Digital technologies and material culture in post-earthquake Christchurch
Dr. Christopher Thomson, University of Canterbury
The liquefaction that damaged Christchurch’s built environment during the
2010/2011 earthquakes has been followed by a period of liquidity – a period of
rapid change in the sense sociologist Zygmunt Bauman designates by his term
‘liquid modernity’ - affecting this small city’s economic activity, social
composition, and material culture (1-15). The physical rebuild of central
Christchurch so far has been dispersed among marginal pockets, with a centre
that is in large parts still empty of life. New hubs of commercial activity have
emerged in the inner suburbs and around Christchurch airport1. The outflow of
Cantabrians seeking to live elsewhere, and the inflow of rebuild workers from
around the globe continues to influence the city’s ethnic composition;
construction-related visas have risen year on year since the earthquakes, and in
2014 international rebuild workers came predominantly from the Phillipines,
then the UK, then Ireland (MBIE Quarterly Job-Matching Report - June 2014; MBIE
Quarterly Job-Matching Report - September 2014). [Slide 2] Many cultural and
artistic responses to the earthquakes have through their exploration of material
forms either celebrated fluidity or sought to re-assert solidity, [Slide 3] even
drawing on natural and cultural objects arising from the earthquakes for their
materials. In many cases heritage architecture, and significant objects and spaces
have been destroyed or changed radically; in some cases valuable cultural
heritage has been re-discovered or revealed by demolitions and subsequent
archaeological study.
To me the most compelling aspects of post-quake fluidity has been the
opportunity for public debate and community re-engagement with urban
planning and social issues. It has become commonplace to note the greater sense
of civic awareness and community-led initiatives that have arisen, particularly
around the many participatory, creative events and projects run by the group
Gap Filler. [Slide 4] Gap Filler has quickly evolved into something much more
than its early-coined, stop-gap name implies. Co-founder and Chair of the Gap
Filler Trust, Ryan Reynolds commented recently that
1
Good examples of this are Victoria Street/Carlton Mill corner and Addington.
“With the massive and controlling city plan that’s underway, Christchurch
is in some key respects an even more rule-bound society than previously,
despite the chaos and disorder. This inflexibility makes something like the
‘transitional city’ movement both crucial and probable – the carving out of
spaces and times where the little people are asserting creative impulses
and self-determination.” (n.p.)
Reynolds’s important point is that the urban planning for the rebuild has been
characterized by a strong reaction against fluidity, and that perhaps the defining
question for Christchurch continues to be how to balance the needs of
government and commercial property developers with the evolving needs of
people, community groups, and businesses. In exploring alternatives to the topdown approach, Gap Filler has developed “techniques to liberate space and
engender fluidity” (n.p.); one of many such experiments is the cycle-powered
cinema on screen, which was set up on the former site of an iconic bike shop and
screened films about NZ’s cycling history, all powered by members of the
audience on bicycles. This need for this type of approach has been registered in
the IT sphere by Stephen Judd, when he commented on the government’s grand
plans for a high-value, high rent central city ‘Innovation Precinct’. Although it
adopted the language of startup tech innovation, it has failed to appeal to
startups, or even medium-sized IT businesses because it was too expensive and
seemingly failed to understand that the city needed to replace its low-rent,
marginal spaces in order to attract the next wave of IT innovators (Judd).
[Slide 5] Before moving to my main topic, I’d like to turn consider
another Gap Filler project, this time an architectural example. The Arcades
Project, a series of 6.3 metre high archways that together can form an open-air
arcade, was a centerpiece of the 2013 Festival of Transitional Architecture
(FESTA). It “was born from a desire for new ways to add movable infrastructure
to empty sites for community and public events. Designed to be reconfigurable
and relocatable, the structures have the potential to enliven vacant sites around
Christchurch for the next 25 years . . . While the shape of the arches references
Christchurch’s rich Gothic Revival architectural heritage, the design’s strippedback engineered timber frames hint at a possible architectural future for the
city” (“FESTA - The Arcades Project”). The project’s name alludes to Walter
Benjamin’s monumental, unfinished work of the same name, which was a study
of the Parisian shopping arcades of the 19th century. Most interestingly from my
perspective, is the connection between the fragmentary, collection-like structure
of Benjamin’s study, and the implied purpose(s) of the Arcades Project to
“enliven vacant sites”. The Arcades Project opens up questions about how we
experience walking through the city, what kinds of activities can take place, and
what kinds of authority govern these activities. The Gap Filler Arcades Project is
about imagining possible experiences, about the substitution of many kinds of
activities, about use and reuse. This is true literally because it is designed to
enables events of different forms to take place: markets, speeches, music gigs, art
works, and so on. It seems to me that it points to the importance of material
connections with history, but refuses to be bound by them. It stands in stark
contrast to Christchurch’s other homage to the Parisian arcades, the suburban
shopping centre known as The Tannery [lower right in slide 5].
