Empty safes labeled “bankruptcy of the local governments,” and shovels and bulldozers representing the Lee Myung-bak administration’s widespread construction projects lie on a desolate sandy beach as high-rise buildings on the brink of collapse due to the plummeting real estate sector dot the landscape.
Material Commonalities
The term ‘material commonalities’ is a reference to Walter Benjamin’s language of things; as we develop new forms of mapping human and non-human actors, questions of representation remain central and continue to take their inspiration from multiple practices of visualization.
The “move away” policy or how to battling pollution in china
Big cities face heavy environmental protection pressure. For instance, Beijing has a daily environmental index and the government also implements an annual “blue sky” plan. And environmental protection departments are especially under heavy pressure to fulfill their quota of emission cuts every year.
From this we can see that the government is very strict about emission reduction.
But how are we solving our environmental problems in large and medium-sized cities? The common practice is to move polluting enterprises such as coal-fired power and steel plants away from the cities to the remote areas.
Korean government looking for a "cyber"spokesperson...
“Whereas the official spokesman mostly delivers the president’s messages, the cyber spokesperson will answer Internet users’ questions on a real-time basis and speak about government positions on light issues as well,” another presidential aide said.
Monitoring the city. The Ubiquitous Integrated Center at the Anyang city hall.
APAP 2010: Urban Ecology
In the purpose of applying artistic practices into everyday life of the general public, APAP 2010 will focus on the contexts that surround the public art - that is the city and its citizens - particularly toward the development of new urban pedagogy that can improve the social and cultural conditions of Anyang and its communities. And against the imposition of Public Art into uninformed public, APAP 2010 looks to cooperate, and even collaborate with the citizens and communities in the process and products of our projects. In short, the goals APAP 2010 is to initiate constructive dialogues between citizens and artists, and to use art as a creative tool and process that can help communities to attain a better understanding and management of their own environments. APAP 2010, therefore, will be based on two important concepts; Urban Ecology and Public Culture. First, Urban Ecology is an idea that city is an organism made of human structures and actions: an artificial ecology. And beyond the popular concept of ecology about the preservation of natural environment, Urban Ecology proposes that the human society can be structured similar to how the natural ecology performs. This is so that we could learn to incorporate the time-based corrections and innovations of the living organisms, and their system of balanced relations between resources and entropies.Urban Ecology is also based on the recognitions of emergent structures and informal systems within the contemporary society, reflected in the paradigmatic shifts of today’s technologies and corporations that move toward networked and cellular systems. The new scenario of horizontal power system—the pancake like configuration of the Information Age—is a major departure from the predatory and colonial tendencies of the vertical power structure of the Industrial Age, the hierarchical pyramid. Urban Ecology is then a system for development of ecological partnership between human affairs and urban systems, where every citizen of all cities and communities are both governed and governed, as well as being the clients and designers of their social, cultural and urban developments. Secondly, Public Culture is a public process for the making of culture, not the making of arts by their specialists for public consumptions. In Public Culture, art functions as tool for the research and visualization of various cultural issues, and a language for public communications so that everyone can be more educated about being public, as well as participate in the making public. Public Culture then is the process and practice of aesthetic discourses, rather than the production and exhibition of aesthetics objects. With city being the ultimate context of artistic engagement of Public Culture, APAP 2010 is inviting a multi-disciplinary collective of experts to collaborate with the citizens and communities of Anyang. They include innovative and respected artists, architects and planners, along with sociologist, anthropologists, historians, economist and others. In addition, we are inviting numerous universities—international, national and local— to participate in several month long continuous on going workshops that could make APAP 2010 an important center for urban research and development for Korea and the world, beyond 2010. APAP 2010 hopes to be one of the first to bring forth community participation in Korean urban developments [Urban Ecology] and artistic practices [Public Culture].
