Elche and Olympiades
elche
Les Olympiades
Les Olympiades street view and map
Elche Street view
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Part II: Google Earth
Elche and Olympiades
elche
Les Olympiades
Les Olympiades street view and map
Elche Street view
Final Exam pt I
Trent Huismann
Home as a Workplace
Many people have done some sort of work out of their house or have sun some sort of home based business (such as a daycare) for a short period of time. Some people however, run businesses out of their homes for a good part or for most of their lives. In the case of the building Les Olympiades in France and the town of Elche, Spain, There has been a long history of working from home and as a result the creation of the new identity of the home as a workplace.
In the town of Elche, Spain, has formed a new way of manufacturing and changed the idea of a traditional workplace completely. Instead of waking up every morning to go to a factory or other traditional workplace, the workers of numerous shoe and textile companies have workers stitch and manufacture shoes in their own home. The materials are brought to the workers, and they are completed, and further manufactured at another workers residence, factory, or workshop until there is a finished product. This has somewhat changed the layout of the town and challenges the idea of a traditional workplace by creating small nodes where people work, instead of having a large factory setting.
The building Les Olympiades in France was once part of a large urban building plan in Paris, France in the 1970's. The building was meant to house 16,000 people, and it turned into a failed project when the building did not meet the standards of it's intended target market. In 1974, political refugees mostly from southeast Asia rented out the vacant parts of the building at a reduced rate. The Asiatic community living in the building started to use the underground parking area in the building for market and retail space. Many of the residents of the building also work or own restaurants or retail space in Les Olympiades. And many of the restaurants in the building get most of their produce and goods from other stores in the building. Many of the residents of the building find this convenient, they can work, sleep, and buy goods all in the same building, and many of the residents said that there is almost no need to leave.
With the creation of this new identity as a home laborer, or having your home and your workplace in the same location, people have seen this new workplace setting as an advantage. In Elche, many of the women like the location of their work because they are able to take care of their family and make a living and not have to worry about travel times to a factory. In Les Olympiades, many people enjoy working and living in the same place, because it creates a new sort of social community where people no longer need to go to the bank to get a loan, the community can lend them money. Also, many of the businesses that are in the building depend on one another for survival.
Many of the people that have adapted this “work at home” lifestyle like it quite a bit and many do not want to go back to working in a separate location just because of convenience. The only real instance of a major disadvantage is in Elche, where labor contracts are not given out and people are often times underpaid. The home labor in Elche will soon be made legal, meaning that labor contracts and minimum wage standards will be enforced.
In both cities, the residents have had a significant impact on their physical landscape. In Elche, the town has been called by Multiplicity as “a network of production points that embraces the entire city”. The reason why Multiplicity says this is because production is scattered throughout the city, and there is a network of vehicles and people keeping production going the residents have gotten rid of the traditional factory setting, in favor of a workplace at home. Multiplicity calls Les Olympiades “a city in a building”, due to the large amount of people and businesses in one building. Residents of Les Olympiades have taken the idea of a traditional home, and transformed it into a small community and a network of businesses and people that rely upon one another for survival. In the cases of Elche, Spain or the Les Olympiades building in France, residents have challenged the idea of a traditional workplace in favor of working from home.
Home as a Workplace
Many people have done some sort of work out of their house or have sun some sort of home based business (such as a daycare) for a short period of time. Some people however, run businesses out of their homes for a good part or for most of their lives. In the case of the building Les Olympiades in France and the town of Elche, Spain, There has been a long history of working from home and as a result the creation of the new identity of the home as a workplace.
In the town of Elche, Spain, has formed a new way of manufacturing and changed the idea of a traditional workplace completely. Instead of waking up every morning to go to a factory or other traditional workplace, the workers of numerous shoe and textile companies have workers stitch and manufacture shoes in their own home. The materials are brought to the workers, and they are completed, and further manufactured at another workers residence, factory, or workshop until there is a finished product. This has somewhat changed the layout of the town and challenges the idea of a traditional workplace by creating small nodes where people work, instead of having a large factory setting.
