“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of the unfolding events of the global economic meltdown of 2008, whilst Robinson’s obsession with port statistics has been replaced by agricultural observations and Paul Scofield’s voice-over, which seemed to embody the character in his absence, has given way to Vanessa Redgrave’s slighlty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/

Exploding Places takes you on a journey through time and space. You arrive in a fictional Woolwich in South East London, create your own community and place them in the real world Woolwich. Over the space of an hour you and your community travel through 120 years of local and global history. The First World War passes in just a few minutes as you play the game to ensure your survival.

You play on the phone screen and through headphones, as you walk the town’s real streets. You can interact with other players, join together and respond to conflict or difficulties in each other’s communities. The ultimate goal is to build a thriving community that grows and creates a new generation, based on health, wealth, knowledge, participation and your contribution to the game. The game will be broadcast on the BBC Big Screen in central Woolwich giving public audiences the chance to watch the games unfold.

Exploding Places is a real world SIM city or Monopoly, played live on the streets of Woolwich. The game offers participants a playful way to engage with London, engaging with its social, community and
regeneration issues. It will explores how new communities come to live in new areas, what happens to them, how they grow, whether they thrive and settle, whether they move on, etc.

Exploding Places is part of the exciting new area of creative endeavour called locative or pervasive gaming, bringing new and emerging technologies into the public realm. It sits alongside the critically acclaimed work of companies such as Blast Theory whose games have received major international awards and BAFTA nominations.

Be the first to play Exploding Places

To play you must first register a place:
Go online: www.explodingplaces.org
or call 020 8858 2825
or Email anna@streamarts.org.uk

Once registered, come to the launch and play:
When: Saturday 24th July 2010, 11am – 5pm
Where: The Tramshed, 51 – 53 Woolwich New Road, London SE18 6ES
Directions: British Rail / DLR: Woolwich Arsenal, then 2 minute walk to The Tramshed

Exploding Places www.explodingplaces.org

Created by Active Ingredient www.i-am-ai.net in collaboration with Greenwich Heritage Centre, Woolwich Polytechnic and Woolwich residents. Active Ingredients locative game Heartlands won the UK and Ireland Satellite Navigation Competition and the Nokia Ubimedia Mindtrek Award in 2007.

Commissioned by Stream www.streamarts.org.uk, the Greenwich based producer of public and collaborative art.
In 2005 Stream produced the Greenwich Emotion Map using bio-mapping technology with artist Christian Nold.
Funded by Arts Council London and Greenwich Council.
Produced in collaboration with Horizon Digital Economy Research, funded through grant EP/G065802/1 from Research Councils UK.

until 14 July 2009
http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_project/computer_baroque/baroque

Computer Baroque is an exhibition of films by pioneers of computer animation: Karl Sims, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, William Latham, Beriou, John Tonkin, Chris Landreth, Peter Callas, Simon Biggs, Ruth Lingford, James Duesing, Paul Garrin, Shelley Lake, The Butler Brothers and Jason White & Richard Wright.

Rarely seen, they represent a period – the late 1980s and early 1990s – in which computer animation was the focus for the most audacious and exuberant experiments across all areas of new media, art and technology. The films range from earlier works by Karl Sims and William Latham influenced by scientific ideas to the more ironic and satirical works by Shelley Lake and the Butler Brothers.

Films are accompanied by programme notes and an essay by curator Richard Wright.

“Why characterise this period as ‘Baroque’? I think it was the sense that by the late 1980s we had reached a stage where the power of computers could finally be harnessed by more than a handful of insiders. Artists wanted to push the computer as far as it would go, to create visual transformations that defied previous traditions, to blend image and music and text, to apply scientific ideas as new sources of inspiration. It created a strident kind of image that insisted on the fact of its own realisation, fleeting paeans to the artificial. Yet equally present was a nagging anxiety, that this artifice heralded a world of totalizing control, paranoia and catastrophe”.

