Urban utopics and the new digital view

Internet Webcam technology is a crucial nodal imaging device that delivers a plethora of new vantage points by which the visual experience of the city is now constructed. Delivered directly to the desktop, this distributed network extends the individual viewer beyond their physical limits.However, it also, remains a regulated system. Unlike sites like Flikr the representation of urban form and life is authored and thus locates the various promotional and proprietorial interests of those who own the view. More importantly, the figurative potency of the webcam image relies on its emblematic, descriptive form. Louis Marin, in ‘Utopics’ and ‘On Representation’ identifies how the use of narrative and descriptive image forms in early city maps constructed differences in the representation of sovereign power. Referring to Gomboust’s 1647 Map of Paris, Marin argues that the image, as a representational vehicle for the mediation of power, inevitably, constructs a gap or interval within any figurative continuity. Here the presence of competing intermediating referents undoes the map’s figurative consistency. In this sense, representations of this kind rupture their own ambition for semantic coherence.Referencing Marin’s observation that the representation of power establishes the basis of its own inevitable rupture, this paper will explore how the Internet webcam, simultaneously reveals the immanence of urban powerbrokers and delineates the mechanism by which this power is disrupted. The paper will examine how pixel-based geometry and image as ‘data’ unravels the narrative of linear perspective representation by supplanting its Cartesian coordinates and instead privileging experiential conditions of colour and luminosity. In rejecting the delineation of form through the line, the city’s image becomes a more affective, qualitative condition. Moreover, the ease by which this content can be repackaged and reassembled institutes a profound political shift in the image’s agency and the viewer’s visual engagement with urban space

Urban utopics: the politics of the digital city view

Digital Futures and the City of Today cuts through these issues to analyze the work of architects, designers, media specialists, and a growing number of community activists, laying out a multifaceted view of the complex integrated ..

New Imaging: transdisciplinary strategies for art beyond the new media

If the eighteenth century Picturesque can be regarded as a proprietorial strategy for mediating the visual experience of landscape, then the proliferation and configuration of webcam networks to promote iconic city form can be seen as its contemporary counterpart. These digital systems, in their most voyeuristic and passive form as a new privileged vantage point for the 'remote' tourist to view the city, allow civic authorities to curate the visual experience of the contemporary urban landscape. Unlike the formal stability of the Picturesque view, the webcam's digital conversion of the real provides viewers with the opportunity to adapt and mediate their experience. Importantly, this digital conversion is able to offer the designer new ways to materialize three-dimensional form. This adaptive facility of webcam content paradoxically subverts the surveillant and the promotional uses of these systems and converts it into qualitative and experiential material. The paper will discuss how open-source digital software can be recruited to process and interpret virtual qualitative data from webcams to the point where it can generate a formal response to civic space. This digital manipulation of the two-dimensional webcam view, asks the designer to relinquish the images commonly used to substantiate urban form and to respond to duplicate virtual and real-time sites whose coexistence shifts the temporal framework traditionally used to guide formal intervention. The application of this unprecedented technique reveals an opportunity to reinterpret the paradigm both for our experience of 'virtual' and urban space and for material intervention within it

'I still remain one of the old Settlement boys': Cross-class Friendship in the First World War Letters of Cardiff University Settlement Lads

This article examines the letters sent from former members of Cardiff University Settlement Lads' Club to two settlement workers, Amy and Edward Lewis, during the First World War. It argues that affective relationships developed within the settlement house prior to the war were subsequently utilised by working-class soldiers in their imaginings of home and community. The letters are used not only to demonstrate the interpersonal relationships that developed between settlement workers and settlement attendees, but also more broadly how the university settlement movement's concept of cross-class friendship worked in practice

‘Granny thinking what she is going to write in her book’: religion, politics and the Pontefract by-election of 1872 in Josephine Butler’s Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (1896)

Josephine Butler’s 'Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade' (1896) has long been considered as one of the crucial pieces of evidence for the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts. Yet few scholars have examined this text to consider what Butler’s only explicit autobiographical publication tells us about how she represented and sought to represent her role in the repeal movement. Scholars have instead preferred to explore how Butler revealed the ‘auto/biographical I’ in the biographies of her father, sister and husband, as well as in her hagiographical writings. This article argues that Personal Reminiscences enabled Butler to reinforce a religiously informed identity. It does so by unpacking her account of the Pontefract by-election of 1872. Both biographers and historians have been drawn to her account of the by-election, especially her description of the terrifying events in the hayloft

'Oxford House Heads and their Performance of Religious Faith in East London, 1884-1900'

This article considers how lecturing in Victoria Park in the East End of London allowed three early heads of the university settlement Oxford House to engage local communities in a discussion about the place of religion in the modern world. It demonstrates how park lecturing enabled James Adderley, Hebert Hensley Henson and Arthur Winnington-Ingram, all of whom also held positions in the Church of England, to perform and test out their religious identities. Open-air lecturing was a performance of religious faith for these settlement leaders. It allowed them to move beyond the institutional spaces of the church and the settlement house in order to mediate their faith in the context of open discussion and debate about religion and modern life. The narratives they constructed in and about their park sermons reveal a good deal about how these early settlement leaders imagined themselves as well as their relationship with the working-class men they hoped to reach through settlement work. A vivid picture of Victorian religious and philanthropic life emerges in their accounts of lecturing in Victoria Park