Nicola Twilley is a researcher, designer, and writer in New York. She is co-director of Columbia University’s Studio-X, co-founder of the Foodprint Project, and still finds the time to write the fascinating blog Edible Geography. In a recent phone interview, she talked about the logic of strategic food reserves, her unusual fascination with “food piracy,” and how the infrastructure of food informs us of global, systemic issues.

Adam Rothstein: How would you describe the Edible Geography blog project?

Nicola Twilley: I had too many diverse interests in food space, culture, naturally built and virtual landscapes, and environmental issues. Rather than having a website where I write about everything that I find interesting, I force myself to go through the lens of food.

I initially resisted launching a “food blog,” because of the image of a food blog being just “pictures of cupcakes” or “what I had for lunch,” or “ten exciting new ways to prepare quinoa.” But I think of it as a frame, frequently on an entirely different perspective to a story that I might otherwise miss. It relates to stories of domestication in agriculture, bioarchaeology, culture, technology, and almost anything else. There’s not a lot of stuff you can’t address through the lens of food, so although I call it a constraint, it hardly is at all.

AR: There’s that conspicuous consumption side of it, the foodie side, and then there’s the also the scientific production side of it, and there’s the distribution, global currents of trade and economy. You been doing some work on this, with food stockpiling and strategic reserves. You’ve had some stories about when things go wrong with stockpiling, the syrup reserve going missing and so forth. How well do think that reserves work on a daily basis, when we’re not hearing about them having some sort of emergency?

NT: There are a multiplicity of types of reserves. Many reserves are all about protectionist trade policy. The maple syrup reserve came from Canada’s strategic plan to grow the maple syrup market. It was their clearheaded assessment that if you grow the market and then have a bad year, then all your hard work in trying to grow the market is going down the toilet. So it’s best to build a reserve then grow demand, and know that you can fulfill it. Certain places like the EU are famous for protecting their farmers with favorable policies that keep the prices high enough to guarantee the farmers make a certain rate per measure and result in huge wine or butter surpluses. Those kinds of reserves are one thing.

One of the things that the idea of the stockpile or the reserve introduces is some of the difficulties around food planning. Demand fluctuates, but the supply fluctuates even more. Some argue in favor of a more insurance policy type reserve. As climate change ramps up and weather events become more severe, our just-in-time distribution is not going to be able to cope with the shock. It’s a fascinating topic right now. Some countries are dealing with uncertainty by buying agricultural land in a land-grab phenomenon. China is buying a vast amount of land in Africa. Rather than build the reserve with the harvest, it is built with the land.

In some ways the land-grab phenomenon is the alternate strategy to the food-reserve phenomenon. It’s difficult to store food. Refrigeration is expensive, and increasingly so. The monitoring and pest control that has to go on in storage is incredible. And then there’s the human challenge. In the developing world, reserves are intended to provide a cushion if the market fails, to avoid a famine. But if stocks are pilfered and not managed correctly, or if there is corruption, then that strategy fails.

The architecture of food storage and preservation has not advanced much. There are innovative sensors and shipping, and the packaging level has seen improvements. A lot of the innovation has been in logistics, and fine-tuning that so that the supply arrives exactly when it’s needed and is exactly calibrated to the demand. And that’s amazing technology. But when you throw random weather, piracy, etc, against that model, maybe it’s too finely calibrated and there is no buffer. The technology of food preservation and storage is ripe for improvement. I don’t know if this is true, I’ve never been able to verify this–but it’s said that if all the trucks stopped rolling, US supermarkets would be out of food in five days. We have this very finely-adjusted just-in-time system, and I see a potential that it will not be resilient enough in the future, with a system subject to extreme weather events. But to fix this would require a truly huge shift in the way that we currently produce and distribute food.

One of the things I’m doing now is working with the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) on an exhibition on the landscape of artificial refrigeration. It’s completely fascinating to me how a vast amount of space is kept at a different temperature just to house our food. Our fruits and vegetables each have their own temperature zones–bananas will be at fifty degrees, meat at another temperature. Each of our foods have their own thermal comfort zones. And we dedicate these temples of artificial winter to our food. That geography of refrigeration is something I’m researching for this exhibition, and also expanding into a book.

AR: You mentioned piracy affecting food. Is food piracy a thing? Or just in the way that global shipping is affected by piracy?

NT: I was referring to global shipping, but yeah it’s a thing. Food crime is fascinating. There was a story just the other day of a New Jersey warehouse where all these counterfeit bottles of Heinz ketchup exploded. It’s a great story that combines two of my favorite things–exploding food, and counterfeit food. We think about counterfeit food as a tiny problem at the moment. At one point, the US had a serious food fraud problem that led to the 1906 Pure Food Act and the construction of the FDA. What that timeline tells us is about the expanding distance between the producer and the consumer. When consumers become suspicious and trust is no longer ensured by community-level person to person relationships, the government has to step in with regulation to add the trust back. This copes with the distance put into the food system.

