An international collection of arts groups reflects on strategies to redefine the urban experience and the arts through the creative application of new media technologies and new methods of collaboration.

From: berlinermagazin, Issue 9 (Summer 2005)
Text collaboratively written by: Stadtblind, Yellow Arrow, UnionDocs, Knifeandfork, Posttourismus Büro & Glowlab
Edited by: Jesse Shapins

We have heard for years now that urban environments are once again at the center of cultural and social innovation. Derided as they were by Le Corbusier and other Modernist reformers for their chaos, inefficiency, and unnecessary ornamentation, dense and vibrant cities all over the world have been growing rapidly during the past decades, both as tourist destinations and dynamic habitats. In what is an extension and illustration of this trend, fundamental transformations in digital technology have created a new dimension of urban experience that is gaining momentum globally.

These changes have reshaped everyday life in the city and given rise to an ever-evolving field of urban arts, fueling the reinvention of the discipline of psychogeography. Originally coined by the Situationist International in the 50s, it was defined as “[t]he study of specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” The Situationists hoped to escape the numbing spectacle of modern life through practices such as the dérive, a playful but attentive drifting through urban space, which sometimes continued for days at a time.

New technologies have provided the opportunity for some exciting experiments in psychogeography, creating the possibility of a derive that may never end. What follows is a selection of such projects, all of which will be featured in the interdisciplinary arts festival Loving Berlin – Woche der Berlin-Liebhaber (Berlin Lovers’ Week).

The Colors of Berlin — Stadtblind

Operating in the border zones between contemporary art, urban design, and ethnographic research, Stadtblind is a Berlin-based arts group dedicated to the investigation and transformation of urban life. The Colors of Berlin was developed under the premise: “Zu oft wird Berlin blind betrachtet” (Too often Berlin is seen blindly). The specific objective of the work was to use photography and graphic design to challenge the conventional images of Berlin and instigate a new way of looking at the city. The core platform is a modification of the classic Pantone® color-fan containing five elements: a theme, an image, color blocks, a text, and a map. It has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Van Alen Institute in Manhattan, and Architekturgalerie am Weißenhof in Stuttgart.

It is Stadtblind’s aim to distance viewers from that which is familiar, to re-frame the familiar in such a way that it becomes unfamiliar, fresh, and worthy of attention. The group presents the common spaces, objects, and surfaces of contemporary Berlin in an unusual manner that encourages viewers to perceive in a new way. It is precisely the everyday aspects of our lives that are most often overlooked; and it is precisely these everyday aspects that most constitute our lived experience of the city.

This project provides a good entry point to analyze the impacts of the technologies of digital photography and inkjet printing, two under-discussed new media that have broad-reaching impact. The combination of digital photography and inkjet printing has created the ability to instantaneously capture, view and print images, enabling a type of documentary photography unimaginable with traditional print film.

Whereas photography in the age of 35 mm was focused upon the single image, photography in the digital era is all about mass groupings. The only limitation to the number of photographs that one can capture is digital memory, which has dramatically shrank in bulk and cost, allowing average photographers to go out and take over 500 pictures in an afternoon without the slightest consideration of cost or storage. The cash-strapped photographer no longer agonizes over a single perfect framing, but instead is liberated to shoot freely.

This project illustrates an enormously important trend in the arts and broader society: the mass shift towards a D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) mentality. Even five years ago, there was no consumer printer on the market that would enable decent quality prints at a reasonable price. For the first time in history, the most advanced means for producing content across all media (print, video, audio, online, etc.) is accessible to average people, especially within developed Western nations, but increasingly throughout the developing world as well. The battle is no longer over the means of production, but over the distribution of content.

Yellow Arrow – Counts Media

Yellow Arrow is a global public art project that subverts the hierarchy of media power by creating an open forum for communication. The project invites the questions “When does an object become art? What makes a landmark? Who says what counts?” By collecting and sharing places of personal significance, this public collaboration creates a subjective atlas, what the creators have called “a dynamic M.A.A.P. (Massively Authored Artistic Project) that expresses the unique characteristics, personal histories, and hidden secrets that live within our everyday spaces.”

