i’m presenting a paper at the creating value: between commerce and commons at the end of this month before taking off to greece. here’s my abstract:

This paper investigates intersections of play, technology, and ontological security within the contemporary East Asian city, based on reflections and observations of play from my fieldwork in 2007– 8 with ‘trans-youth’ in Seoul. Trans-youth are those who are neither children nor adults; In the Korean context, they are those between the ages of 18 and 24, situated on the delicate border zone between digital natives and immigrants in Prensky’s (2000) term. Taking the ontological position, it would seem that given the opportunity, most people would choose to live a pleasurable life over one lacking it. Although ‘pleasure’ is non-universal — for instance, this necessitates certain fundamental material requirements — desiring pleasure has been common across geographical and cultural boundaries throughout human history. Similarly, most people would prefer the next moment to be a more pleasurable one than the contrary. Pleasure in this sense is inherently interrelated with possibility and pressure, together which create a phenomenon of play, a fertile soil for creativity that could bring about transformations necessary for the development of human history. Therefore, change and pleasure are ontological necessity for each other. In this respect, Bataille’s (1986) argument – though essentially confined to the domain of eroticism, which, nevertheless, he perceives as a fundamental element of humanity – that ultimate joy ensues the (unsustainable and thus illusory) overcoming of discontinuity has some validity.

How does this notion translate in the present era of capitalism, rapid urbanisation and networks? One way of answering this question would be to examine the rules of the current ‘economy of desire’ (Petrescu, 2005, p. 46), which encompasses not only financial but also emotional and socio-cultural domains. How then do we conceive the intersections of play, technology, and ontological security in this context? My research suggests that the embeddedness of change in ontological security has increasingly become more manifest with the embeddedness of mobile technologies in everyday life. Here, network technology provides a flexible means for reterritorialisation in the techno-social ecology.

Huizinga (1955) sees play as a pleasure provoking phenomenon and the primordial soil for human civilisation, rather than ‘the other’ of the ’serious’ human life. This paper shares his view and reflects on the concept of ‘urban play’ (or play in the everyday urban context), with particular considerations to ubiquitous technology, an increasing fixture of contemporary cities. Taking Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of the smooth/striated space, it is argued that as an essential fabric of everyday life, urban play allows users of the city to (re)create smooth spaces in conceptually striated urban space. This thus accentuates a need for interdisciplinary approach that combines macro- and microscopic perspectives to understand the value context of the city, which can inform the design and development of desirable and sustainable urban communities.

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creating value: between commerce and commons
wed 25 - fri 27 june 2008
brisbane convention & exhibition centre, south bank
brisbane, australia
http://www.cci.edu.au/events/creating-value-between-commerce-and-commons
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