China, with all the rapid urbanization it has undergone, is now in need of that government-enforced trust structure, which is why you get these stories about melamine milk, and so on. But though we might think about it as a Chinese problem, counterfeit food is still an issue in the US too. There are people with specialties in things like detecting honey fraud. People claim that their industrially-produced glucose syrup is actually honey from X, Y, and Z. Every so often in the tech world, you hear that RFID chips are going to be the thing to prevent this, but they’re too expensive right now to implement in terms of basic food commodities. At the high end you can use them to ensure the authenticity of food. There’s a really good book on the history of food fraud, called Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, by Bee Wilson. It looks at the conditions in which food fraud propagates.

AR: It feels like a perverse fascination to be interested in food piracy, but not as bad as some tabloid issues one could be interested in, I suppose.

NT: It is kind of funny. I was so excited about the exploding ketchup bottles. It could kill people, and it’s terrible, but also incredibly interesting. The idea of simulating food tells us so much about our food system and about our culture in general. When you’re simulating a food, what are the qualities to get right? This is how consumers relate to that particular food, and how we understand food: visual quality, textural quality, and so on. What does it take to “pass” as a fake food? The way that we simulate things tells us so much about how we evaluate things in the first place. There’s such an incredible level of ingenuity. Have you seen the fake eggs video? It’s an overblown story I’m sure–Chinese markets are not filled with carefully crafted fake eggs–but it’s the ingenuity. You have to kind of admire it in weird way.

AR: A lot of stuff that you cover on Edible Geography revolves around the more hidden sides of food production and distribution, the things we don’t normally think about. What is important about the visualization of those aspects of food?

NT: The blog is called Edible Geography, but I sometimes stray very far from what you might call visual, spatial, or cartographic representations. Still, I always return to mapping because it’s such a valuable tool. A map is a spatial diagnostic. As an example, you get public health researchers mapping things like fast-food outlets against demographics, or alcohol advertising against problem-drinking. You can’t prove causation with a map, but you can make some pretty good hypotheses out of the patterns of correlations that you find. You can also look for the best place to intervene, spatially. It allows you to see design opportunities.

I also like the way that a map will let you to see things that are distributed and disconnected as something you can understand as a whole. A really fun project here in New York is a crowd-sourced bodega mapping project. Bodegas are not part of a chain, and they are not a top-down thing. It’s rare that an owner would own even two bodegas. But mapping them and making them visible changes the way we think about bodegas as a whole. As it happens, the city has started to see that they could create initiatives around having fresh produce, etc, in bodegas and make them a health resource. But you don’t see that opportunity if you think about them as just one bodega.

AR: What other visuals do you find useful, other than mapping?

NT: I have ongoing interest in the idea of the flavor wheel as a tool giving us a framework for measuring sensory perceptions. Professor Ann Noble at UC Davis came up with the wine flavor wheel. The categories it laid out have become a huge marketing tool for the California wine industry. People argue, compellingly, that it has also actually shaped the kinds of wine that are now produced. Once you name something you can identify it and recognize it and reproduce it. The value of setting up a framework for that is important, but it also shapes what is produced via that framework.

With the Venue project I’m doing with Geoff Manaugh, we visited the Chili Pepper Institute in Las Cruces, New Mexico. They’ve recently developed a flavor wheel to try to tap into that idea of appreciation that came with the wine wheel. Various industries are creating these flavor wheels to give people a way to understand and talk about their various olfactory and flavor experiences, to create a sensory profile of what their eating. There are chocolate wheels and maple syrup wheels. It’s a way to brand and rate the value of a food by implying that it is a rich, nuanced sensory experience, like wine.

Of course, the wheel is not new. The other day I posted about urine flavor wheels, which I was introduced to by a really interesting synthetic biology blog called Oscillator. Creating a sensory profile of urine was one of the primary ways to diagnose disease in medieval and renaissance times, so a urine flavor wheel was a standard inclusion in a medical textbook.

AR: For your refrigeration project, what sort of visualizations are you working with?

NT: Definitely maps. But CLUI and I have also been talking about how we can create not just visualizations, but the actual temperature variations for these different types of foods at the exhibition. This architecture of food storage is about creating spaces for food, and it’s their physiology and form that are being considered.