The building Les Olympiades in France was once part of a large urban building plan in Paris, France in the 1970's. The building was meant to house 16,000 people, and it turned into a failed project when the building did not meet the standards of it's intended target market. In 1974, political refugees mostly from southeast Asia rented out the vacant parts of the building at a reduced rate. The Asiatic community living in the building started to use the underground parking area in the building for market and retail space. Many of the residents of the building also work or own restaurants or retail space in Les Olympiades. And many of the restaurants in the building get most of their produce and goods from other stores in the building. Many of the residents of the building find this convenient, they can work, sleep, and buy goods all in the same building, and many of the residents said that there is almost no need to leave.
With the creation of this new identity as a home laborer, or having your home and your workplace in the same location, people have seen this new workplace setting as an advantage. In Elche, many of the women like the location of their work because they are able to take care of their family and make a living and not have to worry about travel times to a factory. In Les Olympiades, many people enjoy working and living in the same place, because it creates a new sort of social community where people no longer need to go to the bank to get a loan, the community can lend them money. Also, many of the businesses that are in the building depend on one another for survival.
Many of the people that have adapted this “work at home” lifestyle like it quite a bit and many do not want to go back to working in a separate location just because of convenience. The only real instance of a major disadvantage is in Elche, where labor contracts are not given out and people are often times underpaid. The home labor in Elche will soon be made legal, meaning that labor contracts and minimum wage standards will be enforced.
In both cities, the residents have had a significant impact on their physical landscape. In Elche, the town has been called by Multiplicity as “a network of production points that embraces the entire city”. The reason why Multiplicity says this is because production is scattered throughout the city, and there is a network of vehicles and people keeping production going the residents have gotten rid of the traditional factory setting, in favor of a workplace at home. Multiplicity calls Les Olympiades “a city in a building”, due to the large amount of people and businesses in one building. Residents of Les Olympiades have taken the idea of a traditional home, and transformed it into a small community and a network of businesses and people that rely upon one another for survival. In the cases of Elche, Spain or the Les Olympiades building in France, residents have challenged the idea of a traditional workplace in favor of working from home.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
The Grapes of Wrath
New worlds New identities
The Grapes of Wrath and the dust bowl
When most people think of migration to another place and the struggle of having an identity crisis of who they are and why they are there, we most often times think of people that have moved to another country struggling to assimilate, but we often times don't think of migration in our own country and the concept of a new “world” as a place in our own country. I studied the film The Grapes of Wrath, which is a film based on a book by John Steinbeck which documents a family's migration from Oklahoma to California during the 1930's “dust bowl”.
The dust bowl period in the United States is the period during the depression when the farmlands of Oklahoma and the southwest where being over farmed. As a result, the land started drying up, and dust storms started destroying crops. Farmers could no longer support themselves, and got evicted off of their land. This sparked a massive migration of people out of the southwest to places like California, where they could work on a farm. As a result of this massive migration, there was too many people looking for work on the California farms, and the local people tried to drive them out by treating them less than human. Poverty and starvation often times ran rampant among the farmers that moved to California. Throughout the dust bowl era, roughly 116,000 people where displaced(1) from the southwest, and most of those people came from Oklahoma.
In the film, the main character Tom Jode gets paroled from prison for manslaughter. He comes back to his home town in Oklahoma, where he finds out that almost the entire town was displaced due to farms not being able to produce crops. Tom finds his family, who are moving to California the following day. The family moves to California and Tom begins to realize that even though he came from a community where people often times helped each other and stood united together, that now in order to survive you have to become selfish and think only about what's best for you and your family. His old neighbor Muely Graves quoted “what happens to other people I don't care about, I only care about myself”. Tom quickly learns this and shows it by working out in a farmers crops when some of his old friends and neighbors are outside of the farm protesting the low wages. Tom Jode and his family eventually find a government run camp where they live and try to find a legal form of employment. At the end of the movie, the police try to capture Tom Jode for striking a police officer, and Tom ends up leaving his family to avoid going back to prison.
