Situationist International and the New City New Babylon is... a way of thinking, of imagining, of looking on things and on life...1 In 1960, Constant Nieuwenhuis presented an architectural and social utopia, New Babylon. In New Babylon work has given way to a nomadic lifestyle of creativity and play, and traditional architecture has disintegrated. It is a response to the urbanization of the city, an out lash to our exploitation by bourgeois and avant-garde high culture. These cultures drain productivity, traumatize inhabitants, replace nature, and produce pathological citizens. The architecture of these cultures, where all activity takes place, is the main antagonist to disappear in New Babylon. These anti-social spaces influence the behaviours of the inhabitants; therefore static architecture gives way to spontaneous spaces defined by interactions and desires. New Babylon was the grand reincarnation of the dérive, the aimless movement through urban landscapes and the détournement of spaces and architecture to meet one's own desires. This wandering through physical space lead to a virtual space: a new mental one, and one that Constant had explored with electronics in order to define (walkie-talkies) or to operate (movable architectural elements). It is the meeting of these real and virtual spaces (quantum space) where VJing affects and transforms space to create new architecture. Video Riot! November 2004: A cold and foggy San Francisco night, in a vacant SoMa parking lot, 30 minutes until the RIOT!-dubbed "The Last Gasp of Freedom". An unmarked truck and two vans pull up to the center of the lot. Chaotic, yet micro-organized groups of people swarm the vehicles from across the street and begin setting up the equipment from inside. The scene turns to seemingly random placements of video mixers and projectors facing a seven-storey high white wall. Cars with multiple projectors slapped to the roofs like anti-aircraft guns begin to pull in and the anticipating crowd, cued in their vehicles, are choreographed into position and given instruction to tune to a pirate radio channel broadcast from within the last remaining artist warehouse in the South of Market District, just across the street and literally in the shadow of the Gap building. Not illegal, but not legal either, Video RIOT! is a guerilla art spectacle which has grown out of the monthly Video Salon events held since 2000 when a local group of San Francisco VJs and video artists gathered to share tricks and skills. Video Salon has now grown into an institution of its own, spawning a VJ DVD label, a VJ book, and numerous audio-visual workshops and VJ classes. The San Francisco Bay Area is well known for its anti-establishment nature. Home to hippies and anarchists, political fervor runs in the veins of San Franciscans. It is a mix of individualists who do not feel the need to conform and believe in unrestricted personal freedom, regardless of consequence, as well as Egoist Communists, who can be put up to anything anti-capitalist. In its initial stages of planning, the first Video RIOT! (VR) in 2001 aimed to bring to the general public the skills and technology involved in live audio-video arts and VJing, and to break outside of the box of the studio that Video Salon had been held. In the subsequent years it served as a platform for local artists to freely and openly express their ideas and protests in a public forum. By 2004 VR accumulated to a grand showcase of citizen-artist power against local government and police who did not accept public assembly in a public space, an area other than those defined for public activities. Why has the urban landscape and architecture taken a turn to define us and our activities? SI and Video RIOT! Technology is the indispensable tool for realizing an experimental collectivism. To seek to dominate nature without the help of technique is pure fiction, as is collective creation without the appropriate means of communication. A renewed, reinvented audiovisual media is an indispensable aid. In a fluctuating community, without a fixed base, contacts can only be maintained by intensive telecommunications... As for telecommunications, it does not only, or principally, serve interests of a practical kind. It is at the service of ludic activity, it is a form of play. The dérive of the SI was personal. It reached a limited number of participants meandering through a large area of activity (districts or city-wide). The dérive of VR is communal by exposing the masses to the experience of new meanings for public spaces. What VR creates is a new mode of communication. It is a redefinition of public space for the purpose of a multi-narrative, anachronistic broadcasting of events, stories, thoughts, protests, etc. VJing is an art of re-appropriation of visual language, technology, and space to create new meanings of old languages, new technologies from re-appropriated older technologies and constantly shifting spaces within constant spaces of old. In terms of architecture, VR introduced a deterritorialization for inhabitants not accustomed to experiencing certain spaces; spaces which were not used during "regular" hours, or spaces which were not used at all, other than by transients. It introduced new activities to be taken place in these new and spontaneous spaces. With VR, any space in the City had the potential to become a new point of interaction and of storytelling. When space gains meaning, space becomes architecture and desirable to occupy. The ad-hoc audio-visual experience of Video RIOT! therefore creates temporary architectures plucked from static spatial significance and which blur the boundaries of real and virtual space. |
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