East Village, Midtown, Gentrification and the New York Arc

"Late at night, just befiore the stillness came, he scaled condemned fire escapes and explored the roofs and skylights, lay on the sooty grass behind the Underground station, sat on swings and sang, climbed trees in the dark squares, screamed until the dawn went misty with tears, raced like an animal through the dying streets."

The quote is from Martin Amis's 1974 novel Dead Babies, but it could very well apply to 21st century New York. Though changed, most of the streets still contain vague reminders, telescoped suggestions of what has been, of what was there, and of what might have been.







This is Bellow, in Mr Sammler's Planet:







"On Second Avenue the springtime scraping of roller skates was heard on hollow, brittle sidewalks, a soothing harshness. Turning from the new New York of massed apartments into the older New York of brownstone and wrought-iron, Sammler saw through large black circles in a fence daffodils and tulips, the mouths of these flowers open and glowing, but on the pure yellow the fallout of soot already was sprinkled. You might in this city become a flower-washer. There was an additional business oportunity for Wallace and Feffer."







The business of flower-washing is an apt one for New York. A wry smile barely glances the countenance of those who walk past hospitals for cowboy boots while public services - particularly in the areas of health and housing - disappear into the aether. New York is a city intent on honouring the liberty of the individual at any cost.







At a Starbuck's in Union Square, the warmth from the cafe's ducted internal conditioning.







It became the strategy of many municipalities during the end of the twentieth century to employ former social movement organisations in the devlopment and implementation of (alternative) social and cultural services, of housing provision, and local economic development.What emerged were self-organised initiatives centered primarily on housing, groups formed arouund social and economic problems manifest in sepecific local places. Most of these groups have honed a synergistic structural relationship with the local state.







Banana Kelly on Prospect Avenue in the Bronx is a community organisation which emerged from squatting and militantly defending houses in the 1970s, went on to rehabbing these houses, and is now managing hundreds of low-income houses, helped along by a variety of municipal programs funding sweat-equity and tenant management and the like. It is part of the South Bronx, one of the highest concentrations of Puerto Ricans in New York, and an area that was extensively re-invested during the mid-nineties, a turning point in the history of cities like New York that had seemed to have gradually but irrevocably changed between the fifties and eighties.







The synergy is not only between the government and such organisations, but businesses. In search of an investor, Banana Kelly found a Swedish firm to set up a large paper mill for recycling Manhattan's enormous output of office paper.







The establishment of alternative renewal agents and sweat-equity programs, and the fnding of self-help and social serivce groups was in most places a long and contested process, but since the late 1980s municipal social and employment programs everywhere have been making use of the skills, knowledge and labour of such movement groups. Simlarly, many cultural projects have become part of the "official city", and many youth and social centres play acknowledged roles in integrating "problem groups" and potential conflict.







This sort of post-war arc - from the optimism of the fifties to the unravelling of the sixties and seventies, the cynicism and decadence of the eighties and the final tired going-back of the nineties feels like a pattern that occured across the entire Western world. The transformations during the seventies, eighties and nineties were, to a great extent, accelerated by municipal, state, and national programs, in Western Europe also by supra-national programs of the EU. These programs, which were first launched in the U.S., were far from coordinated, far-sighted adaptations of regulation mechanisms; rather, they were disparate and uncoordinated reactions to the pressure of tenant groups and community organisations on the one hand and to the financial crisis of American cities, the renewal problems of decaying neighbourhoods, and the threat to social integration posed by minorities and impoverished populations on the other. Beginning in the early 1970s, the North American programs focused generally on neighbourhoods and community-based organising. In NYC, for example, the Community Managemnt program (launched in 1972) and the Sweat Equity Homesteading Program were not coordinated until 1978 in one administrative unit, the Division of Alternative Management programs, within the Office for Urban Renewal. All the different DAMP programs required the self-labour ("sweat equity") of the tenants. Soon the municipal subsidy for this kind of self-help and self-organisation proved "successful" for the city, as rent payments went up and the rate of privatisation was accelerated (Mayer/Katz 1985). This perhaps is the crux of the synergy now taking place in the 21st century, and referred to by many New Yorkers as gentirfication.







