Poet. Performance Artist, Architect: Vito Acconci. A Computer makes a city seem almost unnecessary.
One minute 41 seconds.
March 27, 2011
A computer makes a city seem almost unnecessary.
Posted by justinlincoln under Uncategorized[4] Comments
[4] Comments
Computational Thinking 2011 
March 27, 2011 at 10:32 pm
Wow, this is fascinating. A laptop as a portable city, with libraries, objects, and even our friends.
My copy loses sound at about 1 min and 14 seconds. Not sure if that is part of the performance. He seems to keep talking.
March 29, 2011 at 8:10 pm
My hope has always been that virtual spaces and connectivity would make cities more palatable to people. There’s no question that cities are more efficient with respect to per capita impact on the environment. If people begin to see cities as irrelevant and spread themselves out geographically, the environmental impact might be terrible.
March 30, 2011 at 4:12 am
Unless they all plant their lawns to rutabagas…
March 30, 2011 at 4:11 am
So he’s using the word “city” to refer to the connections that were previously only possible through actual physical proximity (although just to be difficult, I might cite Voltaire’s correspondence, but he did spend 6 hours a day writing letters from Fernay.) It’s a metonymy – referring to one thing by talking about something closely connected – that he’s then consciously shifting, dropping the primary meaning of the word “city” to go with the definition of “city” as “place where stuff happens”.
(sharon, the sound cuts out for me, too)