ZONES1-6
LESS COMMON
ISSN 2051 - 9100
EDITORS LETTER Zone 1 – 6 began as a discursive research platform for students interested in the development of cities and their role as catalysts for creative production and experimentation. For two months, at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design’s Granary Building, students took part in a program of workshops, screenings, talks and discussions centred on various topics and ideas relating to urban morphology its impact practice. In this issue of Less Common, we present Zone 1- 6: Cities Innovation and the Space in Between as the first mutation of an ongoing project which, much like the city itself, will change its form to meet new realities. Without aiming to be comprehensive or complete in its first volume, Zone 1 – 6 (referring to London’s transport system) set out to investigate six aspects of urban morphology in international cities. Areas of interest included the global, political, modernizing, environmental, systemic, social and urban developments found in global cities. These are the ‘zones’ city dwellers engage with and experience on a day-to-day basis, and yet we rarely stop to consider their effect on creative practices and modes of production. Furthermore, in defining the project within the socially layered space of the art school, Zone 1 - 6 could respond productively to these conditions, in a space of concerned with perpetual individual and collective production. In this issue of Less Common, you will see some of the projects and concepts that either grew from Zones 1 -6, as a space defined my students and open to a multitude of agents. All of the projects have a vestedinterest in the city, but they go beyond seeing them merely as constructs, to engage with new possible for the future. If the last three years at Central Saint Martins are anything to go by, we are seeing a turn in art school education, where forms of institutionalization are threatening the primacy of artistic practice. Art schools themselves are like miniaturised cities, with their own semantic meanings, codes of conduct and actors. But it is important that we see them as places with hack-able resources, capable of bending to individual needs, and guerrilla actions and methods, they remain places where new definition of civilisation are sought, by way of exploration and experimentation. Cities are not only spaces of integration, but at their most daring, they become vehicles for transformation. Osei Bonsu Editor-at-large, Less Common
Editor-in-chief Xenia Schuermann Deputy Editor Filip Bigos Editor-at-large Osei Bonsu Creative director Yelena Alice Palmer Graphic Designer Jess Frankland Features Editor Helena Goni Copy editor Fi Anderson Olivia Broome Publisher: STUARTS Union (Contact: Rosie Black) University of the Arts London 272 High Holborn WC1V 7EY London Printer: Stephens & George Print Group Contact: lesscommon@su.arts.ac.uk www.lesscommonmagazine.com www.facebook.com/lesscommonmag www.twitter.com/lesscommonmag All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or part without the written permission of the editor. The views expressed in Less Common are those of the respective contributors and not necessary those of the magazine or its publishers. The magazine welcomes ideas and new contributors but cannot assume responsibility for unsolicited submissions.
IN CONVERSATION: RICHARD WENTWORTH Osei Bonsu (BA Criticism, Communication, Curation, CSM) Last year saw the installation of Black Maria in Central Saint Martins Granary building in the Crossing. Being the result of a collaboration between British artist Richard Wentworth and the Swiss architecture practise GRUPPE the wooden construction was intended as a community space, hosting talks, film screenings and more. Osei Bonsu sat down with Richard Wentworth inside Black Maria to discuss the project.
What interesting about this space is that it has the ability to take you out of London. I think it’s a way of distancing oneself from London. Could you talk about your earliest memory of London? The first memories I have of it being in a contentious space was 1967. My parents were living in Hampstead Heath then, near Jewish émigrés and the sort of people that would have been making new television.
We have spoken before about this idea of inefficiency or objects without immediate agency. Yet we are sitting in this very useful and usable structure known as Black Maria. I’m a bit anxious about perceptions of my possession of this. There was an interview in the Financial Times, which made it sound like it was mine and these Swiss characters just happened to build it, when in fact it`s theirs. They built it, I haven’t even co-designed it, it was built out of trust. Without me it could not have happened because it was me who was asked, who would you like to invite to the party? It would never have arisen had I not been asked to restage ‘An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty’. However, I hope it gets remembered as what GRUPPE did at Kings Cross, I’m very pleased that I’ve been the agency for it.
Black Maria is a contentious space – it has a political aspect, which is interesting. Could you discuss this in more detail?
I remember you mentioned before that most artists have this design sensibility. For you this sense of searching and seeking seems to linger in your sociability. Was this the foundation for Black Maria?
We talk about architecture but neither of us is from an architectural background. Do the various aspects of a building sometimes get overlooked?
