O’megaville: Excursions in Planetary Urbanism

Four decades ago Henri Lefebvre anticipated the complete urbanization of the planet, which no longer sounds so strange. Radical shifts seem to appear in our experience of the city, through dislocations of self and body, the World and the Earth. This paper explores a range of concerns underpinning a media performance project – O’megaVille – using Google Street View as a platform for critical approaches to planetary urbanism. This has involved dance workshops in Mexico, mobile media actions and video installation in Montreal and New York, and a performancelecture in Toronto, amongst other events. In this paper I’ll use Google Street View (GSV) to think about how media assemblages play an enactive role in the speculative nature of experience. How may GSV be seen to illustrate what I see as an emerging urban condition that is simultaneously planetary and embodied? What may be at stake here for bodies (broadly defined) that operate within a distributed field of forces – in part nonhuman, often inhuman? And how may these disruptions in the fabric of experience call for a speculative response? Linked to a separate Artist Poster session at ISEA, this paper offers a series of conceptual and theoretical sketches for surveying the ruptured cohesion of Google Street View.