A message from the first post ideological generation...

[Video - Coalition of Resistance conference | School Student | 27 Nov 2010 by adycousins on YouTube]

15 year old student Barnaby speaking of his experience in the Whitehall kettle at the Coalition of Resistance conference last Saturday.

via Anthem

Article 12: Waking up in a Surveillance Society

[Video -Article 12 by Junco Films on Vimeo]

Back in April I posted the trailer for David Bond's film Erasing David in which he put the surveillance state to the test by attempting to disappear. Now Juan Manuel Biaiñ and Junco Films have released their own documentary entitled Article 12: Waking up in a Surveillance Society. Recently screened at the 24th Leeds International Film Festival this new film uses the twelfth article of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 as a benchmark to chart the global ascendancy of surveillance society. According to the film synopsis:

Article 12 presents an urgent and incisive deconstruction of the current state of privacy, the rights and desires of individuals and governments, and the increasing use of surveillance.

The film adopts the twelfth article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to chart privacy issues worldwide, arguing that without this right no other human right can truly be exercised. It assembles leading academics and cultural analysts including Noam Chomsky, AC Grayling and Amy Goodman to highlight the devastating potency of surveillance, the dangers of complicity, and the growing movement fighting for this crucial right.

Article 12 provides a powerful wake-up call as we sleepwalk into a worldwide surveillance society.

Despite our coalition government's pledges to 'implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties and roll back state intrusion' following the general election in May, and the suspension of s44 for the purposes of stop and search of individuals without the criterion of 'reasonable suspicion' back in July, recent proposals to revive the previous government's Intercept Modernisation Programme inspire little confidence in their resolve. 

Indeed, in his recent report to the House of Commons the UK Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham' called for 'government departments to build post-legislative scrutiny into their work as a key way of ensuring the successful delivery of the new transparency and privacy agenda'. This followed the recommendations of the Surveillance Studies Network's (SSN) recent update to their 2006 'Report on the Surveillance Society'. 

In this climate Biaiñ's film looks as though it may prove to be essential viewing. Keep your eyes peeled for further screenings, or simply follow the film on Facebook.

Utopia London?

[Video - Utopia London Trailer by Utopia London on Vimeo]

In this new documentary Tom Cordell attempts to tell the story of the London he grew up in and the Architects who built it. As he explains:

I grew up in the London of the 80s and 90s and it's still my home. I've always been drawn to the excitement of its post-war landscape; concrete and brick textures, unadorned clean lines, neon glow and dark shadows. And most Londoners my age that I know feel the same - the modernist city is our landscape. Yet all our lives we have been told that the same urban spaces are ugly – symbols of a failed, arrogant technocracy. While we're comfortable celebrating 60s pop culture, many people still hate the buildings of that time.

Worryingly, while I had once thought that popular taste would catch up with the urban building of the 50s, 60s and 70s, it's now under attack. Major symbols of that time are being destroyed - often with gruesome delight on the part of the wreckers. We urgently need to defend what is left before it is all gone.

So this film is an attempt to understand both why I am so drawn to these cityscapes and also why some hate them so much.

What excites me about Cordell's project is the way the tensions he describes resonate with my own interests in the subject of urbanism, and my personal ambivalence toward the city to which I remain attached. Undoubtedly Cordell's attachments are different from my own. Growing up in the fringe of London's northern commuter belt I have always felt like an outsider or stranger in London. As Georg Simmel would have had it in his influential essay 'The Stranger': I am 'the man who comes today and stays tomorrow - the potential wanderer, so to speak, who although he has gone no further, has not quite got over the freedom of coming and going'. If we accept this supposition of a propensity toward wanderlust, the real riddle of the stranger then would be to find out what makes him stay? While I am yet to visit many of the the sites appearing in Cordell's film, I wonder if the draw they have for him bares any similarity to that which I've felt toward the Barbican Estate ever since I stumbled upon it on a walk through the City a couple of years ago. 

Situated near the heart of London's central business district, the Barbican appears as an anachronism on the City's changing skyline. Perhaps there is something quixotic in the image of this outmoded Brutalist fortress of concrete, squaring off against the City's new champions of commerce rising to the east; palaces of commerce armoured in glass and steel, more ethereal in appearance, or more wraith-like depending on your view.

At the same time the Barbican is an island of urban life in a sea of commuters. I've often imagined it declaring independence from the rest of the city, or else turning feral in the vein of Ballard's book High-Rise. In my imagination it is more a ship waiting to set sail than an island. Over the last couple of years several of the pedways that reached out from the estate have been severed as the surrounding area has been redeveloped: the gangplanks are going up, all we're waiting for is the hoisting of the mainsail and we're off down the Thames in search of booty off the Docklands main.