When you spend a lot of time in refrigerated spaces, you slow down. In a lot of the frozen food warehouses, workers are not allowed to work alone. You don’t even realize that you are slowing down, and eventually you stop moving. We have these buildings that we maintain at extraordinary expense that we, physically, are not optimized for all. We are not optimized for spaces that slow down decay, to preserve “freshness” — whatever that means — in our fruits, vegetables and meats. On the temporal level, what refrigeration does is so weird. It is an extension that slows everything down.

On the dry lake bed in Nevada where the Burning Man festival is held every year, white-out conditions turn tunnel vision into a torus, wrapping the observable world around you in a tight feedback loop. The world is the color of a dead television channel if you are the electron, caught glowing somewhere between the gun and the glass. You are climbing a ladder in the wind, and you suddenly cannot see the ground. The fusion heat of the sun is stolen, diffused into the air around you, and replaced in the sky by a simple white disc, a blank sky sigil of NASA-ready interplanetary ruin porn. And then your vision suddenly sharpens again as you cut your leg open on exposed rebar, and you’ve never seen anything quite as clearly as your bright red blood mixing with alkaline dust in the dry, widened channels between your brittle receding skin cells.

So what is Burning Man like? It’s not special. It’s simply what happens when gearhead artists, new agers, and frat types get together to build resilience tech in the desert together. Badly. It is easy enough to describe in principle, but harder in practice.

The experience of going to Burning Man is summed in either the ease or the difficulty of figuring out how to talk about whatever the hell it was that happened to you there. It would be easiest to talk about if you died on the playa. Your Burner epitaph would tell the entire story: “Fell off an art car, broke spine.” That narrative would be the easiest to read. Second easiest would be by those who claim a spiritual transformation. “I injected DMT into all my chakra points, and discovered an art car that vibrated at the same basic frequency as the entire Enochian Key.” Gotcha. But for those of us unlucky enough to make it back to society without a punctured kidney or a journey via sky chariots have a harder time in finding the archetype that explains that week. You have been staring into the sun for over a week, and now you look down and try to explain to the purple splotches exactly why. Asceticism topped off by a cold cooler of PBR, and a entire rented box truck full of Schedule 40 metal pipe. There is little revelatory or concluding text to be found here.

The best way I can think to describe the experience is that people who went to Burning Man changed color. You can see them, crawling back over the nation’s roadways on Labor Day weekend. It is not the vehicles that they drive or the things strapped on the roof, but the univocal shade of muted grey. There are no real generalities that can be made about a group of 50,000 people that are not tautologies. To say that Burning Man is for the rich, or for the privileged, or for those with free time, is all about as meaningful as to say that 50,000 automobile owners can afford gasoline. But the one meaningful thing that we could really say about Burners is that they all come back grey. When we get into the shower, finally back at home, the water all runs the same opaque color into the drain. The other details of our bodies are told through the auto-writing of scars upon our frames, symbols inscribed at random in the flesh with washed out metal. You can’t cut a person the same way twice, or cut two people at the same exact time.

***

We tore down our shade structure, for fear that if we didn’t do it ourselves, the wind would do it for us, turning the recycled vinyl billboard covers that we were using as tarps into whirling jellyfish of lumber, rope, and swinging metal. Our design wasn’t bad—the tarps were strong, the wood frame supporting them into a large peaked tent was sufficient for wind forces twice as strong as we were experiencing. The rope was 2000 pound test professional rigging rope. The weak point was the rebar we were using as ground anchors. The half-inch steel rods, cut into three feet lengths and driven almost entirely into the earth, had not been pulled up, but had cleanly bent in half at the point where the knots were tied.  The flinging arm of the wind tugging on the vinyl had twisted the steel like paper clips in the hands of a bored cubicle occupant. And so we brought up our contorted anchors, and wrestled the tarps down in the darkness of a dusty afternoon.

We sat down for a quick consensus meeting as the wind tore at the structure around us. In less that three minutes we came to consensus that there was no choice but to take it all down immediately, and attempt to re-design it when conditions were calmer. Our neighbors were taking a different organizational route, as a bone-thin man in a black canvas kilt screamed profanity about the quality of his camp-mate’s tie-downs from the pinnacle of a 42-foot diameter geodesic dome. Their structure stayed up. Later than night, we cut the remains of ours into pieces and rebuilt it as a fanciful vinyl carport with air bypasses. That one stayed up too. But the playa was strewn with wreckage and flying tarps after that afternoon. I have yet to see it myself, but I have heard that the ultimate wind calamity—a geodesic dome rolling across the lake bed like a massive steel tumbleweed destined to wrap itself around a SUV—is a hell of a sight.

