Thursday, October 29, 2009

Constraint City- the Pain of Everyday life



I recently came across this art/social project regarding a physical/emotional mapping of a city space (“literally”) onto the body. The participants in this project wore a corset, which allows for psycho-geographical writing and rewriting of the city. This project reminded me of the readings for this week, especially Tim Dean’s writing on “Cruising as a way of Life.” This notion of the pleasure-pain principle is quite apparent in the Constraint City project (even though the project doesn’t focus on a “sexualized” or queer space). I am curious as to how the programmers/artists for this project would conceptualize queer space in relation to public/private space, and the coding and negotiation of these spaces when approaching wireless networks/areas. How do we understand this “invisible architecture” that is supposedly transposed onto the body? Especially considering this notion of the stranger or “other” bodies? How is queer space re-negotiated in this context?

2 comments:

  1. here's the website too for anyone interested....http://www.yugo.at/equilibre/

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  2. This brings about the notion that it may be harder to give "the queer plight" proper representation (when compared to photos of the Holocaust and slavery iconography, etc...), but that perhaps a metaphorical queer "simulation" would be more successful?

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