In short, I think the Arcades Project is suggestive of the ways digital
media interacts with our sense of our physical environment. Writing about a
digital photography, Michelle Henning asks, “What difference does it make if
people encounter these technologies, not as the absolutely new but in the form of
repetitions, continuities or revivals?” Referring to other writings by Benjamin,
she explains his distinction “between two types of repetition or reworking: one
which, in returning to a distant past, de-naturalises the present, reminds us of
the unfulfilled promise of earlier times; the other which smooths over change,
presenting the new in continuum with the old, as the heir to what went before”
(223). Gap Filler’s Arcades Project represents a kind of challenges us to denaturalise the present, while the Tannery provides a smooth and pleasurable
transition as it invites us to experience many of our old shops behind ‘brand
new’ 19th century facades. The tensions Henning identifies, and which we see
emerging in architectural forms are also visible in some of the most interesting
digital media projects seen in Christchurch recently, to which I now turn.
I’ve suggested that Christchurch is experiencing a sharper awareness of
its historical present, but I will focus now on a specific aspect of this sense of
historicity: I want to ask how are digital media and data-driven applications part
of the response to the need for re-imagining and revitalising Christchurch’s
urban centre? Is there a relationship between digital media and urbanism that
would inform our understanding of the rebuild? How are such representations
related to the physical transformations of the city and material experiences of its
citizens? And is the distinction between material change as a primary cause and
digital media as an immaterial representation or response too simplistic?
There is a now a rich literature on the connections between digital media,
networked computing, and the shaping of urban material cultures. Much less has
addressed the post-disaster context, like we face in Christchurch, where it is
more a case of re-build rather than re-new. In what follows I suggest that Lev
Manovich’s well-known distinction between narrative and database as distinct
but related cultural forms is a useful framework for thinking about the
Christchurch rebuild, and perhaps urbanism more generally. In short, Manovich
argues that distinct from narrative, which is the representation of events, the
database is an exemplary cultural form, one that “represents the world as a list of
items which it refuses to order” (85). Manovich argues that collections,
encyclopaedias, dictionaries and spreadsheets are all instances of this ‘database
form’, as are database-driven websites and apps. I suggest that the database form
has been prominent in Christchurch because it is better suited to representing
spatially dispersed, multiple, and emergent patterns of experience that have
arisen in the fluid post-quake situation.
[Slide 6] CityViewAR is an augmented reality app created by the Human
Interface Technology Lab at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. Its initial
purpose was to enable users to explore Christchurch after the earthquakes.
Using a mobile phone or tablet, users could see 3D models of damaged or
demolished heritage buildings overlaid on the real landscape rendered by their
device’s camera. The platform was subsequently adapted for a heritage project
entitled High Street Stories, which provides a curated collection of images, video,
histories, vignettes and interviews that explore the uses of the High Street
district over time. The CityViewAR platform has also been adapted for use on the
(now not to be publicly released) Google Glass platform(“Augmented Reality For
Glass » CityViewAR for Glass”); and for a prototype called ‘BuildAR’, which,
although not fully realized yet, aims to help planners and architects visualize
building projects by providing the possibility of multiple 3D models of the same
space. This would mean multiple architectural models for a site (such as
alternate future designs) could be simulated.
High Street Stories is the fullest application of the platform so far, and
gives access to content that can be explored either via the AR mobile app or
through the project’s website (“High Street Stories”). What interests me about
High Street Stories is the combination of a database driven, collection-like
structure, and its explicit focus on stories as the content within that structure.
The history of the High Street area is told through a variety of narratives focusing
on industrial history, stories about retail, cultural uses such as art galleries and
music venues, personal memoir, and stories about illicit practices like
prostitution and the drugs trade.