Part of the temple blew down this year, in the weeks before we got there. The temple is one of the massive, perennial structures that, in addition to the Man, are always ritually burned down. The complete collapse of one of the temple’s gates is something so heavy and traumatic that it was likely the reason for the rumors of especially high winds. Seeing something you built come crashing down is not an idle occurrence, even in a place where things that don’t come crashing down are eventually lit on fire. But then again, the ominous warnings could easily have been because the long-timers were attempting to scare away the newbies, or prep them for the reality of the what could be. This is something that has probably gone on at Burning Man since it first came to Black Rock—the people who have been their before have to remind everyone that hasn’t been there before of the place’s realities.

Not that it stopped the virgin Burners; they were there in droves. Some of this was due to the rising mainstream knowledge about the event, but the ticket situation also played a role. If you haven’t heard about the ticket fiasco, it basically boils down to this: In an attempt to circumvent the economics of supply and demand that create scalping, the Burning Man organization blundered right into the economics of supply and demand that create hoarding. Ticket sales were limited to two per credit card, leading anyone with any interest in tickets at all to get every known credit card in phone call’s distance into the lottery system. With only a third of people applying receiving tickets, large theme camps whose on-site projects rely on the efforts of hundreds of people were thrown into disarray, causing huge projects to be cancelled, causing self-entitled long-time Burners to threaten further boycott, causing the Org to try and re-distribute a number of tickets, causing a backlash against catering to entitlement. By the time the summer rolled around, the hoarders were realizing that demand had lapsed as many people made other plans, and tickets flowed back onto the market. Many a person who had never seriously considered going to Burning Man at the time of the lottery now found themselves with a ticket at half-price.

You could call it a total clusterfuck, or just call it growing pains. Or call it a sign of a coming cataclysm. Every year there are rumors that this will be the last year. The reasons I heard this year that sounded reasonable included: conflicts with the BLM over the costs of those coming early to set up (the BLM wants $10 per person per day); the fact that the Org has burned through every porta-pottie company in existence as they each in turn decide that dealing with the plumbing problems from trash in the pots is simply not worth the contract; and that the influx of newbies not picking up their trash will finally reach a tipping point, and that will end the BLM’s approval of the event.

We had some of these newbies camping next to us. “We’re a major grow op,” they confided to nearly anyone, which was either a pretty dumb thing to share, or a way try and cover for the impressive stuff their trust funds allowed them to drag to Burning Man. None of it blew away, but plenty of it turned into site-wrecking garbage. We watched as their greywater leaked onto the ground, as they ran their generator 24/7 to power the AC in their rented RV, and as the four kegs of beer they dragged into their carport got warm and went unfinished. If this is what the apocalypse looks like, it’s a pretty unsurprising and unavoidable death. I, for one, would love to be on site the year that hurricane-force winds light the entire city on fire, and it’s locked down to prevent flaming vehicles from running over pedestrians as they attempt to make it back to the highway. Unfortunately, the end will more likely occur in a top-level meeting between BLM and the Org, because our neighbors’ discarded mardi gras beads ended up destroying the ecosystem.

***

I don’t take this sort of thing personally, even at something I care about as much as Burning Man. Hell, I was at Occupy from the beginning to the end, so I’ve seen some things that I care about get torn to shit. Riding on an art car one night, talking with some folks on the bench opposite us on the second story of a dubstep-weaponized fuzzy pink mushroom or jellyfish (hard to tell which), or heads bobbing in unison with the bumps, like commuters riding the public transit of the weird, a topless woman said it best. “Just lock down your own drama.” She then handed us a condom with that phrase printed on the package. Wish I had some of those at Occupy. Each camp, group of friends, affinity group, polyamorous meal crew, or whatever you want to call it, has enough of its own problems that can be re-engineered and improved, that it never need lecture others. If this was the last year, so be it. I know very well we’ll do nearly the same thing, or maybe an entirely different thing, somewhere similar or maybe not at all alike next summer. This is the sort of thing we do, and not just for fun. This is what our lives are like.

“Everything you love will be destroyed!” was a motto for our camp, and that is the long and short of it. Your car, your clothes, your body, whatever gear and tools you have, whether a lot or a little. I saw someone riding a bike with a leather saddle, and just laughed. Bikes get alkali dust inside their frames, and die an exceptionally quick death after visiting Burning Man. It’s said that San Francisco bike dealers can tell, no matter how well they are cleaned, that a bike has been to the playa. I don’t ride bikes on the playa, I walk. And you better believe it destroys my feet. But they heal. Everything we love will be destroyed, but everything that we love we built, and so this will just give us an excuse to give birth to it again. As long as we have water, coffee, and whiskey, we’ll build that structure as many times as needed.

