pyongyang as virtual space

Pyongyang as virtual space

Fiction Pyongyang, curated by Joseph Grima together with Stefano Boeri

and Armin Linke

Pyongyang's sinister landscapes are not to be quickly dismissed as

the tangible proof of the existence of a "kingdom of evil." As we

pointed out, one can perceive something familiar in them, an eerie

familiarity to an eye accustomed to the imagery of western science

fiction. It's as though in the aftermath of the 1952 bombing of

Pyongyang (an entire city razed to the ground seven years after

Hiroshima and Dresden -- have we all forgotten?), someone like

George Orwell or Ridley Scott decided to create, without a hint of

irony, Western culture's worst dystopia. It is impossible to remain

indifferent to the bizarre collection of architectural caricatures

built by the North Korean nomenklatura. They created a city

populated by automata unable to exercise their free will, the

incarnation of an isolated absolute regime that is nevertheless

capable of unscrupulous recourse to the symbolic language of

Western democracies.

--from an interview with Stefano Boeri in Artkrush

I know next to nothing about the capital of North Korea, but hey--that

describes, quite literally, just about everyone else in the world,

too. Finally, a subject on which the vast, vast majority of people can

be equally knowledgeable.

Seeing as I find metafictions intellectually appealing, it seems only

natural that a city like Pyongyang would attract my attention. The

thing is, unlike remote natural places like the bottom of the ocean or

restricted spaces like Area 51 (whose Wikipedia entry is longer than

that for Pyongyang), Pyongyang is ostensibly a public space whose

official population is literally a state secret and about whose metro

system (see below) the only absolutely certain things known of it are

that it exists and people use it. Where Boeri sees a

slightly-offputting familiarity in the city's physical space, his

video suggests something else: something close to the city-as-blue

screen. I don't have it at hand, so I can't quote verbatim, but in the

course of an essay on David Lynch, David Foster Wallace says something

to the effect that the strange thing about Los Angeles is that it

looks exactly the way you expect it to look. Personally speaking, I

can attest to thinking the same thing about New York when I first

visited there, the only real surprise being that, beneath all that

asphalt, Manhattan is gently rolling. Pyongyang, by contrast, looks

any way you care to imagine it. It is as close to a virtual space as a

city of somewhere around 2 million people is likely to be.

Some cases in point: Via Andrew Sullivan, this article in Esquire

about the focal point of much of the video above, the uncompleted

Ryugyong Hotel. As you can see, it looks like the Dark Lord Sauron's

idea of a destination hotel. The article reveals that this building is

regarded by the government as being so hideous (not to mention

embarrassingly uncompleted) that it regularly airbrushes it out of its

photos of the Pyongyang skyline.

The Esquire article led me to Ryugyong.org, a site where visitors can

(or could because, analogously to the hotel, it's no longer being

supported) claim space in a 3-D model of the building and install

projects of their own design in that space. The idea is reminiscent of

Second Life--but, again, it's curious that this site's space is now

abandoned, just like that of the hotel it's modeled on. It's fun to

speculate that Pyongyang just has that effect on those who deign to

engage with it, even in the blogosphere.

And finally there is the site I visited a couple of years ago which

first piqued my curiosity about Pyongyang, this unofficial site

describing the Pyongyang Metro. The first two paragraphs from the

"Statistics" page are actually pretty typical--read closely and ponder

the implications of what it's saying:

The Pyongyang Metro consists of two public lines, north-south

Chollima (named for a mythical flying horse, the Korean Pegasus)

and east-west Hyoksin (Renovation); there are also believed to be

other undisclosed lines for government use. The total length of the

public system is probably around 22.5 km, of which the Chollima

line is about 12 km and the Hyoksin line about 10.

Like most North Korean statistics, this figure may be inaccurate,

as it has been reported since the mid-1980s, and may not include

the nearly 2 km between Ponghwa and Puhung, opened in 1987; if this

is so the system is approximately 24 km. Some sources claim 34 km,

of which the Chollima line is 14 km and the Hyoksin line 20 km,

however this figure may be arrived at by adding the original 24 km

mentioned above and a planned 10-km extension to Mangyongdae, and

thus likely does not refer to the system's current length.

And, further down the same page:

Maps of the system are not widely distributed, and physical

locations of stations are not marked on street maps; the brochure

"The Pyongyang Metro" does not include one. . . . As an economy

measure [due to chronic electricity shortages], the entire service

is said to close on the first Monday of each month, and perhaps

more often. Station lights are dim or switched off altogether, and

many sources report that trains in tunnels are often caught by

power cuts, forcing passengers to wait in the darkness, sometimes

for hours.

Indeed, whether the Metro is in regular service at all is not

entirely certain. Practically the only non-North Korean

eyewitnesses to Metro use are the visitors given the showcase ride

on the system.

I have no big wind-up to all this, aside from the obvious: all cities

have their own character, but beyond that they are all the same in

that they are inarguably public spaces, a heteroglossic space whose

meaning is contested (at times happily, at times less so) by various

state and community interests. Those notions are so familiar as to go

unremarked . . . unless or until one bumps into a place like

Pyongyang.