Were you living in the city when you began to feel emotionally uncomfortable? I came to London as a grown up
To overview, overlook, supervise - what all those words mean is that we are literally in a supervisory role, which gives us a kind of emotional power. People can look at us, thinking ‘what are they doing up there?’, but all we’ve done is raise ourselves off the ground. How you feel in the cellar, is different from how you feel on the roof, there is this real emotional dimension. The politics of this are amazing, and it will end up in the history books. I’m so proud it`s here and it feels intended.
The body knows so much. The boy that almost tripped, understood there was a handrail. Your feet know there is a relationship between that step, the step you`re missing and your shoulder.
If there was ever something that confirms that notion it’s the Black Maria project, shockingly so. I grew up being quite curious within very definite social constraints and I liked to get beyond that envelope but I didn’t know why. I found my social class completely overwhelming and airless, I couldn’t understand why they conducted themselves in the way they did. I was emotionally uncomfortable. I was always interested in how things are made, who makes them, what the procedures are as well as the processes and I suppose, in retrospect, I was curious. It was a kind of urbanist curiosity.
in 1965 when I was 17 and all I did was to sort of look underneath its [London`s] skirt. That’s true of my generation because that was all we could do. I was bumping around London and realised it was a plastic city. I lived at the Elephant and watched the Heygate estate being built. Just beneath my skin was some kind of metropolitan curiosity about its fabric and I think that’s quite common. When you see the way things are extemporized in the city and you see people taking place in the city.
What at first seemed to be a lack of confidence was the boy assuming a sort of hierarchical relation to everyone else?
RW: But of course, that’s the other part of what Black Maria is about, that it’s a viewing machine. How funny that whole process is when you’re finding a place to be alone. You`re watching everybody but they’re watching you as well. On the tube you are watching everybody but then again they’re watching you. If we all started to talk about it we’d go mad. Photography by John Sturrock
LIFT
Alexandra Lang (BA Fine Art graduate, CSM) “We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.” (Winston Churchill, 28th October 1944). This quote is said to come from a speech Winston Churchill made during the rebuilding of the House of Commons, which had sustained severe bombing damage in 1941. At that time there was a debate about how the building should be reconstructed. He argued a complete modification of its shape could affect the way MPs interact and subsequently make political decisions. The environment we live and work in has a major impact on us. A city is in a constant state of flux, full of noise and light. It is a juxtaposition of natural and artificial elements, a mix of inhabitants from various backgrounds and cultures. Its boundaries mutate as it expands and contracts and its architecture is exposed to an endless regenerating process. Rarely do individuals choose the environment in which they evolve, although there is a presumptuous assumption that buildings are designed for their needs. In fact buildings – and more specifically their components – greatly influence their occupiers’ feelings and behaviour. My practice is concerned with the psychological impact of urban environments and modern architecture on an individual’s personal experience. Questioning the politics of space, my work is centred on the visual perception of that space. I incite viewers to transform an existing space into a personal experience and challenge their expectations. Reimagining the contemporary urban landscape, I play with light, depth, transparency, reflections and geometry that co-exist in urban architecture. My focus is upon materials used in construction such as glass, mirrors, metal, bricks and concrete. I combine various medias but concentrate on photographs, projections and installations. The body of works I made for the degree show has been inspired by the work of Catherine Yass, among other artists. It involves the superimposition of photographic spaces mounted on virtually clear supports in order to create abstract or figurative imagery and three-dimensional works in which spectators lose their perception of space. Context is essential to my practice where historical, cultural and psychological aspects of a place must be taken into account. The site-specific works I presented included an installation, three light boxes and a video. They are a response to my own experience of the spatial conditions of the Central Saint Martins building where I studied for two years. Located in King’s Cross, the College of Art and Design is part of the major developments undertaken in London since 2009 and the first building to have been refurbished in
this scheme. It is a mix of old and new: the Granary building completed by Lewis Cubitt in 1852 and the immaculate, contemporary extension designed by architects Stanton Williams. Lift is a combination of two large, juxtaposed transparent photographs mounted on clear acrylic and separated from each other by a gap of a few centimetres. The see-through quality of the photographs is emphasised by the natural light coming from behind. The images were taken from different parts of the new building and rotated to various angles. Superimposing two existing empty spaces allows me to create a new abstract space that confuses the viewer. I use the lines, perspectives and colours of the represented spaces as a tool to draw [viewers?] into the space. Adding a gap between these two images increases the three-dimensional effect and creates a blurring between the bare structures depicted and the imagined architecture. The large scale spurs viewers to jump into this illusionary space and slip from one world to another. Lift is hung on a steel structure and stands in a vast framed window made of the same steel in order to match the surrounding architecture. Following the same idea, In-And-Out, Library and Fanlight Ceiling are also combinations of views of the building mounted on see-through materials. They are presented on light boxes and plinths made with the same plywood as the surrounding wooden walls. In-And-Out is the only vertical, double-sided light box of the installation with two sets of photographs on each side. This sculptural piece has been deliberately placed on the right of Lift but further forward to allow viewers to move around it. The two other horizontal light boxes Library and Fanlight Ceiling have been positioned on each corner of the space. They are brightly lit up to contrast with the muted light of In-And-Out and the natural lighting of Lift. Library is the only work using a photograph of the historical Granary building where the college’s
library is housed.
