This symposium explores design responses to movements of people on a global scale including tourism, migration, and diaspora driven by poverty and political instability. How do changes in population and social dynamics affect the natural and built environment, and emergent aesthetic forms? What are the implications of shifting social dynamics for the design and planning professions? How are policy-makers, citizen activists, and designers responding to these forces around the world? This symposium will bring together leading thinkers, practitioners and artists to explore such questions.
Performance at UC Davis:
Empire Postcards
Paper: Ecotone/Interzone
Excerpt from my paper, Ecotone/Interzone:
Cape Town To Cairo
I am interested in understanding the connections between the triangulation of manufactured surrogates, remembered qualities and originary histories in the work I do regarding memory and place. The experience of place I imagine oscillates through the shape-shifting claims, demands and seductions of this triangulation. The work presented today is the mediating image-currency emerging from the prismatic portals of my studio, a tender ecotone, to a variety of Interzone markets. In this global moment, where viral media and technological "connectedness" are supposedly undermining the compelling urgency that geography once had on identity, we have more and more opportunities to invent, re-imagine and project our selves from an infinite number of virtual tide-pools to an endless number of temporal theaters. As my students and I map the evolution of advertising in the last decade from a brutal science of persuasion to, in the minds of the best ad-men, the gentle art of empathetic cultural alliance we clearly see the implications of the words of Paul Virilio: I believe that there is a war of images. I can tell you my feelings in another way: winning, today, is merely not losing sight of yourself. The practitioners of advertising are in fact engaging in efficiently orchestrated, well funded narrative strip-mining and image-jacking in support of product legitimacy through the temporal contract of "tribal" alliance. The majority of the emerging, new-born, stories of our time and our place are body-snatched and reassigned to populate any number of vacuous empires before the notion of the "right to narrate" is claimed, enacted or heralded by its authors.
