[spectre] Conflux Panel: Toward a Schizogeographic Society?

[Mark Shepard]

Toward a Schizogeographic Society?
Re-evaluating the psychogeographic in terms of contemporary  
conditions of subjectivity and urban space.

Sunday, September 16, 2007
2:00pm — 4:00pm

Luna Lounge
361 Metropolitan Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11211
718.384.7112
http://lunalounge.com

A panel discussion with Janet Abrams and Adam Greenfield, moderated  
by Mark Shepard.

Toward a Schizogeographic Society

The psychogeography of a city like New York today is not at all the  
same as that of Paris in 19th or mid 20th Century. Alone in the  
crowd, at home in the crowd – today we dérive in the shopping mall.  
If the Flâneur presents a point of reference for a mobilized observer  
for whom the aestheticisation of the urban is simultaneously a  
liberatory and alienating practice, the Situationist dérive suggests  
a spatial practice for liberation from an alienating commodification  
of the city. Today, negotiating our daily lives in and through a city  
like New York involves evermore-subtle maneuvers between public and  
private, virtual and actual. In place of a unified, embodied subject  
we find new hybrids and assemblages of body, data, self and  
consciousness. The placing and spacing of the urban experience is  
strewn across radically different environments. The gaze of the crowd  
has been replaced by that of the surveillance camera and the RFID  
reader; the pyschogeographic “attractions of the terrain” have become  
a schizogeography of nodes and networks. This panel will attempt to  
re-evaluate the psychogeographic in terms of contemporary conditions  
of subjectivity and urban space.

Bios:

Janet Abrams is Director of the Design Institute, the University of  
Minnesota’s think tank on design futures, which focuses on  
innovations in design education, and mapping as a strategy for  
understanding the dynamics of space, data and social organization.  
Janet edited IF/THEN: PLAY - Design Implications of New Media (NDI/ 
BIS, 1998) at the Netherlands Design Institute in Amsterdam, and co- 
edited ELSE/WHERE: MAPPING - New Cartographies of Networks and  
Territories (DI, 2006) with Peter Hall, at the Design Institute. At  
the DI she has commissioned and produced numerous experimental design  
prototypes via the DI Fellows program, including the Big Urban Game,  
and Twin (a typeface that morphs with the weather). The DI has also  
published Knowledge Maps on diverse issues, hosted six editions of  
Design Camp for Teens, and held symposia, most recently on Mapping  
New Knowledge Ecologies, and on contemporary design curating. A  
former architecture and design critic, Jan’s favorite environment  
these days is a ceramics studio.

Adam Greenfield is a writer, user experience consultant and  
instructor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications  
Program. Before starting his current practice, Studies and  
Observations, Adam was lead information architect for the Tokyo  
office of well-known Web consultancy Razorfish. His clients have  
included Toyota, Sony, Capgemini, and various agencies of the United  
States government. Adam has spoken frequently on issues of design,  
culture, technology and user experience before a wide variety of  
audiences, including the SXSW Interactive festival, LIFT, the  
European “Civilizations Numeriques” conference, Microsoft Research’s  
HCI2020 workshop, Aula, and the O’Reilly Emerging Technology  
Conference. Most recently, he keynoted the 2007 International  
Conference on Pervasive Computing. His 2006 book Everyware: The  
dawning age of ubiquitous computing, has been acclaimed as  
“groundbreaking,” “elegant,” and “soulful” by Bruce Sterling, and  
“gracefully written, fascinating, and deeply wise” by Wired’s Steve  
Silberman. He lives and works with his wife, artist Nurri Kim, in New  
York City.

Mark Shepard is an artist, architect and researcher focusing on the  
impact of mobile and pervasive technologies on architecture and  
urbanism. He co-organized the Architecture and Situated Technologies  
Symposium, with Omar Khan and Trebor Scholz, at the Architectural  
League of New York and Eyebeam in October 2006. His recent project,  
the Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] has been presented at museums,  
galleries, and festivals internationally, including CONFLUX (2006),  
Brooklyn, NY; ISEA (2006), San Jose, CA; Futuresonic (2006),  
Manchester, UK; Sonar Festival (2006), Barcelona, Spain; The  
Contemporary Museum (2007), Baltimore, MD; SIGGRAPH (2007), San  
Diego, CA; and FILE (2007), Sao Paolo, Brazil.  He is currently  
Assistant Professor of Architecture and Media Study at the University  
at Buffalo, State University of New York, where he is a co-director  
of the Center for Virtual Architecture and a researcher with the  
Situated Technologies Research Group.