Transcript of presentation at Pecha Kucha

1.

The last 3 or 4 years (or the last two for Mac users like myself) have seen a noisy and relentless explosion in geo-locative data mapping. Google Earth , through its various iterations, has established itself as a stable, widely accessible platform with a huge variety of APIs delivering a vast amount of commercial and cultural data, from Californian real estate, to excerpts from Google Book Search and embedded YouTube video. As the accessibility and near ubiquity of the interface has grown so has the sheer diversity of information presented on this platform.


Since almost every explorer of this virtual world is also capable of contributing to its authorship the experience of using Google Earth, with multiple layers and KMZ files enabled, is already one of sheer data overload. Layer upon layer of information is presented to the user in a disorientating matrix in which various narratives, agendas and subjectivities collide.





As we move inevitably toward the full integration of social networking sites and local e-commerce, it seems sometimes that our impulse to map the territory, to overwrite it with reams of information (a process already automated by the Application Programming Interface) is a kind of virtual land grab. Inevitably as data is added it is also erased.

We have already seen and forgotten the creation of a 5metre high real-life Google place marker in Gübbner Strasse. The virtual and the actual have a tendency to bleed one into the other, just as the symbolic aspires to the real. Perhaps in the strange new discourse of simulation we risk forgetting that the map is not the territory.


The Invisible Kiez proposes no antidote for this emergent condition of data density fatigue. Virtual space is already colonised to the point of overpopulation and the nightmare of infinite regression described by Borges in “On Exactitude in Science” , in which he imagines an empire where the science of cartography has become so exact that only a map on the same scale as the empire itself will suffice, seems, already, to be at hand. Rather than propose a cure, The Invisble Kiez seeks merely to observe correlations in these laval flows of constantly written and overwritten data sets in the hyper-local. It seeks to explore narrative as a three dimensional “virtual text object”. A narrative structure that has multiple points of entry and exit, a secret, subjective psychogeography of a specific Berlin neighborhood.



2.


I first visited Wrangelkiez in 1993. Then its geography, along with that of the rest of Berlin, had only recently been subjected to a violent upheaval after the fall of The Wall. Wrangelkiez’s geographical situation had been an extreme one. Virtualy surrounded on three sides, the Oberbaum Brucke closed off, along with Treptow to the South East, the area between Bethanien Damm and The Landwehr Kanal was a forgotten corner of what was then SO36.

In the history and mythology of Berlin, themselves violently re-written any number of times, this small corner of the city is further subdivided by ghost architectures.

The route of the Luisenstädtische Kanal still provides a boundary as does Görlitzer Park, in the nineteenth century the site of a station which provided the city’s first connection to Vienna and the reason for Wrangel Kiez’s coming into being. The line of the U1, which in ‘93 still terminated at Schliesicher Tor, follows in part the line of the old city wall and all these geographies and their various erasures continue to contribute to a sense of place.




Since 1993 there have, of course, been many changes but the relentless gentrification and renovation that has swept some other parts of the city seem here to be occurring at a, slightly, more benign pace. Nonetheless it is the nature of ghost geography that it is fragile. Constantly subject to erasure, memory loss and overwriting. The MediaSpree poses a threat to the thriving but delicately poised community of Wrangel Kiez as rents rise and the inevitable displacements of renovation and aggressive new property development become apparent.

The Invisible Kiez seeks the virtual reinstatement of these historical geographies both through the integration of existing historical archives and data sets and as visualised in schematic three dimensional models.The tiered structure, seen in the earlier illustrations, is formed of historical Berlin maps each of which will be populated with geo-specific data and links. As vertical data correlations and juxtapostions emerge, along with horizontal ones, the anticipated modle is that of a three dimensional cats cradle narrative.



It is in the lacunae in this narrative, its inevitable gaps and omissions, that perhaps some new insight into the city is to be gained. As Berlin marches toward a new future of corporate integration, manifested in glass and concrete, there is an ever greater need to understand the idea of the city in ruins. Of liminal space and Neimands Land as a resource in which alternative economies and social structures can flourish.




3.

The Invisble Kiez observes these territorializations of both real and fictional territory at street level. Specific evidence of claim and counterclaim are sought in the emergent language and counter texts of the graffitists, taggers and fly posters.In this continual overwriting and undersigning, defacement and decoration (often re-appropriating space seized for the commercial imperatives of advertising) the city’s subtexts, the secret ebb and flow of its desires, the city’s dreaming, can be read.

The Invisible Kiez is, in part, a plea that the texture and texts of the city should not be subsumed beneath the imperatives of uber-scale corporate architecture, with its hostile surfaces and digital advertising screens. Whilst recognising that nostalgia is a trap and dynamic change is the very essence of the city, the past, here of all places, can never and (must never) be erased.To quote from Azzari’s Futurist Architectural Manifesto of 1927, "The cities of the future will contain no useless garbage of trees and flowers or loathsome promiscuity of animals, but geometrical buildings in glass and armed cement."

In the 21st Century surely it is imperative to escape the false inevitability of this teleogy, to foster flatter economies of re-use and re-appropriation. New, virtual, low-footprint architectures, temporary, improvised and contingent, as opposed to more redundant office space. These architectures can be as ephemeral as words and images, mini city states of data rather than bricks and mortar.

The writing is already on the wall.