tagged 
Multiplicity, Urban Camouflage, urban art in Art, Urbanism
Multiplicity, Urban Camouflage, urban art in Art, Urbanism Hiding in Plain Sight
03-11-2009
Courtesy UrbanCamouflage.de
Well, I know what it is - But I don't know where it is, where it is - Well, I know where it is - But I don't know what it looks like, what it looks like
Well, I know what it looks like - But I don't know where she comes from - Well, I know where she comes from - But I don't know what's her name
-Harrison, Byrne, Weymouth and Frantz From Perfect World
Camouflage is the method or result of concealing personnel or equipment from an enemy by making them appear to be part of the natural surroundings. A group of German photographers have created an exhilarating set of photos called Urban Camouflage. These photographs subtly, or often not so subtly, magnify a cultural unease with our current consumer urbanity. They suppose a world where two circumstances might be taking place: our office supplies, shopping bags, or storage boxes are the means of an enemy's transgression into our space, or that the only place left for us to hide is within the plain sight of our suburban existence.
Courtesy UrbanCamouflage.de
Our task now is to investigate the possibility that the productive flesh of the multitude can organize itself otherwise and discover and alternative to the global political body of capital.
Frankenstein is now a member of the family.
-Hart and Negri From Multitude
These photographs have embedded within them an urbanism of multiplicity. These are not unique experiences but rather destabilizing ones, where humor borders on fear as everyday objects of our mass consumptive existence coagulate together to offer their own resistance. They suggest considering the city as something to be hidden in, blended into or multiplied into absurdity as an interesting formal proposition.
Tower Housing Hong Kong
I am reminded of the vast uniform housing blocks of Hong Kong or Shanghai. The multitudes of favela's that house the mass of marginal but working class of Brazil. What will become the glut of suburban tract homes so lowered in price and separated from services that one could imagine Pruitt-Igo extended across the American, even global, landscape?
Dense Suburban Housing Mexico - Unfinished
It is this Frankenstein urbanism of half built suburbs, underfunded buildings, and infrastructural debacles that is going to be the reminants of this strange economy. We at The Functionality are thinking about how to hijack, usurp, infest, co-opt, the new urbansims that are being created by contraction. We see contracton as opportunity. Opportunity to redefine the roll of a multitude of possible habitats. To see them as generators, as value, as matter to begin to form. We think there are smarter ways of doing things, of not planning perhaps, but of inhabitting. Whether it is energy generation or job generation, we see our natural resources as being our ingenuity in how we can all recast our global interior suburb-come-ghetto into homes, towns or cities.
Reader Comments (2)
I would argue that this is more suburban consumer camouflage than urban camouflage. All of these works take place in massive stores that can only exist outside of dense urban areas and display enormous quantities of a given product. A ghillie suit made of consumer products provides cover as well as a smile in this context. It is unexpected. We value that.
Note, however, that shoppers basically ignore these anthropomorphic piles of product even when they move. We live in a post Punk'd era of information glut where more and more people, primarily in urban environments, simply ignore what they consider irrelevant. In this world urban camouflage already exists: it looks and smells like a homeless person, someone handing out flyers, trying to coerce a donation for...
I do like this project, but it is one, "Boo!" from being Candid Camera. How can it be pushed a step further?
It's true this type of camouflage takes place within the store itself. What we see here is the creation of a strategy of resistance. Could we colonize suburban homes in the same way? We see the Urban Camouflage project as a model for urban colonization within the over glut of unsold housing and apartment units.
Great comment. Keep em coming!