 Good morning My name is Tom Collins if we've not met I'm the executive director and president of the Barnes Foundation And it is really my pleasure to welcome you this morning you the few the proud of those who already filed their taxes Those who are not planning to celebrate Easter and those who have finished your grading It's my pleasure to welcome you this morning to this symposium that was organized by my very talented colleague Martha Lucy Who is deputy director of education and public programs here at the Barnes Foundation in conjunction with the exhibition Person of the crowd, which is on view here at the Barnes through May 22nd Just one part of an extremely varied That includes a film series Lectures adult education courses themed city walking tours billboard and street poster installations and Performance art throughout Philadelphia This symposium foregrounds one of the exhibitions most insistent and Arguably most relevant sub themes the politics of public space I would just point out that all of those programs I just described are well articulated in this handout, which is available here and in the exhibition space and all of this is also Updated in real time on our dedicated website, which is personofthecrowd.org I want to thank Martha for her indispensable contribution to this larger menu of institutional offerings I'd also like to acknowledge the masterful organizational skills of our education colleague, Alia Palumbo Who put all of this together as well the efforts of our AV team which has made live streaming happen and to me That still seems like magic. I know that's sad, but nonetheless it seems like magic to me So this program is being live-streamed Personally, I've infrequently been as excited by a lineup of speakers as I am this morning And I want to thank Bridget Alstorff, Man Bartlett, Andre Dombrovsky, Tom McDonough, Doreen St. Felix, and Angela Washkoe for joining us Unfortunately, our friend Janet Wolfe Was unable to make it due to illness Should I use? Good morning. I Need to apologize for The some of you were here at 9. I hear and I'm not sure what happened. So I I'm sorry about that I know it's hard to get here even at 9.30 I Would also like to thank all of those people that Tom thanked. I'm not gonna list them again But I will add to that my mother-in-law Who is here who I forced to come? Okay the concept of the Flannur a Social type meaning idler or stroller is now almost 180 years old It can be hard to get your head around the fact that this type even has an origin that there was a time when leisurely aimless strolling In the city was a novel experience But if you listen to Edgar Allen Poe's story man of the crowd written in 1840 You get a sense of how new this experience of seeing and watching throngs of people out in public Really was and I'm just gonna read you a passage from the story He is the narrator is sitting in the window of a London hotel cafe and sort of watching people and he says At this particular period of the evening I had never before been in a similar situation and the tumultuous sea of human heads Filled me therefore with a delicious Novelty of emotion. I gave up at length all care of things within the hotel and became absorbed in the in Contemplation of the scene without at first my observations took an abstract and generalizing turn I looked at the passengers and masses and thought of them in their aggregate relations Soon, however, I descended to details and regarded with my newt interest the innumerable varieties of figure dress air gate visage and expression of countenance two decades later Baudelaire famously Elaborated this new social type in his essay the painter of modern life Describing the flannure as the quintessential modern figure a detached observer who embraces the fleetingness of it all Baudelaire articulated a new mode of vision one that was mobile aimless and fragmented and Went on to identify flannery as the engine of an art movement that was beginning to take root around him And which would later become known as Impressionism The flannure became an essential figure for later philosophers and sociologists in their attempt to describe the modern experience Scholars like George Simmel and Walter Benyamin who connected the flannure to the rise of capitalism in the 1980s this quintessential 19th century figure of modernity began to be deconstructed Who was the flannure really who exactly are we talking about in her pioneering essay the invisible flannous Janet Wolfe who Tom mentioned was the first to point out that the 19th century flannure figure Could only be male since women were largely excluded from the public sphere This meant then that the seminal writings describing the modern experience those of Benyamin Simmel Marshall Berman were only accounting for the experience of men and Wolfe argued for a feminist sociology of modernity To supplement these texts And there were issues of class to be addressed after all to be a flannure One had to have not only the time but the freedom of unchecked social and geographic mobility At the same time scholars like Linda Nocklin and Laura Mulvey had begun to theorize the power embedded in the very act of looking Work on the flannure flowed together with theories of the male gaze Of course important work on the on the topic of the 19th century flannure continues And you are going to hear some of this work today and talks by two of the best scholars in the field Andre Dombrowski asks how did the flannure? He's talking about the 19th century flannure a figure with excess time on his hands Fair during this historical moment that was about efficiency and regularization Bridget Allstorff explores the phenomenon of the Gawker another type of looker In the 19th century and draws out this figure's relationship to the flannure The flannure is invariably understood as an extinct species from the 19th century This is largely thanks to Benjamin who in the 1930s argued that with the rise of capitalism There was no longer any psychological space for the flannure and his freewheeling ethos Any sense of mystery previously held by the city streets Was being squeezed out by capitalism that had ordered and commodified the urban landscape But this exhibition has shown that capital has not completely squashed the possibility of flannery as an activity or as a disruptive artistic strategy The artists in the gallery upstairs All engage somehow with the street or with the crowd making spectacles of themselves Sometimes to address issues as diverse as commodity fetishism gentrification gender politics globalization racism and homelessness Today you'll hear from Tom McDonough about another living artist whose work engages with the life of the street The the French artist Philippe Parano whose performances Installations and recent films are often concerned with the various forms taken by the contemporary crowd And even if there are no Top-hatted figures with monocles walking around our contemporary streets the issues attached to flannery politics of vision and power and the right to exist in public space are still of course very relevant What are the contemporary? race and gender politics embedded in the idea of The urban wanderer what are the limits of black spectatorship in the contemporary American city? Does the black flanner exist? Doreen St. Felix will address some of these questions in her talk black mobility on strange terrains How has flannery changed during the age of the internet and smartphones and social media? Think about the fact that for many of us the activities of following and wandering now happen more in the digital realm than in the physical one Angela Washcoe's talk brings us into this new digital space to explore some of the end gender issues that go on in the massive multiplayer video games Man Bartlett will discuss the way that technology mediates our contemporary experience as flanners In a more in a broader sense and this is the driving idea Between his piece upstairs in the light court. That's that's projected on the ceiling so we've got a I think a really interesting lineup of speakers today a mix of writers and artists and scholars and It is my pleasure to introduce our first speaker Andre Dombrowski Andre is associate professor of the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania His 2013 book Cezanne murder and modern life won the Phillips book prize He is currently at work on a new book that explores the relationship between the impressionist instant and Period technologies of timekeeping. So please help me welcome Andre Thank you. Thank you, Martha for that lovely introduction and for for organizing this This this stellar event. It's such an amazing interesting lineup of speakers. I'm really excited to To hear what's what's about to transpire and thanks for including me. I'm honored Tom congratulations to a stellar and important exhibition. I'm it's it's a marvelous Event and thanks to you for coming on early on a Saturday morning and lastly may I also thank my mother-in-law, please Who who lives in St. Louis, but it's actually in Philadelphia this weekend, but at home I did not I Offered her that she could come but she is actually crawled up with a huge six inch book That is called the best American short stories or something like that And and we will see we'll have a big discussion later about who had the better day. I My money is on me. Let me work backwards from a work in the exhibition During an event called homage to David Tudor at the American Embassy Theatre in Paris in June 1961 Robert Rauschenberg created a series of three combines known as his time paintings Here numbers one to three number two at center is in the show Turning the canvases backs towards the audience Rauschenberg Created the works on stage in front of everyone while rendering them at the same time invisible You can see him doing it microphone was attached to them instead So the audience could hear Rauschenberg's actions, but never know in what they resulted visually an alarm clock Attached to each combine rang after a certain point at which Rauschenberg stopped and carried the work off stage Still hiding it from view With this deliberate audience Frustration he shifted attention away from the image object to the exact amount of time It had taken him to create it what Rauschenberg showed and what the audience saw was merely the time of creation and not creation itself the audience had seen time if you will in typical Rauschenberg in fashion an external anonymous measure Clock time or what Benjamin would call regularized empty time had furnished the entire Parameters of the creative act these parameters 30 minutes say We're now the very stuff of representation vision stood if not exactly mechanically reproduced then at least Mechanically temporalized These days as in the exhibition the paintings are usually displayed just as Rauschenberg's other Combines and the alarm clock still figure in them centrally demanding order of their painterly Gesticularity which they oppose and yet created How did painting get here and why did an artist of the early neo flunner period of the 1960s chose to integrate the flunners diametrical opposite the modern clock with its harsh accounting of time so centrally within his representations How come that an extrinsic Regulatory functions such as this came to embody the rebirth of the flunner in the late 20th century We can also think of Leeming ways in 1966 100 days with Lily I'll repeat that 100 days kept counting And all the other pieces in the exhibition organized around calendars and watches and Schedules helping to mark the boundaries between performance and life These are new flunners perhaps more sensitive to and more expressly critical of the role of Social regulation than their 19th century flunnerial predecessors were who were often so ambivalently political and certainly hardly activists Why was this late 20th century outspoken flunner reborn with so many watches in hand an excursion back into the 19th century And the origins of flunnery and its relationship to industrial timekeeping with its ever more precise and ubiquitous clocks in town and watches on the body and an ever-greater drive towards Universality and synchronicity of time will furnish. I hope a part answer to my question the original flunner had in one form or another Died or disappeared in the late 19th century at the hand of the emergence of modern industrial Clock time I believe and its full Implementation just as Benjamin had proposed that he or she had vanished with the West's full embrace of consumer Capitalism as Martha already mentioned a minute ago with its total welcome of mass spectacle the department store And so on to which the flunner's preponderance for the consumption of accidental urban sites and minor events and not of goods Was no longer a useful trope The literary figure of the flunner had been invented in the late 18th and early 19th century The era of the arcades rather than the department store to make palatable an Exhibitionist form of strolling and window shopping that was hardly commodity oriented In the way we would conceive it and quite yet When the practices of high capitalism as Benjamin calls them had become fully ingrained within modern urban cultural Practices the need for the trope of the flunner had partly disappeared Alongside them I want to add to this line of reasoning that the flunner lost some of his luster at the hand of time The flunner was after all Upon his literary conception the consummate figure of a willful Luxuriating in time a partisan of the idea that time wasted is time well spent Flunner's lingered followed flowed through the urban environment at their own pace Here is Louis in his 1841 Physiology du flunner and I quote him that what makes the human the king of creation is that he knows Wasting his time and his youth youth in all possible climates and seasons Then you mean added that he is I quote the man who walked long long and aimlessly through the streets and quote There is a special Temporality to flunnery therefore this talk will show what happened when such a flagrantly unproductive Pursuit met in the late 19th century the industrial ages drive to standardized to eventually Universalized time itself all cumulating if you will in a very emblematic event in 1884 When in 1884 and it was recommended to make Greenwich Of course the prime meridian and the center of universal time So I take that event as a bit of an epitome of the sort of death date of the other flunner as you'll see The final blow that recasted if you will the profligate Temporality of the flunner as pure loss when it once had signified a cultural gain Let us look once more at some of the illustrations I have brought of 19th century flunners some very well-known ones and it will become evident quickly That they rarely counted a pocket watch among their typical accoutrements These included the walking stick the top had a cigarette of course and binoculars You wouldn't walk out