"A Perfect Silence", 1995, by Alba Ambert, from Growing up Puerto Rican:







"Blanca was taken to live with Conchita, her new guardian, inspected and licenced by the city to care for children in crises. She took antibiotics provided by the city for stubborn infection and wore clothes provided by the city. Blanca, whose life was continually regimented by municipial fiat, perceived that an omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient being must surely reside in the mayor's office, sitting in front of a great citymap and pushing pins with coloured heads. One of those little heads, red maybe because it was her favourite colour, represented Bianca. She felt calmer knowing she was taken care of by this faceless, amorphous being."

The Border, or Mirroedshore: Mazara del Vallo/Tunis. Italia. Sicilia. Tunisia. La Goulette

Mazara del Vallo is a small town on the south coast of Sicily facing the narrow band of Mediterranean Sea that separates southern Europe and the African coast. On the globe of the world that sits upon my desk, if I place a pinky between that narrow band of Mediteranean sea, I obscure half of Tunisia, and the entire island of Sicily. A similar sense of scalic dissolution occurs standing on the shore of Mazara del Vallo; you look out at the horizon and feel that the tip of North Africa is visible; that only a fingernail's breadth separates you from another language, another religion, and a continent.

Mazara del Vallo was originally founded by the Arabs, and is one of the largest fishing ports in Italy. Its fleet spreads out along the port-canal that crosses the city. For some thirty years it has been one of the major poles of Tunisian emigration to Sicily. This emigrant population has resettled in the casbah, which has been almost abandoned by the orginal inhabitants of Mazara and lies in a state of considerable decay. Walking down narrow coridors, African and Middle Eastern ryhthms vibrate between the walls; a girls skips rope; a house wihout windows stands, a single lightbulb inside.

The branch of sea between Sicily and Tunisia is today one of the principal corridors of clandestine immigration between Europe and Africa; but the migratory movements between the two populations has a longer and unknown history in this stretch of sea. Beginning in the 1970s, the commuting of Tunisian and Sicilian fishermen between the two coasts has gradually come to favour the forming of two satellite communities along the Sicilian and Tunisian shores. This has been due in part to the tendency of the fishermen to share the same fishing areas, often situated in international waters

Mazara del Vallo constitutes a true frontier. Waves of new immigrants from all of Africa transit through here and other places on this side of the Sicilian coast, then spread more-or-less illegally throughout the rest of Europe.

When you stand on the shore of Mazara del Vallo, you stand before a mirror: across the sea from the old cobblestoned square of Mazara del Vallo, where men quietly seated on a public bench in the cobblestoned square gently decline into old age, their heads bent toward the sea, there stands a Sicilian in La Goulette, looking out over the same sea: a mirroed shore. There is almost the glimpse, as much real as imagined, of a Tunisian community in the old Mazara Kasbah: a dynamic population integrated into professional fishing, the fields and the vineyards, and that has for some years also started to settle in the more modern districts of the city. On the other side of the sea is La Goulette, an antique village in the vicinity of Tunis, inhabited by the second generation of a well-established Italian community who arrived there following a massive and opposing migratory wave from Sicily and southern Italy towards Tunisia; a forgotten movement of population which concluded in the 1970s.

The diocese of Mazara is one of the most ancient of Sicily and was founded by Count Ruggero in 1093, after the liberation from Arab domination. The first bishiop was Stefano di Rouen (1093-1142), relation of Reuggero, who, being Benedictine, favoured the founding in the area the dioceses of numerous convents and monasteries of the order.

Throughout the years therefore, the two coasts have been a theatre of continuous movements, the exchanging of cultural and culinary traditions, and mixed marriages, often in the form of bigamy. It has been an exchange of individuals, traditions, experiences, and memories that has created a game of mirrors between the two coastal territories, moulding two landscapes that today have much in common, even if separated by one of the most rigid borders in the contemporary world--that which separates the Islamic Mediterranean and the Christian Mediterranean.

