On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

“It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.”

Fredric Jameson’s The Seeds of Time (1996)

It is with this sentence that opens Patrick Keiller’s latest offering, Robinson in Space, at once an eminantly political essay on landscape and history, a rigorously experimental filmic object, and part three of a fictional trilogy involving a mysteriously elusive and half-deluded scholarly type named Robinson who undisguisably acts as Keiller’s own projection and fantasy.

The film purports to be assembled from reels abandoned in a caravan left behind by this evasise and shifty character, and is self-described as ‘picturesque views on journeys to sites of scientific and historical interest’. Its narrative backbone consists in the retelling of the unfolding events of the global economic meltdown of 2008, whilst Robinson’s obsession with port statistics has been replaced by agricultural observations and Paul Scofield’s voice-over, which seemed to embody the character in his absence, has given way to Vanessa Redgrave’s slighlty more distant, but no less monotonic and laconic tone.

Made possible through an AHRC-funded project, ‘The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image’, which explores narratives of mobility and the political in landscape and place and received the input of many academics including Doreen Massey, professor of Cultural Geography at the Open University, the film unveils the history and political forces at work in the seemingly peaceful and uneventful rolling hills of rural Oxforshire, quintessance of the English landscape; It challenges notions of the picturesque, confront visions of a rustic past with industrial romanticism and issues of land ownership, and is ultimately a reminder of the socially constructed notion of landscape.

Robinson’s camera stares ininterruptedly at these places, hoping to discern the “molecular basis of historical events”, framing the only visible remain of a decommissioned US airbase: a fire hydrant sticking out in the middle of a field near Greenham Common (the location of Dr David Kelly’s suicide), or highlighting the ruins of the abandoned villages around Hampton Gay, where 16th-century rebellion against the countryside’s enclosure began. Robinson ultimately discovers a vast network of government oil pipelines running unnoticed through southern England, connecting military sites.

True to Keiller’s own brand of meticulously prepared near-static images, the film alternates wide shots and macro, and sometimes reveals the imperceptible, for example in the red paint of a post-box being slowly eroded by use, or a colony of lichens growing at the corner of letterings on the surface of a roadsign.
The camera lingers for long moments, capturing seemingly mundane images of a noisy machine harvesting a field, or swaying foxgloves merely accompanied by birdsong, followed by the precise but silent beauty of a spider delicately spining its web – contrasted with the narrator’s detailed account of the near-collapse of the international banking system – hinting at the dual challenges posed by an economic and ecological crisis. These long shots effectively result in drawing the spectator towards meditative rhythms of thought oppositional to the politically brutal mechanisms outlined in the commentary, bringing intensity and focus and confering a hightened meaning to images of an otherwise mundane materialism, uncomfortably confronting daily reality with remote global events that seem outside any control, asking what efforts of the mind may be required to break free from the hold of market economy with the state of nature.

The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image blog: http://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com/

mappiness is a research project created by George MacKerron and Susana Mourato of the Department of Geography & Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), designed to gain a better understanding of how people’s feelings are affected by features of their current environment—things like air pollution, noise, and green spaces.

To that end, a free iPhone app has been developed, regularly pinging its users to ask them how they’re feeling, as well as a few other things: who they are with, where they are, what they are doing. The anonymous data gets sent back to a server, along with the user’s approximate location from the iPhone’s GPS, and a noise-level measure.

The project being in its early stages, the map displayed on the website doesn’t really give an acurate picture of the spread of happiness in the country – a huge proportion of respondants being in situated in London! – though interestingly the real-time hedonimeter shows that London people are slightly happier than the rest of the UK. I’m pretty sure this could easily be challenged, but I’ll leave that to the academic paper that will come out of the survey…

http://www.mappiness.org.uk/

A couple of days ago my good friend Roberto invited me to take part in an ‘experiment’, in fact it was a sketch for a live art piece he will be presenting at the Rifrazioni Festival of Contemporary Art (Lazio, Italy), in which he and I will be participating in late July.

It was a hot summer night in Clapton. I was sat on a bench in Millfields Park, eyes closed, waiting for the moment to arrive. A presence behind me, someone walking in the grass. A blindfold on my eyes. Roberto sat next to me, opened my hands and took my keys. From now on, I could only follow him – I felt somewhat submitted, I had to listen. He was the only guide. The story he was recounting was shifting time and place: it was now winter and I was in Brooklyn.

Eyesight disabled, the first steps in the grass were a little intimidating. Because of this sensory deprivation, my way of perceiving the world had to be reconsidered, and the world itself was changed into a place full of challenges: my feet became sensors of the ground, every bump a potential hurdle, every kerb a threshold, every wall an insurmontable frontier. Despite being relatively familiar with the area we traversed, I was completely unable to tell where I was going.