without those but a watch chain rarely dangles from a flunner's Vest even though it had become a sign of bourgeois Respectability on most other men of the period think if we compare this photograph of Baudelaire and Fountain painting of money we can see the difference pretty quickly as to who Needed and wanted to carry a watch on on their belly and who did not For the reasons outlined above the flunner did not need a watch. There was no technologically sanctioned beginning or end to his actions Flannery did not just have no temporal limit It also had of course its imaginary tempo then different from that of modern life itself In 1839 Benjamin reminds us quote and it was considered elegant to take a tortoise out walking This gives us an idea of the tempo of flannery in the arcades and quote And you mean said and the poet Gerard de Nerval is often said to have walked his lobster Which was actually called Thibault In public so you can see This illustrated here the flannery demonstrated then a willful slowness a counter-capitalist speed of visual consumption he or she thereby displays and Exhibitionizes or turns outward as Benjamin would say a productive wasting of time the flannery made public spectacle of this counter modern unproductive temporality But Flannery was anything but a pure wasting of time It was hardly boredom or and we but full of activity and conquering of urban space at the same time in 1867 Victor four Nell added the following to our previous definitions of the flannery Flannery means he said undertaking Interminable in terminal expeditions on the streets and promenades Without worrying about going somewhere specific or hurrying Stopping at every boutique in order to look at the images on this display at every Street corner to read the broadsheets at every display to finger through second-hand books and I hope you heard that at every Alliteration here the emphasis here lies on how completely how fully the flannery wasted time The idleness of the flannery is a demonstration against the division of labor Benjamin once again headed headed adding that Basic to Flannery is the idea that the fruits of idleness are more precious than the fruits of labor the flannery then made Unproductive time productive and even though there was no real Wasted minute in Flannery all that interminable activity of drifting did not have a real end goal But to make of time itself a spectacle in the Rauschenbergian sense with which I started Minutes hours days were celebrated in Flannery as wide Subjective flexible entities Entailing no concrete pursuit of meaning the exact opposite of the times of precision the modern clock Invented parallelly But this also means that the flannery had to succumb I think Eventually to the power of newly standardized modern time. This is the argument I'll pursue for the rest of the talk Let me demonstrate this via an example The flannery of times I have described are the ones we find so frequently in impressionist painting as Martha also already mentioned especially Those of Gustav Keibot to whose Parisian urban city scapes are turned for the rest of the talk Here is on the Pond of Europe at the Kimball Impressionism so often focused on the random juxtapositions that the urban environment Created delighting in their composed and precious randomness rather than any potential Significance they might carry the impressionist instant is about itself About passers-by moving in or out of one's frame of vision cut off by the picture Plain positioned at odd angles looking at things we cannot see ourselves Thus creating formal Relationships on canvas rather than meaningful social relationships in urban space The modern urban environment interned through such house manian emblems as the Pond de l'Europe That spans the tracks north of the gas and Lazar had created the perfect framing devices for such Interactions through its iron glass arch Architectural forms the iron trusses and railings turning the urban world always into so many Framed pictures ready for the flaneur's brief inspection Hope you can see pretty quickly what I mean by all those pictures always created by the inside the image Keibot was the master of this aesthetic With dig up perhaps here's plus to the concord of the instant that was never quite as quickly Painted as moneys and those of the other impressionists yet still full of visual Accidents if there was meaning in the modern urban environment for Keibot It was always lodged simply in these brief seconds of Overlap and rupture with no firm base of meaning or truly extensive temporal implications in Keibot's paintings the encounter between flaneur and modern time is perhaps staged in its most dramatic and its most overt Form here's the flaneur of all flaneur's Anonymous face turned away from us and towards the spectacle of the station with its incoming and outgoing trains Dressed in dark uniform clothes top hat on Resembling the figure leaving the picture at left, but still clearly Distinguished as a type from the working-class man behind him who has actually stopped to linger and look at the trains for For a longer period of time. He has sort of really paused and interrupted his day while the flaneur he has only been so stopped in his tracks to take in that site And and I want to make that distinction Meaningful as we go forward and this is actually quite the same in the Related picture Keibot did of the same scene where we have a very similar dynamic of the the working-class figure here Leaning against the railing watching over a longer period of time while the more flaneurial figure over here And then obviously that relationship he has with the woman behind him and so on is is Very ambiguously staged but part of what's going on here I think it's him stopping to see and watch a train coming in and out Right, that's one of the possible readings of why he's turning his head to the left but again those two Temporal Relationships to the site I think are meant to be seen as different And compared to each other What the paintings show us is the direct comparison then between the two deeply modern temporalities I have been sketching that of the flaneur and that of modern transport and industry at the station Keibot annexed the Gar San Lazar and my modern transport more generally to his aesthetic cause in order to compare his painted Flaneurial moments to another set of temporal Indications that surrounded him at this particular site and especially I think at this site at San Lazar he would have Encountered a fixation on being on time Emblematized by the proliferation of clock signals schedules and the eventual establishment of a synchronized time specific to French train comers in the 1870s based on Parisian time Then that debate over the implication of such a synchronized Instant went under the headline of the unification of time or the unification of the hour unification And in French of course Earl means both hour and time so it has that double meaning and and that synchronization or unification was first tested publicly in the 1870s and 1880s when Keibot is at this site and Was not to be actualized however largely until the 1890s By this phrase right the unification of time was meant the telegraphic synchronization of the major Parisian public clocks Which soon set a time for the entirety of the French railroads on top of the various local times It did not always fully override an Idealization and systematization of time through technology that no single clock had yet achieved on its own No matter its actual powers of precision this ideal of a the unified time implied that potentially all Clocks could tick in network unison would coordinate and proffer the same Time to the inhabitants of the modern metropolis and I want you to start hearing the social ideal behind this But that we all agree on a specific Nouness that we all agree on how long it is when it takes place that we do things at the same time through this technologically induced Sense of nowness and I hope you're also starting to hear the kind of counter flannurial ideal in that right and Slow choking of the flannur's temporality that this engenders Back then such a unified time zone stood apart from the daily usage of time that surrounded it Often by up to 30 minutes right so the flannur's time could be 30 minutes off the times at the at the Stations here at least until living by became law or legal French time Which happened on March 1891 when front friends officially decreed Parisian time to be national time what the French did when they were asked to adopt Greenwich meantime is a story for another day and they came up with the with the Funniest proposed they actually the French live for 25 years under what's known as Parisian time, which was nine minutes and 21 seconds Distanced from Greenwich time, so it was actually Greenwich time, but not called that And it had become this kind of temporality this Abstracted form of clock time second nature by this point as it did in the West during the early decades of the 20th century and The in the kibot. I think the flannur here is flannurial bourgeois figure is partly looking at that process Looking at the station and looking at that new temporality Here's Monet writing in 1877 if you would like to visit kibot Without me at 330 precise he writes he will be at home 77 And would be happy to receive you when he wrote to his client George de Belieu in late December 1877 italicizing the word precise thereby drawing attention to the increased value his culture placed on punctuality We have a few a lot more money letter, so I'm using his rather than Kibots as an example here for one's own personal scheduling habits as they changed in accordance This is the first time that money made such an intense demand for sheer promptness in the letters that have come down to it It's the first time that he says, please be precise in your Arrival indeed judging by his entire correspondence money began to organize his daily life in 30-minute intervals Which were then known as Small hours Small-scale hours diminutive hours, if you will rather than hourly ones around this very period In his life So what I mean by that is that money started in the late 70s when kibot is painting here no longer to ask people come To my studio between 11 and 1 and then I'll have lunch from from 1 to 3 and so on but he's actually writing Come between 1130 and 1 And and then I'm closing shop until tooth a bit and then come back between 230 and 4 right and so the Time spans by which one is organizing one's life become ever Short and he's not it organizing by 15-minute intervals, which is sort of I think how we organize at least I am And that would I think have to wait another one another while so the half hour is the is the time frame here Such my new show might say they are my new show Of one's daily schedule may not mean much and may hardly have spilled over Directly into the Impressionists act of painting but taking the train from San Lazar shape their temporal horizons I think and stretched and regulated their sense of time including when they paint it as Germain as such shifts in Lucution may have been to kibots and moneys daily scheduling Paintings had of course no need to be on time in the same manner that the railway and its passengers did But if we take the demand for punctuality bequeath to us from the beginning of coordinated mass transit more literally as the perfected relationship between time and place or the unqualified actualization of place in time then the connections will hopefully become a little clearer Actually For what being on time pledges on being on time the very preposition on or ah as in ah L'heure says so expressly is the ideal union of space and time even the promise of a place that exists on top of Time itself for the Impressionist picture the manufacturer of the space your temporal ideal was a productive Signifier of time one could even say that the Impressionists operated more vigilantly under the logic of being on time Internal to the act of painting than any other group of painters before them as opposed to all the external pressures Painters had to live with in the period such as salon submission deadlines or the simple arrival of the darkness of night Determining these are their challenges, right? The right place and the right time of painting snatching the proper impression from everyday life at the proper moment and Stopping depiction just in time to leave the painting in it's somewhat haphazard look For the Impressionists and perhaps for no one more so than Kaibat composing implied impeccable Timing at the core of the Impressionist challenge to the prevailing pictorial norm was after all this Coordination of various temporal parameters into coherent artworks the suitable instant the restless look the appropriately Paced painterly gesture as well as the time implied by the actions depicted all of the centering around the Flannery at the center of the picture Kaibat went to paint at San Lazar then in order to correlate these two competing Temporalities, I think the Impressionist flannery All instant and the time newly invented for and newly systemic to modern railway travel and other aspects of city life and business In Kaibat's lifetime the Gar San Lazar of course had expanded quite exponentially from a single line station in the 1830s it had successfully grown to include more and more tracks eventually serving most of Normandy and the Northwestern Parisian suburbs In his paintings Kaibat here the two again together and his figures always hovered above this now extensive site watching its activity Kaibat sketched and started painting while trains came by and crowds of passengers passed yet Decided on a scene nonetheless that made his flannery respond directly to the times below We must presume the flannery at the center of the painting Has stopped to watch a train's arrival and departure he thereby made a group of paintings whose iconography And sense of painterly urgency was deeply affected by the trains routes and schedules in and out of San Lazar In fact those schedules are the reason for the pose in the picture, right? And I think we have to Acknowledge that even though we hardly see them directly and only through small signs like a bit of steam and tiny locomotives Seen framed as I've described it if you will that's the action that have stopped the flannery in his tracks pun very much By the 1870s as part of this constant updating of Infrastructure at the station and in Paris as a whole the idea of a unified time took hold and differences in minutes And even in seconds started to matter as never before So the opposition to flannery all time really coming to the fore if you will in these decades Such developments pushed the instant into an ever more prominent place Collectively and culturally preparing it as and for Representation which is where kibot could pick it up halfway if you will The station had prepared for kibot a certain look a certain function and meaning of the