congregate for many reasons, only some of which are economic, but people trade in order to live, regardless of de jure policy. Even in theoretically anti-capitalist societies, trade shapes and alters the city. In industrial and post-industrial capitalist societies, market forces shape the city more profoundly than any other factor. This purely economic understanding of a city problematizes our notion of it as a living, human space, and we will see that economic processes dehumanize space.

The Extraction of Value Capitalism provides a central schema for urban life that optimizes for things disconnected from and frequently in opposition to quality of life. Capitalism forces all spaces and activities to be valued for their potential to generate wealth. Capitalist pressure attempts to reduce the role of the state to maximizing the potential extraction of value for enterprises while assuming as much risk and cost from those enterprises as possible. Whenever people create spaces or undertake activities for other purposes, the capitalist schema marginalizes and forces the spaces and activities (and sometimes the people) to both continually justify themselves and compete for scarce leftover resources, frequently constructed as charity, while more traditional economic activity is unquestioned. In more geographic terms, this yields the concept of the “highest and best use” – wherein there is pressure to convert land currently under economically marginal use (such as an artists’ collective) to a more profitable use (such as a luxury condominium development) – and the related concept of a “rent gap”, the difference in income to the owner and city between what is currently realized by the property and what could be extracted from it. Many of the things that improve quality of life – parks, affordable and useful public transportation, social services, and cultural programs, to name a few, are considered in capitalist circles to be either an overly expensive drain on the tax base or to be services which should not be pro-

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vided municipally because they could instead be provided by a profitable private enterprise. The time scale on which capital operates has an effect here as well. Enterprises attempt to maximize profit over the course of at most a few years. This shortsightedness has profound effects for how enterprises operate; the destruction of longer-term resources for short-term gain is considered to be wholly justifiable. This causes further concern for us, because many of the things which improve quality of life do so over a long time scale.

Coercive Efficiency and Competition between Cities Globalization inside the capitalist schema alters the scale at which capitalist processes operate, turning what were previously disconnected national markets for major commodities and a relatively disjoint set of local markets for minor commodities into a fractured collection of interlinked markets operating at both the global and local scale where localities compete directly against each other. In globalized post-Fordist capitalism, capital is far more mobile than labor is, permitting business to rapidly move operations and switch markets to take advantage of small or transient efficiencies. The interlinking of markets and the mobility of capital force localities to attempt not only to maximize profit for local organizations, but also to attract new enterprise in the global market. Th is produces a coercive efficiency. If any city decides maintaining parks is too expensive and that they should instead direct money towards tax subsidies for new international investment, this creates an immediate responsive pressure on all other cities to do the same lest they lose business to the theoretically more enterprise-friendly location. The pace of capital mobility means that even projects which will directly increase local efficiency on a longer term, like worker education, are frequently underfunded and receive little corporate support due to their short-term costs. Unlike projects which directly provide short-term profit to enterprise, municipalities must fund and establish such activities without corporate support.

Capital Sinks, Urban Planning, and Urban Renewal The end result of a capitalist economy is the concentration of wealth in an increasingly small owning class; this is an inescapable structural effect, especially in post-Fordist capitalism. This causes two problems, closely related. The first is the dissatisfaction of the working classes, whom the state and owning class must control, and the second is the problem of excess capital – the wealth of the owning classes must have some outlet.

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A number of different strategies of control have evolved for the first problem, like public education systems and mass media. One tactic for both problems that is particularly relevant here is the use of large-scale urban renewal as a tactic of civil control, a means to enforce class boundaries, and an effective capital sink. Baron Haussman, under Napoleon, performed the fi rst large-scale urban renewal in Paris, starting in 1852. Work gangs demolished large areas of what he deemed slums – or, in other words, traditional working-class neighborhoods from medieval Paris. They built broad avenues to allow goods to be moved more efficiently, at the cost of destroying much of the street life. The working class was dispersed, destroying existing organizations and making the formation of new ones more difficult. The wide streets were also designed to allow the rapid movement of troops and even artillery inside the city core, to allow the army to swift ly put down any uprising that did occur. Housing for the growing bourgeoisie classes was built along the avenues, providing a visible class marker. Much work was put into regularizing the city, even down to ensuring the regular spacing of trees, further promoting an atmosphere of uniformity and control. The working classes soon established new neighborhoods, as the reasons for their existence had not changed – the work had merely further impoverished them by removing what infrastructure they had. None of this was accidental; the language used to describe the work being done was very plain about its intentions. This was repeated when Robert Moses, the infamous New York City planner of the mid-20th century, attacked the Bronx – in his words, “when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis you have to hack your way with a meat cleaver.” Although massive urban renewal projects are slightly less common in the modern West, they are still occurring in other parts of the world, and the same tactic is used on a smaller scale (with more media-savvy presentation) – see the current Olympic redevelopment work in London. The concept of eminent domain, the legal framework which allows the state to seize land (with frequently only nominal compensation) for some redevelopment purposes, has even been extended in recent years in the US to further favor large enterprise and capital accumulation – in the landmark case Kelo v. City of London, the city of New London Connecticut seized land to be used for a purely private function, a pharmaceutical research facility, with the justification that it would increase tax revenues to the city – a higher and better use.2

2 | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London

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The Concrete Expressions of Capital in the City The same forces that cause major disruptions and distortions of city form also affect cities in more discrete ways. These more concrete changes have just as much impact on our lived experience, and they also provide a more accessible approach for response and action. The deep systematic effects of capitalist urbanity can be countered (to some degree) by mass organized civic involvement. While critical, this is not the type of action we are concerned with here.

Suburbanization and Zoning The changes in transit technology at the end of the 19th century and during the early 20th century profoundly reshaped cities in the West. Before the transit revolution, people with the means to do so lived close to where they worked to avoid a long walk. As new transit technologies (first electric trams, and then automobiles, motor buses, and motor trucks) appeared, the better-off moved outside of the urban core, affording themselves room and privacy. This process continued (again, in the West) throughout much of the 20th century, accelerating after the Second World War. Zoning laws first appeared in Germany in the 1870’s, and spread from there, first reaching America in 1910 and becoming relatively universal there by the mid-1920’s. At first, they were used primarily as a tool to prevent particularly noxious heavy industry from building too near to residential areas, a generally agreeable goal. Their uses rapidly expanded as new building technology allowed for taller construction and as new transit technologies and the modern project reconfigured the desired shape of the city into one where all activities were strictly partitioned into separate commercial, residential and industrial districts and started the process of the suburbanization. One of the primary drivers of the popularity of zoning in America was the desire (among developers as much as land owners) to protect the value of single-family homes in the suburbs as developers encouraged families to put the majority of their income into a single undiversified asset. This split between actions in support of the general public good (protection from noxious heavy industry) and actions in support of class and capital values (protection of property value) defines much of the history of zoning. Zoning has been both an occasional tool of the progressive left, and, more frequently, a tool of socioeconomic control on the part of the state and capital. Much of the progressive work of zoning laws had been previously accomplished by a range of nuisance laws which were sufficient

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to handle the case of most heavy industry, but not to deal with the new flexibility of the automobile, bringing with it the threat of class integration. Specific tools for class segregation in zoning have included: minimum lot sizes and minimum house sizes per lot; prohibitions on multi-family residences, even if they follow the formal typology of other local buildings; land use patterns which require car ownership (and frequently, multiplecar ownership with at least one car per person, not just one per family); and a prohibition of any live-work land use, even where the commercial use would be nondisruptive. Zoning districts tend to operate in conjunction with other administrative regions, including school and tax districts, allowing for segregation of other services along class lines without any explicit legislative requirements. This same segregation also allows silent racial discrimination despite de jure bans, and is an active tool for the enforcement of traditional family structures. As recently as 2006 in the United States, the state has actually forced families with unmarried partners out of houses they owned for violating zoning laws against multiple adults sharing a residence.3 In cases where progressive organizations have challenged this kind of class discrimination zoning, some municipalities have responded by enacting “growth management” regulations, preventing any new development. The environmentalist left has found itself complicit in some of these actions, especially in the area of open space demarcations. Where zoning laws have not been sufficient, homeowners’ associations have stepped in, formed by the initial developers of a subdivision as a way of assuring the new owning class of the continued value of their investment and providing a much higher degree of local control and uniformity than possible under pure zoning law. The selective enforcement common among legal structures designed to reinforce social structures is literally written into zoning law with the concept of a variance, where planning boards may exempt developments deemed sufficiently acceptable from large portions of zoning law. It is also common, especially in urban developments, for planners to create a system of incentives, whereby they grant a developer variances in exchange for building in public amenities; for instance, taller allowed building height in exchange for the creation of a public plaza. As the developer is frequently actively disinterested in bringing life from the uncontrolled, class-integrated street onto their property where their tenants might have to deal with it, these plazas are almost universally dead space in our conception of the liveness of spaces – barren expanses of concrete with neither shelter nor facility, and heavily patrolled by private security and 3 | Loving v. City of Black Jack, 2006.

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video surveillance. In other cases, the developer will design the amenities as actual, functional space, but will construct them to make the space appear as private and closed to the public as possible, discouraging nontenant use.

Gentrification and the New Urban Core After World War II, capital in America (and to a lesser degree in other Western countries) shifted from the cities to the suburbs. The urban core was suffering from neglect due to the exigencies of war and the Depression and much of the housing stock was in poor condition. In America, the GI Bill allowed many returning soldiers who otherwise would have been unable to afford homes to buy in. Insurance companies, considering the housing stock in the city to carry greater risk, frequently refused to allow mortgages there. Additionally, urban cores were still designed around the streetcar; America’s newfound fascination with the car fit no better in urban environments than it does now. Suburbanization had started many years previously, but these factors combined to radically accelerate it. Lacking capital and emptied of all inhabitants but those unable to escape, city centers became as undesirable as they had been culturally defined to be. The countercultural movements, starting in the 50’s and 60’s, moved into this vacuum. In the city, they found cheap space which allowed a kind of freedom unavailable in the restrictive suburbs, at the price of a lack of stability and social convenience they were more willing to tolerate. In other words, they found the affordances necessary for the kind of lives they wanted to live. Sometimes they took over abandoned property but in other cases they displaced existing residents of the neighborhoods they moved into, especially as they arrived in greater numbers. Many of these epithetically termed “urban pioneers” had access to outside resources, whether in the form of college degrees or inherited wealth, or simply a middle or upper class background. As they moved in, they generally kept to their own circles and reinforced perceived racial and class boundaries, instead of integrating into the communities of their neighbors. They worked to improve their neighborhoods but much of the value of those improvements stayed in their circles. As new businesses moved into their neighborhoods to service the new residents, those businesses frequently displaced existing ones. Eventually, people outside of these neighborhoods noticed the newly thriving “cool” urban communities, and the next stages of gentrification occurred, where those countercultural elements were driven out of the neighborhoods they had “found” by increasing rents and cultural change. Displaced, they moved to the next disadvantaged neighborhood where the process repeated itself.

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This process of gentrification has been one of the dominant mechanisms of neighborhood-level change in Western cities over the past fi ft y years, excepting large-scale urban renewal projects (which also generally have a gentrifying effect). The above example, while prototypical in the US, is hardly the first case, nor will it be the last; Vienna after the First World War offers another example, particularly interesting because of the city government’s response. As Austria was suddenly forced to compete on the world market (coercive efficiency), the tight supply of housing in Vienna caused serious problems. In response, the Viennese government enacted a payroll tax and purchased fully one-third of all property in the city, putting up a huge number of apartment buildings designed to be lived in by citizens of all classes and carefully integrated into the fabric of the city. The city gave the apartments away in a socially equitable manner. This large-scale collective action is unthinkable in a modern neoliberal city, a fact that poses a problem for communities attempting to respond to gentrification. Several tactics to oppose gentrification have been tried in various areas, to different degrees of success, including rent controls, housing subsidies, and various kinds of community organization. The most successful schemes have involved common ownership of resources; without ownership, it is difficult for communities to resist the coercive effects of capital. However, the capital required for establishing common ownership rarely exists and the time scale the modern real estate market moves at rarely provides sufficient time for entrenchment. This is problematic for both existing neighborhoods and arts communities that move into those neighborhoods. As we look forward to increasing oil shortages and the bubble-driven results of chronic suburban overbuilding, the motion from the suburbs back into the city will accelerate, further driving the disadvantaged back out of the cities and out to the periphery.

Commercialization and Privatization of Public Space In renaissance Europe, the plaza was considered the heart of the city; in smaller cities, the church, the main administrative buildings, and the homes of the city’s wealthiest citizens were generally found around it. On market days, it became the prime commercial space of the city. In larger cities, the plan was more varied and the square less singular, but the typology remained. The social life of the city revolved around the square, frequently literally. The plaza, and civic public space in general, took on a very important role in the city, becoming a place where culture was constructed, where social interaction occurred, and where ideas where contested.

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This notion of the public did not appear in Europe until after the feudal structures of the pre-renaissance era had been replaced with the idea of the nation as a shared imaginary and the feudal economy had begun to be replaced by a capitalist one. The public is literally the child of the bourgeoisie, as prior to their existence the figures we might now consider public were the literal embodiment of the state. The king could not be a public figure when he was the state, because the public cannot exist without the private; when it became possible for the king to be private, he no longer was the literal embodiment of the state and the transition to a nation of the imaginary and a market economy was under way. The public is differentiated from the private by the fact that access to the public is not controlled. The tightly guild-controlled town markets of medieval Europe were not sufficient to create a public. Only when this was supplemented by the advent of large-scale inter-city trade operating outside of this schema of control did a public appear. Any space where the introduction of divergent ideas can be blanket-restricted cannot be considered public. In fact, we can define public spaces as those spaces which are openly contested by different groups, where different ideas and understandings come together. Th is leads to the standard were reasonable actions must be permitted in public space, regardless of their relevance to the nominal purpose of the space. While harassing individuals need not be permitted, but general religious proselytization or political campaigning must be. These activities define public space as contested space. Historically speaking, access to public spaces has been restricted to only a small subset of the population. Prior to the advent of feminism and the related social changes at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, women had no access to public space in the west, categorically and often by law, and even now our access is contested. Similar lines have been and are drawn on race, ability, class, sexuality, and other identity categories. This contestation of access to public space on social lines is one axis that distorts public space. In modern society, public space is theoretically defined as space where no one group has any greater access right, but social enforcement of access restriction makes this de facto not true. Many restrictions on the use of public space are only enforced selectively, depending on the social group membership of the potential offender. As the social center of a city, public spaces are desirable frontage for retailers, especially in areas frequented by the upper classes. This immediately creates a second axis of distortion, where the mechanisms of social control act to preserve the economic function of high value space. Unsurprisingly, this has led to the creation of areas taking the form of public space but not the function, and attempting to divorce the economically useful congregation of people from the socially divisive and potentially

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economically harmful aspects of a true public space. The first private creation of public space came barely after the creation of the concept of public, when the Earl of Bedford built Covent Garden in London in the early 17th century, and the first large truly private spaces explicitly mimicking the social function of public spaces were built during the 19th century. However, it was the suburbanization of the city and the appearance of car culture that gave private-public spaces their current form. This shift gave developers the ability to move spaces outside of the city and to restrict access only to those who had geographically demonstrated their class allegiance. Only then did private-public spaces truly flourish. After the concept of a private-public space was established as a social category in suburbia, developers engineered it back into the existing urban core, providing an entirely new legal basis for excluding undesirable activities and people. New categories of semi-public space have since been created, where private entities take over some government functions 4. As cities have become denser, more and more space has become monetized, reducing the spaces where dissent is tolerated or where people who cannot or do not wish to pay are permitted. Advertising has further eroded the distinction between public and private space as capitalism fi nds new ways to extract value from the presence of people in nominally free space.

Architecture of Fear and Control Much architectural history, from the first megalithic structures on through ancient city walls and medieval ghettos, etc., can be viewed through a lens of fear and control, especially the elements mentioned above (zoning law, suburbanization, large-scale urban renewal, and the commercialization of public space). However, there are two specific elements which deserve further consideration. First, the continuing increase in social fear through the modern period and the concomitant increase in state control as expressed architecturally at a human scale, and second, the co-evolving commercial control of space. The single defining characteristic of the modern period has been the disruption of traditional structures of life, but not of larger social power structures – society has become more polarized in this process, not less, especially in the post-Fordist era. As these traditional structures have disappeared, new categories of cultural fear have been generated hand in hand with the new cultural freedoms which have appeared. Fear is one of the most effective weapons of social control, and it is used by all sides – whether to push the furtherance of the modern project, to attempt to 4 | Commonly known as Metropolitan Improvement Districts.

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reinstate traditional social categories, or by the state as a means of control. Beyond the direct manipulation of fear, both state and capital have found the existing fears of the populace to be both useful and lucrative points of leverage. Of course, numerous features of the architecture of control are seen as actively needful by many if not most people. Control expressed in the built environment is a way of combating uncertainty, but more control also breeds more uncertainty and more segregation allows stronger and worse stereotypes to appear. As more and more of public life has become consumptively driven, a disturbingly easy partnership has arisen between the state and private enterprise to ensure that public and pseudo-public space provides a controlled environment for undisrupted and predictable commerce. This partnership also provides a strong force for behavior normalization, far beyond anything required for a basically civil society. As new objects of fear have come into existence and new crimes have been created for those categories of fear, new tools have been added to the dizzying array of technologies and systems of control available to the modern state. The development of these technologies is a major project of the military-industrial complex. In the built environment, we see a wide range of responses and tools deployed. Office buildings have turned inside out, focusing on self-contained interior atriums. Companies have moved their operations entirely out to office parks on the outskirts of the city in space they can more carefully manage, mirroring suburbanization. Universities have built new campuses specifically designed to provide little or no public space that can support gatherings, split campuses up into smaller pieces, or moved them to the suburbs, far from the uncontrolled city center. Suburban communities have literally fortified themselves behind glass-topped concrete walls with gates and armed guards. Bank tellers now stare out through two inches of bulletproof glass, and sidewalks have sprouted rows of bollards to keep cars away from buildings in case of car bombs, despite laughably small risk. Those same bollards are likely designed to make sitting on them impossible, lest they encourage the use of the street as anything other than a place of swift passage, but not too swift – many of those same outdoor surfaces will also be designed to inhibit skateboarding. Surveillance has become almost ubiquitous in many urban areas, with overlapping levels of control – closed circuit TV cameras, gunshotlocating microphone systems, and tracking technologies built into everyday conveniences like cell phones and transit cards. As the penetration of technology into space increases, it is becoming more popular as a means of control. It is both cheaper than physical control, and also less visible, thus provoking less protest.

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Even if we agree with the nominal purposes of the systems deployed, the capabilities of these systems far exceed the stated goals and these systems are abused on a rapidly increasing scale – hence the sudden appearance of “free speech zones” and similar radical underminings of civil rights. Furthermore, public discussion about the damage done to quality of life is scarcely ever acknowledged by the officials who authorize these controls. When space is made hostile to users as a form of control, everyone has to live with a space designed to be so horrible that even someone with nowhere else to go does not want to be there.

Responding to the City Looking at the state of the city can draw a very grim picture of post-modern urban life. While this is not unwarranted, the situation is obviously not as one-sided as it seems. The distortion and control of life are far from total, still, and municipal governments are coming to understand the importance of quality of life, even if it is narrowly defined and socioeconomically limited. Large- and small-scale civic involvement remains essential to countering these pressures. However, direct action is equally important. For people to become civically involved, they must understand what is at stake, they must understand their role in the system, and they must be able to see the possibility of a different way of interacting with the system. This is the power of direct action – it makes possible that sudden shift of perspective, the moment of awakening to the potential of the city. In this section, we will examine the schemas under which we can understand direct action.

The Right to the City The first and most essential question we need to consider in our response is by what right we act. We may not like the effect that the modern city has on us, but do we have a right to object to those effects? At a deeper level, this requires considering the degree to which the ownership society is justifiable, as it is the logic of that society which exerts the forces we have examined. We can leave those more radical notions of ownership out of the picture for our purposes, though, and focus on a less contentious level. We have seen that the city changes us. From this and from the fundamental rights to equality and to self-determination, we come to the idea of the right to the city, per Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey. Understanding spaces to be social constructions, we see that all citizens, regardless of how poor or marginalized they are, must necessarily

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have the right to collaborate in the production of the spaces where they live. Furthermore, they have a fundamental right to have those spaces serve their needs and aspirations, not just the needs of capital. While this right does not eliminate ownership rights, it does supersede them in some cases; human rights are more fundamental than property rights. This is not to say all design decisions in a city must be taken in some purely open process, of course, but sufficient heed must be paid to the participation of all citizens to satisfice their right to the city. The right to the city has a few specific applications in light of the issues discussed above. The displacement of existing communities whether by destructive urban renewal projects or by gentrification and market forces, is an act of violence against those communities that denies them a voice in the creation of their environment. Architecture that forces people into patterns of behavior they do not wish to undertake denies them a place in the city. The neglect of poor districts in favor of high-value downtown developments make the citizens of different districts distinctly unequal in the degree to which they may shape their city, especially when all available money in poor districts is consumed with the maintenance of basic utilities while the residents of more affluent areas are consulted about improvements they would like to see. Even in wealthy areas, when all development is private and the residents have no say in its course, they are unable to participate in the shaping of their city. The right to the city and related issues about equitable distribution of wealth in spatial terms are the fundamental concerns of the spatial justice movement, which brings a geographic perspective to existing social justice concerns. While a relatively new concept, spatial justice provides a strong framework for us to understand the rationale for intervening in the city. Legal progress is being made, slowly, in turning the right to the city into a more widely recognized legal right. For instance, it is featured prominently in the European Charter for Safeguarding Human Rights in Cities, which has over 350 signatory municipalities.5

Working with the Inclusive City The worldview the right to the city is founded on is one of basic equality, and this has an effect on the ways we intervene. The fundamental constant in any urban environment is a limit to available resources, whether they are land, money, or attention. Working for equality in this environment means reaching out across boundaries, even (and especially) boundaries 5 | See www.comune.venezia.it/flex/cm/pages/ServeBLOB.php/L/EN/ID Pagina/2198 for more information.

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that may be uncomfortable to breach. When we intervene, we claim space; doing so in an inclusive way, across the boundaries of race, class, sex, orientation, language, ability, nationality, etc., is an important aspect of equality, as is paying attention to the kinds of intersectional confl icts that can silence participation even within activist communities. Th is is particularly important when working with the imaginary of a space. When we imagine or re-imagine a space, defining who is part of the group doing the imagining is critical. For example, although the economic aspects predominate, gentrification can also be read as one narrowly defi ned and privileged group re-imagining a neighborhood without being able to see a place for the existing residents. An important corollary of including others is working with others; we (those attempting an intervention) should not and indeed cannot affect meaningful change on our own; working with existing progressive networks or social circles. Working with other groups is important in both creating the kinds of interventions we might like to create and in making sure they have the desired effects.

Informality and Tactical Urbanism Informality is one of the most effective tactics for the subversion of control. Doing things the right way is often difficult or impossible; presented head-on with a threat, systems of control understand how to respond and do so readily. However, work done outside of official channels can get away with a surprising amount. Much of the effort of controlling power structures goes into attempting to combat informal behavior, but there is also a tacit acknowledgment of its necessity in many systems and a certain amount of allowance for informality around the margins, in part because controlling the last five percent becomes extraordinarily expensive for little functional gain. Informality begets tactical urbanism, where economic and life activities take place outside of sanctioned spaces, whether that means startups working in coffee shops, street vendors gaming oversight systems, or pranksters installing swings. Informality brings a direct social cost in many cases, its actors frequently becoming the target of police brutality and selective enforcement, but this is precisely because it can be powerful in subverting the established order. That social cost means that informal actions are pushed into a space where little certainty exists and change can happen very quickly. This can be both good and bad; speed is essential to the character of tactical urbanism. As the informal operates outside the protections of the state, it can also be a site of danger and abuse, so while it can be functional for us, romanticizing it is problematic. Informal mo-

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dern communications systems are very helpful in enabling action across strong social networks, but it is unlikely that this type of activity can challenge control in a deep way. The state and enterprises have both shown a readiness to violate privacy flagrantly to maintain control. In the same way progressive networks act as a power multiplier, the state has scale on its side when performing data mining and similar surveillance activities, should it feel actually threatened.

Interventions Architecturally speaking, an intervention is an action, whether an act of construction, performance, or reconfiguration of knowledge, which changes the space that encompasses it in some intentional manner. Not all buildings should be considered interventions; much building is just that – building, to solve some human or capital need, without any intent to challenge anything or cause any change in the world. We care about the remainder. There are limits to what this kind of interventions can do; there is a common fallacy in the design world that design can solve everything. As the problems we are trying to address are frequently social issues, this is blatantly false – at best, we can relieve social pressure, draw attention, or change how people see problems. We may be able to trigger the tectonic shift of the masses that cause those social pressures, if we are very good and very lucky, but this is not the same as solving those problems through design directly; we must be aware of this. As we work, we need to return to our first principles constantly. Interventions that work in one place and context will likely not work elsewhere. We have seen large scale tendencies sketched out here, but the functional structure of every place is as heavily determined by its own unique history as it is these larger tendencies. We must work from our understanding of what creates and feeds living places of joy, not just repeat the recipes of others; the work we do is specific and subjective. We have a working understanding of some urban power structures and we have three ways of evaluating the quality of alterations: by looking at how they change people’s understanding of the city; at how they create or help affordances; and at how they help make spaces more human and alive. We understand the necessity of inclusiveness and the value of tactical informality. We can now look at doing real work.

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Space as Event

All spaces have a lifespan; they come into existence and then disappear again. This can be as simple as the space created under a tree while eating a picnic lunch with friends; as you spread out a blanket and sit down to eat, you create a social space of which all the participants are very much aware; you interact with it as an outdoor room with well-understood boundaries. When you pack up, that space suddenly disappears. Where you might have previously walked slowly, as in an indoor space, and addressed the ground as a piece of furniture, you now walk briskly, not noticing the old (no longer existing) boundaries. All spaces are like this. Thus, one of the things which we as interventionists can do is to create spaces in the city. Space, understood as a living structure, is surprisingly flimsy. It does not take bricks, stone, or building permits to create it – if a blanket on a patch of grass can create a space, almost anything can. The most important thing for creating a space is differentiation; if it is easy to tell what the boundaries of the space created are, people will more readily see it as a distinct space. A boundary can be as little as a line of tape on the ground, or even light. For event spaces, bringing people into the space is frequently as important as demarcating the space; the goal is not to create a private region, but to bring other people, strangers, into the same space, to catalyze interactions rather than create exclusivity. Altering Imaginaries

The imaginary is one of our most powerful levers for creating real change. If we change the way people understand their city, we can change the actual, real, lived city, without driving a single nail. We are not trying to shock people, here; this is not about force, and the modern mass media/ post-mass-media have made shock largely useless as a tactic; people simply ignore it. However, direct human engagement, an emotional connection, still has real power. People still dream and hope and laugh and love, and this is the space in which we want to intervene – play, not spectacle. This is where we can still make people pause and reconsider – Deleuze called these created pauses vacuoles – and that pause is what gives them room to change their understandings. The fact that we are using play as a tactic means we need to understand its rules. The theatrical world can be our model here. Even if we are creating relatively concrete functional artifacts, we still need to pay close attention to the way we present them, to how people understand them and come across them. While there are times when an intervention must be an unnoticeable part of the fabric of the city to succeed (see the example

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of DIY bike lanes below), there is frequently room for just a little bit of delight, and this will turn something from just a part of an undifferentiated field into a vacuole-generating entity. Even something as little as a bed of flowers growing where they are not expected can change a stretch of street in the eyes of those who pass by, making it a bit more friendly, a bit more human. As changes like these add up, they can rewrite how people interact with a neighborhood. We are dealing with mass culture, so we should neither over or underestimate the power of individual acts. Working with imaginaries involves a social process for gathering momentum to change culture and ideas. While it does not happen overnight, it can also surprise us by moving faster than we expect. Creating Affordances

Direct action in the city to provide functional conveniences or utilities (like free wireless Internet access) is the most immediate category of intervention, but also one of the more limited. Small actions, both individually and en mass, can make the space around us more livable. There is no need to wait for the state to act when we can reshape our cities immediately. However, changes in affordance, although very important, resonate less in the imaginary of the city than changes which are less functional but more evocative. In the end, both are necessary. A Hierarchy of Materials

In creating interventions, we have our choice of materials to work with. In order to work efficiently, we want to make the smallest change that will satisfice – if there is no need for brick, we do not want to go to the expense of laying it. Weight ends up being a very good proxy for the difficulty of using a material. Information is the most lightweight way to change an environment. An intervention in the form of a story is often easier to create than almost anything else. Information about a city, gathered and presented in the right context, is very powerful, but it can prove transient and too ephemeral for many types of intervention. Working with lighting and sound is also useful, as they are present in a way that pure information is not, and yet they still leave no trace behind. Light and sound are sometimes sufficient to define social space, for instance. Paint (and tape, stickers, etc) come next; they are materially present and more permanent. They persist outside of our presence and extend the scope of our event space. Next come deployable structures; tents, scaffolding, and temporary installations of all kinds which can be installed and removed quickly and

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retain the simplicity and price of informality. They are not always optimal, but a deployable structure can suit a huge variety of needs and still be gone on a time frame between minutes and a day, depending on scale, resources, etc. This puts deployable structures on the right side of the informality line. You can frequently get away with putting them up in all sorts of places where traditional structures would never be allowed. True buildings come last in our hierarchy. This is the scale of the formal, concrete city. It brings with it the permanence and solidity which that implies, but it also puts the project into an entirely different relationship with the law, and an entirely different price range. They are largely outside the scope of these small-scale interventions.

Examples As an inspiration toward actual work and to further explain the concepts that we have covered so far, we will now see a range of examples, both created and theoretical, with some discussion about what they can mean.

Mapping and Imaginaries Our first set of examples are all intended to alter either a shared imaginary or a single, personal conception of the city. Some but not all of them also create functional affordances. Urban Exploration

Urban spaces are full of abandoned spaces, places where people no longer go for one reason or another, or spaces where people were never intended to go – underneath the streets, on the margins, or in between places where people live. To explore these spaces is to approach a city as a place of wonder, a realm of the unknown. Exploring these places, talking about them, and sharing their stories change how people see the world around them. Exploration does not even have to mean going to places where there are no people. We all have routines we fall into of where we live, commute, and go to eat and play. Make a point of breaking those routines. Learn more about where you live. Tell people about it. Bridge communities, and increase the scope of facets of your city’s imaginary you draw on. Many city games serve this same function in passing; see the section on them below. Some specifically exploration-oriented games include letterboxing, scavenger hunts, and (urban) geocaching. Also related is the idea of the psychogeographic walk, where some planned or random element is used

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to determine the direction of travel, e.g., a die is rolled at every corner to decide among available options. Th is has the immediate effect of removing familiarity and subjective judgment to push the walker into discovering the unexpected and unlooked-for, outside of their comfort zone. Augmented Reality as Architecture/Functional Graffiti

Augmented reality (AR) involves digital information, either rendered in 3D or just text and 2D graphics overlaid onto a video stream being captured in real time from the viewer’s position. For example, one can hold a phone up to a scene, and have it act as a lens, appearing roughly transparent. The information overlaid is located positionally in the world, augmenting the view you have of the space. In some implementations, markers (specific patterns easily parsed from the video stream) are printed and placed in the scene, either for registration of images or to control the system. 2D barcodes can be used in the same way, and can also embed free-form data, either directly or as a reference to an online resource. Although not properly AR, similar but lower-tech systems can either read barcodes or use GPS data to trigger events or present information without video overlay. These technologies allow information to be situated directly in the city, with suitable intermediation. As an architectural tool, AR is quite flexible. At the most literal level, we can create buildings in virtual space to act as memorials, remembrances or alternative visions of reality. For instance, there is an AR application for the iPhone which recreates the World Trade Center in Manhattan. The same things can be done for other no-longer existent buildings, showing what a neighborhood looked like before redevelopment destroyed the previous fabric, or virtually rebuilding spaces after conflict to memorialize and sustain their previous social context. Not-yet-existing buildings are just as easy to create; this can help envision new plans, but the affect of the visualization can be either pro- or anti-development. The renderings released by developers frequently show the building without context, to disguise the degree to which the final building will overshadow its neighbors. With AR, we can show the buildings in their real, built context. This kind of visualization can be a useful way to organize communities against development initiatives. As individuals we may not be happy with a given development, but only widespread community support can prevent their construction. AR as a site for community interaction has other possibilities – even without visualization, we can provide communities with alternate ways to interact with the planning process or with municipal government. Although it is in some ways low tech, a good example of the power of AR and AR-like systems is the site http://www.fi xmystreet.

