The white noise of capitalism: audio and visual montage and sensing economic change

摘要

I have been working on a project on Berlin focused on the upheaval that has taken place in and through this city since the fall of 'the Wall' in 1989. Since that time the city's leaders and others have been wrestling with attempts to talk up and rebuild Berlin as a world city. Such global ambitions take a number of forms, perhaps most notably the large-scale developments in the centre of Berlin. Easily the most prominent of these is the collection of architecturally ambitious claims to world city status that have arisen at Potsdamer Platz, a wide stretch of the former death strip between East and West. The significance of Potsdamer Platz should not be lost. Potsdamer Platz '... has always been a non-place - literally a Utopia - a site upon which to project fantasies of desire and fear, power and powerlessness ... Its ambiguous spatial character was matched by its phantasmal presence in time: Potsdamer Platz always seemed [to] be on a point of transition from past to future ... repeatedly called to embody architecturally the political ambitions of its masters. Before the fall of the Wall Potsdamer Platz was Berlin's 'prairie of history', 'a point of transition from the past to the future', a 'wilderness'. By the mid-1990s the redevelopment of Potsdamer Platz had begun. At 15 hectares and for several years the world's largest construction site, the latest transition of this centre has been shaped by its new masters, private-sector corporations such as Sony and DaimlerChrysler, and is now complete. International networks and abstract monetized flows - represented by the data to be found in books on world and global cities written by Sassen and Castells, amongst others - have been the 'magical means' used to aid Berlin's latest rebuilding and reimagining. Faced with such colossal change and the soaring rebuilding that has taken place on this prairie of history, one question that arose during the research was how to capture, how to sense, the economic change signalled by such urban redevelopment. The beginning of an answer to this question lay in the techniques of montage, both visual and aural, and lessons learnt from the work of Henri Lefebvre.