In his review of “On Your Way Down,” Salon Television Critic Matt Zoller Seitz says much the same of this episode, remarking that it was “unimaginative in most ways, and tone-deaf in others.” He cites the circumstances surrounding the vicious rape of Ladonna Williams as his chief concern, and argues “her suffering was treated glancingly” as a result of the large number of characters followed throughout the episode. He emphasizes how “A beloved character was raped and beaten to a pulp. The emphasis should have been on her.”

While I will admit that I felt this episode was the strongest of the season, and that I would respectfully disagree with a number of Seitz’s criticisms, I do want to explore the nature of this response, as I think it speaks to one of the central themes of both this episode and the season as a whole.

As Kristina demonstrated so well last week, the larger sense of place associated with New Orleans and its role or those who remain the city and the ex-pats in New York City is integral to our understanding of the show’s narrative and the show’s characters. However, as notable as this sense of place is, often our focus is on smaller spaces within that place – we are constantly moving back and forth, traveling from character to character and from space to space within the larger “place” of New Orleans.

For me, this season has begun to draw a clear distinction between place and space, emphasizing that one’s knowledge of the former does not necessarily apply to the latter. In the moments leading up to Ladonna’s terrifying ordeal, we see her weighing the situation, and there is that brief moment where she sees familiar faces across the street. That is the New Orleans she knows: friendly neighbors and a sense of community; however, her harrowing experience reveals that the space has been infiltrated by the rise in criminal activity, the same kind of activity that we continue to hear stories about from during the storm itself (as we get this week with Toni’s interview with the officer who discovered her client’s son’s body).

While season one seemed to chart the resiliency – and the limitations, in the case of Creighton and others – of New Orleans as a place, defined by its people and its culture, season two is digging into localized spaces and demonstrating their continued vulnerability in the wake of the storm. Jeanette’s home is taken over by a squatter, while Sonny’s home is invaded by police and left open for looters to finish the job. While one could argue that Sonny was culpable in his case, given that he allowed the drug trade to unfold under his roof, the invasion of the drug trade demonstrates his lack of control over the rise in post-storm criminality from entering into that space.

To go back to Seitz’s point regarding the constant shifts between different storylines even as Ladonna suffers in the hospital, I would argue that this is part of the season’s overall narrative structure. The editing means that we are constantly shifting from space to space, never settling into one long enough to get a clear picture. Just as Antoine can’t find the right rhythm, the show can’t seem to find its bearings: it’s like someone is constantly tuning the radio receiver looking for a different channel, a maddening experience on the one hand but an enlightening experience on the other.

It is also, within New Orleans, a necessary one. The police find themselves trying to be in fifty places at once just like the show itself, while Jeanette struggles with trying to be in both New York and New Orleans at the same time. By never allowing us to feel comfortable in a single space, and by forcing us to move our perspective away from Ladonna despite our concern, the show invites us to consider the absences, disruptions and invasions facing these characters as they go about their daily lives in the city they once knew.

The “where” of Treme is becoming less cultural with each passing week, a sign that the struggles of Katrina continue to erode the spirit of the city. While the constant shift between different spaces in “On Your Way Down” may have seemed to reduce the meaning of Ladonna’s experience, I would argue this shift captured the constant struggle New Orleans residents face as they try to find their bearings in their ever-changing city, a struggle which seems no better than it was this time last season.

Among the things we grappled with while developing this project was how to use smartphone technology to enhance rather than replace a user’s experience of physical space. The intention of many apps is to bring the world to the user, rather than the other way around. The tendency of such apps is to de-spatialize or trans-spatialize the user, allowing her to review, survey, or experience spaces without moving. To put this in terms that Paul Virilio might appreciate, this is the tendency of an app—or mobile media in general—toward a spatio-temporal totalitarianism. “If in preindustrial eras the low speeds of various vehicles structured and geometrized the social landscape,” Virilio writes in Bunker Archaeology, “since the acquisition of high speeds… it is here, and not over there [emphasis added], that the critical is from now on played out.” To encourage mobility, exploration, and discovery, to insist on the “here-ness” of spatial media, we designed the app to allow users to listen to audio tags only by physically encountering the tagged spaces. For Bike Box, there is no content without negotiating physical space. In addition, we designed the app so that there can be no overlap of audio tags. Rather, a participant who adds a tag “owns” a 30 meter sphere of space. Among other things, this encourages a centrifugal or expansive relationship to space, propelling participants ever onward and outward toward unexplored and “unclaimed” territories.

The meaning of the term “space” is a complex one. On the one hand, one can argue that Bike Box opens a new space for communication, broadcast and social struggle, and on the other hand, this space may only be the virtual space of capitalism created for the purpose of being colonized. Geo-locative space is absolute space, as David Harvey puts it in his book Spaces of Global Capitalism: “[absolute space] is fixed and we record or plan events within its frame…. Socially this is the space of private property and other bounded territorial designations.”

Yet Bike Box uses a space that is still somewhat open, not yet occupied or regulated by the industry or the state. For example, we did not submit our application to the App Store and were able to distribute it via the iPhone configuration tool without Apple’s benediction. Mobile technology is still in its infancy and it is still possible to utilize this emerging technology as a  “temporary autonomous zone.”

Another tendency we hoped to work against is the notion of an app as a private and intimate experience. Though users could listen to audio through headphones, we encouraged them to borrow one of the bikes we had equipped with speakers. The bikes served as broadcasting units, allowing riders to share their listening experience with friends and passersby. The speakers allowed the audio content to extend into the space. For the few moments the audio tag plays through the speaker, it becomes spatialized—no longer just a response to or gloss on the tagged space, but a part of the experience of that space.

The performative acts inherent in participating in a mobile game or interacting with a portable networked computer in public space is a rich area for research. This research could include such genres as flash mobs or even public cell phone use. Should we begin looking at this expression as a type of performance? It’s obvious that ubiquitous computing, mobile media, and invisible technologies like GPS and radio-frequency identification (RFID) are undermining concepts of public space and changing our notions of privacy. By utilizing high-powered speakers, Bike Box emphasized this extension into public space.

The advent of a new technology usually presents the possibility to repackage old media. This way, businesses can sell the same idea in a different package. The profit-motive aside, it behooves us to consider what new forms of communication and community are possible as a result of technologies such as smartphones and the availability of location-aware data. The new web standard (HTML-5) incorporates geolocation, meaning that it will be easier to target specific users in terms of their location. In conceiving Bike Box, we were interested in poetic responses to locations, be they field recordings, fictional narratives or interpretive audio. Participants were therefore enabled to contribute whatever audio they wished. The content we culled was more diverse than we had imagined it could be. For all participants it seemed important that the audio be either produced locally or by a local person. As geolocation becomes attached to identification, the concept of a local acquires new meaning and becomes an important ingredient in cultural narratives.