While it is extremely unlikely that architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon or the LCC ever entertained thoughts of the Barbican as a Pirate Utopia, it is interesting to consider the extent to which the buildings they created have preserved or compromised the Utopian Egalitarianism that informed the earlier work of planners and architects such as Patrick Abercrombie and John Foreshaw, embodied in the County of London and Greater London plans of the 1940s:

[Video - The Proud City: A Plan for London (Public Domain Video) hosted by Utopia London on Vimeo]

Despite the harsh modernism, the uncompromising functionalism, or even the brute concrete hostility of many of the sites that were intended to embody these ideals, I'd like to suggest that it is their enduring influence on London's urban imaginary that continues to draw us to them. As Cordell tells us:

I began to contact the people who tried to change the city, and my narrative thread continued to shift around as the filming went on. And what I found was that the power of the buildings came from the vision they were meant to serve - and that it's this vision that so polarises opinion. They symbolise an attempt to build a fair, open society, and their existence frightens people who have rejected these values.

The film will be screened by DoCoMoMo in London on the 14th of December and followed by Q and A with director and architects. The film is also available for purchase on DVD from the Utopia London website.

The most wonderful building you'll never explore...

[Video - In Search of Absent Wonders by Urban Orienteer on Vimeo]

Back in 2009 I began a project with my close friend Mark at Dancing Eye called 'In the Shadows of the Crystal Palace'. At the time I'd just gained an interest in street photography and naively started to take photographs around the City of London. It was only by virtue of the absurdities of s44 anti-terror legislation, and private securities regular attempts to disallow my taking pictures of their transparent buildings, all the time being watched by their cameras, that I became interested in the new glass architecture that suddenly seemed to be springing up across the city. From there on my curiosity took over and quickly led me to the most wonderful building I'll never explore.

In researching the project I visited the Sydenham Hill site several times hoping to capture something...I'm not sure what. While he Crystal Palace Park is wonderful in its own right, I can't help my disappointment that so little remains of the building that gave it its name.

From 1854 to 1936 the site was home to Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace. Originally intended as a temporary structure to house The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London's Hyde Park, the Palace was relocated to the Sydenham site as a result of popular demand, but no doubt assisted by the commercial interest that inspired. Following its destruction by fire in 1936 the site was used to host events like motor racing until the 70's, but was otherwise left to fall into disrepair.

Today the area is dominated by the Crystal Palace transmitter erected during the 1950's. All that remains of the original site is the upper terrace with its Sphinxes and broken statues, and the restored exhibit of antediluvian reptiles in the lower park. The park's past is commemorated by a pair of arches replicating the prefabricated iron frames Paxton designed to hold his magnificent building's spectacular glass panels.

If my trips yielded little else I at least managed to capture the stunning autumn sunrise seen in my short film above. How much more glorious would it have been though to have snuck into the still standing Palace before dawn; seen the sun rise from within the great Central Trancept; watched the morning light dance across the Alhambra, Egyptian, Greek and Roman courts; and observed the eager morning crowds enter from my hiding place up above.

We may well speculate that if the building did still stand it would be little more than a mall today, but to be fair this criticism seemed to plague the building from the beginning. And so what if it is only by virtue of its absence that it maintains its aura? Doesn't this allow it to serve us as a symbol all the more?

With that in mind I'd like to end with two wonderfully evocative passages from a guide to the Crystal Palace featured in an issue of the The Leisure Hour journal from 1856:

See! like a vision of magic, its striking foreground and magnificent park come into view; whilst, beyond them the Palace rises, wondrous in extent, yet so light and aerial in aspect, as almost to defy belief that it is a thing of solid substance. 

What an enchanting scene here meets the eye! A seemingly interminable vista opens, presenting innumerable gaily-dressed groups of visitors, promenading through lines of luxuriant foliage, intermingled with statuary, from behind which arise ranges of elaborately ornamented facades, and lofty, slender, parti-coloured columns, festooned and enwreathed with graceful climbing plants, springing from the ground, and shooting out from suspended baskets, lustrous with blossoms of every hue; while, high overarching all, is a crystal canopy, stained, as it were, with the mellow blue of the heavens, or sparkling with myriads of sunlight reflections. In the foreground, covered with white and purple and crimson water-lilies, is a sheet of water, from the midst of which springs the world- renowned crystal fountain, glittering with prismatic colours. 

This passage is quoted from the full article that featured in a recent post on Lee Jackson's excellent blog The Cat's Meat Shop. Those with a taste for further Victorian delights are strongly encouraged to try Lee's full online archive The Victorian Dictionary.

Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space

Back in May the Royal Academy of Arts held a symposium entitled Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space. I was incredibly disappointed not to be able to attend so I was particularly pleased when, in addition to the mp3s available above, videos of the event were posted by static tv on behalf of The London Consortium.

As indicated by the title of the symposium, each of the lectures are broadly structured around the distinction between the inner and outer operative in the fiction of the late British writer J.G. Ballard. What many of these discussions emphasise in their exploration of Ballard's work is the permeability of those barriers and thresholds ordinarily supposed to mark that distinction in each of its many guises.

By way of example we might consider the violent short circuiting of the libidinal economy of the individual and functioning of the capitalist market economy affected by the penetration of the skin by twisted metal staged by the auto 'accident' in Crash.

Below I offer a selection of the lectures that I found most interesting.

