Materiality / Immateriality: Are public spaces physical or virtual?

For Habermas, the public sphere that emerged in the eighteenth century was a space that was both physical—in the streets, coffee houses, and social clubs—and virtual—embedded in media such as newspapers and journals. Today’s media are even less material, as the Internet allows anyone with access to a computer to produce and disseminate her or his ideas on the web. However, this process remains highly contested, and the proliferation of digital information means that every individual statement has less value than it once did. The most recent social movements emerged through and occupied complex hybrids of immaterial and material public spaces.

Furnishing Positions is a serial publication that focuses on the paradoxical nature of public space. Its standard form is an 18”x18” broadsheet, consisting of an artist’s project on one side and a text on the other. It will be published once every two weeks for three months, starting September 15, 2014, with each issue focusing on a specific paradox. As a serial, each issue builds on earlier editions. As each issue is published, it will be hung and made available for free in the Blackwood Gallery, posted to the gallery’s website, postered in public sites, and circulated electronically. As the exhibition progresses these broadsheets will accumulate, generating and animating conversations in the space.

In the age of Google Maps, HDcctv, and #occupyeverything, it is difficult to neatly disentangle physical and digital dimensions of public space, where the “physical” broadly references the bodies that assemble in public spaces and the (natural or synthetic) material forms that constitute such spaces, and the “digital” signals a mix of computing devices, machine-readable data, and networked communication.

Given that Adrian Blackwell’s installation, Furnishing Positions, is housed in an exhibition titled Falsework, it seems fitting to take what the political economist Karl Polanyi termed a “fictitious” commodity11“Labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life. [Labor is not] produced for sale. The commodity description […] is entirely fictitious.” Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 [1944]), 75.—labour—as the entry point for glimpsing the imbrication of the physical and the digital in public space. To approach public space by way of labour is to immediately confront a paradox. On the one hand, the notion of public space conjures up escape from, or an alternative to, work: lazing on the green, yes, but also, say, striking on the sidewalk beyond the employer’s territory or participating in assemblies of all kinds in which individuals refuse their reduction to labour-power, join forces, and make common claims on the wealth that their collective labour has amassed.

00, Six Paradoxes, 15/09/2014
Adrian Blackwell

01, Affinity / Disagreement, 15/09/2014
Abbas Akhavan | Kanishka Goonewardena

02, Representation / Presentation, 29/09/2014
Dylan Miner | cheyanne turions

03, Materiality / Immateriality, 14/10/2014
Greig de Peuter | Paige Sarlin

04, People / Things, 27/10/2014
Karen Houle | Kika Thorne

05, Privacy / Publicity, 10/11/2014
Eric Cazdyn | Charles Stankievech

The Furnishing Positions broadsheets are all available for free download. To order free printed copies of any or all of them, please send an email including title(s), number of copies, and your mailing address to: blackwood.gallery[at]utoronto.ca.