Maya Reading week 6

picture taken flying over Pheonix

In the Place of the Public: Observations of a Traveler by Martha Rosler

This article deals with issues of transportation and the time/space it creates. Martha Rosier compares the form of air transportation to rail way travel. Flight simulations have lead to computer games and simulated environments in cyberspace. Do we have to physically experience the space for it to be real? Is it enough to experience the space through vision alone? This links back to our cultures desire to multi task and be in more than one place at the same time. We expect things instantaneously.


The use of flying instruments has changed the way we view our environment and our relationship to the environment has changed. We become more removed from the environment and by entertaining a simulated environment we begin to loose touch with reality and are unable determine the fake from the real. Why is it that we are reassured by technology that it is ok for our bodies to travel at such high speeds? Perhaps it is because looking out the window of the plane everything is at a smaller scale that we assume that because the structure is made of steel and industrial materials we will be safe. Consumerist and capitalistic ventures help to reinforce this feeling by associating any failures in flight travel to be associated with terrorism and not with malfunctions or human error.

The article also talks about the type of space created in airport environments. The airport actually lacks actual space or time. When you are neither here nor there, the airport fills in this time gap by posing as public spaces that appear to be like a shopping mall. They look at space as either spaces of consumption or spaces of disorder.

The effect that airports have of the surrounding environment is negative. Unlike trains that can go right into the centre and create public space, the plane is on the outskirts of the city and creates a zone of destruction, which devalues the surrounding land in its direct flight path.
As well the space created inside of the air terminal does not allow for intuitive navigation of people. It always seems as if we are just walking down a series of hallways always searching for signs to direct us.

My big question regarding this article is what is it that she proposes we do? Our culture is interested in the immediate response and is not as interested in the journey as in the destination. If we had a better train system would we really have better public space? I ma not sure, with the competing internet communities and the speed in which information is received, I think that the new public space has no physical space at all.