The two satellite communities have founded their subsistence on fishing, particularly bountiful in this part of the sea; the fishing boats have themselves regulated the fishing areas according to their own convenience and need, frequently ignoring fishing regulations and boundaries of territorial waters. The boat crews are often mixed Sicilian and Tunisian, and not infrequently some fishermen embark with the sole intention of being ferried towards the opposite coast to reach their families. This stretch of sea has become a kind of "black hole", an inter-dimensional door that negotiates the cultural and physical difference between the two extreme points of Europe and Africa. Nevertheless, while in the fishing activities this reciprocation is evident and visible, in the two terminals of this movement (Mazara and Tunis) the presence of the two satellite communities is almost imperceptible, even if by now so rooted as to constitute a stable character of the indigenous landscape.

In the two geographical coastal extremes of Mazara and La Goulette, the integration of the two cultures has happened without causing upheaval or sudden grafts on the respective urban landscapes, but rather through a gradual inclusion of new places, and new ways of living in the indigenous urban tissue. The "skin" of the two towns does not declare this mixture of cultures, but instead confirms it in the landscape of internal spaces. Within these spaces, complex semantics are in force, and the reciprocal contamination is reflected without erasing any of the pre-existent traditions.

The interiors of the mixed family houses are often furnished with portraits of Padre Pio and verses of the Koran; the halls of the elementary schools are decorated with research written in both Italian and Arabic; the cars of both coastal towns, where one can follow the Italian football championship, have regularly become hubs for circles of Italo-Tunisian friends. It is no coincidence that the most important Islamic place in Mazara is situated inside a garage, invisible to the outside.

The contemporary Mediterranean is now even further from its old and mythological nature, as a basin for the meeting of culture and civilisation.

The Mediterranean has in fact become a "solid sea" covered by the predetermined and rigid routes of mono-cultural and "specialised" populations: clandestine individuals, soldiers, sailors, tourists...

These routes intersect without ever actually meeting, and often do not allow their travellers any exchange of identity, dialogue or real interaction.

Nevertheless, the two urban realities of Mazara del Vallo and La Goulette (and the stretch of sea between) seem to signal that in the contemporary Mediterranean basin, crossed by ideological and religious conflicts and barriers, it is still possible to imagine the existence of not only forms of cohabitation, but also trans-national (and indeed transcontinental), socio-cultural and geographic identities.

They seem to suggest the possiblity that on the coasts of far-off countries, homogenous landscapes are realised not out of long-shared traditional and cultural legacies, but rather because they are tied to a contemporary net which is complex and continual with the flow and exchange of men, merchandise and ideas. These nets succeed in tying distant geographies and geopolitics, and connecting otherwise incommunicative routes and identities.

In this solid sea the two satellite populations of Mazara del Vallo and La Goulette have kept a breach open. They have continued to reflect one upon the other, generating characterised spaces of a reciprocal condition to the point that the two continents seem, slowly, to experiement with an unusual and genuinely unexpected form of osmosis.

In Mazara, the wave of Tunisian immigration mirrors a massive emigration in the oppposite direction, from Sicily and southern Italy to Tunisia, which ended in the 1960s.

Mohammed Beshir, fisherman

I come ferom Tunisia, near to Madia. I have been here in Mazara for fifteen years. I came here like all the toerhs, with a tourist permit and then I looked for work. Now I have fixed myself up well. My wife is here now. But she always comes and goes from Tunisia while I am always here. In summer, she is always in Tunisia.

She leaves on the first of June, until the end of Septermber: four months in Tunisia. From time to time in winter I also go there for a month. My vity had thirty thousand inhabitants. It is a small city, not a provincial capital. It is in the province of Madia. It is very close to the sea, and we are almost all fishermen. Approx forty per cent are fishermen. There is some industry, but very little of it.

Until the 1980s many Italians arrived in Madia. They have houses there. It was the Italians that took this form of fighting to Tunisia. Many people from here used to go fishing in Tunisia...they stole our fish. I have worked here for fifteen years and have managed to build myself a little house in Tunisia.

I do not want to leave my house empty and abandoned, I would like it to be open, so that it can be aired, so that there is always someone inside. And then I would like to teach our children our language, not Mazarese, I would like my children to go to school in Tunisia.