This sort of DIY zen is by no means natural to the playa, and while we might have our own drama more or less rigged well, we’re pretty lucky in that regard. You hear stories on the playa, of grudges, of politicking by the Org and by artists and groups of artists, of threats made and carried out. The Burn Wall Street art piece, for example, had some pretty wild stories attached to it. I can’t verify any of this, and so it is only rumor. But disputes about the construction quality and schedule allegedly caused the leader of the project (who as far as I can tell, had nothing to do with Occupy) to be fired from the task by the Org. This was the culmination of a longer dispute involving the previous year’s temple crew, a project that apparently violated design parameters. Burn Wall Street still ended up built and burnt, but after hearing some wacky tales about the designer’s love of guns and his habit of blowing up piles of propane tanks with rifle fire, there was speculation that the burn might not go off without a hitch. And yet, it did. You can never really tell about rumors. Drama on the playa, at Occupy, or at any intense build project is by definition just as real as it sounds. And yet, most drama, like the Burn Wall Street city, is really just an empty shell. So you never know.

Burn Wall Street ended up covered in graffiti of all kinds before it burned, and I couldn’t help but wonder about that paint-soaked empty shell. It was only a few months ago that I watched police officers punch and club the heads of my friends in the streets of major US cities. Trauma feels different than drama. The banks built on the playa were hollow, and so was the gesture, and so was the anarchist graffiti on the outside. Burning Man is often called a Temporary Autonomous Zone, but the bureaucracy behind the building of a monument to an anarchist movement is altogether so far from anarchism that it mostly makes me confused. It’s not that I can’t take criticisms, parodies, or copycats, it’s that it just seemed so obvious. A “Bank of Un-America,” spraypainted with the phrase “Let’s Burn the Real One.” Like learning history through a shoebox diorama. Meanwhile, the anarchists on the playa were building their own shade structures, and the anarchists off the playa were doing everything from writing books to raising kids to running co-ops to building houses. I didn’t watch Wall Street burn, though I hear the explosions were pretty intense.

***

We watched the Man burn several days later, from out in that avoided wilderness of deep playa, a vast vacant area out away from all the big structures and camping, populated only by distant art projects. There is a movie theater out there that shows midnight classic films to those adventurous enough to discover its existence. We watched the giant wooden structure of the Man explode with massive jets of burning accelerant from under a solitary disco ball, rigged to solar panels and a battery, spinning nearly silently in the desert night. Then we discovered a group of older folks that were having a picnic out by the outer boundary fence that is used to keep trash from blowing away across the playa. They offered us beer and freshly baked olive bread, baked that afternoon in a dutch oven in the city. We offered them chocolate. They eyed the pieces suspiciously. “Mom always said not to take chocolate from hippies by the trash fence.” But then they ate them anyway.

Throughout the entire 12 days we were there, I was coated in dust. My beard and hair were grey, my skin, though darkly tanned, was ashen both from dryness and from the adherence of the terrain to my outsides. I ate dust, drank it in my coffee and whiskey, felt it come out of me via muscus, sweat, and all the other means. I was one of the grey people, and those just arriving at the city looked at me funny, as if they thought it was conceivable that they would not end up the same.

The only time I was clean was for a brief number of minutes midway through the week, when I went to the Human Carcass Wash. Run by a camp of nudists and sexually diverse proponents of experimentation, it was a declared safe space in which groups of people were guided in washing each other. After stripping down, and spraying and scrubbing others, each person had a chance to go through the line and be washed themselves. It was an experiment in boundaries, the communication of boundaries, and in the ability of everyone to be attempting the same experiment at the same time. As I went through the wash, I felt no cyborg appendages touching me, but tens of human hands. They sprayed me with cool water, and scrubbed with their palms, letting the dust run off my body, down around my feet. I could not tell whose hand was whose, or what any of them looked like.  I only felt washed, and as I stepped out to dry in the sun, momentarily clean. I looked back at the grey bodies, washing each other, and a gust of wind blew a cloud of dust into my eyes, forcing them shut.

The publishing and design communities now know that a printed magazine can not only be used to kill at will, but as a particularly efficient tool for political assassinations. While much has been made of this intriguing development (the general surprise being that this achievement in design was made by print and not electronic publishing), few have commented on the innovative aesthetic of the publication that pioneered this method. We’ll seek to remedy this here.

Polymer was a large format magazine, printed on thick 120 gsm matte paper, to a length of 136 and 146 pages respectively, in the only two issues that were ever released. Most of the copies that were printed and distributed have since been seized, and so the work of Art Director Silvia Gladdis has not found the appreciation of a wider audience. It is widely acknowledged as true that peculiar technical aspects of both issues caused readers, first, to salivate an acute neuro-toxin, and second, prompted a targeted brain hemorrhage imbuing them with an overwhelming urge to approach certain elected officials and spit this poison in the face of certain pre-selected targets with gruesome effect. However, it remains that through the unique applications of the magazine format the publication rose above its competitors to excel in a field saturated with slick offerings in recent years. Indeed, the magazine as a form is not dead, though some 57 innocent victims may be.