instant that he was ready That was ready to be adopted by him if you will he didn't invent his own instance. He partly Sighted them. It's quite astonishing just to give you a bit more Background to realize quite how many decades it took to establish Unified time in Paris and in France namely the decades that stretch between the 1870s Some early experiments included and the turn of the last century Before this effort many median local times functioned Simultaneously throughout France as each city and geographic area set its time according to the sun's passing above that Sights meridian line those times were by the early 19th century average to what I called median local times That's how they had already been a certain standardization, but time was still Average to a specific site this measurement furnished a specific local noon If you will not always exactly but close to what was then called midi bre or midi du soleil at the real the real moon The actual noon at a specific Setting the result was that there existed a time difference in France in the time when the flunner Is at its height of more than 45 minutes between the local time in breast and the local time in nice Okay, just keep that a bit in mind the the various systems and here are just some of the technical illustrations from the period that I'll Visually bore you with for a few minutes before kibbutt reappears to achieve this we're all based on Electric time regulators and their multiple dependent clocks Which were held briefly in their forward motion until they all reach the desired time provided by the regulator clock Which at that moment releases them back into action that makes sense as a system pretty straightforward with ingredients such as Orloge maire mother clocks and or loge Receptrice or as one commentator phrase did or loge direct trace director clocks and Orloge second air secondary clocks the multiplicity and denomination itself became an index of the fact that time synchronization or Uniformation entailed quite profound hierarchies masking as equality and Uniformity right there's always a sort of center that dictates It's uniformity to its artwork network the Parisian municipality established a committee of scientists to study the issue in 1875 right so listen to that and the fact that kibbutt painted the picture We've been looking at in 1876 and it's in the Impressionist show in 77 in 1876 it inaugurated a widely publicized contest among French clockmakers to build For four precision clocks for the purpose of unifying Parisian time the contest concluded in 1877 actually which is also when Mooney is at the Garcenas are so there's a whole Nucleus of Impressionist painters at that very site when this happens and Some of the results of this contest and others to the same effect were on on display much lauded at the 78 Paris World's Fair as well in 1879 the committee now including none other than Eugène Violet le Duke received approval from the city to fund 12 what was known as Centre horaire adopted throughout Paris that would distribute the observatories time and keep a synchronized time while the other clocks of Paris would continue to provide their times these Centre horaire were opened in 1880 Once still exists today at the barrier d'enfer. These are my photos of my pilgrimage day. It's the last one of them Surviving right but it's the Here you here you have the first if you will Clock system in Paris where you would expect to have the observatory time given to you and synchronized with another set of clocks Right and what that did to the uniformation of? Everyone's individual time. I hope is clear if you're interested in this story It's been beautifully and elegantly told in a famous book by by the Harvard historian of science Peter Galison called Einstein's clocks and Poincaré's maps and Fabulous week During these same years clock synchronization was also attempted by pneumatic means and the so-called company general des horloges pneumatic opened in Paris in 1879 in March 1880 their main location began dispensing What was known as time services an event deserving this double-page spread and in the illustrated newspaper? Illustration and in the minds of many Parisians Therefore a time became a product in itself one of those regularly and mechanically provided amenities of The modern city like water gas and electricity as well Try to be a flaner under these conditions in which time is procured in this way It's a little bit like holding up garlic to a vampire I think these years which coincide of course with the principal years of Impressionism even though the problem had become as critical as it ever would are marked by a heightened temporal chaos This is Galison's formulation before the whole thing of the synchronized time was finally Figured out late in the century the negotiation of the various times of everyday life And it's this negotiation I think this this coming into being of this time that is the ground on which the impressionist instant could could flourish and The temporality that nourished the impressionist instant. I want to claim I Was then most acutely felt of course during railway travel when Representing Saint Lazar here at different times or when painting the instant at Saint Lazar as Kaibot did He yielded temporal signs that were not exclusively painterly or even natural but Technologically encoded within the site he chose to paint Indeed we have to imagine that Kaibot when painting his moments of Saint Lazar Coordinated a host of conflicting actual seconds into one painting which never quite amounted to being one The standard local time then in Paris that we've talked about the various other times Provided by the different clocks in Paris which some ran in accordance with observatory time and others not the time at the train Stations which were operating on Paris meantime in the 1870s All of them in France So if you in Paris the observatory matches your stations time But as soon as you leave you actually have Paris time at the stations and your local time Parallel but this train time this Paris meantime also differed by five minutes between the exterior and the interior clocks What was known as waiting room time and track time? To allow for some wiggle room in the departure Schedule and do I wish we still had this you know? So many less trains missed for me, which means That track time was Actually corresponding to want local time Okay, so at on the tracks in Paris It was actually at the same time once local time and finally if you will the time furnished by kibbutz pocket watch Kibbutz time. So he is actually negotiating all those a coulder coulder nothing but a plurality of times This is how Henri de Parville lamented in 1894 when describing This situation it coulder so in some sense, this is the last thriving of Flannuriel temporality as I see it The game of punctuality had never been more complicated and would never be as complicated again Then while traveling the railroads in those decades This is what Flannur is watching here the reasons for this temporal toe who were who were as follows we add some more Stuff to the list by the 1870s the various French railroad companies which profited of course most From a regulated time schema for their operations had established a time of their own based on Paris mean time provided by the Observatory this meant that except for Paris Where hardly all clocks followed the same time in any case a double time standard was typical everywhere It is I already mentioned Paris time on the trains and at the train stations Verses the various local times in town Resulting in potential differences of nearly 20 minutes between the order the wheel and the order the guard So imagine it's 1040 here right now right at 30th Street station. It's 1040 and a good luck catching your train train travel literalized then and materialized time and time in turn was never more product than when it itself traveled the rails Time in fact was brought along for the ride. I think this is the the the strangest of all the things the 19th century's Craze of technology did sent along from Paris like other goods because once a week a Clockmaker traveled the various French routes with a precision chronometer and set the various clocks at the stations with his Finger or poos with his thumb so official time was does an actual train passenger with with everyone else While time became ever more material and visible in these ways It also developed a progressively autonomous presence in modern life as Paris time was literally carried through the country a Pre-established time proffered a standard that separated itself off slowly from previous lived forms of time as The German media historian Bernhard Siegert would say time had closed in on itself as an autonomous System it established norms that granted standardized time communicated between clocks a Priority over the relationship between clocks and their individual users Being on time shifted then not merely Semantically but practically as well once daily labor of keeping accurate time accommodated This is the best character. I found Talking about this process. Here's the here's your flannery a couple Strolling the streets of Paris and they're coming across one of those newly installed clocks here And what does presumably he? Say oh how monotonous it is to see the same time everywhere Okay, how how monotonous it is to see the same time everywhere that tells you a bit about the the the quarrel going on here What did it mean to create paintings about? Instance within these shifting temple conditions at San Lazar It cannot be coincidental that Kaibat chose to focus on the brief urban moment just at as time Standardized around him and when unified time itself became a topic of public debate the unification of time meant after all a certain Aesthetization of time and adherence to modern cultural tastes and preferences rather than natural given a Unified time enhance the thinly nature of time which in turn could in that spectacularized form become more easily digestible within the act of painting What is more it can be argued that the unification of time and all its material residues inside the train stations Pushed Kaibat to make specific choices about what to paint at San Azar Some of his most daring paintings of the group then resulted like those Focusing so exclusively on the encounter between the modern passerby and the modern iron Architecture that was the material evidence of times newfound rationality as if to demonstrate how fully the Formal logic of painting at San Azar was dependent on the train traffic around him Kaibat arrested his imagery at precisely those moments when trains Fascinated his subjects and even endangered the very place and time of his paintings When trains passed by the brisk bridge shook a bit and his body trembled or steam impeded his field of vision Painting and viewing painting became partly scheduled and and certainly specifically timed events in turn Kaibat thus allowed the Impressionist moment to appear as a deduced temple frame not an autonomous one as I've been arguing Producing pictures that arrested formally that rested formally on the temporal schemes by which they had been set up and which they represented The flunner's temporality thereby had been superseded I think the flunner is watching a bit helplessly The very temporality about to undo his favorite temporal non-productive pursuits The fascination of the paintings I think lies in this encounter and the clash between these two incommensurate worlds When almost a hundred years later the flunner reemerged in avant-garde art in the decades of the rise of urban street performance that is the topic of Tom's exhibition he and she reemerged with that weakness about modern time Conquered with the calendar and the clock having now become a full even essential part of flunnery We do are conchies following peace 1969 in which he followed one different random person per day for about three weeks until they entered an apartment building a restaurant or a cab In doing so as he put it he positioned himself I quote him out of space out of time My time and space are taken up out of myself Into a larger system. He said the clock and the calendar Framed every encounter of this contemporary fluner And he had made of them his and here is his one of his descriptions of one of these encounters October 25 10 30 a.m. Christopher Street and Hudson Southwest corner man in a blue jacket He walked south on Hudson Street west side of Street at 10 34 a.m. He enters golden rule liquor store Lucky him for five seven Hudson Street at 10 40 a.m. He leaves golden rule and walks north on Hudson Street East side of Street at 10 42 a.m. He turns east on Grove Street north side of Street at 10 44 a.m. He turns south on Bedford Street east side of Street and enters first apartment building 90 Bedford Street A conscious flunnery ended at 10 44 in the morning a time frame that would have meant little to Baudelaire Poe and the other 19th century flunners who would I think have kept walking Thank you. Oh, no, it's working. I don't have to laser pointer All right. Sorry. I'm just gonna situate some things really quickly. All right Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for to Martha Leah and Tom and the Barnes Foundation and all the other panelists and all of you for coming I Am happy to be here as a representative of the digital side of this discourse So I make performances interventions Net-based projects and videos often inside video game or internet enclave context and more recently I started making my own video games I'm also an assistant professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University. So I'm coming in from Pittsburgh today I'm gonna mostly talk about my works inside the game World of Warcraft and my ways of utilizing that space as a site for Performance and responsiveness to the landscape rather than the task or goal or rule oriented way that that game space is typically used But Before I can talk about the nature of my actions inside World of Warcraft I feel like I probably have a duty to explain a bit more about that game context and What it sort of means to be a cyber fluner especially in that sort of context how many of you have played World of Warcraft Yeah Got one. I was not even expecting one. So I can't tell you how excited I am We'll have a lot more to talk about How many of you are at least familiar of what World of Warcraft is? Okay Okay, so I yeah So this is why I ask because then I have I know that I have to give you a little bit more information about what this is World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game millions of players millions log into the game space divided into servers And share the space together doing quests often to kill things together and Also participating in a highly social environment It parallels public space in terms of scale the representation of the landscape the ability to run into lots of people in these Social