Otherwise, when we go to Tunisia, what will I do? Should I teach them Arabic? Even if I am not in Tunisia, at least I would like my family to be there, my sons, my wife and my parents. We are the Third World not the First or the Second like you...But we are Third World because Tunisia is small, but it will improve. Many Italians have invested in Tunisia and also many French and Germans...

But what counts above all, is that Tunisia will enter the EU in 2005 or 2006. The life there is exactly as yours in Europe, exactly the same. There are no differences between you and us. There are only 170 km between Tunisia and Trapani, 220 miles or let's say even 300...What difference does it make? Everything that you have in Italy we also have in Tunisia.

Do Electric Cars Dream of Fuel Engines?

Electric Cars and the Sound of the Future

The car has been, since its inception, the crossroads of a number of different ideas of human progress and technology. It is perhaps one of the most visible and popular symbols of modernity in developed countries. Yet materials and additions that remind people that the car, this avatar of modernity, of technology, of private property, of speed and class is a human construction have never been easily assimilated. Driving processes of urban change, mass production, commodification, and pollution, the car is also inseparable from ideals of private property, social distinction, mobility, and representations and feelings of personal freedom. For some consumers, it seems the image of this humanly controlled and managed power must be disassociated from the natural world, the organic. Which begs the question: what happens when we reach a point where technology, nature and human safety collide? This intersection is one the car has always occupied, yet now it is about to have a new spin added to it. Welcome to the world of meowing cars and Nissans that play film soundtracks as you leave your driveway.

Avatar of Modernity

Toshiyuki Tabata is a Nissan Motor engineer trying to make gasoline-powered cars quieter. Responding to concerns that the silence of electric and hybrid vehicles makes them unsafe, particularly for the blind, several agencies have been looking at mandating artificial sounds for vehicles. The move is particularly ironic for Tabata, Nissan’s "noise and vibration expert", who spent thirty years trying to reduce the sound of noisy engines, only to be instructed now to re-create them.

With this new agenda, he told journalists he had used the opportunity to make his engine sounds "beautiful and futuristic": the company went and consulted Japanese composers of film scores. What resulted was "a high-pitched sound reminiscent of the flying cars in Blade Runner" (and it's worth recalling that Blade Runner was a 1982 film portraying Ridley Scott's dystopian vision of 2019). But don't expect a continuous symphony while you drive: the sound system turns on automatically when the car starts and shuts off when the vehicle reaches 20 kilometres per hour, according to Tabata. Why? Suzuki Takayuki, a spokesman for the Japan Federation of the Blind, points out that at higher speeds, electric cars generate tire noise and the engines in gas-electric hybrids kick in.

Regulating Sound

Japanese regulations say cars can’t be equipped with devices that emit sounds that can be mistaken for a horn. This may or may not explain the noisemakers being developed by car electronics manufacturers. Tokyo-based Datasystem Co., for example, makes a device selling for 12,800 yen ($165) that emits sixteen different sounds including a cat’s meow, a cartoon-like “boing” and a human voice saying, “Excuse me.”

In a nice analogy, Tabata voiced concern that “There is a risk of these things sprouting up like bamboo shoots everywhere and disrupting the general noise environment.” Regulators in charge of rules and guidelines will probably have enough time to look at new systems though, given the predictions of a slow release of electric cars onto the road. The systems will increase the price tag, but Tabata believes the “beautiful” sound may help sales. “We don’t want to destroy the brand of the electric car. We want to have something that will enhance its image.”

The Sedan and the Soya Bean

The addition of beautiful sounds to electric vehicles reminded me of other human interventions in the world of engineering and technology. Attempts at innovation in technology have often been greeted with derision, as if human inventions were merely an organic, independent species best left alone. In November 1940, for example, Henry Ford struck a sedan body made of synthetic materials for a crowd of gathered journalists, demonstrating the durability of a hard plastic made from soybeans and phenolic resin. As Sylvia Katz describes it,

"(Ford) had previously laid waste to thousands of bushels of watermelons, carrots, cabbages and onions, macerating them in his search for an agricultural plastic from which he could mould an entire car...The panels of soya protein fibre were hardened with phenol-formaldehyde resin and formed in a press. Heat and pressure thermoset the panels into their unalterable shape. Ford used the salvaged oil from the soya bean in the enamel on his cars" (Plastic: Design and Materials, London: Studio Vista, 1978, pp. 21-22).