Several features of the design stand out, for those lucky enough to have been subjected to only the magazine’s aesthetic effects, rather than its more murderous injunctions. The large, lush photographs that advertising art directors normally favor were eschewed in favor of stark line drawings produced only by in-house artists. All of the artwork was, therefore, original, and provided a unique, uniform rendering of the magazine’s contents. While advertising firms originally frothed with rage at the injustice of not being able to maintain their branding standards in print, the “redrawing” policy was a cold-hearted gift, birthing a new, radical look of congruity. Critics of the magazine assaulted this move as mere “minimalism,” but few have had the opportunity to fall under the raw power of this representationalist technique. It worked as cleanly as a surgeon with a scalpel, radically excising the over-logoed emphasis from the brand itself, and truly presenting the products’ designs.

The typefaces of the magazine, also designed entirely in-house by Gladdis’s handpicked team, were revolutionary for their ability to achieve a whitewashed indistinctness. Sans-serif faces often draw attention to themselves in their attempt to minimalize the amount of ink on the page, but the designers provided the perfect weight to the lines, allowing the words to insinuate themselves to the eye with guerilla stealth, while leaving the mind clear and unperturbed by the text. The means-to-an-end adoption of minimalism in design achieved a victorious blitzkrieg, while many similar attempts clogging the newsstands only manage rash adventurism.

Even the so-called “Pure White Codes” themselves, which were eventually determined to be the means by which the magazine inspired its readership to commit so many fantastic instances of brutal murder, had a quality befitting the publication as a whole. Upon opening the magazine, rather than seeing a blanked of ads and content filling every available inch, the reader’s eye fell easily upon a cleansing blank page opposite each full-page advertisement, sequestered in majesty, apart from the other content. Though, of course, it would turn out they were absorbing more than that. Advances in biofeedback programming made these white spaces anything but empty. There, nearly imperceptible dots of yellow pigment shifted the Pantone color value of certain areas of the paper just beyond the point of conscious awareness, at the very limit of human perception. These wide squares formed the pixelated sigils of Native Diencephalonic Visual Code, or NDVC.

Authorities have not released the means by which NDVC was originally discovered and designed, but what we know is that it is a native visual language that the brain responds to implicitly, bypassing its linguistic centers. Via these Pure White Codes, readers’ brains became unaware weapons. Within hours of looking at the ads and the Pure White Codes, the toxin would begin secreting from their palates and they would hit the streets, searching out targets surreptitiously suggested in Polymer’s articles. When they located a politician, the reader would leap and grasp onto the target’s head, spitting wildly, aiming for the eyes or other orifices. Even after being tased to the point of unconsciousness by the police, readers would claim that they had left their offices or condos merely to get a cup of coffee. The secret component of the design and messaging of the magazine was subtlety. While we are compelled to deplore this sort of coordinated political violence, the aestheticians of the world cannot help by marvel at such unity of form and content.

What was notable about the Pure White Codes in hindsight, is that Polymer was able to raise the bar on the selling of ad space from the aesthetic quality of a billboard to that of a first-rate gallery. The insidious commands the white space was allegedly issuing to the Pons of the human brain and their consequences seem like collateral next to this achievement. Typically, a magazine packs the ads in wherever it can in an attempt to generate revenue in the most efficient way possible. But the breakthrough discovered by the editors of Polymer was that the advertisement were more than twice as effective when paired with a blank empty page.

Though the magazine is now defunct, the publisher is reportedly swamped with inquiries for advertising terms, and we see copycats even now, produced by designers who have heard this story of creative destruction. Look at the current cover of Margin, or the much-lauded center feature of last month’s Hallway to see how the aesthetics of the Pure White Codes live on without the Codes themselves. The editors who originated the technique, unfortunately, are unable to produce future publications along similar lines, as they are currently incommunicado at the government laboratory facilities. The nature of their new federal contracts do not allow them to pursue side projects.

There are rumors of a “disarmed” version of Polymer going to re-release, supported by crowd-funding and a coterie of the magazine’s proponents. This author hopes that we do see it in print once again; good design is to be cherished, studied, and imitated. Toxic or not, Polymer will lurk in the memories of anyone who still appreciates a beautiful magazine.

And now we’ll have an explanation so that simple folks like us can also understand about immortality. All I ask is that you step with me into the boundlessness, where constancy, quietude, and peace, infinite emptiness reign. And just imagine that in this infinite sonorous silence, everywhere is an impenetrable darkness. Here we only experience general motion, and at first, we don’t notice the events we are witnessing.

