Field Season Two: September–October 2025

October 8, 2025

I think my sudden drop in dispatch form must be due to the fact that I just haven’t been taking many taxis these past days. Or, it could be that I am in Slovakia not for any literal joyrides but to actually produce some kind of artistic intervention… but I gotta get back in the cabs soon. Too much material is just being wasted.

That being said, I have been quite caught up in the production of the Temporary Seeing Section — the off-shoot division of the Bureau of Operational Landscapes that will function only during this ‘mission.’ It’s the organizing arm of specific interventions I have planned here, the most significant being the Temporary Seeing Platform. Other initiatives are the Office for Public Interruptions and, finally, the Council for the Rebranding of Load-Bearing Icons. As you can see, the Bureau is heavily loaded in administrative trappings; there is a logic to all this! Partly this has to do with the fine line between the official and unofficial and how irony (but not too much) and humour can destabilize the official in favour of a more expansive, and inclusive, relationship to place.

Official logo of the Temporary Seeing Section, the umbrella arm of the Bureau’s second mission (the first being Park Maasvlakte).

I’m not sure where this dispatch is headed, but perhaps part of my fetish writing about cabbies is that it is a form of procrastination that puts off the inevitable need to actually take into consideration what I am doing here; previously, everything was stored in my head and I could easily grasp the multiple layers of whatever it was that I was working on and then, to some degree, execute that vision. Now, for some reason, I have suddenly become smitten by writing — for me, its a form of rock carving, turning these ephemeral thoughts into some kind of action that then moves and makes the world. But, writing is hard! Behind the scenes, I have been writing a lot — part of the Temporary Seeing Section is the development of a map to the “second city” or the extended city or… in other words, a map to a city that exists as a series of fragments, in memories, recollections, historical fact and total untruths. That is really where the bulk of my writing has been focused on these past two weeks, which is probably also why the passion for cabbies has found itself writ more than necessary. This is just a long winded way to say: I’m burnt out from writing, thus this dispatch I see as a potential turning point to focus on the work itself and try to justify — conceptualize — some of the claims, ideas, considerations, and other thoughts roiling around in Trenčín.

But back to bureaucracy, and why I have so fully been captured by it. Some of you might now that in my PhD dissertation, I wrote a whole chapter dedicated to the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI, for short), and the Los Angeles Urban Rangers. CLUI, like my own Bureau (in some way, CLUI is the ground zero for such actions; I see them as a major influence on my own work) operates in the register of the official. By official, I mean in spaces and places that are under the remit of various authorities. Here, in Trenčín, I am working around the city government and infrastructure. In the Bureau’s first mission, I was operating in the Port of Rotterdam, a landscape formed and maintained by official structures. The Los Angeles Rangers take a slightly different spin. For them, it is about the performance of of public service: they inhabit the persona of the National Park Ranger, which, in the United States, is probably the last government official still trusted. So, if CLUI is a bureaucratic institution then the LA Urban Rangers are a bureaucratic performance troupe. What unites is the social, the need to intervene into systems as a means of revealing those systems, and how such a cloak of administrative norms — the inhabiting of shadow institutions — can actually create structures that feel real enough to believe in while subverting that epistemic authority of actual bureaucracies. As such, administration is a mode of seeing, hut it depends from which lens are we seeing: through the official, or unofficial?

Logos! Round ones!

In other words, I see the Bureau and CLUI and the LA Urban Rangers demonstrate that the bureaucratic apparatus is itself a landscape, manifested through voices, permissions, and exclusions. So, I believe that to mimic that apparatuses to inhabit its logic and re-route its official energies towards the public, the poetic, and the political. Basically, I have been circling around the idea that to critique bureaucracy is not so much to reject it, but to become it differently.

Buttons for the Council for the Rebranding of Load-Bearing Icons; on Friday there’s an event and participants get a button.

Where am I headed with all this? I’m not sure, but what I see starting to emerge is that the Bureau, and all its various initiatives, is a fusion of CLUI — who takes a rigorous approach to mapping unseen infrastructures — and the Rangers, who introduce me to performing access and interpretation. With the Bureau, I want to extend this logic into particular landscapes, the post-industrial, the logistical, the computational, etc. How, then, might bureaucratic procedures be used as tools for observation and encounter? How do systems of management and description shape what can be seen? For the Bureau, that means that administration itself is a medium of aesthetic and civic reflection.

Okay I was not anticipating that direction.

Postscript: I lied; I was in a cab actually last night, and when I cracked the door to get in, a huge poof of incense cascaded out the open door as if I was being trampled by bulls. Just a solid wall of smell enveloped me, wrapping me tight in its patchouli stench. Just an absolute temple of incense. I was so incensed by all the incense? I did, however, manage to squeeze in the tiny slit of the backseat like a Yoga champion, so I guess all that perfume subconsciously transformed me into a Yogi, bending my body in ways it had never been bent before.