BLUR CITY A LOVE STORY | by joseph raffin
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“The words urban and planning and urban development belong in a shop for architectural antiques and should be replaced by phantasms still to be defined, which fluctuate and flicker like the television screen after the broadcast day has finished. White noise as urban strategy, as a digitally networked system without hierarchies, is the play of the suburbs and development on the peripheries and edges, which will mold and determine the image of our cities and the quality they have to offer.” Imagine a city that is all periphery; a soft penumbra with neither a nucleus nor city center. It waves and fluxes, flashes, and then vanishes. Amorphous nodes of clustered networks gather throughout the city and then disperse in an instant. Densities change hundreds of times in almost a single moment. It scurries above the spent plains and spills over and down the mountains like water splashing into a tossed sea. With the grace of a thick starling flock it stretches across the sky and then recoils into a dense huddled mass. The shadow of this phantasm hardly casts darkness. Sun rays slip smoothly past its porous networks. The shadow it casts is more so the result of light diffused than the light rejected; and a cloudy day will render it nearly invisible. If you wish to see it fly overhead, you must listen. The rumble of conversation, collaboration, and the clamorous unfolding of innumerable innovations harold its immanence. “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.” Emma placed the book to her side. Her eyes were swollen to almost blindness from lack of sleep. She was on the cusp of a project that was beginning to consume her. 004
Blur City in passing Emma was really shooting for the stars with this one. Blur City seemed to be most friendly to those meticulous and incremental types. Taking on smaller more immediate problems meant more immediate and recognizable success. It was therefore, immensely beneficial to one’s reputation and esteem amongst peers and the community. Emma’s work ethic could hardly be identified as being compatible with this structure. She was mostly interesting in a project as far as its cosmic significance and concept. She could hardly be bothered with details; struggling heavily with them when the project required it. More romantic types might identify her as a bit of a dreamer, but her obsession with the “whole” often seemed to pair 005
with a misplaced sense of pride. This was a problem she at all times had to keep in check. Furthermore, as a project became dauntingly intricate, she tended to fade back into phases of paralyzing indolence. Her network, however, gave her the benefit of the doubt. They had grown quite familiar with her erratic processes and fickle motivation. This was mitigated in part by a couple lines of code in Blur City’s algorithm that measured people’s backgrounds and linked their likely skills and interests with congruent personality types. It was revolutionary in that it distinguished diversity of background as something of great utility. And Blur City organized itself around this as well as millions of other parameters. This was a source of patience for Emma’s collaborators. They trusted the complex algorithms that drove Blur City and thereby trusted her. Being well aware of this fact, Emma was equally gracious as she was anxious. She couldn’t escape the feeling that she had been letting people down. She felt as though their ability to hide their impatience was visibly waning. As her own private projects began to sap her motivation, she worried her colleagues would begin catching on to her increasing disinterest in her professional practice. This was a tragedy manifest in the fact that she was keen on keeping these private undertakings secret. They were doomed to doubt and question her. Twenty minutes after midnight Emma rose up again and walked out onto her balcony. Earth flew steadily from below her apartment. Its speckled lights scattered the ground plane, carefully and measuredly marking its various typographies. She sparked a lighter and torched the tip of a cigarette. Her smoking habit turned five last month. Halfway through her cigarette she studied its wrinkled 006
edges and observed its smoldering end; then, relaxing her hand, let it fall un-fettered to the ground below. It maintained its glow for a good while until it was sucked into the night darkness. Pause was a fortuitous blessing in Blur City and Emma took the moment to bask in it before returning to her desk. Tomorrow had been long in the making and Emma knew it futile to try and sleep. Besides, there were some final arrangements and bugs she had to finish fixing in her project. A soft screen of code illuminated her pale face as she poured over each indiscernible line of text that crept on like boxcars on an endless track. The momentum of a thousand hours of strained concentration was finally hitting her with a dulling force. Her monotonous pace had become like a sickness.
