http://vectorsjournal.org/issues/index.php?issue=2 Vectors, the relevance of the issue's theme - mobility - was cast into surreal relief by the events leading up to and following Hurricane Katrina. The disaster along the Gulf Coast painfully underscored the stakes of and access to mobility in the United States circa 2005. The dead in the city of New Orleans were those unable to leave, primarily those without the financial or physical resources to evacuate in advance of the hurricane. They were disproportionately African American, poor, elderly, ill, neglected. They were, in a word, immobile, trapped in the raging waters that consumed the historic city, left behind to die.

Understanding the role of technology in the chaos of Katrina is complex. Within days, countless websites sprang up to help track those who had escaped and to organize relief efforts. Hackers quickly produced new mash-ups of Google Maps, outlining the damaged areas and allowing concerned friends and family members to pinpoint affected neighborhoods. These bottom-up technological efforts provided valuable services and some comfort in the wake of the disaster, particularly given the slow response of the federal government. But the limits of technology were plainly revealed as well. Computer simulations and government reports had predicted the scope of damage years earlier. Yet virtually nothing had been done to reinforce the levees despite repeated requests from officials in Louisiana. Processed, parsed, and analyzed data cannot produce change in a country that has abandoned its domestic infrastructure, neglected the poor, and failed to realize the hopes and possibilities of the Civil Rights era (not to mention the Emancipation era.) Never mind that Black bodies and Black labor once built New Orleans.

Each of the projects in this second issue of Vectors in some way serves to remind us of the social and cultural imbrications of technologically-mediated mobility. If the telecommunications and entertainment industries (and countless consumers) are now enthralled with all things mobile, the pieces collected here underscore that mobility is first and foremost a social phenomenon, one with long and troubled histories. From the i-Pod to the cell phone, smaller, faster, more tote-able technologies are everywhere touted as the next wave and celebrated as if they are somehow inherently liberating. This issue explores the possibilities of mobile technologies (and mobile scholarship) while also illustrating that mobility is not equally available to everyone nor inherently a good thing. To the over half million Americans displaced by Katrina (the largest national displacement in U.S. history), being mobile no doubt feels bittersweet.]]> en-us Tue, 10 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT usc.vectors@gmail.com http://guantanamobile.org/vectors/ Vectors' project presented here.

This publication brings together material from the road trip and its interviews, from extensive research, from the film produced for the road trip, and from the website for the larger project, underscoring the mutability and transformative potential of digital documents. Working across multiple platforms ”" both digital and physical ”" and drawing from an ever-expanding database of resource materials to create civically-engaged products, the Guantanamobile Project underscores the intermedial quality of 21st-century life. The use of audio and video in the piece published here sets the stage for the user's deeper engagement with a host of moral, legal, and political topics. It also reminds us that mobility is not equally available to everyone.

Like others pieces in this issue, The Guantanamobile Project also blurs the line between 'scholarship proper' and public discourse, encouraging an expansion of the scholarly concerns of legal and cultural studies to a broader audience. Given the circulation possibilities of digital publication and the increasing marginalization of the humanities within the university, it is crucial to understand such public sphere activity as scholarly activity rather than as something scholars might do 'in addition' to their research. Such a perspective informs the ongoing push within the academy toward a new type of public humanities that can connect the work of various scholars to issues of public relevance and import.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://guantanamobile.org/vectors/ http://placestorming.vectorsjournal.org/index.html
McGonigal's work poses perhaps the most challenging reconfiguration of scholarly practice contained in this issue of Vectors, but it is not to be dismissed out of hand. Those who are involved in game studies have been fighting an uphill battle for legitimacy during the past decade or so of this nascent field's development. Most have attempted to position games on a safe continuum with related forms such as cinema, literature or performance, laboring to retool the conceptual frameworks from those fields to bring insight to the structural, narrative and social dimensions of gaming. McGonigal's approach differs in that it insists on being both formally and conceptually innovative; suggesting that, indeed, the theorization of emergent gaming practices is most productively enacted through a "playful" mode of engagement as well as a serious one.