- Werckmeister Harmonies

I thought of Bela Tarr’s film, Werckmeister Harmonies, several times as I sat in the Occupied Media Van. I too, was awaiting the approach of what might have been a gigantic whale. I peered through the Livestream window, that conjured square of futuristic omnipresent light and darkness, and I switched tabs to monitor Twitter, its textual equivalent. The “whale” was a line of armed and armored police officers–the militant enforcement edge of the State doing its best to posture a Leviathan of wrath. This was a fantastical creature, a Melvillian metaphor beating inevitably through the wet air on its meaning alone. Leaning forward, I could see it through the spotted windshield of the van, down two blocks, through a throng of people awaiting its inevitable approach. Slowly it moved, on the night streets. Floodlights threw shadows on the crowd. The silhouette of its black corpus loomed forward.
In the film, unlike at the eviction, there was a literal whale. A preserved blue whale, “the largest of the most gigantic animals,” that arrived in a small town to much fanfare. The whale was a spectacle, that signaled the town’s violent downfall. No one actually came to see the whale, or the alleged “Prince”, who was advertised to be appearing along side it. These events merely served to mark what was coming. “What everyone knows is sure to come,” in the words of one character. The whale was the spectacle of inevitability, in an arena of trepidation. And then, after it arrived, the men of the town released their built up intensity, and smashed everything to bits.

It was the night when they told us they would evict Occupy Portland from Lownsdale and Chapman Parks, which had been occupied for thirty-seven days, the night they rolled out the whale. And it didn’t just move closer, but backward, and forward, and across in a steady chess game of street protest topology, churning the sea of people in the street in an attempt to scare them. The crowd stayed firm, and lasted the entire night, but they could not remain forever, whereas the whale could. In the morning, as the crowd dwindled. People were beaten and arrested. Chain link went up around the parks. Our food was thrown in the mud, and the rest in a dumpster. There would be video, and photos. But before the spectacle, before the media could be produced, there was waiting. Waiting on the whale.

The aesthetic of Bela Tarr’s film-making, and not just the plot of Werckmeister Harmonies, is similar to the new media-centered political action we’ve seen become common place over the last year. Tarr is one of the masters of what is called “Slow Cinema.” His films are often several hours long, with extended, continuous, dialog-free shots of what otherwise might be considered mundane activity–cows moving about in a yard in the rain, a man following a woman across a town, or a giant trailer containing a whale being towed slowly down a street in the middle of the night. Critics spar over the entertainment value of such an approach, but they certainly agree it’s a definite aesthetic. For better or worse, there is a genre of films that attempt to affect a certain feel by a similar means. “Slow” may or may not be the best word for it — time still progresses at a more standard rate than ever — but there is more time depicted. There is an excess of image. There is more cinema than we are used to, and we end up seeing what we would normally expect to be edited from the narrative.

There is excess media present on our Livestream and liveblog channels. This method of media creation, now synonymous with Occupy protests, emphasizes a particular always-on means of capture and broadcast: taking the webcam to the action, rather than the action to the webcam. The technology is focused on getting the image and the text to the networks as quickly as possible, and so the editing aspects are not nearly as important as the broadcast itself. And thus, with the increase in protests across the continent and the world, we have seen a steep rise in sheer volume of content.

The Occupied live media is powerful, though it’s not the utopian, people-centered media politics that the techno-pundits would to sell us. There’s an odd striving, and perhaps, a failing to it. It’s a medium fraught with pathos. The people, empowered in the streets, waiting to speak high-tech truth to power, long for that beautiful performance when a cop calmly pepper sprays a crowd in the open and it can be captured in high definition from multiple angles. And yet, this rarely happens. Instead, we have poorly lit, shaking, unfocused footage. Hours of it. And still, we hang on the feed, attempting to catch a glimpse of the “real” action, the money shot of tear gas canisters exploding or the baton falling. We have to, because it’s the only thing we have. Media has failed us, and we, with cameras more powerful than common computers were only ten years ago, grapple in the streets for these scraps.

Walter Benjamin identifies three main evolutionary features of cinema. The first is the means of the manufacture of film and its technological repetition. Film is captured on a negative, at the same rate of speed of the action it is capturing. It has the ability to represent life at the speed of life, and the re-depict it as many times as necessary, making manufactured prints from the original film.  The second feature he notes is the subject material of film, and its real life aesthetics. Actors no longer portray characters, but they portray themselves to the camera. They are the stars. Or, to extend the evolution even further: everyday people are often cast to portray themselves. The third feature to note is the political space of cinema’s consumption. Cinema is not a singular work of art, but a reproducible medium, designed to be shown widely, played many times, to crowds of many people. It is a medium for the masses.