Richard Wright

Le format horizontal très allongé (6,82 m sur 0,34 m) ne permet pas une représentation réaliste des échelles de distance et de la topographie. La carte doit plutôt être vue comme une représentation schématique d’un réseau de routes, à l’image des plans de métros, permettant de se rendre facilement d’un point à un autre, de se renseigner sur les distances entre étapes. De fait, elle est considérée comme la première représentation cartographique d’un réseau. Elle figure des points remarquables (carrefours, thermes) ainsi quéune représentation simplifiée du relief. Les distances sont inscrites en chiffres romains le long des tracés routiers.

Détail de la carte représentant la région Provence - Bouches-du-Rhône.

Copie intégrale consultable en haute-résolution : B I B L I O T H E C A A U G U S T A N A – Tabula Peutingeriana

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

"A road from Chelsea to St James Park Gate", engraved map found on the pavement of Duke of York Square, Chelsea (London)

Étymologiquement, le mot anglais ‘map’ provient du latin mappamundi, description du monde par une « nappe » de signes – littéralement une toile jetée sur le globe pour le recouvrir de tracés structurants. Une ‘map’ ou carte est donc l’objet plan que l’on en retire. Or, les premières cartes du monde étaient plus le fait de conventions symboliques que d’une observation cartésienne – les cartes « T-O », s’inscrivant dans un disque, sont par exemple le pur produit de contraintes de représentation et de symbolisme religieux. Le format rectangulaire semble s’imposer à mesure que l’on passe d’une vision du monde dominée par la religion à une vision du monde plus cartésienne, au cours de la période qui a vu la naissance du discours scientifique (XVe – XVIIIe siècles). Au cours de la même période, les cartes se sont aussi défaites des itinéraires.

A l’époque de l’exploration du monde, la cartographie a permis de penser l’espace et la place de l’Homme dans le monde, une vision et un équilibre progressivement modifies par la La découverte de nouveaux territoires. se penser soi-même en se projetant dans l’espace.

La cartographie moderne consiste en une juxtaposition d’éléments disparates, dont la plupart ne sont même plus des représentations du monde visible. Ces éléments sont produit par une observation, un recensement et non plus par une spéculation ou une diction, et sont rassemblés pour former le tableau d’un « état » du savoir géographique, formant un système de lieux géographiques isolés dépouillé de logique opératoire, sans « avant ni après », pour reprendre la formule de de Certeau. « Là où la carte découpe, le récit traverse ».

La carte s’incrit dans la logique de Port-Royal au même titre que le tableau : ce sont des images, mais elles fonctionnent sur un mode différent : La carte ne résulte pas d’un système perspectif, ou l’oeil est positionné strictement au point de vue. Elle met en jeu differents dispositifs de vision, differents types de représentation de l’espace. Elle ne fournit pas « une vue à travers » mais « une vue sur ». La carte n’est pas un paysage vu de loin, elle est le fruit d’un panoramique conceptuel. Il n’y a pas mise distance d’un objet visuel, mais carrément rupture de niveau. (Victor Stoichita)

Cartographier, c’est donc porter un regard sans centre ni horizon, prémisse du « regard panoptique » de Foucault.²

^{Michel de Certeau, Récits d’espace, in L’invention du quotidien, Tome 1 : arts de faire, Gallimard, 1990, p.171.}

^{Christine Buci-Glucksmann, L’oeil cartographique de l’Art, Galilée 1998}

The landscape as an artistic and literary representation, implying a certain sensibility, a way of experiencing, appeared after the invention of single point perspective in northern Italy and its spread across Flanders then Western-Europe. Landscape painting emerged there as a recognised genre, alongside modern theatre as a formal art wherein human actions are presented in direct relation with a designed and controlled environment.

¹ Denis Cosgrove (1984) Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Croom Helm. p.213

Daniel Belasco Rogers spent months recording stories told by local residents of the Greenwich area. In August 2006, the “Peninsula Voices” project will find out what stories are written through the pavements, using handheld computers connected by GPS, making it possible to walk round the area and hear the voices of those who lived there.

www.planbperformance.net/dan