Dirt, Data and the Grid in Site Cite City
In “Market Street Detours,” David Buuck writes: "There's no going back; just watch where you walk, so you don't get soiled in the data-flow” (Buuck 86). Dirty data permeates Site Cite City. Although we tend to associate advances in information technology with cleanliness and hyper-efficiency, Buuck digs underneath this illusion in his work, bringing such technology back to its organic (“man”-made) roots by pairing it with oozing, icky materiality. In “The Treatment,” he drifts from shipping container to shipping container on Treasure Island, finding bureaucratic mazes and in-transit merchandise alternated with dead animals and violent corporality (“volumes of meat and organ parts, flesh-bits sliding out off tongue or peeling back flesh-body lips to expel itself”) (118). Buuck attempts to expose the nasty counterparts to tech’s ultra-convenience in San Francisco, a city totally transformed by information technology and its accompanying culture in recent decades.
Closely tied to the suppressed dirtiness of data is the idea of the “grid,” which comes up again and again in Buuck’s work, first in “Paranoia Agents,” when “workers place polished steel poles in the desert landscape, constructing a grid” upon which the plan of the sky rests in a radioactive, inhospitable landscape (3). The grid designates cleanliness and dirtiness, and past/present/future, to separate spaces. Buuck continuously disrupts this grid. In “Paranoia Agents” he allows the grid to actually collapse into itself, blooming into a “nuclear sunset” (12). And as he walks down the street in “Market Street Detour,” he breaks the social grids of history and geography: “At 3rd and Market, I cross into 1905,” he writes. “Further down Market, the streetcars spill out into Bloody Tuesday” (81). Italo Calvino similarly likes to allow multiple historical moments to occupy a single geographic space; in Invisible Cities’ city of Phyllis, he writes, “If of two arcades, one continues to seem more joyous, it is because thirty years ago a girl went by there, with broad, embroidered sleeves” (Calvino 91).
Just as Buuck digs up the toxic materials that necessarily accompany the shiny prosperity of new tech, he excavates the messy histories and would-be futures that underpin the San Francisco streets through his breaches of the “grid.” The new prosperous San Francisco, transformed by tech, takes on the violence of history-denial inherent in gentrification: “So this is still happening, now and here” (81). Buuck wants us to see the many particles that compose the beach beneath the pavingstones—or in his version, “Beneath the pavement, the beachhead,” “Beneath the pavement, the beechwood” (Buuck 80, 86).