The Anti-Architecture of H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)

Literary works are especially pernicious when deployed as instruments of architectural criticism. So much so that even that most revered of writers, Leo Marx, is often taken to task for using the 19th century novel as a type of spatial critique. More recently, art historian W.J.T. Mitchell alluded to the spatialization of narrative as a new frontier in the annals of literary criticism. And yet he claims that the spatialization of narrative has been a consistent part of literary history: "[S]patial form is a crucial aspect of the experience and interpretation of literature in all ages and cultures. The burden of proof, in other words, is not ... to show that some works have spatial form but ... to provide an example of any work that does not" [1]

That being said, it does not bring us any closer to understanding how a novel can help us better understand issues relating to architecture and urbanism. While some may will still invoke the works of J.G. Ballard or Samuel R. Delany as examples of writers who tackle buildings and cities as the object of their narrative, we still are at the initial conundrum that informs this post: these, and other works are primarily representational in nature. The authors of the Concrete Islands, Dhalgrens, and Make Room, Make Room's of the world provide very little guidance as to how to operationalize their critique.

One way to approach this problem is via the architectural metaphor. Thus, some critics will deploy the language of architecture critique to analyze a narrative. The word "architectonic" is often use to understand a novel's expansive length, or perhaps even its materiality. On the other hand, an author's biographical facts are brought to bear: an early interest in architecture or urban planning is thus made an important critical fulcrum on which arguments are carefully balanced.

The works of the famously misanthropic fantasy novelist H.P. Lovecraft provide an interesting and plausible take on this situation. And this is the case not only because Lovecraft is one of those writers who successfully deploys architectonics and materiality in service of profoundly architectural observations. This is so because Lovecraft lived a manic intellectual existence where an unabashed love for historic preservation was counterbalanced by a deep hatred for modern architecture.

Timothy H. Evans, an American folklore scholar, has written about Lovecraft's personal involvement in preservation issues in Providence and New York. This interest, he argues, is also reflected in Lovecraft's writings. A decisive, malevolent undercurrent thus connects his xenophobia and his anti-modernist inclinations. This becomes especially noticeable in Lovecraft's science fictions. Evans thus writes:

Lovecraft's stories about extraterrestrials also rely heavily on architecture. A familiar sense of place, embodied in Colonial New England architecture, was central to Lovecraft's sense of security; hence, an actual Italian Catholic church may be an abode of monsters, as it becomes in "The Haunter of the Dark" (1935). But if "foreign" architecture is frightening, the ultimate embodiment of fear is non-human architecture, which has no relationship to familiar forms or aesthetics. Lovecraft criticized modern architecture for rejecting tradition and believed that a new architecture, to be livable, must draw on traditional symbols (a rather post-modern idea); it follows that architecture lacking in such symbols would be a terrifying embodiment of cosmic alienage [...] Lengthy descriptions of non-human architecture are used to create such an atmosphere in "The Call of Cthulu" (1926), At The Mountains of Madness (1931), and "The Shadow Out of Time" (1935) [2]

Others have detected similar strains in Lovecraft's work. The novelist John Banville, writing in a 2005 issue of Artforum, even notes when Lovecraft moved to New York in 1924 with his wife, he "found the city a great and, despite an initial period of uncharacteristic uncheeriness, terrible shock; the baroque metropolises of his fiction, infested with monstrous beings, are his response to the spectacle of New York in the early years of the Roaring Twenties." Banville then quotes a particularly gruesome bit from Lovecraft's "He" (1939): "Garish daylight shewed only squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantasis of climbing, spreading stone ... the throngs of people that seethed through the flumelike streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes" [3].

Michel Houellebecq (Source: New York Magazine)

But perhaps the greatest enthusiast of Lovecraft's architectural pretense is French novelist Michel Houellebecq. His strange meditation, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (2005), plays up the architectural musings in Lovecraft's fiction. Houellebecq is so fascinated by this most "anti-literal" of authors that he begins deploying Lovecraft's own persona into his writing. At the beginning of the second section, Houllebecq (or is it Lovecraft?) writes,

The surface of the earth today is overlaid with a irregular, dense web of fibres, entirely fabricated by humans.
In this web circulates the life-blood of the social. The transport of people, of commodities, of provisions; multiple transactions, orders to buy, orders to sell, facts to be believed, other, more intellectual or affective, exchanges ... This incessant flux continues regardless of humanity, absorbed in the lifeless convulsions of its own activity.
[...]
At the intersections of their channels of communication, men build giant ugly metropolises, where each, isolated in an anonymous apartment identical to all the rest, believes himself the centre of the world and the measure of all things. But, underneath the excavated earth with its burrowing insects, very ancient and very powerful creatures are waking slowly from their slumbers. They were there already during the carboniferous period, they were there during the Triassic and Permian; they have known the stirrings of the first mammal, and they will know the agonized cries of the last. [4]

For Houellebecq, this Lovecraft-inspired threnody deploys the forces of architecture for a deeply cynical purpose. Houellebecq continues, this time commenting on Lovecraft's fascination with the Gothic:

Because the dream-architecture which he describes is, like that of the grand gothic and baroque cathedrals, a total architecture. The heroic harmony of the planes and volumes are felt violently; but also, the bell-turrets, the minarets, the bridges overhanging great chasms are overloaded with exuberant ornamentation, in contrast to the gigantic smooth stone surfaces. Reliefs and bas-reliefs and frescoes cover the titanic vaults which lead from one inclined plane to another, in the bowels
of the earth. Many recount the grandeur and the decadence of a race; others, more simple and geometric, seem to evoke disquieting mystical suggestions [5].

Here is an architecture of urgency. An architecture realized by Houellebecq's and Lovecraft's oscillations between the monolithic and microsopic, the decaying and the verdant, the dead and the living. This interplay of extremes is "An effect of scale, effect of vertigo. A procedure borrowed, once again, from architecture" [6].

The words "once again" betray Houllebecq's belief in the essential architecture that is Lovecraft's fiction. It is as if, in reading this most cryptic of authors through the critical lens of an unabashedly unpleasant French anti-liberal, one must admit that the darkest literary impulses carry forth an architectural imprimatur.

Lovecraft's literary predilections certainly echo the works of earlier avatars of the Gothic. In fact, his musings on style would no doubt remind a student of architecture of the strange, proto-modernist musings of Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-Le-Duc (who, in a particularly Lovecraftian take, signed all his documents with an ink rendering of a bat's wing). What is fascinating, if not totally convincing, is that architecture springs forth from a most unlikely of sources: the work of H.P. Lovecraft.