[Video - Ballardian Architecture 1 - John Gray by static tv on Vimeo]

In the first discussion philosopher John Gray draws on Ballard's interest in celebrity culture and surveillance to pose the question as to whether we can expect there to be genuinely public spaces anymore. Gray explores the implications for political economy by way of a comparison with Guy Debord's theorisation of the spectacle in his 1967 book Society of the Spectacle.

[Video - Ballardian Architecture 2 - Nic Clear by static tv on Vimeo]

In this second lecture the Bartlett's Nic Clear delivers his paper 'J.G. Ballard is an Enemy of the Architectural Profession'. Developing themes explored earlier in the issue of Architectural Design that he guest edited back in 2009, the lecture is offered as an exploration of new modes of architectural representation that are intended, in this case via the writings of Ballard, to stage an encounter between the architectural discipline and its outside.

An earlier interview outlining the development of this project, and featuring videos produced by his students in the course of his Ballard inspired 2007-08 programme for the Bartlett's Unit 15, can be found on the Ballardian website here.

[Video - Ballardian Architecture 3 - David Cunningham by static tv on Vimeo]

In David Cunningham's presentation he compares Ballard's writing on space and place with those of his friend Iain Sinclair and the Anglo-German writer W. G. Sebald. In doing so he argues that, contrary to the "hunger for memory and place" of Sinclair and Sebald's writings, Ballard's provide a "profoundly urban, no-turning-back aesthetic of futurism and rawness", embodied in the architecture of Brutalism and the new forms of social interaction it might seem to promote.

The end of session panel discussion above features Gray, Clear and Cunningham answering questions from the floor on the subjects of time, the uncanny, sentimentality and social networking.

[Video - Ballardian Architecture 7 - Chris Hall by static tv on Vimeo]

Chris Hall was one of the first online writers to discuss Ballard's work in his essay 'Extreme Metaphor: A Crash Course In The Fiction Of JG Ballard'. In this discussion Hall uses a reading of 'The Terminal Beach' to explore Ballard's use of particular types of architectural structures as metaphors for those aspects of ourselves that we try to repress. In doing so he develops the psychogeographic themes in Ballard's writings hinted at in Cunningham's discussion.

[Video - Ballardian Architecture 9 - Dan Holdsworth by static tv on Vimeo]

The lecture by British photographer Dan Holdsworth departs from the format of critical appreciation established by the speakers above. Having participated in the Crash: Homage to JG Ballard exhibition at the Gagosian gallery the previous month, Holdsworth reads passages from Ballard's works that resonate with the sparse and sometimes inhuman images suggested he captures through long exposure photography.

[Video - Ballardian Architecture 12 - Claire Walsh by static tv on Vimeo]

The closing speech of the symposium was made by Ballard's long term partner Claire Walsh. Naturally this offers a fascinating glimpse into the authors private life and the more guarded facets of his character.

The full set of videos can be found on the static tv while recordings of the sessions are available on the Royal Academy of Arts site here.

Urban Orienteer in the Anti Design Festival 2010

Today sees the beginning of Neville Brody's Anti Design Festival which will include pieces from my ongoing collaboration with Mark at Dancing Eye. Entered as part of the festivals open submission programme these works should be found somewhere amongst the Front Space display in the gallery at 28 Redchurch Street in Shoreditch.

Intended as a response to "25 years of cultural deep freeze" the Anti Design Festival will run concurrently with the official city wide London Design Festival from the 18th to the 26th of September. Summing up in a brief interview on the Independent website Brody states:

The Government says if you're going to do anything – whether it's science or art – make sure you're making money from it.

What we're saying is that experimentation isn't there to make money; money is there to fund experimentation.

The Anti Design manifesto produced to accompany the event can be read here (with difficulty) or downloaded as a more palatable pdf.

As noted in the Creative Review, the event's self-professed 'outsider' status has been met with ambivalence by many commentators, and its 'anti-commercial', 'rebel' posturing has raised eyebrows in light of its sponsorship by the National Lottery. In order to make up your own mind I recommend checking out the debate hosted on the Guardian website between Brody and Ben Evans; director of the official festival.

A full programme for the Anti Design Festival can be found here (pdf).

RSA Animate - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

[Video - RSA Animate - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by RSA on YouTube]

Provocative as ever, in the most recent RSA Animate irrepressible Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek proposes that 'it is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property'. The lesson he seeks to establish from this proposition is that the form of charity associated with corporate and social responsibility schemes such as Starbucks 'coffee ethics' is an essentially hypocritical and cynical gesture. What he terms 'capitalism with a human face' then remains complicit with the exploitation of the poor it is supposed to help, and all the more effective for the redemptive good conscience it leaves the consumer.

Personally I've always felt that there is something inherently wrong with the demonically perverse desire people harbour for a cup of Joe. I hate their smugness as they storm down the street brandishing their disposable cardboard and plastic cups, waving them aloft as if they were Prometheus bearing their torch for the people. FILTH! Basically makes me want to punch them in the face.

Spleen aside, the video above is an abridgement of the full lecture here, delivered on the release of his most recent book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.