Participants place uniquely-coded Yellow Arrow stickers to draw attention to different locations and objects. By sending an SMS from a mobile phone to the Yellow Arrow number beginning with the arrow’s unique code, one immediately receives a message on one’s mobile phone, ranging from short poetic fragments to personal stories to game-like prompts to action. Their website extends this location-based exchange, by allowing participants to annotate their arrows with photos and maps in the online gallery of yellow arrows placed throughout the world.

With mobile technology, we are now able to integrate the social potential of networked experience with the immediacy of the physical world. As Baudrillard wrote in response to the student strikes of 1968:

The real revolutionary media were the walls and their speech, the silk-screen posters and the handpainted notices, the street where speech began and was exchanged – everything that was an immediate inscription, given and turned, spoken and answered, mobile in the same space and time, reciprocal and antagonistic. The street is, in this sense, the alternative and subversive form of the mass media, since it isn’t, like the latter, an objectified support for answerless messages, a transmission system at a distance. It is the frayed space of the symbolic exchange of speech – ephemeral, mortal.

In a networked age, different communities across the globe have very different access to technology, but mobile phones have become widely available. By perceiving a network as something that is inherently a combination of physical, social, and technological components, this project brings these elements together under a paradigm that honors the type of vibrant exchange Baudrillard found so inspiring.

The Commons_Berlin — UnionDocs

UnionDocs is a Brooklyn-based documentary arts collaborative aimed at reinventing the documentary form so that it reflects the multi-dimensional and inter-connected nature of contemporary existence. Primary concerns include: creating an open structure for interactive participation, conducting a critical investigation of the constructions of truth and objectivity, and engaging new audiences in the ongoing conversation. In a time when populations have become increasingly divided, UnionDocs has created a series of interrelated programs that put individuals in dialogue with one another.

The Commons_Berlin is a performance documentary that engages two distinct, yet related questions: What is common? What makes a city unique? By examining public space, intellectual property, consensus-building language, models of collective living, globalization and the collective unconscious, this inquiry attempts to paint the broadest picture of the myths and realities of what we share today. As a counterpoint, a fictional landscape called “The Commons” is constructed where possible alternatives are imagined. The Commons_Berlin borrows the structure of a rock concert and consists of short, song-length documentary pieces. It is produced specifically for the Volksbühne’s Rollende-Road-Schau.

One of the fundamental debates that has emerged with new media technologies is copyright law. Lawrence Lessig writes:

This rough divide between the free and the controlled has now been erased…. The technology that preserved the balance of our history — between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission — has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture.

The same digital technologies enable collaborative work on a massive scale, while allowing every document to be stamped with supposed singular authorship. Massive media companies and their squadrons of lawyers have claimed all intellectual property, including common thought that was previously source for public inspiration, as exclusively private. In opposition, a growing global movement has galvanized behind a notion known as “Creative Commons” (CC). Instead of the “all rights reserved” of the copyright cartel, a Creative Commons license guarantees “some rights reserved” and fosters the flexibility of creative exchange.

Hundekopf — Knifeandfork

Hundekopf is a new project exploring the experience of Berlin’s Ringbahn, which encircles the inner city and is used as a literal vehicle to move between time and place in a fiction-historical narrative structured through SMS text-messaging.

Stories (…) are like mountain tops jutting out of the sea. Self-contained islands though they may seem, they are upthrusts of an underlying geography that is at once local and, for all that, a part of a universal pattern.

– Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (1990)

The Knifeandfork artist group approaches the urban environment as a narrative space - a human artifact constructed of stories both real and imagined that we collectively engage in telling. So-called ‘pervasive’ technology is used as a means to expose the city’s hidden layers and to create new ones, exploring emerging means of storytelling.