Is this de-naturalising the present, or smoothing it over? My initial sense
of the intention behind the design of AR interfaces is that they aim to create a
continuous experience, despite mobile network limitations that might
sometimes slow them down. Their intention is usually to smooth over change, to
become invisible. There are two important issues I will consider in relation to
this. First, there is a shift in the agency of the user-subject of AR media in the
sense that AR supplies a way to modify our experience of urban space, albeit in a
rather limited way. We are offered the ability to return to a view of pre-quake
Christchurch at any time. The platform allows us to reinstate an image of the old
built environment in three dimensions on a screen while positioned in real
space. In this way, it gives the sense that we can continue to engage with the
place and its history, despite its physical absence. High Street Stories’ AR
interface encourages users to experience urban space as part of what J.
MacGregor Wise terms the ‘clickable world’ of new media, that “responsive and
information-filled” world (159) that is constantly vying for our attention, and
which tends to re-shape the relationship between agency and forms of control
through the ever-increasing demands of networked communication. In short,
having lost much of our city, we are offered a measure of control to re-live or
reimagine it via the clickable world, but that control operates within the
affordances and limitations of mobile and network technologies, and thus also
imposes demands upon the user’s attention and upon their capacity to act in
ways contrary to those pushed by the user’s device. To the extent that High
Street Stories prioritises our interaction with content as an array of choices
within given user interfaces, it supports Manovich’s claim that in new media
often the “database … is given material existence, while narrative … is
dematerialized” (89).
A second, related issue, is the way in which High Street Stories flattens
historical and temporal differences amongst the narratives it holds. Both the AR
interface and the website situate the diverse histories it tells in a continuous
virtual space. The interface tends to obscure the historical relationships between
the many micro-narratives that make up the project, since it emphasizes their
‘equivalence’ as stories for the user to choose from and explore, as dots on a map
and as database records that can be retrieved and displayed in a variety of ways.
This again emphasises the capacity of database forms to offer different ways to
access and interact with content (particularly the content’s spatial distribution),
rather than emphasizing their historical specificity. As Wise comments,
“Augmented reality systems seek to overlay the world with information attached
to people, places, and objects. Though the goal is to add to experience, the danger
is that the information itself stands in for the object (just as data selves take
priority over physical selves)” (161).
[Slide 7] Another somewhat similar project that has been developed
more recently is Sound Sky, a “contributory art project” based on the Roundware
software developed by US sound artist Halsey Burgund and others. Sound Sky is
presented on its website as “an invisible layer of memories, stories, secrets and
discoverable futures within Christchurch”. It enables location-based recording
and playback of audio, some of which may be narratives, but many of which,
from what I’ve listened to, are fragments, conversations, and recordings of noise.
It is a wonderful project precisely because it is sound-based, and because it uses
the listener’s location to determine the stories recorded nearby that will be
played back, and, insofar as it is possible with two channels, the ‘direction’ of the
story. A multichannel installation played Sound Sky, with more precise spatial
reproduction and an algorithmic selection of recordings, at the Auricle Sonic Arts
Gallery in October 2014. The key difference here is that users are not given a
selection from a list or a search function to listen to stories, as this is determined
by location. In this sense, groups of stories will tend to build up around locations,
becoming denser as more stories are added. Story and place are correlated.
Nonetheless, like CityViewAR and High Street Stories, while Sound Sky provides
unique experience and insight into the interaction between place and sound, it
tends to flatten the temporal element of the recordings.
Lastly, I’d like to consider a rather different type of project, one that
brings together a number of contributing databases containing text narratives,
images, video and other media relating to the earthquakes. This project is the
CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive (“UC CEISMIC Canterbury
Earthquake Digital Archive”), which I have been personally involved in since
2012, a few months after it began. I will not go into much of the background to
the project, but will touch on the points most relevant to the present discussion
of narrative and database forms in the context of a digital archive.
Unlike the High Street Stories or Sound Sky, CEISMIC is comprised of many
sub-projects of varying natures. The CEISMIC website, therefore, is essentially a
search index that brings together metadata about this variety of earthquakerelated resources. This search function is enabled by DigitalNZ, a unit within the
National Library of New Zealand, who are another key partner in CEISMIC. In
this sense, CEISMIC is an index of multiple databases of content, and in general it
displays the metadata that was most easily extracted and combined. As you may
know, crosswalking multiple datasets is often very difficult and although
CEISMIC does this successfully in many areas, there are also gaps and issues that
haven’t been overcome. The implications of this are that while CEISMIC provides
fantastic assistance for finding content across more than 90,000 records, the
activity of searching and filtering via search facets is relatively distant from the
full text content itself.