Notes:

[1] W.J.T. Mitchell, "Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory", Critical Inquiry, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Spring, 1980), p. 541

[2] Timothy H. Evans, "A Last Defense against the Dark: Folklore, Horror, and the Uses of Tradition in the Works of H.P. Lovecraft" Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 42, No.1 (2005), p. 118

[3] In John Banville, "Futile Attraction: Michel Houellebecq's Lovecraft" Artforum (1 April 2005) (available at http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Futile+attraction:+Michel+Houellebecq's+Lovecraft-a0131433355)

[4] Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Robin Mackay, trans (2004), p.10 (accessed at http://blog.urbanomic.com/dread).

[5] Ibid., p. 18.

[6] Ibid., p. 23.

Hyperbolic Rooms

Technician adjusts wood model of North American B-25 Mitchell inside a wind tunnel (source: Library of Congress)

There may be a future project, one that looks at research facilities and laboratories not just as places where knowledge is produced, but also as places where the most extreme conditions are manufactured. A good example is a return-flow wind tunnel (above), which uses condensers and other equipment to simulate high or low atmospheric pressures. The two following examples, however, I find fascinating for the types of extreme architectural conditions they represent.

The first example I can think of is an anechoic chamber. Anechoic chambers are rooms designed to curtail, shape, or even prevent sound propagation. Typical examples contain some type of foam or cork sound baffling. The example below, from the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, England, is interesting as it is a room for testing radar equipment. This particular room, dating from the 1980s, is shielded from RF waves. The foam bafflers look menacing, almost like teeth. It is as the room were designed to literally eat soundwaves.

RF-Negative Anechoic Sound Chamber at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, UK (NMR.Crown Copyright)

The next example comes from NASA's Project Fire, a testing program from 1964-1967 designed to simulate the re-entry of an Apollo Command Module in the Earth's upper atmosphere. The idea was to understand the conditions of extreme heat, pressure, and friction a capsule would experience upon its descent.

Project Fire documentation (source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

The image below shows a section diagram of the Project Fire re-entry vehicle. It is, in essence an Apollo capsule crammed with telemetry equipment and various other sensors. The vehicle was launched from Kennedy Space Center , entered low Earth orbit, and descended in the vicinity of Ascension Island.

Project Fire II Re-entry Vehicle (source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

The below image shows a static test of a Project Fire vehicle. Here, technicians adjust the testing model inside a small, metallic room. On either side, large metallic perforations channel and radiate the incoming flames. Farther off, in the center of the picture, a concrete aperture provides a peek into a barren landscape. Presumably, some type of rocket booster would be placed inside the aperture and fired inside the room.

Project Fire static test preparation (source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

The above buildings are not of the type usually featured in architectural surveys. They are of special architectural interest, however. These are rooms, if not for habitation, but for silence and incineration. It is an odd affirmation of Steve Shapin's dictum about entering the spaces of science in 18th century England: "We can, it is true, make the occasional trip to places where scientific knowledge is made. However, when we do so, we come as visitors, as guests in a house where nobody lives."

Laredo is The Reason

I've just come up for air from a prolonged excursion to the Texas-Mexico border with my family. It was hot, dusty, and windy (yes, 60+ mph winds only a couple of days ago). I also witnessed a couple of things I had never experienced before, such as a Mexican illegal hiding in my parents' property, en route to Houston, and even bobcats. Several nights ago, I was out on the deck, and noticed a strange, infernal glow coming from the southwestern sky. A brush fire. It looked as if the horizon was aflame.

I also spent a long afternoon in Laredo, Texas. The last time I was there was back in 1986, when we crossed the border to take my grandfather to see a dentist in Nuevo Laredo. This goes without saying, but Laredo's transformation has been equally alarming and stunning. Now known as a locus of Cormac McCarthy-esque vioence, Laredo is one of the United States' most important ports of entry. Taking these two aspects into consideration -- it's bordertown woes and infrastructural significance -- one wonders why writers on urbanism and infrastructure have neglected this very important city along the Rio Grande River.

Take this, for example, from a report published by the U.S. Department of Commerce:

[T]he port of Laredo is ranked first among ports along the Southwest border and fourth among all U.S. land ports for the value of goods that are shipped through the area. In 2004, $130.8 billion worth of goods and merchandise passed through the port of Laredo, an increase of 13 percent over the previous year. Over 40 percent of northsouth traffic that crosses our international border with Mexico drives across one of the international bridges in Laredo.

Laredo’s primary industry is transportation and warehousing. In 2003, these industries contributed 16.2 percent of the total earnings of the area. Crossing the Rio Grande River into Nuevo Laredo, one finds numerous maquiladoras. The Delphi and Sony manufacturing plants are the top two employers for all the maquiladoras in Nuevo Laredo.

And even this snapshot of the Port of Laredo, taken after a momentary glance through Google Earth, gives an idea of the sheer amount of truck traffic exchanging through this city:

Port of Laredo Trailer Docks (intersection of Bullock Loop and Interstate 35)

And for those of you of have an interest in the prehistory of cybernetics, consider that the old Laredo Army Air Field (now known as Laredo International Airport), was the site where the U.S. Army Air Force calibrated their computerized gunsights.

AAF Gunnery Crews test nose turret configurations in Laredo, Texas (source: LiberatorCrew)

Driving north along the Bullock Loop, I even noticed some windowless DC-9 aircraft. These are freight forward aircraft operated by Kalitta Air that fly directly to Willow Run, Michigan. Yet the ones I saw bore no markings, and in fact, bore a striking resemblance to the red-flashed Janet aircraft Trevor Paglen often writes about (see previous post on this very topic). That Laredo International Airport is a site with bustling DHS aerial operations is no surprise, as it is one of the facilities used to ferry illegal aliens and other personae non grata to various locations throughout the hemisphere.

A series of articles (and perhaps a book) needs to be written on different types of urban and infrastructural phenomena in Texas. Perhaps it will begin here.

Game Space_1: Portal/Fez

At SXSW this past week, Bryan and John both alerted me to some interesting games out there. The first is kokoromi's Fez. Think Mario Bros. on X-Y-Z gimbal axes. The result is, to say the least, pretty awesome.



The second is Valve's Portal. The online entry for the game tells us that

The game consists primarily of a series of puzzles that must be solved by teleporting the player's character and other simple objects using the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device ("Portal Gun" for short), a unit that can create an inter-spatial portal between flat planes. The player character is challenged by an AI named "GLaDOS" to complete each puzzle in the "Aperture Science Enrichment Center" using the Portal Gun with the promise of receiving cake when all the puzzles are completed. The unusual physics allowed by the portal gun are the emphasis of this game, and is an extension of a similar portal concept in Narbacular Drop; many of the team from the DigiPen Institute of Technology that worked on Narbacular Drop were hired by Valve for the creation of Portal.

These games are fascinating in that they involve some type of spatial manipulation. Specifically, Portal reminds us of the work of Israeli architect Eyal Weizman. In a 2006 essay, Weizman describes the IDF's theoretical approaches to navigating hostile urban spaces. He writes:

During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of ‘overground tunnels’ carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manuvering simultaneously in the city, they were so ‘saturated’ into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city’s streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as ‘infestation’, seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF’s strategy of ‘walking through walls’ involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.