Sound was the other point of reference I could rely upon, but again it was hugely transformed by the effect of the blindfold: Ambient sounds took a whole new significance; they became abstracted, almost as if they were part of a setup, akin to a film soundtrack. Street chatter and conversations strangely felt like they were ‘acted out’ by people.

This unique experience, reminiscent of a soundwalk like Subtlemob, if only better, placed me at the center of an invisible stage, where everything and everyone around me took up a new role, forcing me to focus both on my senses – to make sense of my surroundings, and on my imagination – to visually interpret the story I was listening to.

The Rifrazioni festival takes place on the 29th, 30th of July and 1st of August in Anzio e Nettuno (Italy).

http://www.rifrazioni.org

“Part city symphony and part visual poem, this award-winning film explores the invisible life of London, its patterns and its hidden secrets, through the eyes of crane drivers working high above its streets.

The result is a lyrical meditation about how our existence is shaped through the environment we inhabit, both for the drivers and the people they are watching far down on the ground below them.”

You will be slightly disappointed if you expect to see here a deep reflection on psychology and alter-urbanism, to go by the over-stated description above – the film monologues consists for the best part of mundane platitudes narrated by the crane drivers themselves, though this doesn’t remove any of the visual beauty of this peaceful string of panning shots featuring highly unusual sights of London. Overall, an enjoyably conemplative film I would highly recommend for lovers of the city skyline, its buildings and its cranes.

The Solitary Life of Cranes Dir. Eva Weber (UK), 2008, 28 min.

The Solitary Life of Cranes / City of Cranes [Director Eva Weber's website]

This documentary is available to watch on 4OD until the 8th of January.

“imagine walking through a film, but it’s happening on the streets you walk down everyday.”

‘As if it were the last time’ is a series of street actions/soundwalks which took place in London, Bristol and Liverpool on the 12th, 13th and 14th of November. After signing-up, participants were able to download one of two soundtracks and gather along a location that was kept secret up to the beginning of the event, in order to take part in an impromptu public performance. On a rainy Thursday evening, the mob started to congregate in the area around Seven Dials, and at 6pm sharp, mp3 players began to unravel their story:

As an atmospheric soundscape started to resonate in my headphones, the heavy drops of rain were giving the situation a sense of heightened drama. The first couple of words whispered in my ear coincidentally seemed to be echoing what was going on around me: someone looking over their shoulder, readjusting their coat, putting their hand in their pocket… Everything that was said seemed to predict what was going to happen, as if the street suddenly became the scene of a theater that was directly responding to the soundtrack, as if seemingly random passers-by were all part of an orchestrated setup, their choreographed moves obeying a pre-determined script.

The result of taking part in subtlemob: the schizophrenic feeling of being both a spectator and actor, an insider and an onlooker. Above all, the inexplicably intense sensation of belonging to the street, of being here and now in the city.

http://www.subtlemob.com/

Stunning large-scale photographs of what was once the third largest energy generating site in the UK and the most thermally efficient power station in the world are currently on display at the Royal Institute of British Architects until 29 Sept.

The building’s exterior was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott (responsible amongst other things for the red letterbox, phonebox and Bankside Power Station  a.k.a. Tate Modern) and was built and opened in two phases, respectively in 1936 and 1956. It was decommissioned in 1983.

Having visited the derelict building a couple of years ago, I was already taken aback by its sheer scale (It is said that the boiler house could contain St Paul’s cathedral) and the poignant remains of heavy machinery scattered around the storeys. Michael Collins’ photographs succeeded particularly well in conveying the vastness of indoor spaces; He applied the technique of ‘record picture’ photography to capture the experience of the site, extensively used by the government and institutions for the purpose of official visual documentation, and used some traditional equipment to produce the shots, resulting in a somewhat bizarre timeless feel particularly visible in the shots of the control rooms.

The site now faces uncertain prospects after several failed attempts at re-development spanning over two decades, which only succeeded in removing the roof of this brick cathedral, now open to the elements.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)

66 Portland Place
London, W1B 1AD
020 7580 5533

http://www.architecture.com

http://www.recordpictures.com Michael Collins Photography

The retrospective of arguably the best-known contemporary British artist/walker concludes this weekend at the Tate Britain. Richard Long’s practice has consistently placed primitive mark-making at the centre of the work, exploring relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement in the simplest way: by instigating walking as a means of marking, sensing and measuring the vastness and eternity of the world. Long explains with disarming simplicity:

“my work really is just about being a human being living on this planet and using nature at its source. [...] It’s about the intellectual pleasure of original ideas and the physical pleasure of realising them. I enjoy the simple pleasures of wellbeing, independence, eating, dreaming, and sometimes leaving (memorable) traces.”