McGonigal dares her users to dismiss this method, which takes literally academia's often-stated but seldom-realized goals of collaboration and relevance outside the walls of the university. For those who are willing to traverse these familiar boundaries, PlaceStorming serves as a reminder that spaces are also places and that abstract coordinates are rooted in physical locations, which are both culturally diverse and geographically specific. Ultimately, McGonigal's argument offers a convincing counterpoint to conventional wisdom regarding mobile and pervasive technologies, which would have us believe in the spatially dislocated nature of life in an increasingly mobilized world.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://placestorming.vectorsjournal.org/index.html http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/02_issue/wifibedouin/ Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan invokes the image of a Bedouin wandering the remotest deserts by camel, dazzling the natives with media broadcasts from a battery-powered radio. McLuhan compares the wonderment of the native with the occultation of everyday technologies among urban dwellers who, despite being immersed in a media-rich environment, are no less in need of developing their own technological "literacy." With Julian Bleecker's Wifi.Bedouin, the concept of inserting wireless signals into unexpected places ”" and thereby suggesting new ways of thinking about the world ”" has been updated for the 21st century. The result is a compelling revision of the dominant logic of mobile and pervasive media, emphasizing locality over ubiquity and promoting awareness of the limits of even the most fetishized new technologies.

At the risk of suggesting that, to some extent, the medium of the Wifi.Bedouin provides its own message, Bleecker's device is perhaps best understood as a cognitive tool, a means of creating conceptual and technical possibilities rather than a discrete object unto itself. The Bedouin also merges the ordinarily disparate worlds of the tinkerer-hacker-slasher with that of the academic or cultural investigator. In fact, the Wifi.Bedouin breaks no new technological ground, relying instead on several relatively common digital components that are ingeniously assembled into a self-contained, mobile package. More adventurous users are invited to try their hand at assembling a Bedouin themselves by following the step-by-step instructions in the Wifi.Bedouin DIY guide. For the less technically inclined, Vectors is soliciting project proposals for an ongoing series of field tests in order to explore the possibilities and limitations of both wireless technology and the cultural imaginary it has activated.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/02_issue/wifibedouin/ http://vectorsjournal.net/issues/02_issue/mobilefigures/
In an early design meeting for the project, David Lloyd expressed the hope that the piece might produce in the reader a feeling akin to dropping into a bog, a sense of displacement and radical reorganization. As such, he was interested in mining the affective registers of argument set free from the strict linearity of the traditional essay, opening up the possibility for contingency, juxtaposition, accident, and meandering as modes of scholarly engagement. Through a process of iterative collaboration, Creative Director Erik Loyer and Lloyd have succeeded in modeling a more rhizomatic form of scholarship that simultaneously sustains linear argument and pushes hard against it. In deploying this 'both/and' logic, the piece points to new modes of historiographic inquiry by forging points of intersection between oft-distinct modes of thought, linking up political economy, visual culture, literary theory, and an investigation of subaltern agency. It creates a space for those associative lines of thought that regularly get pruned away as we force our ideas into the confines of linear print. Through the Vectors collaboration process, it also became clear that Lloyd was unearthing fresh dimensions to his argument, allowing a new 'form' to reshape what he could do and say with 'content' he knew quite well.

Such a multi-layered structure is exquisitely appropriate to the subject matter at hand, for one of the lessons of the piece is to remind us that the Irish were at once reified in their figuration by the British and always also outstripping that very fixity, enabling and escaping the logics and rationalizations of capital at one and the same time. In their mobility and their stasis, the Irish limn both the dream of perfect abstract labor and the impossibility of that dream's full realization.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://vectorsjournal.net/issues/02_issue/mobilefigures/ http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/02_issue/cultivatingpasadena/index.htm Cultivating Pasadena began life as a public exhibit at The Pasadena Museum of California Art, expanding multimedia into several tactile, sensory and spatial dimensions via the contours of immersive installation. That version of the project generated a lively response, igniting as it did countless reflections and narratives from museum visitors about their own recollections of the history and development of the city of Pasadena. Portions of the project have been extended indefinitely at the museum and, as such, Cultivating Pasadena maps important new directions for the public humanities, illustrating timely transit routes between scholarly considerations of historiography, memory, and the database and public engagements with those same terrains. We've here excerpted one section of the DVD-ROM that was produced following the museum installation, one focused on transportation in Pasadena's development, an appropriate selection given our theme of "mobility."

