Likes Come and Go. Memories last forever.

I wonder if we still possess the ability to see the unusual in the everyday and an interest in capturing life’s in-between moments.
Have stylized Instagram posts and micro-productions - “stories” - carried us closer to a banal familiarity akin to food-porn, that has the potential to blind our collective conscious to what’s really going on in the world around us? Has the design of public space fallen victim to a frenetic response to influencer-demand and economic-driven consumption of place as photogenic backdrop? Can we still conceive places that facilitate the interactions we need for human connectivity amongst ourselves and to our communities? Or, are we simply designing and building a global stage set attractive to followers hungry for the perfect photo-drop; a production that features climax after climax but misses opportunities, setbacks, and the aftermath?

The Plaza Program in NYC, conceived with the laudable goal of transforming “underused streets into vibrant, social public spaces” has begun to subvert form-giving designs for the vehicle in turn for a human-powered eccentricity of space design. If a simple increase in square footage of open space is the primary goal then, arguably, we are achieving it. Many of these temporary spaces, however, do little to develop a collective and lasting memory of place. Instead, accoutrements that resemble props  - artificial turf lawns, graphic tableaus of thermoplastic and painted etchings, and over-sized play equipment - scream for our attention in this, the most photographed city. This trend is further reinforced in buildings public art installations that are rarely conceived as anything but plop-art. As this trend becomes the new-normal should we more carefully consider the implications to place-making as pressure to “design-in” these features becomes increasingly great? A walk through the city no longer resembles a journey articulated by built-form. Instead, we find ourselves amidst a pop-up urbanism; a hyphenated story that exist as ephemeral realities to an “Insta-need.” 

An obsessive-compulsive tendency to document and distinguish ourselves has quickly altered our experiences and perceptions of cities. This pictorial representation and  “sharing” of our individual worlds - “the uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided” - is effectively displacing a contextual and geo-physical uniqueness of place and anaesthetized our responses to our collective lives within them. Authenticity is questionable. Are we not also missing the gritty moments that live within the interstitial spaces of time and spectacle? Do we need to proceed with greater caution as the environments we are creating resemble products of an increased consumption and exchange of image as substitutes for places? This trojan-horse of visual consumption has the power to radically affect our response to places when we actually see them. Contrived for the purposes of social media rather than longevity, our connection to place and each other becomes increasingly transitory; a world where chance meetings and lingering conversations are subverted in lieu of ‘Flicker’ing photo-shoots with the express purpose of announcing our enviable position.

What drives us to highlight the epic “stories” of our lives? Is struggle and discomfort so taboo that we feel extreme discomfort when “sharing” these moments? Perhaps this is where Snapchat sought to intervene, a radical departure with the express intention of sharing life’s more banal moments; the moments that build resilience and offer growth. It’s what Instagram smartly mimicked to preserve - nee dramatically increase - its financial longevity but unknowingly facilitated the perpetuation of a glorified narrative, perfectly produced through lurid lenses and fantastical filters. 
 
Dissimilar to the deceptions of the picturesque – power masquerading in cultivated images of neglect and depravity – curated images of today’s places are disseminated with an accuracy that is both authoritative and enticing. These images are highly composed and frozen in time illuminating their aesthetic and material qualities, and implanting a preconceived notion of public space within the human mind as one without a hede for the present. Similar to the thousands who stand before the Acropolis every day, our impressions, expectations, and subsequent interactions with places we repeatedly see pictures of elicit a dulled complacency to the experiential qualities of that place in search of an understanding of ourselves in relation to it. Could it be that where once we were taught how to view the landscape - through unfiltered interaction with it - today, images are our guide to perceiving, and thus designing the world around us? As we become further distanced from our contact with this world, is it possible we now find ourselves as passive gazers of an objectified scene? We need only ask ourselves how many passersby of Lorenzo Quinn’s sculpture in Venice - a stunning metaphor for the effects of climate change - were provoked to consider the implications beyond a split-second composition.

This proliferation of imagery, forever recycled and shared, can only lead us to a separation from landscape and place as we have traditionally been exposed to it. As both an idea and a physical reality, our built world is continually reinvented - its image preserved and modified for notoriety and resale. In its gross (mis)representation our landscape procures estrangement. Objectification of a world that is visually free from the rapacious pillage of resources, inhumanity, and life in between poses an uncertain and newly formed cultural imagination and connection to landscape. 

As we continue to see our world through an invisible frame, it is hard to deny the number of people viewing their lives through their phones. The anaesthetising effects of a built environment as art and adjunct are increasingly for crowds with cameras. Indulging what appears to be a narcissistic attempt to let others know we have imbibed some culture in an attempt to boost our own image, do we not instead risk the loss of places designed for comfort, movement and lingering? I can only hope we are not so thoroughly detached that we cannot continue to design for complete “stories” - stories that live on as a result of a production of place that precludes shallow spaces of fluorescent colour and glistening gloss.