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com/. It provides a direct, easy to access way for people in the UK to alert their municipal governments to pending maintenance issues, via both a web site, and more interestingly to us, a location-aware mobile phone application. AR can provide for spatially situated comment in a variety of ways. Graffiti is a blunt instrument for public comment, but a barcode that links to an active online discussion could provide a much richer forum. To do this effectively in the city requires a degree of electronic anonymity, but no more than many other types of electronic civil disobedience. Distinguishing between community content and advertising may cause problems, but this is also a problem with any other situated media. AR can be used for storytelling. Mixed-reality games where fictional elements invade the real world have been around for some time. While their reach may be limited, they are an effective way to provide alternate readings for places, changing their meaning, and to engage people with their cities. Games can encourage people to explore new parts of their environments. Fiction has the freedom to comment on life in ways which would be ignored or discounted in more serious narratives. The limited reach of AR is worrying as it is not just a matter of personal preference – one problem with AR as a tool is the hard class division it creates between the people in the city who can afford the entry fee of a smartphone and a data plan and those who cannot. Beyond that, it requires buying into an entire consumer mindset that alters how we interact socially. This must be carefully considered when evaluating AR initiatives, especially those intended to involve community. Providing SMS-only interfaces as an alternative, when possible, is a useful alternative. Mapping Resources

Cities are rich places. Frequently, things we are looking for may exist without our awareness of them. Commercial resources advertise their existence, putting noncommercial resources at a disadvantage. Mapping available resources makes cities more understandable. While doing this for an entire city is obviously a huge undertaking, broadcasting the existence of specific resources can be done trivially, and it allows people to experience their city as a richer and possibly more friendly place. The fallen fruit map 6 is a great example of this. In many places the fruit of trees growing on or overhanging public property is also public, but it is rarely eaten. The fruit map helps people find it, turning what would be a rotting mess into something useful. The same thing can be done with lists of dumpsters where good food or useful objects are routinely discarded (like 6 | http://www.fallenfruit.org/maps.html

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overage at bakeries), or with curated collections of pointers to hard-to find and poorly known commercial resources. Th is kind of mapping breaks down barriers, whether they are based on who has the money to live in the city or who has the trade connections to find specific goods. Public Ar t

Good art stops people in their tracks and makes them think, especially outside of the neutered environment of the commercial gallery or sanctioned public museum. Art in the street has to negotiate a complicated boundary between artistic expression and property damage when it is not authorized. While getting permission can avoid this, it can also rob art of much of its subversive power – simply putting up an image can express a challenge to authority. On the other hand, many people will dismiss the message of illicit art out of hand, and they may be outright hostile to it if they do pay attention. The pervasiveness of advertising is another challenge to public art; we are used to fi ltering out a flood of images every day, and this jadedness is difficult to break through. If you can break through however, it provides a very direct means to tell a story in public space. Street art is a democratic medium, but by creating it without consent we can deny others their right to determine the structure of their city. Being aware of who else uses the spaces you are using as a canvas is an important component of understanding how a piece will be interpreted. Temporary work, whether that means working with light, with impermanent media, or by creating performance spaces, can be more acceptable to the community you are working in but it also lacks the inherent challenge to authority. In some cases, temporary (and especially interactive) work may be more effective at engaging people. However, it can be much more resource intensive to provide the same number of people with the experience of interacting with a piece when working with temporary or interactive art. We talk more below about performance art. For more information on public art used in ways which can challenge authority, the Graffiti Research Labs site at http://graffitiresearchlab. com/ is a good place to start, especially their work with light painting as a (generally) legal and thus easier to sustain but still authority-challenging graffiti medium.

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Guide Book

In 1913, a fascinating (from our perspective) book was published in Berlin, Was die Frau von Berlin wissen muss, or What a Woman Must Know about Berlin. The book was published as a guidebook for women in Berlin, not as tourists or housewives but as first-class members of the city, an act that was quite revolutionary at the time. The book was not intended for people unfamiliar with the city, and so was not an introduction to Berlin in a factual sense, but rather to a way of interacting with the city. In our terms, it was an explicit introduction to a specific imaginary of Berlin. The guide included both pointers to specific resources the reader might be interested in and not familiar with and, more importantly, essays exploring opportunities available to interact with the city. While a book may not be the relevant format any more, the idea of a guide with which to pull someone from one imaginary into another as an explicit, coherent shift presents fascinating opportunities. Instead of the women’s Berlin, we can think of the hacker’s city, either as a guidebook to a specific city, or, more likely, a version in the generic with specific references inserted as relevant, the guidebook presenting an interpretation of the world and how to interact with the city.

Infrastructure Our second set of examples are all directly practical extensions of the city, correcting the shortcomings of the environment as it exists. Some of these interventions will be effectively invisible, but others will either inspire delight or act as direct attacks on existing structures of control. Semi-legal WiFi

Access to information is now a mark of effective citizenship, and while being able to get online at all is a basic level of engagement, doing so while out and about is increasingly important as the Internet becomes a more localized resource and more basic social functions move online. Paid wireless access points and expensive mobile data plans make mobile information access a site of class stratification. While only providing Internet access does not solve device availability or space constraints, it does help to equalize different groups’ access in a space, changing their understanding of the space and their interactions with other people in it. The economic interests of those providing paid network access, in conjunction with municipal rules about antenna placement, can cause problems for

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projects like this, but those problems are mostly just a confi rmation of the worth of such a project. Providing point-to-point links cheaply or for free is another place where hackers can uniquely enable groups, in this case for poor and small nonprofits and similar organizations where the cost of Internet access is a significant barrier. Beyond its direct utility, this kind of shadow infrastructure projects an understanding of the city as a more living, caring place. Citizen CCT V

Closed-circuit TV is a tool of social control and a means for the expansion of police power in cities. In many cases where CCTV might be useful to record police brutality it is either mysteriously missing or suppressed, particularly during demonstrations where handheld video may be seized and destroyed. Depending on the level of police brutality in question and the degree of systemic corruption, video may or may not be a useful tactical tool in fighting police violence. However, the existence of independent video documentation can frequently be at least a strategic, long-term tool. A system of decentralized video cameras, when possible sending the video off-site for automatic archiving and publication – if necessary in a different jurisdiction – could provide both a long-term means for publicizing abuse and a short-term means for pressing charges against the police and freeing activists. In the US, video evidence is generally admissible in court with the proviso that the owner of the video must testify for its veracity. It is not clear what, if any, specific standards might be required to anonymously verify video. Video recording is generally allowed provided that the camera is located on private property with the permission of the owner or tenant, or on public property, even if the subject is on private property, while audio recording requires consent of all parties. Consult a lawyer for details in your jurisdiction. The right to the city is heavily tied into the freedom to assemble and be heard. Making the city safer for people being heard makes the city more inclusive and helps encourage a sense of ownership of space. DIY Bike Lanes

Bicycles make good cities. They provide a way for people to get around cheaply and they maintain the human scale of pedestrian traffic. They are a good fit for our evaluation criteria of things which make cities alive. Integrating bikes into heavily car-centric cities is difficult, though, even in places which should, climate- and terrain-wise, be very bike-friendly.

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Bike lanes are not an optimal strategy here. They are frequently abused by drivers when they are just a line on pavement without any physical separation from cars, and even when respected, they imply (regardless of the law) that cyclists are not to use any other part of the street. That said, in some places they are the only way to ride safely – for instance, on a busy street with no sidewalk, narrow shoulders, and high-speed vehicle traffic, especially when constrained by a bridge or similar geography. Given the car-centrism of most departments of transportation, bike lanes are not always forthcoming even in places where they would literally immediately start saving lives and enabling more people to travel the city. In many cases, there are significant class implications, where the lack of bike accommodations restricts riders who are seen as lower class from entering or using a space. Why wait for the municipal government to act, when a bike lane is just paint on the ground? Reflective paint for striping parking lots is readily available at hardware stores, and the specifications for bike lanes are often available online. It is worth doing some background reading before installing one, because a homemade bike lane is both more likely to last if it blends in, and more likely to be safe – drivers may not recognize bike lanes which are not properly marked or too narrow. As with many interventions, a bit of planning and official-looking reflective vests go a long way toward making things go smoothly, as does familiarity with similar actions in other cities.7 Street Furniture

The streets of our cities are the most immediate place which determines the degree of life a city has. Frequently, they are actively designed only as places of consumption and passage, and intended to deny all other uses. Furnishing a street lets it live in new ways. A table and chairs can turn a wide sidewalk or the edge of a small square into a place, an outdoor room. Likewise, a simple canvas overhang can make sitting at an existing bench more comfortable, and a hammock can make a park a nicer place to spend a lazy afternoon. While the users of a space are likely to enjoy (thoughtful) interventions, immediately adjacent tenants and city authorities may not, whether because they feel it interferes with commerce or simply because it does not follow the rules. It is best to work cheaply for this sort of intervention because it may not last very long. On the other hand, in some cases one may be able to match existing street furniture carefully enough that the 7 | See http://artoft heprank.com/2009/07/17/diy-bike-lanes/

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city does not even notice – for instance, installing new bike racks and matching the existing design, possibly obtaining the racks via city surplus sales. Guerrilla Gardens

Grey concrete and bare dirt do not make a city alive. Gardens desterilize cities and make them more human – a median that comes up with wildflowers brings a bright, uncontrolled note to a harsh space. Not only that, but gardens can be actively productive. Assuming the air and soil is clean, fruit and vegetables will grow just as well on an abandoned lot as on a farm. Greenery can make buildings look better, too – even the bleakest cement wall looks less offensive covered in ivy. Plants which are native to a region can frequently live with little or no care, and small plantings can be created in literally ten minutes. Ivy can be planted in thin soil and still climb tall walls. Clearing and planting larger abandoned lots is often easier to accomplish with permission from the land owner, which at least reduces the worry that gardens will be trampled mid-season. A large movement around urban and guerrilla gardening exists 8, and larger projects will often find allies there.

The Event-city The third set of examples are events that change how we see the city, and turn spaces of function into spaces of delight. While many of these could be sorted into other categories, they all emphasize the event nature of space. BART Swings and Subway Tea Par ties 9

Mass transit is commonly considered a purely functional space. It is an environment of long, boring commutes to work or school. Even when traveling with friends, it is rarely a site to meet people, interact with strangers, or play. Obviously, mass transit must be functional first, but there is no reason the experience needs to stop there. Due to its liminal nature, events on transit can show people that anywhere can become living, enjoyable space. The transit experience, with its defined and separate envi8 | See http://www.guerrillagardening.org/ 9 | Credit and inspiration for this section belongs, in part, with Mike Burnstein, twitter:@burnstein

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ronment and understood beginning, middle, and end, lends itself well to transformation into a performance space. The most critical part of a good performance in a transit-like space is getting people to participate. Putting on a spectacle can be entertaining for friends, and passers-by may enjoy it, but in the end, it is a less powerful experience than one where complete strangers get involved in the action directly. In Mike Burnstein’s two swing installations on BART in San Francisco, the most critical components of the experience were not the swings, but the planted “normal” transit riders who encouraged strangers to use the swings and enter the experience directly; this was the point at which it ceased to be a spectacle and became something larger. Public City Games

Using a city as a playground is a literal way to change how people understand it. Play is a fundamental activity and many activities use it as a medium, from getting people to explore a city to the creation of public art. A game can last a few hours, like Journey to the End of the Year10, or it can be a large, ongoing game, like SFZero11. In either case, pulling in people outside of the small subculture which originates the game is key to having a larger effect; playing entirely within a social circle will not alter the larger city. Games allow us to tell stories in a very direct way, similar to public art and essays, and this allows them to speak very directly to the imaginary of a place. Parking Day

Parking Day12, initially created by Rebar13, is a very literal example of both event-space and of events making a city more livable. On Parking Day, people all over the world take public parking spaces and turn them into parks for a day, paying the meters for the spaces. The effort is intended to draw attention to the problem of limited open space in cities, especially relative to how much space is used by cars. Building a park can be as simple, in this case, as putting out a marker around the space and setting out a few lawn chairs, but many parks are more decorated, frequently with

10 | A game of urban exploration, held on December 31, 2009; more information at http://totheendoft henight.com/berlin2009/ 11 | http://sf0.org/ 12 | http://www.parkingday.org/ 13 | http://www.rebargroup.org/

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sod and potted trees (reflecting the way plantings and green space defi nes park space as a type in Western culture). Done properly, even these temporary parks are inviting for outsiders, bringing them into the space in the same way a real park would. Ideally, a temporary space like this could be deployed and left for passers-by to discover it, even outside of the scope of semi-organized events. Sadly, this is not possible in most cities, but it may point to other, similar events where that could work. Temporar y Ar t in Commercial Spaces

Space for art is scarce normally, and in times of economic hardship, it tends to get scarcer still. However, at the same time, much commercial real estate is sitting empty. For the property owner, completely idle space is bad. A space which has not seen any use in a year or more is more difficult to rent. Owners may be skeptical depending on the type of event planned, but a temporary gallery is generally seen as a safe use compatible with their intent of getting space rented. The owner may require some assurance that the space will be returned clean and that it will be relatively secure during the event, but this is often a low bar. Putting on even a short event lasting just a few days is a surprising amount of work, but it can be a way for groups of artists working together to get exposure they cannot get through the mainstream commercial art world. A gallery space will of course have to be staffed while open, so this may only make sense for short events. However, a rotating display of pieces in a window can provide a lot of exposure without as much work. The Inflatable Cafe

Third space is one of the most important categories of public space; a third space is somewhere neither work nor home where people spend significant time working and socializing. They are a building block for community. However, third places do not need to be made from bricks. Space can literally be created from thin air – thin sheets of plastic and a battery-powered blower can create an inflatable space that can be set up in minutes, anywhere a small patch of empty land exists. Folding chairs and LED lamps complete the picture, and with care the space can be heated in the winter. A space like this can pop into existence over the course of an evening in a corner of a park or a parking lot, and can go away just as easily.

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Affordances for Life Our final section covers serious actions that require much more time and investment. They are still in reach for small groups of individuals, through longer and more concerted effort, and we can understand them within the same framework we have used for our other interventions. Through these longer-term actions, we see how the same set of concepts we use for small interventions scale up to larger and more permanent work. Third Spaces and Hackerspaces

Temporary third spaces can be wonderful, but they can only supplement the needs of a community. It is difficult or impossible to accumulate resources in temporary space, and it is challenging to build a lasting shared culture. To do these things, the community needs more permanent space. A permanent third space requires longer-term commitment, and while a group of friends can still start one, the group will need to grow to sustain and build out a space of any size. The existence of physical space for a community is key to that community's survival and influence in their larger social context. In the hacker community, a lot has been said about hackerspaces14. While these can meet some of the needs of our community, many of these spaces are (unintentionally) exclusive and all privilege some activities over others. This may be partially unavoidable, and the creation of more new spaces by other groups can help to provide more room for diversity, but it is also important to be aware of the need for diversity in all spaces. When we ignore our neighbors and fail to reach out to the community around us, we recreate the class segregation and the power divides that limit our full participation in the life of our cities. Squats

Squatting, taking over property without the permission of the owner, is one of the most direct subversions of capital control of land possible. It is also at least as time-intensive as creating a third space, and generally more so. Squats can allow community space to be created on a scale not typically available to rent-paying groups, and virtually require community support for long-term existence. The law varies widely between jurisdictions; in many places, squats will survive only as long as they go unnoticed; in others, they may be able to obtain some degree of legal protection from 14 | See http://hackerspaces.org/wiki for more information.

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land owners. Squatting is not something to be taken lightly, and a more in-depth discussion of it would be out of scope here. However it is worth mentioning, as it fits into our general theme of changing the power structures of the city. Housing for Non-Normative Families

We have seen how the shape of the city determines the kinds of lives we can live; this is rarely more true than with housing. Housing in most cities is built to accommodate only a few types of households. The cost of housing is the single largest expense in most people's lives. Only a relatively small elite have the available capital to buy property and construct or alter buildings to suit their needs. Everyone else attempts to fit their lives into the available housing stock. Households with more than two adults are frequently especially illserved, whether they are polyamorous families where three or more people live together in a relationship, groups of friends who want to share their lives, or single parents raising their children together. In some cases, groups of households can come together to create housing that better suit their needs, via a co-op or a cohousing community15. Even when dedicated space is not possible, landlords are sometimes amenable to tenant improvement of apartments, such as the combining of several one bedroom flats to form a shared residence for a group of single mothers who constitute a household. In addition to the affordances for life, shared housing can be economically important for many families. Specifically in the case of single parents, good shared housing can mean shared workload for parenting, along with a more secure, if not actually cheaper, housing situation. Directly working for the housing you want for your family is one thing. Working with larger community groups to ensure a wider variety of housing stock is available is another important step. Unselfish Building

Creating a human city is hard, but it happens one step at a time; one bench, one garden, one awning. Chances to help this process pop up unexpectedly. If you are involved in a larger construction project, taking a few fairly small steps can make a huge difference. If you do your part to push for the project you are involved toward a more human cast, piece by piece, a 15 | See the Cohousing Association of the United States at http://co housing.org for more information.

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better city will take place. Christopher Alexander, mentioned earlier, has a set of patterns for building.16 Only a few of them may be relevant to the project you are part of, but they can be a useful starting point for creating living spaces.

Conclusions You can change your city! Right now! The changes may not be big or permanent, but they do not have to be; small and light changes have a real effect on the city over time. With a better understand of the change that we want to see, a toolkit for creating change, and the means to understand the changes that we make, let's get to work.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following individuals who have contributed ideas and critique to this paper, who have pointed me at invaluable resources, and who have supported and encouraged me while writing it: Tiffany Laine De Mott, Eldan Goldenberg, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Natarajan Krishnaswami, Aaron Muszalski, Rachel Hestilow, and Rose White. Finally, a very special thanks to Ari Lacenski, my editor, sounding board, tireless supporter, and loving partner.

16 | Christian Alexander: A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Oxford University Press, 1977

Please love Banksy. A retrospective on the options of an art of disruption in public space in Vienna. Thomas Edlinger

Early in 2007 Sao Paolo’s mayor, Gilberto Kassab, enacted a spectacular measure against the commercial colonisation of his city. He made all kinds of commercial publicity illegal, removing posters and logos from the streets of the economic metropolis, currently home to around 18 Million people. Vienna, on the other hand, is considered as one of the cities with the highest density of posters and general commercials within its borders, as it already had been at the beginning of the 20th century. Artists competing for attention have a hard time even being noticed, let alone leaving a permanent mark on the urban landscape. Perhaps that is why contemporary artists feel a need to irritate, to disrupt the society of the spectacle and its iconography today more than ever. However, the contradiction in principle of cultural jamming cannot be resolved. Interventionist art in public space can only achieve a shocking effectiveness when resorting to drastic measures – thereby competing within the economy of attention with the commercial iconography of urban space. Th is is both its strength and its weakness. Said differently, visible “loud” criticism of the spectacle in openly accessible space is only to be achieved with spectacular methods, subtlety and intra-artistic references of art projects are rather to be found indoors.

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Many interventions in urban space can be understood as a form of criticism of the post-modern reconstruction of urbanity. They question the status of public space, which tends to either desolately degenerate at the outskirts of the city or to be the object of commercial endeavours of privatisation. The bourgeois public space, idealised in the moment of our contemporary losses, that area to mingle and meet in, is endangered in part even in Vienna, traditionally administered by social democrats, by gentrification and ghettoisation. At the same time however public space is massively expanded in Vienna – new parks, green spaces, pedestrian areas. On the other hand, the theme parks of the disneyfied city, the shopping malls, the amusement centres and the multiplex cinemas restructure the social spaces, the flows of capital and people, partly concentrating them in areas not planned for by the city council. The internationalisation of the cities, especially so since Austria became a member of the EU, has left its mark on Vienna as well. Frantic real estate speculation has heated up the usually quiet Viennese market since the 1990s, e.g. during the cancelled EXPO event in the second district around the planned pompous boulevard Praterstraße, or recently also in the fi ne areas of the city centre. Popular areas were pressured massively towards commercialisation. Shopping streets such as the Mariahilfer Straße were turned into open air shopping malls, syphoning purchasing power from former direct competitors such as the gradually desolated Gumpendorfer Straße. At the same time critical urbanists perceive Vienna’s quintessence likened to a theme park called “Alt Wien”, the architectural backdrop of the main areas of tourist interest such as the Innere Stadt, the historic city centre, or the Museumsquartier (the former imperial stables), as a historicist masquerade.1 “I shop therefore I am”. This slogan was introduced into the post-modern mimesis of urbanity, staged in the areas of consumption, by the US-American artist Barbara Kruger in 1987 in the form of shopping bags. Since the 1970s the shopping areas have quadrupled in Vienna, there are 6000 24-sheet billboards – even Paris only has around 2000.2 Speciality retailers and shopping malls on the outskirts of the city ac1 | Christoph Laimer, Erik Meinharter: Disney World ist authentischer als Wien. In: dérive. Zeitschrift für Stadtforschung, Nr 1, Juli 2000, P.20 2 | S ee “Linienführungen der Entschrift lichung. Zwei Gespräche mit Rainer Dempf und Christoph Steinbrener über Delete!” In: Delete! Die Entschrift lichung des öffentlichen Raums. Ed. Rainer Dempf, Siegfried Mattl and Christoph Steinbrener. Freiburg 2006, P. 63

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count for the majority of this difference. The city council considers them to compete with the suburban consumption complexes such as the Shopping City Süd (SCS, one of the largest shopping malls of Europe), which are responsible for a massive drainage of purchasing power, i. e. taxes, into the communities of the affluent suburban sprawl. Simultaneously the traditional inner city commercial centres are restructured as stages for the logos and brands of international corporations, e.g. the Mariahilfer Straße, Kärnter Ring and surroundings, whereas the streets and alleys in the vicinity become the playgrounds of the creative industries. The traditional retail and shopping street Neubaugasse in the seventh district is now characterized by it’s proximity to the “Broadway” Mariahilfer Straße, as well as it’s young, environmentally motivated and yet consumption-oriented inhabitants.

Spectacular critique of the Spectacle In June 2005 Rainer Dempf and Christoph Steinbrener replaced all commercial publicity and logos in the Neubaugasse with yellow sheets of plastic for two weeks, in the course of their action Delete!. “De-lettering the public space” meant deleting, enshrouding and repainting at the same time. By clarifying the process of censorship, it was a gesture of deletion that emphasized the pervasiveness of advertisement, a spectacular intervention, effective and “commercially successful” for its own art interests. The act of enshrouding could be read in a sculptural-installation-based sense in the tradition of Christo’s object-transforming wrappings. The proximity to the process of repainting, a pentimento of sorts, finally reveals itself in the fact that the messages beneath the yellow sheets were still perceptible, even legible. The signs were therefore, in a recoding similar to that of the culture jammers, held awake in the act of their repainting – their sense, however, is defaced and readjusted, irritated and annulated synchronically. The experimental challenge of the legibility of the city and the texture of its attention economy was the result of tedious negotiations between the two artists and the shop owners of the Neubaugasse. Two years earlier, without any prior agreements or permits, a two-story pavilion with a big logo had provoked productive misunderstandings of global commercial and image-preserving interested parties. The pavilion was emblazoned with the widely visible logo of the international sporting goods corporation Nike, the Nike Swoosh, and the inscription “nikeplatz (formerly Karlsplatz)” as well as a link to nikeground.com. Within this pavilion one was shown the plans for a thirty-metre sculpture of the logo and the alleged renaming

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of the Karlsplatz to nikeplatz. The venture was (of course?) a fake – and the public debate it caused, along with the attempts of Nike to impede the denigration of their brand juridically, was documented in detail on the website nikeground. The project nikeground – rethinking space resulted from a cooperation of the Italian group 0100101110101101.ORG with the Viennese net-culture platform Public Netbase. It over-affirmed the power of global corporations and the increasing reduction of public space by private economic interests. On the backdrop of the intensive marketing theme parks of consumption, some of which even really exist, such as the so-called Nike-Towns, the public and media space was used “as a theatrical stage for a complex modern work of art”3 according to Public Netbasedirector Konrad Becker.

Incitement to appropriation Another work that was confronted with legal threats was realized by parking a car in front of the EA-Generali Foundation as part of the exhibition “Das neue Europa” (New Europe). This piece on the political and ethical behaviour of companies was conceived by Silke Wagner in 2005. The van was part of the project Bürgersteig (footpath, literally citizen path) and consciously reminded of the corporate identity of the Luft hansa airline in colour, design and typography of the print. The mobile manifestation of brand piracy was placed on a main street and bore the inscription “Luft hansa Deportation Class” and a revamped Luft hansa logo, with the crane plummeting instead of rising. The interior of the bus had already been used by three exhibitions of local political groups as a mobile information and agitation base prior to its presentation in Vienna. Now, it served as documentation of the political conflicts around the 2001 campaign Luft hansa Deportation Class, founded by Wagner and the initiative “kein mensch ist illegal” (no human is illegal). The deportation practices of the German government and the specific cooperation of the German airline was confronted. Certainly vague in content, a playful-militant call to arms, rallying for the disruption of the dominant symbolical and spacial order was dispatched 2006 by Otto Mittmannsgruber. The artist sprayed rallying cries on the floor, protected by a temporary tent-like rondo, at several locations around the city – all focussing on the imperative “Besetze” (occupy), e.g. occupy the Ring, occupy the media. The possible connotations of this 3 | Cited from: http://www.t0.or.at/nikeground/pressreleases/de/004, originally “ Theaterbühne für ein komplexes modernes Kunstwerk”

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literal occupation of the floor with script in No Man’s Land were manifold – from the agitation for political activism and personal anarchism to the incitement to the appropriation of public space, or the expropriation of private space. A both impressive and sophisticated recoding of public space in the tradition of situationist disruptions of order took place on the roof of the subway station Hietzing in 2004, without any prior announcements or permissions. Reinfried Blaha, Paul Regl, Christoph Treberspurg and Martin Zangerl, using removable dispersion paint, turned the roof within three nights into the depiction of a minimalist street map which reminded one, from birds-eye view, of an elliptical Basic-version of a racetrack in the project Intervention F1. The website of the platform for art in public space, PUBLICwienSPACE!, says: “Such a transformation blows up the limits, expands the repertoire of traditional Street Art. The tendency towards Land Art is furthermore perceptible in the utilization of a paradoxically natural element of the urban landscape as well as in the extent in three dimensions, the monumental size (around 3000 m2) and the unattainability of the work of art. However, the socio-critical gesture of the urban subculture isn’t lost. Quite to the contrary, as the documentary picture of the completed work clearly shows (24 hours from the perspective of the neighbouring Parkhotel Schönbrunn) the oval racetrack within the daily commute and life in fast forward is – unlike most other icons – able to express the speed craze and blind (and therefore aimless) goal orientation of our society.”4 The retrospectively documented artistic Actionism or performance, thereby converted into a permanent piece of work, has a long tradition, especially so in Vienna. Both manifestations of artistic action shouldn’t, however, be subject of our debate here if they are only to be considered a primitive stage or the source material for later manifestations and can’t be seen as self-sustained, completed interventions in public space. Surely the distinctions are blurred, as are many verbal attempts at discerning topics in connection with art in public space. Leopold Kessler’s work Perforation (2006) for instance caused a stir as part of a single exhibition in the Secession (2007). For this piece of work the artist, disguised as a road worker, strolled through some streets of Vienna and punched holes in street signs using a giant home-made ticketpunch. The Secession then showed the documentary picture of this action, 4 | Cited from: http://www.publicwienspace.net/index.php?option=com_ content&task=view&id=87&Itemid=85

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which could be interpreted as an intentionally ambiguous disruption of public (traffic) order. The results of this action would however only cause those other, unsettling interpretations on possible perpetrators and reasons for the damaged signs probably intended by Kessler only and fi nally in public space (if the installation had been permanent). In the spaces of art, however, that can no longer be considered feasible. A similar case is the Akademiekabel: the power cable strung by Kessler between his flat at the Praterstern and the Academy of Fine Arts at the Schillerplatz, thereby re-routing the publicly subsidized electricity. Th is is conceptually comparable to the pervasion of the within and the without, the private and the public, as also demonstrated by Hans Schabus with his artistic diggings and overgrowths. The Akademiekabel aroused quite a lot of attention as an erratic object, but was only completed as a work with the video and a book, thereby integrated into the context of a student’s piece of work.

Autonomous acts Other, more “quiet” shift ing of daily experiences in social space were for instance Nebelkammer and Camouflage on a Mannequin (both 2008), the first two realized projects of the four-part series Autonomous Acts. Opposed to Kessler’s unannounced urban interventions, these performances were even announced and featured in newspapers, both playing with the junction between advertising, privately owned offered views and their reception in public space – the shop window. Nebelkammer by Henry Plenge Jacobsen fogged in a shop in the Glockengasse, fourth district, and thereby overlaid the promise (or the dictate) of the world of goods with a light grey nothing. Camouflage on a Mannequin was a cooperation of John Miller and Richard Hoeck. A male and female mannequin therein played with identities and looks. At the beginning they seemed to be promoting military wear or hunting jackets – but in the course of the one-month performance the clothes were changed, the positions of the puppets in space shifted and thereby a narrative choreography under the impression of the masquerade was enacted.

Enlivening between provocation and politicization In this context one recalls two projects, both symptomatically taking place in the year of a certain turn of events, 2000 (the right-wing populist and Nazi apologist Jörg Haider’s party, the FPÖ, joined the coalition government with the Christian conservatives, the ÖVP). The theatre-maker Hubert “Hubsi” Kramar arrived as a prospective guest at the ramp of the Viennese Opernball (a large social event held for the traditional high and

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mighty) on the 2nd of March dressed as Adolf Hitler. This was about one month after the FPÖ-ÖVP coalition took power with Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel. He was promptly (and probably as planned) arrested after descending from the car and throwing a few Hitler salutes. The action caused a serious scandal. The Viennese urban paper Falter headlined their next issue with “Österreich wie es wirklich ist: Adolf Hitler sofort verhaftet” (Austria as it really is: Adolf Hitler arrested immediately). The second scandalized art Actionism took place a short while later, in June, during the Wiener Festwochen, while the so-called Donnerstagsdemos (Thursday manifestations) remeasured the urban space again and again and the resistance doesn’t seem to ebb, especially in the cultural scene. Christoph Schlingensief started his legendary “Containeraktion” (container action) Bitte liebt Österreich! Erste österreichische Koalitionswoche (Please love Austria! First Austrian coalition week). Even in the run-up the scandalisation machinery was running at top gear. The container, equipped with FPÖ banners, the inscription “Ausländer raus!” (Foreigners out!). And the logo of the important Austrian newspaper “Kronen-Zeitung”, housed twelve asylum seekers waiting for the decision on their deportation, moderated in the style of a Big Brother-show and apparently reflecting the results of a call-in voting of the Austrian public. The container action itself therefore conjoined theatrical, performanceand installation-based elements. It occupied a space with heavy symbolical baggage and tourism-based characteristics, converting it into a heterotopically provisional-experimental space. On one hand, applied media criticism, and on the other hand, open to the political activism of its day. It was a calculated participatory theatrical trap of Schlingensief’s as well as a game with a non-fi xed result, beginning in material space in front of the Viennese Opera and continuing in the worldwide public debate in the media, which was again echoed as feedback into the public space in Vienna. The explicit and direct addressing of the FPÖ and the “KronenZeitung”, the heated public opinion, the megaphone-based agitation in situ and the forced over-affirmation of TV cynicism by the real cynicism of the deportation practices triggered extremely controversial reactions. The provocation did not, however, as it has become characteristic of most subversive practices, end in a tactic withdrawal from communication, but only made the creation of new, dynamic constellations of the public “im Medium des Antagonismus” (in the medium of antagonism) possible. Art was not produced, but a moment of politicization as for example claimed

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as constitutive for art actually in a relationship with the public by Oliver Machart.5 Public, therefore, neither describes the public space in the city nor the art-institutional space of the White Cube, as the material nature of a space doesn’t present sufficient clauses for the dynamics of confrontation of the yet to be confronted, fi lling the public with life. A space is only in this sense public that “generates a conflict”6, or, as Jacques Rancière would say, that blows up the “police” regulation of representation in favour of a “political” redistribution of the sensual.7 The indignation of the right-wing against the “Österreich-Vernaderer” (roughly, discreditor of Austria) Schlingensief was to be expected to a certain extent. But also the left was shaken. Participants of one of the then regular Thursday manifestations symbolically tried to liberate the prisoners on June 15, destroying parts of the container in the process. Many sympathizers of this only somewhat steerable “Bilderstörungsmaschine”8 (machine for the disruption of images, Schlingensief in Paul Poet’s documentary motion picture “Ausländer raus!”) interpreted this disruption of the disruption as evidence for a naïve lack of understanding. However, just as likely, and independently of the actual existence of such a conscious decision by the protesters, one might claim that the “attack” on the container was itself part of the dramaturgic orchestration, the demonstrators taking the role of the “good” Austria, acting as amateurs. The Schlingensief-savant and then boss of the cultural department of The Standard Claus Philipp wrote: “The attack on the container gave Austria images of revolution as were never produced in reality by this country. At the same time, images of xenophobia are spread around the world, often bringing things to a crucial point, interpreting, erring. As much as Schlingensief valued the damaging moments, those moments that can get out of control,

5 | Oliver Marchart: “There is a crack in everything...“ Public Art als politische Praxis. In: Kunst und Öffentlichkeit – Kritische Praxis der Kunst im Stadtraum Zürich. Ed. Christoph Schenker and Michael Hiltbrunner.. Zürich 2007, P.241 6 | Ibid., P. 240 7 | See Jaques Rancière: Das Unvernehmen. Politik und Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main, P. 41 8 | Christoph Schlingensief in: Ausländer raus! Schlingensiefs Container. Documentary picture by Paul Poet. Vienna 2002

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as much he kept control and an overview of the handling of (transmission) time and (action) space.”9 Three years before Schlingensief’s container action, in 1997, a cubical poster object, also brandishing messages, concerned itself with the topic of custody prior to deportation. The Plakatobjekt vor der Wiener Staatsoper (poster object in front of the Viennese state opera), three square meters large, by Martin Krenn and Oliver Ressler, was part of a simultaneous exhibition in the Kunsthalle Exnergasse and informed on the backdrop of a photographed house front trilingually on the state racism of the Austrian practices during custody prior to deportation. The dryness of the venture not only had to compete with a notorious low visibility in the advertisement-covered zones such as the opera, as the cultural journalist Matthias Dusini comments: “the rhetoric arsenal of so-called “art in public interest”, street theatre, video, ad spaces, protests, manifestations, graffiti, flyers and stickers has long been used by ecological and civil rights groups such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace without them valuing the perception in the context of art.”10 Therefore one could turn the situation around and not criticize the poor aesthetic originality or finesse that is often certified of socio-politically engaged art, but to honour the casual development of the aesthetics of activism. In this context one can talk of a caesura of sorts, referring to the protest culture of 2000. Not only did a politicization of the unorganised masses far from the grasp of the parties take place – the plurality of the positions of the then so-called “Widerstand” (resistance) corresponded to a plethora of means of expression to recode the sings of power. The Botschaft der besorgten Bürger (Embassy of concerned citizens, a dropin centre for the organization of the Thursday manifestations), the changing artist statements on the political situation during the Projekt Fassade (project house front) of the Secession, the design of the Widerstandsbuttons (resistance buttons) by Johanna Kandl or the fictional speeches of the artist duo Julius Deutschbauer and Gerhard Spring in front of the SPÖ’s (Austrian social democrats) central office entitled Bundeskanzler Wolfgang Schüssel und Kulturstaatssekretär Franz Morak eröff nen den Wahlcontainer der SPÖ (Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel and secretary of

9 | Claus Philipp: Wahre Lügen, einfach kompliziert. In: Der Standard, June 14, 2002 10 | Matthias Dusini: Das Transparent am Bau. Global 2000 im Vergleich zur neuen “Kunst im öffentlichen Interesse“. In: Zur Sache Kunst am Bau. Ed. Markus Wailand and Vitus H. Weh. Vienna 1998, P.170

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state for cultural affairs Franz Morak inaugurate the campaign container of the SPÖ, 2002). This activism reminds one of the guerrilla tactics used against occupying forces, of the fight of the Vietcong against the B2. The Vietcong, by the way, upgraded it’s armoury with high-tech pieces of booty looted from the US army. And then the first helicopters got shot down – by the same hightech weapons the US-Americans brought into the country themselves. Translated into the sphere of cultural struggles this means: it’s about developing and arsenal of recodings, flippings, misappropriations, parodies, simulations, fakes, appropriations and expropriations in a world in which the options of de- and re-territorialising are in flux. Especially because of this subversive liquidification, more often than not symbolicalpolitical practices are not immune to further subversion. Even the right knows about posters and banners by now. The advertising people are the Detournement-users 2.0 and create images that for instance use the slogan “Image is nothing”. Society is, according to Deleuze, something that leaks, financially and ideologically, in all directions – good as well as bad. Synchronically, capitalism is also a system that is not only necessarily self-contradictory, but that can also use the disruption as innovation, adding dynamics and positive feedback. The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald’s. Andy Warhol once pronounced these words in his notorious ambivalence. Should or may one therefore add today: The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is Banksy, the most beautiful thing in Stockholm is Banksy, the most beautiful thing in Florence is Banksy?

