How Public? Rebar explores San Francisco's privately-owned public open spaces

John Bela, Blaine Merker, Matt Passmore

REBAR

Surveillance as Medium

Kris Paulsen

PhD Candidate, Rhetoric with a Designated Emphasis in New Media ~ UC Berkeley

Picture Book

Erik Davis

UC Berkeley

Linda Williams, Commentator

Rhetoric and Film Studies ~ UC Berkeley

__Matt Passmore.__

(Founder of Rebar)

Rebar: collective of creators designers and activists

• Environmental installation
• Surrealisn
• Urbanism
• (another ism)

Explore niches or loopholes in regulatory space. We sample elements from physical/cultural landscape and put them in novel context.

Sampling remixing is a generational critique

Rebar Project 001. The Cabinet National Library

Rebar Project 002. (Park)ing

Rebar Project 005. EnCanment, performative canning. American can mfring company

COMMONSPACE PROJECT (southern exposure gallery offsite project)

Exploring spaces that can be reprogrammed for creative acts. Legal ambiguity and norm ambiguity offer opportunities for creative work

Privately Owned Public Spaces – legal window

How public are these spaces?

Designed to meet the needs of the public, what band of the public?

Under heavy surveillance. Some have signs, some do not. People do not debate it.

What rights are protected?

The way in which we use them can affect their legal structure and governance regime

Assert our right to free expression – they have a yoga class in there?

Explore how they fulfill their role as public places

First Mapping them

Documented their information. Put it on a website and let people explore it

Paraformances: blur boundary between actor and audience and expand permission for open expression

1. Tour – inviting people on a tour of them
2. Kite flying
3. Counterveillance : did surveillance cameras in popos have a chilling effect? We took it as a given.

camera run by owner denotes mastery

would cameras in the hands of people denote their mastery? Warm behavior, ad-hoc exhibition?

What is the governance structure. Have to test them to find out what they really are

C3 normative behavior is acceptable in these spaces

THE SPACE: 101 second street.

Is used as a social space. Atrium is filled with old-fashioned public?

Four cameras in the ceiling. Security desk is around the corner.

There is a scripted performance

Ask people if you can photograph them (shaking hands ,hugging, other)

If they complain, ask them to photography you and hand’em the camera

Also ‘seed’ the space with a few performers in business drag to cooperate and fill the space with implicit permissions by modeling this not quite familiar behavior

After an hour, security guard came out and asked for ID building tenants had complained

One conclusion:

Building tenants are also governance. They don’t perceive the place as a public. The see it as corporate largesse.

More conclusions:

In re: Legal but non c3 actions

Presence of live human seemed to inhibit people more than cameras.

Psychogeography seems to effect the behavior more than the cameras.

People like interacting, to perform and to play.

__

Missed Kris Paulsens’ piece__

__Erik Davis__

Question: how will these values transform in relationship to coming generations. Will growing up with these technology install new expectations?

There is a generational concern:

How do we send a message forward about values? What do we want to carry forward?

In the shadow of the as-yet-unetheorized subject that is neither rational decision maker or pomo amalgamation

Privacy requires a person –something to protect. It is a mode of living. Public sphere (of anonymous others) is bracketed – we get private.

Culturally conditioned shelter.. defines boundaries of the self. Privacy is related to interiority, subjectivity, maybe even consciousness?

Expanding sphere of visual technology, makes our questions more visible too.

Monitoring devices challenge the self. Especially the surveillance.

But with Sousveillance, it is an experience recorder, existing AT the boundary of public and private.

Nonprofessional photography has been a medium of negotiating spaces between private and public. In terms of imagining the private life.

Originally distributed for a few people. One of a kind.

Shift into digital – a cluster of information, no longer one of a kind. Eliding materialization (or making it less necessary), less a physical trace more a mathematical approximation. More communicable as well. ‘noiseless communicability’

Private photo that was can’t call private

Experience vs. capturing experience is no longer a division