All in all, these two games are evidence of practices that fall outside architecture's more normative realms.

The Bligh Cosmos

Plan and Section of the H.M.S. Bounty's Stern (Source: Project Gutenberg)

Way back in the day, many careers ago, I actually studied maritime law. It was a specialization in the truest sense of the word: its tangled skein of laws and lore were esoteric enough to sustain my interest. It was a simple choice, really. Should I bog myself in the minutae of corporate and securities law, or should I read about naval battles, perilous salvage operations, sunken treasures, and hot pursuit across international waters?

I quickly learned that the field of admiralty had some very interesting peculiarities. For example, ships have juridical power in American maritime law. A sloop, steamer, tugboat, frigate is chattel that not only merits a special type of jurisdiction, but that also has "rights". In other words, a ship can have the same legal status as a person. A chance look at an admiralty docket thus reveals a type of poetry in which ships with wonderfully evocative names sue each other in Federal court.

It thus follows that as a piece of chattel, a vessel is subject to the same matrix of property laws that would extend to real estate. A ship was literally a floating piece of property, a mobile island, so to speak. These rights also extended to the arena of public international law, where a ship enjoyed a certain amount of territorial sovereignty. A ship was therefore governed by the laws of its flag of convenience. A ship flying an American flag was covered by U.S. Law, a French by French law, and so on.

Hans Hollein, Aircraft Carrier City in Landscape (1964) (Source: MoMA)

What my law professors failed to convey was that a ship was a place. A vessel's riggings, superstructures, et cetera all comprise a spatial configuration addressing a particular programmatic need. In other words, a ship can be thought of in architectural terms. It is no surprise that when the Austrian architect Hans Hollein declared that "Everything is Architecture", he chose to depict a gigantic nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the middle of a grassy landscape in service of his point.

The most eloquent statement of a ship's architectural-ness comes from the Australian historian Greg Dening. In his 1993 book, Mr. Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty, Dening provides an in-depth look at the events leading to Fletcher Christian's 1789 uprising aboard the H.M.S. Bounty. Dening rightly portrays the insurrection as one with a particularly spatial origin. On the Bounty's fateful expedition, its officers' compartments (see above) were fitted to carry breadfruit and other plants -- a situation that surely infuriated the Bounty's subordinate officers.

Dening captures the Bounty's significance as a space of habitation in the following passage:

Space and the language to describe it make a ship. Space was inseparable from the authority it displayed and the the relationships it enclosed. The 'quarterdeck' in naval parlance was a place -- the upper deck abaft of the mainmast. It was also a social group -- those who had the privilege of walking the quarterdeck and and using the space associated with it, usually the great cabin and the wardroom. From the earliest times the quarterdeck had been a sacred place for shrines of the gods of the sea ans seamen. By the eighteenth century, the quarterdeck was sacred to the presence of sovereign power in displays of etiquette and privilege. It was the captain's territory -- his to walk alone, his to speak from but not to be spoken to unless he wished it. But the captain himself also owed the quarterdeck a deference. He too saluted this shrine as a sign that he was subordinate to the power that others saluted in him. The quarterdeck embodied this commission from the King. It was the space of his sovereign's power, and all its trivial gestures and etiquette were its geography. The quarterdeck, for officers of a fighting ship, was a space for very deep plays. It was there that an officer was expected to stand exposed, shielded only by his honour, when others on the ship might fight with more protection. The dread possibility but also the hope that any officer might have of treading where captains trod touched even the most trivial gesture with solemnity (1992: 19-20).

The H.M.S. Bounty was Captain Bligh's literal and figurative cosmos. It was also an architectural object freighted with power. This view is not uncommon with Herman Melville's passages describing the Pequod as a maritime abbatoir, a seagoing slaughterhouse plowing the mains in search of more ambergris -- all in service of a captain's maddening quest.

Border Blasters, and Other Forms of (Literal) Culture Jamming

Map of Border Blasters (AM-frequency Pirate Radio Stations) on the U.S./Mexico Border

A fascinating piece from WNYC's On The Media, on Border Radio and the politics of airwaves on the U.S./Mexico border.

Mapping Undersea Urbanisms

Images from a 2005 GIS project where I attempted to map oil/gas pipelines in the North Sea. The data came from the Olje Direktoratet (Norway's Oil/Gas Administration) and the UK's Department of Trade and Industry. The idea was to develop a purely spatial comparison between British and Norwegian undersea pipeline networks. The results are far from visually stunning, evidence of GIS software's own visual and graphical limitations.

Confidence Men

Munitions workers at Antonelli Fireworks, Co., Spencerport, New York, circa 1942. Image: Town of Ogden, New York

A “dapper man in a dark black suit”, Amerigo Antonelli emigrated from Italy to the United States with his sons and daughters in 1910 with the hopes of continuing the family fireworks business. He settled in Spencerport, a sleepy town on the outskirts of Rochester, New York, and eventually founded Antonelli Fireworks, Inc. in 1917. The Antonelli family business grew steadily and withstood the economic downturns of the 1930s. Antonelli Fireworks remained a modest outfit responsible for some of the biggest firework displays in Western New York. It bears mentioning that the Antonellis specialized in the manufacture of display pyrotechnics. As Amerigo learned his history and tradition of his craft as a family apprentice, he was possibly familiar with the works of the French polymath Amédée-François Frézier (1682-1773). In addition to books about strawberries, Frézier gained notoriety for his most well-known text, the Traite es Feux d’artifice pour le Spectacle (1747), a treatise on fireworks that caught the attention of the French Academy of Sciences in 1752. Although Frézier’s work was primarily devoted to decorative pyrotechnics, it is important to note that he also wrote books about architecture, geometry and stone cutting. He also devoted his time to the study of defensive fortifications, eventually becoming a member of the French military intelligence corps as well as the chief military engineer for coastal defenses at Saint-Malo.

It is thus interesting to note that like Frézier, Antonelli also exemplified the movement from decorative pyrotechnics to military explosives. By 1941, a time when American military planners cautiously considered the idea of entering the Second World War, the town of Spencerport held a banquet in honor of Antonelli’s "loyalty to his country and his desire to produce for victory." Antonelli Fireworks was one among many companies in Western New York wholly mobilized for the war effort, companies that manufactured everything from camera lenses to M1 Carbines. That year also marked the year that Antonelli Fireworks entered into a series of contracts with the United States Chemical Warfare Service, worth around $1,005,000, for the manufacture of 3,000,000 incendiary bombs. The United States Chemical Warfare Service made an advance payment of 30% and also provided Antonelli Fireworks with money for new buildings, equipment, and employee salaries. After production of bombs started in February 1942, in July of same year Antonelli Fireworks entered into an additional contract for the manufacture of 1,000,000 M-14 incendiary grenades.