One of the identity struggles that Tom and his family faced is the same situation that many migrant workers in the town of Elche, Spain face. Having the identity of being an illegal underpaid worker. Tom and his family cannot find a job legally and the people that he works for in the film refuse to sign a contract with him or any other displaced farmer so that they can pay them next to nothing for wages. One of the labor contractors in The Grapes of Wrath quotes “if you want the work take it, otherwise there are 200 other people that will”. Likewise, Vicentina Navarro also faces the same situation and quotes:
“It all stays in the hands of the contractors, of the distributors and manufacture is paid very little. They say: well, if you want to do it good! Otherwise... nothing. ”(2)
Unfortunately, for Navarro and for Tom Jode, this type of labor is often times not stopped because it drives the prices of goods down and boosts sales. In some cases, there are a few labor contracts given out to keep the business “legal” but the places that do this also keep the number of legal workers to a minimum so that they can still drive down the cost of labor far below average. Tom Jode and his family faced this issue of not being able to find legal employment multiple times in the film. Navarro also quotes:
“The authorities say that it will be legalized. But there are many workshops where the workers are employed completely illegally. In others they make contracts for some and others are employed illegally. That is all I know. It would be very good for me to have a contract or something like it.”(3)
The struggles that many illegal workers these days face of having the identity of an illegal undocumented worker with little to no job security is not that different from the struggles that Tom Jode and other people from the dust bowl era faced.
Citations
(1)Gregory, N. James. American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California. Oxford University Press. 1991
(2)Multiplicity. “House Factories: Elche Disseminations.” USE: Unceartain States of Europe Ed. Susan Wise. Milan: Skira Editore S.p.a., 2003 (155)
(3)Multiplicity. “House Factories: Elche Disseminations.” USE: Unceartain States of Europe Ed. Susan Wise. Milan: Skira Editore S.p.a., 2003 (156)
The Grapes of Wrath and the dust bowl
When most people think of migration to another place and the struggle of having an identity crisis of who they are and why they are there, we most often times think of people that have moved to another country struggling to assimilate, but we often times don't think of migration in our own country and the concept of a new “world” as a place in our own country. I studied the film The Grapes of Wrath, which is a film based on a book by John Steinbeck which documents a family's migration from Oklahoma to California during the 1930's “dust bowl”.
The dust bowl period in the United States is the period during the depression when the farmlands of Oklahoma and the southwest where being over farmed. As a result, the land started drying up, and dust storms started destroying crops. Farmers could no longer support themselves, and got evicted off of their land. This sparked a massive migration of people out of the southwest to places like California, where they could work on a farm. As a result of this massive migration, there was too many people looking for work on the California farms, and the local people tried to drive them out by treating them less than human. Poverty and starvation often times ran rampant among the farmers that moved to California. Throughout the dust bowl era, roughly 116,000 people where displaced(1) from the southwest, and most of those people came from Oklahoma.
In the film, the main character Tom Jode gets paroled from prison for manslaughter. He comes back to his home town in Oklahoma, where he finds out that almost the entire town was displaced due to farms not being able to produce crops. Tom finds his family, who are moving to California the following day. The family moves to California and Tom begins to realize that even though he came from a community where people often times helped each other and stood united together, that now in order to survive you have to become selfish and think only about what's best for you and your family. His old neighbor Muely Graves quoted “what happens to other people I don't care about, I only care about myself”. Tom quickly learns this and shows it by working out in a farmers crops when some of his old friends and neighbors are outside of the farm protesting the low wages. Tom Jode and his family eventually find a government run camp where they live and try to find a legal form of employment. At the end of the movie, the police try to capture Tom Jode for striking a police officer, and Tom ends up leaving his family to avoid going back to prison.
One of the identity struggles that Tom and his family faced is the same situation that many migrant workers in the town of Elche, Spain face. Having the identity of being an illegal underpaid worker. Tom and his family cannot find a job legally and the people that he works for in the film refuse to sign a contract with him or any other displaced farmer so that they can pay them next to nothing for wages. One of the labor contractors in The Grapes of Wrath quotes “if you want the work take it, otherwise there are 200 other people that will”. Likewise, Vicentina Navarro also faces the same situation and quotes:
“It all stays in the hands of the contractors, of the distributors and manufacture is paid very little. They say: well, if you want to do it good! Otherwise... nothing. ”(2)
Unfortunately, for Navarro and for Tom Jode, this type of labor is often times not stopped because it drives the prices of goods down and boosts sales. In some cases, there are a few labor contracts given out to keep the business “legal” but the places that do this also keep the number of legal workers to a minimum so that they can still drive down the cost of labor far below average. Tom Jode and his family faced this issue of not being able to find legal employment multiple times in the film. Navarro also quotes:
“The authorities say that it will be legalized. But there are many workshops where the workers are employed completely illegally. In others they make contracts for some and others are employed illegally. That is all I know. It would be very good for me to have a contract or something like it.”(3)
The struggles that many illegal workers these days face of having the identity of an illegal undocumented worker with little to no job security is not that different from the struggles that Tom Jode and other people from the dust bowl era faced.