Technology encourages stories that are dynamic and nonlinear, mapping closely to the ways in which the human mind and thought process persist. Multiple realities, stochastic storylines, deconstructed time, branching … while the most brilliant of novelists such as Borges and Calvino and filmmakers from Kurosawa to Tarrantino have hinted at such techniques in the past, there are obvious limitations for passive media to go beyond mere representation of these structures. Games, on the other hand, with their rule systems, interactivity, and role-playing dynamic have always involved flexible outcomes dependent on the players’ choices. Arguably an important evolution of literature in recent history, incorporating these elements gives new media storytelling a game-like feel.

A first-person perspective makes the “reader” simultaneously the narrator, a central character, and even the creator of the story. As a result, the reader thinks, participates, and feels for the artwork, becoming emotionally involved with the story and ultimately, its outcome. It’s about actively acknowledging the role of audience perception: in Hudekopf, the reader’s identity - whether a German accustomed to the S-bahn from a daily commute or a visiting American seeing the city for the first time - is not at all arbitrary, but an essential element of the piece.

With wireless devices we can incorporate the unique perspective of the reader at a particular place at a particular time, letting physical reality (visual, auditory, olfactory) make immediate the sensory experience of an event in the narrative.

Together, these elements create a storytelling environment that is extremely vital: Hundekopf invites us to experience the city as verbs, not nouns. A feature of the cityscape, though it might be objectified and cataloged
by postcards, understood by a caption or label or expectation, is in fact an invitation to act and imagine. Location-embedded narrative acknowledges history as an active thing, a persistent framework for re-experience. The
artistic and even soteriological goal is to let the actively creative mode of consciousness inspired by the context of the piece drift permanently into our everyday motions through the city.

Berlin by Chance — Posttourismus Büro and Glowlab

Whether a native or tourist, one typically only knows pieces of the vast area called Berlin, as personal patterns or routes substitute for a real exploration of the city. Berlin by Chance is about fooling these patterns and experiencing the vastness of the city. Glowlab, a Brooklyn-based arts lab focused on psychogeography, was founded in 2002 by Christina Ray. Given the emergence of new technology, Glowlab projects interpret traditional Situationist practices with mobile phones, wi-fi, GPS, and computer algorithms to promote the collective evolution of the field.

For Loving Berlin, Gesa Henselmans, founder of Posttourismus Büro in Berlin, will be collaborating with Glowlab on the project Berlin by Chance.

Anyone who wants to join Berlin by Chance receives an expedition sent by a random generator. Explorers are asked to collect impressions of their journey and reinsert them into the system when they finish. A communal, pyschogeographic cartography of the city develops as these impressions accumulate.

To paraphrase Glowlab contributor Kanarinka: psychogeography is about rethinking the omnipotent perspective of the map, where everything is generalized so as to be indistinguishable, and looking instead at the specificities of maps produced by actions and impressions of the transient realities of place. The algorithms of this project inevitably produce unexpected experiences of the real city. The participant’s actual encounters in the live city are the primary element, and the virtual capability of the Internet serves as a reference point and space for documentation.

Conclusion

All of this work embraces the democratizing potential of new media, is fueled by collaborative structures, embodies a growing global community, displays an open and playful engagement with commercial culture, focuses on real world experiences, and utilizes the city as the ideal stage for interaction. Whereas the artists of the past focused upon the individual production of “works,” these groups and their projects illustrate a shift towards artists developing collaborative platforms that expand the artistic process into the public realm and open channels of creativity.

Today, perception is the ultimate battlefield for power. In an age of pervasive mediation and the ever-decreasing production value of material goods (especially in the more industrialized nations), the conceptual space of immaterial valuation is the sweet spot for all those seeking change. Advertising and political propaganda aim directly at manipulating perception, going to any length of trickery to convince the individual of their message. Truth, never a genuinely solid concept, is now more fluid than ever.