2. C OMMUNICATION

AND

C RE ATIVIT Y

Guerilla.com Johannes Grenzfurthner

(Transcript of lecture performance at paraflows 2009) Welcome to all newscasters, pollsters, watchdogs of discourse, German rappers, sages of economy, alternative separatists, management consultants, classy columnists, share holder agents, pop writers, advertising strategists, java-script coders and junior professors from Latvia. Welcome welcome welcome! By now you have probably read the short description for this little lecture saying “information and political education are completely useless if nobody wants to listen.“ Of course you will have underlined that part in your papers. If you haven’t, please do so now. This is very important for your job, being part of the info worker semi-elite. As we all know, we live in an age that has been deemed the ‘Age of Communication.’ Calling it this has done us all a huge favour because now we know that it’s all about communication. And it is global communication we are talking about here. Global communication is organized and institutionalized by big machines that we call the ‘media’. Media is a word for lots of things that we need to communicate. There has always been media – such as our faces and hands which we frequently use to get something across to one another. I don’t think I am an exception here (talking with hands, a lot). But for a couple of years

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now we have media enabling us to communicate over long distances. And this has massively changed our world as well as our reality. Now, our reality – say our houses and streets and towns and habits – is supplemented by far-away realities of far-away houses and streets and towns and habits. On MySpace we can have friends that might not even exist and we still keep befriending them and feel great about it. As a result, our world has become bigger and smaller at the same time. This world wide world is no longer a world constituted by direct action in the way that, say, our garden is by our gardening efforts. Gardening the modern world means gardening the media. The garden we live in is a media garden in which we act and react. Every real world problem has to be represented in the media system to be real – or at least, to be real to us. Even if something might fi nally kill us – like global warming will – the media has to tell us now that some such will happen then. So at least we shouldn’t act surprised while we’re croaking. We all know and most of us probably understand that the major power of today’s world is the media. Whoever controls the media controls everything. And since the media is not nature but culture – Western culture that is – it is always owned by somebody. There’s no such thing as free media – no matter how deeply you might yearn for it. Again: There’s no such thing as free media – as I am going to show you (take his cell phone out of his pocket, shows it). This is my cell phone (pointing at person in audience): Can you please come over here and take it? (guy gets up and comes over to Johannes; Johannes acts as if he wants to hand over the cell but holds it back in the last moment). No, I will not give you my cell phone. It’s mine! Go away or I will call for police. Does anybody know what the police’s number is in this part of the world? (tries to call police) Bugger! No battery left! Media is always owned, I own some, you own some – but most of it is owned by… well… someone else. About 35% of the media is owned by Bill Gates as a recent study suggests that I asked my friend David Fine to do on his lunch break. I gave him 20 bucks for his work. I offered him 25 if he could find that it’s actually 45%, but he said nobody would believe that and so we agreed on 35% for 20$. David Fine completed his study in under two minutes and received 20$. And now you understand why Bill Gates is called “Gates of perception.”

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So, now we recognize that media is the strongest political, economic and of course heuristic power in the modern world. And most of us do not own significant parts of it. So if someone wants to do anything about it, he has to hack the system. And I know that you want to hack the system in order to add something to it – like your stupid marketing concept for your stupid product that you stupidly believe in. So what you need is guerrilla communication. And I am about to tell you what that is, and how it works as a way to help you put together the stupid marketing concept for your stupid product. To get on my stupid nerves afterwards. Dumb ass me! I also know that you don’t want to change the world in general because you are living on the sunny side of it. That’s only natural and you won’t go to hell for it, because there’s no such thing as hell to punish you for what you have been or done in your lives. I sometimes wish there was a God to beat you up in the afterlife for what you’ve done and been – but there just isn’t – you lucky bastards. Guerrilla communication intends to wage war on the media system and to wage war on a reality that is produced by this system. Using the word ‘guerrilla’ suggests that there’s a war going on. And it suggests that media tries to constitute and preserve the status quo. This is the status quo of a society in which knowledge and information are not only means of controlling people (as US-American-type liberals might fervently acclaim) but also to segregate people into classes like the working class and the networking class – that‘s you and me, by the way. (From a proud leftist perspective there is no real difference between conservative and liberal ideology. They are both on the same side, fighting for the fluff y concept of “freedom”. But in fact they are fighting to maintain their privileges of class, sex, race and birthplace. That’s why both sides fear the “government” like Satan fears Holy Water, because an entity like the “government” can actually cut down their privileges.) So what can be done about it? How can you fight these powers which also make sure you can keep your privileges as the ruling knowledge elite? Let’s see what the classical guerrilla communication theories suggest here… The determining factor of guerrilla tactics is to launch small but effective operations to attack an enemy which is much bigger but also a little lame due to a certain degree of formal institutionalisation. And these tactics are taken from classical guerrilla warfare (which already made use

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of plenty of guerrilla communication to disturb, confuse or interrupt its enemy’s communication system). But – of course – there is a difference between military guerrilla tactics, and guerrilla communication strategies. Military strategies always try to win. Communication guerrillas cannot win. Guerrilla communication does not want to defeat mainstream media as a whole. Unlike military guerrilla action, guerrilla communication aims to interfere in the monologue of bourgeois mainstream media, and to show how reality and normality are created by having control over the media, publicity and public spaces. Guerrilla communication is inspired by various theories on social communication – how it works and how it works for those in power. It includes positions that tend to focus merely on the government (just like the liberal tradition) and excludes any other factors from the analysis, feeling no need to show a more complex portrait of social powers. But guerrilla communication theories might also include more left-wing or Marxist positions, pointing out that all power is derived from the social factors underlying and forming a society, such as class, race or sex. My position in this would of course be that normality and reality are created within such a structure. And that to attack normality and reality would also mean to attack this very structure – something which theorists have referred to as the semiotics of reality, or social semiotics. In a media-based society (and of course there is no such thing as a non-media-based society consisting of more than one person) it is the signs and significants, the meanings and habits and conventions of speaking and thinking, the images and stereotypes which control everything. It is important to analyze how it is represented and of course what is not represented or how it lacks representation. It’s not so much Rupert Murdock – whose assholeness I will not dispute – that we should attack, but rather something I would call the cultural grammar of the public space (which consists of the media space as well as of streets, places and baseball stadiums). Power is formed within such a grammar. Access and non-access to each and every thing is regulated in its realm. Meanings are negotiated there. Good and evil are determined – bourgeois morale is defined as the morale of the ruling elite and then forced upon everybody else through the pseudo-objectivist legal system, locking away those who won’t comply with their position in the social class-race-sex-structure. And of course this structure is not a free gliding and mystical pattern but merely the effect of class and race and gender management in society. Society, to put it in a Foucaultian way, is an ongoing process of rediscussing and remodelling its power structures. Power is not a unidirectional force, it is negotiated. It is a standard reflex that people think they are helpless against almighty governments and

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corporate powers. But power is more like a fluid, or like a jellyfish, than a solid brick wall, and we can play with it. Communication guerrilla should be political activism drawing from a watchful view of the paradoxes and absurdities of power, turning these into the starting point for political interventions by playing with representations and identities, with alienation and over-identification. Guerrilla communication tries to understand the processes by which the media come up with social frameworks of behaviour and perception. And by understanding what’s going on there it also tries to introduce tiny symbolic changes to that system, in order to make people suspicious of the information, and to perceive the ideological structure and goal it transports. Guerrilla communication urges us to reconsider what we believe (and also what we believe we believe), and whom we do believe, and why. Moreover, it tries to point out that media is forcing Gleichschaltung (“alignment”) onto people, by censoring facts that don’t fit in the picture. It tells us that information and the media should be free. But most of the people involved do not realize that there’s no such thing as free media in a capitalist bourgeois and liberal society. A free good on the free market would be either a nice gadget, a simple freebie, a marketing tool for something else, or merely a paradox. If you disagree, feel free to come up with an existing example which doesn’t fit in any of these categories. There’s a wide range of strategies for guerrilla communication; most of them have something to do with mocking or mimicry of official communication, faking and rearranging it in the process. These strategies are useful in attacking a single player like a multinational doing the very wrong by trying to stain its image and tactically embarrass itself as a warning to stop the evildoing. While this rather useful strategy is pointing out the power of the public as buyers or not-buyers, these tactics still remain within the wrong dichotomy of “good and thoughtful capitalism fighting its evil twin”. It doesn’t dig too deep under the surface of the media world. It’s like half-assed guerrilla communication, perfectly fit for a middle-class that wants to consume protest, not act. Another strategy would be decoding information techniques and processes. The idea here is that getting publicity means exposing yourself, and therefore you can be attacked. Advertising has to be placed somewhere in public and as soon as something tries to give instructions it can be obeyed or disobeyed by not playing by the rules. You could for example decide to not buy a specific product as long as it is advertised. This might become your personal and individual strategy of guerrilla communication. But

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it sucks because, unfortunately, it’s always the best products which are advertised because they are advertised. There is no such thing as free and individual taste. But advertising wants you to believe in the freedom and individuality of your taste which doesn’t even exist – empirically, that is. You too can sabotage instructions by misinterpreting them and acting dumb. That goes for the factory workers who are of course excluded from a congress like this but also for you white collar supremacists: why not use the CD drive in your office computer as a coffee cup-holder? Ever tried it?! It’s got a tinge of freedom to it which you of course wouldn’t want to experience because it’s dangerous. It’s the freedom of something that exists beyond the mere functionality the way it was intended. Oh wait – are you a hacker? Anyways, one of the basic strategies has to be faking things: press releases by political parties or companies, even websites like the one the Yes Men did – one of the most famous guerrilla communication group of our time. Through their fake websites they receive correspondence from other players on the information market and even invitations to speak in the name of the company they pretend to be part of. One of their biggest hoaxes was a BBC-World interview as a Dow Chemical spokesman on the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal toxic gas accident in India, a disaster which resulted in 3.000 deaths and 120.000 injured, many of whom are still suffering badly from the effects. Dow Chemical (who is in charge of the responsible company, Union Carbide) continually refused to pay compensation to the victims in the case. But Yes Men activist Andy Bichlbaum – under the name of Jude Finisterra – claimed during this interview that Dow Chemical was finally willing to take responsibility and pay 12 billion dollars. Shortly afterwards, Dow Chemical repudiated. Their stocks had begun to fall rapidly. To sum it up, you could say that all about playing with representation and identity, with alienation and identification. At least through over-identification which means that you use affi rmation to a degree that goes far beyond what is conventional in order to show what something really means – but also to act out the habits and conventions of your enemy. Marketing disinformation, for example, uses classical marketing tools and knowledge in exactly the same way it is always used, but twists it in the opposite direction. This works for press releases and interviews as well as for personal habits, like what you wear and how you look. The Yes Men, for example, are masters of the typical company spokesmen body language and tone of voice, so what they do can no longer be called a parody (even if they use parody and satirical points) but is rather an impersonation.

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You could call this strategy the illegitimate occupying of speaking positions in a world in which some people and players have more power to speak and a louder voice than others. While classical counter-culture media could rarely have had such an effect on the public due to its natural limitations, hijacking or faking the channels and speaking positions conveys the ability to get messages out with a lot more Nachdruck (authority). So you could say that guerrilla communication is not trying to destroy the dominant codes, but rather to deconstruct and strategically abuse them. And of course to use them for its own purposes. Now we understand that guerrilla communication doesn’t have a military goal like destroying and overtaking anything, or suppressing and overruling anybody, or exterminating a special group of people. It’s more about bringing a special group of people like the people of Bhopal on the map of global consciousness. But an important question is if the Yes Men’s Bhopal prank was successful or not. Of course it managed to draw attention to the subject, but most of middle-class people who watched the incident on television were probably astounded about the positive outcome of the case, and of course never learned about the fake story. So, are the Yes Men actually unwillingly stabilizing the system? Most of the time guerrilla communicationists are not so much concerned about themselves. But I am also sure that the media attention they get, as well as a possibility of upgrading their human capital as ethical rebels and skilful pranksters adds a lot of motivation. Interesting, isn’t it? To sum it up, guerrilla communication is a versatile practice of cultural resistance. The earliest forms of modern guerrilla communication are to be found within the WWI art scene, when a group of international artists and deserters met in Zurich on neutral Swiss ground to launch the Dada movement. Dada was the precursor of modern and post modern radical art movements such as The Situationist International, Punk or Neoism. A major concern of Dadaist art was to cut in on old forms of artistic activities such as painting pictures or writing lyrics. Instead, they were looking for new forms of art to fit into the modern world. They started out as noise mongers with pretty radical performances. Soon they began to manipulate the press by distributing fake press information. In a way, Dadaists worked with the media like other artists work with paint or metal. They also cut and re-cut pictures, words and lines from newspapers and assembled collages and montages out of it, sometimes of grotesque and sometimes of

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political content. Later on, they launched interventions in the public space attacking major institutions of post-war society. The so-called “Oberdada” (chief dada) Johannes Baader – one of the first performance artists of the 20th century – managed to confuse the attendants of a church service at the Berlin cathedral by reading out his own bizarre sermon. He also threw leaflets entitled “The Green Corpse” down from the gallery at the German National Assembly. By doing that he catapulted Dada right into the bourgeois media. These interventions broke ground for a lot of late modernist art and subcultural strategies attempting to model the public space or the social world rather than holding on to classical art stuff such as painting pictures or sculpturing. A vast group of social drop-outs emerged during the high times of Western counterculture – from the Beatniks to the Punk movement. These people developed strategies to provoke and challenge society, to implement their political agenda into the public space and to start reclaiming the streets – jut like a slogan has it. The street is synonymous for public space and the humdrum surface of society. Therefore, it was considered the perfect stage for informing people or, let’s say, for counter-informing people. Most activists came from a classical art or journalist background but had experienced that nobody really listens when you speak in the traditional art space. Your average guy does not go to exhibitions, concerts nor does he get in touch with counter culture media. Counter culture and the art world are niche places. And even if people would go there they would consider what happens there to be “just art”. Art is the place where things might be reflected. But that amounts to nothing because it is not linked to everyday life. Art is a special task and a special place for special people. Something the elite are involved with, by buying its high-priced products of criticism. Th is is the classical drama of bourgeois art in bourgeois society – same is true for bourgeois journalism: it simply keeps embodying the same old role as a critical sidekick of the powers to be. The shiny good cop to its bad cop-ness. It does a good shoe shining job within a system that neither opposes nor represses it, but generously grants art and literature and journalism to feel free to criticize and to complain. Around the 1960s, a lot of strategies emerged to confront the men and women in the street right where they were, to escape the bourgeois art world’s limitations. The first happenings were staged referring to Dada and a lot of street theatre groups popped up everywhere. Street theatre ranged from conventional plays acted out amidst the shoppers and

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passers-by, to role plays where the audience did not even realize they were watching a play. The post-bourgeois artists were trying to bring the art back to the people – not as a handy service (as it is to the bourgeois elite art consumer) but as a form of irritation. This was one of the many starting points of guerrilla communication, of the so called ‘reclaim the streets’ movement which includes funny yet irritating activities like Flashmobs, and of the Adbusters movement. To “adbust” means to attack advertisements and other inscriptions in the public space. Adbusting resists the vulgar capitalist idea the there’s no such thing as a public space, but only private spaces belonging to those who buy or rent them. Everybody is an adbuster – at least sometimes – because everybody has defaced advertisements in his or her life. You can for example bust a billboard if you park your car in front of it, blocking it from view for a while. Or your dog might pee on it. And if the internet is public space, too, you can block pop-ups – the possibilities are endless. So there’s a great variety of adbusting techniques and only a small percentage might get you into serious trouble with the law. More severe interventions include pasting over advertisements, tearing them off, graffiti-ing or otherwise commenting on them, rendering them impossible, changing the messages or the like. These are not necessarily very refined ways of attacking the ads but rather spontaneous expressions of disgust and frustration with advertisement in general or a specific ad – one displaying, for example, racist or sexist images. If you take into account that the average person receives up to 3.000 advertising messages every day, as a recent study had it, you will understand that advertisement causes aggressions and frustration and the need to let off steam at least from time to time. I think I should let you alone with your anti-consumerist fantasies here – but don’t let your imagination run too wild. Some people develop such an anti-consumerist fetish that they turn into present-day hippies, and we don’t want that to happen. In the 1970s, counterculture split into a more traditional Marxist wing consisting of small parties and groups that wasted a lot of their precious time and beautiful youth to fight each other. One less dogmatic movement was the “Spaßguerrilla” – fun guerrilla, that is – also called the ‘Spontimovement’ to emphasise its spontaneous and site-specific character. Plenty of the activities which were conceived at that time – like throwing pies at celebrities – are still around in the guerrilla communication movement of today. They too started working with so-called fakes – fake information and actions distributed via the bourgeois media oblivious of the fact it was spreading a hoax. A popular slogan had it that the basic idea was to ‘invent false facts in order to create real events’ (= Die Erfi ndung falscher Tatsachen zur Schaff ung wahrer Ereignisse). But they also made real

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object fakes, like pirate editions of the socialist classics, or handing out well-counterfeited subway tickets. Pirate radio stations – like the famous Radio Alice in Italy – hijacked radio frequencies. Graffiti was an important weapon of that movement to overwrite the text of the city. And in their best and most far-out moment the Spaßguerrilla came up with the post-modern idea that social structures are texts, too, and therefore can be overwritten in the same way you can overwrite an advertisement. At the same time the squatter’s movement emerged, and there were lots of fruitful synergies between those different movements and approaches. These were post-bourgeois artists in the very literal sense of the word, attacking actual private property as well as non-material cultural property. So, the good thing about guerrilla communicationists is that – unlike everybody else – they show no respect for the fact that the media and the public space are always owned, and in the hands of the bourgeois elite and semi-elite, as are the images and cultural frameworks we live in. The central and basic guerrilla strategy is to misappropriate images, words, radio frequencies and shift them to different contexts. In France, the famous and influential Situationist Movement defined a form of art called détournement. It means that you roam aimlessly around the streets of Paris – or Paris, Texas – and take what you find and then do something absurd with it. Even today people indulge in such psychogeographical romps and there is tons of material on YouTube. A lot of these activities were and still are strictly illegal. Therefore, guerrilla communication activists had to develop forms of camouflage and hiding behind multiple names and open pseudonyms – like in the LutherBlissett-project. The Luther Blissett activists edited their works exclusively under the name of Luther Blissett. A detective novel bestseller was published under the name, plus lots of other books on the matter of cultural subversion and jamming – for example by the German guerrilla communication group ‘Autonome A.F.R.I.K.A Gruppe’. Pseudonyms don’t just grant invisibility for people avoiding the blame; they also let you get away with violating the bourgeois principle of identity as a person, as an artist, or as an author. The person is – so they say – a nation within in the nation (= Staat im Staat). And that is why some people try to overcome it by forming collective personae. So, in a certain way, guerrilla communication is a lot like hacking. And hacking is, of course, one of the means of guerrilla communication, because it is a hostile assault from outside the system trying to find a way into the system to change or manipulate it from within. And to do so, you have to know how everything works, so, first you need to understand the

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way in which the media shapes and constitutes reality – just like hackers know what a website is and how it works. And that is to say: not simply what a website looks like and how you can find it in an ocean of websites, but also how the code works. Actually, you’ve got to dig deep into the code to then be able to manipulate it. Every one of you will probably know what a web programming code is or you will at least have some idea of it. And most of you probably even are aware how technological code constitutes the media. But what do we know about the cultural code of messages? Do we really understand how, for example, heterosexism is cemented in our society via texts and images? And what about cultural stereotypes? How do we – or at least some of us – come to believe that white males from suburbs are meant to rule the world without even once spending a thought on it? How is the sexist and racist and classist subconsciousness of the liberal society shaped through the media and access to creating it? Any suggestions? You sure won’t have any, because it is just the nature of the capitalist and bourgeois constant flow of ever-the-same images and stories and pictures. And that is what’s got to be hacked and changed, to make it visible and questionable. Only once something can be seen will we realise what has been invisible before. That’s why we need to hack the media flow to bring on some different images and ideas – to change its message and the stereotypes it communicates. But we have to be careful. Only thirty years ago Western societies were still governed along the principles of the “disciplinary society”. The institutions of a disciplinary society are founded mainly on two devices that keep its subordinates where they are: Control and punishment. Both are certainly effective, yet they produce at least an inner resistance, as well as the possibility to avoid either. It’s hard to monitor in absolute terms, and there are always ways of avoiding, if not “hacking” and ridiculing these mechanisms of control. Loop-holes will be identified and used. The disciplinary society was one that created refractoriness; it revealed hierarchies and blatantly opposing classes of rulers and the ruled. These small acts of individual resistance also instigate models of theoretic and actual resistance on a grander scale. The society of control has however shifted this device and transplanted it into the subjects themselves. As soon as control is collectively internalised, when control is part of the psychological apparatus and of thought,

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then we can speak of control in absolute terms. Not much can be done anymore, as no one is independent from, or outside of, control any longer. We have to be aware of this change and have to analyze and adjust our attacking strategies. Companies like Nike already use Graffiti as a standard variety in their marketing campaigns and the first people who read Naomi Klein’s “No Logo” were marketing gurus who wanted to know what they shouldn’t do. We can change the political economics of a society. And you can quote me on that. But we have to be precise about it. Just playing around might only make our actions end up as a funny 15-seconds-clip on CNN, and that would be useless. We have to understand cognitive capitalism or we will just be going round and round in the same old circles, as the history of guerrilla communication clearly shows. Looking back at the guerrilla communication movement, we have to say that beside the countercultural intentions, these strategies were an early form of viral marketing for the rebels themselves, or at least for some of them. Because a great part of the movement has made it to the top of our society and its institutions – like the former German minister of foreign affairs, Joschka Fischer, who has been among the notorious players of the huge Sponti-movement in Frankfurt before turning into a complete butthead. So it is all about success; and success is what you are up to, aren’t you? So will you do me a favour and at least erase all the information I gave you from your memory. Maybe not sharing the information would be the utmost guerrilla communication act. Or at least it would make a slightly better world.

Guerrilla Gardening. Political protest, or mainstream-compatible, watered-down, wannabe subculture? Julia Jahnke

The need to define... What are we talking about and why? Well, of course we should always strive to know what we are talking about and also try to make sure that we have the same understanding as the person we are talking to. In scientific writing, it is a rule that we define our subject(s) before we go deeper into the issue. With guerrilla gardening, I feel like that there are still very vague ideas about what it “is” and what it “isn’t”, for scientists probably even more than for laypeople... To give you an example: for some people guerrilla gardening is “secretive cannabis plantings in remote mountain areas with the intent of making monetary profit” and for others guerrilla gardening is “the semi-legal planting and tending of ornamental flowers in neglected public flower beds with the intention of beautifying the neighborhood and thus contributing to the community”. What do they have in common? The fact that it is both are uncommon...?!? Are there right and wrong definitions of guerrilla gardening? While the discussion about the dualistic approach of right and wrong can be led somewhere else, the discourse about guerrilla gardening hasn‘t come up with one single valid definition of it yet. The Canadian Eco-Journalist

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David Tracey calls it “Autonomy in green – you can even defi ne it yourself” (thanks, David), and he defines it as gardening in public spaces with or without permission (Tracey: 2007)1. On the following page he goes into a discussion of public space. The famous London guerrilla gardener Richard Reynolds calls it “The illicit cultivation of someone else‘s land” in his popular book about the subject (Reynolds:2008)2. Until recently, I used to call it “Gardening in places you don‘t privately own without asking for permission before you start”, based on the numerous interviews and informal chats I have had over the years with guerrilla gardeners. Here is a quote by an anonymous German guerrilla gardener: “The question is not if it has to be illegal [...] the most important thing is the active participation in your own environment”. Now, as mentioned above, I am under the impression that various players use the expression randomly to fit their specific purposes (like selling sneakers). Th is impression has led me to my current understanding of it: “a word used as a multi-tool that can be applied to different means”. Since I‘m writing this (subjective) article, this is my valid definition for now, even though I might get confused myself with my other definitions of it... From here the questions go: Who is using it? What are you using it for? And why? Remember: “it” = “the term Guerrilla Gardening”.

Let‘s play scientist! Follow these questions and come up with some categories. Who says “Guerrilla Gardening”? First, we can make a distinction if a) you are calling yourself a guerrilla gardener, or if b) you are talking about someone that also sees themselves as a guerrilla gardener. Then it becomes a bit more twisted, because c) you could be labeling someone that would disagree with you about being a guerrilla gardener. And, just to round it off, there are d) the people who don’t even know you are talking about them and might or might not care... All the people using the term could be scientists, activists, advertisers, politicians, artists, journalists (a lot of them, for sure!) or something else. You might be more interested in who does Guerrilla Gardening than who talks about it. I will address that too, right here and now: anybody! Did 1 | Tracey, David (2007): Guerrilla Gardening – A Manualfesto. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers. 2 | Reynolds, Richard (2008): On Guerrilla Gardening. London: Bloomsbury

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you say “Be specific!”? OK, to be more specific: I have found anyone in any age group, any occupation and any educational background can be a guerrilla gardener. Most notable for me personally are people who have been doing it for decades, like a lot of older women in former East Germany. I am sure many readers will also think of anti-globalization or other activists. Of course, the “who”, “what” and “why” are closely connected with each other, I don’t want to exaggerate too much... but generally it is true to say it could be anybody, your teacher, your daughter, your neighbor, and you might not even know... One last thing worth mentioning: it seems that more women are doing it, while more men are in the public view with it. Sound familiar somehow? What? Second, what act are you describing? It could be anything that has to do with plants, really. My personal favorite is building community gardens. But it could be planting tulip bulbs at a roundabout. Or planting trees by the river. Sowing daisies in cracks in the concrete. Planting weed in the mountains. Building wooden boxes that you hang on traffic lights, with geraniums growing in them. Giving Winston Churchill’s statue a Mohawk of lawn. Throwing seed bombs. Free your mind, throw in some plants and guerrilla gardening will surely follow... Won’t it? Or is there anything else missing for it to be guerrilla gardening? Maybe the next category enlightens us a bit more. Why? Why are you using the expression guerrilla gardening? It is a catchy phrase, I have even heard several people calling it “sexy” – there is all kinds of kinky stuff out there, I guess... It definitely gets peoples attention. You are guaranteed a bigger audience if you label your lecture “guerrilla gardening” instead of “gardening to beautify the neighborhood”or your advertising campaign as “we are trying to sell sneakers”. That is a simple fact. Let‘s dissect this clever sound bite. Basically, it derives from guerrilla warfare which describes decentralized strategies that are carried out by small units that act locally and unpredictably so they are very hard or impossible for a large army to beat. Illegal cannabis fields, for example, share a quaint resemblance with the setting that real guerrilla fighters struggle for their cause in. We can categorize guerrilla gardeners according to their motivation as I did some years ago in my master’s thesis.

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Possible motivations for guerrilla gardeners were found to be gardening just for the sake of gardening, or gardening for aesthetic reasons, for therapeutic and healing reasons, artistic expression, the urge to participate in designing the city or village you live in, or reclaiming public space. You might hear the calling to contribute alternative educational material for kids that grew up in the city and have never seen a carrot in the ground. Your main focus may be to do something fun with your friends or get to meet the neighbors. And there are some people that really just guerrilla garden for the need of food while others have enough food to eat but do it to raise the global and local issue of food sovereignty. And – it has even been used for advertising purposes. Arrgh. What a nuisance. One common uniting reason is the fun and joy it gives us to work with plants, touching them and putting ours hands directly in the soil, which reconnects us with the web of life from which we all come. All in all, the most prevalent, underlying idea (- with exceptions -) is guerrilla gardening as a symbolic act to raise awareness; one could say to open a public discussion about quality of life and justice, ecological, political and societal issues, resource and power distribution – in short. Does that mean, guerrilla gardening is always political? What about the people who just want to plant pretty flowers? Here is what Aresh Javadi from New York City thinks about defi nitions. He founded the MoreGardens!Coalition and fights for the development and preservation of community gardens there. “If you wanna call it Guerrilla Gardening – great. If you wanna call it everyday gardening or kids gardening or let’s heal the earth gardening – that’s what we need to be doing, [...] it is our right.” Well, Aresh, I agree. But since we are already playing, let us look at this charming definition of the word “guerrilla” that I found on thefreedictionary.com. “guerrilla, guerilla [gəˈrɪlə] n 1. (Military) a.  a member of an irregular usually politically motivated armed force that combats stronger regular forces, such as the army or police [or capitalism] b.  (as modifier) guerrilla warfare

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2. (Life Sciences & Allied Applications/Botany) a form of vegetative spread in which the advance is from several individual rhizomes or stolons growing rapidly away from the centre, as in some clovers. Compare phalanx.” Funny – definition #2, I hadn‘t heard that before, how attractive definitions can be... Definition #1 we briefly referred to already. It is a military term that has its backgrounds in the Spanish independence war against Napoleon at the beginning of the 19th century. In the 20th century we find a lot of revolutionary partially armed underground movements, often anti-colonial, described as Guerrilla. They are suppressed individuals and small collective self-organized groups, not trained as soldiers, not well equipped, but nonetheless fighting against a strong and well equipped state army or dictatorship – they have the moral and practical support of the people, they are the people. Their motives are freedom and self-determination. In the second half of the 20th century, the term urban guerrilla comes up frequently. A famous example of it would be the radical left German militant group Red Army Fraction... So, this little political side note leads us back to the question...

...is there a political guerrilla gardening? I guess it’s already time for more definitions – political? Max Weber wrote in 1919 that politics is to be understood as any activity in which the state might engage itself in order to influence the relative distribution of force (Weber:1919)3. Half a century later Hannah Arendt describes political action as a bunch of people with all individual goals ending up agreeing on one common decision (Arendt:1958)4. I am getting tired of definitions, but I would like to know what “force” or “power” is. Is it just top down decision making or is it also the slow trickle of water that over time, almost unnoticed, changes things – or preserves them in other cases – ? It seems it may possibly be both... OK, since we are on a playground, let’s hop over to another term and play

3 | Weber, Max (1919): Politik als Beruf. Vortragsmanuskript. Ditzingen, Reclam (1992). 4 | Arendt, Hannah (1958): Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben. Neuauflage 2009: München: Piper Verlag.

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with it: political gardening. If politics is striving for influence over the distribution of power, it seems to me that people get political if they want to have a say about what is going on around them. Since it is impossible for us to exclude ourselves from society if we live in it, everything going on is somehow connected to society. And politics of course... and that whole rattail of concepts that society is constituted of... So our “have a say” is not restricted to institutional politics with its political parties and that whole game, but rather touches all aspects of our lives. Human interaction, perception, education, enjoying beauty, appreciating and respecting all other non-human life, gender issues, health issues, economic structures, religion, nutrition, city design, contributing to “the” human race, this entity that lives by the life of several billion people. And for each of these threads which constitute our “reality” I can give you an example how gardens connect to it. The fi lmmaker and garden activist Ella von der Haide started a documentary fi lm series a few years ago, titled “Another world is plantable!” which is worth checking out. In the first volume she portraits the community garden movement in Buenos Aires that popped up a few years ago in the midst of Argentina’s economic crisis. People got together, organized against all odds and gained tremendously. “Our garden is a way to fight for more justice in society. But not only the garden itself but the organization that comes with it, and how we do it”, says Nadja from a community garden in Buenos Aires proudly and goes on to explain in detail. “If we just made a garden and there was somebody to tell us what to do and at the end of the day gave us three coins – this logic doesn’t ... – it would be a garden but nevertheless it wouldn’t bring about any change. What we do is try to follow a different logic. That doesn’t change things altogether, either. But we believe that it can contribute to something and to our ability to see things from different angles.” (Arndt&von der Haide: 2004)5 The guerrilla and community gardener Zachary Schulman from New York City explores a very similar thought in an interview I led with him in 2006: Guerrilla Gardening is important because it empowers people. Someone gave up this land, neglected it, but its ours, we can retake it. Once you start thinking like that, it changes the way you live your 5 | Arndt, Christoph und von der Haide, Ella (2004): Urbane Gärten in Buenos Aires. Gemeinschaftsdiplomarbeit an der TU Berlin.