Finally Saint Martins Crossing, a 6min 49s video in loop, mixes a photographic space with a real space and stands in the window next to Lift. Played on a small flat screen, it contrasts with Lift’s huge scale. The photographic space is a transparent picture already used in Library. I often use the same pictures for different works in order to experiment and disturb perceived spatial characteristics. The video records the movement of people walking both through the entrance of the building and through an abstract photographic space. It is the first time I have introduced characters and moving images in a work. Viewers are no longer transported into an empty space of inner contemplation but are looking at themselves observing others. Like a city in constant mutation, this gives me new starting points to develop my practice further.
COMBINED
Francesco Corsini (BA Graphic Design, CSM)
IN CONVERSATION: JEREMY TILL Xenia Schuermann (BA Criticism, Communication, Curation, CSM) Jeremy Till is not only the UAL vice-chancellor and CSM dean but as a trained architect also part of the Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment (SCIBE) research group. When thinking about this urbanism issue we realised he was the ideal person to talk to.
Less Common: You have done a lot of research on scarcity, what was you initial interest in the topic?
Jeremy Till: I was getting frustrated with the sustainability discourse, which I thought was getting too broad, applied to everything, etc. I wanted to look into a term which is a bit more edged and a bit more poignant than sustainability. This is quite a long time ago, around 2009, and I just thought that scarcity was this inescapable term which it would be good to face up to.
In which context was sustainability discussed – was it in the environment/resources context? What kind of sustainability?
Well I’m an architect and was interested in the ways sustainability has been abused in architecture. Our [SCIBE’s] initial bit was very naïve. We just defined scarcity as ‘not enough’, as a lack. Our basic argument is that this is how designers generally treat scarcity: they don`t have enough so they do the same with less. You just get used to doing smaller things or less decorated things or whatever. When we started the project as a group of architects we found that there was incredibly little theorisation of scarcity. In the end, instead of doing what we set out to do - “What does ‘not enough’ mean for architecture?”- we ended up doing a project about the construction of scarcity.
So in three sentences, how would you re-define scarcity?
Ok, so scarcity in economics is usually seen as an inevitable condition, we live in an age of scarcity, we can`t do anything about it. Our straightforward thesis is that scarcity is always constructed: there is nothing natural, nothing inevitable and nothing given about it. An example of this would be that there is enough food in the world to feed everybody it is just in the wrong places. So the construction of scarcity in sub-Saharan Africa is to do with the whole set of socio-political and economic forces.
How do you see your research then? Is the role of academia to describe these conditions or do you see your research as maybe practical advice or some sort of activism?
In academia we have this very generous space to look at issues in a kind of dispassionate manner and I think this is a good example. If we didn’t have the space to look at the discourse of scarcity then we wouldn’t have come up with what we did. Our argument is that as a designer you shouldn’t just be looking at the object you’re dealing with – you should also look at what happens before and afterwards, ask questions: do you need that object in the first place? So although we had the distance to come up with a ‘theory’ of scarcity, from that ‘theory’ it allows us to look at how design might operate.
Are there any concrete examples? Do you know of any design practices that have taken on this idea and have re-thought models of production? Well, there is the front room here at Kings Cross where I commissioned Pablo Bronstein. I gave him our text and said, “What would you do with it as a project?” So his project just took the challenge: what if instead of adding new stuff to the world, a designer just redistributes what there is already? Have you seen the front room? Right in front of CSM, next to the Lethaby gallery? I can take you there afterwards.
Ok thanks. So while we are already at CSM… A lot of people complain about resources, like not getting into work spaces etc. Could that also be solved by redistribution?
In an ideal world yeah but I mean lots of it is just simple logistics and whole sets of institutional issues. It’s a good question, maybe I should challenge myself to take my own writing and come up with some kind of practical solutions but if I’m honest I don’t think my scarcity thinking applies to access to workshops.
How would you redistribute the resources in CSM if you had a clear sheet? Would you allow access to all rooms, for example?
Oh god, if I had a clear sheet of paper I would have it co-designed. I mean when I explained to people why we don’t have access to the studios they kind of got it. But because it looks like we imposed a system, it feels like a prison. Whereas if we had the opportunity to have a much
more open conversation with everyone here I think the building could have been different. I think we missed out.