spaces that are basically towns And it differs from public space Not only because it's on a computer screen But also because of the way that it structurally facilitates exchanges with complete strangers This is aided by the fact that you're represented by an avatar and this avatar does not point back to who you are behind the screen The possibilities for unusual encounters not guided by the rules that were governed by outside of the screen Was something that excited me about earlier versions of the internet the web 1.0 internet or the anonymous internet The internet before we were bound by our identities before social media connectivity Before our YouTube account says Angela washcoe on it World of Warcraft still maintains elements of that one web 1.0 internet The element of wonder and wandering the internet without purpose is at the core of the practice of the cyber flinear Described by of Jenny Mars of and at the core of a lot of the gestures that I produced in the two major projects in Wow That I'll talk about in a moment This video that you're seeing now Sorry, I won't do that again Ended up being called chase in waterfalls and it was the first time that I actually recorded myself Performing in quotes because I wasn't seeing it that way at the time Inside of World of Warcraft. I had just been playing the game and decided for a moment that instead of doing a quest or whatever It was I was doing that I was going to record a video of me trying to jump from the top of a waterfall Into the water below and see if I would survive I've failed several times. I die. I resurrect myself. I die again I resurrect myself again and then the performance as I now call it felt finished when I finally land safely into the water and In Wow one of the interesting things about game space is like Wow is that everything you do to the landscape disappears over time I can die a million times and come back I can say something to a group of people and in a few minutes the record of those words will be completely gone These qualities both the social culture of the space and the ephemeral quality of the environment led me to make many performances That I no longer use quotes for in the space from 2012 to 2016 The performance is it's important Hopefully it'll be clear to you when I explain the next project But the performances are coming from a position also of criticality about how women's experiences Differ greatly from men's experiences in this space Okay So, okay, I'm gonna go into two of the major long-term projects. I completed inside World of Warcraft So in 2012 My interest in online gaming performance are Organizing and collectivity overlapped when I started the council on gender sensitivity and behavioral awareness in World of Warcraft I've been playing World of Warcraft for over 10 years now. I've been playing since the game started but in 2012 I decided to Begin this council as a platform to discuss issues within the community's public communication channels Which had become quite misogynistic, homophobic and racist on the servers that I've been playing on As the council I started to ask questions about inclusivity Entitlement to the space who gets to ask questions about the community's actions how players are held accountable for harassment Why women are treated so poorly in the space and Why the politics of everyday life outside of the screen ended up so embedded in exchanges in the fantasy game landscape? You know we're trolls and whatnot so after Many years of playing the game properly And becoming really a part of the the player base the community I'm not just sort of dropping in and being like hey What can I take from the space to show the art world or something like that? Which is I think important to the level of access that I have to it But yes, so after many many years of playing the game properly and being a real gamer as the council instead of Continuing that Trajectory of following what the game wanted me to do with my characters Getting more more and more better equipment killing more and more challenging enemies, etc. I started going into major towns To talk to players about why the wow communities at least on the servers that I played on had become so exclusionary toward women LGBTQIA communities and people of color and that later developed into a focus on asking players to share Their understandings or definitions about feminism meant to them I started focusing on this after it became apparent that feminist sorry Feminism the term warranted the most extreme and polarizing responses of any topic I could bring up in the space At some point in this process. I started capturing video of these conversations and started an archive of them Which started to create a geographically diverse picture of? American opinions on feminism at least from self-identified gamers Some right away conversations dove into really delicate and intense subject matter Especially as I mentioned before the anonymity in the space ends up allowing for an intimacy and a lack of sort of physical world accountability for that intimacy because wow is Still relatively avatar-hidden unlike most of the spaces that we now occupy online it maintains that Anonymity and that intimacy so here I'm talking to a player and I heard her avatar name was Chastity and we talked for eight hours and She ends up going to a very very personal story about Sexual assault, which was not something I thought that the council would really be covering as a part of the practice This was very early on in the process And that video is online if you're interested Initially went into the project with a plan to try to change the sexist and racist language used casually inside Wow By rallying people who are also frustrated with the discrimination in the space However, as I talked to more and more players about it the reasoning for its presence became increasingly complex And I realized that trying to change it was not only Naively unrealistic at the time, but also a bit Colonial in its impulse me sort of wanting to change This community to speak in a way that I thought was you know more acceptable So my intention shifted away over time from changing to rather Trying to understand how it came to be and also trying to create safe spaces for Players to share and discuss their experiences around these issues One of the many subtopics of the project involved in investigation into why in more recent years men have Overwhelmingly started to play female avatars in World of Warcraft Through these conversations, which I always disclose to participants will be presented elsewhere like here I began to realize that most of the female avatars that I was talking to were actually played by men And this hunch was backed by Nicky's 2010 census data Which stated that 55% of the female avatars running around are played by men And on the other hand less than 1% of women play male avatars Which is kind of a striking difference Initially, I thought the whole men playing when women phenomenon was kind of interesting and potentially exciting I imagine that maybe men were playing women because they wanted to Experience while from the perspective of a woman or to have some kind of empathetic Experience of learning what it's like to play while perceived as a woman and constantly being solicited for sexual favors But I was wrong Avatar bodies are treated as abstracted objects of desire at least in this space removed from the physical reality of human flesh and the responsibility of having to see the Emotional response to being treated like a sex object even in a casual collaborative battle setting when I'm not even Remotely discussing feminism. I'm just trying to kill this dragon If it's known that I'm a woman in the space even if I jump too often or make too many smiley faces Or maybe I say e in a string If it's if it's assumed that I'm a woman in the space I become something to project male sexual fantasy and ownership onto in this space Women often accept this as their scarcity in World of Warcraft is also a benefit in terms of getting to trade their femaleness for preferential treatment in Guilds which are sort of micro communities that are competitive in the game And also receiving gifts of gold and equipment and so on With so many men playing female avatars women actually have to come out as women to be identified as such Otherwise they're assumed to be men So this became a frequent focus in my discussions as the council I started asking men why they play women Women avatars and I was surprised to find that this answer was pretty consistent Because I'd rather look at a girl's butt and a guy's butt. That's what he's saying here And then it happened again and again and again, and I got the same answer over and over again I have so many screenshots like this and I was wondering how one line of thinking became so pervasive It's as if somebody decided all of a sudden it became an informal rule across all of the servers Here a group of us are trying to figure out the origins of that line of thinking But yeah, I became interested in the social codes produced and enforced that would create this kind of universal canned response These codes became so ubiquitous across servers that many male players play women as a way to avoid a fear of being perceived as gay by other players This I found incredibly shocking that in this fantasy space We can't even be queer like this would be like, you know such a horrible thing to run around and have somebody project that onto you So this player is actually shouting. That's what the red text means He's shouting to the whole town that he plays women to make it clear that he's not gay The project had gained a pretty large following in game, especially on the primary server that I was operating on and intentional inclusive guild was created as a part of the regular discussions that we're having in the space and I I kind of I have stopped doing this process in the last year and I'm my my biggest hope was that the project could ultimately become a prototype for continued actions by other players and so this guild that was created was one way that it can sort of continues to operate Yeah, I used to have this theory about that I think think the client the political climate has changed so much that Yeah, it's I used to say that I thought that maybe some of the reasoning for the extreme language and extreme exclusivity in this fantasy space Was that wow became a kind of dark safe space for people who have to perform political correctness in their daily lives outside of the screen because of you know This lack of real-world accountability in the space and I thought that perhaps people who are afraid of losing their jobs because of their discriminatory beliefs used wow as a social space where they could use their increasingly culturally unacceptable language here without consequence and Then we elected and the our recent presidential race which outed millions of Bigoted homophobic misogynists and the unanswered for deaths of many unarmed people of color at the hands of those tasks of protecting them I think we've returned to a moment where white supremacy is mainstream and at the same time I've noticed in sort of the end end time of The project that I was doing that while players seem to be much more compelled to informally police Discriminatory behavior and seem to actually be getting better. So I don't know what to make of that But I do think that I Hope that I didn't get to elaborate too much on this in this project But the the digital and the physical are entwined so much more than I think So much more than I I hope What was I gonna say? Sorry This is real life many people in World of Warcraft meet each other and get married there You know that this is this is not fantasy It looks like fantasy and it's packaged through fantasy But people are having really real experiences in this space and it's so integrated into daily life now, especially as we have Handheld devices and whatnot that we're very rarely, you know, not connected to What used to be sort of relegated to a computer screen? So anyway, you think what is computing? So in addition to performing this intervention in the game space, I have occasionally brought the performance to live theater audiences Or the process live theater audiences The last iteration of this was hosted by Franklin Furnace archive in New York And I actually recruited two other players of World of Warcraft to work with me in the game for a year And then we came together to produce a live performance of the process And also if you want to see the the long version where I Talk quite a lot about this project particularly the first three years of it and there are a lot of videos as well I Have an essay called why talk feminism in World of Warcraft commissioned by creative time, which yeah, it's very detailed Okay, so at the same time that I was operating as the council I was spending a lot. I was just spending a lot of time and wow And I started another Project in which I wandered the landscape in a way that was not encouraged by the developers of the game After a while of doing this I started convincing other players to join me and began calling the practice the World of Warcraft Psycho geographical association I was really into naming things at the time and institutional legitimacy So operating under this title I performed these long Wandering drifts throughout underappreciated aspects of the landscape in the game inviting players to take time off from the games increasingly structured Quest environment and explore with me This was a 12 hour long version of it. I you know 12 hours not be do conchie time Yeah, so I did a 12 hour long live version at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki Kiasma in 2014 And I was surprised that anybody came On one drift a player guided me to the in-game shrine designed for a very young Programmer who had died a 19 year old aspiring programmer At Blizzard there are very few ways to have a lasting impact on the The landscape and wow and all of your actions are wiped clean after a certain amount of time So this monument sort of referring to something going on outside of the screen was quite significant Here a player asked me to take him to the moon He didn't he was not able to fly so I helped him out, but we could not go to the moon On these drifts they often explore areas of the landscape that are completely inhabited by an artificial intelligence As the game has expanded there are many aspects of the landscape that are no longer useful within the leveling trajectories of the player base The the game is much less designed around exploring now. It's much more focused on Clicking a button being transported going to the next place fighting something So I like to go to these formerly very active spaces and now basically abandoned by human player spaces and You know gives give the AI something to do basically and this is a part of a Practice of misplaying games, which is evident in a lot of my work I Also in