"Transportation" intersects with issues of mobility in some fairly obvious ways, particularly given the status of Southern California as a region that "came of age" with the automobile. But Cultivating Pasadena tracks mobility along other, less literal, trajectories as well, particularly in its brilliant use of "rephotography," charting both the mobility of the city across time and the mobility of memory and pleasure, especially as these are scaffolded by the work of the image. In courting speculation about the space between the "before" and "after" images, the project invites the user to imagine other Pasadenas and other histories, including histories of loss and displacement.

Labyrinth Director, Marsha Kinder, describes one subset of the collective's work as "database documentaries," inventive multimedia projects that create a hybrid space where theory and practice collide. Drawing from cinematic language, they push these grammars toward new intermedial potential, crafting project after project that beautifully blend form and content, technology and theory. In many ways, the pioneering effort of the Labyrinth Project helped to create the space from which Vectors might emerge, and we are pleased to be able to present this sample of their work. It raised for us interesting questions about the status of the "excerpt" in the digital age, for selecting a portion of a digital project for reproduction is not the same as publishing a chapter of a book. Nonetheless, much as a book chapter functions as a lure for the larger project, we hope that this selection from Cultivating Pasadena encourages you to learn more about the Labyrinth Project.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/02_issue/cultivatingpasadena/index.htm http://www.vectorsjournal.com/issues/02_issue/hypermediaberlin/Hypermedia_Berlin_Presner.htm http://www.berlin.ucla.edu/hypermedia (Use this link to open Hypermedia Berlin before launching the Flash 'walkthrough' to the right.)

In his 1960 book The Image of the City, urban planner Kevin Lynch showed that a city-dweller's sense of alienation correlated with the degree to which he or she could - or could not - mentally navigate surrounding streets and neighborhoods. Further, he found that a city's "imageability," which is linked to the presence of legible and identifiable kinds of markers, contributes to a sense of familiarity and the acceptance of the city as a recognizable place. Todd Presner's Hypermedia Berlin extends Lynch's ideas through the creation of a series of layered maps of Berlin that not only chronicle the evolution and dissolution of the city's districts, architectural landmarks and boundaries through multiple chronologies, but that also reflect the city through diverging ideological lenses.

The project, designed to be shared with students and instructors internationally, offers a new form of scholarship in which "visitors" discover the city's multifaceted history through its sedimented terrain. Rather than moving through the histories traditionally arrayed in linear text, Hypermedia Berlin invites users to begin in the streets, parks and landmarks that constitute the city and then to move either up or down on a temporal axis almost decade by decade, or outward, from one place to another. Further, Presner views the project as a foundation upon which others will build with the goal of crafting a rich and culturally dense collaborative "hypertext encyclopedia."

Hypermedia Berlin is the result of a collaboration between UCLA's Center for Digital Humanities and Stanford University's Humanities Laboratory. Based on a series of interdisciplinary courses taught in Palo Alto, Los Angeles and Berlin, Hypermedia Berlin is designed specifically for use in classrooms, where it offers a multidimensional platform for a variety of applications and may serve as a model for investigating other urban spaces.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://www.vectorsjournal.com/issues/02_issue/hypermediaberlin/Hypermedia_Berlin_Presner.htm http://www.vectorsjournal.org/issues/02_issue/wegzeit/index2.htm
In one cartogram, Offenhuber shows what he calls "zones of velocity," which illustrates differing sectors according to the speeds traveled therein. Another model shows how the experience of temporal distance is generally asymmetrical depending on a range of factors; he calls this "the rush hour slope." The maps offered by Offenhuber help demonstrate the potential malleability of cartography, as well as the significance of the manner in which data is made visual. While we all know the limits, ideological and otherwise, of maps, Offenhuber's attention to the relative over the absolute offers a productive refiguring of cartographic principles which can only be enacted in a dynamic, digital form. Wegzeit is interested in exploring ways of representing space in an abstract sense, merging the subjective parameters of individual navigation with the broader implications of an integrated network of data.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://www.vectorsjournal.org/issues/02_issue/wegzeit/index2.htm