If you look at art schools in the 60s quite a lot of them were defined by a lack of resources which triggered a makeshift attitude towards creating art. Do you think this still applies to CSM?
I am fairly interested in what the building has done to our practice here in as much as it is very different. If you go to Wimbledon, it’s a classic art school: it has studios with people in there with their space and their painting – it’s very reflective. Here, in particular the 3D people, have to negotiate space, have to improvise. They do work that actually emerges during the show, I think that has changed the work. Lots of pieces in the degree show this year were reflecting a sensibility which is not to do with the refinement of the object, something I think you can only do in times of abundance: abundance of space, of time, of resources. So if space and time is scarce because they don’t have the time sitting in the studio waiting for the muse to strike, then it does affect the work. I’m not making value judgment about one being better than the other but I’m saying there are different types of practice and therefore different types of work emerge in conditions of scarcity.
CSM has a really international student body- do you think this changes a) the structure of courses and b) the social fabric of UAL? In which way?
Of course it does. Positively, through an incredible mix of cultures, negatively when the cultures get isolated. I do worry about loneliness. I do worry about an 18-year-old coming from Southeast Asia or anywhere arriving in London to this huge, bloody great machine of a place. I don’t know how they survive, I think it’s really, really tough. We’re also dealing with huge cultural differences in learning. In a Southeast Asian or particularly Chinese context, you learn through repetition and through being told how to do things and they arrive here where we tell them that there is no right or wrong, which is probably really confusing.
I’m just guessing but I think 20 years ago there were more British students. Do you think there were more working class people at CSM then? There has been a general increase in international students but we`re stopping
now; we are not planning to increase the proportion of international students, and this year we’ve taken on a slightly higher proportion of home students on our undergraduate courses. In terms of students from lower socio-economic groups, we’re not complacent about it but we’re above the national benchmark. We’re not perfect but we do have a reasonably high proportion of working class students. We have a very strong Widening Participation programme. Postgraduate courses are the real issue because once home students have 9000 pounds a year debt why should they come and do an MA? So there is a real issue about drop-off in postgraduate courses.
Ok so let’s go from there to the city of London. London is frequently seen as a hot bed for creative production on a global scale. How do you think the specific urban fabric of London affects creativity? How does it differ from say Singapore or New York?
I think it’s just density of people, density of creative people. For example your graphic design show in Shoreditch – the fact that a group of second year students can already get an exhibition there and can make all those networks and the cross-fertilisation of disciplines blahblah... But I think the real issue is the cost of living and space in London. I just saw a really interesting graph about why people like Berlin and the number 1 reason was cheap rent.
Do you think that that in 10 or 20 years London will be like Paris with the banlieue on the outskirts and Disneyland on the inside?
I think it will be more linear than that, more distributed along lines rather than circles, you`re already seeing that. But the general process is inevitable.
Do you think anything could be done about that? Not as long as we have a completely
market-led housing system. You can only do it through state intervention and none of the parties will have the guts to do it. There is inner city land in public ownership, the trouble is just that local authorities are not allowed to borrow money to build. You could unlock the whole national housing prices by allowing local authorities to borrow money, without any risk, you would end up with a completely different housing system.
I found it quite interesting that your writing is really anti-utopian yet at the same time the absence of scarcity would mean utopia- how do you see that? I think there will always be scarcity of some form. Our only argument is to understand that these lacks are constructed rather than accept them and then deal with less. Where the project really became interesting was in austerity: the classical thing to do is to use future scarcity as means to legitimise present day political systems. A typical example is: we`re running out of energy, therefore we need bio fuels. This is taken as a legitimisation to buy up sub-Saharan Africa in order to plant those crops for bio fuels. The spectre of scarcity, that we`re running out of money, is used to implement austerity regimes which are deeply divisive. Scarcity is the ultimate threat to legitimate political ideology. Photographs by Nicole Weisz and Anastazja Oppenheim
UNTITLED
Or 12 Ways to Troll CSM and Call it Art (Excerpt) Marijam Did
THE CITY AS MEDIUM Rebecca Livesey-Wright (BA Criticism, Communication, Curation, CSM)
Can the city be a medium? If so, what role do urban explorers play in challenging the accepted and normalised codes existent within the city itself? Art critic Rosalind Krauss (1991) describes a medium as recursive, which refers to “a structure, some elements of which will produce the rules that generate the structure itself” (Dictionary.com). This description of the medium will be used as a basis for discussing the ways in which urban explorers have established new codes for living and moving within urban environments. As Bradley L. Garrett (2013, p.6), writes, “explorers are recoding people’s normalised relationships to city space”; challenging and questioning the accepted, codified behaviours conditioned within neocapitalist cities such as London. Garrett, who entered urban exploring as an ethnographer and became an integral member of the urban exploring community, makes frequent reference to the dérive of the Situationists as a precursor to urban exploring. The dérive is the concept of walking through a usually urban environment, allowing oneself to be subconsciously directed by the influence of the surroundings. He explains, “Here again, urban exploration’s lineage stretches back to those Surrealist experiments in Paris that sought to realise the marvels they believed were buried within the everyday” (2013, p.89). The Situationists have been discussed in similar terms by writers Edensor and Lefebvre and their thinking will be applied to the practice of urban exploration; a practice which has remained relatively hidden from the public eye until very recently. To fully examine the ways in which urban explorers question and challenge urban environments and make a process of recodification possible, a short critical analysis of neocapitalist cities is required. Many writers have described cities as places of extreme surveillance, exclusivity – in that many areas remain out of bounds for the average citizen – fragmented experience and disassociation.