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life and approach resources and land and people, being proactive and not assuming someone else is gonna take care of something. (Jahnke: 2007)6 The second volume of Ella’s series shows community gardens in Berlin: Kinderbauernhof am Mauerplatz, one of the oldest city farms right by the wall which is now gone – they started guerrilla and continued like that for a long time, still are only semi-legal, the infamous Rosa Rose garden (started and currently is guerrilla) and Buergerpark Laskerwiesen, a new Berlin model of citizen participation in tending and using public parks. You know I have to talk about the Rosa Rose, this little green jewel of fresh air, whizzing and buzzing with life inside and out through so many summer nights, breeding ground for concepts of another world and all kinds of gardening and community activities, inspiration for many around the globe, integrating being a moderate neighborhood initiative and a radical subversive project simultaneously. And bringing so much creative energy together, always anew. Born a guerrilla garden unintentionally, then becoming a nomadic garden through necessity, keeping the spirit alive against all odds as if it isn’t only the product of the people running it anymore but has come to possess a life of its own, and a strong will to survive. Rosa Rose’s future is yet uncertain as I write this. She was forced to move a few streets over in the summer of 2009 and in the process she dropped some seeds and spread all over the city, not only as an idea but as tangible matter, in the form of plants and clippings. She might go legal now. Time will tell. I admit; I am biased. I am in love with Rosa Rose, you caught me... but you would be too if you knew her... Ella‘s third volume of the garden series deals with community gardens in South Africa. Women groups started organizing gardens and from there gained a lot of confidence and insight, which led to more organizing of all kinds of things. Recently, Ella started a piece on school gardens. You might wonder “what’s political about school gardens?” If you did, I would answer “dude/ dudette! Haven’t you heard? Knowledge is power!” Yes, this is one of my beliefs – it all starts with education – or the suppression of it and the suppression of access to it, which still happens all over the world. In particular, kids 6 | Jahnke, Julia (2007): Eine Bestandsaufnahme zum globalen Phänomen Guerrilla Gardening anhand von Beispielen in New York, London und Berlin . Veröffentlichung 2010: Tönning: Der Andere Verlag.

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that grow up in urban environments often don’t have any relation to the natural world. It might seem crazy to some of you, but it is not exaggerated that a lot of kids don’t have a clue where food comes from – besides the fact that you buy it at the store. But the fact that a carrot doesn’t grow in the plastic bag that it is sold in doesn’t even cross their minds. Let alone the whole issue of agricultural politics and their far reaching implications. So, step by step: having a school garden and offering kids the sensual experience of smelling, feeling, tasting, hearing, seeing, witnessing the process of growth and decay is by itself worth so much already. Then, the next step is having them influence these processes by tending or neglecting their gardens. It’s all about perception. You don’t need to push it further but maybe some of them get interested in the issue and start asking questions. This can go different directions from here. Let‘s now look at some more forms of political gardening. I have a few lined up to talk about, we will see how far we get here... Intercultural gardens: this is a concept which has existed under this name in Germany since the late 90s. It sprung from a situation of traumatized Bosnian refugees, all women, who received asylum in Germany but were confined to sit around and bide their time. When asked what they missed the most they answered unisono “Our Gardens!” So the German lady that asked them started looking for ways to make it possible for these women to have their own garden. Soon, other refugees joined in. Interestingly enough, this turned into a great way to learn German, because often enough the gardeners didn’t have another common language to speak to each other. And then the gardeners were all of a sudden in a position where they didn’t solely just receive support any more, but could give it as well! What a different situation! They could generously share – their harvest, their knowledge, their life-long experiences, their warm and lively garden space, even their tips and tricks about dealing with German bureaucracy. And Bosnian and Serbian people would work together. Now try to tell me this isn’t political. I’ll just laugh. Next subject… Let’s pick Community Supported Agriculture. The idea was developed in Japan, Germany and Switzerland in the 1960s and made it big in North America in the 1980s. The consumers volunteer to share the benefits as well as the natural risk of cultivation and harvest. There are varying degrees of involvement but the most basic scheme is, you put in a specified monetary share at the beginning of the season and you receive fresh produce for the whole year – according to real conditions. If there is a sudden harsh frost during apple blossom time, you receive less apples

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because the apple harvest just turns out worse than in mild springs. If there is a record zucchini year, you will be eating more zucchini than you wish or just turning zucchini into your standard birthday present for the summer... OK, you get the idea. The point is: it’s a concept relating to the solidarity principle that undermines the prevalent capitalist market structures. The farmer has a much better financial base to plan the growing season and the consumer is provided with very fresh live foods, gets to learn a bit about agriculture and maybe new vegetables, and both sides get to know the other’s perspective. Another even more radical shade of this idea is the concept of NonCommercialAgriculture as practiced by the East German Collective of Karlshof. Their main crop is potatoes, but they also do peas and some grains now. You can’t buy the potatoes, you can’t trade them in for something else, you can’t work in order to get them, but you can have some. How? By having a consciousness that you are contributing to the community. What community? Contributing what? Consciousness? Yep, it is complex, not very sharply defined, very far from the more or less capitalist thinking structures we all grew up in, and hard to grasp. It is subversive and revolutionary. Ah, more controversy please! How commercial can political gardening be, eh? And how commercial can guerrilla gardening be? Duh, not at all of course... But political gardening has been seen to be commercial as in the CSA described above. Another case, that still needs to be proven, is a new garden in Berlin, Prinzessinnengarten. Two guys founded a company, rented an empty lot for a lot of money, and with the help of hundreds of volunteers built a big vegetable garden in bread boxes. They run a cafe and soon a restaurant, do projects with kids and unemployed people, host concerts, a circus and so on. They need to make a living from this project and are dependent on all their helpers. But all the people helping out and even just visitors get something back: seeing beautiful vegetables in the middle of Berlin, sharing work, knowledge and wonderful moments with others, being inspired – kind of like a community garden except it is a company running it, weird, eh?! I could talk about roof top gardens, about the landless workers movement in Brazil – Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) -, even the German Schrebergaerten (allotment gardens). I could talk about food sovereignty, education, gender issues (just a side comment: did you know that in oh-so-modern Germany women still earn about a fourth less than men?), about car free cities, global solidarity, and more. And I would

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link it all in one way or another to gardening. What do all these different alternative forms of gardening or agriculture have in common? They all practice constructive criticism on our local and global society structure, be it implicit without talking about it or spoken out and part of some philosophy. They put a finger on something that is dysfunctional or maybe just improvable and at the same time they offer a practical solution for making it better. Planting little utopias here and now. Pretty cool, huh? I love it... it makes so much sense, intellectually as well as emotionally and spiritually. In fact, I am so fascinated by it that I am assembling a whole book on the subject, together with Ella.

Closing the circle and making bubbles Lets put the terms political gardening and guerrilla gardening back together. These gardening forms are political because they influence society. They are guerrilla because they are all decentralized, self-responsible local acts that are hard to pinpoint and hard to control. Peter Cramer from New York (who – besides being an activist and artist – is a guerrilla gardener but refuses the term) says about Guerrilla Gardening, it is “kind of transgressive, you become part of the hidden fabric that constitutes the city”. So, even in its mildest forms, it shakes up the distribution of power. It cannot be beaten by a “regular army” if we want to stick to the military metaphor. There are so many strong ideas behind these actions, and so many different people implementing a plethora of concepts. It is not all that new either. To go back only a couple of centuries, the English diggers movement in 1649, led by Gerrard Winstanley, revolted against the suppression of the poor by feudal lords. They started cultivating vacant land, common or private, grew food and gave it to the poor. They were beaten shortly after, but the events turned into a legend and inspired many later generations. My fellow gardener and friend Richard Reynolds likes to quote the diggers a lot as the first recorded guerrilla gardeners. One of my favorite quotes on the issue is the following by Jean-Jacques Rousseau from the year 1754: The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “this is mine“, and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes or fi lling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

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Here, Rousseau speaks about the concept of property, perception and awareness, responsibility and society. Well, a garden often needs a fence to keep out boars, deer or – in the case of Berlin today: dogs. It doesn’t have to belong to anyone though, does it? Let’s go back to our subject and the title of this article. Can these ideas of down-to-earth justice and the intelligent search for solutions be watered down and corrupted? As Aresh said so adequately, it doesn’t really matter what you call it (in fact, words can be so deceiving, can’t they?), but it matters what you do. Let your actions speak. And gardens make such perfect metaphors for everything, patience, power, being, learning, love, life and death... You’ve probably noticed that I like to quote people and cite poems. To close with, I would like to share a poem with you by the wise Bengalese poet Rabindranath Tagore. It goes like this: Fools hurry, the clever wait, the wise enter through the garden gate. More gardens, more peas! Another world is plantable!

Literature Books

Arndt, Christoph und von der Haide, Ella (2004): Urbane Gärten in Buenos Aires. Gemeinschaftsdiplomarbeit an der TU Berlin. Arendt, Hannah (1958): Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben. Neuauflage 2009: München: Piper Verlag. Jahnke, Julia (2007): Eine Bestandsaufnahme zum globalen Phänomen Guerrilla Gardening anhand von Beispielen in New York, London und Berlin . Veröffentlichung 2010: Tönning: Der Andere Verlag. Reynolds, Richard (2008): On Guerrilla Gardening. London: Bloomsbury. Rousseau, Jean-Jaques (1754): A Discourse On Inequality. World Wide Web on december 1 2009: http://www.constitution.org/jjr/ineq.htm. Tracey, David (2007): Guerrilla Gardening – A Manualfesto. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers. Weber, Max (1919): Politik als Beruf. Vortragsmanuskript. Ditzingen, Reclam (1992).

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Websites

eine-andere-welt-ist-pflanzbar.de greenguerillas.org gruenewelle.de guerrillagardening.com moregardens.org prinzessinnengarten.net rosarose-garten.net thefreedictionary.com stiftung-interkultur.de urbanacker.net

Lenin as major urban hacker in Lviv. From monument to market. Bohdan Shumylovych

Lviv, Ukraine, is a city with a rich urban history. However, it is lacking contemporary urban hacking. The biggest momentum in public space performance of the 20th century were the erection and demolition of the Lenin monument in front of the opera house. It is this monument which has accentuated a new mode in urban public space where people interact and socialize under peoples’ conditions. Even though this particular square became social in its practice – it does not attract new artistic activism. Why? In this context several subjects are to be considered:

Fig. 1. Panorama, which shows how city was surrounded by river Poltva

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River Two centuries ago a river, called Poltva, lead through the center of Lviv. There was no actual center in this place at that time. The river passed the city’s stone wall; it was supported by a high bank which also served as rampart. However, these constructions could not prevent the city’s loss of independence from the Austrian Empire in 1772. Already in 1777 the walls could not provide any military defense and were dismantled (under the supervision of the architect Clemens Fessinger). The river banks were turned into a garden. The fosse was fi lled with earthy garbage and the first urban promenade appeared in Lviv. In the early years this place was still semi-private and people used to dry their laundry on its trees or to herd their animals there. The master plan for Lviv foresaw a big circle – a promenade along the former walls surrounding city. Similar projects had successfully been finalized in Vienna and Krakov, but not in Lemberg. The river Poltva was put underground for the first time in the early 1820s when the city administration decided to establish a new urban center and arranged a square which soon turned into a black market by the very active Jewish community. Up to 1883 the river was almost entirely blocked by means of newly developed concrete material. The first city promenade on the former river bed soon became very popular for a new class of urban dwellers – people who liked to show up in public in a new outfit or to drink coffee in the new Viennese-style coffee houses. Also the first administrative quarter for the Austrian administration whose representatives brought new manners from the capital was located here. In this way new public space was organized in Lviv, and already in the early 20th century this promenade functioned as main boulevard of the city (350 meters). In 1787 the first theatre opened in Lemberg; in 1859 the first public monument (in honor of the military general Yablonovski, namely Hetman). Later the number of monuments increased, as almost every ruling system tried to establish a sort of mark on the avenue. It became the new urban center of the city and its main public space which included several other public areas, like shopping centers, coffee houses, monuments, theatres, museums, etc.

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Fig. 2. Pre-modern Lviv/Lemberg, in which main public space is organized around market square, the place for exchange of goods and ideas, late 18 century

Fig. 3. Opening out urban space for public promenade, which will become the new city center. The place of future opera is still occupied by Salzmarket

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Fig. 4. The map shows how the modern public space was finalized in the new center of Lviv in the 1890s – 1930s

Opera In 1895 the city of Lviv announced a competition to build a new theatre – a fashionable opera house which finally was erected in 1901 according to a project of Zigmunt Gorgolewski. The opera was placed on the former square named after Agenor Goluchovski where an active Jewish market functioned for many years supporting the image of the promenade as a truly public space (public space in an old town is usually concentrated around a market). By its position, the opera created a perfect vista and became an ideal stage background for political actions. The theatre was turned into the most popular place for the local wealthy public, but, nevertheless, it was closed down in 1934 because of financial difficulties and re-opened as state opera under the communist regime in 1956. In 1959 the boulevard was named after Lenin and was later called ‘1st May’ boulevard (former: Hetman walls, Untere Wallgasse, Carl Ludwig Strasse, Legionov, Opernstrasse, Museumstrasse, Adolf Hitler Platz) and fi nally in 1990, it became the Liberty Avenue.

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Fig. 5. View on the public promenade before opera house was erected in late 1890-s, river is still part of the public space

Fig. 6. Opera as focal point in the first modern public space in Lviv; this created the perfect theatrical background for political and mass events

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Fig. 7. Soviet postcard showing 1 of May street, on which a monument to king Sobieski still exist (later it was removed and travelled to Poland)

Fig. 8. Contemporary view on opera house, which is considered one of the most attractive theatres in Ukraine

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Soviet Lviv There are probably only a few cities in the world which witnessed such rapid inhabitants’ relocation as it happened in Lviv after the Second World War. After the new division of Europe Lviv was controlled by the Soviet government and there was a decision of ‘purification’; to be exact, Polish citizens were urged to move in. Taking into consideration that the Jewish population which counted for almost 40% of the city had vanished because of the Holocaust up to 95 percent of Lviv’s original inhabitants had disappeared. In their place the Soviets resettled Polish people with Ukrainian family background and the new proletariat class from other Soviet cities who were to build the new Soviet system in the city. It turned from a typical bourgeoisie East European metropolis (a capital within the Austrian-Hungarian empire) into a Soviet Ukrainian town, the center for the Lviv region. Public activities were strongly restricted in Lviv; official art was permitted only to members of the Art Institute (founded in 1946) and the Art Union which was created by Stalin in 1933. In fact, the first art project coordinated by the Art Union and the Communist Party in Lviv was the Lenin monument. By its appearance in the heart of Lviv’s public space Lenin marked the dominance of a new system of total control. According to the Soviet ideology, there was no division of public or private. Everything in the urban space belonged to everybody, so it was not possible to arrange something in public space as it belonged to everybody, even the administrative decision making body was not allowed to give the space free for other than political actions. Private public spaces, like coffee houses, theatres, cinemas, and restaurants were closed down or rebuilt into Soviet-type ‘stolovaya’, cheap canteens and dining rooms.

Lenin The Lenin theme was substantially important in the USSR; the commission for depicting Lenin was a sign of becoming part of the system. The image of Lenin was used as propaganda and marking tool and appeared in almost every Soviet settlement. When the USSR acquired Lviv (Lemberg, Lwow) in September 1939 after the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact (24th August, 1939) between the Th ird German Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics it became evident that the new city needed new signs of new power. One year later, in September 1940, when many Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish political, cultural, and other activists were arrested or

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executed, the Communist party made the decision to build a monument to commemorate the so-called reunification of Western Ukraine into Soviet Ukraine. A, plate indicating the location of the Lenin monument which was planned to be finished in 1942 appeared in front of the opera house. However, Hitler was faster than Stalin… During the Nazi occupation the plate disappeared and new monuments were built in front of the opera. In March 1945, a decision was made to erect a Lenin monument again. A community for arts was commissioned to draft the sketch and to finish the work in 1946. In November 1947 the sketch for the monument was approved by a special commission in Moscow. The new monument was unveiled on 20th January, 1952, one year before Stalin’s death. About one hundred thousand people gathered for this important event. It marked the biggest event in Lviv’s public space which attracted the crowds by means of art, to be exact, by sculpture. From that time on the main prospect (boulevard, avenue) of Lviv built as a typical urban public space was re-named after Lenin and ‘1st May’. It was used as major place for mass demonstrations due to its ideal location. It formed an open avenue with two lines framed by the opera house on the one side and the Adam Mickiewicz (Polish poet) monument on the other side. Political speakers were standing in front of the opera facing their godfather – Lenin.

Fig. 9. The monument of Lenin was erected in 1952 in front of the opera house, one the site were river used to flow

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New times In the late 1980s, when thoughts on liberation and anti-Soviet energy started to emerge in the city debates about the public sphere appeared in. the USSR. In 1989 the first so-called democratic election took place in the USSR. As a consequence, several political organizations appeared in Lviv, like Memorial (commemoration of victims of regime) and Rukh (namely ‘movement’,which aimed at realizing the reforms proclaimed by Gorbachov). Democratic activists heavily relied on public (and art) activism, and as opposition to the square occupied by Lenin a new place in the city’s public space was defined as a site for democracy: the so-called Klubma (flower bed) where in the mid-1990s a monument in honor of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko was erected. All major demonstrations and public gatherings took place near Klumba. It became the major source of dissemination of ‘democratic’ information (unofficial publishing, announcements of demonstrations, alternative concerts, etc.) which was censured by the mass media. In September 1990 democratic activists started a campaign for the demolishion of the Lenin statue in commemoration of the sovietization of Western Ukraine and on 14th September an official decision of the municipal government of Lviv allowed its removal. ‘The Lenin monument was removed from its place in front of the opera during a public gathering named ‘In the name of free man and democratic society’’. The next year, Ukraine proclaimed its independence from the USSR, and the first festival of public art (‘Vyvyh’, namely ‘dislocation’ referring to social changes) was held in the city giving birth to new independent art organizations. Although a variety of street art activities were held in the city, none of them compared to that of establishing and demolishing the Lenin monument in front of the opera house. However, hardly any local artists took action; in a way this place seemed to be protected by the spirit of its past. The biggest event in front of the opera house took place in 2006 during the 750th anniversary of the first written record of Lviv. It was a light show by Gert Hoff, who created an immense theatrical event using the opera as a stage background. The light show marked the substantial shift from ‘monument feelings’ to ‘market economy’ which confronted in Lviv’s public space. After this event all cultural mass activities were prohibited in front of opera, the space was to become ‘public’ again. In May 2008, a fountain was erected in the place where in former times the river Poltva used to flow and then the Lenin monument was erected to symbolize the natural water flow. Water washed away history …

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Conclusion From its early beginning, Lviv’s public space was planned by, as Habermas put it, the ‘sphere of public authority’. Public space appeared as an appropriation of the authority’s actions. In the early stages of its development, local inhabitants used the public space as a venue for goods exchange (the normal and well-known system of urban interaction). However, this was soon to change. Apparently, in Lviv, like in many other European cities ‘… the emergent bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the ruler’s power was merely represented to the people by a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through the informed and critical discourse by the people’ (Habermas). The indicators of such changes were monuments in this space and their importance: from the military general Hetman to Archangel Michel, the virgin Mary, the king, poet Adam Mickiewicz (where the first democrats gathered to discuss political issues). Public space which, according to Habermas, is free from both, economy and state, was destroyed in many cities by the same forces that initially had established it. The growth of capitalistic economy led to an uneven distribution of wealth, thus widening economic polarity. This resulted in the limitation of access to the public sphere. Everywhere political control of the public sphere was inevitable for the modern capitalistic forces to operate and thrive in the competitive economy. The public received a new space totally controlled by market forces and shopping malls in which entertainment hides the power behind. But public debates have entered the sphere of media (media activism) and control over information flows, alternative spaces appeared; new forms of art emerged as reaction to capitalist control of the public sphere. The historic development of Lviv took a different way: capitalism has never established itself as a strong force here, instead, communist ideology flooded the streets of the city. There was no battle for free media, as media was ‘public’ and controlled. While public art started to appear in the 1950s to 1970s in the West, major public projects in Lviv were done by the ruling system. So, Lenin’s monument was the major urban hacking project in the 1950s. From that time on, ‘Soviet painters, sculptors, graphic artists were creating real people’s art expressing the greatest ideas of the present day – the ideas of Lenin and Stalin – the artistic images of social realism’ (Kemenov, 1947). Nancy Fraser pointed out that in the West the bourgeois public sphere shifted the political power from ‘a repressive mode of domination to a hegemonic one’. Similar happened in Lviv. Rather than rule by power, there was now a rule by ideology controlled by means of power

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and repression. All members of society who were not part of the majority had to explore different modes of public space which normally was practiced in private surroundings (art workshops, home video, underground culture etc.). Drab public space in Lviv was a kind of sign of total control over means of communication and the system,monopolizing the coding of meanings (like different dressing and different art). On top of that, authorities claimed the right to depict that space, the right to record and to distribute it in the media. What artists could possibly do in such a situation was to paint works or to perform actions which would be shown only to those who shared a similar discourse. They had to remain hidden from ‘the people’. The modernist interpretation of form was a kind of escape from the overwhelming art of ‘the people’ which was extremely evident, but not public in sense of dialog and discussion. Following Hauser’s logic, public sphere is also a ‘discursive space in which strangers discuss issues they perceive to be of consequence for them and their group. Its rhetorical exchanges are the bases for shared awareness of common issues, shared interests, tendencies of extent and strength of difference and agreement, and self-constitution as a public whose opinions bear on the organization of society’ (Gerard Hauser, 1998).

Fig. 10. The monument to Stepan Bandera, leader of Ukrainian nationalists and main antagonist of Stalinist Soviet Union (he was assassinated by KGB agent in Germany) was erected in Lviv in 2008. This monument represents the typical Soviet aesthetics, which indicates that even though used by anti-communists, it has evident Soviet influences. Lenin still posses control over public space in Lviv

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Contemporary public space now offers a semi-freedom regulated by the forces of the market. Somehow, artists in Lviv do not want to intervene in it. Following Arthur Danto and John Dewey, the concept of art is articulated within the art world, therefore, if this concept does not presuppose urban activism – it will be absent from the real practice. In Lviv/Lemberg, Lenin’s monument which was erected in 1952 marked the art discourse which in many regards dominates the urban scene even now. Hegemonic modes of domination used by the market economy appeared relevant to Soviet mass art production. Therefore, there was no discrepancy after one (the communist) system changed another (market). On the contrary, the symbols and modes of ‘peoples’ art are still strong now, only the commissioner has changed. To conclude, I state that even though market occupied public space in Lviv after the USSR collapsed it uses the same modes and signs as the Soviets. Hence Lenin is the major urban hacker in Lviv, because (also if his monument has disappeared) his cultural hegemony has not been challenged. And artists do not know (or do not want) to challenge it.

Verbal Graffiti. Textures of unofficial messages in public space today Thomas Northoff

I summarize the urban public space on both, the built and social-geographical, as well as a process in which physical space and living factors influence each other through relationships. We learn from childhood sociability, i.e. the ability to conduct ourselves fitting to so-called social needs. One of those needs is the internalization of the significantly normalized behaviors of people in public space. But in every social group there are people with different discontents, for example with the values and norms of society that demand expression. A part of the discontent is expressed in a gesture of self-empowerment as messages on the walls of public areas. This action, which is also prohibited by law, is the only unifying standard actually applied by all writers of word-graffiti, who otherwise often meet in the language on the walls as enemies wishing death to the others. Text graffiti are written on all imaginable surfaces in public and some semi-public places. These are rarely in possession of their creators. In addition to walls of houses, public-“furniture” such as light poles, junction boxes, benches, flower basins, and telephone booth surfaces are also utilized. The importance of public space as a transit and lounge is ambivalent for different people and groups. Appropriately, the ideal surfaces get selected depending on the content of the message and target groups. This for the young scholar Lisi might be the park bench on which she had sat with Metin (“Metin, your eyes are a thousand hearts”). Metin`s answer is

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an example out of thousands (“Tomorrow I will fuck you”); it shows how some things can not be upheld gender in certain situations. Generation after generation young females look for the heart of a lover and the boys typically long for the female body. In childlike handwriting someone later added to the afore mentioned graffito: “100 children”. Such messages represent the timeless part of the graffiti, in which personal problems are published and to some extent the things of life which enjoyed or tortured the people during all ages of history. Although they can be found everywhere, they cluster mostly in low-traffic spots or in highly vibrant parks. In short: in these graffiti are authored by individuals writing down something personally drawn from the soul. Confrontational graffiti on the contrary, politically or socially articulate and responding to a particular context of time, are found in areas frequented by adults, although one also finds that category of graffiti scattered. All these objectifications since Charles Zangemeister’s defi nition in 1871 are called graffiti (Zangemeister 1871: VII)1. Drawing from his Latin text, I would summarize Zangemeister’s still valid defi nition in Latin language as: graffiti is not manufactured on the basis of a contract, but according to the discretion of private, depending on current emotion, either because different writers wanted to record one’s conduct, or derive a public agitation. I see the text graffiti as evidence of private origin. And still nowadays they are mostly written by hand. First, they reflect the important criterion, not to be requested by any official body or have been ordered. To the other, they are mainly hand-written sources, as the research usually evaluates letters, diaries, proceedings etc. from long-ago. Numerous graffiti writers represent the diverse positions on political, social and societal issues as well as deriving from their own or other people’s feelings. In this way graffiti does not just make individual pieces, but a process of attached artefacts. Written graffiti was preceded by actions and feelings and will be followed by such, and only if the written words are crossed out as anonymous answers. Graffiti are more than a part of the broad texture in which they are embedded. Th is wall language can be interpreted. One aspect of my work with graffiti parallels with that of the graffiti collector V. Roberts. Already formulated in 1731, he pointed at the testimony

1 | Zangemeister, Karl: Inscriptiones Parietariae Pompeianae, Herculanenses, Stabianae. Berlin 1871

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of the so-called people on the street in opposition to the “scholarly studies of the court part of the world” (Roberts 1985: 239)2. My other view on the matter of graffiti focuses the non-reactive openness of the writers. In comparison to messages and face to face discussion, graffiti assemble an unadulterated form of narratives. Graffiti content can be evaluated and analyzed in the context of official often unspoken conflicting values. Through interpreting unofficial textures, let’s take into account the places where graffiti are installed. They assist in establishing world-views and evidence of collective desires, even behavioral patterns of certain groups. For example, if a column in Vienna’s Karlsplatz subway, where always dealers and consumers of hard drugs are hanging around, is laminated – not for the first time – with a death notice with the handwritten addition “Maybe you had stayed much spared. But Way [= Why]? Your friend”, it could be implied that the person who died was not the only one consuming hard drugs. It offers insight into ways a group with very negative image publicly could be thinking, but hardly has any chance to speak publicly about. The yard long graffito “Enough of spying, get out now!” had found its place at the intersection on Dresden’s Stasi building. For years it was spared because it conveyed a commonly shared opinion, situated in a place where it could at least be openly discussed. Its special symbolism for intersections, reinforced reflective collective identity. In turn, it was treasured.  

2 | Roberts, V., zitiert in: Müller, Siegfried: Spurensicherung. In: Müller, Siegfried (Hg.): Graffiti. Tätowierte Wände. Bielefeld 1985, S.235-251, hier S.239

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Fig. 1. Thomas Northoff: Dresden's Stasi building

Ley and Cybriwsky questing in the 1970s about urban graffiti as territorial marks, already asserted the hostile attitude of a more aggressive role beyond graffiti at first sight. They found that these graffiti also pointed at the enemy’s temperaments. In border regions, they found roads with the most aggressive gang graffiti that foretold what to watch out for (Ley and Cibriwsky 1985: 183f).3 In my many years of observing unofficial messages, I have learned that not only content symbols of gangs-graffiti accord practical everyday realities. Numerous text-graffiti of different kind hold biographical facts pertaining to their origin and provide information about intentions as individuals or as groups. On occasion in Vienna, one can experience the ugly side of graffiti at the Markus Omofuma Memorial. The plaque area of the monument for the murdered black man has had various spray-attacks. Graffiti voiced by racism and xenophobia can be seen in all Austrian and European cities. In regard to numbers and wide dispersion of the creators Vienna considers itself the leading edge. In fact, racist and xenophobic graffiti are produced by all greater groups living there. After a steep rise during the 1990s aggressiveness in text-graffiti, the first nine years of the new century increased less in its level than in its masses, which demonstrates the popularity of racism and xenophobia. Interactions between people and their residential areas for example, could 3 | Ley, David,/Cibriwsky, Roman: Stadt-Graffiti als Territorialmarkierung. In: Müller, Siegfried (Hg.): Graffiti. Tätowierte Wände. Bielefeld 1985, S.175-187, hier S.183f

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be seen in the graffiti on the famous social housing Am Schöpfwerk. Nazi symbolism emerged in the large investment especially in areas where people live together in the densest, namely at and in the high towerhouse with its many floors and flats. The aggression level in other subjects appealing graffiti was also high (Northoff 1999: 19-26 passim).4 In addition to the often simple and everyday life historicals, such as in numerous love and sexual graffiti, stemming from the 1980s until today, more and more often occur striking ethnic and nationally recognizable images of tough durability. Meanwhile they figurated out as a main part of the language on the walls. There are perceived separate scenes in public spaces. These lead to messages and conversations with each other and against each other. They do it in a pose of “I” or in “we”-attitude. The messages show undisguised pictures of the others. These are subjective views, but many of them are very common within groups. They are placed on walls by more and more subjects in a stereotyped similarity in the whole country. A characteristic of the graffiti is the (expressive) short form. Long graffiti are much less numerous than the short ones. Graffiti that is longer usually tends to be lamenting something. Sometimes they may be a support mechanism to cope with life in severe emotional states. The following example of a derivation discloses the authenticity of a relevant narrative into a deeply felt life context: Only in this way in the night/the shit began / to I think of / the night because I / do not sleep, / I live for my / country pointed to / think of any / KOSOVA is my / home life, where I / I want to enjoy / all the days in which I / chill there there / I do could / always what I want / the [illegible] Serbs wanted / to tear my country / [illegible] / in parliament sat a / man with his gay / white waiting, he went / to war of no avail / no plan / KOSOVA IS MY / SELF / KOSOVA IS MY / HEART / KOSOVA’s my / pain / melosevic’s my foe my opponent I found this poorly written German graffito in on a public park bench in Laaerberg. This summarizes more grief than hate, and it does differ from the one on the other end of the bench. The handwriting is the same: “A true Albanian / must always fight / a true Albanian / must finish the fight.” Without identifying its enemy country, it expresses stubborn hatred. It is a formula used by various warring groups in accordance with changing national names in different places. In mass, however, short graffiti predominate: a range of lapidary vulgar-up to hate words of extremist groups. 4 | Northoff, Thomas: Schöpfwerk als Text an der Wand. In: Heidi Dumreicher (Hsg.): oikodrom. Stadtplaene. Nr.18. Heft 1/1999. Wien 1999. S.19-26

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In many examples like the one above whole state spaces are symbolically transferred into other states and with them conflict areas. The striking numbers of text-graffiti and ethno-national symbols of South Eastern European youth are based more so on other historical events and local and personal life contexts than the graffiti of “our” xenophobes. Nationalism and xenophobia are hardly to be separated at all. Ethnically motivated xenophobia developed even before the fighting of the former Yugoslavia on the basis of nationalist thinking, and once again causally associated with the subsequent events. Each hate-motivated graffito must act as an identifying symbol for other passers by: I am not abnormal, I am not alone. The more people engaged with these symbols of identity – all the more worry for the enemy. People prone to stereotyped images easily develop feelings for threatening images and attitudes. Text-graffiti are often representations of intentions and interests. The numerous responses to ethnic graffiti, whether by distortion, unrecognizable-making, or by the contents of the first-graffito reversed, show the serious attention groups give the other ones to exclude them symbolically in return. Defi ning themselves as ethnic-national groups – an essential part of many countries’ populations -, in graffiti they all have equal platforms for free speech compared to the autochton people as to those of other minorities. All actors are located in the same system of the symbols exchanged. If anyone is censored, then the inevitably is that someone was just writing a graffito. Sometimes three or more groups fight each other constituting a chaotic tuft of graffiti, so it’s almost impossible to find out what they wrote and who wrote what. Here is one readable example: a green sketched Serbor Cetnic-symbol with “Stop The War! Liberate Kosovo” in green capital letters. The drawing and writing is clearly by one person. Then there was a reaction, over-striking “Stop” with a black “Start”. “Liberate Kosovo” is repeatedly crossed out. Placed next to the original graffito one sees an addition: “Kill Albania and fuck their mothers in the ass”.

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Fig. 2. Thomas Northoff: Kill Albania and fuck their mothers in the ass

Discrimination because of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual affi liation, and/ or identity is a wide spread trait in graffiti, no matter the origin. When it comes to purely ethnic-chauvinistic motivated graffiti in Europe I do prefer the term demarcation graffiti: this means all gradations of found examples include the element of rigid territorial marking. However, a symbol of country of origin may be a sign of homesickness, homeland pride or simple desire for documentation. Regardless of placement and organization, the symbols from different ethnic groups can be remarkable in correspondence, showing textures reaching up to the martial gesture, if implemented in text-graffiti. A differentiation arises further because of the strong presence of acronyms of extremist parties or groupings. The leading symbol in graffiti at the Employment Office for young people for many years has been the acronym of Turkish extreme nationalist party MHP. It topped all the other ethnic indications of that kind, and even it beat the swastika. The presence of at least two groups ready for violence is also suggested. On a whole, these graffiti present an aspired behavior manifesto of certain groups and/or a substantial number of their representatives. Arrangements displaying violence show themselves for individuals sometimes already from single graffiti. The ethnic mismatch in the mirror of its graffiti testifies unmastered conflicts, more dependant on except-Austrian problems than from internal-Austrian ones. In times of neuralgic events, like before the referendum in Kosovo, the number of the symbols or short slogans on some

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roads suddenly increases. At that time over night the acronym UCK appeared on many houses. Little time remains during such actions for spraying slogans. Graffiti created suddenly is always sprayed. The writers want everyone’s attention on their current historical topic. A prominent part of text graffiti are calls more or less coded after revenge, repayment or killing. Th rough the years, writers from Balkans countries (males by far over-represented) have developed a reputation for hatred.. In these predominantly anonymous graffiti, only signed with ethnically national symbols, the pose of hate is very apparent. A phenomenon, which – constantly rising at times – has always been found in graffiti history, are faith- or religion-specific formulations. Still during the 1980s mainly unbelievers and religious Christians exchanged messages along walls or inside telephone booths. In addition sectarians and separatists are known to participate as well. Within university campuses many anti-Semitic graffiti were particularly found on men’s toilets; while women seem to write more often about issues pertaining to antichurch influence with their personal lives. Church walls have only occasionally been decorated with blasphemous graffiti, but also with anti-paternalistics and church-critiques, and as well as desires for social justice. Graffiti against Islam has increased visibly since 2000. Far stronger in number appear the “Turks out”- calls. These are written by so-called Autochthonen to the larger part. Anti-Turkish and anti-Muslim graffiti generated by migrant groups and/or single citizens with migrant background are not at all rare. Traditionally for example “Turkish” has negative connotations for numerous writings by Serbs. Muslims, Bosniaks and people from Kosovo: they are seen as Turks in the sense of devaluation.

