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of the unfolding events of the global economic meltdown of 2008, whilst Robinson’s obsession with port statistics has been replaced by agricultural observations and Paul Scofield’s voice-over, which seemed to embody the character in his absence, has given way to Vanessa Redgrave’s slighlty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

You are cordially invited to the presentation of Translocated – a platform for reflection and artistic practices revolving around urban space and psychogeography.

TRANSLOCATED – EXHIBITION PREVIEW + FORUM

21st / 22nd August 2010

The Alleyway
219 Glyn Road
E5 0JP

The preview will feature projects and presentations from three artists whose work is currently engaged in the issues raised by Translocated, as well as some work in development and an open forum to discuss the boundaries of translocation.

// PROGRAMME ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// Saturday 21st August
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4 – 5 pm
exhibition preview

5 – 6 pm
presentations
(curator’s introduction, artist talk, open forum)

7 – 8 pm
drinks reception

8 – 10pm
film screening

// Sunday 22nd August
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4 – 6pm
video actions

6 – 8pm
1-to-1 guided walks

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http://translocated.org

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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/

Mythogeography takes the form of a documentary-fictional collection of the internal documents, diary fragments, letters, emails, narratives, notebooks and handbooks of a loose coalition of artists, performers, ‘alternative’ walkers and pedestrian geographers. All Illustrated in full colour by Tony Weaver, who designed the Wrights & Sites’ Mis-Guide books.

The fragmentary and slippery format recognises the disparate, loosely interwoven and rapidly evolving uses of walking today: as performance, as exploration, as urban resistance, as activism, as an ambulatory practice of geography, as meditation, as post-tourism, as dissident mapping, as subversion of and rejoicing in the everyday. ‘Mythogeography’ celebrates that interweaving, its contradictions and complementarities, and is an attempt at a handbook for those who want to be part of it.

Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways by Phil Smith is out on 26th January 2010.
Paperback (244 x 170mm), 256 pages. ISBN: 978-0-9562631-3-1

Mythogeography: The Book at Triarchy Press

http://www.mythogeography.com

“The crowd is his element, as the air is that of the birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world – such are a few of the slightest pleasures of the independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.”

Baudelaire, C. (1964), The Painter of Modern Life, New York: Da Capo Press

NB: Studio - Londons Kerning (2007)

Un nom, le nom d’une ville sur la terre, suffit à ouvrir le jeu qui commença sur les atlas de l’enfance. Ce nom, avant d’être un ici, est un là-bas : un motif de rêverie, un buisson d’idées qu’on se fait, d’images mentales relayées par la littérature, les représentations. Puis arrive un jour ou l’on s’y rend et tout le buissonnement confus du « là-bas » s’évapore. L’apprentissage commence : On se rend compte que ce nom, ce qui a fait venir, ce qui a fait rêver, s’il recouvre bien toute la ville, n’en désigne vraiment que le noyau originel. Chaque ville est un ensemble de possibles, prêt à se décomposer en fragments distincts à l’arrivée de chaque nouveau visiteur.

On ne connaît une ville et on ne se l’approprie qu’en la pratiquant – telle une langue. Pour en maîtriser la topographie, la disposition de ses quartiers, il faut plonger dans sa densité kaléidoscopique et entrer dans sa matière. La syntaxe lentement découverte laisse entrevoir sa structure ; Le lexique y prend forme en des phrasés multiples qui se superposent et s’entrecroisent, de façon à la fois réglée et aléatoire, en une forme déchiffrable ou complexe, le long de la grammaire du plan. La ponctuation laisse respirer ses grandes phrases amorphes comme ses éclats lumineux ; Un amas de collages, de parenthèses ouvertes remplies de visions, d’odeurs, d’instants, qui laisse filtrer du sens, ce sursaut d’intensité.

La ville est ainsi une réserve de sens en jachère, de signes que chacun articule, anime, « locute », occulte à sa façon en la parcourant. Une somme d’agencements réalisés, et dans chaque parcours, la réalisation d’un nouvel agencement, d’une nouvelle phrase. La ville, « ionisée » par la démarche qui la traverse en l’explorant, s’éclaire de l’intérieur.
On y forme des suites de mots, des phrases, on établit des repères. Les villes, « pelotes d’histoires », nous exposent à un buissonnement permanent de traces et d’indices enchevêtrés. Chaque ville parle son propre argot secret dont le flâneur reconstitue la trame, le tissu, avec ses moirés et ses accrocs, à la fois achevé et à tisser encore. Cette inextricable complexité de la ville est rendue lisible par l’ascension de l’observateur, qui peut dès lors déchiffrer le texte écrit par ses habitants-marcheurs (Wandersmänner)¹, sans qu’eux mêmes puissent le lire.