As Henri Lefebvre writes, spatial practice under neocapitalism: “embodies a close association, within perceived space, between daily reality (daily routine) and urban reality (the routes and networks which link up the places set aside for work, ‘private’ life and leisure). This association is a paradoxical one because it includes the most extreme separation between the places it links together.” (Lefebvre, 1991, p.38) Lefebvre is describing the ability to move from the area designated for work to the area designated for rest (home) and to the areas designated for leisure as easy and obvious. Yet he questions the apparent necessity to separate these areas as defined and hermetic spaces. Within neocapitalist cities – taking London as an example – it is easy to find areas created purely for work such as Canary Wharf, those created primarily for leisure such as the West End’s ‘Theatreland’ and those built for ‘private’ life such as the suburbs. Christopher Alexander (1965) points out cities are frequently thought of as ‘trees’, a type of abstract structure, which he describes as not having any overlapping sets (we can take sets to mean areas of work, rest, or leisure). However, Alexander holds that this structure is not truly representative of cities no matter what
the urban planner may have us think. Instead, cities are more akin to semilattices: “A collection of sets form a semilattice, if and only if, when two overlapping sets belong to the collection, the set of elements common to both also belongs to the collection.” The main distinction between these concepts is that sets within semilattice structures do not have to be wholly contained within another set or totally disjointed. Semilattices allow for overlay and interconnection (see Fig. 2). As Alexander explains, “There are virtually no closed groups of people in modern society”. Alexander’s article suggests human beings create and live by interconnections within semilattice structures despite urban planners’ attempts to simplify the existing networks. However in Tim Edensor’s view, the experiences of city-dwellers are being negatively affected by urban planners: “While urban stages are inevitably incorporated into multiple, overlapping spaces, and subject to contestation by performers, I want to argue that the city is increasingly composed out of highly regulated stages which constrain the range of performances and experiences.” (Edensor, 2005, p. 81) Edensor writes of the desire of the urban planner to “rationalise the landscape” in the form of a grid-like design and describes how this process of demarcation leads to production of spaces which “might be characterised as commodified, hidden, inaccessible, ‘prickly’, uncomfortable to occupy and subject to intense surveillance”(p.55). The implication of these spaces is that people who live within cities increasingly restrain their behaviour and have a disembodied experience of the urban environment, leading to feelings of disassociation. Edensor continues, “regimes of urban behaviour are consolidated and act to
suppress the body’s expressivity and the
range of sensations experienced”(p.56). This is a process Garrett explores in depth and argues urban exploration aims to overcome, If the city is to be understood as a recursive medium used – perhaps unintentionally – by urban explorers to challenge both the structures and the ways in which the neocapitalist city determines the ways people move in, live in and experience the city, we must return to our idea of what a medium is. Krauss states that: “For, in order to sustain artistic practice, a medium must be a supporting structure, generative of a set of conventions, some of which, in assuming the medium itself as their subject, will be wholly ‘specific’ to it, thus producing an experience of their own necessity.” (Krauss, 1999, p.26) The easiest way to comprehend how a city can act as a medium under this description is to breakdown the statement and apply the medium of the city to it. Thus: •The city acts as a supporting structure to the practice of urban exploration. The practice would be impossible both outside of urban environments and without a basic understanding of the city under neocapitalism; •The act of urban exploration challenges the structure of the neocapitalist city and the expected codes of behaviour, leading to the possible generation of a new set of conventions; •While the city itself may not be generative of a new set of conventions, new conventions are created which assume the medium (the city) itself as their subject; •These new conventions, the recoding of behaviour within and structure of the city, are wholly specific to the medium of the city; •and, these new conventions produce a new way of experiencing the city, thus the medium of the city has helped to produce an experience necessarily connected to the medium. Having established the possibility of the city as a medium, we can begin to explore the ways groups have used this medium as a process to critique the neocapitalist city. As mentioned above, urban exploration has a strong lineage with the Situationists, who were active between the 1950s and 1970s, and their process of the dérive. Edensor writes, “Situationists offered the dérive as a technique to bypass and subvert the commodification of everyday space, and the spectacularisation and bureaucratic