And here is Jeffrey Meikle describing the car's reception:

"The St. Louis Globe-Democrat described the new car as 'part salad and part automobile', while the Cleveland Press thought Ford should 'strengthen his plastic by adding spinach'." (American Plastic: A Cultural History, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995, pp. 55-7).

To which those less hysterical might well have replied, "perhaps he should have."

Golden Parachutes, or How to Jump out of an Airplane and Not Lose Your Briefcase

With the attention being given to former Qantas CEO Geoff Dixon's almost eleven million dollar cash payout after serving five months as CEO, it seems pertinent to examine the often large gap between the losses felt by shareholders vis-à-vis CEOs when a company falters, a matrix more commonly known as the "golden parachute".

Calculated as pay per day, Dixon's payout is more than the average annual salary of most Australians. Meanwhile, Qantas staff face another $1.5 billion in cost-cutting over a three year period, following last year’s 88 per cent fall in full-year net profit.

Alan Joyce, the current CEO, inherited the airline just as the global financial crisis struck and, as a result, received no short-term cash incentives (which were worth $1.2 million to him as the head of Jetstar in 2008), and a large reduction in the value of his share-based payment.

In contrast, it seems that Geoff Dixon and his chief financial officer Peter Gregg "timed their bailouts from the airline to perfection" (ABC News Online, "Dixon's $11m parachute from Qantas nosedive"), with Dixon's $1.86 million base salary boosted by $3 million in long-term benefits, $3.2 million in share-based payment, $1.7 million in annual leave payout and $657,000 in termination benefits. The total pay is the equivalent of almost ten per cent of the company's profit. Even the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's financial newscaster Alan Kohler devoted a moment to the story in between reporting the Dow Jones and NASDAQ.

Recently in the Australian Financial Review ("Investor spotlight on 'disgusting' big bonuses", Sep 19-20, p. 3), Patrick Durkin writes:

"After the worst year for investors in decades, superannuation funds and their money managers have told boards to expect greater scrutiny of the pament of bonuses based on 'underlying profit'--a figure that excludes the worst damage of the financial crissis and inflates executive payouts.

...

The local investors are likely to win support for tougher standards from the group of 20 leaders' summit in the us after European leaders agreed on Friday that the G20 should set binding rules on financial sector pay, backed up by sanctions.

The EU decision came amid reports that the US Federal Reserve was considering surprisingly far-reaching proposals to rein in risk taking at financial institutions. The Wall Street Journalreported that the Fed's plan would, for the first time, inject govenment regulators deep into renumeration decisions traditionally reserved for the bank boards, allowing it to reject policies it believes encourage bank employees to take too much risk.

After the EU leaders' meeting, the Fed backed reductions in pay when bank performance deteriorates and said governments should explore ways to limit bonuses to a proportion of total pay or a bank's profits or revenue."

Sydney-based Stockland's eco-friendly offices

The article goes on to cite a few examples:

"Stockland reported a record $1.8 billion loss this year but managing director Matthew Quinn received more than $1.2 million in bonuses based on the company's underlying profit of $631.4 million.

Ports and rail company Asciano reported a $244 million net loss, its share price fell from $3.47 to $1.34 during the year and total shareholder returns were negativce 49.52 per cent, but chief executive Mark Rowsthorn received a bonus of $741,678 based on an underlying profit of $655 million."

With the 2008/2009 collapse of numerous stockbroking firms and some major banks, the spotlight on reckless CEO behaviour has meant that today's CEO and brokerage stories talk not only about investor losses but the possibility of regulation--particularly in the banking sector. How these regulations are enacted could well be one of the biggest economic overhauls since the twentieth-century rise of Keynesian economics.

On the other hand, Robert Wade, a former World Bank economist and current Professor of Political Economy at the London School of Economics, voiced a more realistic interpretation of events on the ABC's Foreign Correspondent (22/09/2009). The program looked at the fate of Iceland in the wake of the global economic crisis, the first country to be hit by the credit crunch, and one of the hardest: in the first week of October, 2008, its entire banking sector collapsed.

