Line+of+Reasoning



Baudelaire spoke of the flâneur of the boulevards. Benjamin later discussed the act of the flâneurie against the backdrop of the Parisian Arcades. Guy Debord and the Situationist Internationals made use of the act of dérive and psycho-geography. Constant Nieuwenhuys theorized on the rise of the Homo Ludens within the realms of the intercontinental New Babylon. Each of these social archetypes is an evolution of a lifestyle and a method of personal engagement with the environs one inhabits. Enabled by a class whose emergence as a result of industry was between that of the aristocrat and the commoner, the bourgeois morality was cultivated. Idle pursuits were facilitated through the wealth of means, education, and time allotted to leisure – labor having been rendered unnecessary. Along such a course, it is the intent of this project to appropriate certain aspects – not of the archetypes in-and-of themselves – but of the projects resulting from their actual or imagined activities to the purpose of altering the experiential conditions within the Rapid-Transit-ory, subterranean territory, of the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority Subway Tunnels.



To begin with, Charles Baudelaire in the Paris of the 1850’s first depicted the notion of the Flâneurie. Involved in this activity were the gentlemen of the new leisure class whom strolled the streets of Paris aimlessly and without purpose beyond that of experiencing the city and its neighborhoods in their varieties and particularities. At times a turtle accompanied them on a leash to exemplify their status as men of such an idle nature to permit so greatly lethargic a creature as the turtle to set their walking pace. This however was a short-lived trend in the lifespan of the flâneur as an archetype.





By the 1930’s, Walter Benjamin had embarked on the project of categorically depicting his impressions of the Parisian Arcades through both literary quotations, and fragmentary notations pertaining to the range of environments, archetypes, and activities produced within their precincts. Included in this was the flâneur in a slightly modified version. He was no longer confined to the streets of Paris, but was now seen while himself seeing the seers within the localities of the vaulted streets of the interior provided for by the Arcades. The observer was both observed and observing, much akin to a scene in Dziga Vertov’s 1929, Man with the Movie Camera, where the viewer is viewing the viewed while being viewed and recorded by the film-operator (cameraman). The society becomes the subject, and the subject subsequently is studied by the society personified in a man of talent and insight – in these instances the director of the film, and the philosopher of the Arcades. Such was the state of pre-war Europe.





In post war Europe, a further development of such notions was pursued and exchanged, this time amongst artists and philosophers. People also possessing the time necessary for pursuits of leisure, but with the added intent of making such idleness productive towards social means, and the development of theories through observation and the art it inspires, to improve upon the impoverished, regimented lives that many believed were being led at the time. It goes that the Situationist Internationals were such a group of social-artists, led in many ways by Guy Debord and Constant Nieuwenhuys. They utilized the act of dérive to re-appropriate the city. It was an evolution of the passive flâneur, where simple rules of conduct and intuitive methods of movement were developed to enrich the experience involved in the engagement of space and its fellow occupants. The impressions received from such activities were then recorded using the pseudo-science of psycho-geography.

This involved verbal observations, and the construction of maps of a fragmentary and subjective nature. The areas traveled, and the connections made between, were not cartographically documented, but intuitively conveyed through collage and images, in line with the modus-operati. Along with the evolution of the flâneur into the 1960’s, the evolution of means of expression accompanied. Equally fragmentary and impressionistic in nature, Fellini’s Roma (1972) offers vignettes into the various faces of the city as experienced, communicating his thoughts and what fragments of speech and convention have been imprinted upon him. A series of disjointed memories and associations of Rome as recalled by Federico Fellini, the visual techniques, correlations, and languages utilized are what make this as an excellent example of the maturation process of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. Vertov had made an earlier attempt at disjointing reality and drawing correlations between apparently unrelated subjects and actions. It is in Roma where rather than splicing two individually filmed sequences together to establish a paired relationship, these correlations are articulated within the scenes themselves, allowing for movement to be continuous, relying less on post production and more on the actual filming of the sequences. The collective unconscious in both cases works to bring a consistency to the forms of creativity produced at a given time. Benjamin and Vertov, the Situationists and Fellini.



The last of the projects to be elaborated upon in order to better establish the foundation of this project is that of Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon. Over the next thirty years as a spin-off/development of the urban research and work accomplished by the Situationists during the 1960’s that culminated in the Paris student riots of 1969. Of relevance to this project in the ideas brought forth by Constant and his New Babylon are not its utopian ideals of a labor-less world with Humans freed from the tasks of daily survival by machines, to pursue cultivation of the mind and pleasures of the flesh; but the environs which Constant concluded would be the backdrop for this new race- the Homo Ludens. He stated that the people of this global society would live a transient existence in mega-structures elevated above the ground, yet linked in an intricate and totalizing network of platforms that span the globe and aggregate more densely at existing city sites – while rendering the cities of past ages obsolete. These hovering planes world in turn be the armatures for the citizens of this utopia to flesh out ever shifting environments according to whim and circumstance, while ever moving on to create new spaces to inhabit, new realms to manifest, in an endless succession of transient environs through which to experience – the flâneur now having evolved the ability not only to perceive – as in Baudelaire’s age, or even merely to record visual/verbal impressions – as in the worlds of Benjamin and the Situationists, but to actually determine and alter the environs which are to impress upon them, and to play host to their activities of leisure. Admittedly – there are many factors implicated within human nature, or at the very least the cultural programming of man within the dominant societies of the current age; particularly those of ownership and aggression/conflict, that would prevent such an ideal realm from being a viable reality – but that is no the point…is it? No, so in that regard, this project of The Neo-Metropolitan Flâneurie Subterranean while not being Utopian in nature will nonetheless not be practical either.







It is an art installation of sorts at scale of the city, in which the environs of the subway begin to diversify. It is the intent of this project to generate environs of a varied nature arbitrarily placed within the system of the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority Subways. To modify individual train cars to either visually engage the tunnels en-transit – or to ignore them and offer an environment as abnormal to the commuter subway car with its standard benches and poles for bracing. Those strategies, at times in tandem with minor modifications of certain subway tunnels to alter the spatial/visual perception while in a mobile environment in a normally blind/darkened network of subterranean tunnels. So, only some cars may be arbitrarily altered and placed on indeterminate trains and lines to confront the passengers, and the tunnels altered most also undergo the same confinement of modifications – for if too much were altered, then the unexpected would set in once again, though without being so utilitarian and uninspired. Now, as for the criteria which are to determine how such cars are modified, and which tunnels, that remains to be resolved, for there is no science as of yet to determine such actions.