Please join us Thursday, March 3rd at 5 pm as Javier Arbona presents
“Memory/Cloud: a San Francisco Police Department Memorial”
This working paper will focus on the fortuitous location of an architectural memorial dedicated to dead officers at a new police fortress that happens to also house the "cop cloud," a digital management system for "emergency response." I will examine what role the architectural design of memory space plays in defending the very infrastructure of the increasingly data-driven—and privately managed—policing of San Francisco. In addition, I explain how a sensing on foot can explore the politics of embodied feelings of tribute, grief, and paranoia that would go otherwise unregistered in typical urban data. This writing comes from a larger collaborative project on "footprinting the urban security cloud" with the Demilit art collective.
Arbona holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California at Berkeley (undertaken with the support of a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and a Bancroft Library Award), a Bachelor's of Architecture from Cornell University, and a Master's of Science in Architecture Studies from MIT. Arbona's book manuscript (in-progress) is tentatively titled, "The City of Radical Memory: Spaces of Home Front Repression and Resistance in the San Francisco Bay Area." "The City of Radical Memory" is a study on racial violence and organized forgetting as perpetuated through military shaping of landscapes. He cofounded the landscape arts collective Demilit with Bryan Finoki and Nick Sowers. Together, they have created writings, sounds, and events for venues such as the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Istanbul Design Biennial, and The Funambulist.
RSVP is required. Papers will be pre-circulate a week before each session. Please email Megan Eardley (meardley@princeton.edu) for a copy of the paper.
All events to take place at 5:00pm, N107
School of Architecture
Princeton University
Convened by Carson Chan, Martin Cobas, Megan Eardley, Curt Gambetta, and Elis Mendoza.
With kind support from:
Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities
Program in American Studies
Program in Media + Modernity
Program in Latin American Studies
Race and Citizenship in the Americas Network
