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Thanks for visiting the Temporary Travel Office's Blog. Here you can read news about our projects and discussions about critical tourism practices and other developments related to travel and tourism.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Oct. 12 - Upcoming Parking Public Tour (Hollywood, again)

parking public tourists in Hollywood on a November 2007 tour.

We're not sure how we keep getting pulled back into the parking universe of Hollywood, but we're grateful that we have the opportunity to visit with some great folks there and revisit the ever changing (especially at the moment) Hollywood place-scape.
This time, we're offering our tour as part of a series of De/tours organized for the LA Freewaves "Hollywould" festival, and will have a special guest. Hollywood urban planner Sarah MacPherson will expand our itinerary to the equally interesting and overlooked spaces of alley ways.
The De/tours will take place on Sunday, October 12, and the look extremely promising. Below is an overview of the schedule.
4:00 — Ryan Griffis, artist – Parking Public: a Tour of Parking Lots and Utopias: Hollywood
4:15 — Elizabeth Lovins – Excavating the Lost Hollywood Art Colony, a walking pod tour; BYO mobile video player
4:30 — Greg Goldin, architecture critic – Stepping on the Cracks: Skeptical Promenade thru Hollywood Redevelopment
4:45 — Matthew Reynolds, visual culture scholar – The Glamour of Surveillance: A User's Guide to Looking in Hollywood
5:00 — Sara Wookey, choreographer and Deborah Murphy, urban designer – Actions of Time and Space on the Walk of Fame Workshop at LA Forum/Woodbury Hollywood Exhibitions
5:00 – James Rojas, urban planner – playful brainstorming workshop with props and 3D model about Hollywood's future
See the LA Freewaves site for more info on the tours and festival.

posted by ryan griffis # 4:07 PM 0 comments links to this post

Friday, September 5, 2008

Locating the State

A brief, but interesting discussion about locative media was launched by Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky) on Nettime recently. Basically, it started with a reposting of a story from the NY Times about the use of vehicle GPS systems to prosecute criminals in the US. The discussion then moved through the problematics of location information as a personal data set, not unlike biometric data. How does satellite-generated information linking identity and geography become another form of biometric data - another institutional representation of personhood in the archives of biopower?
On a lighter note, Miller also pointed to a mobile walking project hosted by Yellow Arrow, one of the most widely known locative media projects. Surprisingly, we hadn't seen this specific project - Capitol of Punk, a mobile documentary video work that looks at the geography and history of the Washington DC punk and hardcare scene. Some great, brief edited interviews with folks like Ian MacKaye, Ian Svenonius and Allison Wolfe.

posted by ryan griffis # 12:10 PM 0 comments links to this post

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

People's Atlas of Chicago

Our compatriots over at AREA Chicago are plugging away at their People's Atlas of Chicago project. They have taken another step towards improving community feedback and input, incorporating drop-sites where maps can be picked up and dropped off for incorporation into the Atlas.
If you're in Chicago, these locations are:
Backstory Cafe: 6100 S. Blackstone Ave
Women and Children First Books: 5233 N. Clark St
Southwest Youth Collaborative: 6400 S. Kedzie Avenue
Quimby's Books: 1854 W. North Avenue
The Map Room Tavern: 1949 N. Hoyne

Mail maps to AREA Chicago PO Box 476971 Chicago IL 60647

posted by ryan griffis # 3:07 PM 0 comments links to this post

Monday, July 28, 2008

Countdown to Beijing

So, it's no surprise that with the 2008 Olympics opening next month there would be a dramatic increase in journalism focused on Beijing. From the apparently policy-resistant smog to that human rights dilemma that just won't go away, and of course, the endless lists of who is or isn't going to be at the games, there's more than enough to chew on.
As the New York Times often does, they found an interesting cultural angle from which to approach some of the vast changes unfolding across the city and China at large. A recent story focuses on a struggle over the preservation of the historic hutong neighborhoods. While the writer does point to the class inequities that usually accompany architectural preservationist movements, at least in the U.S., the piece tends to find sympathy with the connection between architectural preservation and the preservation of disappearing social traditions and conventions. Interestingly, this is also applied to the socialist-modernist housing projects built during the heyday of China's socialist regime in the 1950-60s. The similarities, and differences, among this architectural narrative in China and the U.S. is striking... modernist, government housing projects in China are still, according to the NYT article, a desirable place to live:

So ingrained is the bias against hutong living among middle-class people that Yan Weng, a forward-looking architect who once lived in the Qianmen neighborhood, told me that he had recently moved into a high-rise. "For those of us who grew up in Mao's China, the government complexes were always the ideal," he said. "And that has not changed much."

