Jack Morris is an urban landscape artist. His art is a form of cartography ─ however, rather than attempting to accurately replicate what the city looks like, he seeks to convey what the city feels like. 
Situationism's journey from its Parisian origins into Anglo-Saxon culture has been littered with feuds, schisms and excommunications. Writer and conceptual artist Stewart Home recalls the history and politics of Situationism and its British pendant, psychogeography. 
New Voice Nick Papadimitriou on what has changed in thirty years of walking London's fringes and the mysteries of the suburbs. 
Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with Eric Brightwell, proprietor of both Pendersleigh & Sons Cartography, which offers hand-drawn maps of neighborhoods in Los Angeles and beyond (and posts them to Amoeba Music's Amoeblog), and Brightwell, which offers luxury and craft items to the discerning cosmopolitan gentleman. They discuss the days when Silver Lake was Ivanhoe; the distinctively shifting and disputed nature of Los Angeles neighborhoods; the differences between neighborhood mapping by Google Maps, by Yahoo Maps, on subway station walls, and by hand; the unintended Berlin Wall effect of freeway construction; his attracting of angry, all-caps comments from the gangs of Frogtown; longtime Angelenos' lack of awareness about the neighborhoods that surround them, and their need to believe that their own has gone to the dogs; Hollywood's retailers of pimp-geared $169 three-suit deals; how an authenticity jones can ruin your experience of Los Angeles; his discovery of microsubcultures in unexpected places, and the larger fact that no one part of the city is more interesting than any other; Hitler's Pacific Palisades bunker; and the advanced art of entering a neighborhood, exploring it, and documenting it without knowing anything at all going in. 
“Ruin porn” is a somewhat contested term for a category of photography that focuses on images of abandoned human constructions, often urban in setting. Factories, theaters, hospitals, schools – all in states of abandonment and decay. As I indicated, there has been a fair amount of heated debate around the term “ruin porn”, some of which I will deal with directly. First, however, I want to talk about the physical side of the creation of the images, before they implode with the digital and become images that we consume. 
The placement of each disgruntled image next to another seems at first to be a response to the claustrophobic vastness of London. The depth of each picture on its own leaves us desperately searching for connections. Their images are at times beautifully composed of stark figures and shapes (sign posts which at first glance seem to point us in easily-followed directions), and at times strikingly messy (East-London tower blocks overgrown with weeds and vines)... 
Much of a city's history is written in its architecture, its infrastructure, and even its natural geographical features. Over time, however, much of that history is lost. ![Cryptoforestry: After London, Wild England [the Victorian cryptoforest] | Psychogeography | Scoop.it](http://img.scoop.it/KeA2xF3eY4Suxdm6Kvfx5zl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVaiQDB_Rd1H6kmuBWtceBJ)
Thematically this book has to be mentioned here as it describes England as a gigantic post-purge/post disaster cryptoforest where nature is retaking roads and buildings, where London has turned into a toxic swamp and where a retribalized ...
If older science fiction designs are any indicator, the city of today should look like a bundle of broken Christmas tree lights during the middle of a Peyote trip. Via Artur Coelho This is a map that will document all London locations of note in post-apocalyptic and dystopian literature. SYNOPSIS In a post-nuclear future, when the earth is riddled with radiation, a new urban developer proposes to regenerate the cities back into civilisation. |
Auburn-haired, freckled and elfin-faced Miss Borehamwood 1954 was picked up at eight o’clock at her house in Elstree by her fiancé William McGrath. After a quick spin in McGrath’s white MG Midget to St Albans where they had dinner, the couple set off south, car-roof down on the hot June evening, heading for Edgware and the cinema. As they passed over Elstree Hill, Sheila Margaret Lomath and William McGrath discussed plans for their approaching wedding day. Everything was arranged, the service at St Nicholas’ church, Elstree, to be followed by a reception at the Orchard Restaurant in Mill Hill. The honeymoon would be spent touring France, the new Mr and Mrs McGrath (plus MG Midget) taking the Silver City cross-channel air ferry from Lydd in Kent to Dunkirk. As they shouted to one another over the engine noise, the evening air hitting their faces, they crossed Brockley Hill, swung onto the sleek and modern A41(T) Edgware Way and plummeted down off the ridge at 70 mph. Sheila smiled as she gazed at the curve of streetlamps marking the course of the arterial road up ahead; in her beautiful mind the chain of orange globes became a necklace bearing the years-to-come, each jewel-like soda-light a rich season, distinct yet integral to the shaping pattern of her life. William merely pondered his luck; to wed an ex-beauty queen – who’d have thought it? It was good to be alive in 1958. Andrew Kotting's English road movie. He travelled the coastal perimeter of Britain accompanied by his grandmother & 8 year old daughter who has Joubert Syndrome, on a psychogeographical endeavour with a peculiarly English surrealist twist. The resulting film is discursive, comical, & moving. 
That Dawn of the Dead owes much to its inspired use of setting — the Monroeville Mall, as pictured above — is a no brainer. The image of zombies shambling through a suburban shopping mall has, without a doubt, permeated our cultural consciousness.... 
You might think a book of short stories about redevelopment in Hackney would be a rough and tumble of Olympic gripes. You’d be wrong. As Stewart Home says on the cover quote, Acquired For Development By… “reaches the parts of Hackney Iain Sinclair doesn’t reach”.
If waste is taken to denote change, a coming to be by having been, then the anticipation of ruins mark out the present as the condition of the future.
In fiction, film and the painterly arts, the anticipation of a ruinous end is frequently a narratological means by which to return to and make sense of the present; by ‘traveling to the future’ we might make and give meaning to the present. 
I saw the London estate wars break out. Gangs stake their territories. Middle Classes build steel barricades. The Techtopia district spread from Shoreditch to Mare Street, gleaming towers and shopping malls protected by gun turrets. And that’s where we were lucky enough to live. Guilt stricken, but relieved.... 
Wild Hackney is a docu-drama taking you through an imaginary landscape of the Lee Valley after the seawater has risen.
Made in response to the canal and the surrounding ancient flood plains, the piece takes as inspiration the Victorian Gothic novel After London by Richard Jefferies. Written in 1885, the book imagines London reverting to nature after a flood, with only a few survivors roaming the marshland.
Using field recordings of the area, the feature moves through scenes of a future Hackney combinging elements of documentary and fiction to reflect on the allure of urban ruin. 
More than any other sporting spectacle, the Olympic Games have a recurring tendency to mirror the political dramas and expectations of the societies in which they take place and of the wider world. |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |  |
12 |
|
Next |
