Playing with the future: social irrealism and the politics of aesthetics

In this paper we wish to explore the political possibilities of video games. Numerous scholars now take seriously the place of popular culture in the remaking of our geographies, but video games still lag behind. For us, this tendency reflects a general response to them as imaginary spaces that are separate from everyday life and 'real' politics. It is this disconnect between abstraction and lived experience that we complicate by defining play as an event of what Brian Massumi calls lived abstraction. We wish to short-circuit the barriers that prevent the aesthetic resonating with the political and argue that through their enactment, video games can animate fantastical futures that require the player to make, and reflect upon, profound ethical decisions that can be antagonistic to prevailing political imaginations. We refer to this as social irrealism to demonstrate that reality can be understood through the impossible and the imagined

Queerying Public Art in Digitally Networked Space

There is an increasing interest among geographers in studying social engagement with public artwork, but there remains a lack of scholarship on how such engagement operates in digitally networked space. This article examines this gap on the basis of a virtual ethnography involving (social) media analysis on encounters with Paul McCarthy’s temporary installation Tree in Place Vendôme, Paris, 2014. This artwork, a 24-metre inflatable resembling a giant butt plug, unleashed a heated debate over social media about the artwork’s (mis)uses of the locality and urban public sphere. From this case study, remembering/forgetting and materiality/digitality emerged as ambiguous values/appropriations of this public artwork. Accordingly, experiences navigated between, foremostly, obscene and/or misplaced (the artwork’s postmodern/‘sexual’ style vs. the site’s classical architecture and Paris’ alleged ‘romantic’ image), ludic, and radical (i.e. anti-normative message towards permanence and heteropatriarchy). Considering such ambiguous and sexuality-related ramifications, I engage with ‘queerying’ as method for examining online mediated public-art engagement. The study demonstrates how receptions and interactions digitally intertwined with the temporary material artwork (where the examined digital material was not an intentional part of the artwork as initiated by the artist). Specifically, the queerying analysis shows how dialectical online and offline public-art engagements with Tree negotiated (i.e. mediated) and augmented (i.e. enhanced) one another and offered alternative ways for conceptualising user agency and spatial connectivity. This study can be of use for critical geographers using online media as both sites and tools for examining the bottom-up digital co-production of public art

Visual geographies : an editorial

The use of image-processing procedures and techniques and their products – photographs, aerial photographs, satellite images, maps – and the application of GIS and GPS, so-called "geomatics" (Thornes, 2004:787), are taken for granted in academic geographical practice today..

LOCATIVE MEDIA, AUGMENTED REALITIES AND THE ORDINARY AMERICAN LANDSCAPE

This dissertation investigates the role of annotative locative media in mediating experiences of place. The overarching impetus motivating this research is the need to bring to bear the theoretical and substantive concerns of cultural landscape studies on the development of a methodological framework for interrogating the ways in which annotative locative media reconfigure experiences of urban landscapes. I take as my empirical cases i) Google Maps with its associated Street View and locational placemark interface, and ii) Layar, an augmented reality platform combining digital mapping and real-time locational augmentation. In the spirit of landscape studies’ longstanding and renewed interest in what may be termed “ordinary” residential landscapes, and reflecting the increasing imbrication of locative media technologies in everyday lives, the empirical research is based in Kenwick, a middleclass, urban residential neighborhood in Lexington, Kentucky. Overall, I present an argument about the need to consider the digital, code (i.e. software), and specifically locative media, in the intellectual context of critical geographies in general and cultural landscape studies in particular