disciplining of the city” (2005, p.87). What is particularly interesting here is the idea that the dérive served to subvert the ‘bureaucratic disciplining’ of the city, the reduction of the city to a ‘tree’ or a ‘grid’, and instead encouraged the performer to break away from the codes of behaviour and movement expected of him or her. Also important is Edensor’s reflection that the flâneur, during his or her dérive, is “creating alternative narratives of the city” and thus opening up possibilities to construct new conventions (Edensor, 2005, p.83). Similar language is used by Garrett when describing infiltration as a means to urban exploration. He writes that “using infiltration as a medium to transit a message of quiet and social subversion, the explorer softly insists on the right of the individual to decide to engage with urbanity in different ways”(Garrett, 2013, p.79). Here again, emphasis is placed on the act of subverting normalised codes of behaviour and structure and allowing freedom to the individual in order to generate their own response to and understanding of the city. Lefebvre describes the importance of infiltrating and subverting spaces – of détournement – in helping to deconstruct the neocapitalist city and constitute new processes of producing space: “The diversion and reappropriation of space are of great significance, for they teach us much about the production of new spaces… it may be that such techniques of diversion have greater import then attempts at creation (production).” (Lefebvre, 1991, p.168) Although Lefebvre does not expand on this point it is possible to understand this quote within the framework of analysis of the representation of cities as ‘tree-like’ structures. Lefebvre gives an example of reappropriation by describing the brief use of a former wholesale produce market in Paris as a gathering-place. Writing that young people turned the market “into a centre of play rather than of work”, he reaffirms that cities are semilattices built of interconnections between ‘units’ of work, rest, and leisure (1991, p.167). Although Garrett says many urban explorers do not personally see their acts as political, for him, the act of urban exploration is highly politicised. This is evident in another reference Garrett makes to the Situationists’ influence on his own conceptions of the city and personal approach to urban exploration. He states, “Guy Debord, the self-proclaimed leader of the Situationist International… believed in taking back the city by any means necessary” (2013, p.14). Implied in this statement are ideas that the city
has been taken from its rightful and original owners, the urban dwellers, and that they have an undeniable right to the city. Much like the Situationists, Garrett believes urban exploration is “about taking back rights to the city from which we have been wrongfully restricted…” and, as such, is about opening up access to spaces previously closed to the average urban dweller (2013, p.8). As Lefebvre writes, “Public space… ought to be an opening outwards. What we see happening is just the opposite.” (1991, p. 147) Garrett also writes about embodied experiences of urban environments in helping to facilitate new narratives and understandings of the city. As mentioned above, Edensor discusses the urban dweller’s inability to have bodily self-expression within the neocapitalist city due to the urban planner’s simplification of specific spaces for specific use. Lefebvre writes in a similar vein, arguing that reduction of space to ‘units’ leads “many people… [to] suffer (albeit unevenly) the effects of a multiplicity of reductions bearing on their capacities, ideas, ‘values’ and, ultimately, on their possibilities, their space, and their bodies” (1991, p.106). Yet Garrett frequently writes of how his urban explorations into places, which were usually out of bounds, “made [him and his fellow urban explorers] feel like [they] were building a deepening connection with London” (2013, p.80). By breaking out of the restricted flows prescribed by the neocapitalist city and becoming more aware of the spaces not usually traversed, both horizontally and vertically, Garrett was able to build a more embodied experience of his environment and create a kind of relationship with the city. While deriving as much from the ability to gain a wider understanding of the structure of the city, this embodied experience and deeper connection with it may also stem from the necessity to use one’s body in extreme manners in order to infiltrate those hard to access places. Garrett’s urban explorations became more extreme over time. On occasion he and friends would scale multi-storey buildings under construction without harnesses, posing for photographs on narrow ledges with nothing to catch them if they fell. For Garrett, embodiment is not about a result, but a process, something which he calls ‘the meld’: “It would be easy to see the meld as a temporary fusion of body with city. And in some ways, it is. However, the meld is more process than result; it is a reaching, a branching out, that is in fact always becoming.” (Garrett, 2013, p.188) The image of an urban explorer (either Garrett or one of his friends) standing on the ledge of the Ritz-Carlton hotel is one which, for Garrett, symbolises a moment of ‘the meld’ occurring. In this image the photographer stands on the edge of a ledge, high up from the ground, in a precarious position demanding an awareness of body not normally required in everyday life on the ground. The lack of opportunity to create embodied experiences within the city leads to the feeling that, as Garrett writes, “Today, we all live in cities that are divided in various ways, and the majority of the city is an ‘exclusion zone’ for most of the population” (2013, p. 120). We are forced into a state of dissociation with the city which can have far-reaching implications. Garrett gives a powerful example of the extreme negative effects of this dissociation when recounting his visit to Las Vegas, a city of “unrestrained capitalism” in which there are over 14,000
homeless people in a city of 580,000. (2013,
