The
Queue Project. All the world's a net! And all the data in it merely packets
come to store-and-forward in the queues a while and then are heard no
more. 'Tis
a network waiting to be switched!
(Vint Cerf, co-author of TCP-IP protocol)
Queues are one of the fundamental architectural principles of all networks.
They are infinite and stochastic and yet utterly controllable. Queues
are a distribution technology: they are a resource for sharing, smoothing
the striations that form at thresholds, and producing a serialised form
of justice that, oddly, in a time of real time and swarming technologies
seems to be spreading virally. Queues are not merely technical, they cut
across all dimensions and in every direction, moving seamlessly from management
to morality and back again, capturing the motion of the multitude and
directing it into a sequence. Utterly implicated in the regimes of abundance
that dominate network life, queues raise both technical and cultural questions
about the 'informationalisation' of both media and architecture.
The queue
project considers queue architecture from a technocultural perspective
and meditates on the politics and rhetorics of regimes of mobility, immobility
and the evolving configurations of movement itself. This project is data
driven, comprising: still images and video of waiting lines at key thresholds,
such as train stations and bus stops; audio recordings of call centre
IVRS (interactive voice recordings); people’s stories of experiences
in queues, and visualisation of data in various formats.
These are
test visualisations of people queuing at an ATM in Rotterdam. The animation
on the right flattens and simplifies the scene, and twists the perspective
into a simultative mode to focus on the positional interactions of the
bodies. Many people have advised me to use Flash as it would be easier
to synch the animation to the video. I thought about it and then decided
a) i'm hopeless in Flash b) i have really bad RSI c) i really like the
roughness of the felt (a fetish I caught off Lotte
Meijer). I like working directly with the soft surface and experiencing
the limits of my clumsiness.
My colleague, Andrew Murphie, tells me my method is radically empiricist.
I take this to mean that i work with data but i don't take it too seriously.
I play with it.
Part of the queue project is visual documentation of queuing in typical
urban spaces around the world. So far i have gathered about 150 x 20-30
sec videos from various cities: Sydney, Beijing, Singapore, Moscow, Rome,
London and Rotterdam. I'm still gathering.