The contracts contained strict specifications of manufacture and outlined provisions for quality control of bombs and grenades. Specifically, the incendiary bombs and grenades were to be loaded with a “Therm-8” burster charge. “Therm-8” is a variant of thermite, a flammable compound used primarily for small explosive ordnance. The contracts further stipulated that specific mixtures of Therm-8 were to be loaded into the grenade or bomb “whether steel-jacket or magnesium, in four approximately equal increments, each increment to be successively consolidated”. Eighty per cent of the bombs were to be ordinary incendiary bombs and twenty per cent were to include burster charges. Antonelli was proud about the business he was generating for the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service. When asked about the "possibility of some of his own bombs being dropped on friends and relatives in his native land," he replied: "We're in this country. We love it. We must defend it. It's too bad about those people over there, but they started all the trouble. We must not let them stand in the way of our lives and liberty."

At 6:30 a.m., on the morning of June 22, 1943, under the authority of a search warrant issued by the United States District Court for the Western District of New York, F.B.I. agents entered Amerigo Antonelli’s home and arrested him for “willfully making defective hand grenades and incendiary bombs for the United States government and with conspiracy to defraud the government in making defective war materials.” The F.B.I. also arrested John and Joseph DeRitis, Dominick Barbollo, Bennie Piteo, Frank Bianchi, and Angelo Constanza – all family or employees of Antonelli Fireworks. A Federal grand jury eventually returned two series of indictments: Amerigo Antonelli, John and Joseph DeRitis, and Dominick Barbollo, were charged with fifteen counts of “defective manufacture of war material.” Bennie Piteo, Frank Bianchi, and Angelo Constanza were all charged with a single count with “conspiracy to defraud the United States in its war effort.” Piteo and Bianchi pleaded guilty. The court consolidated the two indictments; and after a trial that lasted from May 1 to June 10, 1944, and produced a record of nearly 4,000 pages, the jury acquitted the defendants of all charges of the indictment, but found the corporation, Antonelli, the DeRitis brothers, and Barbollo guilty as charged in the second indictment. Costanza was found not guilty. The court imposed fines upon the corporation and upon Antonelli, and sentences of imprisonment for eighteen months upon Barbollo, and for two years upon the other individuals.

M14 incendiary grenade in use, Anzio, Italy, May 1944. Image: Chemical Corps Association

Although local newspapers used the lurid language of sabotage to describe the ensuing trials, the trial court did ask the jury whether Antonelli, et al., indeed had produced defective weapons. At issue was whether the Antonelli’s grenades and bombs contained the requisite combination of Therm-8 and incendiary mixture. In a subsequent appellate opinion, Circuit Judge Clark quoted expert testimony from a Colonel in the United States Chemical Warfare Service, noting that “the employment of separate [Therm-8] increments was necessary to obtain a uniform center of gravity, and that the functioning of the bombs would be seriously impaired by consolidation of a lesser number of increments than called for by the specifications.” Circuit Judge Clark continues, “He [the Colonel] further testified that the purpose of the requirement for burster charges in 20% of the bombs was to discourage fire fighters from approaching the bombs too soon after they had fallen.”

Ensuing witness examinations revealed that Antonelli Fireworks had difficulty meeting production quotas and failed to mitigate deficiencies in the manufacture of incendiary bombs and grenades. For example, a 20-year old woman, the United States Attorney’s chief witness, revealed “how she had been instructed by Antonelli and two of his stepsons to put rejected hand grenades back into the assembly line.” The witness also testified that she was told to deliberately underload the hand grenades with only three scoopfuls of powder "unless (government) inspectors were there, and then we were to put four level scoopfuls in.” As the trial continued, other disturbing testimony emerged in newspaper accounts. Supervisors were seen personally putting rejected explosives back on the assembly line. As a result, more than half of 1,000 incendiary bombs randomly selected from the plant appeared to have been underloaded, clear and overwhelming evidence that a great many defective explosives had been produced.

Antonelli’s attorneys then sought to shift blame elsewhere as part of their strategy. Antonelli contended that the government itself had caused many of the problems by making it hard for the company to obtain supplies and funding and by insisting on stepped-up production methods that led to defects. One defense attorney wondered how such a high percentage of allegedly defective explosives made it past a supposedly "rigid" system of government inspection. If the inspectors were "not on the job," they — not management — "should be tried for criminal negligence." However, even managers took the stand against each other. One foreman, who had already pleaded guilty to fraud, turned state's evidence and claimed that Antonelli and his two stepsons had ordered the underloading. Another foreman also "turned against two of his former associates" on the witness stand. The Antonelli defense team, in turn, produced testimony suggesting the blame lay in the other direction. Even before the trial began, Ray Fowler, one of the defense attorneys, argued that there was no incentive for Antonelli Fireworks to take shortcuts. Any powder saved by underloading remained in government control, he claimed. Moreover, the company did not stand to reap any financial rewards because the profits it could make from any given contract were closely regulated. In the end, however, it was Assistant U.S. Attorney R. Norman Kirchgraber’s words that summarized the general feeling of the trial court. During Antonelli’s arraignment hearing in 1943, Kirchgraber told the District Court, "If our fighting men cannot depend on these very bombs they are using while endangering their own lives, then the very purpose for which these bombs were intended is defeated … If there is a more deliberate form of sabotage than in this case, I don't know where it is."

With the above statement, and in conjunction with the definitive holdings of the Antonelli cases, one can begin to get an idea as to the official mood as to the relation between copies and the war effort. And here, a distinction will be made between three types of copies made for military purposes. First, there are objects whose main purpose is deception. This would include an inordinate number of structures strewn with vegetation, washed in dazzle paint, etc. that are wholly operational, but that exist to confuse enemy forces. This category would also include “bogus levels of communications traffic, fake radio messages, planted information ‘leaks’, and documents that were allowed to ‘fall into enemy hands’”. According to an Air Force historian, the object of such deception was nevertheless “to protect key assets by hiding a force or factory, deceiving an enemy as to what was hidden, or confusing an attacker just long enough to cause some weapons to miss.” It is a type of disinformation, a manipulation of data with the sole purpose of creating cognitive dissonance. This type of confusion not only serves to protect the structure (or people using the structures), but also allows the hidden to buy time, to gain advantage in conflict. As Paul Virilio explains, “There is no war, then, without representation, no sophisticated weaponry without psychological mystification.” This mystification is a direct product of deception, it is intentional and germane to the successful execution of a particular military strategy. As such, these are conditions not necessarily applicable to the fake grenades and bombs in the Antonelli cases. In those cases, the deception was for personal and pecuniary ends – wholly illegal and in contravention to the American war effort, as Mr. Kirchgraber suggests.

