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

Birmingham timelapse from 7inch cinema on Vimeo.

Amateur photographer Derek Fairbrother has assembled photographs taken from the same spot in Birmingham’s Chamberlain square between 1963 and 1986, and compiled them into this intriguing timelapse sequence. The timelapses are displayed in an exhibition called Birmingham Seen which opens at BM&AG this weekend; other sequences include the Post Office tower and the Rotunda.

Implicitly, we think about the years of our lives in a linear fashion, e.g. in terms of decades: our twenties, thirties, etc. In this linear view, all our years are equal and time moves at a uniform pace.
This simple picture, however, doesn’t quite fit with our perceptions as we age: Where are the long, leisurely summers we knew as children? If it seemed forever to get through the fifth grade, what happened to last year?

The ‘logtime’ hypothesis is that we use our age to estimate the passage of time, resulting in a perceived shrinking of our years as we grow older, and giving a subjective scale of life very different from that of the calendar: In this view, the older we become, the faster we seem to age or, conversely, the shorter the years seem to be. Mathematically, this relationship is said to be either logarithmic or exponential, depending on which variable is used as the reference.

Starting with the premise that the human mind judges the length of a long period of time by comparing it with current age, the logarithmic nature subjective human temporal experiences can be easily rationalized: Hence a year adds 10% to the life of a ten-year-old, but only 5% to that of a twenty-year-old. For the twenty-year-old, two years are required to add 10%.
A consequence of the logarithmic function is that it is the ratio of the years defining an interval of time that we use to judge the duration of that interval, not the absolute magnitudes of those years. For example, the years from ages 10 to 20 seem to pass at the same rate as the years from 20 to 40, or 40 to 80 – they are all of equal subjective duration.

A logarithmic scale: stretched out at the low end and compressed at the high end.

However, the changing nature of our lives when we are young tends to obscure the shrinking years: the twenty-year-old rarely thinks about how life was at age 10; life at 20 is filled with different activities and concerns, and it is the future that dominates reverie.
It is only after life becomes more settled and routine that we become more retrospective, and only then do we have an easier basis for comparing the years.
This sense of elapsed time, narrowly dependent on memory, is also heavily reliant on psychological factors: Intervals of time may be judged differently in retrospect than while being experienced; they may seem longer if you feel you have accomplished much or had a memorable experience.
In great part at least, the foreshortening of the years as we grow older is due to the monotony of memory’s content and the consequent simplification of the backward-glancing view. In youth, new experiences are pretty common and regular, apprehension is vivid, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.

William James (1890): The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt.

Link to the original article on Logtime by James Main Kenney

“Old traps vanish, new ones take their place; the old safe places become impassable, and the route can either be plain and easy, or impossibly confusing.”

Andreï Tarkovski, Stalker

As illustrated by Tarkovski’s Zone, the conception of place seems to be constantly evolving, ever-adapting to the circumstances of one-self.
Bergson sees place as “space in which the process of remembrance continues to activate the past as something which is lived and acted, rather than represented”.
Indeed, the notion of place couldn’t exist without memory – or perhaps even outside memory: when we leave a place, we take with us our own constructed and fantasised version of it: for instance, “home is absolutely an imagined or fictiously remembered place that people want to exist, but it exists almost entirely in memory” (Simon Schama). The tension between memory and present experience is epitomized by the feeling of Nostalgia (from the Greek word nostos meaning returning home, and algos meaning pain), which was once recognised as a clinical condition known to have once rendered Russian soldiers incapable of fighting.

In his street-walking itinerancies, Bojan Sarcevic has seeked to highlight the relationships going on between different forms of experience of a place, from tourist to inhabitant: from alienation, to strangeness, to familiarity. The remote and exotic place offers something ‘other’ to those who go there; but the tourists are themselves also ‘other’ to the city’s inhabitant…
On tourism, the sociologist John Urry wrote: “Like the pilgrim the tourist moves from a familiar place to a far place and then returns to the familiar place. At the far place both the pilgrim and the tourist engage in ‘worship’ of shrines, which are sacred, albeit in different ways, and as a result gain some kind of uplifting experience.”
For Erik Cohen, “Pilgrimage is defined by a movement from the ‘profane periphery’ to the ‘sacred centre’”.

Place (Tacita Dean & Jeremy Millar) is released in the Artworks collection, Thames & Hudson.

This post is another snippet from Memory, where Hunter describes the experience of déjà vu as an episode of illusory recognition involving two features which seem incompatible with each other: a present event is recognised as having been witnessed before, yet there is a certainty that this is impossible.
In this form of self-contradictory recognising, we believe that what we say, do or see has been done before in the same circumstances, and we feel that we know what will happen next, as if we remember something that hasn’t happened yet. The present moment is saturated with recollective familiarity as we experience an intense feeling that everything around us has happened in the same way before, and seems out of hand. The sensation of déjà vu, if not the result of a severe brain dysfunction, is usually short and infrequent, merely causing mild puzzlement over unaccountable familiarity.
The opposite situation is alienation, in which intimately known situations and persons are experienced as being strange and unfamiliar.

Déjà vu may be experienced when we are visiting some town for the first time: despite having never been there, the streets look strangely familiar, the scene we are witnessing is somehow not unexpected. A rational explanation could be that this place shares similar environmental characteristics with another place we remember.