It is the aim of these projects to challenge the assumed truth in pervasive messaging and mainstream meaning. Perhaps they seek a change in their underlying pursuit of an old objective: revolution. Revolution not in the traditional sense of overthrowing the state, but in the steady, yet widespread transformation of perception. They are critical by nature, seeking to invigorate questioning. It is a new practice of a subtle politics of liberated thought.

To see a version of the print version of the article, click here.

Stadtblind frequently pursues the publication of essays related to the group’s work and inquiries into general conditions of urbanism — past, present and future.

Urban Mythologies, Stadtblind, and “The Colors of Berlin”: Intervening in the Realm of Perception, Initiating Urban Transformation
From MUSEO 7, Spring 2004
By Jesse Shapins

 

URBAN MYTHOLOGIES

Operating in the border zones between contemporary art, urban design, and ethnographic research, Stadtblind is a project dedicated to the investigation and transformation of urban life. On a theoretical level, one of the project’s main concerns are “urban mythologies.” Urban mythologies are the frameworks of individual and collective consciousness that condition the construction and interpretation of meaning, and thus, structure active living in the city. Mythologies are understood as the immaterial city, the city constantly imagined in the mind’s of its residents and a global community through popular culture, political agendas, the media, the tourist industry, and the arts. It is the perception of a city, formed and experienced from inside and outside, always in flux and immensely influential. The immediate provinces of urban mythologies are mental, spiritual, and emotional spaces–the spaces of subjectivity–but their impact can be traced in all facets of urban life.

We believe that the representation and interpretation of Berlin is dominated by two concrete mythologies which we have called “Berlin as construction site” and “Berlin as historical landscape.” These are the two most conventional and publicly valorized forms of approaching Berlin, and it is in relation to this regime that we position our work.

BERLIN AS CONSTRUCTION SITE

Probably the image most associated with Berlin in the 1990s is that sea of cranes that covered the land between Potsdamer Platz and the Spreebogen, a swath of seemingly endless building activity that included (and includes), among others, such internationally recognized architects and artists as Renzo Piano, Sir Norman Foster, Christo and Jean Claude, Peter Eisenmann, Helmut Jahn, Axel Schultes, Frank Gehry, and Santiago Calatrava. Artists, architects, tourists, politicians, and scholars were fascinated by this landscape: it symbolized the transformation of the new German capital. Construction sites were turned into performances [ Baustellen wurden ‘Schaustellen’ ], various photo essays and films concentrated upon this building madness (e.g. Hubertus Siegert’s Berlin Babylon ), and a seemingly endless number of books and essays appeared focusing upon the changes taking place in Berlin-Mitte.

Underlying this fascination with these new buildings was a latent assumption about Berlin, namely, the belief that Berlin was a city in the midst of a boom, a city on the rise, the “center of a new Europe.” The city’s population growth was predicted to be astronomical. All of the structural problems plaguing both the former East and West Berlin were by in large part ignored, or at least not aggressively or creatively confronted. No one wanted to acknowledge that neither part of the divided city was integrated into a free-market system before 1989; that both East and West Berlin were state-sponsored enterprises, their economic, social, and cultural politics driven by subsidies and isolated, protected markets. Disregarding the particular circumstances of Berlin, leading politicians, developers, planners, and architects simply assumed that the same methods used to develop other large cities in the West would be effective in Berlin.

Overnight, in the imaginations of many powerful figures, Berlin magically became a “metropolis” [ Metropole ] that could compete effectively in a globalized market with other German and Western cities. No one was ready to accept the viewpoint that Uwe Rada articulated ten years later: “[Man müßte sich vielleicht eingestehen], daß Berlin längst nicht mehr die Metropole ist, als die sie immer noch angepriesen wird, keine Global City im Wartestand, sonderen eine abgeräumte Industriestadt, eine Metropole allenfalls für neue Goldgräber und Abenteurer, mehr Saloon als Salon, eine wilde Mischung aus Detroit und Lodz, eben eine Grenzstadt zum Osten” (Rada, 2001, s. 196). In the process of imagining Berlin as a construction site, the need to confront the actualities of the city, the specificities of the context, was neglected; a false conception of the city was generated and an impossible future projected. No one wanted to acknowledge what actually constituted the exceptionality of a post-Wall Berlin cut off from Western and Eastern subsidy, a city, in Rada’s terms, that was and is more characterised by the metaphor of the “saloon” than the “salon.”

