“Hello Mr. Yakamoto! Welcome Back to the Gap! How did the assorted tank tops work out for you?” The year is 2054, and the protagonist’s name is John Anderton, PreCrime agent, played by Tom Cruise. Anderton had his own eyes removed, and had a new pair implanted. In the Gap store he hears for the first time the previous owner’s name. The Gap’s ‘customer-friendly’ iris scanner mistakes Anderton for Yakamoto.
Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report Steven Spielberg – Minority Report, 20th Century Fox, 2002 is full of such moments. With the exception of Minority Report’s highway and transportation system the world in 2054 doesn’t seem to be that alien; most of the technologies presented in the film are either in the making or in full swing. Iris scanning has already been put to practice in airport restricted access zones and in American high-security prisons. It’s not that much of a big step towards iris-scanning applications in the ad world. If this happens, the Iridian Technology Inc. shareholders -just to mention one global player in the biometrics industry- will become billionaires overnight. As an initial step in this direction Rem Koolhaas’ OMA introduced an electronic customer-identification/service system in the US Prada flagship stores that either promises or threatens to track shoppers and their ‘needs’ Rem Koolhaas, Miuccia Prada, Patrizio Bertelli – Projects for Prada Part 1, Fondazione Prada, 2001 Will you accept or reject cookies in the public realm? Will there be a way to protect data that are too private to be made public, even when it only boils down to the purchase of tank tops? “How to deal with the cookies” will be the core question when technologies such as iris scanning will become ubiquitous.
In the 1960s and 1970s the burgeoning presence of large-scale ads and commercial hyperboles in the public realm were both a source of inspiration and self-reflection for artists, architects and designers. In 1972 the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour published their seminal book Learning From Las Vegas Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour – Learning From Las Vegas, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1972 (revised edition in 1977). The title reflects the authors’ intention not to debunk the Las Vegas Strip’s outrageous aesthetics and entrepreneurial strategies, but to assess its workings, and the repercussions such aesthetics and strategies could have on both architecture-cum-city planning and the world at large. Learning from Las Vegas also advocated a reevaluation of the Architectural Tools of the Trade partly by means of appropriating methods used in other fields of knowledge, such as the graphic interfaces applied in cartography and statistics.

There is a tendency to discuss the connotation of the public realm predominantly with its hardware in mind. It’s obvious that hardware innovations trigger discussions about the elasticity of public and private boundaries. The public realm is -and always has been- a platform for social innovation, and therefore a test site. After all, shifts in behavioral patterns stem from hardware shifts, and vice versa. What can be learned from Learning From Las Vegas is the need to investigate the public realm with all available tools, prior to becoming an active actor, whether the actor is an artist (questions asked) or as a designer (answers formulated).

Recent projects undertaken by the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and its participants address this fascinating field of tension between ‘questions asked’ and ‘answers formulated’. The projects, Design Your Own Academy, Nomadic Banquet and Ethics of Visual Ads in Public Space research the complexities and contradictions of the public realm by means of addressing its inherent hybrid nature.

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DESIN YOUR
OWN ACADEMY
gave DAI’s participants the opportunity to modify and/or expand a small industrial building in Enschede’s Roombeek area, a neighborhood destroyed by a devastating fireworks explosion a few years earlier. At this moment new houses are being built in close cooperation with Roombeek’s residents. After many years of formal education DAI’s participants had the opportunity to reflect on and design their ideal academy building.

In his recent book In The Bubble, Designing in a Complex World John Thackara – In The Bubble, Designing in a Complex World - The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2005 John Thackara states: “What matters most to all learners is activity, not architecture (…) What learning needs most is a lot more space, as well as time, than it gets right now.” Quote from: John Thackara – In The Bubble - Chapter 7, Learning - page 148
Since education definitively needs a lot more space and loads of time, the institute -the building- should be perceived as a hub rather than as the nucleus of all learning. Reconsidering the project’s initial outline Johan Akkerman interpreted education and project building as a flow of activities in, around and beyond this hub. With his proposal he states that any location, space, or object is potentially appropriate to harbor collective and individual educational activities. In order to make DAI visible from a logistic and public point of view, he proposed to print ‘DAI-related’ stickers, which emphasize the way institute and participants embed with the public realm, whether it be Roombeek, Nanjing, or New Delhi. Thus the public realm’s hybrid nature is reflected in DAI’s equally hybrid, geographically independent activities, ‘tagged’ by means of Akkerman’s stickers. Regarding the way he responded to the Design Your Own Academy project, I value the visual discretion of his input. In their apparent simplicity the stickers represent effectively DAI’s stance with respect to ambient education and cultural exchange.



AKKERMAN'S
ETHICS OF
VISUAL ADS IN
PUBLIC SPACE
relates to John Anderton’s eyes the moment they become unavoidably illuminated by the iris scan laser beam. In this project his ethics are clearly artist’s ethics: he who prefers to ask questions rather than to formulate answers. Akkerman’s strategy is not intended to accommodate new ways of advertising as a designer might do, but rather to create momentary voids, or ‘retinal blanks’. His proposal to build an advertisement light box executed in white porcelain disrupts the passerby’s expectations and plays with the connotation of white porcelain as a fragile, pure and sanitary material, sharply contrasting with the public realm’s roughneck vandal-proof reality.

LEARNING FROM
NEW DELHI
could become an interesting sequel to Learning From Las Vegas. I’m not so much referring to the architectural discourse Venturi et al ventured to trigger, but to the necessity to analyze and appreciate previously neglected social and cultural networks. New Delhi street food vendors -or any street food vendors in the developing world for that matter- are an indispensable undertow in the city’s social, economical and cultural fabric. This fabric’s warp and weft conveys important information about the city’s makeup and contains valuable data, which might serve to generate new networks.

With this project the breadth and versatility of DAI’s undertakings reveals itself. If there is one ritual that triggers social and cultural exchange it is eating. During the DoorsEast conference DAI mentor Debra Solomon extended her Nomadic Banquet http://nomadicbanquet.dutchartinstitute.nl project into the streets of New Delhi. Together with Indian DoorsEast attendees and DAI participants Solomon explored the New Delhi world of street food and unraveled the intricate fabric of food production and transaction. In this edition of the Nomadic Banquet it was not so much the ‘hardware’ that was investigated, although some baffling ‘hardware solutions’ were encountered. The core analysis was rather pointed at the intuitive efficiency and social wealth of the street food vendor network. Johan Akkerman took part in Nomadic Banquet and focused on one specific New Delhi locality where several street food vendors are based. Through mapping and portraying this locality he discovered the inherent value of the street food vendors’ wide social network and the way it generates relationships that go far beyond the core activity of preparing, selling, buying and eating food.

Having taken part in Nomadic Banquet definitively has broadened Akkerman’s scope. Inevitably his New Delhi experiences lead to an intensified and broader relationship with any biotope he wants to leave his imprint in. In that respect Nomadic Banquet’s chief accomplishment is the way art and design can become a meaningful blend of ‘questions asked’ and ‘answers formulated’. Happily this also manifests itself in the way Akkerman successfully has questioned and enriched his initial assumptions and ongoing ideals in the course of two years at the Dutch Art Institute. Now the time has come to investigate further the relationship between ‘questions asked’ and ‘answers formulated’ in order to become a truly valuable actor in the public domain, wherever, whenever.
Wasn’t it that famous boxing promoter with outrageously frizzled hair who said repeatedly: “Watch that kid - we’re gonna hear more from him”?
http://www.donking.com/

Ronald van Tienhoven, Amsterdam

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