Utopic horizons: cinematic geographies of travel and migration

Theoretically grounded in debates surrounding the production of space and mobility in contemporary cultural discourse, this thesis examines the role of film in these deterritorialised landscapes of theory and practice, in particular the shift from place-based geographies of travel and film to those of 'utopic' displacement. Focussed primarily on examples from contemporary European film, the thesis also considers the broader geo- historical contexts underpinning travel and filmic practices: for example, cinema's nascent links with the democratisation of travel and the construction of a touristic 'mobile virtual gaze' . In so far as these and other examples of 'travel film' can be said to discursively centre the 'voyager-voyeur' in geographies of home and placement, they invoke an 'Ulyssean gaze' of mythic circularity against which the utopic deterritorialisations of migrancy and transnational space are counterposed. It is these utopic horizons of travel - cinematic mobilities that pose dialectical challenges to hegemonic cartographies of place and space which this thesis sets out to explore. Mapping the utopic gaze in early and 'classic' (e)migrant films, I examine the extent to which the frontiers and horizons of utopic travel, predicated in these examples of spatio-temporal distance, could be said to have collapsed in a spatial conflation of presence and absence. In this analysis ellipses in space and time have increasingly displaced the representational spaces of the journey. Looking at a range of examples from contemporary film, I examine the dialectic between a displaced imaginary of utopic hope and the material non-places of transit, refuge and waiting which dominate these cinematic geographies; dialectic which maps affective spaces of stasis and transition. In the deterritorialised landscapes of postmodernity I argue that it is the agential and embodied mobilities of movement-in-itself - psychogeographic, oblique confrontations with hegemonic space - that constitutes the fullest realisation of the utopic. Far from valorising undialectical tropes of the 'open road' or of the rhizomatic, homeless 'nomad', these peripatetic, embodied mobilities are the product of a dialectic of stasis and transition in which the conflict between abstract and lived spaces of mobility is brought to the fore

Cosmopolitan speakers and their cultural cartographies

Language learners' increased mobility and the ubiquity of virtual intercultural encounters has challenged traditional ideas of ‘cultures’. Moreover, representations of cultures as consumable life-choices has meant that learners are no longer locked into standard and static cultural identities. Language learners are better defined as cosmopolitan individuals with subjective and complex socio-political and historical identities. Such models push the boundaries of current concepts in language pedagogy to new understandings of who the language learner is and a refashioning of the cultural maps they inhabit. This article presents a model for cultural understanding that draws on the theoretical framework of Beck's Cosmopolitan Vision and its related concepts of ‘Banal Cosmopolitanism’ and ‘Cosmopolitan Empathy’. Narrative accounts are used to illustrate the experience of a group of students of Arabic and Serbian/Croatian and their use of the cultural resources at their disposal to construct their own subjective cosmopolitan life-worlds. Through the analysis of learners' everyday cultural practices inside and outside the educational environment, the scope of the intercultural experience is revisited and a new paradigm for the language learner is presented. The Cosmopolitan Speaker (CS) described in this article is a subject who adopts a flâneur-like disposition to reflect on and scrutinise the target culture. Armed with this highly personal interpretation of reality, CSs will be able to take part in their own cultural trajectories and imagine and ‘figure’ their own cartography of the world

Placing post-graffiti: the journey of the Peckham Rock

This article is about the intersections between contemporary forms of urban inscription, art and the city, as they come to be configured through an emergent `post-graffiti' aesthetic practice. Exemplary of this movement is the self-proclaimed `art terrorist', Banksy, who has earned a reputation recently for his audacious interventions into some of the most significant art institutions in the western world, as well as for his politically charged stencil and sculptural work in the everyday spaces of the city. Focusing on the artist's Peckham Rock, a fragment of concrete that he surreptitiously stuck to the walls of the British Museum in May 2005, this article uses the methodological device of `the journey' in an attempt to place the connections and disconnections between a series of elite and institutional spaces, social relations and mediascapes through which `the rock' passes as its `life' as an artwork unfolds. Existing research, including that by geographers, has examined graffiti in terms of urban identity politics, territoriality and transgression. While such work has generated important insights into the nature of particular kinds of urbanism, it is often limited to a focus on graffiti `writing', a subcultural model of urban inscription originating in New York and Philadelphia in the late 1960s. In contrast, this article explores a more recent style of inscribing the city, as set out in a series of art publications and conferences, and unpacks what such a model might indicate regarding contemporary urban processes and experiences