Michael T. Martin

Shrove Tuesday is a day to be remembered by strangers in New Orleans, for that is the day for fun, frolic, and comic masquerading. All of the mischief of the city is alive and wide awake in active operation. Men and boys, women and girls, bond and free, white and black, yellow and brown, exert themselves to invent and appear in grotesque, quizzical, diabolic, horrible, strange masks, and disguises. Human bodies are seen with heads of beasts and birds, beasts and birds with human heads; demi-beasts, demi-fishes, snakes’ heads and bodies with arms of apes; man-bats from the moon; mermaids; satyrs, beggars, monks, and robbers parade and march on foot, on horseback, in wagons, carts, coaches, cars, &c., in rich confusion, up and down the streets, wildly shouting, singing, laughing, drumming, fiddling, fifeing, and all throwing flour broadcast as they wend their reckless way. Scenes in the South, and Other Miscellaneous Pieces by James Creecy

Still somewhat obscure only because of its overwhelming ubiquity, space is itself an infrastructural technology that is mobile and monetized, traveling around the world as a repeatable phenomenon. From An Internet of Things via E-Flux

If our history is a history of forgetting how to remember the past…then the city of Detroit is the engine of our conflicted deliverance. It’s the machinery we’ve used for particular acts of forgetting, each connected to the place and time where the forgetting got done. The Forgetting Machine via Design Observer

Let the age and wars of other nations be chanted and their eras and characters be illustrated and that finish the verse. Not so the psalm of the republic. Here the theme is creative and vista. Here comes one among the well-beloved stonecutters and plans with decision and science and sees the solid and beautiful forms of the future where there are now no solid forms. Leaves of Grass; Preface - Walt Whitman