The mythology of “Berlin as construction site” is not only significant because of its problematic underpinings (its out-of-touch vision of Berlin’s future development), but also because of its geographical concentration. The only parts of Berlin that were considered deserving of attention were those in the center of the city. The rest of the city, except for the areas where the Szene established its presence (Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg most of all, but also Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg to an extent), was erased from popular consciousness. Or, if more peripheral regions did surface in the media and mainstream discussions, it was only when so-called soziale Brennpunkte (e.g. Wedding, Neukölln, and the Plattenbauvierteln on the eastern edge of the city) were mentioned. As far as the main players constructing Berlin’s future were concerned, the distinctive qualities and complexities of these less central districts would have no place in the new identity of the city.

BERLIN AS HISTORICAL LANDSCAPE

Not surprisingly, the ghosts of the past also played a central role in the process of imagining and developing Berlin following the fall of the Wall. Questions concerning the “New Berlin” were intimately interwoven with the city’s long-standing confrontation with its troubled past. The Senat ’s dominant planning ideology attempted to draw its legitimacy from what it proclaimed was a historically-based, regionally-specific Berliner architecture and city planning. Concretely, this meant promoting the use of stone (not as supportive material any longer but in the form of curtain walls), limiting the height of buildings to five-stories, enforcing unified street-front façades, and dogmatically re-creating the city’s historic street grid. The most prominent vision of the Senat’s ideal city Wilheminian Berlin with a faint trace of the Weimar era. The post-war era, both in its Eastern and Western manifistations, would have no place in the future of the city. One of the peaks of this ongoing debate is, of course, the discussion surrounding the preservation or destruction of the Palast der Republik and the drive to rebuild the old Schloß .

While Herr Stimmann and cohorts focused upon pre-WWII Berlin, the capital of a German nation-state unified for the first time since the Third Reich could not avoid becoming the crystallization point for national discussions concerning the remembrance of the tragedies of the NAZI era. Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum was built to present a historical account of Jewish life in Germany beyond the horrors of the Holocaust, the construction of a new documentation center at the Topographie of Terror, the site of the former Gestapo headquarters, was begun by Peter Zumthor, and Peter Eisenmann’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is being built.

This historical lens also manifested itself in obsession with the Wall and the empty spaces that its removal left behind. Wim Wenders and others celebrated Berlin’s Brandmauern and voids. One of the most influential architectural publications on Berlin after the fall of the Wall, Philip Oswalt’s Stadt ohne Form , praises the fragmentation of the city and sees its vacant spaces as the source of its future identity. The few remaining fragments of the Wall (e.g. The East Side Gallery) became major tourist attractions and Checkpoint Charlie became the city’s most visited musuem.

THE PRESENT AND EVERYDAY LIFE

It is important to note that it is not our intention to deny the importance of the large building projects that took place and are still underway in Berlin. And we definitely do not believe that one can approach Berlin without confronting its past. It is understandable that Berlin was frequently approached from the perspective of its monumental rebuilding efforts and its negotiation of its history. Our critique is not of these discourses as such, but of their total hegemony, their determination of approaches towards researching and artistically engaging the city. This narrow vision of the city had its costs, its “blind spots.” Our aim is to expand the discussion surrounding Berlin, to open up space for discussions that have been forced out of debates. Specifically, we contend that the two urban mythologies of “Berlin as construction site” and “Berlin as historical landscape” fail to capture the complexity of Berlin in two vital ways: they fail to account for the city’s present and they ignore practices of everyday life.