Wade, who predicted the outcome two years earlier (and warned the government, who couldn't have cared less), said of the event on Foreign Correspondent:

"Very little has been done to address the deeper causes of the crisis in Iceland. And I think unfortunately, that is a microcosm of what's happening elsewhere. We are moving back quite rapidly in the United States and Britain, Wall Street and the city of London towards something like business as usual."

Bastard TV/Got Milk?/Fucking in Norway

In 2004, Taiwanese-born artist Shu Lea Cheang was asked by the Swiss-based 56kTV - bastard channel (www.56k-bastard.tv) to create a channel for its “station”.

Sounds simple enough. But before I discuss Shu Lea Cheang and the history of the MILK project, it’s worth taking a look at the station itself. They describe themselves as “a cross between a television and a web project, a platform in the Internet that tells the story of itself as a television channel.” This channel has collaborators on three continents. Its programme can be received all over the world. The participants include artists from Bangalore, Basel, Berlin, Geneva, Los Angeles, Mexico, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo and Zurich, as well as collaborating text writers, translators, programmers and graphic artists.

According to the website, “It will not be possible to receive all the bastard channel programmes at all times, for our online project operates according to the television programme structure. Trailers will provide information about the times of day and night when you will be able to receive the next programmes in your part of the world.” So the station itself operates as a giant, ever-changing picture of the planet. What can you watch?

Tv-Bot: Striking News

This production, by Marc Lee (www. 1go1.net/doku/tvbot.mov), automatically searches the most recent news items from the Internet and compiles whatever radio, television, newspaper, and website news it finds—which are never older than an hour—to make the world’s possibly most up to date TV program. Live TV streams, live radio stream, live videocams, live imagecams, breaking newspaper headlines: it's all here. Regardless of which part of the world or what language it's in, via programming code transmission sources from five continents are delivered to the station audience and put together to form a permanently self-regenerating news event from across the globe, supplied with an infinite renewability of topicalities (complete with local times and headlines).

The channel’s “programme guide” states:

“TV Bot reports the happy return home of alleged tsunami casualties, added to it live Webcam images of peaceful American landscapes, in between snow storms in Chicago, snow-covered Arizone landscapes, the island Madeira's harbour, a harbour in Alaska. Original sound advertising clips from Saudi Television showing Saudi-Arabian businessmen clad in national costume buying mobile telephones. Then the latest search enquiries—just come in on fireball.de—are being played in per computer voice: 'playpen, rims, nylon, satellite TV installation, cabbage soup diet, D2 contracts, paste jewellery, Germany, floor lamps, Alicante flight, depressions, riddles, fuel cell construction kits, muscle build-up, soft toy animals, packing cases, air dehumidifying, class reunion, computer parts'. Al Jazeera reports 'Suicide Bomber kills 15', added to it Foxnews reports 'England heads towards defeat', added to it Webcam images of a lighthouse on a grey beach. Telegraph.co.uk reports 'Pinochet under House Arrest' accompanying a picture of a Christmas market somewhere in Germany, there are live TV streams along with the latest numbers of Indian Ocean casualties, a basketball game in American Daytona Beach, and finally Radio Japan broadcasts the latest news from Japan—in Russian.”

For my part, I found reports of a Swiss election campaign, a wife harassed in the UK, reports of Will Smith winning apologies and damages over a Hitler remark, Australian cricketer Brett Lee saying India were tough to beat superimposed over a picture of jellybeans taken in Japan, dozens dying in a Turkish invasion over a picture of the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, a headline in French news magazine L’Express concerning President Obama with a stunning picture of outer space taken from Mt Wilson observatory in the US…all received at 8 pm at my home in West Australia. Links to the articles and how many minutes ago they were published are provided, as well as a URL for the images.

ZZZZZZapp: Commercial Break

Japanese artists’ group exonemo have turned the concept of those flashes of sound and image that intersperse the white noise you get when tuning a TV set and turned it into its own program. Their channel is a musical representation of commercial imagery, converting advertising images from spam mail into sounds.

