The Rapture of Capture: the queue

Original URL: https://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/Seminars2/Gillian

Public Lecture: Gillian Fuller (Media, Film and Theatre, UNSW, Australia)

Title: The rapture of capture: the queue.

Place: Collegezaal, Overblaak 85, Rotterdam

Time: 18.00hrs

Date: Wednesday 30th November, 2005

Entry: Gratis, all welcome

How long and for what will people queue?

For Maria Callas at Convent Garden in the early 60s? For check-in at Heathrow Terminal 4 in July 2004? For Macdonald’s hamburger in Moscow in 1990? For a fistula operation in Rwanda? A Dominos Pizza menu to download with a dodgy ADSL connection in 2005? For a chance at Australian Citizenship in 2001?

Each of these queues form at thresholds where many become, in the event of queueing, one. When queues form, the organised traverse from one domain to another becomes palpable in the form of a time lag – a shift in a temporal rhythm. In the queue one is positioned in expectation of access of some kind of threshold encounter - just delayed. For those off the network there is not even the ‘tyranny of hope’.

To think about queues is to think about how the politics of distribution move from one body (in the broadest sense of the term) to another across multiple thresholds forming a technics of connective control. Queue seems so orderly, bringing a sense of harmony and justice to regimes of distribution. To stand in a queue seems such an obvious and transparent act based on mythical notion that first come, first served is socially efficient, even if, algorithmically speaking, that may not true.

Queues remain a fundamental architectural principle for networks and a form that, despite real-time and alternative networked models like BitTorrent, seems to proliferating. Commensurate with the rise in excess (and ‘personal’ service) is scarcity (and the queue). Some things stream through thresholds, like commuters on the Singapore metro, defty tapping epasses on electronic pillars, others are drip fed by bureaucracies and NGOs - each runs to a different rhythm of control. In queues, the relationship between intensive and extensive time stops being transparent and becomes obvious, systems start showing their seams, boundaries start forming in the modes of queues. If fluctuations in time present sites of both conflict and routine for the shiftworkers, jetsetters and global oligarchies, then queue provides a site to ask what are chronopolitics of waiting? That a queue is an emergent structure is obvious. But what are the conditions, the ecological ‘affordances’, that enable the queue to cohere as a form, which in the process of forming becomes index and sign?

BIO:

Gillian Fuller is an academic, writer and lapsed semiotician who works in the area of network media and cultural politics. She is Senior Lecturer in Media in the School of Media, Film and Theatre, UNSW, Australia. She currently publishes in the areas of convergent architectures, biopolitics and biometrics, and politics and methods of movement. She is co-author of Aviopolis: A book about Airports 2004, Gillian Fuller & Ross Harley, Blackdog Press: London, and has just begun a new project on the politics and methods of distribution architectures, called 'the queue project'.