Citations
(1)Gregory, N. James. American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California. Oxford University Press. 1991
(2)Multiplicity. “House Factories: Elche Disseminations.” USE: Unceartain States of Europe Ed. Susan Wise. Milan: Skira Editore S.p.a., 2003 (155)
(3)Multiplicity. “House Factories: Elche Disseminations.” USE: Unceartain States of Europe Ed. Susan Wise. Milan: Skira Editore S.p.a., 2003 (156)
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Trent Huismann
Media Franchises: Big Brother
The show that I am analyzing is the reality TV game show known as Big Brother. It is an elimination style TV show where contestants live in a house that is wired with video cameras recording their every move. Usually the show is played using 15 people, who vote and choose to evict one another. At the end of the show, the last person remaining wins either a car, money, or in some cases a house. The show originated in the Netherlands and was first aired in 1999 on the Veronica TV Channel. There is no one particular company that distributes the show since it is worldwide, rights to the show are held by a company called Endemol, a TV production company based in the Netherlands that has media ties to studios in 23 other countries. Endemol is owned by the Italian media conglomerate Mediaset. The show is aired in multiple variations in multiple countries. Some of the countries include: France, Norway, UK, Germany, South Africa, and the United States.
Big Brother is a prime example of media homogenization. In every country that the program is aired in, the basic setup and the way the game is played is quite similar with having house mates voting to evict one another and then afterwards having an interview to talk about what happened, why they think they got voted off, and to talk about their experiences in general. One of the main differences that I noticed about the video clips is that Big Brother UK, Big Brother Australia, and Big Brother South Africa, is that they always had a large cheering audience and made it seem almost like a red carpet event. In the U.S. Version, you cannot hear the crowd, and it seems to be lower budget and not as flashy as it's foreign counterparts.
One of the new engines that is used in Big Brother is voting to evict other contestants out of the house. In some versions of Big Brother the audience is used to vote to evict people out of the house and also in some cases viewers at home can either phone in their votes or vote on the Internet for who they want to be evicted that week. One of the more innovative things that the TV show uses that has never been seen before is the ability for people to view live video footage through the Internet. These new “engines” give people a level of interactivity that has never been seen before on most TV programs. This level of interactivity gives people a sense of being part of the show and tends to make the viewer more interested in the show.
If you watch some clips of the show in different countries, you will notice that each show has it's own flair that follows along the lines of cultural values and norms. One of the prime examples of this is censorship and nudity. In the American, South African and Australian versions of the show, the editors of the show don't show nudity or explicit sexual content to in order to make it more of a family friendly show. The live video feed on the Internet for these shows also has a 15 minute lag time so that editors can censor or block footage from that camera if there would be some explicit content displayed. The British and German versions of the show do however broadcast uncensored raw footage, and has even gone as far as showing people engaged in sexual activity with one another. Because of the explicit content that has been broadcast in some parts of the world, countries like Greece have made an effort to have the show taken off the air due to their cultural values and norms.
I believe that the new media franchise culture can bring people together to produce a greater sense of unity while also creating a new type of fragmentation. I say that it creates greater unity because having franchised shows can create some common ground between countries. Having other countries use these different franchised shows is a great way for people to share ideas about what they feel is entertaining while giving people in other countries a small taste of what other cultures ethics and norms are like. I also believe that there is a certain small level of fragmentation that is created by people modifying the show's original format to work with their cultural norms. This is not a bad thing by any means, but it is fragmentation none the less.
Works Cited
"Big Brother (TV series)." Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia. Web. 15 Oct. 2009..
Keane, Michael, and Albert Moran. "Televisions New Engines." Eprints.qut.edu.au. Queensland University of Technology. Web. 20 Oct. 2009..
