Windows
Witness: I can feel the heat closing in.
Two police cars slide in and come to a stop on –––– Street. Four officers get out, one heading off down an adjacent street, another questioning two men standing outside –––– restaurant, their yellow vehicle humming bee-like while its pilots carry out the social recognisance, triangulating the undesirable.
“Sometimes it can be hard to hear anything, hard even to listen to one’s own thoughts, amongst all the noise.”
Public places in the city are under constant policing, by officers and security guards, and by CCTV, the present-day panopticon.
We propagate in ourselves and our places a defence mechanism, a coldness or ‘city-shell’ to deal with the proliferation of otherness.
“a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”
Locks, doors, gates, and blinds all keep out, lock in, and protect us, but they are also a statement of protection, a reassurance nestled in the mind that calms the scary thought that outside the home exists an world constantly moving, in flux, and thus difficult to quantify. This is a city where even residents close-by are sometimes wholly unknown.
Even in public space, where we are lulled into a sense of collective ownership, there are many agreements and transitory deals to be made. Spaces to sell, spaces to solicit, spaces to play. They are all negotiated and contested on a daily basis.
The individual is both at the centre of everything and at the centre of nothing.
In the crowd we are each the centre as much as anyone else. It’s all just a matter of framing, really.
