Control Space

Sze Tsung leong

Project on the city: shopping

• Control space is the paradigm by which shopping understands and shapes the city. It forms the cognition of shopping, determines its vision, seeps into its subconscious. it is so basic as to be, simultaneously, shopping's assumed and uncritically deployed mode of operation, its instinctual reflex, its aspiration. 
• For retailer, control space is driven by the need to understand, quantify, record, regulate, manipulate, and coerce the processed, circumstances, and flows that influence and determine sales. It is a meticulously assembled apparatus employed to track, in as detailed and surreptitious a manner as possible, who buys what kind of product where and how often for how much under what conditions with what kind of stimulation. In order to make these processes intelligible and useful, it has apotheosized data. Control space inaugurates the triumph of the statistical. 
• For consumer, control space is conveniently packaged for accessibility, efficiency, entertainment, fun, spectacle, freedom of choice, security. It much appear benign. It thiis sense it's one of the most effective marketing tools ever invented. What could be more appealing than the promise of off-the-shelf, do-it-yourself omnipotence?
• Space is evaluated through an entirely modernized vocabulary: no longer is it geometrically  composed or visualized, but computed, calibrated, assessed, predicted, optimized.
• How totalizing is control space? Since it is mainly engineered to optimize and maximize profits at minimum expense, at the most rapid rate, and under the most voraciously competitive conditions, its focus is inferently short lived, inherently desperate, inherently capricious. Control space is constantly searching for the next realm of exploitation, the next window of opportunity. In exacerbating instabilities for its own benefit, inf artificially accelerating the cycles of decline and obsolescence, and in constantly shifting its focus from one domain to another, control space inevitably produces gaps, contradictions, perhaps even moments of freedom situated not so much outside but along side and within control.