These three evolutionary features have continued to blossom. Technology has progressed to digital cameras. Not only actors but the crew has been abolished, placing the cinema technology in the hands of the “audience.” And this producing audience is connected to the internet, so that the new interwoven masses are constantly performing for itself. Our contemporary situation is the swarm of cameras: the Liveswarm. At protests, I see this swarm surround me. At the recent Occupy Congress convergence in January, I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say there were more people holding Livestream cameras than carrying protest signs.

But this is no mere techno-cultural oddity to gawk at and then go about our business. In the conclusion to Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he articulates the difference between fascism and more revolutionary politics. Fascism gives the proletariat a voice, but does not give them the material things they need and deserve. Fascism, therefore, leads to “an aestheticization of political life.”

It is the difference between having one’s voice be gratified without doing anything, and having one’s material power increased. There is a voice that is mere expression, but there is a material supplement to that voice that becomes a form of a power. Livestream is not merely a way for people to express themselves. It is, at least potentially, different than the ego gratification of a standard web cam or Youtube account. And we’ve proved the difference, not only to ourselves, but to culture as a whole. The power of the pepper spray video clip to affect the material situation is undeniable, though the process by which it occurs is not seamless or automatic.

We know the camera’s power. We know how to work our cameras fairly well, and we know how to keep them them charged and filming. We wish to record everything, in the hopes that we might record something, and indeed, it often seems to be the only way to ensure that something is to keep the cameras rolling. Because of the potential political value of just the right moment of cinema, we also end up with an aesthetic supplement: hours and hours of live footage. Of what? Of whales, slowly moving in the streets. Of the backs of heads, walking on sidewalks. Of people sitting in intersections, waiting for the result of their action to happen. Of chants chanted, over and over again. Of talking, smoking cigarettes to pass the time. Of the sorts of things one does with the hands and the feet to keep warm while standing on the concrete. There is something that is being transmitted here, beside the potential political value. Something aesthetic.

When we think about an everpresent multitude of recording, broadcasting cameras, we might first think about reality television. But the Liveswarm is nothing like that. It’s an aesthetic that is not intended to portray “as if” it were real–with “true to life” drama, confessions, and human-like camera angles. It merely records. It does not attempt to affect any aesthetic at all. It only does so as if by accident. The Liveswarm is not a directorial decision, but a last chance consequence, as we look to the only method we have for telling a story. In our post-media environment, we are so far past the ability of archetypal narratives to get at the meat of politics that the only thing we can do is leave the camera on and hope that, like some sort of mutually-mediated group meditation, we can somehow find a glimmer of truth. It’s as if we’ve taken riot porn and made it ambient.

This aesthetic of media, derived from its form and technology, is not just an artifact of the the politics. It is the politics. This sort of politics, of taking to the streets and waiting for something to happen, is itself stretched out. It’s not unlike the consensus process of the general assemblies–some sort of glitchy remix of human endeavor. It’s Slow Politics lowered to an inhuman-sounding octave, broadcast at a few frames a second. It’s sometimes unintelligible, often frustrating. And yet we stare at it, transfixed. We know the power of a pepper spray photo–but there is a lot of waiting around to get it. We know the power of consensus, but a lot of times it is a pain in the ass.

A movement without leaders creates cinema without directors. It is lingering, always on, mired with boredom, with the certain sorts of observations that only happen when the lens is allowed to linger. There is nothing else to look at, and so in being forced to look at this, you finally begin to see something. It is in this element that it is most clearly not a reaction to speed. The Liveswarm is actually quite fast when measured frame to frame, jerking around and bouncing. What’s slowed is the narrative–drawn out to a point when the sine wave ceases to change, portraying a single tone. Until the frame changes, and the politics is renewed.

Slow Politics is a new way of communication, and–in a deliberately decelerated way–a building of revolutionary community through technology. It speaks of the street, by the street, while in the street. The live media teams at occupations are not only some of the most technically savvy, they are also among the closest knit. Their communication skill defines their effectiveness, and anyone watching a channel can immediately tell the difference between a camera that is part of one of these networks, and just a camera that is on. In terms of media, at least, Slow Politics is seizing back the technological architecture: the means of production. Whether it was the proletarian extension of cinema that Benjamin foreseen is unlikely. The political potential of aesthetics, ripped from the museum by cinema in the early 20th century, were quashed by Hollywood and the megaplex. But now they are renewed, at least for a time. The speed of futurist cinema has been replaced by the digital media autonomist’s choppy languor. Politics makes it’s way forward, albeit Slowly. And it better, because the whale is moving.