Orange County.

I'm submitting the first task done in Orange County (at least, according to this). At first it baffled me, but the more time I spend here, the more it makes sense.

A sense of perpetual lethargy runs through this place. Whether Lethe or wealth-induced, the time people spend here (no one "works" here in this nation of commuter towns) is governed by a kind of mass dreaming, the perpetual denial of history fused with an eye at a future which never arrives.

None of this is conducive to any kind of negation.

This is not a new analysis. But it's one that begs to be investigated.
My mission, then, was to expose the subliminal boundaries arbitrarily set up here that keep us in our perpetual tourist's dream. I set out to expose the praxis of control.

What I found was unsettling.
Instead of outlawing or even exploring the dichotomous relationships of power that dominate the rest of the world, Orange County simply uses its resources to exert more control over them.

LIGHT:DARK::PUBLIC:PRIVATE

Public spaces were lit, private spaces were not.
In public spaces everything can be seen. In private spaces darkness was allowed but under constant threat of surveillance (think the neighborhood watch).

First in my study was an exploration of the roads, which are the primary means of experiencing cities there. It's difficult to argue with lighting in large streets...but so much!



These roads took me to a local park, where people get their fill of the outdoors in highly controlled environments.
Where residents find it necessary, night is simply abolished.



That's the public part.
After this, I began to become worried that "deepest, darkest night" might not exist in my area of exploration.

Private space, though darker, was slightly more difficult to monitor.
Night and darkness is used as a psychological barrier (cheaper than walls) to designate private space and try to avoid attention. Darkness, as I noted before, implies neighborhood monitoring.

All I had to do to see this divide was to turn around in one of the parking lots I was monitoring. Towards the park lights are everywhere, but toward houses they grow more and more minimal:

I found some non-gated neighborhoods to study:

This one, in particular, sums up what darkness does for spaces, and how it gets used selectively:


There were some dark spaces I could see from the road but they were, without fail, fenced up.

This study had me pretty depressed about the directions the place is taking. I could not find an open public space that wasn't flooded with light. I may have been a bit biased against the county to begin with but perhaps I'd underestimated the totality of its domination.

I went back indoors.

The Happy Ending:

After a while, softball teams and tennis partners have to go back to sleep so they can work.

I found myself back out at one of the myriad parks, listless and still a bit down.

When much to my surprise:

They turned the stadium lights off.
The only disturbances came from streetlights off in the distance. Even the headlights from the surrounding street pointed away from me at this park.

The lights at the tennis court were turned was down low so I grabbed some long exposures:


So I found Night after all, scathed and wounded but still alive, not completely banished.
Still fighting.

-et al

postscript:
Presently I'm back in Berkeley, preparing for Earth Hour. I'm kinda sad because there's so much for me to fix down in Orange County. But the realistic part of my brain tells me that any actions I choose to take down there in enforcement of Earth Hour might get labeled terrorism, or at the very least unacceptable shenanigans.