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Fig. 3. Thomas Northoff: ISLAM = Mental Illness

Pro-Islamic graffiti appeared even with the counter-graffiti in 2006. ProIslamic messages require large quantities of stickers to be put on public city-furniture. There were only a few giant religious-graffiti. They are ideally situated in places that allow distance. In Vienna’s Yppen-park such a constellation resulted. Over the back wall of the old house belonging to the marketplace all park-visitors could read, i.e. had to read “Do not forget God or AIDS you will have”. Using god in graffiti is broadly diversified and likewise the implied meanings. An ostentatious sprayed “Nation of Islam” can be seen on the facade of a catholic church, and few meters away “Malcolm X”, both green in color, the color of Islam. Both writings have existed since 1994 at the Nikolai Church in Vienna. Nation of Islam was very important for Hip Hop at that time. But nowadays almost exclusively male park visitors with Turkish background believe that Malcolm X had been “a very early rapper”. Nation of Islam however did not say anything to them except that it should be Islamic, and that’s why nobody would ever overwrite these two graffiti. But the RAP they adore is the Gangsta’s. The strict black-and-white positioning in the graffiti reveals strictly good-and-bad thinking. Pure forms as ethnic, religiously or sexual motivated graffiti can be described, however usual is the presence of combinations, similar with this example: “We [Moslems] are smart, you/ shit

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Schwabos/ are like a woman/ look out what you/ do otherwise I will [illegible] you/ you gay pig/Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha”.

Fig. 4. Thomas Northoff: We [Moslems] are smart, you/ shit Schwabos/ are like a woman/ look out what you/ do otherwise I will [illegible] you/ you gay pig/Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha

Over forty graffiti of that kind are distributed on three benches at the recovery strip behind the Catholic church of Maria of Mountain Carmel. They come from only one person. Continuous reports on faith they express demarcation, women’s contempt and homophobia. The word “Ketzer” comes forwards. I have not heard it in Austria for over 20 years. The indication of the Turkish Grey Wolves appears several times. If one arranges text graffiti according to the criteria discussed, it turns out the more complex a graffito is composed in language and content the more consciously or unconsciously implied prejudices arise. They tell of rigidity in education, morals and traditional beliefs. Mutual reproaches and/or poses would be quite often compatible. But they show in their seriousness that most postings regard and reproduce their pictures of the others as reality. Concerning the so-called autochthone writers one finds in Austria xenophobia-graffiti high in extent. A big part proceeds from ideologically conscious right groupings and individuals, who use many stickers.

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If spreading from group markings at the same time is felt as personally marking too, it seems to develop a power- and a well-being – feeling at same time. At small ranges such as parks, schools, and buildings. Two worlds, demonstrating another side of graffiti diversity, exist on exterior and interior walls in special cases. They particularly reference social issues. Beside the entrance to one administration building, in which a social welfare office is located, two unofficial messages were attached: “AMtliche Schikane” (= official harassment) and “WORK INSTEAD OF COACHING”. The latter in red is the chronologically older one. Hammer and sickle as an addition to it have been sprayed in graffiti since about 1990 only as rarity. The first slogan, “official harassment”, written with the capital letters AM (= AMtliche Schikane), stresses the AM-logo (= ArbeitsMarkt = labor market). Whether this was intentional or a mistake in writing is not certain. Evidence has proven that graffiti from external walls of so-called social services typically tend to refer to the institution or refer to people, who work there, and to the situation of clients as subject matter. Their authors usually use safer spelling and symbolic awareness within a linguistically and aesthetically complex context. These graffiti are already serving a visual-literary method. Some writers have a great knack for the literary short-form. The world of those who need to visit the AM-office generates other derivatives in unofficial expression – a look into the building of the AM-Office for young people, second floor, suggests: Only few marks insult AM-Office or its employees. The message of this kind with the most words says: “FPÖ, Strache rules in the young people’s AM-office (7.10.05)”. Just as often, but by movements of the faith, the Christians get insulted. From another aspect a Graffito resulted, in that originally the Serbian- or Cetnik-symbol, an Ustascha-symbol and the quarterly moon were set equally next to each other. Someone crossed the Serbian- or Cetnicsymbol and accentuated the moon with a circle. Finally a third person crossed out the Ustascha-symbol and the Islamic quarterly moon. This is one of the many pictures of general-human inadequacy in handling social, ethnic, political, religious, sexual orientations. Also here, in an area of persons in comparable situations, mental conflict areas pop up. With the victory of the easy to clean surfaces, graffitophags are well served. Also the deletion includes a narrative. In extension of Klaus Merten’s theory – that by manifest characteristics of an apparent text one can

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deduce not manifest characteristics of a context (Merten 2001: 86)5 – I direct this aspect also toward situations. Deletion of graffiti could be considered as evidence of relationship with consume-imbecility, disturbance of the feeling of cleanliness and of the self, belief in power of authority and giving credit to control, irrational fears, etc. Deleting by reason of muzzleorder for non-officials is not a primary ambition. There should not be the impression that graffiti represents only the back side of the society’s living together. Some people play in pleasurable ways with attractive words daily thrown by administration and commerce. Even today sanctified texts in graffiti become rearranged: “Only if the last oil-well derrick was dumped,/ and the last gas station is closed/ you will recognize/ that at night at Greenpeace no beer is available!!!”

Fig. 5. Thomas Northoff: Only if the last oil-well derrick was dumped,/ and the last gas station is closed/ you will recognize/ that at night at Greenpeace no beer is available!!!

Ambiguously our powerlessness becomes ironized here, nevertheless signs of lives of contradiction and discordance. Swiss Germanist and graffiti researcher Beat Suter sees parody coined from a critical consciousness in relation to the environment and its changes: “the vital turns against

5 | Merten, Klaus: Inhaltsanalyse. Einführung und Theorie, Methode und Praxis. Opladen 1983, S.15f. Zitiert in: Brednich, Rolf W.: Quellen und Methoden. In: Brednich, Rolf W. (Hg.): Grundriß der Volkskunde. (3. überarb. u. erw. Aufl.) Berlin 2001. S.77-100, hier S.86

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restrictive rigidity. In case of the graffiti it proclaims the freedom of the walls to ridicule rigidity.” (Suter 1992: 126)6 The number of similar graffiti correlates with the everyday speech situations of human beings. How often in everyday conversations do highminded thoughts get formulated? Graffiti as mirrors – in blunt thoughts and verbalism. Graffiti is supposed to be funny, but they ain’t, is daily grind as well. Mobile guards and monitoring with fi xed video cameras by public city lines, police and private properties are detrimental to graffiti production. It’s for few taggers to test courage, but their marking philosophy mentally differs strongly from the text graffiti initiators’. For years an almost sterile atmosphere covers the walls of Viennese Underground and those of other cities. The possibility of being observed or caught awhile writing accelerated the development and spreading of stickers. A sticker in the form of a pictogramme strip adhered a time at some over day buildings of the Underground. Resembling the strips attached in the railroad cars with the symbols of the three person groups to which one should leave a seat without being asked, it irritated coming and leaving passengers. Taken as a second view, one recognized the substitutions of the fragile old person, the woman with a little child and the blind man by human beings brought to deportation by airplane, behind metal bars of a prison and thirdly behind barbwire. All three are framed with the red outlines of the prohibition sign. Here as a whole changes the appearance of graffiti by becoming cheaper and more popular advanced technical possibilities of the application – tools and – surfaces, which led from scratching stones to writing with ink up to the markers and sprays. Interestingly laptop and internet, having been so – called everyday life features for well over a decade with their communication and access options creating a universal virtual public environment, so far have not decreased graffiti production as a whole. But the content wise message of new and small social or political movements has been subjected to a change. They often simply write their website address on the wall. This is the contemporary social-economically and technically adapted technology of old strewing notes. Their circulation started in 1934 against the clergy-fascism in Austria and was forbidden with jail time sentences. In most cases they were smaller than today’s stickers, usually printed as a revolutionary slogan. Communist logos were even handwritten. All of them would have reminded that under the dictatorship of the clergy-fascism: 6 | Suter, Beat: Graffiti: Rebellion der Zeichen. Frankfurt am Main (2. Überarb. Aufl.) 1992, hier S.126

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some of us are still active, although it is forbidden. Under the Nazis punishment was even more draconian and spreading these fliers with slogans almost stopped totally. This makes a large difference to us today. Wolfgang Schüssel before the elections of 1999 had promised to withdraw if becoming second. However as having become third suddenly transmuted in the very first (chancellor), he could do that play only with support of the very right winged Haider – FPÖ and he presented minister – appointments with them. All over Austria, predominantly however in Vienna, 05 – Graffiti were drawn. 05 (=Austria) was the anti – Nazi – symbol of a resistance movement in the late world war II. When asked, a member of the 05 – movement mentioned the new use of the symbol: they wrote that Graffito is under mortal danger, which today is not the case. Speakers of the so – called Austrian Civil Movement asserted that it plans today to resist the beginnings. The today’s website addresses often are easily to memorize. The internet is regarded as independent medium of the public area. Relationship between material walls and the virtual surfaces of the electronic communication media is lucid in matters of graffiti. To stay anonymous in forum in the net is an almost unrestricted possibility. Almost unpunished one can send unofficial messages of hate and contempt. Already 1996 unknown hackers penetrated the Website of the US Department of Justice and left there a rich collection of racist, obscene and the government targeting sayings. (Kurier 19.8.1996, S.4)7 With the new communication media also new forms of the civilian disobedience became possible. One of them is blocking the net – site – entrance, when visiting the website by masses at the same time. This happened to German Luft hansa. As part of the protest – action “Lufttransa. Deportation Class” a mass – demonstration in the information superhighway was announced, even at the police. It was not taken seriously by the authorities. Largely attended, thousands and thousands took part and protest – marched virtually against the participation of Luft hansa with deportation. The text of their protestmails became graffiti. The sites of Luft hansa were clogged, no longer practical for course of business. In parallel demonstrations in material public space took place. Graffiti as banners and boards and on clothes were carried and shot by press and visual media. A small transport bus, like Luft hansa used it for first class passengers, was indeed with accurately the letter design of the flight com-

7 | Kurier, 19.8.96, S4

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pany. The text “Lufttransa. Deportation Class” showed fake art, which was supposed to make road – users think. Nowadays the net plays the basic role during the globalization of protests and their preparation. Since Seattle protest – slogans are nearly world – wide prepared and appear under the protesters of all countries, especially against the world currency fund and the G – 8 summits. Here preprinted boards push themselves into the foreground. A certain linguistic depletion and uniforming is to be watched. But the messages of the mobile graffiti at demonstrations and the ones on the walls today are embedded into a more complex texture of various contacts, connections and dealings than before the 1990s. Predominantly young themselves, publishing authors and authoresses of text graffiti do not produce noble literature, but chronicles of their mental states, thoughts and intentions. Sometimes they code, but more frequently the expression in words is extremely simple, particularly numerous in the area of intercultural friction. Likewise, you will also find extensively elaborate graffiti just in such space. With graffiti, public areas have become intercultural indication spots over the last 20 years. A dialog and/or polylog of the cultures steadily takes place, although rarely in copious way. The majority of the messages comprehend we-them – demarcations. Among them one also finds subjective documentations of strangeness experiences of the writing persons. Pictures of manhood and masculinity and such of womanhood and femininity occur in large measure, antiquated, illegitimate, and invalid in the corpus. They reflect collective emotions in groups and of social groups. Quite a few of these graffiti express attitudes and tendencies. Graffiti in their particular aspect as national and/or ethnic symbols can be characterized as encouraging social and cultural identities. So they give means of orientation in life practice of various groups and individuals. There is social function in them, and every now and then even historical in weight. Many graffiti anteceded important issues well before the upstanding of broader social discourse. Remember the Peace-Movement, the Anti-Nuclear-Power – Movement, the Feminist- and the Natural-Environment-Movements: their early statements were written on walls because of lack of media attention. The overall view of the graffiti symbolizes democracy in work, and the amount of work left to do.

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Literature Ley, David/Cibriwsky, Roman. “Stadt-Graffiti als Territorialmarkierung”. In: Müller, Siegfried (Hg.) (1985): Graffiti. Tätowierte Wände. Bielefeld: AJZ-Verlag. 175-187 Merten, Klaus (1983). “Inhaltsanalyse. Einführung und Theorie, Methode und Praxis”. Opladen. 15f. In: Brednich, Rolf W. (2001³): “Quellen und Methoden”. In: Brednich, Rolf W. (Hg.) (2001³). Grundriß der Volkskunde. Berlin: Reimer. 77-100 Northoff, Thomas (1999). “Schöpfwerk als Text an der Wand” oikodrom. Stadtplaene 18(1): 19-26 Suter, Beat (1992²): Graffiti: Rebellion der Zeichen. Frankfurt am Main: R.G. Fischer Roberts, V. In: Müller, Siegfried: “Spurensicherung”. In: Müller, Siegfried (Hg.) (1985): Graffiti. Tätowierte Wände. Bielefeld: AJZ-Verlag. 235251 Zangemeister, Karl (1871): Inscriptiones Parietariae Pompeianae, Herculanenses Stabianae. (=Corpus inscriptionum latinarum. 4.) Berlin

Urban Hacking. An artist strategy Annett Zinsmeister

With hacking we generally associate the unauthorised infi ltration of software. The acts and attitude of a hacker are not, however, restricted to the culture of soft ware hackers which has so far coined the usual use of the word hacking. The exposition entitled urban hacking, a plethora of extremely different artistic statements on the Karlsplatz in Vienna, demonstrates how hacking can engender a variety of expressions as an artistic strategy, but also how to doubt or negate it. Steven Raymond’s manifesto How to Become a Hacker clearly defines the broader meaning of the word hacking as seen by hackers. The hacker mind-set is not confined to this soft ware-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music – actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Soft ware hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them ‘hackers’ too – and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. (Raymond 2001) Raymond, who considers himself true to the soft ware hackers’ traditions and aims his manifesto at these, perceives hacking as a practice of far larger scope. Everybody, especially artists, can use the strategy of hacking in completely different areas from soft ware, utilizing a cornucopia of media, analogue as well as digital. In a broader sense, “hacker” signifies a person that experiments avidly and uses his or her factual knowledge of a given technology

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in order to utilize it in a way not normally intended or beyond the normal scope. (wikipedia, 2009) Hacking has contradicting connotations, as it implicates two quite contrary modes of operation: the destructive and the constructive. Raymond therefore segregates hackers from crackers in his manifesto: “The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.” (Raymond 2001). Therefore it’s not surprising that the community of soft ware hackers developed ethics of hacking that tries to separate the “goodies” from the “baddies” and aims to clarify that creative hacking is a constructive and ethical activity, far from destructive intents. Raymond describes the attitude of a hacker as follows: “Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help.” (Raymond 2001: “The Hacker Attitude”) To certify constructive activities according to hacker ethics the five-dotsin-nine-squares diagram was developed. It originated from cellular automata (game of life), and it’s available for download free of charge in several varieties.

Fig. 1. five-dots-in-nine-squares diagram The five-dots-in-nine-squares diagram [...] is a simple pattern with some surprising properties in a mathematical simulation called Life1 that has fascinated hackers for many years. I think it makes a good visual emblem for what hackers are like – abstract, at first a bit mysterious-seeming, but a gateway to a whole world with an intricate logic of its own. (Raymond 2001) Generally speaking, hacking is an activity that affects both constructions in general and specifically architecture. Alternative usage of the word hacking can signify, on the one hand quite broadly “bringing something to a point, sharpening”, on the other hand very materialistic and factual 1 | http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Artificial_Life/Cellular_Auto mata/

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“hacking a hole in a wall”. Urban hacking is therefore a terminologically correct lexical construction and makes a far broader view of hacking possible than is generally assumed.

Urban hacking The equivalent to the (soft ware) hacker in urban spaces is, specifically speaking, the squatter. A squat is created by (illegally) gaining entry to a building and subsequently changing structure, materials, usage or, generally speaking, the interior cohesion of structures and the environment. There’s hardly a squat that doesn’t have new passageways, spacial restructuring, expansions, additions etc.. Redefining and transforming spaces bordering on the legal, new models and structures are implemented and tested in construction, society, economy – mostly based on openness. Squatters have a quite dubious reputation, as do software hackers. They’re seen as illegal intruders, presumed “vandals with murderous intent”, as the mainstream press proclaimed after the eviction of the Mainzerstrasse in Berlin in 1990.

Fig. 2.a. Annett Zinsmeister: “14.11.90 Räumung der Mainzerstr. Berlin“ (eviction of the Mainzerstr. Berlin), collage + mixed media, 1990 Squats are urban hacking par excellence, as they redefi ne and re-evaluate urban emptiness as habitable space. In general, this not only affects a single building but whole streets or districts. Especially Germany has a quite varied history in this aspect: Squats in Berlin-Kreuzberg in the early 80s

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and about 150 squats in East Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990. This comparison, however, is only one of several possible interpretations of urban hacking. Interventions in space of an entirely different nature may be called urban hacking, as in adding or subtracting, reinterpreting or re-evaluating urban substance. It’s about transformations of urban space or spacial elements that add value.

Urban hacking as an artistic strategy The spectrum of possibilities that urban hacking as an artistic strategy implies can be fathomed by observing different works of art by several artists: Mentioning a wall hacked open, for instance, recalls the work of Gordon Matta-Clark. His piece “Splitting” from 1974 shows the veritable splitting of the wall of a house; actually parting the whole building in two, a picturesque illustration of “hacking a hole in the wall”. Matta-Clark actually sawed the abandoned former family home in half and created a gap by precisely lowering a segment of the building. The technique of splitting is not decisive in this context; it’s rather the artistic strategy as well as expression and effect caused by this piece. In 1975 Matta-Clark actually hacked open the walls of a building scheduled for demolition in Paris and added a circular opening that expanded spherically into the interior of the building. By cracking and breaking the existing, Gordon Matta-Clark creates an autonomous aesthetic piece of work that not only explores the limits of construction, but also poses many questions.

Fig. 3a. Gordon Matta Clark: Splitting GB 1974

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Fig. 3b.-c. b. Gordon Matta Clark: Splitting GB 1974, c. Gordon Matta Clark: Conical Intersect (detail) 1975, 27-29, rue Beaubourg, Paris. Creating spatial complexity, reading new openings against old surfaces. Light admitted into space or beyond surfaces that are cut. Breaking and entering. Approaching structural collapse, separating the parts at the point of collapse. (Gordon Matta-Clark 1971) Matta-Clark’s work embodies breaking and entering; it shows an act of destruction and violence. But this act of destruction is not a destructive act in this context, but a constructive one, as it merely anticipated the demolition of the buildings, not causing any damages, but creating added aesthetic value. The degrees of difference between destructive and constructive hacking can be clarified by juxtaposing pictures of a “hacked open” row of houses at the former front lines in Sarajevo. Such images only document pure destructive intent and are expressions of raw violence. The only goal of the depicted breakings and enterings is to cause damages, even worse: to destroy lives and homes.

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Fig. 4.a. Annett Zinsmeister: frontline – lost homes, Sarajevo 1996/2006 © Annett Zinsmeister

Fig. 4.b. Annett Zinsmeister: frontlinie Sarajevo 1996 © Annett Zinsmeister Fig. 4.c. Annett Zinsmeister: gefüllte Schrapnellspuren im Strassenbelag (traces of shrapnel in the pavement, refilled), Sarajevo 1996

So-called Guerrilla art, artistic interventions in public spaces comprising such diverse artistic strategies as graffiti, guerrilla gardening etc., is conducted at the limits of the legal at times. This figurative tightrope walk is the reason why guerrilla art is confronted with ambivalent reactions to its doings. Actions become illegal when they appropriate somebody else‘s property for their ends, such as walls for graffiti or private plots for unauthorised planting. Guerrilla art can work legally as well, however.

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Crossing the borders between the legal to the illegal is not essential, even if especially graffiti artists cherish the challenge. Guerrilla art is rather about constructive acts, for instance in the sense of a political, socially critical communication strategy that creates (discursive) added value. Artistic strategies vary – a plethora ranging from the political activism of the anonymous New York art group Guerrilla Girls2 to the very playful and seemingly childish interventions, for example “dispatch – work” by Jan Vorman that realize partial renovations of buildings collectively, among other things. Random passers-by are invited to “mend” bullet holes in the walls of buildings in Berlin using Lego bricks. These remaining traces, or furrows, of the Second World War are perceivably fi lled up, but in contrast to the artificial blood on the streets of Sarajevo here they’re smoothed nearly naively in a collective game. Th is piece of work not only reflects the traces of violence, but also translates them into a playful communion. Everybody is given the same pieces and may join the game.

Fig. 5.a. Guerilla Girls Poster, 2007 © Guerilla Girls or

Fig. 5.b. Jan Vorman: dispatch work, Photo by Kathleen Waak

2 | http://www.guerrillagirls.com

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Thinking of games brings me back to another description of “hacker ethics”: Hacker ethics can rather be read as the ethics of a game: Everybody may and should participate, all players are equal, the rules and the pieces should be freely available, the games of other people should be respected and protected, and all of this should lead to a better world. […] The hacker first gets a socio-political drive and a political-pedagogic mission. […] It’s therefore about a method of tapping existing, but not yet utilized possibilities that is only possible having sufficient technical competence. (Pias 2002: 262) The media theorist Claus Pias opens the field for hackers with varying levels of technical competence that leave their traces playfully in real and virtual space. This comprises an artistic strategy that is embodied by guerrilla art, among others, but especially so in this case. There are very playfully oriented instructions for this: the guerrilla art kit by Keri Smith. “By leaving art and ideas in public places, you can affect someone’s day – change their mood or their mind – and maybe even change the world in the process!” (Princeton Architectural Press 2007) My own artistic works, that will be treated subsequently, are not spacial interventions, unlike the pieces that were just discussed. These works are less about the practical tweaking of structural substance or the illegal appropriation of spaces; they’re rather about how to disassemble urban and architectural structures and codes and to rebuild them in different ways. They’re about how urban space constitutes virtual space and how virtual spacial elements transform real spaces. It’s a strategy of urban hacking that stacks real and virtual space, or simply conjoins them. I primarily work with places of transition, whose past is heavy on history and whose future is uncertain. As I moved to Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 the quick dismantling of DDR culture was omnipresent. The successive disappearance of cultural and commercial goods, the racing changes of urban space in East Berlin gave me a cause to confront myself with the parameters of cultural identification and to explore the problems and potentials. The forceful transformation of Berlin, that continues to warp its urban countenance in the most varied of ways, became an important topic of my artistic work in the 90s. It broaches the issue, on the one hand, of a clash between urban density and urban emptiness, especially to be found in the war-torn, derelict and partially demolished

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eastern part of the city, which in part remains today, and on the other hand it depicts simultaneous urban events.

Fig. 6.a. Annett Zinsmeister: Berlin Tuning 1991-95 © Annett Zinsmeister

Fig. 6.b. Annett Zinsmeister: Berlin Disappearing, 1991-95 © Annett Zinsmeister

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I documented fronts of buildings‘ decorative elements as urban images that I “stole” from the city before they have vanished because of demolitions, modernisations and rebuilding. One could consider these images an extraction of urban elements, fragments of buildings, without affecting the substance. The collection of these documents is a vault of original and noteworthy fragmented images of the city taken before they were “hacked”, destroyed, in reality and substantially vanished. None of the buildings featured in the collage Berlin Tuning exist anymore. Fronts of buildings signal the limits of spaces and perception; they are the central creative elements of the urban. In modernity the facade has lost its significance as an autonomous artistic architectural element and was often converted into an equally important or less relevant part of a functional whole. The “Plattenbau”, a building made from prefabricated slabs, is a very impressive piece of architectural evidence for this development. The “Platte” (slab) represents the architectural construction as facade and constitutes public space. It defines and accompanies the street space not on the basis of artistic-structural thoughts, but on the basis of the technology of its industrial production. Prefab buildings are not only the result of a mass culture centred on efficiency, but they‘re also a cultural phenomenon, an architecture that creates spaces in which social utopias and politically repressive realities overlap. The Plattenbau, as a presumed structural “utopia” and vision of the wide varieties of a system of prefabricated elements, failed because of its command economy realisation. The structure of the Plattenbau has a global-spacial dimension, and also a political one, as the architecture was understood and used as a political tool. Public space was hacked open and re-described using roads in regular intervals along of which the cranes moved, therefore defi ning the space to be fi lled with industrially prefabricated structures. Within this decryption of the urban code, centre and periphery not only changed their appearance, but their whole spacial organisation. The examinations of political history as well as those of the history of technical construction, and especially the socio-political encoding of these structures are essential for my work. The Plattenbau is not only a mass-produced construction method, but also a conveyor of significance used by completely different social systems. Architecture, because of its long duration, is always subject to a change of program and codes. The Plattenbau is a very interesting subject for study indeed, as it went through a similar rise and fall of popularity as some stocks in the year 2009: In the time of the GDR (German democratic republic, Soviet vassal) they were celebrated as comfortable new homes, but also avoided by those who warily feared them to be bastions of the state

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security (Staatssicherheit, secret service and massive informant organisation). After the fall of the Berlin Wall the West-German perspective considered them to be urban problem areas that didn‘t conform with the technical and infrastructural standards of the BRD (West Germany). They became a little loved task of renovation for many architects of the newly reunited Germany. At the start of the new millennium the popularity of the Plattenbau began to soar again – it was adapted in a wide variety of designer products and became the habitat of a young creative population. The Plattenbau embodies a similar dichotomy as the utopia, which always includes a dystopia (Zinsmeister, 2005), or the topos of the hacker that cannot be thought without the cracker as well. The prefabricated districts, for instance, offer the structure of a community because of their urban density. As state architecture of the former GDR they represent a social and privileged communal living space. The socialist structural molochs promised each and every worker his or her own flat, with equal living conditions, but they also served as an instrument of state control and surveillance. In the newly reunited Germany they were condemned as mass architecture that created urban anonymity, monotony, inhospitality and ghettoes, responsible for the development of social unrest. Therefore, there are very contrary positions for interpreting the Plattenbau that I treat in my works by “sharpening” (→ hacking) different facets, thereby exposing them. Among other things I demonstrate the utopian possibilities of the Plattenbau and relinquish them for everyone to play with via a work of art. (Zinsmeister 2002)

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Fig. 7a.-c. Annett Zinsmeister: Plattenbau oder die Kunst Utopie im Baukasten zu warten, (Plattenbau or the art of maintaining utopia in a construction set) 2002 Fig. 7.a. WBS70 Regelgeschoss Modell (normed floor, model) 2002 © Annett Zinsmeister Fig. 7.b. WBS70 Regelgeschoss Plattensortiment Modell (normed floor, assortment of prefab slabs, model) 2002 © Annett Zinsmeister Fig. 7.c. WBS70 modulare Visionen (modular visions); Fine Art Print 2002-06 © Annett Zinsmeister

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The hacker is […] a playing user. […] The game of the hacker is obliged to combinatorics with many compossibilities and defi nes itself as that organisation of elements in which the most possibilities are implemented in the smallest space (shortest code) and least time (fastest code). […] While experimenting with his game of combinatorics the hacker looks for (and finds) not only what the designers predicted and the manuals say, but mainly for what they not even dared to dream about. (Pias 2002.1: 254-257) Structurally and artistically, the prefabricated slab coalesces construction and facades; it’s constitutive and decorative at the same time. In an endless repetition the reason for efficiency becomes apparent. The Plattenbau oscillates between its minimalist attractive aesthetics and the deterring effect of its serial monotony. This anachronistic powerful effect of the slab on public space is what I’m interested in my artistic practice. Using spacial installations and the computer I rescale and re-intensify the effect of these serial facades and translate them from outside to inside, and vice versa. The slab images of Annett Zinsmeister therefore encompass the materiality of calculation and enable one to recognize these aesthetic objects as (calculation) elements. They don’t isolate or auratize these, but rather keep their repeatability conscious in many instances, sharpening one’s view for the incommensurably fi ne differences of the analogue world. (Pias, 2002.)

Fig. 8.a. Annett Zinsmeister: outside_in, Installation Solitude Castle Stuttgart 2005 © Annett Zinsmeister

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Fig. 8.b. Annett Zinsmeister: outside_in, Installation Gallery Oberwelt Stuttgart 2005 © Annett Zinsmeister

My work outside_in/virtual interiors is constructed from the documents of the original, today often vanished, house front elements of the Plattenbau and other facades, forming new structures and placing these in new spacial contexts. I reconstruct the structure of each room I exhibit in and wallpaper them. So, the facade of the Plattenbau becomes the element describing the room, without discerning above or below, inside or outside. Vertical limits become horizontal floor- and ceiling levels. A double intersection of outside and inside develops: An outside space turned inside out without any inside, a virtual space that is only perceivable or able to be experienced from one specific point of view, i.e. the spot where the illusion of a central perspective is perfect.

Fig. 9a. Annett Zinsmeister: virtual interiors/container project, Installation at paraflows Wien 2009

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I examine urban structures/codes and rewrite these by recombining urban spaces I first differentiate into elements, symbols and images. Thereby, I create virtual spaces in real spaces, real rooms, in real locations, that jointly defy the categories of outside and inside, of up or down, of open and closed. The installations are at the same time simulations. Turned inside out, partly dystopian visions of space, they intensify the interchange of minimal and ornamental aesthetics and endless monotony. They oscillate between photographical documents and artistic artefacts, between authenticity and illusion. Surreal perceptions of space are created, spacial irritations that no longer allow the limits of the private and the public, the road and the interior, between real and virtual space to be strictly discerned.

Literature Pias, Claus (2002.1). “Der Hacker“. In: Horn, Kaufmann, Bröckling (eds.) (2002). Grenzverletzer. Berlin: Kadmos, 254-257 Pias, Claus (2002.2). “Von Platten und Plättchen“. In: Zinsmeister, Annett (ed.) (2002). Plattenbau oder die Kunst Utopie im Baukasten zu warten. Hagen: Karl-Ernst-Osthaus Museum, 126 Raymond, Eric Steven (2001) How To Become A Hacker. http://www.catb. org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html Smith, Keri (2007). Guerrilla Art Kit. Princeton: Architectural Press Zinsmeister, Annett (2002). Plattenbau oder die Kunst Utopie im Baukasten zu warten. Hagen: Karl-Ernst-Osthaus Museum Zinsmeister, Annett (2005). Constructing utopia. Konstruktionen künstlicher Welten. Berlin/Zürich: diaphanes Zinsmeister, Annett (2008). City and War. A trip to Sarajevo. Stuttgart: merz/solitude

The most dangerous thing on the air. Someone broadcasts something Thomas Thurner

Hackers rarely want to actually destroy the systems they‘re attacking. They are mostly about something different: perhaps the ambitious sporty spirit of competing with supposedly secure systems. Or the chance to point out holes and weaknesses in systems in order to encourage their owners to strengthen them. And if anything, to remedy problematic situations out there by themselves. Yes, sometimes hackers do attack systems that they deem to be unacceptable. And with these attacks they want to influence the general confidence of these systems; to force their administrators to fundamentally rethink their processes, otherwise they risk users permanently leaving their platforms. So the infi ltration of foreign systems is as much a technique of hacking as the necessity for systems that run into error. In order to reduce the complexity of the following I will use the triangular relational construct of “hacker – system – error” in the following essay on urban hacking, as seen in pirate radio in 1990s‘ Vienna. Let‘s start at the beginning: pirate radio stations or rather non-governmental, non-commercial and non-licensed radio broadcasts, have existed for a long time. As every medium, radio also had its unregulated, autonomous and experimental phase wherein its possibilities were explored and the avant-garde played with it. In the 1920s radio was a strange communicative contraption that the visionaries of utopia, specifically

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Berthold Brecht, saw as a tool that could help to re-establish communicative equality. The Austrian Workers Association for Radio (Arbeiterradiobund) also had high hopes for the new medium – hopes that were squashed in later years by the totalitarian regimes throughout Europe. The abuse of the medium for propaganda, controlling the masses, was driven to perfection in the thirties and forties. Radio was everywhere: but it was no longer a means of communication. It had become the instrument for the opinion-building hegemony. A tough legacy for the further evolution of radio in Europe: the taint of the manipulative, the misleading and the controlling remained even after the war. The mark remains until today, as the governments regulate, assign frequencies and inhibit access to non-governmental broadcasters. The “Volksempfänger” (the people‘s receiver, mass-produced Nazi radio sets) is the negative heritage of a communication device that seemed to have so many possibilities. After Second World War, the allies only gradually gave up their control of the airwaves to the new established democratic institutions in Europe. A tight corset of regulations in the state contracts on media, and a guided scarcity of frequencies enforced the state monopolies until the late 70s and 80s. Late in the 80s and 90s, Vienna‘s society began to open. Formerly grey and lethargic, Vienna began to gradually develop different alternative scenes. Houses were squatted, cultural centres were founded, independent printing projects and the first alternative concert locations brought fresh air to the city. In the late 90s the impulse for the renewal of the Austrian media came from the subculture, as it had before with the squats and the fought-for cultural centres: the then so-called “Underground”! An alliance of autonomous anarchists, left ists, musicians, theatre people, feminists, dreamers, students, desperadoes and radicals set out to modernize a part of the no longer supportable Austrian stone age of the media: pirate radio stations, free broadcasts, civil society using the media. So the activists of the 90’s underground can be considered the hackers of their time, and the encrusted powerful media and opinion leaders were the erroneous system. The above described triangle (hacker-system-error) was fi lled with life. And the error in the established system was endangering democracy: it was the medium for the rise of the populist right, led by Jörg Haider. Evidently it was the state-run media monopoly (ORF, Österreichischer Rundfunk, Austrian Broadcasting) in cohesion with street publications that, contradicting its often touted social function, made way for Haider‘s rise. In the name of objectivity the ORF distributed strictly counted airtime minutes, which often also meant being the stage for the proliferation of the unacceptable politics of the far right. Jörg Haider

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knew how to arrange media events that the ORF, often with a Pavlovian reflex, would cover. The radio and TV monopoly were flawed systemically. Unable to handle right-wing populism, this domination couldn‘t attempt to spearhead social renewal, and mainly did not manage to cover the broad civil society activism of those years (nuclear power plants were stopped from being activated, a dam of the Danube and the destruction of large areas of natural wetlands were averted at Hainburg, punks, squats etc.). Exactly at that time, as the civil society was looking for its representation in the media, the ORF cancelled one of the few such existing links: the Musicbox (cancelled on the 13th of January 1995). The rest of the media were also not attracting the civil society. Austrian chancellor and head of the social democratic party SPÖ Franz Vranitzky had already announced the importance of the sale of the AZ (Arbeiterzeitung, workers newspaper, party-run), which was shut down on the 24th of January 1992, despite the intense commitment of the staff. In 1988 the two newspapers with the highest circulation concentrated their power in the WAZ corporation. Many high-circulation magazines followed, such as profit, trend, Wochenpresse, Rennbahn-Express and Basta. The reaction of the subculture (the hackers) to this increasingly precocious situation of the media, creating new facts by broadcasting illegally and thereby trying to get things going, seems very obvious at this point. Pirate radio was a good medium for this, as it provided a mixture of fun and socio-political relevance that was needed for this “hack” of three years. On the 31st of March 1991 it was time. Radio Boiler started broadcasting. The first show lasted for 15 minutes, and it was broadcasted to the city from three alternating transmitters on three hills in the Wienerwald, the forest surrounding Vienna. Seen in the rear-view mirror, the subsequent speedy proliferation of the pirate radio scene and the increase in airtime and coverage are the most obvious similarities to the flash mobs of the 2000s. The topics covered by the pirate radio stations were quite diverse: some were focused on music, others on politics, equal treatment and rights for men, women or homosexuals. Radical leftists, Marxists, feminists and liberals passed the mike and sent waves on the ether on 103,3 MHz. Within a year the project grew up to 40 hours of airtime per week and involved approximately thirty active regional broadcasting groups from throughout Austria.