Emma at work 007
She looked again through her window to where Rene slept. She envied his silent drive. She knew she was doing work that he could power through at will. She wished she could wake him and bribe him to finish the damned project for her. He would do it too, bribe or no bribe. This was a second tragedy. He more than anyone in Blur City, could not know what she had been piecing together. She reckoned back to a conversation she had with him last week about relocating. It had deeply upset him and she was completely in the dark about how he might handle tomorrow’s revelations. Taking note of the time, Emma returned her mind to her work. Finally, the music in her apartment stuck a kind of rhythm that began to carry her productivity and it picked up enough inertia to continue through the night. She broke the morning, as she had for the past week; too exhausted to fully attend to her pressing fears. Emma’s alarm pulled her out of a deep REM cycle. The inconsiderate buzzing bounced off the glossy walls of her small white apartment. She arose a few hours later than she had planned, while still a good bit disoriented. Emma wasn’t rushed in her morning preparations. She was already glad that this day had arrived. And she was keen to the fact that the complexity of human existence had little room for the best made plans of getting to work on time. The priority of her day was her project. And today was the day of its groundbreaking. After months and months of sneaking, hacking, and hiding: the project would finally find fruition. Rene seeks out Emma just about every morning at 10:30. He would choose an earlier time if it weren’t for her chronic tardiness. This particular morning he was forced to postpone the visit until 11:00.
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On cue he greeted her at her work station with warm coffee, “I saw you standing on your balcony last night. American Spirits are hard to come by these days” He clicked the coffee down next to her. Emma, forgetting this part of her morning routine scrambled to conceal a pile of scattered doodles on her desk. “Huh? Oh yeah, guilty pleasure I guess. You know Rene, the level of detail with which you recall our distant encounters can come off as a little creepy” Rene skipped addressing her fake concern. “Yeah… Hey, that was one of your father’s projects, am I right? He wrote the program gauging personality types with balcony square footage.” Emma thought it a silly way to get a conversation going but she played along, “Correct, yeah that was him.” Rene continued, “I don’t have much of a balcony, I don’t think I have much use for one anyway. I like to view the scene from inside my apartment. The world makes quite a bit more sense from there. It’s like I can view the world with a sense of control.” He smirked and clenched her fists in front of her. Emma, rather off-put by his obnoxious gesture, took a second and then replied, “Well, I think his intention was to introduce reflection into the domestic function. I guess there are those who have less a need of it than others.” She caught Rene hesitant in thought, “You know, in a way, I enjoy the feeling of helplessness to externalities, like a flag in a gale storm. Except instead of a flag, I have a balcony.” Rene sipped his coffee, and pulling the cup away from his face he murmured, “Yeah… that’s certainly your father speaking. It’s very Organizing City if you think about it..?” 009
Emma replied, “Of course I have thought about it, you’re spot on.” She quickly switched to a new thought, this time her confidence in speaking began to find slippery ground. “Um, before you go I need to make sure I tell you something” Rene cautiously replied, “I haven’t left yet, what is it?” Emma stammered on, “Well… You know how... we’ve been talking?” Rene’s giddy morning attitude washed away to a seriously confused inquisitive demeanor, “Yes?” Emma continued cryptically, “Um yes, well, could you stay late at work tonight, maybe meet me at my work station a little later? 8:15 to be exact. I want to show you something interesting.” Rene looked away, “Can you tell me what it is, I mean, this is a very peculiar request?” Emma replied bluntly, “No, I really can’t” Rene knew it was odd that she would demand such a precise time, but he nonetheless chose to employ a soft smile. He thought it best to respond positively in the face of uncertainty. His trust in her afforded him some optimism and no one likes waiting with the assumption of bad news. He said, “Sure.” She thanked him. And he paced on back to his work station across the room. A small clock at the corner of Rene’s screen notified him that he had 5 minutes until 8:15. He gauged that it would take him a few minutes to grab his things and make his way to Emma’s desk so he began to leave. He was accidently early of course, and he caught Emma tuned into her work. 0010
