Writings – Paula Levine

YOU ARE THE NETWORK 2014

Writings

For many people, the notion of origin suggests a narrative of immigrating to one place from another, having daily roots in one country and familial, cultural or historical roots in another. However, since the proliferation of public access to DNA testing, narratives of origin have become more nuanced portraits of who we are and where we have come from, giving diversity visibility, as it is embodied within each of us.

Along those same lines, our daily use of the web and wireless connections contains geo-spatial diversity that is invisible to most of us, most of the time; hidden dimensions of multi-variant pathways and relationships to elsewhere. For many these pathways of global connections and interconnections are invisible, but, what if that could change? What could this information reveal about the complex relationships we have both to and within these emerging global systems? If tracked as a more common visible byproduct of each connection, what information would it reveal about the system and sites that sustain and enable it? Could it contribute to an emerging global perspective based not on physical properties of space or location, but rather on revised, complicated relationships to local and global?

These considerations have led me back to data visualization and projects that have represented information in ways that powerfully alter our relationships to it.

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May 2013

Writings

Public space, place to place connections using emerging global communication technology for a greater common good. I’ve been searching the web for projects and works that bring these together. Do send along suggestions for projects (my zero1 email). A few from what I’ve gathered thusfar follow:

Spontaneous Interventions
Design Actions for the Common Good at the Chicago Cultural Center from May 24 to September 1, 2013. Organized by Cathy Lang Ho and in affiliation with the New York Institute for Urban Design, an event and series of works that focus on the city and public space. From the curator: “Our goal is to use the exhibition as a framework for understanding a larger movement, in which citizens all over the world are devising and implementing clever, low-barrier urban interventions to make their cities more inclusive, sustainable, pleasurable, and safer…we have organized a rich roster of programs that will place the trend of tactical urbanism in the context local urban issues and citizen action.”

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April 2, 2013

Writings

I find myself in the remarkable position of being a ZERO1 Fellow, engaged in the challenge of bringing underlying ideas from previous work to the foreground to shape a project that enables connections between disparate places and circumstances. The underlying force is empathy; that curious ability to project ourselves into the experiences of others. To paraphrase Susan Sontag in Regarding the pain of others, place ourselves on the map of another’s suffering, bypassing sympathy, and imagine their suffering as our own.[Susan Sontag. Regarding the pain of others (Picador, 2004),103.]

These ideas have been the undercurrent of work I’ve done since 2004, work that attempted to make, even hypothetical bridges between disparate places to imagine circumstances and events that take place in one location, in relation to (an untouched and unrelated) other. Now, here with this fellowship, and it’s affiliation with Google and their world of inventions and products, my challenge is to give form and life to these ideas, envisioning a way to facilitate such connections and offer such experiences in some combination of physical and virtual space.

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