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This meant that the project had reached a size with which it represented a direct attack on the system of media monopolies established in postwar Austria. It was illegal and politically relevant. The then director of the Austrian Post (federal mail service), Josef Sindelka, quite hit the spot in expressing the wonder at this disruption of the system in a typical Austrian way: “the most dangerous event on the air is someone broadcasting something!” The hack was not only trespassing current national law, it also triggered further developments, unavoidable at that time, that substantially transformed the Austrian media monopoly into a formally plural media ecosystem with a western commercial character. Even the admittedly efficient reaction of the state apparatus couldn’t avert this. The state police, the department of criminal investigations, the department of administrative law – they all persecuted the activists, but had as little impact as the ORF and the boulevard at its side.

Fig. 1. Thomas Thurner: Radio Pirate, http://prezi.com/hyqu7nmmdbos So, the crucial step for Austrian radio to open up was the concrete fact of illegal broadcasts. Not only that it pressure the status quo with hard facts, it could also be shown that firstly there was a demand for information on, for and by the civil society, and secondly that there were listeners looking for exactly that content. That these social necessities were more than the romantic broadcasting dreams of a selected few is supported by the

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fact that up to 300 people ventured into the illegal, and that the stations were powered by the people, who donated small amounts directly to the pirates (the so-called pirate tax). The transmitters cost about 4000 ATS each, around 300 €, and thirty of them had to be purchased throughout the station’s activity. Mere activism was not enough, however, for the permanent and sustainable – legal – occupation of the airwaves. The development of a popular will (lobbying), the building of alliances, concept work and financial backing for the future independent radio station turned the pirate radio station into a politically active organization of civil society. With great tenacity these pirate radio activists complained to the human rights court, twice to the Supreme Court and repeatedly applied for licenses. Only four years after the last pirates stopped broadcasting the first legal frequency was established for Viennese radio producers. This was in 1997. This demonstrates the great differences that exist between the two forms of activism, in spite of all similarities between pirate radio and urban hacking à la flash mob: on the one hand, the scope and duration of the hack, on the other hand, the far-reaching variety of tools used to achieve one’s goal. Yes, flash mobs are also pioneers and catalysts of a fundamental change in society; they change our perspectives, attitudes and power structures, even reversing them. But they manage to do this with a plethora of pinpricks and actions that, when seen in sequence form a “bigger picture”. Urban hacking would never call this an “organization”, unlike the pirate radios of the 90s. The simple phenomenology “hacker-system-error”, that allows us to describe both pirate radio and urban hacking quite well, leaves out at least one aspect: that of the hack support system. Without a doubt the radio pirates of the 90s were silently allied with the commercial producers of media, who also had interests in the weakening of the state monopoly. Pirate radio has to cope with the fact that their call for freedom of communication also opened the door for the commercialisation of the airwaves. Looking at promotional flash mobs organized by the advertising industry these similarities are obvious.

Improv Everywhere. An interview with Charlie Todd. Johannes Grenzfurthner

JOHANNES GRENZFURTHNER: Could you tell me how Improv Everywhere started? CHARLIE TODD: In August of 2001, I went out to a West Village bar with my college buddies Brandon Arnold and Jon Karpinos. On a whim we decided to pull a prank where I would pose as musician Ben Folds. Three hours later, “Ben Folds” was drinking on the house surrounded by women and his “two big fans” were thrown out of the bar for “stealing Ben Folds’ wallet”. I had always been a prankster, but this experience enlightened me as to how far a prank could be taken. As an actor new to the city, I discovered I could create my own theatre rather than waiting around for someone to give me stage time. Bored at my temp job the next Monday morning, I wrote the story down and put it on the web. Improv Everywhere was born. JG: Do you think there were certain specific phases in the evolution of Improv Everywhere? CT: I would say the biggest evolutionary change happened in 2005. That was the year that people I didn’t know first started showing up to participate. The first four years it was really just my friends and improv classmates. By early 2005 we had started to build a reputation online and had received a bit of press, including a big New York Times article. All of the sudden there were dozens of people showing up to the events who I didn’t

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know personally. Of course this snowballed over the years. Our most recent event had 3,000 participants and I probably knew 30 of them personally. We still do many small scale events a year where the participants are long-time members of the group, but for the larger ones I’ve had to start thinking about the enjoyment of the participants more than I used to. When we were all friends, it didn’t matter how much fun it was. The idea was more important. When thousands of strangers are involved, I have an obligation to make it worth their time as well. I wouldn’t say that we’ve had thematic phases though. From the beginning I’ve tried to make our projects as diverse as possible. If I had recently done something successful on the subway, I’d be sure not to do another one right away. I think constantly changing gears has helped our longevity. Our documentation has certainly evolved. Some of the early projects weren’t fi lmed and a few weren’t even photographed. For the 3,000 person No Pants subway ride we covered it with 10 HD video cameras and probably a half dozen DSRLs for still photos. JG: How would you define the strategy (or strategies) that you developed at Improv Everywhere? Is there a tradition you refer to? CT: I would say our basic strategy is to come up with an awesome idea and then figure out how to make it happen. I don’t give too much thought to process or tradition. We just like trying out cool, funny ideas and seeing what happens. I know that sounds simple, but it’s really the way I operate. I haven’t really spent too much time thinking about how others have done similar things in the past. JG: But, as the name suggests, you are at least referring to the tradition of improv theatre. Could you tell me a little bit about improv theatre and how you try to find new playgrounds for it? CT: I absolutely regret choosing the name “Improv Everywhere.” I came up with it when I was 22 years old sitting at a temp job. I had just fooled an entire bar into thinking I was Ben Folds, and I wanted to create a website to document the experience. That particular prank was completely spontaneous and improvised, so Improv Everywhere seemed like a good name for what I had done. I was also about to start taking improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater so that certainly played in to the decision as well.

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I think it’s a terribly confusing name. People already have a pretty poor understanding of what improv is. Ask any long form improviser who has to explain what he does to his uncle over Thanksgiving. Improv is widely confused with stand-up and sketch and the distinction between short and long form improv is even more obscured in the minds of people outside the comedy world. Now I’ve come along and popularized the word “improv” in a context that has very little to do with traditional improv comedy. I wince whenever I see our projects referred to in the media as an “improv stunt.” Not to mention the fact that I have to read angry Internet comments like this pretty much every day. “How can you call this improv when it is clearly pre-planned!?!?” Of course we spend tons of time planning our projects, and in the case of our Spontaneous Musicals there is even a literal script that actors memorize. I do think that there is an improvisational nature to what we do, as we never know how the public will react to our mission and always have to adapt accordingly. Still, I’d change the name if I could, but it’s been almost nine years, and I think we’re pretty much stuck with it. JG: Our conference “Urban Hacking” dealt with new strategies to open up public spaces and to re-claim the cities. What’s your take on that? CT: I think there is an inherent political message in what we do. We are exercising our right to freely assemble and express ourselves in public space. We do not ask for permission for this expression; we just do it. New Yorkers are assaulted with outdoor public advertising, much of which is illegal, on every block. Our public space shouldn’t be reserved for just paid advertiser messages. We as residents of the city should also have the right to express ourselves peacefully. JG: You mention “permission”... do you think we are living in a “permission society”? CT: Not really. I think we’re probably living in less of a permission society than ever before. I think the Internet has allowed creators to do what they want to do without asking permission. The means of creation are exceptionally cheap and the means of distribution are free. Ten years ago I would have needed the approval of an important person with a corner office to have my work seen on any real scale. Not anymore. The gatekeepers, or permission granters, are losing relevance-- studio, network, and record label executives.

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JG: Some people call this a democratization of media... still it seems that most pranksters are only really happy if their pranks end up on prime time TV. A paradox? CT: I guess everyone has different priorities, but I personally could give a shit if my pranks wind up on TV at this point. I don’t really see the difference between YouTube and TV. Both have the potential to reach millions of people. The added benefit of being on the web is that your work reaches the entire world. I traveled to 10 different countries the past 2 years to stage events. All of the organizations that brought me over did so because they had seen me on YouTube. I made a television pilot in 2007. It didn’t get picked up, but if it had I don’t think it would have reached an audience outside of the US. It probably would have ran for six episodes and then been canceled because network executives didn’t “get it.” It was great to get to work with network television budgets and stage some things on a grander scale than I was used to, but ultimately the experience showed me that I don’t need television to be successful.

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C ONSEQUENCES

P2PFOUND CITIES. Project Proposal for the Reconstruction and the Preservation of Abruzzo Agatino Rizzo, Eric Hunting, Michel Bauwens, Cityleft, P2P Foundation

We present in this proposal a scheme for efficient transitional housing for the communities of Abruzzo accounting for the need to maintain the social cohesion of original communities under reconstruction, given the protracted periods of time this may incur with the restoration of the traditional regional forms of architecture which are themselves both a source of cultural identity and economic benefit.

Emergency, Transition, Restoration The greatest threat to a community struck by natural disaster is not the disaster itself but the loss of social cohesion that can result from the immediate actions taken to secure public safety. When this cohesion is lost the ability of a community to function as a social/political unit to work and -sometimes- fight for its existence and the restoration of its physical architecture is greatly diminished. In any natural disaster there are three basic phases calling for the use of three different forms of architecture; Emergency, Transition, and Restoration. In the initial Emergency, saving lives in the midst of a dangerous situation is the priority and expedience compels a military-style

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mobilization of populace and resources and the deployment of very rudimentary and temporary forms of relief shelter based on ‘instant structures’, such as tents and similar light prefab quick-deploying structures. In the phase of Restoration, the objective is to create permanent housing for a large population as quickly as possible, either by creating completely new planned habitats or by restoring existing architecture. In the case of Abruzzo the cultural and economic importance of much of the original architecture compels true restoration rather than quick-build substitutes that will ultimately detract from the value of the communities and be deemed substandard, but at the same time imposes a longer period of restoration because of the pre-industrial nature of this architecture. Between these two phases is Transition where the instant structures of relief shelter must be replaced by very economical and ‘rapid-build’ shelter -ideally as physically close to the original habitat as possible- that can remain comfortable for a protracted period of time as Restoration proceeds and can be removed easily and cleanly when no longer needed. This is a very critical phase but one that is historically not handled well because this is often a point where the needs of communities as communities -not masses of population- come into confl ict with political expedience and misconceptions about the time and scope of Restoration. There is often a presumption by authorities that Restoration can be performed so quickly no Transitional phase is necessary. However, this is almost never actually the case and would most certainly not be possible with communities based on architecture going back to medieval periods. Often, as the unanticipated suffering of a populace living for protracted periods in relief shelter devoid of functional infrastructure becomes apparent, authorities grasp frantically for quick solutions and often resort to mass relocation or dispersion of the population. And it is this kind of response that poses the most threat to a community -far more so than the original natural disaster. Because here the disruption of the social structures that bond a community together becomes permanent and the community no longer has the means to work and fight for what they consider to be an appropriate restoration. The most important thing that needs to be restored after a disaster is not the local architecture but the social cohesion upon which the existence and function of a community depends; hence the reason for the architecture to exist in the first place. Communities are not made of architecture. Architecture is merely an expression of the community. They are the elements of a habitat a community creates to shelter itself with. Coral doesn’t make a reef. Coral is what the polyps make the reef environment with.

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They are the reef. This is an alien concept for many, raised in and accustomed to the increasingly anachronistic paradigms of an Industrial Age which had little use for traditional communities because they hampered from the willing mass-mobility of workers and created political factions inconvenient to those seeking to centralize political power. But in much of Europe history and tradition helped community survive in ways not seen in places like the Americas. The Abruzzo region is an especially good example of this, and of the significant cultural and economic value of this. What we propose is a form of transitional architecture specifically intended to quickly re-establish the functional ‘social infrastructure’ of damaged towns in ways similar to the original architecture being restored and in the immediate proximity of the original towns so that people are ‘at home’ and able to function as a community to support the restoration effort. Our key tool for this is a concept called Peer-To-Peer Architecture; building methods that allow the inhabitants of a community to design and spontaneously redesign their habitat as they see fit. With this communities can reconstruct, through their transitional housing, the same neighborhoods and socially important structures they know as ‘home’ in parallel to and in proximity to the original community architecture under restoration. And there’s no preconceptions here as to how this works. The communities come together to design their own habitats and whatever doesn’t quite work later they are free to change, allowing the community to be fully functional in the midst of the restoration effort.

Collaborative Community Design Professional architects and builders are a very recent invention. For most of the history of civilization people have relied on themselves, their immediate families, and their communities for the creation of shelter -the sharing of labor for that creation, in fact, being one of the key reasons why people formed communities in the first place. There is a common misconception that, barring the occasional ruler with an interest in building beyond his own elaborate dwellings and with the aid of rare geniuses like Imhotep, all early architecture was an ad hoc and largely individualistic affair. In fact, most historic human settlement employed urban densities as a matter of practical necessity and were often based on communal structures such as walled enclosures and contiguous dwelling structures which required communal labor, continuous maintenance, and thus compelled a continuous group negotiation over the allocation, location, and configuration of personal space. A very organic yet orderly evolution of architecture resulted with a certain uniformity yet flexibility in dwelling

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design that is a reflection not merely of vernacular building methods – which co-evolved as an expression of this collaborative design- but a flexible communal notion of fairness and equity of property rights in lieu of market systems. Before we started on the tact of virtually subdividing the landscape according to imaginary grids, the limits of property were a dynamic social convention constantly -interactively- negotiated. The sophistication of this collaborative design was often very great, collectivizing cross-generational knowledge/wisdom, exploiting bio-climatics, adapting rapidly in response to environmental and situational changes, producing structures of tremendous scale and durability, and sometimes anticipating contingencies centuries in the future at times when an average lifespan was half of what it is today. But it was often severely limited in its pace of evolution and ability for response by the labor overhead involved in early construction methods based on high mass materials like earth and stone. This often resulted in a hierarchy of collaboration based on the scale of labor needed for any particular architectural adaptation, ranging from light and small structural features which were within the scope of a single person or immediate family, impacted only immediate neighbors, and thus could be more ad hoc and spontaneous in change to larger communal structural elements which needed whole community participation in their construction/modification. As those villages of strategically important location -crossroads of trade/ commerce and centers for key resource commodities- evolved to cities and became seats of concentrated political power for ever-larger regions the traditions of collaborate development gave way to hierarchical authority distributed from afar. As we learned to wage war on progressively larger scales the architecture of communities often became ‘militarized’ in the context of strategic military defense and thus their community-level collaborative design often superseded by military ‘experts’ -often rulers themselves- employing them as ‘hard points’ in a larger regional defensive schemes. This resulted in increasingly less organic top-down rather than bottom-up design methodology and the eventual adoption of that key architectural hallmark of western civilization and property ideology, the rectilinear street grid. Collaborative development continued to persist on the smaller scale of neighborhoods and rural villages for a long time, until finally succumbing to Industrial Age mega-bureaucracies which had little or no recognition of community identity below the level of the larger province, state, or nation-state. Our cultural memory of collaborative community development faded and became associated with the dwindling base of skills embodying particular vernacular building traditions.

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In the 1950s utopian artist Constant Nieuwenhuys, inspired by observations of the communal behavior of nomadic Romani communities, realized the potential of collaborative community development when combined with the benefits of modern demountable building technology, or ‘plug-in architecture’ as it came to be known among Modernist designers. Envisioning a utopian culture rooted in the notion of a spontaneously adaptive habitat, he envisioned a new urban environment where structural elements at the human scale were freely adaptive on-demand while progressively larger features of the habitat involved progressively greater planning and collaborative group involvement -very much as with communities of the past but with a far greater ease and pace of evolution and a far more comprehensive control of the sensual aspects of the environment with the advent of new building, energy, climate control, and communication technologies. Nieuwenhuys saw in this organic collaborative creation of habitat the potential for a far more socially adjusted and intellectually engaged culture better suited to the rapidly evolving situation of modern life that also had the very practical benefits of an improved standard of living and better integration with the natural environment. Unfortunately, the technology of the day was not quite up to Nieuwenhuys’ vision and though a great many modular, demountable, and plug-in building systems have been devised and developed, few have survived to the present day in the face of a reluctant building industry. Driven largely by the novelty and potential of emerging building technology integrating both the technology and design sensibility of Information Technology, new interest has recently emerged in this notion of collaborative community development deriving from the Open Source soft ware -and now hardware- movement and its strategies of Peer-To-Peer organization of development activity. A new awareness is emerging that the common dysfunction of the contemporary urban habitat is rooted in its tendencies toward personal anonymity and the inability to effectively evolve with changing contemporary situations under top-down, centralized, specialized, professionalized, authoritarian management. New contemporary forms of ‘smart’ plug-in modular architecture offer prospects of rediscovering/reinventing the potential of bottom-up collaborative community development, transforming the relationship between ourselves, our communities, and our built habitat toward a more organic dialogue that imparts upon the built habitat a heretofore unknown level of integral -encoded- intelligence. They also offer new prospects of industrialization of housing through the cultivation of ‘platform’ rather than ‘product’ focused decentralized global ‘industrial ecologies’ like that of the computer industry -a manner of industrialization very different from

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classic Modernist models derived from examples of the primitive auto industry. However, current plug-in building technologies remain -for the most part- experimental or limited in commercial development, limiting the scale at which implementation of P2P/collaborative development can be explored in the contemporary context, and for that matter immediately deployed for a relief effort. One seemingly unlikely and relatively low-tech modular building technology, however, if ready to use in this context and perfectly suits the situation now facing the communities of Abruzzo.

Microvillage Cargotecture The use of adapted ISO shipping containers -often called ‘cargotecture’for relief shelter is nothing new and has many advantages in the role of emergency relief and transitional shelter. Though the cost-effectiveness is dependent upon local market situations and industrial capability -which, thankfully, Italy is suited to- containers offer a means of quickly creating extremely durable, temporary, and comfortable homes and buildings that have low environmental impact and can be quickly removed without leaving a trace. Their only down-side is aesthetic, retaining an industrial appearance unsuited to the tastes of most middle-class people unless costly cosmetic treatment is applied -not an issue for structures intended for the role of transitional housing. It is quite likely that other entries in this competition have proposed cargotecture use. However, we propose to use this technology in a very different way. Container shelters are typically fabricated as trailer-home-like all-in-one units deployed in the manner of military camps. Appropriate for short term emergency relief activity, this offers no advantage over any other form of portable relief building and does nothing to reestablish community infrastructures, invariably becoming dysfunctional and unlivable. We propose to use containers as modular elements for the construction of complex multi-storey structures formed of single, pair, triplet and quad side-by-side room sets with a number of additional accessory elements such as stairways, walkways, pergolas, and outdoor decking. These would be combined into larger conjoined complexes serving as neighborhood clusters -microvillages-, freely designed and adapted collaboratively by their own inhabitants in order to approximate some of the character of their original homes and reestablish, in parallel, the same social, commercial, industrial functions of damaged structures under restoration. It would be as if the community established a retrofit life-support structure within and around the ‘body’ of their original habitat -their home- as it is being ‘healed’ through reconstruction. As original structures are restored and brought back ‘on-line’ in function within the community, these transitional structures can be incrementally

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repurposed or removed, leaving no trace thanks to quick disassembly and simple low-impact foundation systems based on prefabricated piers. Assembled from varying combinations of container modules modified for different uses, these microvillages would be mixed-use structures combining residence with public features and some commercial and light industrial activity that assume the same functions of the damaged parts of the original towns and would employ an architecture -deriving from the inhabitants’ own concepts of comfortable and functional form- paralleling, to some modest degree, the architecture of their original neighborhoods. Many would center on squares, courts, or atriums as employed by the traditional neighborhood architecture. The objective here isn’t to mimic the original architecture. These are not intended to somehow compete with that as a permanent habitat. Rather, the point here is to reestablish the functions disrupted in the damaged towns so that as close to a normal community routine can be restored while the inhabitants wait and work on the restoration. Emergency shelter need only consider the short-term issue of human safety. But transitional architecture must account for the _full_function_ of a community; social, cultural, and economic. So we are talking not just about residential structures but shops, workshops, offices, churches, schools, clinics, recreation -all the things that make a living town and community work and which, in the case of the unique and ancient communities of Abruzzo, are very intimately integrated architecturally. With this seemingly simple building technology we can re-create, in a miniaturized, temporary, form, all these functional elements. And there need be no pre-conception as to what is functional or not. We derive that from the knowledge of the inhabitants through their collaborative design of neighborhood clusters while the free demountability and adaptability of this building system allows one to fine tune these structures as necessary over the course of their use. The basic module set for our system is composed of the following structural elements: – Shelter Units: basic 20’x8’ finished building units for housing and other uses composed of single-room and multi-room sets with one or both ends fitted with windows or sliding door units. Sides are either fully open (for side-to-side connection) or closed with one or two openings matching the end window/door dimensions. Can be grouped side-by-side to make 20’ wide clear span bays of any depth in multiples of 8’. Can also be joined end-to-end. Can be stacked many storeys high. A typical minimal singleperson dwelling might combine just three modules, two for a common

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room and one for a combined bathroom/kitchen module. A typical family dwelling may combine 6-8 or even more base shelter modules. – Shelter Accessories: special purpose single container modules for prefinished bathrooms, kitchens, utility systems, staircases, balcony/decks, repositionable friction-stay partitions, rooftop gardens and decks, and the like. – Open Space Modules: containers modified with no walls used to create outdoor spaces and outdoor structures like gazebos and seating areas interconnected to the shelter modules. Would also be used as open interstitial elements to support raised/cantilevered portions of the shelter structures. Would consist of flat bed decks, open frame decks, pergolas, covered deck/walkway, covered/outdoor staircase, shallow open top planting beds (particularly suited to greywater recycling systems), etc. Would also support optional accessory modules like planting boxes, trellises, integrated bench seating and outdoor tables, tensioned shade tarps, etc. To cover larger areas with fewer modules, flat deck units may employ 40’ container frames. – Special Purpose Modules: concerned mostly with infrastructure systems including solar/wind power, telecommunications, water supply, waste processing (though most dwellings may employ marine incinerating toilets), trash handling, etc. Would also include kiosks for small shops and outdoor cafes and certain health and recreational facilities. – Industrial Units: simple work-shed variation of the Shelter Units intended for light industrial applications and used for local container modding facilities as well as work facilities for the ongoing restoration work. Would include translucent roof panels and a side-mounted garage door unit allowing handling of large bulky objects and the use of small fork lifts. Par ticipation and Urbanism 3.0

The situation of earthquake victims demands expedience and so a simple and straightforward approach to design collaboration is necessary to make the process of designing neighborhood clusters as speedy as their physical assembly -a process which, with these container modules, may take one to a few days for basic assembly and one to a few weeks for complete outfitting. In both traditional community development and anticipated community development based on more advanced future small component plug-in building systems a more direct physical interaction

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with building elements would allow for a very direct design conversation between people and building elements as structures are built. Th is will be particularly apparent with future building technologies where the building elements are very easy for individuals to physically manipulate and where structures will embody integral information systems that, in a sense, have the structural engineer built-in and very actively communicate with user/builders the details of structural integrity and safety standard compliance as structures are assembled and changed. But for the moment we must deal with rather large structural elements manipulated by crude machines such as reachloaders and so we need a means of ‘conferencing’ the design collaboration process in advance in a way easy for people with little or no building experience to understand. However, our main priority is to develop a design process which is open to the local community. We think that after establishing a nucleus of our cargotecture we could then involve local stakeholders in the development of temporary settlements. This participation process is actually coherent to our P2P ideal. We think that for the self-sustainability of any design process a direct involvement of locals must be achieved. To do so we will use a previous experience that our network had the opportunity to carry out in Tallinn in 2008. Plug & Plan urban centers are a system of temporary, removeble, and adaptable urban workshops creating the necessary space to allow experts (say architects, planners, region makers, researchers) and non-experts (say NGOs, inhabitants) interaction. Within these urban centers will be carried out P2P urbanism to inform the re-construction of L’Aquila. The projects developed will be atlases, plans, maps, texts, soft ware, anything useful to inform a new life for L’Aquila. Wiki planning could be one of the tasks of Plug & Plan centers. With simple tools (say paper models) architects and inhabitants could together develop different urban scenario, displace economic and cultural activities, and mediate impacts on the surrounding environment. Architects would assist with pre-designed dwellings residents could pick and then customize. In the neighborhood conference stage these individual dwellings are then combined into a neighborhood cluster with more active participation of assisting architects and building engineers. Once a communally agreed-upon design is created from all these models, the architects then

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compile the whole community assembly plan, which would then be given to the container modification shops and the on-site assembly work crews. This conferencing approach is not only intended to be a mode of collaborative design but also a means to restoring a sense of empowerment to the members of the community. Victims of natural disaster suffer much loss of dignity and sense of self-worth by the way they are pushed around by their situation, first by the cataclysmic forces of nature, then by wellintentioned but still militaristic emergency aid personnel, and then -over protracted periods of time- by government bureaucracies. Though commonly overlooked, it’s important to consider the psychological impact of all this on disaster victims. With this collaborative design process we give back these individuals a sense of control over their own destiny through active and shared participation in their own transitional habitat and thus their own recovery process. We give them ownership as a community of the restoration. Yet in Plug & Plan centers will be developed Urban Artistic Interventions to simulate the actual change and collect, ex-ante, social feedbacks. A Urban Artistic Intervention is a performance, or a panel of performances, in public spaces meant to stimulate people imagination upon alternative urban scenarios. Using UAI to collect social feedback will be extremely useful to forecast social, economic, and environmental sustainability of our project. We have called this approach Urbanism 3.0, a new way to deal with urban issues, where trans-disciplinary research and P2P urbanism merge together for the study/planning/developing of urban environments.

Flexibility of our proposal Because the containers employ the simplest of modifications and are otherwise generic building elements, they would be completely free for further customization by their inhabitants with many means for self-expression possible -everything from interior decor to gardens and other outdoor features. Residents will likely employ their own ingenuity and invention in adapting these structures to their needs and tastes as part of fine tuning them -a process likely to continue for as long as these dwellings are used. Aiding such customization would be a local container modding facility near the communities and employing local people which would serve for maintenance and modification of community structures over their period of use. Much of this customization would be indoors and on

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the level of the household or small business and so would need little community involvement beyond negotiation with immediate neighbors. But larger outdoor projects -such as community gardens and outdoor recreation facilities- would also possible and would be handled by neighborhood conference. Gardens and building customization are not commonly considered elements of relief architecture but we see this, again, as having great importance from the standpoint of psychological recovery and the reestablishment of a normal community routine. We must bear in mind that this transitional architecture must house a community comfortably for many years. Indeed, some of the original architecture damaged in these earthquakes may take decades to restore. We don’t want to compete with the permanent architecture under restoration but at the same time the microvillage must not impose hardship on its inhabitants. The free demountability of the structures also means that the initial community design is not set in stone. At any time things that prove less workable or effective than originally anticipated or which must be updated to suit changes in the neighborhood situation, can be changed with minimum disruption to the community. In fact, the neighborhood cluster would actually have the option to physically reconfigure with the seasons to maximize the bioclimatic function of the architecture. For instance, becoming more enclosed in the winter months and more open with open outdoor spaces in summer and being able to deploy special seasonal structures. This adaptability would also be important for light industrial and commercial activity where businesses must cope with less space than they may have previously had with their permanent buildings. All architecture learns. That which does not anticipate the need to facilitate this learning will still learn -the hard way. As restoration of the original community architecture proceeds, these transitional structures would be incrementally obsolesced. Some would be removed; others repurposed and moved to different locations. Durable as they are adaptable and demountable, there are innumerable possibilities for repurposing and recycling of these container modules for use in other relief efforts, as light industrial buildings, and for facilities such as schools, dormitories, hotels, commercial buildings, and more. Some might also be returned to their original purpose as shipping containers or they could be completely recycled as scrap metal. Ultimately, these transitional structures would disappear completely from their sites leaving no trace. However, we anticipate that their impact -particularly the social and cultural impact of this P2P collaboration- will be lasting,

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leaving stronger communities with a greater sense of empowerment and community identity.

Conclusions Though the disaster that has struck the Abruzzo region has brought tragedy and hardship, we see here a potential opportunity to demonstrate a much more effective and humane response to disaster recovery. Recent history has been rife with examples of national disaster response as destructive and disruptive as the disasters themselves. Unfortunately, we are in an era of history where disasters, natural and man-made, are occurring at an unprecedented pace. We, as a global society, must devise more effective responses to this. So far, the Italian government has done an admirable job of initial emergency response in Abruzzo. With this proposal we hope to offer a strategy for continuing this exemplary response through a transition and restoration that will serve as a model for the world. We believe this unique peer-to-peer approach to architectural collaboration will result in swifter and more complete recovery for these stricken communities and an even stronger social infrastructures than may have existed previously, preparing them for other future challenges that will most certainly come in time with our rapidly evolving world.

cODE wRITING. On (Artificial) Writing Kerstin Ohler

ExperimentalHACK I want to expose a few parallels between CODE/HACKING/PROGRAMMING and LITERATURE and perhaps to question a few. Literary authorship has long been considered to have artistic intent (which is to be defined accordingly in each case). To keep things in persepective, the author aligns a certain set of symbols in the right order and the reader tries to decrypt the message that was sent to him on many levels, according to its intended use. The attempt of writing soft ware, optimising or boycotting it, is quite similar to the process of literary writing. The statement “programming or/and hacking as art” cannot be merely understood as commentary in a subculturally defi ned parallel world, but it should also impulse the attempt of a comparison on many levels. The question poses itself, of course: Why, for heaven’s sake, should literature studies deal with hacker-specific topics. During my research in the last few years I have noticed more and more that it’s not primarily about telling students and scholars of literature that programming and hacking can be viewed as “writing” and yields a lot as a topic of research. Most people need to be made aware that “programming by writing” or “code work” has existed in literature (only on paper!) forever, without the technical spook-medium “computer”. It’s mainly about forcing the literature scholars to adapt a somewhat broader view and therefore expand their

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areas of research according to the times. New theoretical observations or the development of contemporary methods of analysis could then be accelerated. The discussion should not lose force because of the widespread technophobia among comparative literature scholars. To stay true to the topic “urban hacking” I shall try to mix a few areas of literature in this article. Mainly I will focus on “language as code”, of course. But I also want to emphasize the “room” or “space”, or the “city”. One could imagine a Cartesian system of coordinates in two dimensions wherein the x-axis left of the centre shows “conventional language” and to the right “experimental language“. The y-axis describes descending the “narrative structure” and ascending the “spacial structure” as a main characteristic. This should help discover works of literature that hack the (or let’s rather say: one) conventional language, therefore using experimental language. This language has certain rules so that it may function, so that it may be understood and executed – as, for instance, program code.

RoomHACK The vertical axis of our fictitious system of coordinates should only be of second-rate interest and help to discern texts that not only have narrative quality, but implicitly shift the focus to the topic of “room” or “space” – for instance, urban structures. Works wherein the spacial structure is overlaid on the narrative are not scarce, to mention a few classics like “Alice in Wonderland” (Carroll 2000)1 and Abbott’s “Flatland” (Abbott 2001)2. Or Houellebecq’s “La Possibilité d’une Ile” (Houellebecq 2005) as a somewhat more sophisticated variety: The body as space is discussed as being within a somewhat historical “non-space”. However, the authors use a more or less conventional language. It gets more interesting and more hacker-like when we take a look at the right side of our virtual graph, examining the authors that use language as code or make it unusable. A more detailed description of these examples will follow further on.

1 | Abbott, Edwin A. (2002). Flatland. In: Stewart, Evans. The Annotated Flatland. A Romance of Many Dimensions. Cambridge: Perseus Publishing. 2 | Carrol, Lewis (2000). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In: Gardner, Martin: The Annotated Alice. The Definitive Edition. New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company.