He thought it would be amusing to surprise her, and a soft hand on her shoulder sent her spinning in a fit of shock. As she spun around, a stray arm bumped a stack of doodles from under her jacket unto the floor below. “Rene, what the hell?!” Rene, attempting to contain his laughter, brought up a couple observations. Pointing to the coal black Helvetica confirmation number flashing across a white work screen, he noted, “Hey, isn’t that a production release confirmation notice? Did you just release an algorithm change today? You didn’t tell -” Distracted by the rare sight of paper, he halted his rambling inquiries. He walked over to pick up her doodles, “Emma, where did you find…?” His mumbling tone trailed off into incomprehensibility as he began fetching the scattered pages and carefully unfolding the dog-eared corners of the stack. Emma, unable to calculate her next move, froze in her chair. Her mind, dually full and empty, had her body in a vice grip. She watched as her last doodle floated to the floor and alighted upon its glossy surface. After Rene lifted the sketches from the ground, he looked blankly at her and then back to the drawings. His joking air had receded. “It’s so fragile and immediate” He murmured, “I’ve never seen paper here in Blur City before. It’s so strange.” He failed the employ the upbraided tone she expected as wonder washed over his face. Emma grasped for a response. “It’s not so strange though, Blur City too is fragile and immediate...” His wonder turned to a kind of pseudo-disappointment. They had this conversation before. “Visceral… yes, fluid… 0011
yes, but it’s not so much immediate as it is imminent. Our immediacy implies a more perfect ends. Ever more perfect… ever more… more. These doodles are at best contrarian to Blur City” He shuffled through the pages between his hands. “This is an outdated tool, fragile in its abstraction, immediate in nostalgic sensibility toward imperfection. Did you bring this paper all the way from Organizing City?” “No! Well, yes I did, but you’re wrong. It is a tool, Rene, ancient in its conception, however its utility transcends the ages in increasingly more complex ways. It’s actually the best kind of invention. It seems neither to hold origin, nor encounter obsolescence. It’s an immediacy that implies a dialectic between pause and conceptualization.” “Pause? Emma, you know we have plenty of tools at our disposal aimed at mediating the transition between your ideas and a finished product. How can you say that an effective medium both values pause and pushes the envelope of imminence. Pause? Really, it’s a flaw, it’s a speed bump that Blur City has been dedicated to mitigating. It flies in the face of progress, it’s strange…” (He paused then continued), “It’s strange to hear you speak about pause so passively.” She nervously looked down at her fingernails and tried not to fidget. “Maybe, pause isn’t such a bad thing in the context of real production. It seems like you’ve really bought into the mission of Blur City. Don’t get me wrong, I… (She paused then continued)... I love it here. I feel like, in this place, I’m challenged to push my limits every day. It can be a tremendously empowering thing. However, there are times I feel like I’m writing a bunch of sentences that fall just short of the point.” “The point seems fairly simple to me,” Rene retorted with a tone of annoyance, “To make ourselves, our lives, and others better… we push our limits to do so. The only 0012
pause there is exists in a kind of misplaced nostalgia that only sets the community back.” Emma cringed a little. This is how their conversations always ended. Rene always leveraged his point of view as the true noble high-road, the only moral imperative. She would be forced into admitting that she was neglecting the common good of the community surrounding her. Then, in the typical fashion, he would walk away after she fumbled through her final point. However, this particular moment, she was quite determined to reverse this trend. She had her plan in mind, one that had almost consumed her over the past few months. The late hours of the night had left her energies worn and drained for the harsh early mornings. She started, “Well, if we want to talk about purpose we need to ask a question of meaning; even if we end up finding that meaning falls apart amidst deconstructive pickiness. You keep talking to me about self-improvement. But it’s a kind of mechanical self-improvement. Like, how one would fix a machine or add a parameter to an algorithm. But being human surges beyond this mechanical existence; even beyond the throws of nostalgic revelry. We need to explore what it really means to be human again; even at the expense of your supposed progress. I just think we ought to ask ourselves what it means to dive the depths of being. It’s not what you or the entire force of Blur City thinks it is. It’s not here or in any other city. It’s a between-ness between two objects; between complete freedom and radical submission. It is something found at the eye of a storm; at the bottom of a barque tossed peacefully about by the crushing waves. It’s a type of unity encountered in a scattered milieu.” Rene’s gaze returned to her sketches. He looked directly 0013