“THE COLORS OF BERLIN”

What is to become of Berlin in the 21 st century? What sort of self-understanding and identity should the city strive for to best meet the challenges ahead? These questions that were pertinent in the 1990s are also relevant today. Now, however, all of the illusions following the fall of the Wall and the euphoria of reunification are gone. A more sober, honest, and critical approach to Berlin’s current dilemmas is necessary. It is against this complex backdrop of Berlin’s present that we founded the group Stadtblind and developed the project “The Colors of Berlin.” Our intention is to develop a different, fresh view of the city. Neither pure praise nor criticism, “The Colors of Berlin” attempts to explore the reality of living in Berlin today. The questions we ask are: despite all of the city’s problems, why do so many of us still love this city, why do we choose to live here and nowhere else, why do we still have affection for a city on the brink of disaster?

We developed “The Colors of Berlin” under the premise: “Too often Berlin is seen blindly [ Zu oft wird Berlin blind betrachtet ].” In this ever-progressing work, we have modified the form of a color-fan [ Farbfächer ] to contain five elements: a theme, an image, color blocks, a text, and a map. The themes outline some of the most basic, everyday aspects of urban life in any city: sitting, eating, vehicles, façades, the ground. This thematic structure is the organizing principle of the work, allowing us to highlight the diversity of the city by presenting series that illustrate contrast and continuities through comparison. It is the combination of the image, text, and map that make each card or page specific to Berlin.

The sources of our images are from nearly every corner of the city: the city-border in the east by Hohen-Schönhausen, the backyards of single-family homes in Hermsdorf, the inside of the Europa Center in the City-West, the banks of Diana See in Dahlem, the main residential arteries of Neukölln. Our text selection is as diverse as the locations of our photographs. We have quotations from such classic Berlin-commentators as August Endell and Wim Wenders, citations from the daily newspapers the Berliner Morgenpost and die tageszeitung , and have included statistical information, personal observations, and words of wisdom from the Dalai Lama and Virgil. In an age when the central form of communication is the rapid consumption of images, we find the insertion of texts necessary to slow the viewer/reader. The exact location where the picture was taken is marked with a black circle on a cutout from the Berlin map. This localization is essential to the scientific aspect of our documentary process and lends every image a crucial specificity.

The two color blocks below every picture give the work its emotional and polemical element. The color tones are drawn directly from the picture itself and are intended to intensify and complexify the images, aiding viewers to see these often mundane objects, scenes, and spaces with new eyes and feelings. The colors also assure the work a degree of energy, fun, and accessibility. It is always said that Berlin is a grey city, and although we do not disagree that Berlin, like most cities, has many patches of grey, it is the amazingly vibrant and diverse color palate of the city that we wanted to bring to the forefront.

In a sense, it is our aim to distance viewers from that which is familiar, to re-frame the familiar in such a way that it becomes unfamiliar, fresh, and worthy of attention. We present the common spaces, objects, and surfaces of contemporary Berlin in an unusual manner that encourages viewers to perceive in a new way. It is precisely the everyday aspects of our lives that are most often overlooked; and it is precisely these everyday aspects that most constitute our lived experience of the city.

Instead of directly documenting “lived experience” in a classical one-to-one fashion, we attempt to evoke “lived experiences” by displaying the many traces that daily activity leaves behind in the urban landscape. These traces may be fleeting, such as a puddle, or the more consistent presence of such essential everyday urban utensils as trash cans, benches, and trailers. But it is precisely this focus upon life in the city that forms the basis of our practice; architecture for us is “spatial scaffolding [ eine räumliche Gerust ],” the backdrop against which urban life transpires. Our approach to the city rejects pure aestheticism in favor of attention to the way urban space is used and inhabited. Such an approach is echoed by the words of anthropologist and architectural critic James Holston when he writes in “Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship,” “The problem [of the city]…is more anthropological than morphological” (Holston, 157).