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LanguageHACK So what is the theoretical approach if we want to examine the “common author” as a hacker of the code “language”? Christiane Heibach fundamentally claims that literature should be renamed language art studies (Sprachkunstwissenschaft), as the term literature has been too intensely associated with books, i.e. the medium paper. She emphasizes the necessity for comparative literature to expand their competences to language phenomena in other media. Heibach requests the development of new models that can relate the specifics of computer- and internet-based language art to those in other media. (see Heibach 2003)3 Florian Cramer, on the other hand, makes things quite simple for us, although many literature scholars despair because of this simplicity, or rebel against it. In my opinion the simplest approach is often not the worst. You can always criticize it later on. The most important phrase of Cramer: Es gibt keine digitalen Medien, es gibt nur digitale Information, die in analoge Medien übertragen und gespeichert wird! (see Cramer 2001)4. This is to say that an LCD-screen in a plastic case and a few metal chips does not comprise a digital medium. Only information, input and output, is digital. This also means that a soft ware program remains digital even when printed out, or that a nursery rhyme can be digital if it constitutes executable code for a machine. Literature, as language art (Sprachkunst, with Heibach) or, with Cramer, as character art (Buchstabenkunst), can be transmitted by any medium. Cramer describes the main medium of code work, the ASCII code, and roots its foundations in the hacker subculture of the 1970s. De facto the most important poetic forms of code-artists originate in the hacker subcultures of the 1970s, for instance ASCII art, code slang and poetry using programming languages (such as perl poetry). Some code artists (such as e.g. Jaomil and Walter van der Crijsen) belong to both “hacker” and “net art” cultures.

3 | Heibach, Christiane (2003). Literatur im elektronischen Raum. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. 4 | Cramer, Florian (2001): Über Literatur und Digitalcode. Published online: http://cramer.pleintekst.nl/all/digital_code_and_literary_text/liter

atur_und_digitaler_code.pdf

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Furthermore, Cramer allows a historical and methodological recap in his text “WORDS MADE FLESH” (Cramer 2005)5 on the term “executable codes”: Contemporary definitions are preceded by ancient philosophical approaches and literary experiments (Pythagoras, Llull, Cabala, etc.). An algorithmic code or fi xed calculations was the common basis. For instance, Georg Philipp Harsdörffers’ poetry machines, such as the “Fünffache Denckring der teutschen Sprache” (five-fold ring of thought of the German language) originate as far back as 1651. Using this contraption, according to Harsdörffer, one could […] show all of the German language on one sheet of paper. (Harsdörffer 1990)6 The machine systematically allows combining predefined word fragments.

5 | Cramer, Florian (2005). WORDS MADE FLESH. Code, Culture, Imagination. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam. Published online under GNU license: http://pzwart.

wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/fcramer/wordsmadeflesh/ 6 | Harsdörffer, Georg Philipp (1990). Mathematische und philosophische Erquickstunden. In: Berns, Jörg Jochen (ed.). Texte der frühen Neuzeit. Band 3. Frankfurt: Keip.

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Fig. 1. Denckring der Teutschen Sprache This system from the 17th century is not only interesting when considering its implications in the field of combinatory poetry from a scholarly view. Cramer is of the opinion that: At this point, computation is no longer a rhetorical, magical or theurgic means of manipulating language. Instead, language in itself is thought to be computational and algorithmic, a program. (Cramer 2005)7

7 | Cramer, Florian (2005). WORDS MADE FLESH. Code, Culture, Imagination. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam. Published online under GNU license: http://pzwart. wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/fcramer/wordsmadeflesh/

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Code poetry – found footage After this brief introduction I shall immediately continue with more examples. Let’s begin with the field of (program) code poetry: works that use a similar style as program code, obviously so. The readability of these poems depends e.g. on the readers’ knowledge of programming languages such as PERL or ALGOL, or on whether the author wrote an executable program or just pseudo-code. Hybrids are most common i.e. the authors use expressions and structures taken from programming languages as well as from conventional languages. Furthermore, a definitive recursive tendency of self-reference can be noticed. The “extreme case” is a poem that can be read on three levels: The actual sequence of code for the reader, the executable for the computer and fi nally the text displayed on screen by the program actually running. I want to present the following two texts as examples that, despite their simplicity, pose many questions. The first poem has been proliferated in the internet for the last few years therefore an “author” in that sense can no longer be seriously defined. Roses are #FF0000 Violets are #0000FF All my Base are belong to you. The original is a poem from 1784, written for Valentine’s Day: The rose is red, the violet’s blue, The honey’s sweet, and so are you. Thou are my love and I am thine; I drew thee to my Valentine: The lot was cast and then I drew, And Fortune said it shou’d be you. The usage of the hexadecimal codes, as used, e.g., in PERL, for the colours red and blue is interesting. But the secret of the text is only deciphered if the reader not only knows the colours in hex code but is also a gaming nerd. Two lines can only be understood correctly when considering the following: Originally “All your base are belong to us” is a citation from the opening sequence of the game “Zero Wing” and represents, with its whole failed grammar, an internet phenomenon of the years 2001/2002. Net culture likes to poke fun with it at the deterioration of language and proper

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forms in the internet. The sentence grew from an inside joke between gamers and geeks to be a mass phenomenon that even Time Magazine and Wired covered. We take a step further with the following PERL haiku (Bob Meyers, 2006, ActiveState Perl haiku contest, http://aspn.activestate. com/ASPN/Perl/Haiku/InPerl ): use strict; my @love; my $wounds = open(FLAME, “of_passion”); foreach () {push @love “fully”;} Not only was PERL code used to write a love poem, it was also wrought in the Japanese literary form of the haiku. If, however, certain classes are defined, then this code has to be considered executable. It’s far more difficult to read than the former example text, as the structure and the “punctuation” will at least cause some raised eyebrows by those who enjoy poetry. A programmer, moreover, would perhaps be also able to see the third level text, i.e. the result of the program’s execution. So far I have presented two short and simple examples to illustrate the constrained readership, the hybrid levels of language and the recursive, self-referencing nature.

Code Poetry – MEZANGELLE Mary-Anne Breeze, a.k.a. MEZ, takes a further step towards a literary language oriented on code. She calls her poetic idiom “mezangelle”. MEZ happily mixes and minces English, ASCII art, fragments of source code, conventional and slang expressions. She creates a multidimensional form of expression that can be interpreted in many ways, combining the English language with computer code by manipulating syllables and morphemes. Like other code works, mezangelle assumes elements of the Leetspeak/language (1337) and/or perl poetry. A somewhat shorter example text that was distributed in 2000 as “Spam Art” is called “Fantazee Genderator” (Breeze 2000) ::Fantazee Genderator::> Assig.n[ation]inge Ov Charact.wh[m] orez 2 [w]Re[ck]quired Fiction.all.lie.sd Para.m[edical] Statuz ::Vari.able[bodie]z::> Prince Cessspit N Princess Pit N Cin.der.ella[fitzgeraldingz] N Rap[t]punzelle N Gr.etal]

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::Will B Mild[h]er than me[aslez] but damaging to the fe[male]tus during the first try[mester]. [5 Micah Dolls awai.ting AC.TIF.[f]ASHION] Florian Cramer easily defines the executable code in MEZ’s work. Slang and sexual language exposes mezangelle as a messy code, one that does not run on machines, but on a human imagination that encompasses machines and bodies alike. Unlike in the Steven Seagal action movie and the Voynich Manuscript, the semantic associations are not superimposed and therefore external to the code, but are embedded into the code proper. The multiple meanings of mezangelle – achieved by using the symbols of brackets and boolean algebra and punctuation games using (imaginary) fi le endings – let us recall the portmanteaus of Lewis Carroll. In Fantazee Genderator these multiple meanings can be mapped to the gender descriptions, consignations and negations. When analysing Mary-Anne Breeze the questions of possible receptions and the creative process of the artist (or her soft ware?) as optional background information on the actual code system should be our main focus. The first two example texts are considered a bit amateurish by scholars because of their simplicity. MEZ, however, introduces, as Cramer puts it, neuere konzeptkünstlerische Umcodierungen, not only a political and gender equality discourse. The simple codes that turn out no to be executable on machines demonstrate a recursive self-referential behaviour the likes of which have never been reached e.g. by hyper-fiction projects. Technology without errors is questioned as much as the readability of “normal text”. Poetry of program errors can only be conceived on paper. This approach combines, in my opinion, among many further intersections, code poetry with the language art of DADAISM. I shall return to that in more detail later on.

Multimedia code – listening post First I’d like to mention an example from multimedia art that, in my point of view, really sticks out of the above criticised mass of unreflective digital literature. Listening post was fi rst presented to the public in 2001 by Mark Hanson and Ben Rubin. More information on the project can be found online at http://www.earstudio.com/projects/listeningpost.html. A dark room contains 231 fluorescent text displays affi xed to a semicircular metal net. Diverse speakers and sub-woofers let the perceiver listen

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to the acoustics caused by the reflections of the displays on the aluminium net on the opposite wall. Several computers analyse data from different chat sites and public forums in real-time, choose 85 messages that begin (during the first part of the performance) with “I am”, “I like” or “I love”. Gradually more and more messages appear on the screens and illuminate more and more space with their light. The chosen texts vary in length and complexity starting with easier and shorter texts. Before each message appears an answering machine is heard beeping. This setting is changed during the different parts of the performance. “Listening post” engages the mass of online communication and forces an online discourse in an endless loop. The following approaches of thought are interesting in this context: first, whether the real can be turned into fiction without involving an author, or whether chats and forums only contain fiction to start with and what is created through listening post is a sort of hyper-fiction. Second, the randomized machines can be considered to be the “authors” of the texts displayed on the screens – they’re machines, therefore, that “hack” virtual public spaces such as chat rooms and blog platforms and utilize them, continuously processing. Of course such museum art also needs to be perceived critically. There’s certainly not enough emphasis on the aspect of naiveté concerning data privacy etc. The immanent motto “Hack the chat nicely, take what you need and make electric art for the museum!” needs to be doubted. Again, the relationship to DADAism is quite interesting. Cutting and pasting “news items” has been a popular attempt to (de-)politicise language since 1916.

DADAhack Even earlier than Borroughs and Gysin in the 1960s, the randomness as the moment of creation was used by Tristan Tzara. What separates his concept from later, similar concepts such as”Listening Post” is the fact that the diligent copying of the newly created sequence, the very conscious re-writing of the original text is an essential part of the process. There are no possibilities for choice or additional sorting. The “program” has to run as the bag demands! Another important aspect needs to be considered: The raw materials are newspaper articles. Artistic media criticism at its best! Um ein dadaistisches Gedicht zu machen. Nehmt eine Zeitung. Nehmt Scheren.

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Wählt in dieser Zeitung einen Artikel von der Länge aus, die Ihr eurem Gedicht zu geben beabsichtigt. Schneidet den Artikel aus. Schneidet dann sorgfältig jedes Wort dieses Artikels aus und Gebt sie in eine Tüte. Schüttelt leicht. Nehmt dann einen Schnipsel nach dem anderen heraus. Schreibt gewissenhaft ab in der Reihenfolge, in der sie aus der Tüte gekommen sind. Das Gedicht wird euch ähneln. Und damit seid ihr ein unendlich originellerer Schriftsteller mit einer charmanten, wenn auch von den Leuten unverstandenen Sensibilität. [Tzara 1984]8 DADAism should not be perceived as an art movement or a literary movement, the word was hardly used by the groups themselves. The goal was to create a new view of the world, a new savoir vivre. The Dadaists charged at the dogmatic bourgeois culture in order to clearly expose the senselessness of logic and intellect. Language should no longer allow proclaiming participation in the First World War. This is clearly an instance of socalled “hacker spirit”. Connections can also be made to the term of the computer virus: The Dadaists wanted to expose conventional language and recycle it by dissecting, lampooning and reinventing it. A wonderful 8 | To make a Dadaist poem Take a newspaper. Take scissors. Choose from this newspaper an article of the length that you intend your poem to have. Cut out the article. Carefully cut out each word of the article and put them in a bag. Shake gently. Then, take out one piece after another. Diligently copy by hand in the sequence they came out of the bag. The poem will be similar to you. And you're therefore an infinitely more original author with a charming sensibility, yet misunderstood by the people. [Tzara 1984]

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example for this is Kurt Schwitters’ “Ur-Sonate”, in which he redesigns language according to a musical pattern (Schwitters 1988)9. The Ursonate is a Dadaist spoken opera that was developed from 1923 onwards in different versions by Kurt Schwitters. The 1923 variation was recorded on the 5th of May that year in Stuttgart. A written version of the score was also published 1923 in the last issue of MERZ, Kurt Schwitters’ journal. Schwitters himself was of the opinion that Kunst ist Form. Formen heißt entformeln (Schwitters 1988)10. Language therefore needs to be decoded before art can be created with it.

CIT Yhack The last example is a text that hacks the conventional idea of literature on many levels. “barnarella oder das herzkunstwerk der flamme” is defined as a novel, but cunningly averts the conventional constraints of narrative structure. The German author and performance artist Ginka Steinwachs mainly works with surrealist techniques, likes to refer to the theories of Roland Barthes and her three “main works” are all named after, and are about, cities: Berlin (Steinwachs 1979)11, Paris (Steinwachs 1978)12 and Barcelona (Steinwachs 2002)13. Ms. Steinwachs delivers a quite hip approach there. Steinwachs’ novel about Barcelona is not only about the city. There’s also a main character named Barnarella. The content is quite difficult to summarize, but the author has written her own summary on the back of the cover, which lets us guess at how this text treats “conventional” rules of writing. die story ist schnell erzählt : eine frau von lebenslustigen jahren kommt bei einem flugzeugunglück auf halber strecke zwischen europa und afrika um . sie selbst ist bei aller liebe nicht mehr zu retten , wohl aber das manuskript , das sie bei sich trägt . es ist nur zum teil leserlich , da an den rändern verbrannt , aber 9 | Schwitters Kurt (1988). Ursonate. In: Lach, Friedhelm (ed.): Kurt Schwitters. Das literarische Werk. Band 5. Köln: DuMont Buchverlag. 10 | Ibid. 11 | Steinwachs, Ginka (1979). Berliner Trichter. Berliner Bilderbogen. Wien: Rombus Verlag. 12 | Steinwachs, Ginka (1978). marylinparis. montageroman. Ein Compendium der Spracherotik. Wien: Rombus Verlag 13 | Steinwachs, Ginka (2002). barnarella oder das herzkunstwerk in

der flamme. Wien: Passagen-Verlag.

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eine kommission von sach- und fachverständigen , darunter echte liebhaber , macht sich nun unter der leitung von professor bidabo daran , es herauszugeben . dabei gibt jeder von sich selber preis . daher und noch aus einem anderen grunde die form der buchstücke . diese sind den keramikbruchstücken des barceloneser architekten don antoni gaudi-um nachempfunden : und sie passen ins I GING . und und und . im übrigen spielt der roman im himmel . im himmel über barcelona , der stadt , die für barnarella und cellophan , den freund , beides zugleich : himmel und hölle ist . musterknabe und mustermädchen in einer stadt zum abheben .14 The consequent lower case type, the lyrical melody of the language, the hacking apart and reconstructing of new words – these and further traits already hint at what to expect in the summary. Steinwachs hacks language and adapts it to her schemata and work methods. The possibility of random maiming of language is excluded e.g. by the fact that Steinwachs repeats her creations, thereby quasi carrying the reader to the peculiarities of her language. In the prefi x to the novel there are 11 instructions for the reader. Some of the interesting ones are e.g.:

14 | the story is quickly told : a woman of fun-loving years deceases in an airplane accident midway between europe and afrika . she can’t be saved anymore, despite all love , however her manuscript , that she has with her . it is only partly intelligible , as it is burned at the edges , but a commission of experts on the topic and field , among them real connoisseurs , is now occupied, led by professor bidabo , by publishing it . whereby everyone exposes parts of oneself . because of this and because of some other reason the form of fragments . the ceramic fractions of the barcelonese architect don antoni gaudi-um were the role model : and they fit in the I CHING . etc etc etc . by the way the novel takes place in heaven . in the heaven above barcelona , the city that, for barnarella and cellophan , the friend , is both at the same time : heaven and hell . model chap and model lass in a city to take off .

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- Nr. 4: ruminieren SIE jedes fragment, jeden satz, jedes wort einzeln. die optimale lektüre ähnelt den lesevorgang dem schreiben an. […] - Nr. 10: schreiben SIE barnarella ab. Gestatten SIE sich dabei verbesserungen aller art, die IHREN schreibfluß in gang setzen. SIE können es doch bestimmt tausendmal besser als alle anderen zusammengenommen.15 Steinwachs perceives reading as “re-writing”, “continuing to write”, “writing again” – also preferably as “writing against”(“Wieder-schreiben”, “Fort-Schreiben”, “Um-Schreiben”, “Wider-Schreiben”). A book, an open source system. The novel continues the fragment as a type of text and contains 8 chapters, each containing 8 fragments. These 64 sections correspond to the I CHING, “the Chinese book of transformations”. Steinwachs negates the esoteric idea behind it but uses the structure. In the original Chinese sense the I CHING also needs to be read as a philosophical treatise. The depiction of each one of the 64 characters is achieved by hexagrams: 6 lines, divided into two blocks of three. The lines are either continuous (the symbol of YAN) or are interrupted once (the symbol of YIN). This means that a sort of binary code is used. Florian Cramer also considers the I CHING: Other prominent examples of computational writing are the Chinese I Ching oracle and Tibetan prayer wheels. In fact, no historical Western computational text has been transcribed as early and frequently into electronic computer software as the I Ching. (Cramer 2005)16 I shall not describe the code in more detail, as I want to examine the descriptions of cities by Steinwachs (Steinwachs 2002)17 more thoroughly – her URBAN HACKING:

15 | – Nr. 4: YOU should ruminate each fragment, each sentence, each word on its own. the optimal read resembles the process of reading to writing. […] - Nr. 10: YOU should copy barnarella by hand. allow yourself all kinds of improvements, which get YOUR writing flow going. YOU can probably do it a thousand times better than all others in unison. 16 | Cramer, Florian (2005). WORDS MADE FLESH. Code, Culture, Imagination. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam. Published online under GNU license: http://pzwart.

wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/fcramer/wordsmadeflesh/ 17 | Steinwachs, Ginka (2002). barnarella oder das herzkunstwerk in der flamme. Wien: Passagen-Verlag.

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B…ARCELONA als schwitterssäule (fragment für eine assemblage). das haus der temperamente … himmelsrichtungen … die winde … ist in mehreren … schichten wie güssen wie arbeitsvorgängen … aus einer schwitterssäule gemacht. es hat haushohe stockwerke und wechselt in seiner neigung von 15 (fünfzehn) 15, 30 (dreißig) 30, und fünfunvierzig (45) fünfundvierzig grad gefühlsmäßig … von der lust-mordhöhle … zur großen grotte der liebe heimlich: die schwitterssäule warnt: kein turmbau zu sündelbabel. aus städtebaulichen trümmern (hier das gran teatre del liceu, da der palau de la musica catalana, dort der triumf des nort) wie ein puzzle zusammengesetzt , aus den wackeren lettern der ursonate geformt, mit dem mörtel der (F)estdeutschen syntax gebunden […]18 Immediately perceptible: Steinwachs’ love for Kurt Schwitters and for his work. Especially Schwitters MERZBAU is constantly used by Steinwachs in comparisons with Barcelona. Hacking rooms i.e. flats or houses was also one of Schwitters’ artistic activities. The MERZBAU can be described as follows (and as can be found at www.merzbau.org): The Merzbau in Hannover was a fantastically constructed interior, as bewildering as it was abstract. The walls and ceiling were covered with a diversity of three – dimensional shapes and the room itself was crowded with materials and objects – or “spoils and relics”, as Schwitters himself put it – which were contained in countless nooks and grottoes, some of them totally obstructed by later additions to the work, with the result that their contents then existed only in one’s memory of the Merzbau in one of its former states. The Merzbau was – “on principle” – an uncompleted 18 | B...ARCELONA as schwitterscolumn (fragment for assemblage). The house of temperaments … cardinal directions … the winds … is in several … layers as casts like work processes … made from a schwitters column. it has stories high as houses and changes its tilt from 15 (fi fteen) 15, 30 (thirty) 30, and forty-five (45) forty-five degrees emotively … from the lust-murdercavern … to the great grotto of love secretly: the schwitterscolumn warns: no tower of sindelbabel. from urbanely constructing debris (here the gran teatre del liceu, there the palau de la musica catalana, there the triumf des nort) like a puzzle conjoined , from the valiant letters of the primordial sonata formed, with the mortar of (F)eastgermans' syntax bound […]

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work and continued to grow, changing constantly. The starting point of the work was Schwitters’ studio in his house at No. 5 Waldhausenstrasse. However the work grew and grew until finally, just before Schwitters’ emigration to Norway, as many as eight rooms had been “merzed”, including the skylight in the roof and the space underneath the groundfloor balcony. The actual center of the Merzbau was a tree-standing sculpture, commenced in 1920, which Schwitters called the Säule des erotischen Elends (Column of Erotic Misery). The artist once remarked that everything that was of any importance to him was contained in the Merzbau. Back to Barnarella – wherein parts of Schwitters' Ursonate feature prominently (Steinwachs 2002)19: ich zitiere: oooooooooooo […] dll rrrrrr beeeee bö, dll rrrrrr beeeee fümms bö, … rrrrrr beeeee fümms bö wö, […] zum exempel manifestiert sich diese liebe der lettern zueinander im turmbau von BARCELONYLON.20 The author uses a plethora of text types which are voluntarily juxtaposed and mixed. The description of Barcelona and the historic background of the city are prefi xed to the respective chapters in texts similar to travel guidebooks. Steinwachs plays on many varieties of language: German, Spanish, French, Latin and Catalan. Not the intelligibility of a text as such seems to be important here – the reader e.g. only recognizes the names of buildings. But the city leaks in, even through a primarily unintelligible language. Furthermore, Steinwachs uses flash drama, a fairy tale, letters, diary entries and the above mentioned homages to Merz-art or concrete poetry for her novel.

19 | Steinwachs, Ginka (2002). barnarella oder das herzkunstwerk in der flamme. Wien: Passagen-Verlag. 20 | i cite: oooooooooooo […] dll rrrrrr beeeee bö, dll rrrrrr beeeee fümms bö, … rrrrrr beeeee fümms bö wö, […] as example manifests this love of letters to one another in the tower of BARCELONYLON.

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PostHACK It’s up to the reader to decide which of the possible interpretations he wants to perceive – or is able to. Does he understand more of the source text, or more of the text clearly displayed on screen? Florian Cramer is of the opinion that, speaking about the above mentioned MEZ-poems: Like a piece of software code that gets executed, the writing expands beyond itself, generating dozens to hundreds of possible readings. And that’s what eventually makes the comparison of literary texts with soft ware viable: It’s all about executable code, baby!

Bibliography Abbott, Edwin A. (2002). Flatland. In: Stewart, Evans. The Annotated Flatland. A Romance of Many Dimensions. Cambridge: Perseus Publishing. Carrol, Lewis (2000). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In: Gardner, Martin: The Annotated Alice. The Definitive Edition. New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company. Cramer, Florian (2001): Über Literatur und Digitalcode. Published online: http://cramer.pleintekst.nl/all/digital_code_and_literary_text/lit eratur_und_digitaler_code.pdf Cramer, Florian (2005). WORDS MADE FLESH. Code, Culture, Imagination. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam. Published online under GNU license: http:// pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/fcramer/wordsmadeflesh/ Steinwachs, Ginka (2002). barnarella oder das herzkunstwerk in der flamme. Wien: Passagen-Verlag. Steinwachs, Ginka (1979). Berliner Trichter. Berliner Bilderbogen. Wien: Rombus Verlag. Steinwachs, Ginka (1978): marylinparis. montageroman. Ein Compendium der Spracherotik. Mit einem Nachwort von Til Stegmann. Wien: Rhombus Verlag. Harsdörffer, Georg Philipp (1990). Mathematische und philosophische Erquickstunden. In: Berns, Jörg Jochen (ed.). Texte der frühen Neuzeit. Band 3. Frankfurt: Keip. Heibach, Christiane (2003). Literatur im elektronischen Raum. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Houellebecq, Michel (2005). La Possibilité d’une Ile. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard.

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Schwitters Kurt (1988). Ursonate. In: Lach, Friedhelm (ed.): Kurt Schwitters. Das literarische Werk. Band 5. Köln: DuMont Buchverlag. Tzara, Tristan (1984). Um ein dadaistisches Gedicht zu machen. In: Tzara, Tristan. Sieben Dada Manifeste. Translated by Gallissaires, Pierre. 3., altered re-edition. Hamburg: Edition Nautilus. Images

Denckring der Teutschen Sprache: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Denckring.png

Urban Trash Zone. Notes on the collapsing city in Warren Ellis’ and Ben Templesmiths Fell: Feral City Verena-Cathrin Bauer

The comic Fell: Feral City, written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Ben Templesmith, combines classical narrative techniques of the detective story with an extraordinary setting. The design of the post-apocalyptic city Snowtown is rooted in studies about the feral city – urban spaces that, instead of developing further, are destined to regress into a pre-modern state of infrastructure and organisation while still being connected to advanced technological means of communication and commerce. The introduction of fantastic elements adds further to the characterization of Snowtown, which not only serves as a backdrop, but undertakes a kind of anthropomorphosis, thus becoming a protagonist of the comic in its own right. In this paper, Fell: Feral City shall be analysed in regard to its connection to different genres, its innovative mode of production and its references to other art forms.

206 | Verena-Cathrin Bauer

Into the urban wilderness Fell: Feral City depicts urban space as a project doomed to fail: Not only stagnation, but regression take the place of rapid spatial evolution and progressive technological development – the city itself ceases to function. Another component adds to the total loss of infrastructure and supervising institutions in the post-apocalyptic city: even during the process of deterioration, regressive living conditions are confronted with an ever expanding and improving array of communication technology. This scenario refers explicitly to the essay “Feral Cities – The New Strategic Environment” (Norton 2003)1 by Richard Norton. His thesis integrates a global communication network into the classic defi nition of the devastated metropolis, whereas social networks and interpersonal relationships are subjected to further decline. Warren Ellis employs this setting as a backdrop for his creation of Snowtown, the “collapsing urban trashzone” (Ellis/Templesmith 2007: s. p.)2, a questionably safe haven for criminals, perverts and human flotsam and jetsam. The city seems desolate and abandoned, the shops are empty, packs of free-roaming dogs are closing in on the city’s centre. The population is cut off from water supplies and food for short periods of time, the only connections to the word outside of the city’s boundaries are a bridge and a tunnel controlled by violent gangs. “The thing is...the thing is, this city’s just fallen apart. Fallen apart. Whole chunks of Snowtown.” (Ellis/ Templesmith 2007: s.p.)3. Comic artist Ben Templesmith creates distopian visions of entropy in a feral city dominated by shades of grey and blue. Ellis’ protagonist, Detective Richard Fell, has been transferred to Snowtown for unknown reasons, but it is obvious that he has fallen out of favour with his officials. Now he tries to keep a semblance of order in an urban maze, supporting the “three and a half detectives” (Ellis/Templesmith 2007: s.p.)4 – one having lost his legs – of the police department in Moon Street, “where Snowtown pretends to have a police department” (Ellis/Templesmith 2007:s.p.)5. His contacts span from odd colleagues and vulnerable bartender Mayko to the so-called low-lives who, as it often turns out, are not evil per se, but deeply marked by their life in Snowtown. The city as 1 | Norton, Richard J. (2003): Feral Cities – The New Strategic Environment. Naval War College Review 56 (4): 97-106 2 | Ellis, Warren & Ben Templesmith (2007): Fell. Feral City Vol. I. Berkeley: Image Comics 3 | Ibid. 4 | Ibid. 5 | Ibid.

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a cesspool of vice attracts disease, perversion and organized crime; violence is always boiling underneath the surface. The plot of each episode of Fell: Feral City focuses on one case that allows Richard Fell to explore the collapsing city and the psyche of its inhabitants, to learn about its past and about a bizarre menace – Fell’s nemesis, a nun wearing a mask of Ronald Reagan’s face and pursuing what can only be considered as nefarious goals. As of now, each of the eight episodes published in one volume corresponds to a new concept that reduces an episode to 16 pages with a nine panel grid format, thus creating a narration with faster pacing. In his published blogs Bad Signal, From the desk of Warren Ellis and Come in alone, Ellis not only talks about the artistic dimension of comics, but also broaches the issue of its marketing and production conditions. The basic definition of the Pop Comic is a finite, commercially accessible, inventive and intelligent modern comics work. A cultural hand grenade, short, bright and inexpensive. An art bomb, cheap as a single and demanding as much of your time. Three or four issues, or a short original graphic novel. Open-ended ongoing titles are your dad’s comics. And your dad probably listens to Genesis. (Ellis 2003:7)6 This concept can be found at the core of Fell: The reduced number of pages goes hand in hand with a shorter waiting period between issues and facilitates a reduction of costs. As different story arcs don’t span over more than one issue, new readers fi nd easier access to the comic. Furthermore, Ellis’ critique of the comic industry aims at the absence of sustainability and availability of comics that don’t belong to the classic superhero genre. The Pop comic is, in my mind, the direct competitor to the majorcompany superhero comic. Pop comics are fast delivery systems for explosive storytelling, as much flash and thunder as your ideal superhero comic, with more innovation – and operating in other genres. […] And the Pop comic is creator-owned. (Ellis 2003:7)7 The last episode of Fell was supposed to be released in 2008. The series was put on hold, but it appears as if a continuation is at least in preparation.

6 | Ellis, Warren (2003): Bad Signal. Volume I. Urbana, IL: Avatar Press 7 | Ibid.

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Sherlock Holmes, Hard-boiled, Neo-Noir With the detective story in Fell, Warren Ellis not only ventures into a genre that can already look back on a long history in literature and in cinematography, but also into a type of text closely associated with postmodernism. The character of Detective Fell positions himself in the succession of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: The “science of deduction” expresses itself in Fell’s attention to tiny details, to psychological motivations and in his expertise on a variety of topics. Fell’s motto “Everybody is hiding something” seems to be his greatest flaw at the same time: “‘Everybody’s hiding something.’ You like breaking people, don’t you? Good for your little ego. This town’s gonna kill you, detective.” (Ellis/Templesmith 2007: s.p.)8. Detective Fell is, just like Fell: Feral city, a genre hybrid. When he finds an issue of Black Mask Magazine in a thrift store and tentatively leaves through it – “I almost don’t want to touch it in case it breaks…” (Ellis/ Templesmith 2007: s.p.)9 – Ellis opens an intertextual gateway to the pop cultural universe of hard-boiled pulp fiction. Black Mask, which started to be published in 1920, offered writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, whose detective stories would later reach an extremely sophisticated literary level, the first opportunity to introduce their work to a broader audience. The change of focus from the solving of the case to the description of relationships and problematic living conditions is only one factor in the adaptation of the genre in Fell, as is the cynical tenor of Ellis’ acid-tongued and politically incorrect black humor and his individual interpretation of moral values that sometimes has nothing in common with police protocol. Meanwhile, he still tries to show compassion and maintains at least a little human dignity in a dark and anonymous metropolis. Ultimately, Fell is portrayed as a positive character who, even in a disaster area, is able to relate to victims and criminals alike. Moreover, it should not be omitted that Warren Ellis is a declared fan of crime scene shows: “I should note here that I’m a complete sucker for forensic crime shows, and I still feel that Quincy should be turned over to me [...].” (Ellis 2003: 18)10. The city as a dark abyss, as a labyrinth in which the protagonists can only get lost, is one of the most idiosyncratic motifs of the Film Noir. Whilst 8 | Ellis, Warren & Ben Templesmith (2007): Fell. Feral City Vol. I. Berkeley: Image Comics 9 | Ibid. 10 | Ellis, Warren (2003): Bad Signal. Volume I. Urbana, IL: Avatar Press

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the classical fi lm noir is mainly seen as a psychological reaction to the changes that took place during and after WWII, the Neo-noir offers a wider range of temporal and spatial settings that can even lead to the present or to cyberpunk. The city is a labyrinth of human construction, as intricate in its steel, glass and stone as the millions of webs of human relationships suspended within its confines. It is a projection of human imagination, and also a reflexion of its inhabitants’ inner lives; [...] the framing of the city, our visual progression through the labyrinth, is as significant an element as plot or characterization. (Christopher 1997: 16)11 Fell’s forays into the urban spaces of Snowtown, through empty streets, abandoned houses and vacant stores, concedes only a minimum of orientation to the reader. The city’s known cartography is strictly limited to the immediate vicinity of Fell’s daily routines: His apartment, the “Idiot’s bar”, the police department, the harbour and the warehouse district. Street names like “Regret street” speak for themselves, whereas “Love Lane” doesn’t keep its seductive promise, but is converted into its opposite. The rest of Snowtown lies in the dark – blank spots on the map that generate the fear of the unknown, imply an atmosphere of imminent danger and generate the dreaded horror vacui. Fell’s work as a detective overlaps with the intellectual reception of the comic on part of the reader: Fragmentary pieces of information create a puzzle, a mystery that has to be solved to understand Snowtown’s doom, its trauma and its nebulous past. The Austrian author Kathrin Röggla states in her essay disaster awareness fair (Röggla 2006)12 that talking about urban space can only ever be an seen as an intellectual effort, as the city itself is fiction. We can only experience different levels of the city, discontinuous situations and stories, varying degrees of intensities and speeds, social realities and contradictions. The disastrous evolution in Snowtown seems to take place slowly – a sole, cataclysmal cause for its downfall is never mentioned. The status as an urban trash zone rather appears to be the consequence of a development that could have been stopped at any moment. For the inhabitants of Snowtown, the city itself is the reason for their demise. “This place was built by maniacs. You should do the history, S’why I’m saying. This town 11 | Christopher, Nicholas (1997): Somewhere in the night. Film Noir and the American City. New York: The Free Press 12 | Röggla, Kathrin (2006): disaster awareness fair. zum katastrophischen in stadt, land und film. Graz/Wien: Literaturverlag Droschl

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is gonna getcha. You should go back over the bridge.” (Ellis/Templesmith 2007: s.p.)13

Tag your city As the only element marked by bright coloring, the Snowtown-tag can be found on nearly every surface of the city. The bright letter “S”, crossed out with two forceful, red streaks, is sprayed on houses and shops, walls and signposts. On the contrary to graffiti culture, the paintings do not express the wish to recapture commercialised public spaces: “Street art can be seen as a reaction to the saturation of marketed physical, cultural, and psychic space.” (Hanley 2003: 20)14. Exactly these intrusions into cultural space no longer exist in the feral city of Snowtown. The application of the tag is the expression of an inverted gesture of appropriation. “It’s the Snowtown Tag. You put it up, you belong to Snowtown. If Snowtown knows who you are, it won’t come and get you.” (Ellis/Templesmith 2007: s. p.)15 On one hand, the city is established as the common enemy that turns against its own inhabitants as long as they do not prove their allegiance by applying the tag. On the other hand, the faith Snowtown’s inhabitants have in the tag can be interpreted as another example of the regression of social order. Just as the infrastructure and the organisation of the city seem to regress and become more and more rudimentary, improvised and primitive, this change also takes place inside the heads of Snowtowns inhabitants. Superstition and criminal tendencies take over, a fact that exempts the personificated city from its guilt. “We can’t just say, ‘Oh, it’s Snowtown’ all the time.” (Ellis/Templesmith 2007: s.p.)16 Next to what has been an enlightened, modern society evolve ideas that rely on magic and shamanism to explain the world – a system of thought that clearly belongs to the past.