In his classic book Memory, first published in 1957 by Penguin Books, Ian M. L. Hunter made some interesting attempts at characterising the processes at work in memory and remembering. He defined and analysed them in those terms:

recalling: reproducing in the present some event from the past. While a person is recalling, they are essentially engaged in selectively constructing the salient characteristics of the original event. This highlights the constructive and selective nature of learning as an active process of registration, in which coordinating relationships are elaborated between old and new. These relationships play a role in subsequent recall.

recognizing: identifying some present event as being familiar from the past.

We sometimes become aware of our attempts at characterising and constructing a framework for remembering past events, using devices like associations of sounds, rhythm, or the context of encounter. By constructing a historical context for the event, we can also localise it in our personal past.

Recollecting constitutes a particularly rich form of recalling, when the warm intimacy of past personal experience is suddenly brought to the surface of the present – see Proust’s madeleine and the idea of involontary memory.

Imaging: experiencing sensory qualities in the absence of appropriate sensory stimulation. Much of our remembering takes the form of imaging, i.e. re-living past complex experiences in vivid sensory terms. We recall the past by reconstructing its sensory characteristics, thus giving us the illusion of going back in time.

The cumulative effects of past experience

The Bartlett experiments¹ have highlighted the gradual and ongoing process of filtering / transformation / degradation occuring with memorised events. The retained effects of past experience form an organised system, progressively elaborated into inter-related systems and sub-systems, where events are selected / re-ordered according to their mutual relevance, which in turn informs the way present circumstances are perceived. A person’s memory is a permanently self-modifying system, their cumulative past constantly enriched and updated by the present.

¹ Frederic Bartlett was a british psychologist famous for his experiments related to the formation of memory. He conducted a series of studies where subjects were told a story, then asked to recall it after various intervals of time.

Paradise Place Birmingham 2007 by Martin Hartland

My visit to Birmingham last month was the occasion to take the pulse of the city and revisit some of its architectural landmarks. I was naturally drawn to the closing evening of the Flatpack festival where three documentaries were shown to celebrate the life and work of John Madin, the Birmingham architect who is responsible for so much of the city’s post-war redevelopment. The screenings were followed by a panel discussion which was timely for one important reason: his creations are now bulldozed or threatened with iminent demolition. The BBC Pebble Mill and Post & Mail building have gone already, and more worringly the Central Library is next on the list.

Birmingham’s tumultuous relationship with modernism began in the 50s, at the time when numerous Victorian buildings were targeted by policy-makers on the grounds of unsoundness and inadequacy. One must acknowledge that the language of brutalist architecture demands a bit of getting used to: born out of utopian and visionary schemes of functionalism and segregation of traffic flows, it has resulted in monumental slabs of raw concrete, varyingly described as inhuman, insensitive or lifeless – not to mention the ‘urine-scented’ underpasses. Modernism is still the subject of a fierce debate, particularly in conservative England: between those who feel it is ugly and irrelevant, and those who feel that by erasing all trace of it we are in danger of blindly repeating post-war mistakes.

Nonetheless, the films presented here were an interesting occasion to put in perspective yesterday’s grand plans of tabula rasa for a clean and efficient urban system lasting “for the next 100 years” with today’s conception of modern ‘urban living’: new, shiny, glazed – and disconnected from the past, thus raising interesting questions about the changing notions and purposes of urban planning and architectural heritage. One major theme that came through during the public discussion was the increasing re-purposing of the city as a haven for shoppers and consumers rather than a public space owned by its inhabitants. Hailing a newly built shop [Selfridges] as the icon of a city bidding to become the 2008 European Capital of Culture was clearly a twisted symbol, for the very idea that consumer culture is rooted in the world of illusion and ephemera. Incidentally, the Bullring and the surrounding shopping area have already aged dramatically in their very short life.

I’m still grappling to understand the city’s attitude to the idea of architectural legacy; Why this constant need to reinvent itself? It’s as if Birmingham was somewhat ashamed and unable to come to terms with its past, and that only by erasing it, it could move forward – the city’s motto.

In the case of the Central Library, the council’s claims of structural issues look at best quite shaky and disputable, at worst more like an attempt to disguise a shift in architectural taste. Razing a building because it has fallen out of fashion is is not just short-sighted, it is expensive – especially at a time when many parts of the city are neglected and could do with a refurbishment. The recent ruling of English Heritage in favour of the listing of the Central Library came as a blow to the council’s plans. Yet city planners have also argued that the Central Library was an obstacle to the realisation of a east/west trans-urban axis. Obstruction? They have a point: as a place for free thinking and enlightenment in such a central location, the library is an obstruction to profitable shopping and spending. Alas, the latest wave of urban regeneration seems more driven by commercial motives than a genuine concern and respect for the wellbeing of people.

Six Men: John Madin, architect (BBC2, 1965, 30 min)

Friends of the Central Library

The Guardian – Society | Razed Stakes

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

Exemples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes’ fashion, ways of making pots or of building archives. Just a genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm of eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, a reads about a good idea, he passes it onto his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up our earlier draft of this chapter: ‘memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.’ When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking – the meme for, say, “belief in life after death” is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.

The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins. Oxford University Press (1976), p.192