Le texte ci-dessus est en partie inspiré/condensé de trois essais de Jean Christophe Bailly publiés dans La Ville à l’œuvre, paru aux Editions de l’Imprimeur en 2001 :
La grammaire générative des jambes, p.21 – 34
Le propre des villes, p.81 – 84
La Clairière, p.73 – 79

¹ Michel de Certeau, L’invention du Quotidien, Tome 1, p.139

Narita Tarmac

“I suspect that the airport will be the true city of the 21st century. The great airports of the planet are already the suburbs of an invisible world capital, a virtual metropolis whose faubourgs are named Heathrow, Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Nagoya, a centriportal city whose population forever circles its notional centre, and will never need to gain access to its dark heart.”

J. G. Ballard

Home is where the hangar is on utne.com

Jeremy Wood, The World's biggest 'IF'

Last week-end saw one the busiest day at the Kinetica Artfair in London, featuring over 150 exhibiting artists working at the cross-roads of sound / light art, computer art and interactive sculpture, and an extensive programme of related talks. One of them was given by Jeremy Wood, whose work I saw for the first time last year in the V&A Mapping the imagination exhibition. Wood had been working with GPS technology for over 8 years, and started from a disconcertingly simple idea: he noticed the aesthetic qualities of the paths formed on a map by geo-tagged photographs taken during a flight from Berlin to London. From there he has pushed the practice of flying, driving, cycling, walking (and even dog-walking) with a GPS attached, expecting some meaningful shape or pattern to emerge.
It’s interesting to note that while some of this ‘always-on’ recording process may be totally random (and pretty similar to Dan Belasco Rogers‘ work), Wood has also taken a keen interest in plotting routes to achieve a specific – and often funny – purpose (e.g. writing the world’s biggest ‘IF’, or drawing a ship sailing on the shoreline by cycling around the streets of Brighton – amusingly dropping its anchor where it had the most space to draw it in all details: in a park).

Jeremy Wood, Brighton Boat

I would describe Wood’s practice as negotiating around the possibilities offered by space to enable a drawing to take place, diverting and using wearable GPS technology as a mark-making tool. Initially a method for the military to record spatial activity, the technology has also become in the hands of Wood an ‘alibi’ to find out what’s going on where – a reminder of Situationist strategies for the Dérive (He has applied psychogeographic principles to a few drawings). In a different strand of works, he also explored the assumed precision level of GPS and has interrogated how accurate and reliable the technology actually is.
His work has obvious parallels with art movements of the last century: GPS drawings by animals echo the surrealists’ use of snails to paint. The special relationship to the territory established through walking as a creative act is also found in the work of many land artists, including Richard Long and the Stalker collective.
I was curious to figure out how much importance real-time feedback takes in this kind of work – I guess a lot of the fun is about experiencing it for yourself. Good, because Wood actually happens to run regular GPS drawing workshops with schools, local authorities and art galleries.

http://gpsdrawing.com/

Finisterre is a collaborative film project, part-documentary / part-music promo, between film-makers Paul Kelly, Kieran Evans and the electro-pop band Saint-Etienne, produced by CC-Lab and supported by Onedotzero.

I watched this film for the first time shortly after it came out in 2003, and remained fascinated by it ever since; after watching it again recently I was inhabited by the same irresistible feelings of nostalgia and tenderness. Beyond the innovative format of the film, which seeks to explore the possibilities of a 60-minute music-promo at the scale of an entire album, the combination of Saint-Etienne’s melancholic or energetic tunes and Kelly/Evans thoughtful shots successfully captures the alternating moods that London has to offer to the unsuspecting visitor.

The film starts and finishes with a train journey in and out of the city, dusk to dawn, unknown to familiar, and transports the spectator on a journey of discoveries and insights into the ‘London Nobody Knows’, through a succession of interviews of local artists and residents connected to the story of Saint Etienne, blended with powerful musical passages accompanied by imagery ranging from architectural patterns to urban scenes and walking crowds, always meticulously shot as stills documenting the city area by area, punctuated by an overwhelming voice-over narrative that features the observations and reminiscences of Lawrence. Finisterre sheds some light on London as a source of influence, inspiration and curiosity for many, offering a trip through the city that is largely reminiscent of a line of psycho-geographic films such as ‘London’, ‘Robinson In Space’ (Patrick Keiller), and ‘Orbital’ (Chris Petit).

The result is a touching tribute to London, marvelously conveying the essence of the place while forming a visual record and musical impression of the city today.

Art [Espace] Public est un cycle de dix rencontres-débat proposées à Paris du 25 janvier au 28 mars 2008 par le Master Projets Culturels dans l’Espace Public de l’université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, en partenariat avec HorsLesMurs, centre national de ressources des arts de la rue et des arts du cirque, sous la direction de Pascal Le Brun-Cordier.
Différentes formes de pratiques artistiques dans l’espace public sont ainsi évoquées et questionnées par des artistes, opérateurs culturels, chercheurs, critiques d’art, flâneurs, spectateurs et acteurs de l’urbain.

Radio Grenouille propose en libre-accès trois enregistrements des conférences, sur les thèmes suivants:

• Dans les interstices des villes…
• La ville, comment ça sonne ?
• La ville, comment ça marche ?

Infos sur le site Art [Espace] Public.

site du Master Projets Culturels dans l’Espace Public.