Blind Field Shuttle: City Shapes as a Language of Division

Carmen Papalia, Blind Field Shuttle guided walking tours, 2015. Photo credit Mitchel Oliver.
Carmen Papalia, Blind Field Shuttle guided walking tours, 2015. Photo credit Mitchel Oliver.
Carmen Papalia, Blind Field Shuttle, 2015, guided walking tours. Photo credit Mitchel Oliver.
Carmen Papalia, Blind Field Shuttle, 2015, guided walking tours. Photo credit Mitchel Oliver.
   

Part I: Papalia’s Blind Field Shuttle

   

“Language is like a road. It cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read.”

— Rebecca Solnit

   

The art and business worlds alike are increasingly focused on works that are described as “collaborative.” The word evokes a sense of community, cooperation, strength in numbers, and togetherness. Indeed, the practice of working together in this way is perhaps key to the betterment of our world. What follows, however, is a counter-conversation; a reflection upon what happens when interaction and collaboration, the commonplace varieties that occur daily on the sidewalk and in the public sphere, are done passively and thus miss the mark of togetherness. This train of thought was initiated by an experience I had while working closely with artist Carmen Papalia, who conducted many guided walking tours as a part of a practice he calls Blind Field Shuttle, which he most recently enacted at Elsewhere Museum. The walk lead us through a variety of public spaces, an environment that allows for a fascinating conflation of both collaboration and isolation.

   

I won’t engage in a critical analysis of the work itself. What’s been exceptionally more useful is the examination of the experiential dust kicked up by this walk. My reflection process has been fittingly perambulatory, but two inextricable observations have moved to the forefront. Firstly, that the designed space that makes up our environment consists of coded symbols, messages intended to demarcate and instruct traffic. The cityscape is a language meant to move us. Secondly, that this language, like any language, is not free of human politics, preferences, and prejudices. It too can facilitate and perpetuate injustice.

   

Papalia’s Blind Field Shuttle is immersive. It is a dive into both shared and individual experience, sensory alteration, sightlessness, and trust. At the beginning of the walk I was asked to close my eyes and follow Papalia through the downtown area, to join the artist in an act that puts the artist and myself in the same boat. Papalia has experienced increasing degrees of visual impairment since his early 20s. He now identifies as a non-visual learner within the Social Model of Disability, which “focuses attention onto social oppression, cultural discourse, and environmental barriers. This is the context for much of his work, which is based in experience and access within a society that favors the abled.

   

The phrase “blind field” was conceived by philosopher Henri Lefebvre to describe a blind spot within our perception and experience of an evolving contemporary space. “We focus attentively on the new field, the urban, but we see it with eyes, with concepts, that were shaped by the practices and theories of industrialization, with a fragmentary analytic tool that was designed during the industrial period and is therefore reductive of the emerging reality.” Describing Lefebvre’s “blind field,” Galloway refers to these conceptual voids as “risks – a term which has its origins in the Spanish term for ‘reef’ unseen but existing…The everyday is often unperceived.

   

In the context of this philosophy of perception and criticism of the urban sphere, Papalia’s Blind Field Shuttle becomes more than an invitation to focus on your other senses and consider the privilege of sight. It is also a way to access Lefebvre’s “blind field.”

   
Carmen Papalia, Blind Field Shuttle guided walking tours, 2015. Photo credit Mitchel Oliver.
Carmen Papalia, Blind Field Shuttle guided walking tours, 2015. Photo credit Mitchel Oliver.
   

Part II: Things Noticed in the “Blind Field”

 

The Perception of Design

 

The cityscape is a language. The sidewalks, door frames, curbsides, crosswalks, and the other structures and infrastructures that make up the urban environment are symbols. They are imbued with meaning, whether intentionally or by default. They compose a space that is almost a written sentence, nonexistent until it is interpreted by the human mind as a shape with an inherent function. The curb flanks a sidewalk, which leads to a crosswalk, which is regulated by a changing light. As in a sentence, there is a sequence: subject, object, rhythm, and punctuation. There is a hypothesis of relativity which states that one’s worldview, although informed by objective evidence, is colored amongst other factors by the lens of one’s language – that language shapes not only how we communicate, but also how we understand. To close one’s eyes is to switch languages. As I walked with Papalia, a curbside became a safety alert. A street sign, meant to announce the identity of an intersection from a distance, instead became an obstacle, a confrontation around which one hooks a foot or clips a shoulder. A fire hydrant at the right intersection became a wayfinding landmark, almost a friend. With Papalia’s help, I learned to interpret these shapes despite no longer being a part of their intended audience. It was through this experience of metaphorical language-changing that I became aware of something I should already have known: that beneath each symbol lies an etymology and a subtext, a meaning within a meaning. To put it another way, just as the shapes that make up the city are an extension of language, they are also an extension of our fallacies, presumptions, and prejudices.