Carroll, Noel. "Art and Globalization: Then and now." Journal of Aesthetics & art Criticism 65.1 (2007): 131-43. Print.
Media Franchises: Big Brother
The show that I am analyzing is the reality TV game show known as Big Brother. It is an elimination style TV show where contestants live in a house that is wired with video cameras recording their every move. Usually the show is played using 15 people, who vote and choose to evict one another. At the end of the show, the last person remaining wins either a car, money, or in some cases a house. The show originated in the Netherlands and was first aired in 1999 on the Veronica TV Channel. There is no one particular company that distributes the show since it is worldwide, rights to the show are held by a company called Endemol, a TV production company based in the Netherlands that has media ties to studios in 23 other countries. Endemol is owned by the Italian media conglomerate Mediaset. The show is aired in multiple variations in multiple countries. Some of the countries include: France, Norway, UK, Germany, South Africa, and the United States.
Big Brother is a prime example of media homogenization. In every country that the program is aired in, the basic setup and the way the game is played is quite similar with having house mates voting to evict one another and then afterwards having an interview to talk about what happened, why they think they got voted off, and to talk about their experiences in general. One of the main differences that I noticed about the video clips is that Big Brother UK, Big Brother Australia, and Big Brother South Africa, is that they always had a large cheering audience and made it seem almost like a red carpet event. In the U.S. Version, you cannot hear the crowd, and it seems to be lower budget and not as flashy as it's foreign counterparts.
One of the new engines that is used in Big Brother is voting to evict other contestants out of the house. In some versions of Big Brother the audience is used to vote to evict people out of the house and also in some cases viewers at home can either phone in their votes or vote on the Internet for who they want to be evicted that week. One of the more innovative things that the TV show uses that has never been seen before is the ability for people to view live video footage through the Internet. These new “engines” give people a level of interactivity that has never been seen before on most TV programs. This level of interactivity gives people a sense of being part of the show and tends to make the viewer more interested in the show.
If you watch some clips of the show in different countries, you will notice that each show has it's own flair that follows along the lines of cultural values and norms. One of the prime examples of this is censorship and nudity. In the American, South African and Australian versions of the show, the editors of the show don't show nudity or explicit sexual content to in order to make it more of a family friendly show. The live video feed on the Internet for these shows also has a 15 minute lag time so that editors can censor or block footage from that camera if there would be some explicit content displayed. The British and German versions of the show do however broadcast uncensored raw footage, and has even gone as far as showing people engaged in sexual activity with one another. Because of the explicit content that has been broadcast in some parts of the world, countries like Greece have made an effort to have the show taken off the air due to their cultural values and norms.
I believe that the new media franchise culture can bring people together to produce a greater sense of unity while also creating a new type of fragmentation. I say that it creates greater unity because having franchised shows can create some common ground between countries. Having other countries use these different franchised shows is a great way for people to share ideas about what they feel is entertaining while giving people in other countries a small taste of what other cultures ethics and norms are like. I also believe that there is a certain small level of fragmentation that is created by people modifying the show's original format to work with their cultural norms. This is not a bad thing by any means, but it is fragmentation none the less.
Works Cited
"Big Brother (TV series)." Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia. Web. 15 Oct. 2009.
Keane, Michael, and Albert Moran. "Televisions New Engines." Eprints.qut.edu.au. Queensland University of Technology. Web. 20 Oct. 2009.
Carroll, Noel. "Art and Globalization: Then and now." Journal of Aesthetics & art Criticism 65.1 (2007): 131-43. Print.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QvJd_yuioI
Big Brother 8 USA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCpTdwh0sDw
Big Brother 1 South Africa
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvsWo_7yfew
Big Brother 9 UK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpG7I7UcS18
Big Brother 4, Australia
Due to copyright issues and HTML code issues, I was not able to embed videos. Click on the links above, I have given a brief description of the above videos
Big Brother 8 USA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCpTdwh0sDw
Big Brother 1 South Africa
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvsWo_7yfew
Big Brother 9 UK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpG7I7UcS18
Big Brother 4, Australia
Due to copyright issues and HTML code issues, I was not able to embed videos. Click on the links above, I have given a brief description of the above videos
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