Sphinx: The Adviser Program

In which the audience can ask “the sphinx” questions and get an answer minutes, hours or days later:

“Our listeners get into contact with the tele-oracle and are personally being given advice…viewers receive personal answers to existential problems from the Television Sphinx—without, however, knowing whether they will receive a written or spoken answer from the Sphinx herself or her intelligent robot within two to three days…one never knows in advance if the Sphinx itself or her machine will answer us. Since, here, two answering-instances are acting: on the one hand the Sphinx, the medium with a human voice, and on the other hand the machine, the advice of which is written in lissom sextain metre and being read by varying voices. Already dozens of people from Asia, Europe, and America have sought advice with the Sphinx—one can read up on her answers on bastard channel.”

And if you’re wondering what “lissome sextain metre” is, type it into google and see what happens…

View and Plan of Seoul. A Transpacific Intrigue. Espionage thriller in 13 parts

The artists’ group Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries from Seoul contributes this “soap opera”, in which a roboticised woman’s voice narrates the reports of a fictional Korean agent over free-jazz music, the words appearing on the screen at varying speeds and in different sizes as they are spoken.

The twist in the tale? Our Korean agent is also a critical theorist: while talking about her missions she digresses into all sorts of topics, including “matters of a globalized world…graffiti in men’s rooms or the comparison between concrete architecture in Tokyo and Seoul.”

MILK

Shu Lea Cheang’s project, MILK, is the one channel on the station branded “Adults Only”, and originally intended as an “after midnight” channel (according to which time zone I’m not sure). It begins with a numeric counter which measures how many “Africans have died of AIDS since you loaded this web page”. After about five seconds 1 appears inside the counter, a few moments later, 2…the barest glimpse of a full-screen picture appears at the top of the screen. Suddenly, one by one, pornographic images appear. These images are called up live through a data-mining search engine, hence the other images that appear, all culled from the vast field of the Web—news photos, advertisements, family snapshots, celebrity pictures—and ensuring that the photos are different with every visit (or “rerun”?) Although the program uses “porn” as the search engine keyword, these other images are inevitably captured in the process, producing a numbing effect akin to rapid channel surfing.

The repetitive stasis and similarity of the pornographic images is placed in contrast to the rapid and inexorable movement of time represented by the African AIDS pandemic. Her work explores the limitations of the idealised webscape, that place of endless potential, by showing up its controlled, commodified and privatised nature. One realises parallels between the limited/endless free choice that the Web presents and the similarly configured excitements and frustrations of pornography. It takes about a half hour for the background picture to finally load and the images to disappear.

Such frustratingly slow speed is suggestive of an outdated dial-up connection, which also makes MILK something of a historical work, a reminder of how the Web has managed to both undergo immense change and stay exactly the same.

The idea, perhaps, is to move viewers’ physical responses away from the desire and frustration of a commodified sexual landscape, toward a politicised awareness of the relationship between time, capital, and visual imagery. It puts the global AIDS crisis in sharp relief, using the particularities of viewers’ isolated and commodified relationships to pornography within cyberculture. An academic journal in the University of Western Australia’s library that I found talks about the piece’s attempt to move its audience “toward an ideal of collectivity, connection, and ultimately postcapitalist economics.” The Web promised us the first two (and perhaps the last one, if the global financial crisis and its effect on the world’s perception of capitalism and possibilities of a refined version of late twentieth-century capitalist economics can be said to have been partly facilitated by all those Blackberries and laptops allowing such a rapid collapse in the markets), but its ability to deliver them has been ambivalent and varying.

As for the significance of that final image—“MILK is the white fluid for the 21^st century what the white powder was for the 20^th century high”—it’s a reference to a movie project Cheang was developing and had to abandon called Fluid. According to those who’ve seen it, it’s about a genetically engineered cure against AIDS:

“The movie is set in 2030, when a certain breed of people has started to produce a sexual fluid, called milk, containing a potent mix of endorphins. The government wants to control the drug traffic. The people who can produce milk are also declared illegal and hunted down by state/corporation. Milk is the white fluid for the 21st century, just like the white powder dominated the 20th century high. The film never saw the light but instead became a conceptual art project.”

Which brings us to one of the artist’s most daring pieces. In 2004, Shu Lea Cheang created an installation inspired by the aborted film for the Detox music festival in Norway.