p. 197), As Edensor writes, regulations against certain types of behaviour in neocapitalist cities, especially those against actions which do not comply with desired forms of movements, disadvantage the most underprivileged of urban dwellers. For example, “rules against sleeping or resting on benches and floors impose restrictions on the movements and strategies of the homeless” (Edensor, 2005, p.56). This, perhaps ironically, pushes the homeless into spaces such as the drainage systems underneath Las Vegas, the very places that the neocapitalist city aims to deny access and the urban explorers try to infiltrate. In a less devastating but just as poignant example of citywide dissociation, Alexander touches upon the disconnection of retired people from the rest of urban life. He draws an interesting comparison between dissociation within a person and dissociation within a city to highlight just how extreme the impacts can be: “In a Person, dissociation is the mark of schizophrenia” while “In a society, dissociation is anarchy” (Alexander, 1965). Without being able to experience the city in an embodied maner, urban dwellers are at risk of disassociation with their urban environments physically, mentally and emotionally. As Alexander powerfully describes, “Every time a piece of the city is torn out, and a tree made to replace the semilattice that was there before, the city takes a further step towards dissociation” (Alexander, 1965). Another common theme in analysis of space and urban planning is the notion of the importance of play and child-like experiences. “The desire to explore for the sake of exploring, to take risks for the sake of the experience, with little thought to the ‘outcome’, is something that flows deeply through us as children. Urban explorers are, in a sense, rediscovering and forging these feelings of unbridled play.” (Garrett, 2013, p.89) The need to undertake subversive actions such as urban exploration in order to experience this sense of ‘unbridled play’ is again due to restrictive structuring and planning of the city as a ‘tree’. As Alexander (1965) writes, “The playground… is nothing but a pictorial acknowledgement of the fact that ‘play’ exists as an isolated concept in our minds. It has nothing to do with the life of play itself.” In order to gain a true child-like, playful experience of the city, it is once again necessary to break out of the restrictive designated flows of movement within the urban environment and recode the accepted codes of behaviour. For Garrett, the act of rekindling a sense of play within the city, as well as subverting accepted codes of behaviour and movement, is a political act. Writing about the Situationist dérive as a practice appearing to be ‘playful’, Garrett points out that the dérive, as well as urban exploring, “multiply the possibility for effective engagement in relation to
people, places and things. Multiplying possibilities, and creating opportunities that are not offered, is always a political act” (2013, p. 173). To conclude, this essay set out to discuss how the city could act as a medium to challenge and disrupt the restrictive codes and regulations in a neocapitalist city when used by urban explorers. As such, the notion of the city was applied to Krauss’ idea of a recursive medium which must be generative of a new set of conventions assuming the medium as their subject. In comparing the practice of urban exploration with that of the Situationists’ dérive, this essay has also applied the pre-existing theories of Lefebvre, Edensor and Alexander to urban exploration. As a result, it has explored the ways in which the city has been used to generate new codes of moving and living within the city. In much the same way as Situationists subverted the rigid structures of neocapitalist cities, urban explorers have opened up possibilities for creating alternative narratives within urban environments, allowing more freedom to the individual, and have reaffirmed the true nature of the city as a semilattice. Urban explorers have achieved this by proving the need for a playful, embodied experience within the city, which re-associates the urban dweller with city space. In recoding behaviour in the city, urban explorers have also highlighted the problems inherent within neocapitalist cities that continue to operate under modes of restriction, delineation and surveillance. Stemming from feelings of disembodiment and dissociation, average urban dwellers feel a lack of connection with the city. The most disadvantaged people living within city space are pushed further to the margins and consequently ignored. For Garrett, urban exploration is a deeply political act about allowing people to rightfully claim the city as their own. As he notes, the use of the city as a medium to this effect has been successful. He claims that ”the work [he and his fellow urban explorers] were doing was the kind of release millions of people were looking for – a sign that the city was not as controlled as it appeared” (2013, p.267)
SPATIAL MONTAGE Daniel Samuel van Strien (BA Fine Art graduate, CSM)
to create a claustrophobic and almost oppressive atmosphere. compressed – virtually square – image
Producing stills from the 8mm films illuminates the qualities of the medium and the traces of time associated with a still. It tests the limitations of time within the context of 2-dimensional representations as well as the relationship between the stable or enduring and the temporal or ephemeral. The physical reception of architecture through motion is removed and so the contexts in which the stills are placed, as well as their formal qualities, becomes the site of the works’ interpretation and critique. The stills express a fragmented and mediated space.