Certainly not the case with state-sponsored housing in the U.S. But then again, our housing projects were built with completely different objectives in mind, and our tag-team racialized and capitalist state has produced such a ghastly image of government housing, that it's hard to imagine it being rehabbed.
The article continues, getting to the fact that the hutong neighborhoods are being reoccupied by wealthy foreigners and Chinese alike. Sounds very similar to the process of gentrification that has been happening in cities across the U.S. for several decades - upwardly mobile small families and couples renovating previously working-class bungalows in close-in urban areas. We're sure there are differences, however, given the extreme divergences in history between the two countries.
One place we're looking to for information on how the games and Beijing's development is effecting housing there in more politicized terms is the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions, who just released a new report entitled "One World, Whose Dream? Housing Rights Violations and the Beijing Olympic Games." We havn't finished reading it yet, but the findings seem in line with the overall trend of displacement in the wake of urban redevelopment schemes designed around the Olympics.
Image above from COHRE website, apparently it reads "Demolish quickly, Welcome the Olympics, Switch to a New Look"

posted by ryan griffis # 11:08 PM 0 comments links to this post

Saturday, July 19, 2008

They're No Laff-A-Lympics

We don't know if many people are following the Olympic narratives currently unfolding... it largely seems like they're mostly a non-event for folks outside of journalists, sports enthusiasts, Olympic boosters and those unfortunate enough to live in host cities. And, we guess, those like us with some weird obsession with the intersection of tourism and mega-event found in the modern Olympic Games.
At any rate, some of the stories this past week about Olympics caught our eyes. For example:
The remnants of industrial production coming back to haunt London in its preparation for 2012.
The Australian Press' fears of a sterile Olympics in China.
And reports that over 1600 people have been arrested since June in Hong Kong alone - who knows what the number of arrests are in China at large, but it has included so far some inarguably egregious crackdowns on critics of the state.
We've come across some books that we're looking forward to getting into, in trying to come to a better understanding of the mechanics of the contemporary Olympic Machine and localized resistances to it. A few of the more recent ones that we are particularly excited about are:
Helen Jefferson Lenskyj's Inside the Olympic Industry: Power, Politics and Activism that seems to be written from a scholarly position that is simultaneously invested in resistance to the inequities enacted in Olympic host cities.
Mike Weed's Olympic Tourism
Andrew Billings' Olympic Media
and more generally related to the political economy of sport arena construction, Joanna Cagan and Neil deMause's Field of Schemes.

posted by ryan griffis # 1:22 PM 0 comments links to this post

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

The Truck Is The Message

We're getting lots of interesting announcements from our friends this Summer, like this from Ken Ehrlich about the Active Trucking project, with long time collaborator Branden LaBelle:

Tracing the infrastructure of trucking and transport, the project is an examination and meditation on the truck and the trucker as a slippery signifier. Oscillating between the pure functionality of the movement of goods and the poetics of being on the road, trucking generates an array of mythologies that in turn are tied to concrete policies regarding trade. The project attempts to playfully represent this spectrum through videos and drawings installed at FIT, Berlin, a project space housed in an old petrol station.

The project has already taken place in Los Angeles and Tijuana. And as their collective website, Errant Bodies explains the project further:

Based on the networks and infrastructures of trucking and roadways, Active_Trucking maps and notates idiosyncratic aspects of this system. Acquiring information from a variety of sources including trucking companies, notes from excursions on the road and interviews with truckers in the Los Angeles area Active_Trucking seeks to present narratives about the existing system and structure of trucking in the United States and give form to these infrastructural expressions as both economical and alchemical. We are particularly interested in the movements and intersections that occur on the roads of the US both as material embodiments of trade policies, that is, as an example of the constantly negotiated abstract dynamics of transport and markets that have significant local impact, and the mythic fantasies of the open road and the desire for freedom. In the spaces of the highway, we imagine narratives of "Free Trade" intersecting with Easy Rider: multiple narratives that mark the road both as a site for cultural mores and economic activity. The labor of the trucker, the mechanics of trucks, and the workings of dispatchers and related transport companies, feature as efficient systems always on the edge of disruption, distraction, and delay according to the complications of laboring bodies fixated on the roadway.

posted by ryan griffis # 11:41 AM 0 comments links to this post

Monday, July 14, 2008

Interrogating Public Space with Fritz Haeg

Travel Office friends Nato Thompson and Fritz Haeg recently had a conversation about Fritz's hybrid art-architecture-education practice and how it interfaces with notions of the public and the private. We like this response to questions about public v private space:

Right now I am most interested in private spaces that have the capacity to be public. It’s not that I have given up on public space (though maybe I have!) but I do think that private property, and in particular the home, has become the focus of our society. We are obsessed with our homes as protective bubbles from the realities around us. Today's cities are engineered for isolation, so starting a salon in your living room or growing food in your front yard become ways to subvert this. Perhaps at this moment working from private space out may be more useful than working from public space in.

We're currently working on, with our long time associate Mark Cooley, an upcoming curatorial project based on artistic, collective and otherwise coordinated uses of agricultural methodologies to transform the political and social dimensions of place. Fritz's work will be included. This should happen in Wash D.C. area in the Spring of 2009. More on that later...
pictured above: Edible Estate Regional Prototype Garden #3: Maplewood, New Jersey, established July 8th, 2007 / as viewed from the upstairs bedroom
Photo: Fritz Haeg

posted by ryan griffis # 3:02 PM 0 comments links to this post