this project try to inhabit a state of environmental responsiveness and openness that shares affinities with psycho geography So instead of relying on the game's utility model of using the space I try to come up with games inside of the game in order to create new ways to participate in this Massive and also I think quirky and very beautiful game space So trying to find opportunities for play that's more expressive and not as task oriented Which in wow is difficult to sort of get people to do in the way that they're incentivized to keep clicking Here I'm playing a game with someone where we're just walking around trying to find yellow flowers I'm just gonna show a few I guess nice looking moments from the drifts Letting someone know that our conversation is being projected in a museum, and they're like wow sweet So as often as I like to show this work to you because as often as I was doing this pretty serious community based ethnographic Work as the council. I was also doing equally as many silly and absurd gestures and performances in the space And I'm gonna show a quick clip from an experiment by the Wow's Psycho Geographical Association in which I managed to start a scantily clad or control March with other players And it's important to note that we're walking like the default in World of Warcraft is to always run and through this process We've elected to walk And so we move very very slowly and this looks very very strange in this environment And then we'll move away from wow for a second As dingle as dingle Where we travel from so yeah, so what would an artificially intelligent non-human fluner look like well In another related body of work, and this is the last work. I'm gonna talk about that. I've been exploring since 2013 Is a project called free will mode In this project I put artificial Intelligence or simulated humans into situations where they have the opportunity to break free at least of the financial demands of capitalism And then test how they respond to the situation So these these experiments are happening inside the 90s PC game the Sims And they involve me setting up an architectural context for simulated humans Which is clearly not in line with the game wants you to design if you play the game properly then you Design houses and then you get your Sims better jobs, and then you decorate the Sims houses more nicely And then you you know have make your Sims have kids And then you buy bigger better houses and get better jobs and decorate the houses with more expensive stuff Right sounds familiar And this to me seemed so mundane for the most popular game of its time when it came out it was the best-selling game of its time and Yeah, so I thought that this said something about our you know cultural desire for normalcy and control and to watch ourselves and so on but the environments that I construct force the AI into Situations in which they do not have access to something considered standard in the Western capitalistic and domestic sense And so in this particular work that you're seeing survival rates and captivity the fifth free will mode video I Have actually two separate instances of the game the Sims running on two computers at the same time The architectural setup for both is exactly the same But on the left channel you have all women Sims because in the at least the first Sims is a very strict binary You only you've women or you have men and there's not a lot of Avatar customization possibilities, but on the left channel you have all women Sims confined to the inside of a house They cannot get out of But with more than everything they could possibly need And on the right side you have a set up of all male Sims confined to the outdoors But with still food bathrooms for outhouses a pool and trenches In the free will mode project. I check a box on the interface called free will And and doing this allows the Sims to do what they think that they need to do to survive So they know that they should eat food. They know that they can do that without the human player controlling them So I click that box and I relinquish control of the Sims allowing them to act as they're designed to in their new environments And all I do is run the camera. So where you're seeing and once I start the project The this sort of situation also puts the AI into this position of being surveilled performers Responding to the spaces as they're designed to which ultimately exposes the lack of creativity and overall Stupidity designed in their human logic, which you'll see in a second This is the the very beginning of the piece. So they've just sort of entered the spaces. They are exploring them And I'm gonna advance to what happens 40 minutes into this sort of setup and You'll see Well, they sort of start to break down. They they want the player to intervene. They don't want to be autonomous anymore Without the guidance of the player, they sort of start to fail to take care of their basic needs This if you project humanness onto these figures, this might be a little upsetting So just remember that they're AI and we don't respect AI intelligence. So it's okay. Okay My newest project or newest in the sense that I've been working on it for two years Because after critiquing and misplaying games for so long, I felt like I wanted to make games and So I've been very interested in exploring why the utopian Connective and hopeful aims of the internet devolved into increasingly niche communities with their own very specific languages I'm sure you've heard the term echo chambers thrown around And that there are so many Toxic racist sexist and homophobic and very mobilized groups Who antagonize people working in social justice online? So I made a game called the game the game Through it to interact with a bunch of the most prominent Pickup artists or male seduction coaches At a common place for them presenting people to be picked up So the bar and you sort of are trying to meander through the space But you keep being sort of interrupted by these different figures Who won't let you sort of proceed? All of the dialogue is taken from the pickup artists actual books and blogs and videos So I'm not really projecting on to them what they're like, but they sort of speak through themselves and their work The first chapter was released in the fall at transfer gallery in New York And the full game will be available online soon and the soundtrack was made by the band Shushu. So there's that too Thanks so much Thank you, that was so interesting and disturbing and you gave us a lot to think about Fascinating I Would now like to introduce Doreen St. Felix who is a writer from Brooklyn her Criticism focuses on the intersections and gaps between pop culture Blackness and language her writing has been featured in the New York Times the New Yorker Vogue and Many other publications Currently she is a music critic at MTV news So please help me welcome Doreen St. Felix Good morning, everyone. Thank you for having me Martha and Tom and very excited to have listened to the talks this morning And also for the talks this afternoon So This is my clicker. I want to begin with this photo This is the cover of a later edition of a travel and vacation guide that was published once a year from 1933 to 1964 The guide was alternately called the Negro motorist Green Book or the Negro travelers Green Book Before later dropping the word Negro during its last cycles of publication Victor Hugo Green founded the Green Book He had spent many years walking the streets of America as an exigency of his occupation He worked as a mailman Green understood Experienced and witnessed the peculiar dramas black people could find themselves immersed in walking around or on or inside of This America especially during the era of Jim Crow legislation each edition of the Green Book Offered practical tips and techniques for its ideal reader an Adult plagued with a moderate degree of wanderlust and of practical fear of the sundown towns located in his country Green's intention was to alleviate the quote embarrassments black citizens black citizens endured when breaking their sterile fields When showing up in neighborhoods cities and towns that they didn't previously know It should be said that by embarrassments Green likely meant a range of consequences that would have upset the gentile etiquette of travel writing These consequences have been historically harassment forced segregation heckling Hosing the sickening of dogs rape murder and then the spectacularized murder of lynching The Green Book was meant to be a solution to a problem a Satirical piece that ran in the crisis, which was the NAACP's newspaper Lampoon's very well. And so this is how the piece reads part of it Would a Negro like to pursue a little happiness at a theater a beach pool? Hotel restaurant on a train plane or ship a golf course summer or winter resort Would he like to stop overnight at a tourist camp? While he motors about his native land quote seeing America first. Well, let's just see him try Having studied original issues of this Green Book the essayist Carville Wallace said this There is an obvious irony in the fact that a country that obsessively Congratulates itself on its freedoms Even using them as a rationale for foreign military intervention is so unsafe For its own naturally born citizens that a guidebook this Negro motorist Green Book Has to show these citizens where they could safely exist within its borders It is so ironic that this thing ever had to be published This talk called black mobility on strange terrains Will interrogate the peculiar emergency that is a moving ambulatory traveling black person There are many sorts of movement a black American citizen might need to make in a day They might need to cross the street. They might need to start their car Or they might need to develop an idea or they might need to flex their creativity I'm interested in analyzing the performativity of black movement of tracking both the conforming and aberrant choreographies black people have designed in order to placate or Intervene on those institutions that infringe on their movement. I Will chart choreographies of freedom To do so I'll focus on a literary tradition Discussing the works of the poets Phyllis Wheatley and June Jordan attempting to retrieve their respective geographies This talk will apply a black feminist approach to its subject I'll follow the effects of policing both systemic policing and social amorphous policing on black creativity I hope to coax out the troubled line between black utopias and the reality of the country Between promise and peril. I'm sure that I'll fail Last year I wrote an essay called the peril of black mobility which partly inspired the range of this talk I'll read an excerpt from it now Who is the black Flannery? He or she is a loiterer The roving that permits white fancy white whim white walking in our modern American cities When observed in us and our children reads criminal Some black wandering the public has grieved Michael Brown in the middle of the street Sandra Bland on a road trip To Mir rice in the park a kai girly up the stairs In America cities black bodies stand under many lights and the effect is not liberating one But that paranoia of surveillance There are streets, you know not to walk down for the particular threats that are built in It's maddening Incorporating so many fields of vision planning so many sophisticated routes To go back to the green book You could interpret the dropping of the word negro as an act of optimism You could also interpret the ending of the publication of the guide Which was the savior as the passing of the civil rights act as another act of optimism as a signal to a sort of thrilling idea of the obsolescence obsolescence of racism and Yet there's a word of advice printed at the bottom of the green book. I'll go back to it It's an exclamation of both caution and wonder Carry your green book with you. You may need it Phyllis Wheatley was the first black woman published in America In fact Wheatley's poetry was published before the idea of America had coalesced into reality As a young girl Wheatley demonstrated precociousness At age 11 this girl was already well versed in Greek tragedy English plays and the Vulgate She had grasped a sophisticated understanding of European history and cartography just a couple of years after she learned to speak English He took two religious texts in particular Influenced by clerics like George Whitefield and poetry by Alexander Pope her first poem on Mr.. Hussey and Coffin was published in the Newport Mercury in 1767 when she was just 13 years old By the time she was in her early 20s. She had gained patronage from Royals in England. She was really important She corresponded with contemporaries like John Newton and Thomas Paine Her first volume of poetry poems on various subjects Religious and moral was published in London in 1773 in 1776 which was an important year Wheatley visited with George Washington He marveled at her He sensed a sort of intellectual and elegi kinship with this girl Their encounter seems to have sent Wheatley herself into a swoon She wrote a poem about the man and in the poem she addresses him as his Excellency George Washington So this is one of Phyllis Wheatley's poems. It's probably her most famous We can think of this poem as a sort of ecstatic hymn to transit and it's called on being brought from Africa to America To as mercy brought me from my pagan land taught my benighted soul to understand that there's a God That there's a Savior too in this verse Wheatley is obviously practicing Fervent Christianity that was absolutely appropriate for the time She metabolizes the rhetoric of her new geography, which was a forced geography and Through that issues a missive of subjugation. That is a lot more ambiguous than it sounds. I think I Like to argue that she's attempting to reconquer her biography. There's no other way for her to do it, right? She can't get back to Africa. She also has no desire to do that She calls her blackness benighted. She calls her race the color of sable in This poem Phyllis Wheatley is contextualizing the sensation of placelessness within the practice of Christianity So if it's not clear by now Phyllis Wheatley was a slave It should be obvious by now that the peculiarity of her story is not that she was even literate It's peculiar because she was a slave who was literate The etymology of her name stirs a feeling of brutal grace This is the case for most black names in America after slavery There is the formal meaning derived from the old language from which it came maybe Welsh and Then there's a logistical one The name that explains the journey to identity Wheatley received her name when she was sold off to a wealthy family in Boston in 1761 she was eight years old The Wheatley family gave that gave her their surname as you did with all kinds of property For her first name the wife Susanna Chose the slave ship on which she'd been exported to Massachusetts