The incendiary grenades and bombs produced on the Antonelli assembly lines thus bring attention to a second type of copy – the defective copy. “Copying is ultimately imperfect,” writes Hillel Schwartz, an observation of the relation between an object and its defective copy. Schwartz continues:

The more widespread the act of copying, the greater the likelihood of significant mistranscription. Genetic slip or evolution, scribal mistake or midrash, whatever we call it, miscopying raises hard questions about identity, security, and integrity. The same technical advances that render our skill at copying so impressive also intensify the dilemmas of forgery. We use copies to certify originals, originals to certify copies, then we stand bewildered.

One way to unpack such bewilderment is to note that a defect in a copy may be literally and figuratively marked by an imperfection. The definition, identification, and isolation of an imperfection could bear the weight of institutional, cultural, legal, or even scientific authority. Whatever standards are created for the identification of an imperfection, it perhaps useful to think of them as set by a particular set of codes. In other words, an imperfection can be thought of as an occurrence, event, category, aspect, etc., that falls outside the prescriptive norms that a code can offer. In the Antonelli cases, for example, the defective hand grenades and incendiary bombs were actionable under 50 U.S.C. § 103, which provides for “fine or imprisonment up to 30 years for those who, when the United States is at war and with intent to injure or obstruct it in carrying on the war, willfully make in a defective manner any war material as defined in the statute.” The parties were also sued under 18 U.S.C. § 88, a conspiracy statute that provides for “penalties of fine and imprisonment up to two years for those who conspire 'either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States in any manner or for any purpose.'” Again, the defective grenades were subject to a strict inspection regime. Observers from the War Department as well as from the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service constantly monitored the Antonelli Fireworks’ production line, a procedure that eventually contributed to a finding that Amerigo Antonelli and his employees were in violation of the two statutes listed above. The manufacturing of (literally) millions of incendiary bombs and grenades, the pressures associated with production quotas, the constant scrutiny by Chemical Warfare Service personnel – these all contributed to an environment that indeed “intensified” (to use Schwartz’ terminology) the likelihood that a defective copy would emerge from this process. As Circuit Judge Clark stated in the appellate opinion for the Antonelli case:

That there was defective manufacturing was thoroughly established; that it reached truly appalling amounts seems likewise clear. This was shown by the testimony and report of a disinterested X-ray specialist, who stated that in tests of Antonelli products, made at random and thus fairly representative of the entire output, he found that out of 777 steel-jacket bombs, only 291 contained four increments, and that out of a total of 272 magnesium bombs tested, none contained four increments and only 23 contained three increments. Similarly shocking results were reported as a result of visual testing by the Chief of the Incendiaries Branch, Chemical Warfare Service. Indeed, the defendants did not seriously dispute the fact of extensive misproduction, but rather contended that the deficiencies were entirely accidental and due to the sudden necessity of mass production, or that, if any criminal intent did exist, it was entirely on the part of subordinate employees.

At this point, however, mention again must be made regarding Kirchgraber’s statements at Amerigo Antonelli’s arraignment, for they illustrate a prevailing attitude at the time – that defective war materiel is actionable because it hampers the American war effort. This was a sentiment echoed by the U.S. Government in the closing statements to the first Antonelli trial. In that case, United States Attorney Kirchgraber stated:

I cherish an overwhelming confidence, ladies and gentlemen, in the belief that each one of you, after you have been instructed by the Court, will each render your verdict without malice, but without sympathy, that you will each render a verdict of which you can always be proudly justified in the presence of your fellowmen, those here at home who labor and have labored unceasingly in an honest effort to manufacture munitions of war as well as those of us beyond the seas who look to us for the things they need to sustain them in their hour of extreme sacrifice.

If anything, the above statement not only reiterates the unusual and incredible set of circumstances forming the background against which Amerigo Antonelli was arrested, indicted, and imprisoned. If defective war material is indeed actionable because it compromises the efforts of the American military abroad, then is there a situation where a copy can be considered as aiding such an effort?

At this point, we consider a third variation on the copy – the simulacrum. Although such an analysis may invoke some more obvious sources, debates about restoration and preservation come to mind for the purposes of framing some general issues. Thus an issue arises that asks about the nature of restoring lost buildings. On the one hand, there are those who see it as an endeavor wholly separated from the veneration for the object to be restored. For example, Gilbert George Scott, a self-avowed devotee of Gothic churches and luminary of the mid 19th-century Oxford Movements, observed that a restorer “should forget himself in his veneration for the works of his predecessors.” And then there are other architectural thinkers who see restoration and preservation as misnomers. An instance of this occurs when French architect and theorist Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc reacts strongly against the “reinstating in its entirety and in its minutest details, of a fortress in the middle ages, the reproduction of its interior decoration, even to its furniture; in a word, giving back its form, its colour and – if I may venture to say so – its former life.” If that statement sounds unusually prescient, one must keep in mind that Viollet-le-Duc was indeed combative when it came to issues of restoration. Viollet-le-Duc continues, “The term Restoration and the thing itself are both modern. To restore a building is not to preserve it, to repair, or rebuild it; it is to reinstate it in a condition of completeness which could never have existed at any given time.”

The creation of a simulacrum, however, requires the complicity of the huckster, the panache of the Melvillian confidence man. French thinker Gilles Deleuze provides some initial guidance on this matter. Deleuze readily distinguishes between copies and simulacra as two types of images. The former are “secondhand possessors, well-grounded claimants, authorized by resemblance,” whereas the latter are “false claimants, built on a dissimilitude, implying a perversion, an essential turning away.” Deleuze readily identifies a simulacrum’s author as a trickster, “the satyr or centaur, the Proteus who intrudes and insinuates himself everywhere.” Yet the creation of a simulacrum should not cause offense to the armchair aesthetician: “The simulacrum is not a degraded copy, rather it contains a positive power which negates both original and copy, both model and representation.” The simulacrum is thus a wholly modernist phenomenon as it “is not simply a false copy” and “calls into question the very notions of the copy … and of the model.” If we then take these observations as just that, and apply them to the instance of Antonelli Fireworks employees, we lack the sense of epistemological urgency that Deleuze attributes to the whole enterprise of identifying copies. As stated earlier, the employees faced insurmountable production quotas, and at some level in the decision-making process, a very bad decision was made. Deleuze’s scheme does not account for such errors.

However, the idea that the author of a simulacrum is a type of huckster is very salient indeed. Nothing demonstrates this more than R. Norman Kirchgraber’s suggestions that the Antonelli’s were immigrant saboteurs hellbent on derailing the American war effort. But, Deleuze sentiments are somewhat justified, for the ensuing legal cases really did call attention to the relationship between the defective and original incendiary bombs and grenades. Likewise, Gilbert George Scott’s and Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc’s statements implying that the restoration or recreation of a structure is really a sui generis architectural gesture also call attention to the relationship between the copy and the original.

