TOWARD A JUST METROPOLIS: From Crises to Possibilities June 16–20, 2010 Conference • San Francisco Bay Area

#DECODING MILITARY LANDSCAPES //18 JUNE 2010 // A PARTICIPATORY

WORKSHOP TO DEVELOP A PUBLIC ARCHIVAL PRACTICE: http://bit.ly/demilit

WE BEGIN WITH THIS PREMISE: the crisis of the contemporary spatial

condition is produced in part by the hyper-expansion of militarization,
operating in realms removed from public scrutiny and agency.

Military space enforces conformity to a single prevailing mode and ideology of

power. While space can be produced or transformed by a multitude of competing
ideological claims, for this workshop military space is simply meant to connote the
existing physical environment or imagined environments as these are configured
by military power, including private corporations. This basic definition is intended
to broaden the scope of what military space is, how it can be perceived as process
rather than as spatial object, how it can be engaged, recorded—or archived—
avoiding any preconceived idea about how military space does or does not
manifest itself.

The legacies of the military exist at every scale of our society, from the historic
bunkers of old military bases and tourist landmarks of earlier wars, to more
central monuments like the Pentagon and its constellation of financial towers that
serve the defense industry. While the army base epitomizes the most literal
entrenchment of military space, its sphere expands from the cordoned barracks to
the terrestrially detached orbital satellite. The spatial dimensions of military
power persist at the very core of our society on through the grandest public
infrastructure, and continue all the way to the atomized in the form of RFID tags,
biometrics, video games, GPS, and our SSNs. Suffice to say, the environment has
always been constituted by the spatial forces of military evolution, but today
hegemonic power only seeks to further erode any previous distinctions between
‘military’ and ‘civil’ space at unprecedented scales. Military space is now a
pixilated blur of infiltrating actors —wealthy and legally insulated—whose logic
poses great threat to the interfaces between ‘public’ and ‘private’, ‘human’ and
‘mechanic’, ‘transparent’ and ‘fortified’, ‘civic empowerment’ and ‘subjugation’.

WHY AN ARCHIVE? What is the political crisis of current archival practice?

What should a public archival practice look like? If the evidence that society
gathers and stores from history can no longer be used by the public to generate
new knowledge then what is the point of archiving in the first place? Who are
archives predominantly designed to serve and who are they meant to exclude?

We want to not only challenge the current practices of memorializing as a system

of power, but to expose the techniques of this as they are rooted in the very
production of military space. The web itself is the archetypal example of a
military-industrial complex archival practice, and the paradoxical nature of
working with the web is up for critical examination—or outright rejection—as well.
We welcome hackable project ideas.
We seek to reclaim the archive from forms of militarization and devise a tool or a
practice that can be used by individuals and communities. Ideally, we would like
this imagined instrument to be applied to the struggles against military urbanism
in all its forms. Maybe it looks a bit like the Creative Commons badge and can
simply narrow search results. Maybe it persists through a Twitter hashtag such as
#demilit. The archive will contain a diverse range of media from sound
recordings to video clips. Whether it is hosted on its own server or on an existing
social network, the archive will be open, dispersed, hackable and mutable. As
such, we can make visible a more pervasive post-9/11 security landscape that
eludes scrutiny.
contact: BRYAN FINOKI | subtopia.blog@gmail.com
JAVIER ARBONA | javier@berkeley.edu
NICK SOWERS | soundscrapers@gmail.com
Tel. 607.233.4615