from West Africa the Phyllis So Phyllis Wheatley was literally named after the ship that brought her to her new life Now as Sadiah Hartman examines in her essay Venus and two acts the travel across the Atlantic cut off many tongues There is an archive that does not exist because it is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean And that this The ocean reminds us over and over again as we travel across it in ways on planes that the archive cannot be retrieved Wheatley's poetry I think dramatizes the effort of remembering before that idea existed in America There's a very strong spiritual exertion that requires her to imagine the travel from her quote-unquote Pagan land Africa to this new place of Boston, Massachusetts Here is an interlude In honor of the conclusion of scientific racism with enlightenment thinking Grape Domainia as it was invented by Samuel Whitefield who was a doctor in the 19th century is The condition or the disease that causes Negroes to run And then this is what this doctor said about Drape Domainia It is unknown to our medical authorities Although it's diagnostic symptom the absconding from service is well known to our planters and overseers And noticing a disease not here to fork last among the long list of maladies that man is subject to It was necessary to have a new term to express it and this is the term that they come up with So this painting which is at the Brooklyn Museum by Eastman Johnson who was a genre painter in the 19th century shows a trio of slaves escaping from slavery and it's called a ride for liberty and If this doctor could have gotten his hands on them, he would have diagnosed them with Drape Domainia I'd like to go back a bit earlier in history While also saying that this time is immemorial clean nanny of the maroons There's a graphic and really triumphant folk tale about clean nanny Who's also known as the mother of all Jamaicans? So this is how the story goes she was leading her tribe of maroons Which were people who had escaped and were running away from slavery. She was leading them through the blue mountains of Jamaica And while doing so British soldiers gave chase They started shooting at this group of maroons Queen nanny caught the blue the she caught the bullets in her ass cheeks And ricocheted them back in the direction of the British and escaped This legend clues us into her billions as a guerrilla tactician Queen nanny had been sold into slavery at a British plantation near st. Thomas parish in southeastern Jamaica along with her brothers He had escaped into the blue mountains Up until her death Queen nanny lived as a fugitive and she built maroon settlements across the island She also conducted dozens of successful raids on British sugarcane plantations Often destroying property as she bid the enslaved to come with her. She also killed a lot of white guys He freed more than a thousand Queen nanny was eventually killed in 1733 or around that time by a British captain named William Cuffy Six years later queen nanny's brother kujo signed a treaty with the British government Agreeing to cease the raids in exchange for five settlements Including nanny town in the blue mountains The reason I wanted to talk about queen nanny at this point in the talk is because I want to introduce the idea of maronage So fred Newton who I'll discuss in just a bit talks about maronage quite frequently maronage is obviously the physical act of claiming Another landscape as a free home for people who have been formally enslaved But it also if we think of it in a literary context is a sort of creativity Creativity of strategy, of course knowing that you should grab the bullets and your ass cheeks and throwing them back at the at the Soldiers who were chasing you is a very creative stratagem for a warrior But I think it also suggests a creativity of self Maronage if we were to practice it in our everyday lives imagines charts and then creates environments out of already existing environments And it's all buttressed by this idea That's a Samuel whitefield had in the 19th century That maybe black people were draped maniacs that maybe the idea of rebellion is inborn It's in the blood and that no amount of conditioning can extract one's natural propensity towards freedom The condition of being a maroon or becoming marooned requires balancing a vision of A black utopia with knowing how to get to it with having a strategy of survival Now this slide Has a quote from tony morrison from her essay playing in the dark which was a series of essays electors actually that were turned into essays and They're really wonderful literary analysis in which she charts the dark and abiding africanist presence in american literature It is a dark abiding presence There for the literary imagination as both invisible and invisible mediating force And then this quote from frent mouton who I had mentioned earlier Fugitivity is imminent to the thing but is manifest transversely And that's from the under commons fugitive planning and black study I place these quotes above gone And historical romance as it occurred between the dusky thighs of one young negroes in her heart This is by carol walker um this Panorama was Mounted at the drawing center in soho in 1994. I recently spent the past month Having a continual conversation with carol walker for a piece that I was writing for a magazine And I kept asking her as many people in this room know how she has been able to Negotiate the constant stream of Quite visceral critique that she's gotten from predominantly black artists and many of those black artists are the generation before her And she has so many interesting answers some that I'll Be able to summarize here Carol walker, I think Is a fugitive of history She's able to Especially as we see in this panorama gone Go into the interior rooms of those mansions of those plantations that have been raised or have been reappropriated for post reconstruction purposes She's able to exhume those mansions of their stories and show them in quite lured yet romantic harlequin landscapes and I think the practice of carol walker Especially at the time that it came which was in the 90s at the turn of post-blackness at the turn of post Modernism opens up for us the idea that a black person might be able to reach into history without an agenda there is three strong current Within interracial black communities that the images of positive blackness are to be Curated or to be thrust into the public before those images of ambiguous blackness And carol walker I think sort of undergirds the second part of this talk that i'm getting into which is how can we Reappropriate environments to tell our stories This is june jordan june jordan was a professor a poet a cultural critic An architect and a foremother of the racial environmental justice movement She published 27 books in her lifetime and one of these is right here It's called his own where and that was a young adult book that was published in the 1970s This book was written entirely in african-american vernacular english and it quite upset some of the more established guard in the black literary world The genres that june jordan worked in range from poetry to criticism to fiction To what tony morrison called political journalism In her poems jordan was often directed by desire to borrow the title from one of her collections She wrote sparse structural odes to sensuality in the ghettos In that sense jordan's sense of the range of her intellectual geography was wide and unbridled But her freedom was bogged down by the usual things She didn't always have money She was raising a young black man in new york city Eventually her environment, which was also her muse Entered and compromised her body giving her cancer june jordan one of this country's most under read public intellectuals died too young in 2002 Along with other black female poets and intellectuals including alice walker june jordan sought to complete the psychic travel that phyllis wheatley initiated june jordan wrote this essay called the difficult miracle of black poetry in america and in that she Offers to phyllis wheatley a generosity of spirit that she never would have experienced in her lifetime She tries to understand why this young black slave would feel such home and solace in christianity Which of course had been the source of hostility in this Hemisphere and this is what june jordan writes It was not natural But she was the first phyllis wheatley Come from a country of many tongues tortured by rupture by theft By travel like mismatched clothing packed down into the cargo hold of evil ships sailing Irreversible into slavery June jordan was also an architect. She did a lot in her life In the 60s, she went to the american academy of roam and there she was particularly fascinated with one structure And that was the shape of the cone Jordan was obsessed with it because it neither began nor ended At the time This is in the 60s Two life changing events encouraged jordan who had been a native brooklynite to redesign harlon There were the riots of 1964 and the birth of her only son that black boy christopher She was a young worried black mother Jordan in collaboration with her mentor the futurist architect and engineer blackminster folly Buckminster foller. He was also called bucky She translated her critical theories about the effect of space on families place and mood Into a blueprint for a new harlem and this is the blueprint right here She planned green space. She sketched longer roads She lifted earthbound apartment complexes into the sky and put them in these wide cylindrical towers that you see there The idea was by lifting literally lifting where people lived day to day The environment could also lift the community psyche out of depression or out of all of those Out of all the moods that black people were experiencing at this time New jordan's plan was called a sky rise for harlem Rid the area of no quarter of corners So I don't know if you can see it there, but there aren't any corners in her idea of harlem her fantasy of harlem And that makes a lot of sense at that time and still to today corners are associated with criminalized activities so drug dealing or people who hang out on the corner because of inadequate housing or The women and men and gender non-conforming people who stand on corners to enter sexual transactions Instead of corners june jordan introduced curvature because for her The experience of a black person walking and continued and continuing to walk and meeting no roadblock and meeting no corner would have inspired in them the creativity 150 years of Subjugation had stamped out We know that she was never Allowed to a plant to apply her plan to the geography in which she lived In fact when this plan was published in esquire magazine during the 60s The magazine totally took her name off of it and just put bucky fallers And by taking her name off of the blueprint It has faced both her genius, but also her psycho geographic perspective about the lay of the land But still looking at jordan's plan now We can see the we can see how environment inspires mood We can also see how environment can expand possibilities of literal physical movement And behaviors as much as it might foreclose these possibilities And this of course is the racialized ideology baked into the makeup of our city grids It informs redlining the ghettoization of predominantly black and brown communities The highway system the metro system This is a quote from wandering philosophical performances of racial and sexual freedom by sarah jade kastronack Now in this chapter kastronack is reading a novel by gale jones and the novel is called mosquito And there's a character in it who's a black female driver as you'll see she says As a listener, I wonder what the relationship might be between a 21st century black female driver And a 19th century itinerant anti-slavery and perfectionist preacher It is often not serjourner truth But tubman who tends to be associated with a pro fugitive movement Namely the underground railroad The underground railroad as a sort of analog to all of the little escapes and the small exits A 21st century black female driver might make makes a lot of sense Of course, colson whitehead's book came out this last year The book is going to be turned into a tv show for amazon in just a bit by Barry Jenkins will be doing the adaptation And I find this quote provocative because the underground railroad has Entered the space of mythology right when students learn about it in school They have no way of actually understanding how it worked. It's just that A tubman who was this magical woman that's often the tenor with which she's discussed Was able to transfer all of these slaves out of their condition via a strange network of exits And escapes and so what would What would an underground railroad railroad look like in this 21st century? How would a black woman as a participant and also a subject of capitalist action find her small escapes and her small exits You might not find them So here we talk about fatal movements. This is of course mike brown and sander bland There are other photos of mike brown and sander bland As there are also other photos of the ones you might see of tamir rice Trayvon martin rickya boyd Eric garner and akai girly the people I mentioned at the beginning of this talk Those other photos of these american citizens show them dead Or in the protracted process of being killed And they're often prostrate in public places Mike brown's body lay in the intersection of the street in ferguson Sandra bland was on a road trip She was heading to texas for a new job prospect that she was super excited for when a police officer stopped her And then a few days later. She was found dead in a jail cell At this point, it's perhaps useful to think of being black in public as a series of gestures that can become criminalized At times these gestures remain unfettered and remain eccentric And that's the source of black genius But there are other times these times When the physicality of blackness when black gestures are conceptualized as already disruptive or already violent And of course The reason why these gestures such as walking down a street or driving down to texas to get a new job Are seen as criminalized is because of the theater of looking the theater of police looking It's part of a systemization of how black movement black gestures are narrated in the greater wider context And and in both public and private space Sandra bland and her car Invites us to go back to the green book In the green book they often talk about how much safer it is to travel in America in a vehicle And in some ways the accrual of wealth that black people experienced in the 20th century Allowed them to get these little shelters that they could go around the country in and These shelters mitigated the theater of white encounter However They're just cars They're just vehicles and you can be taken out of them. You can be