The extraordinary climate surrounding the Second World War undoubtedly figures into this equation. Perhaps the fact that these projects were borne out of a climate of total, global war, and that war necessitates its own type of space is helpful. As Paul Virilio explains in an interview with Sylvere Lotringer:

The military space is something people don’t talk about too often. You’ll find it in Clausewitz, but it hasn’t really been taken up since. People speak of the history of war, of battlefields, of deaths in the family, but no one speaks of the military space as the constitution of a space having its own characteristics. My work is located within this concept. I suddenly understood that war was a space in the geometrical sense, and even more than geometrical: crossing Europe from North to South, from the shelters of the German cities to the Siegfried Line, passing by the Maginot Line and the Atlantic Wall, makes you realize the breadth of Total War. By the same token you touch on the mythic dimension of a war spreading not only throughout Europe, but all over the world. The objects, bunkers, blockhouses, anti-aircraft shelters, submarine bases, etc. are kinds of reference points or landmarks to the totalitarian nature of war in space and myth.

What, then, of a space of war that is both a simulacrum as well as its own type of space?

Battles | Atlas

Musically (and visually) arresting, to say the least. In addition to the march-like rhythm, a synergy of bass and drum that propel the music forward, the aural and visual action take place a room with two-way mirrors. Yet the images do not extend into infinity, they are circumscribed by a cube. The cube is obviously an artifice, a wholly conjectured object that floats and rotates in green-screened space.

Elements of digital and analog, human and machine, to be sure. Snare hits alternate between real and triggered. A bassist occasionally dances in front of an Apple MacBook, yet we hear a slightly fuzzy, bass-y low frequency noise. Tyondai Braxton sings into a microphone, his voice serrated and ambiguous. Somewhere between vocoder and Speak-and-Spell.

Battles' latest album, Mirrored (WARP CD156) will be released in the US on May 22.

Emotional Atlas

(No, this is not a thread about Giuliana Bruno's wonderful book.) Christian Nold is an artist who, using Google Earth with GPS technologies, creates "emotional" maps of well-known spaces. According to this website:

Bio Mapping is a participatory methodology for people to talk about their immediate environment, locality and communal space. I'm trying to use 3D visualisation as a way of talking about the space. It's not representational. As part of this method I have developed a device, which can be used by lots of people. It consists of a lie detector connected to a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit, which measures your location and your physiological arousal at the same time. By combining the two I can talk about physiological arousal in certain locations. A Galvanic Skin Response sensor in the form of finger cuffs measures the sweat level. Fitted out with this device, people go for a walk and when they return their data is visualised and annotated.

Although these maps are not rendered using GIS software, they nevertheless have the look and feel of a TIN polygon. The above map, for example, from an "emotional map of Greenwich, England", combines real-time emotional data and assigns corresponding colors and shapes to these metrics. The project is fascinating. Like the work of Spain's ecosistema urbano architecture and urbanism collective, Nold's project places a premium on the participatory process.

(via CNN and Bio Mapping.net)

Fiktion und Simulation

Schematic drawing of the Kinalog Display System, an early variant of the HUD (or "Head's-Up Display") commonly featured in military aircraft. From Branden Hookway, "Cockpit" in Beatriz Colomina, Annmarie Brennan, and Jeannie Kim, eds. Cold War Hothouses (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004): 22-54.

Here is a strange little fragment culled from the cobweb-ridden corners of the Internet -- a brief statement on fiction and simulation by media scientist and literary theorist Friedrich Kittler:

The two terms fiction and simulation are used to state a difference between the traditional arts and the technical media that is to challenge the concept of electronic "art". Whereas thmarts (in the terminology of Jacques Lacan's) have been operations in the symbolic producing some imaginary effects on a psychological level at best, the technical media (from the analogue media of the turn of the century to the computer as the universal discrete machine) for the first time employ symbolic procedures at a level concerned with reality and its unpredictability. Here simulation surpasses fiction. This unpredictability was first illustrated by the well-known Mandelbrot set, and the mathematician himself was surprised by the graphic results of his algorithm. (As if to demonstrate that after Turing mathematics is no longer the privilege of mathematicians.) It must be stated, however, that computer algorithms have not been developed to serve as graphic-aesthetic surprises, but in order to minimize strategic surprises by the enemy. This military concept of simulation developed during World War II permits retrospective strategic reformulation of aesthetic simulations (as with Richard Wagner, e. g.).

(via Ars Electronica)

The Quantifiable Target

My research here at Yale revolves around issues of mapping and representation. In particular, I am interested in how Allied military planners incorporated visualization and computational technologies in deciding how to bomb German and Japanese targets during World War II. What I find fascinating is that data was used or manipulated – made absolute or indisputable – in order to justify not using advanced technologies for target selection. The ugly truth is that Allied policies in favor of accurate target selection were abandoned in favor of a campaign that allowed British and American bomber crews to systematically obliterate urban areas in Europe and Asia. And although the ultimate outcome of such polices led to the use of nuclear weapons against Japan in 1945, there is a sense that some military planners violated one of Tufte’s cardinal rules regarding the display of visual information – they failed to depict data in relation to other data.

The above diagram, featured in Peter Galison’s article "War Against the Center", Grey Room 4 (Summer 2001): pp. 7-33, is a chart created by members of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey in 1945. In calculating the effects of precision daylight bombing over European targets, the diagram shows that the majority of bombing attacks on German ball-bearing factories were part of precision (dark cross-hatching) as opposed to area (light cross-hatching) raids. However, the historical record tells us the exact opposite. For example, this diagram does not account for area incendiary raids against nonstrategic targets like Hamburg or Dresden, nor does it account for indiscriminate and collateral civilian casualties. The diagram also depicts the results of American bombing operations in a couple of days. No comparable data appears that depicts the results of British operations. Nor is there any language describing the extremely narrow and limited scope of the diagram. As with the examples iterated by Tufte in Visual Explanations – Dr. John Snow’s mapping of a cholera epidemic, and Morton Thiokol’s diagrams misrepresenting the conditions leading to the o-ring failure, which proved fatal for the Space Shuttle Challenger – the above diagram confirms that“design quality” must indeed stem from “intellectual quality.” If the motives behind the formulation of data are suspect, then the display of that data is equally corrupt.

Literal and Sonic Terrains

Those who have a general understanding of maps and international borders may be confused when reading the opening chapters of Vladimir Nabokov's bloated masterpiece Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). One may notice that locations in the book ("Canady", "Mayne") bear a phonological similarity to places we notice when looking at a map ("Canada", "Maine"). In fact, the book has a distinct Amerussian flavor to it. It is as if Nabokov took a mercator projection of the world and folded it longitudinally -- the desired effect would be that some cities and features in Russia would be grafted on to North America. The superimposition of these two maps creates a new type of cognitive map -- a personal geography that invokes Nabokov's family roots in Czarist Russia as well as his fascination with American culture. Thumb through Lolita (1954), and as you listen to Humbert Humbert's transcontinental jaunt, you are in fact listening to a topographical description of then-contemporary American culture.