There is a strong focus on stories, but as far as I know they are all stored in
databases of one form or another, and, to varying degrees can be explored via
interfaces that either emphasise their ‘narrative’ or their ‘database’ aspects. I’ll
give one example: QuakeStories, created by our Ministry for Culture and
Heritage, is one key sub-project contributing to CEISMIC. It has collected stories
of people’s earthquake experiences, and in many cases images too. Although
there are both narrative aspects and database aspects involved, as with High
Street Stories we are presented with many stories to explore. However, a key
difference is that QuakeStories employs little of the usual database-type ways of
accessing content. Users do have the ability to browse and search, but this
functionality is de-emphasised in favour of simply browsing page by page
through stories, starting with whichever one is profiled on the home page.
Although the majority of stories are geo-located, maps are only used on each
individual story page, rather than by providing a distant overview of the spatial
distribution of all stories.
Among Manovich’s conclusions about the relationship between database and
narrative is the suggestion that we want to bridge this gap, we want a kind of
“new media narrative” that can “take into account the fact that its elements are
organized in a database” (94). While Manovich argues the answer is to follow the
example of avant-garde film, Katherine Hayles has considered this question in
the context of object-oriented databases that can model events more sensitively
than relational databases (Hayles, in Packer and Wiley 20). The University of
Canterbury’s particular contribution to the CEISMIC project is QuakeStudies, an
earthquake research repository that uses just such a ‘object-oriented’ database,
and employs a data ontology that includes events, people, and places. Although it
goes some way to try and model events in time, it is limited, not least because of
the unending amount of work that generating such metadata creates for curators
or administrators. Nonetheless, object-oriented models and semantic web
technologies do offer data structures that we might consider more similar to
narrative and that allow better expression of complex or nuanced relationships
such as the relationship between a person and an event.
In all these examples, a common thread is the suitability of database forms
for presenting space, and narrative for presenting time. This is not at all a new
observation, but I think it has interesting implications for the post-earthquake
environment in Christchurch at present. The key difference is that unlike
narratives, databases do not need represent a single point of view, or a limited
number of point of views to be coherent objects of their type. [Slide 10] Given
the need to re-imagine urban space and the way in which spaces are keenly
involved in the production of social relations, I conclude that we’re seeing lots of
interesting digital projects because database as cultural form appears better
suited to communicate in certain ways in this situation. In particular, digital
media has been prominent in PR for the Central City Blueprint and for particular
building developments. However, I think digital media and the database form are
still potentially very problematic in terms of their influence on user agency and
their tendency to become a substitute for material interactions in some
instances. I also speculate whether, in the post-disaster context, database forms
appeal ideologically and politically precisely because they can simply aggregate
multiple points of view, or adopt points of view like the ‘fly through’ or ‘fly over’,
that doesn’t correspond to a mundane human perspective. This is a possibility
that remains for me to investigate via comparison with other types of natural
disaster or social upheaval. [Final slide]
Works Cited
“Augmented Reality For Glass » CityViewAR for Glass.” n.d. Web.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge : Malden, MA: Polity Press ;
Blackwell, 2000. Print.
“FESTA - The Arcades Project.” n.d. Web. < http://festa.org.nz/arcades/>
Henning, Michelle. “Digital Encounters: Mythical Pasts and Electronic Presence.”
The Photographic Image in Digital Culture. Ed. Martin Lister. London ;
New York: Routledge, 1995. Print.
“High Street Stories.” n.d. Web. < http://www.highstreetstories.co.nz/>
Judd, Stephen. “The Enervation Precinct.” Once in a Lifetime: City-Building after
Disaster in Christchurch. Christchurch: Freerange Press, 2014. 98–99.
Print.
Manovich, Lev. “Database as Symbolic Form.” Convergence: The International
Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 5.2 (1999): 80–99. Web.
MBIE Quarterly Job-Matching Report - June 2014. Ministry of Business, Innovation
and Employment, 2014. Web.
MBIE Quarterly Job-Matching Report - September 2014. Ministry of Business,
Innovation and Employment, 2014. Web.
Packer, Jeremy, and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, eds. Communication Matters:
Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks. Abingdon, Oxon ;
New York, NY: Routledge, 2012. Print.
Reynolds, Ryan. “Desire for the Gap.” Axon Journal 5.1 (2015): n. pag. Web.
“UC CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquake Digital Archive.” n.d. Web.
<http://www.ceismic.org.nz/>
Wise, J. MacGregor. “Attention and Assemblage in the Clickable World.”
Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and
Networks. Ed. Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley. Abingdon,
Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2012. Print.