ripped out of them. In fact, I wanted to end on these photos of mike brown and sanded bland to interrogate The possibility of new movements for black american citizens So often black people are often forced to make the same old movements In our bodies and our speech the way we live Because the space for whiteness to see us as safe if we're unpredictable or quirky or eccentric barely exists This is a lesson that children are taught when they're quite young If you haven't noticed maybe when you're on public transportation Look at a black child who's wrangled in by his mother for Moving away from her on the bus or walking around to see what's going on at the other end of the train Often she will rain her child back in And that's not for you know, the reasons that black mothers are often pathologized It's not a It's not because this black mother wants to prevent her child from experiencing the world It's that she wants to stop the world from experiencing her child This is leslie mix badden. She's the mother of michael brown This is a still from lemonade, which is a film that Beyonce put out last year The film accompanied her album also titled lemonade And in this still we can see that mix badden has her eyes closed She's possibly crying and she's holding a photo of mike brown the photo that we saw in the previous slide The reason that we see mix badden In that tableau is because Beyonce invited mix badden and mothers who have joined this coalition The coalition is called mothers of the movement and these are women who have had their sons or their daughters or sometimes even their husbands Killed by the state and by the police Beyonce invited them to be uh a part of this Utopia that this film lemonade puts forth lemonade struck this incredible Mind of creativity in black feminists and black women circles on the internet Last year there have been syllabi that have come out that contain all the writing that black women And also black gender non-conforming people have made about the project Now this image is of course inspired from Daughters of the dust a film by julie dash that was uh that came out 26 years ago And that was the first feature film by a black woman So in all the history of film the first feature came out 26 years ago Beyonce puts forth an interesting utopia here. No one's smiling. The sun is setting like in those sunset and those sundown towns I think The idea of a black feminist utopia that does not detach but rather incorporates All of the discriminations the infidelities from both the state and also from men and other policing structures that makes Those discriminations a part of a better world I think that's a useful utopia for us going forward The film begins with Beyonce looking like oh shun who is the goddess of birth and destruction Punging into a pool of water and here we see her emerging This water looks familiar This water might have been the water we played in as children as girls This water might have been the water phyllis wheatley was transported on when she came to america so many centuries ago Thank you So much doreen and I would like to now invite our three speakers up conversation. Those were such All diverse and interesting talks and you all gave us so much to think about. Thank you One of the things that I noticed about Andres and and angela's talks were well your Your talk andre kind of set up angela perfectly in a way because You were really both dealing with time um, we're not dealing with time but Everything that you said about the flaner have this sort of excess time You could see that happening you could sort of see that happening in the world of warcraft and in the other games that you talked about where You had to ask people to kind of take a break from the the very structured environment that that they were in so the sort of association of the flaner with with A kind of luxuriating and time still you know even exists even in the cyber sphere And then yours doreen was very much about space and the sort of necessity of kind of the the right space for Wandering and safe wandering and and flannery. I just begin with a question for you. Is the Flanner An anti-modern figure I didn't see that question coming out of the out of your nice set of observations rather. Thank you Of course Yes, the flanner is a is a modern figure No anti-modern anti-user. Okay. Yes Well, I is the is the answer to that. Yes, too. Um Yes, and no, I think there are What strike me I I like the continuities you've drawn up between the the the three talks but the the differences are also quite striking Where were the 19th century flanners such a figure as I think I said briefly right where where the the activism And the outright critique in the gesture is meant to be Very invisible and very subtle right and and I think this is this has something to do with with angela's Strategies too of trying to figure out how overtly one has to integrate oneself into the regulatory system One is critiquing and and so I think they and and to that they are both I think modern and anti-modern features to it right in in in my case right because the Invisibility and the hiding the endless coding that comes with it right does does sort of lack some of the political outright posturing that we expect of Modern critique to entail and so so I think those are some of the more anti-modern features of the Of the the 19th century that I think the 20th and 20th century Get somewhere close to an answer to just made me so aware of My own privilege and how I don't even have to I don't have to think about To think about being safe as a woman, but I don't have to really think about being out in space and and being Under suspicion automatically or you know sort of being criminalized So it's just sort of interesting that in some ways flannery is about It's like the ultimate freedom, but it's also Terrifying yeah, I hope to at least elucidate the ways that The absence of the possibility of a full and free family for black women and black people can at least allow Covert or subverted ways of going through the cities or even reimagining the cities as June Jordan did Which I think is important to understand Of course, it does not feel good To walk around a city or any kind of municipality and feel that you're being surveilled or being pleased but it also offers by necessity some Fugitive ways of living in America and therefore it allows these communities to Uphold the integrities of their communities who uphold certain codes and languages that they of course don't want to have read by outsiders by the police or by the state Is it about creating new spaces or is it about changing your gestures and behaviors to be It's about like reappropriation Appropriation of an appropriation Which is to say black bodies obviously became capital Many centuries ago given the atrocities of this hemisphere, but what happens if these bodies are able to Not retrieve because that isn't impossible, but re-imagine what they would have been like prior to that intervention Up to the audience in a minute, but first give the three of you a chance to ask each other questions if you have them Anticipating Sorry to put you on the spot if you don't I just want to say that I was just so a little bit. Sorry. Yeah having space for talking about who doesn't get to be a familiar and why and a Deep history of that was I feel like I can't formulate a question because I'm still I actually have a question for you But thank you so much. I really appreciate that. Um Has your positioning now as an ethnographer of this world Um troubled the way gamers interact with you when you're playing are they suspicious of you or are they worried of you? um, I think It depends on what game and what i'm doing and how like I think with the council Um on gender sensitivity and behavioral awareness and world of warcraft I think when people hear that that's what it is In the space initially there's sort of like a oh, I see what you're doing like this doesn't belong here people throwing It's it's hard to really show that experience in a limited context like this But there's you know, there'll be people throwing fireballs on top of us and really like trying to disrupt it at first And then what I quickly realized was that instead of saying that that was like an unacceptable action in this context I said, oh, this is great. Like I want to like hear from you and and this avatar environment facilitates that in a way that's Safe whereas there are other spaces where that's certainly not space even on Or it's not safe even online and I think that that that willingness as a facilitator in that space to be able to incorporate Even even those who like I clearly don't agree with was a I guess a necessity to the continuation of that Project and also made it clear that that that sort of disruption wasn't going to affect the conversation from continuing Whether or not they wanted to do that like They could keep doing it. It just wasn't going to affect The conversation from ever going away But in other spaces, it's definitely Been harder to to do that especially spaces that don't have that sort of anonymity even though I shared the name of the project and people sort of traced back to me in this space I had a lot of issues with A particular pickup artists community that I kind of approached with the same process Initially with some success, but then ultimately becoming so vulnerable that I couldn't sort of continue because of the the way that it was translated through In some ways news media that I didn't have control over so the the anonymity in the space I think also protects me as a facilitator from some of the Highly mobilized more aggressive Behavior that you might know about from things like gamergate and stuff like that Yeah, and I was I was thinking of asking you again both of your contributions so so inspiring What you're the the infiltration of Ideology into this fantasy computing world Would you say this is part of the computing world or part of the world of fantasy? So rather than Would this apply also to sort of other fantastical worlds that are non computerized and And on the internet I'm so much of what you described in in my field would have been a beautiful description of bachner's Semitism or so right and sort of the the ring and you're sitting there for six hours and and all these mythical figures right and And this immense creativity also harbors this endless set of anti-semitic rhetoric and so I'm I'm just wondering again if this is if the system you're describing is Follows the logic of the of the internet and the computer if it follows the logic of fantasy Obviously it does both but but but where's maybe the priority or or the difference between the two I mean, I think the way that it Functions and certainly more people are invested in the lore of world warcraft so the storytelling of fantasy But I think as it's like functionally grown it's you know, it's old now. It's like it's not a bright new shiny game It's you know over 10 years old So Over time I think that the the fantasy has really been subdued and they're the developers seem Although although certainly they they create these expansions and the game continues being built to keep people playing But over time the keep people playing parts structurally Has really become much more important than the the fantasy at least in the way that Participants are engaging with it So I think that structurally what for me it becomes like a sort of social space We're just constantly clicking constantly like being provoked to continue logging on being given quests That's like if you log on tomorrow will give you more stuff almost like, you know Cal clicker or something like that, you know, like it's It's masked in the form of a fantasy game And I think that's also why the sort of space to project all of these Issues outside of the space is is possible because it's not as It's not like a a linear game in the sense of that we might think about when we imagine Video games if we're not very familiar with them right like video games you you do a you go to that cave You get that thing and then you know you progress in this sort of linear way and world of warcraft is not like that It's it's much more of an sort of open world where in the beginning you're given some guidance and there's um a lot more A lot more tasks that are um less related to the the lore so much so Yeah, I don't I don't know. I mean, I think that the the fantasy part of it really has become less important at least to the continued player base Fox brought out is that you think of flannery as type of resistance to Attempts to control the body That those are a great great set of questions kata Let me start with the first one about where where resistance lies I don't I think then I'll slowly move to the to the other ones. I I Think the flanner was a figure of resistance up until a certain point Then maybe others emerged and took over like the more dandified asthe the garker that Bridget this talk we'll talk about later on and so they're they're they're You know, obviously not a strategy of resistance like the flan doesn't isn't Uh Effective throughout time, right? I think it had it sort of 40 50 year Effectiveness, I think then it was submerged and I think now in in later, but it came back and I think that's partly Because the flan nurse subtlety An invisible was such a marked difference to the 19th century's Real revolutionary communists sort of to the arms kind of upheaval right of real sort of violence in against which the subtlety of the gesture actually Operated on a on a on a different level of critique, right? And as soon as sort of that Democratic revolutionary practice subsided I think then the flan and other figures could step up a bit more in their forms of street intervention And so on which didn't have that sort of specter of opposition And associated with them anymore. So I think those are the kind of I think we have to see a kind of history political activism And the the strategies and a bit of a lockstep dance here trying to to interrelate each other's effectiveness Initially is a question for andre, but I think it has implications for the the panel as a whole and I mean Obviously, I think you create this really elegant model, you know, where A rationalized capitalist time kind of squeezes out The heterochronias, you know of an earlier earlier modern regime but You know, I wonder whether the thinking isn't dialectical enough because you know, you create this totalizing model, but of course, you know Capitalist development is always uneven Right, it never imposes itself uniformly across all spaces or presumably all times. And so I think the question for resistance becomes finding Where the where those regimes Create areas of underdeveloped time. Maybe that might be one way of considering it and one way of searching for those areas of resistance, you know, and I mean, okay now I'm going to fudge my like bridge thing because I'm going to move from a Temporal mode back to a more spatial