Texts of all kinds enjoy a certain status as a type of map. They not only act as a historical document, but they give an all-too subjective read on a particular landscape. The idea that a text is a kind of map (and vice versa, that a map is a kind of text) was definitely on Michel de Certau's mind when writing The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). To say that the book is about the quotidian strays off the mark. The book is about raising the quotidian, elevating the particularities of everyday existence -- a process that ostensibly reveals several common currents. It is as if de Certau is cracking the code of an impossibly complicated Enigma machine.

This process invokes a seemingly disconnected set of analytical tools. At some points, the text reads like a literary-theoretical exegesis. At other instances, it dwells on semiology and anthropology, as well as geography. However, de Certau's irreverence is such that one can take the varied analytical touchstones and apply them to other types of cultural products. In effect, The Practice of Everyday Life enables us to deploy a theoretical toolkit that allows for reading any type of cultural production as a spatial phenomenon -- in other words, a map. As Nabokov's books are a form of cognitive mapping, so are relics of popular culture.

Using de Certeau as a guide, I turn my attention to two specific types of pop culture products, and will engage on a slight and all-too brief investigation of these products as spatial phenomena. Popular music and comic books may provide hours of discourse for dorks and geeks -- yet often these two realms operate as a type of critical text. As they deploy beats, decibels and speech bubbles, popular music and comics directly engage issues about urbanism. But the actual process involved in the creation of music and comic books also speaks to their distinct urbanism.

Two types of popular music that reveal a critical urbanist bent in terms of content as well as authoring are punk and hip hop music. Critical hindsight affords us the ability to view punk music as a cultural relic. The origins of this movement are subject to debate, yet a reader can glean that punk music shared similar beginnings in both England and the United States. Whatever view one chooses to subscribe to, British and American-flavored punk variants shared antiauthoritarian and anticommericalist impulses. Punk music also has a distinct geographical tint to it. American punk bands in the early 80s, usually associated with the Washington DC-based Dischord Records, and the Los Angeles-based SST records have differing sonic and lyrical content. Dischord bands, such as Minor Threat and Rites of Spring, had a distinct political flavor. To these bands, a song was something like a sonic burst of pure energy and raw emotion -- the quintessential aural Molotov cocktail lobbed at unsuspecting listeners. Likewise, bands like Black Flag and the minutemen were a bit more sophisticated in their musical approach. Their musical references came from a wider spectrum, such as 70s-era heavy metal as well as jazz and R&B music. Those punk bands from middle areas - such as Minneapolis, Chicago, or Austin, were also diverse in their musical cues.

What unifies these bands is the notion of tactics. De Certeau refers to the tactic as a type of spatial re-appropriation, "a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus." A tactic is a device used by a person or persons at a disadvantage for quick, uncertain, and short-term gains. It can be a devious gesture as well -- de Certau likes to invoke the notion of le perruque (the wig) as a type of tactic. A Perruque is a trick, akin to using office stationery for personal purposes or any other device for unintended uses.

Cultural historian Dick Hebdige must have been thinking of tactics and perruques when writing about punk music in Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). He thinks of the punk as a type of bricoleur, taking the emblems of everyday existence (i.e. a safety pin) and subverting it into a symbol of rebellion (an earring or nose-piercing). However, the notion of bricolage also extends to musical influences as well. Thus, in "Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs" (1982), the minutemen were able to use funk-inspired bass lines and drum rhythms to craft a new type of sonic samizdat. The lyrics also betray a tactic:

I'm waiting in third person
I'm collecting
Dispersing information labeled rations
Manifestoes are my windows and my proof
Locations and more rations outline my route

Likewise, in Austin, Texas, the Big Boys used their punk and funk cues to inspire youth to become bricoleurs and sonic collectors when they issued their clarion call: "GO START YOUR OWN BAND." Whereas the minutemen and Big Boys looked to their musical and visual aesthetic to promote their political agenda, Minneapolis-based Hüsker Dü took the subject of media-saturated urbanism head on. In "Divide and Conquer" (1985), lead singer Bob Mould screams amidst a wall of distorted guitar noise:

Well they divided up all the land
And we've got states and cities
Cities have their neighborhoods
And more subdivisions

There's lots of area codes
And nine digit zip codes
Secret decoder ring codes
Arteries, shopping nodes

It's not about my politics
Something happened way too quick
A bunch of men who played it sick
They divide, conquer

Early hip hop music not only has elements of the bricolage and tactic as well, but further demonstrates how such an approach has spatial ramifications. Like punks, hip hop artists subverted material items and musical cues for their own aesthetic and social aims. Reacting against stale and overcommercialzed disco and R&B music, the early avatars of hip hop music not only sought inspiration from European electronic music, but also reinterpreted contemporary popular music.

Perhaps a good way to characterize this aspect of early hip hop music involves an application of some of de Certau's ideas of theory and practice. In the end, hip hop can be thought of as a type of practical theory (or theory in practice). But perhaps the best way to describe it is as critical praxis. Hip hop music, through its modes of musical appropriation and sampling, applies de Certau's concept of "cut-up and turn-out." "Cutting-up" can be thought of as a tactic of appropriation: a cultural or material product is removed from its context. In the case of hip hop music, this can involve taking a drum track from Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express, ESG's U.F.O., or a James Brown horn cue. These are "turned-out" and re-contextualized in another product. Hence a mechanical, rote drum part played through an electronic drum machine is accented with samples from other pieces of music. In addition to this new product, lyrics can be added, and as is the case with Grandmaster Flash and Mellie Mel's "White Lines" or "The Message", can comment on diverse topics such as drug abuse and urban blight.

This critical praxis takes on a spatial and geographic aspect as well. Hip hop, although sharing a multitude of international influences, is quintessential New York music. There is much to be said about how these hip hop became an element of, and was a product of New York underground culture. However, hip hop can be thought of a music style that defines a specific spatial locus. The same can be said of punk music from Washington DC, London, New York, or Los Angeles. Through the deployment of tactics and theories, we can think of punk and hip hop as a type of sonic document. An aural, cognitive map that not only describes a specific location, but betrays the points of views of those artists who craft and compose the music.