through them to the floor below and down to the dark earth until it stopped at its boiling core. “Emma, I’m… I’m just worried. Everyone is worried because you’ve been stalling out on your project deadlines. There are people becoming concerned about how you’ve been using your time. They think you’re holding others back. They think you’re holding me back. And I think you’re holding yourself back.” Rene had it in his mind to walk away. It was almost choreographed and scripted at this point. His day was over as far as he was concerned and his stress was pushing him to seek a space alone and a strong drink. Meanwhile Emma resisted her tears. She knew she had pushed him to a limit he did not like to see. She hated to push him farther but, she could not let this dispute end like it always did. She made her move, “could you just look at the sketches?” Realizing how he had hardly cracked the first page of her sketch pile, he willingly began to flip through them. “These... these are our memories…” he murmured. The sketches, a powerful vehicle of historical experience, threw Rene into a rare nostalgic episode. They were a collection of small formal studies emulating past memories important to their friendship. Their depth and detail seemed to open doors to him that were long since shut. Emma woke Rene from his trance, “Rene, remember how you wanted to know what I’ve been working on all this time? I need you to see something.” He peered up above the pile of sketches to see her facing the window. The ground began to shake.
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Rene rose and staggered cautiously towards the window to peer out upon Blur City, where a great unfolding was rumbling forth. The force of which nearly knocked the two to the ground. From the voids and densities within the penumbra, gathered and unfolded massive blockish
Emma‘s sketches 0015
objects. Large slabs and towers started to fall together into obscure pseudo formal gestures. Massive blocks began to form as solids with purposive voids carved out of them. Rene, still gripping Emma’s sketches noted the likeness to the drawings she had given him. He looked astoundingly as the great masses dropped their roots into the cold dirt below like massive legs. For the first time, the city walked instead of flew. Overtaken by her excitement she turned and yelled to him, “This! This is what I’ve been working on! This is my latest project!” Rene’s eyes bulged in wonder. The plethora of scrambled questions in his mind left him dumbfounded-ly silent.”
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Emma’s creation | enlarged elevation
He noted the confusion on the faces of those in the surrounding rooms and spaces. Grandiose changes to the city were somewhat common and it wasn’t the first time a shift in an algorithm had brought about such commotion. But this time the citizens of Blur City could be seen stopping at the windows to see exactly what was unfolding. Confusion conquered their minds. They paused to comprehend it. Then Rene observed Emma’s small familiar hand reach out to him and while his whitened face gave way to a weary smile. He gripped her hand gently and returned his view to the commotion outside. From the confusion there arose a kind of ambiguous clarity and understanding rooted deep within his doubt and confusion. He realized they were going to be alright.
Emma and Rene in contemplation 0017
Rene murmured: “Emma, this is incredible. You did this all on your own?” “You know Rene,” Emma calmly replied, “perhaps beyond the convenient illusions of control, lay the elusive foothills of freedom” ... the end.
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Blur City post intervention | prespective
Notes: 1. Prix, Wolf D., and Martina Kandeler-Fritsch. Get off of My Cloud: Texte 1968 - 2005. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005. Print. 2. The Holy Bible, King James Version. New York: American Bible Society: 1999; Bartleby.com, 2000. www. bartleby.com/108/.
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