Public Space, Media Space

We are surrounded today, everywhere, all the time, by arrays of multiple, simultaneous images — in the streets, airports, shopping centers and gyms, and also on our computers and TV sets. The idea of a single image commanding our attention has faded away. It seems as if we need to be distracted in order to concentrate, as if we — all of us living in this new kind of space, the space of information — could be diagnosed en masse with attention deficit disorder. The state of distraction in the metropolis, described so eloquently by Walter Benjamin early in the twentieth century, seems to have been replaced by a new form of distraction, which is to say, a new form of attention. Rather than wander cinematically through the city, we now look in one direction and see many juxtaposed moving images, more than we can possibly synthesize or reduce to a single impression. We sit in front of our computers on our ergonomically perfected chairs, staring with a fixed gaze at many simultaneously “open” windows through which different kinds of information stream toward us. We hardly even notice it. It seems natural, as if we were simply breathing in the information.

Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map (Figure 3.1) first surfaced as a sketch in 1927 entitled “One-Town World.” A decade and a half later, in 1943, Life magazine published a refined version of it called the “Air Ocean World map.” By 1954 the Dymaxion Air Ocean World map had become the full expression of what Fuller referred to as “Spaceship Earth” (Marks, 1960, p. 50). As it circulated, one of Fuller’s biographers explains, “many geographic facts, not usually observed, became dramatically apparent” (ibid., p. 50). The final version of the map represents the planet as an island in one ocean without any visible distortion of the relative shapes and sizes of the land areas and without splitting any continents. It is relevant to the mapping of orbit for several reasons. First, it exemplifies an experimental and conceptual approach to the mapping of earth that challenges methods and assumptions of traditional cartography, which tend to reinforce elements that divide societies, obscuring the relational patterns emerging from processes of globalization. Second, it foregrounds principles of contiguity and integration by presenting the earth, air and oceans as continuous domains, and in so doing implies that change in one inevitably affects conditions in another. Third, it became a template for the demonstration and analysis of the unequal distribution and use of world energy resources, and thus articulated broader global political, economic and environmental concerns (ibid., pp. 50-53). Finally, the map changed the ways in which the public thought about the world as well as the ways in which geographers thought about mapping it.

The invention of the printing press and the resulting availability of printed, yet often unauthorized theatrical productions, allowed theatre companies to produce plays without having seen a performance, or having consulted the playwright. Writers included “margin notes” — didascaliae — to guide actors rehearsing from their scripts. The Direct Address project explores how contemporary uses of social media engage with the tradition of annotation and commentary by making them live, participatory and open to public scrutiny. How are our lives and desires represented in public space with the proliferation of media screens, the immediacy of access to products and services, linking us to an ever-expanding network of consumption while in transit? What would happen if we reclaimed and renegotiated access to some of those spaces? What if we could overwrite the corporate signature by introducing a different voice and consolidating a different civic agenda?