Like popular music, the comic book is also another type of pop culture item that deploys elements of tactic and theory outlined by de Certeau. Scott McCloud defines a comic as "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer". Yet I argue that the comic book is also a cognitive map whose creation also recalls some of de Certeau's ideas in different ways. One comic of particular interest is Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbons' The Watchmen (1987). This innovative comic has been the subject of many articles about the comic book genre -- and deservedly so, for it is something to be experienced. The storyline revolves around a group of aging superheroes who were once part of a unified crime-fighting unit, yet fell out of political favor. Only two of the former heroes -- a nihilistic, ultraviolent gumshoe named Rorschach, and a psychotic right-winged operative named The Comedian are left. It is the latter's unexpected murder that sets off a chain of events ultimately leading to an unusually prescient 9/11-like tragedy. In layout, presentation, and content, The Watchmen operates as a type of political commentary where everything, urban utopias, the Vietnam war, as well as the comic book genre itself, is dissected and deconstructed.

Moore and Gibbons' innovations in Watchmen show how a much-maligned visual form often associated with children's literature is elevated to the status of serious artistic discourse. In this in this sense that The Watchmen becomes a sort of tactic, a perruque that subverts the form and content of the comic book and recasts it in a wholly original fashion. Its creation also betrays a type of practical theory -- again, de Certeau's notions of cut-up and turn-out become the subject of critical inquiry. A look at the individual panels shows Moore and Gibbons playing with notions of flashback and foreshadowing. A series of intercalary "commentary" chapters -- which take the form of fake historical narratives -- also offers a new way of subverting psychoanalytic and hermeneutical modes not only for the sake of analyzing the comic book genre, but for creating a narrative as well. With Watchmen, Moore and Gibbons stake out a new literal and figurative territory, not only reclaiming a creative medium reserved for dorks and geeks, but doing so with unbridled and uncompromising panache.

This seemingly tenuous connection between punk, hip-hop, and comic books is not only enshrined in Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, where a punk band named Stately Wayne Manor plays at CBGB's, but in contemporary music as well, with Viktor Vaughn (aka MF Doom, aka Metal Face Doom, aka King Geedorah) takes on the persona of Dr. Doom (from the Fantastic Four comics).

As with Nabokov's Ada, contemporary comic books also take the guise of personal geographies. As Daniel Clowes' Ghost World takes on the subject of suburban ennui, Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid in The World confronts the notion of a city. In Ware's graphic magnum-opus, Chicago becomes a literal and visual palimpsest. As we read the highly-stylized, ravishing and meticulously-arranged panels, Jimmy Corrigan's search for his family roots takes him on a historical re-visitation of Chicago's built environment. The buildings, the empty public spaces all become cenotaphs -- dead structures revealing the secret history of a metropolis. As Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quarter shows pre-World War Two Egypt as (to use Giuliana Bruno's terminology) an Atlas of Emotions, so does Ware's Chicago reveal the city as a personal diary entry. De Certau could very well be invoking comic books when he tells us

A series of articulated operations (gestural or mental)-- that is what writing literally is -- traces on the page the trajectories that sketch out words, sentences, and finally a system. In other terms, on the blank page, an itinerant, progressive, and regulated practice -- a 'walk' -- composes the artifact of another 'world' that is not received but rather made. The model of a productive reason is written on the nowhere of the paper. In many different forms, this text constructed on a proper space is the fundamental and generalized utopia of the modern West" (135).

It is in this and perhaps other ways that popular music and comic books may present a reclamation of space.

Aural Praxis

It's hard not to get excited about MIT Media Lab researcher Noah Vawter's Ambient Addition. From his own website:

Ambient Addition is a Walkman with binaural microphones. A tiny Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip analyzes the microphone's sound and superimposes a layer of harmony and rhythm on top of the listener's world. In the new context, some surprising behaviors take place. Listeners tend to play with objects around them, sing to themselves, and wander toward tempting sound sources. With Ambient Addition, I'm hoping to make people think twice about the sounds they initiate as well as loosen up some inhibitions.

Not to overacademicize this, but Ambient Addition could very well be a literal (and aural) example of Peter Bürger's idea of incorporating art into the praxis of life.

The Privacy Penumbra

When one thinks about any possible spatial praxes that may be associated with jurisprudence, he or she may well think of the intractable skein of laws dealing with territorial jurisdiction. However, the United States Supreme Court's decision in Griswold v. Connecticut 381 U.S. 479 (1965) contains an important tidbit that prefigures French thinker's Henri Lefebvre's famous iteration of different types of space in The Production of Space (1974) (English translation, 1991).

Justice Douglas' opinion in Griswold is one of the most-cited, and is a staple of Consitutional Law courses in American law schools. The facts are fairly well-known: in 1879, the State of Connecticut passed a law that banned contraceptives, a law that stood unchallenged for decades. Successive opinions in Poe v. Ullman (1943 and 1961), upheld the legality of the anti-contraceptive law. Later, in 1961, Estelle Griswold (above image, right), the Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and Dr. C. Lee Buxton, a faculty member at the Yale School of Medicine wanted to test the legality of the 1879 statute and opened a birth control clinic in New Haven, Connecticut. The two were quickly arrested, prosecuted, fined, and subsequently appealed their convictions to the Supreme Court of the United States.

In a 7-2 opinion, Justice William O. Douglas declared that the Connecticut statute violated a right to marital privacy -- a right that was not explicit in the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution. Justice Douglas thus writes:

[S]pecific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. ...Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen. The Third Amendment in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers "in any house" in time of peace without the consent of the owner is another facet of that privacy. The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." The Fifth Amendment in its Self-Incrimination Clause enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment. The Ninth Amendment provides: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." (emphasis added)

The above quote is not only remarkable for it audacious reading of the Constitution (a reading that has been influential on generations of legal thinkers and practitioners), but also because it hints at the idea that the idea of privacy has a spatial component to it. Thus, the concurring Justices found some truth in the fact that various Constitutional guarantees of privacy have spatial consequences

This is reminiscent of Lefebvre's famous pronouncement regarding "Representational Space." In The Production of Space, Lefebvre defines representational space as:

[S]pace as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of 'inhabitants' and 'users' ... who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. This is the dominated -- and hence passively experienced -- space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects (1991[1974]:39).

Here is an iteration of produced space that is "alive" and that "speaks" (42). Lefebvre even echoes some of the court's pronouncements, telling us that representational space "has an affective kernel of centre: Ego, bed, bedroom, dwelling, house; or: square, church, graveyard. It embraces the loci of passion, of action and lived situations ..." (ibid.). It seems that this language is curiously evocative of Justice Douglas' penumbras and zones of privacy.

Projection Reference Relief

Back on the blog detail ... Harvard History of Science/Architecture PhD Bill Rankin has created a truly excellent projection reference table. Although Rankin claims that this is a "cheat sheet" that allows him to see what types of projections he can mine from ESRI's otherwise clunky GIS, this table contains excellent comparison diagrams. You can see exactly how the projections look compared to each other. Not only that, but the table is organized according to three types of maps (and their corresponding projections): wall maps, continental maps, and regional maps. This is an excellent resource for spatial analysts everywhere.

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