Long instituted walking as an act of mark-making on possibly the vastest scale possible, freeing sculpture from the constraints of exhibition: the only remains of the artist’s peregrinations in the land are those pictures and diagrams, strangely similar to strategy maps: photographs of deserted landscapes or plans printed with geometrical figures showing the whereabouts of the artist/walker. His trajectory and purpose are often driven by natural forces: gravity, wind, water flow, magnetism, geology – or by his interest in transference (physics) – the idea of a certain equivalence of places and events on different sides of the world.

Using his foot as instrument for art, expressive and perceptive, the footprint as a testimony of his journey and presence in time and space, Long’s walks become an act of inscription; a reminder that the verb “to write” originates from the practice of incising, as in the inscription of running letters in stone or the furrowing of a track.

Richard Long – Heaven And Earth at Tate Britain until 6th September 2009.

Today sees the public release of Mapumental, a ground-breaking map-generator tool that helps you to work out the optimal place to live or work in order to have an easy commute and an affordable home.

Through a highly intuitive interface, you can highlight parts of a map that match your ideal criteria of averaged commuting time, house prices and ’scenicness’ (whatever that might mean!).

After I generated my own little map and customised it, I came to three conclusions:

• Public transport in London is a nightmare
• You can’t be too demanding about where you want to live, according to that ’scenicness’ index…
• You have to be bloody rich!

Mapumental is a project by Channel 4 and mySociety.

http://mapumental.channel4.com/

Lately, my work has taken me to a college in Reading where I teach 16-18 years old kids; Weirdly perhaps, I haven’t been round so much juvenile display for the past 10 years. Being there was like jumping back in time, suddenly putting me back face to face with what I must have been like at that age. Yet because of the progressive evolution of my circle of acquaintances (and my aging!), I didn’t realise how I came to look retrospectively at the places I lived in with a strong connection to a particular age band – London being the most “grown-up” environment, dispossessed of any immaturity, as if pranksters had ceased to exist just because I became oblivious to them.

Coincidentally, Reading was also the set for a comedy series of 6 episodes running last autumn on BBC2, starring two teenagers as they are grappling with the hopes and dreams of moving to London in order to fulfil their lifelong ambition of becoming respected hair-dressers and being around the ‘Beautiful People’. The series amusingly managed to capture the essence of the nineties pretty well – thanks to a heavy load of girl-bands-era soundtrack [CD sold separately]. Besides, the acting was pretty good, especially from one of the characters who struck me by the physical resemblance he bore with me, and the similarities of his views on life.

The journey to London they undertake towards the end of the series is a lot more than a mere 30-min train ride: it tells of the irresistible attraction of the big city, the very embodiment of ambition, freedom, stardom: everything one craved as a teenager. It clearly represents the symbolic transition from one age to another, from one status to another. Only to realize that after all, the life of the Beautiful People isn’t as desirable as one might have imagined.

Beautiful People on bbc.co.uk

Just came back from Birmingham where I attended the closing days of Flatpack, a 10-day event put together by old pals 7 Inch cinema, now (already!) in its third edition. It’s good to remember that 7 Inch started life as a “family business”, running DIY monthly film nights at the Rainbow pub in Digbeth back in 2003 (I still have the very first flyers!), and it seems that they’ve kept going that way without selling their soul.

Eclectism and spontaneity is the name of the game in this quirky little festival; The clash of retro-modern graphics with victorian-punk aesthetics is spot-on, thanks to the visual craft of Gas. Many of the events were free and casual, reinforcing its vocation as an antidote to mainstream/commercial media, offering a mind-opening and enlightning glimpse into independent/amateur film-making and unearthing what the experience of early cinema must have been like before Hollywood and multiplexes came along – or possibly pointing at what moving-image might become as a democratised and participatory art-form for the future?

The programme successfully negociated its way around an array of strands pulling together the weird, the experimental, the kitsch or the serious, a bit like if Onedotzero, Aurora, Raindance and the London Short Film Festival had collided together, consequently attracting a well mixed audience. Overall, the greatest thing about the festival was the shameless balance between old and new, together with an uncompromised and resourceful emphasis on homegrown stuff. This reconcilation of past, present and future is refreshing – something that can’t be said about the plans for the new central library in Birmingham – more on this later!)

Highlights included a presentation and film programme compiled by Berlin-based animator David O’Reilly, and a panel discussion and screenings on the work of Birmingham-born architect John Madin.

http://www.flatpackfestival.org

http://www.7inch.org.uk