CCRN: Politics & Pandemos
The Pandemic, the Pan-Demos and Art
Prof Nikos Papastergiadis
University of Melbourne
n.papastergiadis@unimelb.edu.au
Nikos Papastergiadis is Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures, his most recent books include On Art and Friendship (2020), Museums of the Commons (2020).
Recent events have presented profound challenges to our conception of the viability and security of life on this planet. From political changes such as Brexit, to the climate fires in Australia, and now the Covid pandemic, in sum we confront radical questions about the stakes of survival and the hopes for the future. During this upheaval we have also witnessed an exacerbation of the existing social divisions of race, class and gender. Disproportionate harm is meted out to the precariat and people of color. In these new times of crisis the environmental damage is at its extremes in the rural regions and women are more likely to suffer from domestic violence. There is also the generalized fear that the political landscape is being dominated by discourse of isolationism and authoritarianism. At a time when the world needs to come together to find common solutions there are growing signs of hostile retreats and aggressive barricading. How can art hope to offer an alternative in a context where social relations are conducted at a distance or mediated through masks? In what ways has the rush to on-line events given a glimpse to new forms of connectedness? How can art generate new forms of ambient aesthetics that can enhance the vitality of co-presence in these highly mediated environments?
Pan-demos and the Public Museum
Dr. Jasmin Pfefferkorn
University of Melbourne
jasmin.pfefferkorn@unimelb.edu.au
Jasmin Pfefferkorn is a member of the University of Melbourne’s (UoM) Research Unit in Public Cultures and holds a PhD from UoM on emergent museum practice.
With on-site visitation restricted, museums around the world have rushed to retain connection with their audiences via digital platforms. While museums have presented online offerings since the 1990s, these are often positioned as a way to increase physical visitation, and this content is generally understood as either an archive or marketing strategy. With the option for physical visitation constrained, public museums are refocusing on the capacity of their digital platforms to facilitate sociality. This has resulted in expanded digital offerings. Taking an exhibition focus, we have seen four main ways this is transpiring: through virtual tours of existing exhibitions, creating new exhibitions (both online and offline) responding to the pandemic, cross-institutional collaboration, and crowd-sourcing content. From the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition of ‘pandemic objects’, to the Rijksmuseum’s social media challenge to recreate famous works from the collection, new avenues for public participation are emerging. Activities and objects from the ‘private’ spaces of homes are entering into the public space of museums, then projected back into the home. These developing dynamics offer the opportunity for increased sense of public agency and ownership within the institution. This virus has brought a multitude of challenges to our lives. However, the mobilisation of digital sociality by museums provides insight into how publics and their institutions are co-constructing spaces and practices for creativity and connectedness.
Infrastructures and Imaginaries of the Communicative City
Dr Curry Chandler
University of Pittsburgh
rcc37@pitt.edu
Popular discourse is proclaiming the death of cities as the twin pincers of viral pandemic and pervasive virtuality spark dramatic reappraisals of public space and pose existential threats to urban inhabitants. Policy responses to these challenges tend to frame urban life as a precarious problematic to be solved through technocratic managerialism. Data-gathering technologies of surveillance capitalism are now recast as essential tools for tracking viral transmission, while the quality of interpersonal connections is increasingly measured by broadband speeds. Under these conditions the very notion of the “communicative city” must be meaningfully disentangled from urban infrastructures and imaginaries that recuperate ideals of communication within ubiquitous systems of capture and control. I argue that the discursive delegation of communicative ideals to technical infrastructures functions to depoliticize practices of city planning, obfuscate the social inequalities inherent to urban development, and foreclose opportunities to formulate an emancipatory or oppositional urban politics. These approaches foreground technological solutions while obfuscating entrenched social problems whose causes are inherently human. I suggest that scholars of urban communication should centralize a political commitment to spatial justice in the communicative city concept in order to directly address the human dimensions imbricated in the overwhelming technical challenges facing cities.
Urban Political Thought in the Time of Covid
Dr Alex Lambert
National University of Singapore cnmlat@nus.edu.sg
Alex Lambert is Visiting Fellow at the Department of Communication and New Media at the National University of Singapore. He researches the politics of platforms and creative cities, focusing on progressive change in these interwoven domains.
Popular discourse is proclaiming the death of cities as the twin pincers of viral pandemic and pervasive virtuality spark dramatic reappraisals of public space and pose existential threats to urban inhabitants. Policy responses to these challenges tend to frame urban life as a precarious problematic to be solved through technocratic managerialism. Data-gathering technologies of surveillance capitalism are now recast as essential tools for tracking viral transmission, while the quality of interpersonal connections is increasingly measured by broadband speeds. Under these conditions the very notion of the “communicative city” must be meaningfully disentangled from urban infrastructures and imaginaries that recuperate ideals of communication within ubiquitous systems of capture and control. I argue that the discursive delegation of communicative ideals to technical infrastructures functions to depoliticize practices of city planning, obfuscate the social inequalities inherent to urban development, and foreclose opportunities to formulate an emancipatory or oppositional urban politics. These approaches foreground technological solutions while obfuscating entrenched social problems whose causes are inherently human. I suggest that scholars of urban communication should centralize a political commitment to spatial justice in the communicative city concept in order to directly address the human dimensions imbricated in the overwhelming technical challenges facing cities.