One website, paraphrasing an “Art in America” report, wrote of the installation:

“In a darkened space, seven urinals lined one wall, each lit by miniature projectors aimed so that videos appeared over the drains. The center urinal showcased goldfish swimming in a bowl. The videos in the flanking urinals showed a tight shot of a contracting and distending anus that seemed to be squirming. Roped into the drains, were condoms that looked heavy with jism.”

Leading from this installation was another piece (at least in one of “Art in America”'s reports, referring to a (perhaps subtly different?) 2001 exhibition in Harlem), called Tub I.K.U.

“The miniature bathtub on a narrow perch was transformed by a scaled-down video projection—again, from above—of a woman reclining in utter relaxation, her arms draped over the tub's edges. As her right arm dropped into the water to caress her body, tiny splashes resonated in the tub as she masturbated. This small sound drew viewers closer as the woman quietly reached orgasm and was satiated. Her arms returned to the sides of the tub, and the tape loop replayed this scene of exquisite intimacy.”

Cheang would later make a film entitled I.K.U. (the word is a play on the Japanese 行く, iku, which means both "coming” and "going", but in slang terms refers to orgasm, in the same way that “coming” is used as sexual shorthand in English).

I.K.U. was a “Japanese sci-fi porn feature” conceived as a sequel to Blade Runner (and causing many problems with the actors and crew: the lead role had to be divided between seven actresses because no one of them was able to both act convincingly and willing to play out all of the sexual encounters. One of the editors stated “if it becomes a real porno film, I stop working on it”, demonstrating the project’s blurring of genre boundaries.

As for her installation in Norway, the Aftenposten, Norway’s largest subscription newspaper, reported that her idea to organise a casting session for Fluid inside the tent at the Quart Festival in Kristiansand resulted in the authorities intervening,causing a debate about the censorship of art projects. The idea was to film couples volunteering to have sex in the tent, the aim of the project being to focus public attention on the public sector's AIDS policies. The tent was set up in a restricted area on the festival grounds:

“Organizers say that will limit visibility from the general public at the festival, which has attracted thousands of fans and top name musicians this year such as Alicia Keys, Sean Paul and Morrisey.

Reaction to the sex tent is decidedly mixed. While some young festival goers say they'd gladly ‘perform’ for Cheang in the tent, others dismiss the project as a ‘PR stunt’ from festival organisers.

Some local politicians go much further in their criticism, saying the sex tent art project is a good argument for shutting down the festival.

Acting Mayor Bjarne Ugland called festival chief Toffen Gunnufsen in to answer questions about the sex tent. Gunnufsen told newspaperAftenposten that the project actually is part of a larger project called Club Detox, which even the city government supports.

‘That makes it good enough for Quart,’ Gunnufsen said.

Artist Shu-Lea Cheang expressed surprise that the project has sparked so much controversy. ‘Those who participate sign a contract before going into the tent,’ Shu-Lea Cheang told local newspaper Fædrelandsvennen.”

ABC news in the U.S. also reported on the story, helpfully informing its readers within the first sentence that the project was organised by a “Korean artist”! They added to the story that she:

“had intended to start filming couples who volunteered to have sex inside it in a fictive search for people to star in an imaginary pornographic movie called Fluid, Staale Stenslie, the head of Norway's National Touring Exhibitions told AFP.

Cheang's film of the search was to be shown at the Soerlandet Kunstmuseum, an art museum in the southern Norwegian town of Kristiansand.

The National Touring Exhibitions forced Cheang to cancel it at the last minute amid concerns that the shoot could violate Norwegian decency laws.

Stenslie had earlier said the project was ‘far from pornography’.

‘It's about humanity, nakedness and intimacy. Shu Lea is a very serious and respected artist,’ he insisted.

‘This is a society-critical exhibit. It's commentary on how we have handled the AIDS epidemic, and it's a bridge between popular culture and art,’ Stenslie said.

The music festival did however feature sex on stage.

A young couple attending a Cumshots concert was called up by the lead singer in the middle of the concert, where they had sex on stage to the crowd's applause, as the band played on.”

Which goes to show that artists may never be rock stars, but rock stars at least can become artists.