TOURIST INDUSTRY

One of our work’s most consistent reference points is the tourist industry. Tourism in Berlin feeds off the two aforementioned urban mythologies. Berlin’s top tourist destinations are Checkpoint Charlie, the Brandenburg Gate, Potsdamer Platz, the Jewish Museum, the Reichstag, Museumsinsel, and the Hackesche Höfe. Tertiary tourist destinations might include the “bohemian flair” surrounding Kollwitzplatz in Prenzlauer Berg, shopping on the Ku’Damm and around the Gedächtniskirche, the Kulturforum, the fabricated medieval alleys of the Nikolaiviertel, or a trip to the top of the TV Tower. Next to no major tourist sites are outside of Mitte, and none are outside of the Ringbahn.

The power of tourism rests not only in the experience of a city that is transported to visitors. The tourist industry and all of its apparatuses also have a tremendous impact upon the residents of a city. The touristic approach to a city tends to reduce a place to a collection of isolated monuments and districts, blending out everything in-between. In the interest of increasing the touristic attractiveness of a city, city planning policy attempts to develop a city that fits the dominant touristic image of a city and focuses upon blockbuster events and monumental building projects. It is precisely these chosen “highlights” that receive the attention and investment of the city planning office. That which seemingly does not fit into the touristic image of the city is, for all practical purposes, forgotten.

Stadtblind’s response to this relationship between tourism and urban development has been to adopt the mass-oriented strategies and language of the tourist industry, but to focus upon those places outside of the normal tourist program. And it was with this intent that we initiated the project by running a gallery in Wedding from January to August, 2003. We see the work “The Colors of Berlin” as a type of “guide-book” to Berlin. However, instead of being confronted with the classic tourist sites and a map guiding to you to them, the seemingly banal scenes and details of lesser-known inner-city districts and the vast periphery are mapped out for potential tours. Moreoever, the colors are to be understood in dialogue with the practices of the tourist industry and its facile appeal to conventional notions of beauty. The colors, often perceived in a positive manner, are a means of generating immediate accessibility and clarity, and their aesthetic language borrows from the fields of popular advertising and marketing.

CONCLUSION

In Invisible Cities , Italo Calvino presents this fictional conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan:

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. “But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks. “The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.” Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.” Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.” (Calvino, 82)

We believe that choosing to focus upon the traces of everyday life in the city, is akin to paying attention to all the stones that constitute an arch. A city is not constituted by a sum of its monuments, a collection of its “highlights” but by the combination of all of its details. Our ambition is to generate such a sensitivity to the city of Berlin. It was precisely this inability to confront the complex actualities of Berlin that doomed the city planning policies of the 1990s to failure. The Berlin city authorities imagined was drastically out of touch with the Berlin that actually existed or that realistically could develop in merely ten years’ time. One of the most serious problems facing Berlin today is a lack of critical self-reflection. More than presenting answers, “The Colors of Berlin” asks questions. Less a direct representation of our version of Berlin’s “reality,” “The Colors of Berlin” should be seen as a metaphor for a method of critically examining the city.

For a change in Berlin to truly take place, a change in mentality is necessary. Intervention in the fields of the city’s urban mythologies is crucial. If we want to change the city, we must challenge our forms of perception. How we perceive, determines the decisions we make, in other words, it determines how we act. Berlin will always be disappointed with itself if it only sees itself in relation to Paris, London, or New York. Berlin, because of its singular history as capital of the Third Reich, capital of the German Democratic Republic, “Showcase of the West [ Schaufenster des Westens ],” and site of the Berlin Wall, will never achieve “normality.” In fact, it is precisely accepting the whole range of everyday phenomena that these historical events have instigated in the city, the core of Berlin’s abnormality, that is the essential first step towards effectively working towards a better future.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Calvino, Italo. Inivisible Cities . Translated by William Weaver. New York: A Harvest Book, 1972.

Holston, James. “Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship.” In Cities and Citizenship , edited by James Holston. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.

Rada, Uwe. Berliner Barbaren. Wie der Osten in den Westen kommt . Berlin: BasisDruck, 2001.