   

Take the example of the curb, that discreet lip that highlights the difference between the sidewalk and the street (Interestingly, as a verb, the “curb” becomes a check or restraint). This shape marks the border between foot and engine traffic, restraining each side so that they do not mingle. It is an act of design that demarcates, sections, and categorizes. When walking without vision, it is one of the most crucial pieces of information, one of the loudest voices in the designed space. Its liminality makes it a fascinating perch from which we can pivot to examine the individual qualities of the sidewalk versus the street.

   
Carmen Papalia, Blind Field Shuttle guided walking tours, 2015. Photo credit Mitchel Oliver.
Carmen Papalia, Blind Field Shuttle guided walking tours, 2015. Photo credit Mitchel Oliver.
 

The Other Side of the Curb

 

On the other side of the curb is the rush of engine traffic. This is a space reserved for the technologies, customs, and regulations that make up our transportation. The cars that dominate this space echo the stock animals that were once used in their place. Like the equine and bovine traffic of the past, the engine vehicle fills this space according to a human-centric selection process, yet also somehow in spite of it. Even after replacing the mule with an entirely lifeless machine equivalent, we have been unable to eliminate the demands that these things place upon us. It is this resemblance to life that I wish to highlight; this sphere is increasingly regarded as an ecosystem, with all the give-and-take that word implies.⁵ This is the technosphere, the part of the environment that consists of human technology, which has an unprecedented influence on the biosphere that precedes it; this is a development specific to the Anthropocene.

   

Obviously, the construct of the technosphere has massive environmental implications. What interests me at the moment, though, is what this ecosystem of technology means on an experiential, day-to-day basis. What does it mean if I choose to inhabit the sidewalk more often than the road? What will my experience of this space be as the growing engine traffic chips away at the already eroded American sidewalk? This is a trend that reveals a systemic favoritism of whatever can make a profit; one must buy in to participate in traffic, but not to travel on foot. The industry that is the technosphere, therefore, has a socio-evolutionary advantage. What will this mean as supermarkets are built further and further from residential areas? Is this lack of access one of the “disadvantages” we talk about when we talk about “disadvantaged communities”?

   

Although not yet a clear thought, I felt this favoritism, or separatism, as an almost oppressive weight as I followed Papalia along the fragile sanctuary of the curb.

 
Carmen Papalia, Blind Field Shuttle guided walking tours, 2015. Photo credit Mitchel Oliver.
Carmen Papalia, Blind Field Shuttle guided walking tours, 2015. Photo credit Mitchel Oliver.
 

This Side of the Curb

 

On this side of the curb is the sidewalk, where other walkers can improvise, side-step, say “excuse me” or “you’re fine.” Here we can negotiate. But the designed space, again, must be understood not only as a creation of humankind, but also a strong influence upon the individual and collective population. The American Marketing Association highlights this fact with journals containing articles like “Servicescapes: The Impact of Physical Surroundings on Customers and Employees” or Psychology and Marketing “Store environment and consumer purchase behavior: Mediating role of consumer emotions.” Our environment – and not just the “servicescape” – influences us on a concrete and perpetual basis. What is created for utilitarian purposes (the sidewalk, the road, etc.) is also a part of that complicated human history, and is therefore, again, a loaded language. If the public space can be understood as a sentence, then our interaction with it becomes an act of interpretation. But as much as the designed space is a form of language, an extension of the human conversation, it is also an embodiment of human fallacy and bias, the presence of which informs our every step. How many of our actions in this space start with a cue from the space itself? Or have we simply brought our histories to this place, which becomes the stage for further struggles? The fragile promise of safety offered by the curb does not equal a promise of justice. Consider the work of Dr. Naomi Priest, whose recent study, “Patterns of Intergroup Contact in Public Spaces: Micro-Ecology of Segregation in Australian Communities,” casts the sidewalk as the public site best suited to study “throwntogetherness” and the significant casual encounters that happen while on foot in the city. Priest states, “Unequal power dynamics, positive and negative interactions, and division and cohesion, can all be features of public space…It is argued that the ways in which routine or habitual practices are organized sociospatially function to uphold distance between groups and to reinforce dynamics of domination and subordination.

   

Consider the women of our own country who are currently rebelling against catcalling and street harassment, or the people of the #BlackLivesMatter movement who move along the curb aware of their perpetual vulnerability to a hegemonic justice system. Think of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, or the teenagers at a pool party in McKinney, Texas, all of whom were assaulted and killed or nearly killed: there is a curbside in each of their stories. I say so not to distract, but to call attention to place, and to the connotations built into the structures around us. If you are a woman on the sidewalk, your body is on display; you will be harassed, you may be assaulted. If you are black and on the street, the police are deadly. If you are equipped with senses different from those predicted by the designers of the space, you will need courage and adaptability in order to enact your agency, to expose the “blind field.” Nowhere are these things more evident than when one walks along the curb.

   

—Evelyn Walker