13 | Ellis, Warren & Ben Templesmith (2007): Fell. Feral City Vol. I. Berkeley: Image Comics 14 | Hanley, Tara (2003): Urban Guerrilla Tactics. Hip-Hop Culture and the Art of Resistance. In: O’Brien, Susie & Imre Szeman: Content Providers of the World Unite! The Cultural Politics of Globalization. Hamilton: Institute of Globalization and the Human Condition: 17-22 15 | Ellis, Warren & Ben Templesmith (2007): Fell. Feral City Vol. I. Berkeley: Image Comics 16 | Ibid.

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“‘You into that? Believe that magic stuff ?’ ‘It’s what they say. Protective magic. You stay in Snowtown long enough, you’ll believe anything.’” (Ellis/Templesmith 2007: s.p.)17 The connection between Detective Fell and the city is intensified by the application of the tag on his own body. A branding that his love-interest, waitress Mayko, burns into the skin of his neck illustrates the eerie relationship between Fell and Snowtown. As of this moment, Fell himself belongs to Snowtown and, as its possession, is protected by the city whose inhabitants he ought to protect himself. “I guess I belong to Snowtown now.” (Ellis/Templesmith 2007: s.p.)18 The seemingly primitive faith in protective symbols and magic rites can also be traced back to the alternate past established in “Fell” – a past that is marked by a decidedly stronger relation of western philosophical tradition – Snowtown decidedly exhibits characteristics of a North-American city – and thought systems of Asian origins. Th is syncretism developed from the incorporation of Asian immigrants, mainly refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia, into the town population. The cultural and philosophical traces of these immigrants now live on in the thoughts and deeds of the inhabitants of Snowtown, and they also indicate the mindset intellectual regression will create: “Cambodia was kind of surreal at the time. Almost medieval. Old beliefs, you know? Magic and ghosts.” (Ellis/Templesmith 2007: s.p.)19. The rise of immigration from Asian countries can be traced back to the Vietnam War and the regime of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia that reached its peak in the Seventies. An armed and violent conflict only ever referred to as the war may be a version of WWII inside the universe of Fell: Feral City. “‘I bet Snowtown was a nicer place back then.’ ‘You’d think, wouldn’t you? A lot changed after the war. [...] But I remember when Snowtown was a city of women. All the men left for the war. And then they came back...See, what the war did? It trained a generation of men in the expert use of firearms. That’s what made the Fift ies crime waves so bad. The bad boys came back with a couple years experience in shooting.’” (Ellis/Templesmith 2007: s.p.)20 17 | Ibid. 18 | Ellis, Warren & Ben Templesmith (2007): Fell. Feral City Vol. I. Berkeley: Image Comics 19 | Ibid. 20 | Ibid.

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The parallel existence of rational and magical discourses such as the belief in a city that somehow became alive is reflected in Fell’s detective work and his attitude towards crime and criminals. The reading habits of Fell and his co-workers can be considered as an exemplification of this paradox. Fell is seen to read a book about neuro-linguistic programming (“NLP-Reading Minds”) which corresponds to his investigative method that places a heavy emphasis on the manipulation of others and meticulous observation. His colleague, Lieutenant Beard, however, tries to fight the seemingly endless wave of criminality in Snowtown by somewhat more unorthodox methods. As an intertextual clue, his reading material, the Necronomicon, leads the reader into the universe of H. P. Lovecraft. The fictive book as the documentation of a demonic cosmology, including occult knowledge about the summoning of black magic and demons, should serve as an innovative strategy to fight crime. “All of our problems with crime here in Snowtown are over, Detective Fell. I am going to learn magic.” (Ellis/Templesmith 2007, s. p.)21 The ironization of the discursive duality of rational thought and magic is never completed – the characters not only fall back into primitive belief systems, they also adjust their own actions to their superstitions, which more than often turns them into a danger for public safety. Fell, the newcomer in town, still seems unfazed by the madness that has taken over the city. “I’ll leave the radio on. Have dispatch call me if he starts bringing back the dead.” (Ellis/Templesmith 2007: s.p.)22

Photographic protocol The definition of the comic as a medium that itself comprises other forms of media seems to correlate to Warren Ellis’ conception of the comic as an art form. The comic is a bastard form, a multimedia art all its own, a twentieth century hybrid grown from half a dozen arts. Elsewhere in Europe, comics are called The Ninth Art. Since no one’s ever quoted me a Tenth Art, this leads me to wonder if comics aren’t also The Last Art. (Ellis 2000:31)23 The concept of intermediality in “Fell” is conveyed by the evocation of 21 | Ellis, Warren & Ben Templesmith (2007): Fell. Feral City Vol. I. Berkeley: Image Comics 22 | Ibid. 23 | Ellis, Warren (2003): Bad Signal. Volume I. Urbana, IL: Avatar Press

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photography: Fell always takes his camera with him during his forays into the city; his view of Snowtown is practically shaped by the camera lens. By capturing reality with pictures, Fell’s vision of the city shifts – his gaze is drawn to otherwise unremarkable details. At the same time, all the references to photography establish the motive of the photographer as a hunter and tracker of criminological evidence. In Fell’s case, the act of photographing the city can almost be regarded as an appropriation of an originally foreign space: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and therefore, like power.” (Sontag 2008: 4)24. Using his photos, Fell creates a collage on a pinboard, a patchwork of urban impressions. Apart from documentation, the photographs also serve as a mnemonic device. After a rather unsuccessful date that turned into the solving of a case that involved the abuse of a minor, Mayko asks Fell for a picture of the child they saved. “’Why did I take that shot? I have bad days sometimes, you know that. On the bad days, I can look at that and know that you’re a good man.’ ‘Weirdo.’” (Ellis/Templesmith 2007: s.p.)25 In issue number eight, Ellis employs photography as a means to structure narration. Other than in the usual episodes that all involve the successful completion of a case, issue number eight is constructed like a photographic protocol of one night in the life of Detective Fell. The better part of the drawings, arranged in a three panel grid format – are made to resemble photos taken by Fell or the people he met, while yellow post-its contain commentaries to the actual events. The reduction of panels leads to a deceleration of the narrative pacing and creates more room for introspection and Fell’s thoughts on his workday and his life in Snowtown. Taking photos while chasing bad guys still poses a problem: Turns out my camera’s pretty tough for a cheap digital. But isn’t it always that way? Spend a grand on a top-end gadget and it breaks when you breath on it, but some piece of ten-dollar junk keeps working even if you drop it on the street and a pimp falls on it a few times.” (Ellis/Templesmith 2007: s.p.)26 In Fell, the transformation of observation into action does, contrarily to Susan Sontag’s theories about photography as an “act of non-interventi24 | Sontag, Susan (2008): In Plato’s Cave. In: Sontag, Susan: On Photography. London: Penguin Books, 3-26 25 | Ellis, Warren & Ben Templesmith (2007): Fell. Feral City Vol. I. Berkeley: Image Comics 26 | Ibid.

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on”, take place. Fell’s commitment to the inhabitants of Snowtown – although it borders on a Sisyphean task – might be the only way to symbolically create a semblance of order in the city’s chaos. “This is where I live now. None of you are nothing to me.” (Ellis/Templesmith 2007:s.p.)27

Bibliography Christopher, Nicholas (1997): Somewhere in the night. Film Noir and the American City. New York: The Free Press Ellis, Warren (2003): Bad Signal. Volume I. Urbana, IL: Avatar Press Ellis, Warren & Ben Templesmith (2007): Fell. Feral City Vol. I. Berkeley: Image Comics Ellis, Warren (2000): From the desk of. Volume I 1995-1998. Urbana, IL: Avatar Press Hanley, Tara (2003): Urban Guerrilla Tactics. Hip-Hop Culture and the Art of Resistance. In: O’Brien, Susie & Imre Szeman: Content Providers of the World Unite! The Cultural Politics of Globalization. Hamilton: Institute of Globalization and the Human Condition: 17-22 Norton, Richard J. (2003): Feral Cities – The New Strategic Environment. Naval War College Review 56 (4): 97-106 Röggla, Kathrin (2006): disaster awareness fair. zum katastrophischen in stadt, land und film. Graz/Wien: Literaturverlag Droschl Sontag, Susan (2008): In Plato’s Cave. In: Sontag, Susan: On Photography. London: Penguin Books, 3-26

27 | Ibid.

CONTROL Thomas Ballhausen

Drink up baby down Are you in or are you out? Leave your things behind ‘Cause it’s all going off without you Excuse me too busy you’re writing a tragedy These mess-ups You bubble-wrap When you’ve no idea what you’re like So, let go, let go Jump in Oh well, what you waiting for? It’s all right ‘Cause there’s beauty in the breakdown So, let go, l-let go Just get in Oh, it’s so amazing here It’s all right ‘Cause there’s beauty in the breakdown Frou Frou: Let go

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Characters Troilus, Prince of Troy Cressida, daughter of a Trojan priest Choir/Whisperers

Introductory Note It is the thematic parameters of control that led me to the topic under consideration: the loss of control. What happens with the small, intimate situations in the context of bigger, more important scenarios? When both systems go off the rails, when the much-praised equilibrium is lost? When we lack stability and a solid basis of trust, too? William Shakespeare’s drama about Troilus – immature, absurdly romantic and deeply angry due to rejection – and Cressida – calculating, cruel, desiring and yet at the same time fearful – seem to me to offer the perfect setting: every knight is a scoundrel, each princess a harlot; only fornication, war and betrayal always stay in vogue. Featuring the complete reversal of the Danish set of values in Hamlet, which directly precedes Troilus and Cressida in the chronology of works of the great unknown playwright, can also be understood as a political manoeuvre on the playwright’s part. The two characters that give the play its name are able to spend only one night together before Cressida is given in exchange for a captured prisoner, the taciturn General Antenor, and the drama between the unequal lovers is set on a course to the worst possible conclusion. Despite its length, the war between the Greeks and the Trojans is characterised by being in a stalemate and is peppered with battles, losses and the secret pleasures of the night. A complex, cyclical game of blood and iron puts Troilus and Cressida under its spell; already in Shakespeare’s play it rains sneering verses, steel and shit. But nothing changes, also not between the potential lovers; misunderstanding and betrayal are more or less preprogrammed. Cressida is all talk and wants to come across as less ‘blonde’ than the abducted Helen. She also wants to be less easily seducible than her, but ends up being just as easily lured away. Misuse of trust, broken oaths and sighs quell all hope and sideline the heroes’ war to nothing but an exhibition fight, to almost an uninteresting subplot, whilst Cressida gives herself to the Greek Diomed and Troilus witnesses this act. Ultimately, everything that is desired remains unfulfi lled in the original text; revenge stays unappeased, everyone ends up sleeping alone, peace is

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not made between the enemies or the lovers. The human being is not itself anymore, it betrays itself again and again. The figures are autistic when it comes to feelings. They hold monologues; they brush what is said aside as if it’s got nothing to do with them. Declarations of war and confessions of love are said in such quick succession that they are almost indistinguishable from one another. Mood swings are the order of the day. A misunderstood signal or a slight irregularity of behaviour is enough to decide whether they embrace or drive a blade between each other’s ribs. If one looks more closely, all the figures are completely enraged by their own existence, their own life, and now and then this mushrooms into imposition. How to keep the knowledge of things, the inevitability of death under control, as one controls the certainties about everyone in all the drama and décor. Birds of a feather do flock together after all. Human values contrast sharply with the errors humans commit, a disparity that inevitably leads to repetition, to fruitless talkingin-circles, to a cyclic deterioration of the situation. The characters in this love-game don’t get each other with alarming regularity. The things one puts oneself through, because one can actually stand each other quite well. The ruins of Europe are in the background, if this remix takes place within an Elizabethan setting. You should be able to taste despair and ashes at the moment of deceit, when the aesthetic and warlike elements creep in. Troilus and Cressida play their dubious game that is riddled with doubt, with the wish to win. Vanity, and the awareness that they are carrying around a past that has raw and open wounds, dominate the mood. An animosity shaped by romance gone sour permeates everything – an atmosphere of latent violence. That things may turn physical cannot be ruled out. The constantly-present whisperers want to participate in the progress of the game. They are also illustrating what is being said, mute portrayers of a distinctly verbose confl ict. They are at the same time both advisers and supervisors. Insult and suffering lie closer to each other than the characters are ever able to. They throw phrases and home truths at one another without care; they interrupt each other and impatiently put their weapons and toughness to the test. Despite their inability and their conceited attitudes, they manage to have a properly structured argument here and there; the rudiments of a conversation on what could be potential. This is a world that poses embarrassing questions about our purpose, our innocence and our beauty; that relentlessly puts us to the test and confronts us with conundrums. For example: does intuition exclude intellect or vice versa? Have we room for feelings, for a romance, for a little more self-abandonment than is actually good for us? A little more than

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we ever planned to have? The answers generally prove to be more sobering than wished for. And yet from time to time there is a longed-for hope. That does not make things better, no. In this hope lies a certainty that confirms a loss which has been sustained. The speakers should note this; every time there is desire to destroy, it should not be forgotten.

Text (Lights) (Enter the choir) Choir: The scene is of Troy, hence the armour, the occasionally coarse language, the cries and the fracas. The scene is of Troy, so everywhere. The time is irrelevant, just like it always has been: insignificant. And at the same time important, as always. The sun is rising over these stricken walls as never before in the past seven years during which the Greeks have besieged our city. So lights please, LIGHTS. The sun is rising as never before in the past seven years during which those bloody Greek arseholes have been hanging around our city, have attacked us and then quit, like children in a huff. You can’t have this toy, NO. Helen... the cause of this fucking war, Helen, you can have her back. She’s all yours. Perhaps we’ll simply toss that bloody Spartan over the wall. So much for Helen of Troy, Pah!.... Helen. Us Trojans have our own problems. We’ve also got our own romances, our unfulfi lled desires, our rejections and terrible secrets. We can lose our grip on things, we lose control too, but we get by, thank you very much, we get by. Let’s take Troilus and Cressida, denial and frustration personified in two individuals. Troilus, Prince of Troy and brother of the hapless Paris. Cressida, daughter of Calchas – a priest who is far too friendly, too familiar with the Greeks for our taste. Let’s just take Troilus, the languishing and immature prince; let’s just have a look at Cressida, that calculating and coquettish spoilt brat. You’ll quickly see how good we are at losing our grip on things, losing control, how we get by, thanks very much. If everything works, nothing does. If nothing works, even less does. The scene is of Troy, so everywhere. The time is irrelevant, just like it has always been, so insignificant. And at the same time important as always.

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If everything works, nothing does. As always. And that’s well known to be quite a long time. But when nothing works, even less does. You know this; you get the idea. So: Welcome! Welcome to Troy! Feel free to step a little closer. DON’T BE SHY, STEP A LITTLE CLOSER! (The choir retreats to the rear of the stage, the following scene opens up before us: two chairs in the centre of the stage, in between them a table with a chessboard on it. The background is dark, maybe with curtains. Serving more as decoration than having an active function, a trace of demise is perceptible. Every so often the thunder of cannons can perhaps be heard, the wail of a siren, a grenade going off.) Cressida: (setting the pieces on the chess board). I’m still vying for you and your love. I’m fighting so hard to get your attention, that’s why I’m so demanding. But I’ve never had more than words from you; from now on you’ll just get actions. Actions which show you that there is something BIGGER and which can’t be solved by your leaving things up to me. But I can do what I want, say everything in a thousand different ways, yet I can’t get through to you with my repeated questions, my never-ending explanations. If I had known that you’re THAT SORT of person, somebody who can simply blank me out, then I wouldn’t have let myself get so involved with you. Troilus: (taking off his armour as if it is a suit, as if he was stripping off a day at war or even just a normal working day): I don’t actually want to take my armour off anymore. The scars underneath are far too revealing about my past and about you too. Is that right, does that have such a literal truth? Is it war when we leave mercy at home, strap on our armour and promise ourselves that things will be different this time? That this time you won’t take any hostages nor I any prisoners? I want to contain my mercy and come home some time. When the time comes. (Troilus and Cressida sit down opposite each other, the choir behind them has divided into two groups of whisperers. Whilst the main characters begin their game, the whisperers start, silently gesturing to each other, whispering tips to the opponents, acting out what is being discussed – sometimes more, sometimes less, earnestly. Cressida: I want to create a daily life that I can tolerate too, one that is also bearable for me, which I can stand. What is so incomprehensible about this, so difficult, so hard to understand? Why can’t you just do this for me? Am I that unimportant to you, do I really mean so little to you? And

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don’t look at me so reproachfully again. I DON’T SHOUT LIKE YOU RECKON I ALWAYS DO, I just speak loudly. Troilus: It’s these unbearable compromises that wear me out. It’s these empty promises that drive me away again and again, although actually they are all only totally natural, totally normal demands which you simply then don’t carry out. In the meantime it seems to me that you quite simply don’t want to honour them anyway. Cressida: Because you can only ever view everything as a compromise, as if I simply weren’t good enough for you. Look at me, just look at me PROPERLY for once. I can’t understand why you can’t change yourself, that this you really is you and no one else. Someone who I can’t stand and yet still love, because I can’t do any otherwise. I’m completely at your mercy, and I’m so fed up with this being-at-your-mercy. You haven’t got a clue how it is, how lousy it all is. Troilus: How is it that when the benefits of youth are lost, we make the mistakes we didn’t want to make, and although we try to avoid emulating the failures and defeats of our parents, we have them nonetheless. Full-on properly. What does it mean to be a real Trojan, to function in the background and yet know the right words that open all the essential doors? How this war and its fallacious and seedy cause has become our war, how it now permeates everything, has taken over every detail. No tank is thick enough not to be penetrated. No attitude can pacify me; prevent me from breaking into tears. Cressida: You are always so vulnerable. You weakling...You! Girl! Ha! We could surrender, right now, in this situation. We could quite simply banish this phantasmal marriage, this wretched ghost that has ensnared us and is drawing us to a certain early grave. It would be simple. Gone. Just like Helen. Simple. Troilus: Helen, Helen, a devil from the belt down. A face that is the object of a thousand ships, an unconquered fortress for the destroyed suburbs. Is everything that isn’t Helen really dross? At least for now it is. It’s madness and lunacy to put duty above God. It’s both wonderful and terrible, as if I’d go up in flames in these miserable times, gunshot disturbs the dawning morning. One has developed an eye for the signs that herald the arrival of the gods. A sound maybe, a sudden change in temperature or between light and shadow. Then it counts even more than ever to do everything on command – come, vomit or kill on command.

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Cressida: To be sure, really wonderful atrocities do happen with the help of heaven. But you haven’t listened to a word I’ve said; you’ll simply maintain that deceit lies in my alleged silence, indeed, has to lie. You never pull me down to you tenderly, even when I want it. It is always the pull of sleep, the weight of the tablets, which let me sink away from consciousness. I’m completely unconscious, but full of agitation. Full of agitation and totally unmoved. You could fuck me till the end of time, but you’ll never reach my soul. Troilus: Beds are places of increased wakefulness, doesn’t matter where you make them, never mind where you lay them out. The covers folded back, legs spread, head slightly thrown back as if you’re being fi lmed. What an abyss separates us, why has our love gone stale? What more should I say? Cressida: It’s because we never learn anything, because we always discuss the same things, because we make the same mistakes again and again. There is something we aren’t able to learn, aren’t able to experience. The feeling is aiming far too high; we are perfect in our shabbiness. Once opened, you can’t seal your body up again, it simply can’t go back to how it was again. Perhaps that’s ok for some people. Where did I read that I could glisten like a sweating mare? In fact I dislike horses, like to eat them though. Horses are revolting in all their splendour and elegance. Disgusting! Troilus: Lay my head in the gutter and hope that I drown. It’s not possible for me to do anything else, I’m that exhausted. All I can do now is to obliterate myself; the only thing left for me to do is die. And why all of this? Because we know what is proper. Otherwise we know very little, but that doesn’t really bother us. Lust is as deaf as revenge and things that get stolen are always the things that we’re scared of keeping. But what is beyond our reach always carries a high price; just like love felt but not professed. You read about that from time to time. Cressida: I have no new questions for you, I can’t do anything more for you – for us – and I can’t wait any longer that perhaps you come up with something new either. It’s disturbing, extremely disturbing, what I’ve given up bit by bit, how oddly easy it has become to forgo things. I wish you could finally see what I do for you, but I also can’t do any otherwise around you. But your behaviour, your talk, one dog is taming another here. You and your stupid

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TALK OF STRATAGEM. What exactly would a relief attack be for us, you fucking idiot? Troilus: Every time a wall collapses, your view falls on yet another wall behind it. Every time a wall collapses under the force of the attackers, yields to this force, the view behind it gives the impression that the walls go on forever. That in fact there is no city behind the walls. As if the city doesn’t exist at all, as if the walls are stretching around an empty core, as if a fortress is curving around a tiny, untrodden patch. What value should we place on this small, unexplored space which has taken the place of all that is possible, all that is real? It’s worthless, completely worthless, after all the waiting and the fighting. In the mean time I DON’T GIVE A DAMN, it’s easier to cope with things that way. Cressida: I’m losing control of things. You always are so despicably flippant towards me. How high does the level of sensuality need to be to make it worth a war? Combat, coffee and cup-sizes are all that seems to interest you any more. Is that so, IS THAT REALLY SO? Troilus: You can’t interrogate me any more. Sometimes one answer has to be enough, I can’t dig any deeper. There are already too many corpses, I simply cannot, will not, dig any deeper. Full stop. Cressida: I cannot support this career as a killer, as this controller of a set procedure. What other alliance can you form, what else can you count on? Do you just ignore the foreseeable catastrophes? Troilus: I’ve run out of patience, I don’t even want to show any patience any more. I’ve been tolerant and indulgent for years, but I can’t bear this in-and-out version of sex any more. I don’t want you to touch me again. You’ve got me for the last time. Exactly…got to me the very last time…in every sense of the word. Cressida: How can it be so unclear to you, why can’t you understand me? How can it be that someone who is actually so intelligent, quite simply does not get me? What’s so bloody difficult? Troilus: It’s my life, my time too. I don’t want to be unhappy any more, I’ve had enough of being dissatisfied and troubled. I’ve had enough, more than enough, because I’m still in my best years, in my prime actually. I’ll

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have a look around, check things out, because I could have it easy, HAVE OTHERS EASILY, AGAIN AND AGAIN. Cressida: (first singing, then talking again) Come with me, ’cause I need a thrill now, it’s ok, cause I’m on the pill now... Just don’t expect me to kiss you any more, that’s history. Troilus: (particularly declamatory) As it’s a habit, should I stick a piece of iron in the fi rst piece of flesh I come across, or the next? Hold fast on to it because the world is spinning? I’m going to tie your hands behind your back now; the idea of your embrace disgusts me. The woman with the slit wrists, the woman with an overdose. I’m going to fling open the doors so the wind can come in and the cry of the world. I say down! Down with the happiness of submission. Cressida: Is that all you can think of? Manslaughter, murder and suicide? I can’t believe it, I CANNOT BELIVE IT. Medication and their side effects can’t help there either. Why take any more painkillers, I’ve got more than enough pain already. How weak and defenceless my feelings for you make me. It’s but a fine line between dignity and ridicule. I know everything, even if my body hasn’t got a clue. This life holds no more secrets for me. Troilus: You and your miserable pill-popping. There really are problems with morale, the fighting spirit, with seduction. I actually wanted to give up fighting and war because of you. But nothing’s going to change here; I don’t believe that that’s possible any more. Cressida: The only thing that’s always dominant is how blunt what’s happening is, how things aren’t being disguised. You can’t be bothered to fight any more or somehow play an active role. Is all this honesty really all that good? Troilus: This love has turned into a bad joke. In the meantime you’re simply moving too slowly for me, of that I’m sure. And I always wrote to you. Cressida: Yeah letters. One, two, three million letters – they mean nothing to me because they can’t substitute you, can’t substitute US. What can words do? Our love lies between the pages, in all its slaughtered glory. Troilus: You’re going to give away my pledge soon, the proof of my love will become the evidence of your true faithfulness, your fickleness. But I

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won’t accept it; the pistols are too loose in their holster with us two. We are the embodiments of faithfulness and deceitfulness, we take turns. Cressida: Do you still think that I believe in making you want me more by playing hard to get, by dragging things out? What haven’t we learnt in our short time, what haven’t we learnt that speaks against a deeper insight, against head and heart, against knowledge and feeling? One yanks at a random wire and finds that in doing so they end up betraying themselves in a war where this woman isn’t worth anything. Troilus: Of course we could pretend that power doesn’t exist and then it’ll hold sway over us. Just like that Spartan is holding sway over us so blatantly obviously. The future is less certain than ever, so I renounce everything. I can, and will, promise nothing anymore. Cressida: What excuses are these, what promises? Why can’t you stick to anything that you’ve said yourself? Troilus: I’m such a lonely fool, such an idiot and obviously such an arsehole. When you’re a fallen man, you recognise your doom more quickly in the faces of the crowd than in process of falling itself. I fi nally want to have a nice reason to sleep for a long time again. Cressida: How can this be about me, when all you do is talk about yourself all the time? Of course it doesn’t always have to be about me, it would be fine by me if it weren’t about me at all, if you could think about us for once. We’ve got a good idea of each other; want to get to know each other when things are bad, too. Maybe even more so. Troilus: How can we be safe behind these walls, how can we exercise any control? In the watchtower you have to keep an eye on everything and pretend that things are following a set plan, as if our plans and expectations are subordinate to reality. You are in control, so you have to make sure that everything runs to plan and according to the rules. I can see from up on high how everything spreads out in front of me and behaves, how it is supposed to behave. I can see how everything spreads out in front of me, the battle and you, your body and the world. Cressida: That’s a crooked truth that has been found a little late, an insight that horrifies me. What will I see now when I look at myself in the mirror? There’s nothing, nothing that looks familiar to me about me. The world

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has spun on further and the flames are burning higher. They are as hungry as we are thirsty. You’ve never regarded me as a woman or treated me like one. Don’t start now. Troilus: Pain tastes particularly special in the shade of these walls, but none of you bitter, blonde women have got even faintest idea about it. When opportunity and war meet, the life of every person present is hunted, even if they’re well hidden. Syllable by syllable, I will memorise everything I hear here, what I’ve yet to hear. There will never be enough dangers and challenges to make me change my mind again, take a different direction. It’s a one-way street for me from now on. Cressida: How you can talk down to me like you’re high up on a warhorse with these smug statements, these affectations and this pretentious attitude. Hopefully it’s clear to you that you will never have me again, can never have me in the way you have had. Troilus: What one reads in the newspapers, what these tabloids say about you, is actually really true. A cheeky laugh on pale lips and death in your heart – that’s what they write about you. It’s fun to beat you into a pretty, into a prettier figure. When I’m doing it I don’t get angry but I’m also not soothed. But I won’t do anything by halves any more; I said to myself I wouldn’t do anything by halves any more. Either completely or not at all. How do you spell NORMALITY, how do you write COMFORT, how do you spell LIFE? Cressida: I’ve just told you again that I love you. LOVE YOU. Love. And THIS IS HOW you reply? Love. Is this a word that holds any meaning for you? I’ve come, gone and sunk so far, but I can’t go on any further. It’s over. And you’re still laying the blame on me that you haven’t changed, that you don’t want to change, simply do not want to change any more. What’s standing in your way? You, you are holding yourself back. You have to decide, you’ve FINALLY got to make a decision. Troilus: It doesn’t matter how I perceive things anyway, what happens without being seen is completely unimportant. Having an overview doesn’t pacify me, but creates the necessity to commit everything I see to memory. The glove you gave me was certainly no coincidence. You are a beautiful shape-shifter that agilely reinvents yourself again and again. I should have seen it from the start.

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Cressida: OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR! At the end all that’s left over is that I’m obviously not enough for you. But I can’t give you up; I cannot and will not give you up as long as I still love you. What hasn’t got through to you is that a person who loves you is suffering, suffering so unbearably because of you. I don’t understand you any more. I’m just causing myself more pain because of you and your lack of understanding, your stony stubbornness. Troilus: (does not reply, his head is lowered, and he stares at the chessboard.) Cressida: Time’s up. Things are as they look… stay seated, I’ll fi nd my own way out. (She is shown out by her group of whisperers.) Troilus: (singing): Oh the devil will find work for idle hands to do, I stole and I lied just because you asked me to, but now you know the truth about me, you won’t see me anymore, well, I’m still fond of you, but no more apologies, no more, no more apologies, I’m too tired, I’m so sick and tired, and I’m feeling very sick and ill today, but I’m still fond of you… (Blackout)

List of contributors

Ballhausen, Thomas, born 1975, studied Comparative Literature and German at the University of Vienna. He is a lecturer at the University of Vienna and at the University of Applied Arts and head of the StudiesDepartment of the Austrian Film Archive. Bauer, Verena-Cathrin, born 1986, is currently completing her degrees in Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at the University of Vienna. Her recent publications include the German translation of Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow. Bauwens, Michel, born 1958, is a Belgian Peer-to-Peer theorist and an active writer, researcher and conference speaker on the subject of technology, culture and business innovation. Edlinger, Thomas, born 1967, lives and works in Vienna/Austria. He is radio journalist (FM4 – ‘Im Sumpf’), freelance author and curator. Friesinger, Günther, born 1973, lives in Vienna and Graz as a philosopher, artist, writer, curator and journalist. He is Head of the paraflows Festival, member of monochrom, co-organiser of the Arse Elektronika Festival and the Roboexotica Festival. Hunting, Eric, born 1967, is a technical writer and futurist with particular interest in alternative and sustainable architecture, renewable energy, information technology, marine and space development, and post-industrial technology and culture.

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Gadringer, Melanie, born 1983, studied Theatre, Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna. She wrote her degree thesis on the subject of torture in fi lm. She works as an editor, travel writer and research assistant on miscellaneous projects, amongst others the Filmarchiv Austria. Grenzfurthner, Johannes, born 1975, is an artist, writer, curator, and director. He is the founder of monochrom. He teaches art theory and aesthetical practice at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria. He is head of the Arse Elektronika Festival in San Francisco, co-organiser of the Roboexotica Festival and co-organiser of the Paraflows Symposium. Jahnke, Julia, born 1974, is a schooled and experienced gardener. She also holds university degrees in Horticultural Sciences and Sustainable Land Use. Currently, she is working on a PhD at Humboldt University in the context of a research project on adaptation to climate change. Northoff, Thomas, born 1947, lives in Vienna as writer and cultural scientist. Since 1983 Northoff has been developing the “Austrian GraffitiArchives on Literature, Arts and Research”. Numerous scientific and literary publications. Ohler, Kerstin, born 1977, has been living and working in Vienna since 2001. Literature and cultural scholar. Comparative study of literature /cultural sciences at the University of Vienna. Extracurricular work, among others, as media planner, copywriter, project coordinator. Rambatan, Bonni, born 1987, is an independent cultural researcher, theorist, and blogger. His primary field of research is the role of technology in shaping contemporary human subjectivity, sexuality, and society. Rambatan aims to develop a critical approach to society and politics with his unique blend of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Rizzo, Agatino, born 1969, is assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Qatar University, College of Engineering, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning. Agatino is member of the Italian Professional Association of Engineers and Planners and the International Society of City and Regional Planners (ISOCARP). Saitta, Eleanor, born 1978, is a designer, artist, hacker, and researcher working at the intersections between mediums ranging from interaction design and architecture through jewelry and fashion. She has previously

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worked at the NASA Ames Research Center and the IBM Almaden Research Center. Schneider, Frank Apunkt, born 1969, is an unfree author, unfree artist and unfree lecturer. He lives and works in Bamberg, Germany. In 2007 he published ‘Als die Welt noch unterging’ (Ventil Verlag), a book dealing with early German punk/new wave culture. Frank Apunkt Schneider is member of monochrom. Shumylovych, Bohdan, born 1976, has studied and taught cultural and visual studies at Ivan Franko University in Lviv (Master Program in Cultural Studies) and has given lectures both in Ukraine and abroad. Shumylovych has also headed the Division of Marketing and Tourism at the Lviv City Council. At the Center for Urban History, he directs the creation of its multimedia library and is in charge of the development and organization exhibitions. Todd, Charlie, born 1979, is the founder of Improv Everywhere, producing, directing, performing, and documenting the group’s work for over eight years. He is also a teacher and performer of improv comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. Charlie is the author of Causing a Scene, a book about Improv Everywhere published by Harper Collins. Thurner, Thomas, born 1968, became radiopirat in the early 90ies and was founding father of viennas first independend community radio, where he was in charge of fundraising from 1997 to 2002. With some colleagues he launched the SpinOut-Company “Team Teichenberg” and is also executive director at “Quartier für Digitale Kultur”. Zinsmeister, Annett, born 1967, is an artist,and author living in Berlin. Professor at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart (from 2007), Visiting Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Berlin (2003 – 2007) and the University of Wuppertal.