one because it seems to me one of the things we could begin to look at Is not simply the the great, you know mass workers movements that you talk about of the 19th century, but these um Stranger phenomena, you know, what was you know for a white supremacist medical community drapedomania But which you know, uh, a subaltern community might call fugitivity you or we could think about The strange plague of automatisme ambulatoire the strange working class Wanderers who you know unconsciously Are are moving through the city as kind of latter-day vagabonds that you know Early psychology becomes fascinated with in the 1880s 1890s in france, you know, can we can we begin to find these um Last gendered raced Alternate times and spaces That are in some ways the very products Of the rationalizing regime you talk about Tom, thank you absolutely, right when one One could do that that would be absolutely fascinating project to find in all the kind of literary proofs and in the all the other forms of sort of subtle Intervention against this regime at which in part comes Also to the fore in the in the really fraught and long and extensive global spread of universal time Which is not at all even but very haphazard and resisted in very particular pockets Around the world so so this does take 50 or so years and and obviously I never meant to suggest that You know universal time comes about and it it sort of Sits down on the throne of time and never ever can be undermined or Or or subsisted in any form right in all these ways gendered Ethnic in which you have described it it can right, but I think there's also some What I what I wanted to get it was sort of a larger shift here in temporal conception, right and once that Really fundamentally the the the heterochronomity of the previous time had been Subsumed into this more standard form right there just other forms of resistance to it needed to emerge than the flunner right that flunnerial Flowing just was not going to do it right and so that doesn't mean That's all I wanted to point out right obviously that then brought all forms of other kinds of resistance to the to the four But but not the flunnerial kind of the flunnerial kind died and I think I will stick with that proposition To brief responses to that if that's okay, and just maybe it's just that they made me think of of things but aren't entirely directly related but That I guess it's a I didn't mention it's important for me to say that if you don't know this about world of warcraft Like people are logging on for 14 hours at a time People are already on for that much time And so for me to ask them to rethink how they're spending that time Shouldn't shouldn't I don't think should be as radical as it kind of is in that space when people are already committing that kind of time Um, and then there's still like when people do commit to Shifting the way that they're going to spend their time and going on these sort of psychografical games with me There's still things that happen where my identity undermines the possibilities of what we can do together Like if i'm spending a couple of hours with someone and we're having a great time and then all of a sudden it's I'm being asked to like give my Skype information and take this off to another space and have like Undergoing a sexual exchange with this person now because I put two hours with them Like it's clear that they're special and I I want to spend time that way. So I think that um, I don't know in forms of thinking about How these things can sort of even break down when I have this, um, I don't know model of of uh, performing as a flinear in this way Getting stimulating talks that I thought the progression of where progression along the line the flaneur in his You know to use Kant's phrase purposiveness without purpose to use agamba and means without end is an idealized figure of of resistance or of You know something we should aspire to in terms of freedom, but then um, when we when we got to angela's talk um There was both You know you were pointing to both this exciting discovery of new terrain when you were leading people into moments of beauty as they were adopting this flaneur model, but then also the flip side was the total chaos of freedom in the sims in the sims game and then of course doreen pointing to Really flipping our view of the flaneur not just to someone who sees but as someone who is seen Flipping for me this notion of the fugitive, which for the 19th century Is the definition of the modern of course would layer of the by modernity I mean the ephemeral the fugitive and then taking that into a completely new context So for me the the parallels were just extraordinary, but my question is for fester d'imbreschi My question is very simple, but i'm going to complicate it as always I love that you drew out these competing temple modes as you say Oh well now that that's actually working Based on mechanization of the flaneur these two sort of separate modalities that are you know The instant on the one hand a more durational looking on the other hand visual accidents on the one hand will willful looking on the other hand distraction Versus attention And then to to just continue up the point that was brought before this notion of the crowd and and looking to le bon as the crowd isn't A tomaton versus the flaneur as as martha says Representing total freedom. So we have these sort of all these contradictions In these two modalities and so my question is the title of this exhibition is person of the crowd So my question is is the flaneur ever a person of the crowd or is the flaneur a figure person outside the crowd The the the position is ambivalent right and and meant to meant to be ambivalent here right as a As the person of the crowd right there you you have in the man of the crowd in the in the initial poin formulation You have both entities present, right? So it's this it's this continual struggle And and i'm sure bridget will will talk much more about this and has written a beautiful book about the struggle in in the modern age between The individual and the individuals Coming ego coming into being and mapping itself over the social world and the urban world right and while that happens There are also certain solidarities formed along the way of artistic groupings of social groupings of political groupings of which that individual had to Had to fit into while preserving and a form of individual expression So the i i think the the characteristic here is to keep both of those elements absolutely Alive and intention and in this this beautiful dialectic dance because they are both necessary and both deeply modern forms of engagement The individual and the social collectivity. So i i i think the flaneur becomes the figure of Early on the figure who can negotiate those two boundaries beautifully right and and sort of manages to do both to be Himself herself in the crowd and and so it's it's that what fascinates people and then i think slowly As as the crowd becomes ever more an important political entity and so on the the balance shift and so on and the and the And the the power of the figure shifts and dissipates But yeah, central central question of the of the of the exhibition and the talks we've given good good pointing them out Yeah, thank you all so much. Um, I have an observation of a connection between Angela and during durian's talks And I would love for you to comment. It's just sort of an observation. So um, you both brought up psycho geography in interesting ways And I was really interested in the synergy between What you were describing durian about june jordan's concept of a new Harlem and uh, really Uh putting to the fore uh concept of elevation and curvature as part of that urban infrastructure model And I saw that happening in angela's approach to the world of warcraft When you would kind of allow yourself to drift in this new psycho geographical realm and you would fly and you would Engage in elevation and you would engage in circuitous routes So i'm just wondering if you guys have any thoughts about that commonality, um and and that kind of type of approached space In the in this mode very excited watching your talk. I was anticipating the polarization on that idea given that we were Examining two completely different environments And so I think with regards to jordan's plan in Harlem and new york city one of the most gridded cities in america The idea is that the curvature would absolutely obliterate the straight lines of the city It's very rare that you find a curved block in new york city or in any of the boroughs inside of it. And so I think Essentially my guess is that that would be to approximate the sensation of walking in nature of watch of walking in on or Of walking in the place before the place became Gridded or before it became lined But of course ultimately in order to impose that on a small region of land or a small area That contains a very particular population of people that would of course destroy the entire Um city as as we conceive of it You can't just create a circle full of interior circles in new york city because of course in the 19th century all of um american cities began to You know get these grids a boulevard from paris becomes a sidewalk in new york city. And so I think um the um Yeah, I totally agree with that observation. I think that the prevalence of curvature for her was meant to Inspire in the walkers and inspire in the citizens A lack of stoppage should never feel like they had to stop walking to never feel like they had to Be controlled by a stoplight or by the intrusion or introduction of a store that there would always be another destination and therefore they would Continue past the prescribed Expectations that the the city and the government and the state had for them Fast the space was compared to any other game that had come before it how How many details there were that were unnecessary how Like that waterfall that I um fly up in the one video that I showed in the beginning Um, I just I was like how come nothing has ever pointed me to go to this place It looks amazing. So then I went up to the top and I'm like, there's literally no reason to be here But I'm here and it's like the best view I've ever seen in this, you know, and I just was Doing this so much and trying like talking to the first acts of the um, the psycho geographical Projects I was just asking people what their favorite places were in wow Like where where is something interesting that I should know about and so many people were just like I lived I don't look at it like what And I was like, how do you Get it because so much of the early Days of the game was leveling so that you could get the you know thing that you could ride on the horse or the variations of horses And being able to move faster and farther and then being able to fly You know, you can't do that until in the beginning at level 60 which took a really long time So finally like the the original structure of the game was built up to allow you to expand your Understanding of the space over time like babies do or something But what they did over time was sort of break that down so that people didn't have to spend the time flying to to really accommodate lifetime players who just wanted to sort of like get new cool here and not have to actually ever like See much of the space so now you don't have to fly at all anymore really So and that I think also like over the time of the project is that sort of being started being minimized it seemed More and more important for me to to spend time in the space that way and yeah a lot of a lot of players commented like oh You must I knew you were a woman because you were interested in Spending your time this way in the space and you must not be like really a real gamer Because it's not you know, it's not natural for gamers to want to do this Yeah, it's not efficient. You're not like leveling fast enough. You're not getting the new gear and so on So I think that became it became more more clear to me that these two projects were more related than I originally thought Because we are all controlled by the clock Um do one more quick question and then we're going to take a break Tom Sorry, I'm playing favorites Tom When it's your house So this is a question for Doreen Phyllis Wheatley did something incredibly profound with the psychogeography of the middle passage in that little Fragment of poetry that you presented and then you did something I think Equally extraordinary in the way that you extrapolated from that An idea about psychogeography in the way in which we conceived around related issues and I'm just wondering if you could unpack that a little bit because I'll be thinking about it for a long time Which is why I cited he was in two acts at that point in the talk and that is to say Of course the possibility of failure just buzzes around you when you look at phyllis Wheatley's poetry from centuries ago And you have absolutely no sense of her story outside of the interpretations or the publications that happened in In newspapers or her meetings with dork washington or her correspondences with royals from england and so It's a very intrusive practice I think to Anachronistically read this poem and to sort of imbue it with the intention that might have been working Under her outwardly intellectual project right and her project was obviously to contextualize the flight The forced flight of africans to america as a sort of reverse exodus story That's what she's doing in so much of her poetry And ironically what she wasn't I think Able to complete because she died penniless like most women artists do so I think the work that june jordan and alice walker and all of the Black women who were writing at the End of the first introduction of womanism. So that would be the late 70s early 80s the work that they've done to sort of like reconstitute the Person who was phyllis Wheatley very much inspired me when it came to my reading of the poem and like I said the difficult miracle of Poetry in America that essay by june jordan also does that and it does that at length it looks at No archive no record only what is underneath The words only what is working underneath the poetry of phyllis Wheatley to deliver an idea or an approximation of her psyche And of course, I want to totally emphasize that failure is part of this process of Anachronistic with looking we'll have no idea what her true record was but Because of the lack of the archive We have to we are absolutely indebted to the work that phyllis Wheatley has done in terms of Opening a lane for black female writers in this country. We have to imagine it We have to attempt to reconstitute it even if in that reconstitution. We might be Um aberrant going to take a break now to have lunch and You have time to check out the exhibition if you haven't already We'll reconvene at 145. So since we're running a little bit late the program says 130, but we'll start at 145 Thank you for three brilliant talks