BA Fine Art graduate Daniel Samuel van Strien explains how film constructs our relationship to contemporary architecture: Architecture and the formal processes in the making of an artwork are central concepts to my practice. Contemporary architectural aesthetics are appropriated to explore the dialogue between the architectural image and real architecture; how our relationships to the urban environment are shaped by mediated images. Architectural façades suggest the impenetrable, suffocating and alienating experience of urban environments. Using 8mm film reel in these continuing series of films and resulting stills, I allude to a nostalgic or retro aesthetic where the material qualities of the film create an image form that is not just a mere document. The stills reference retro-futurism and depictions of our speculated futures from our past. Using an outmoded medium to document contemporary architecture explores this tension of contexts. Through this approach, the medium explores the connections between reality and its representation as a ‘picture’. Modern and contemporary architecture and film are both bound to surface; the often-private architecture of cities creates an experience of seeing almost only the skin of a building. Filming involves the process of walking through architectural environments. Containing the presence of time through the spaces of the city, these films echo a modern flâneur, that urban explorer celebrated in Charles Baudelaire’s poetry and Walter Benjamin’s critical texts. The specific duration of a reel of film, in which all film is used, along with the physical movement of the reel when screened and then projected, alludes to the rhythm of time and space, where no trace can be erased except by the physical cutting of a piece of film itself. This process was not used with the conscious aim of creating narrative but finding compositions within the architectural façades. The technique of close framing is used throughout this series to remove specific geographical narratives. Texture, colour and tonal properties of 8mm film translates what is recorded via the medium itself and thus combines the material values of film with what is documented through the camera lens. Such close framing expresses rigidity due to the magnification of an architectural surface. This is heightened by the aspect ratio of 8mm film, which offers a condensed and
Using 8mm film to create stills will be an on-going process and simultaneously provide an area of research for my drawing and collage practice.
THE SKYWALK A micro-urbanist investigation Ethan Liu (MA Architecture, CSM) Somers Town has been the site of cityscale infrastructure planning for more than 200 years. More recent developments have been the regeneration of the area connected to the construction of the railway lines from King Cross station and St. Pancras international station, especially the high speed connection to Paris (HS1). Further regeneration projects for the area include a high speed connection to Scotland from Euston station (HS2). This proposal has been meet with criticism from locals and NGOs who point out that the HS2 and especially the planned connection between both stations will have significant impacts on local Somers Town. Arup, the construction company responsible for this proposal have designed a connection via an Automated People Mover (AMP) which can accommodate thousands of passengers on a daily basis. Unfortunately, this suggestion primarily focuses on increasing efficiency and saving passengers’ time rather than involving local Somers Town. My proposal is an alternative connection between both stations which uses the existing urban context such as roof buildings, stairs in communities and accommodations. Taking on the role of a micro-urbanist means to observe and record details of the specific urban fabric in order to apply them to design.
Background
HS1 and HS2 will be important new transport infrastructures for Europe and the United Kingdom. The plan for Euston station (HS2) was released by the labor government in 2009 and is intended to increase economic growth and employment in the UK. Additionally, it is supposed to facilitate the connection with other European countries via the existing HS1 to Paris and Brussels at St. Pancras station. The development of HS2 in Somers Town is scheduled to start in mid-2014. Critical to the success of this development, however, will be its effect on the urban context, the regeneration, constructional disruptions and opportunities it creates for the Somers Town area between Euston and St Pancras/Kings Cross. According to the Arups ‘Route Engineering Studies Final Report’ from December 2009 the company considered the feasibility of several strategies for the connection. In the end it suggested linear bridges, above ground, to travel between both stations as a way of to increase efficiency and save time – a top-down and rationalist approach to new infrastructure. Studying the local context of Somers Town was essential to my project so I decided to start by investigating realistic possibilities to build a link between the stations. This led me to focus on the area between Phoenix and Polygon Road as all buildings except for one are council housing belonging to Camden council. This means there is a realistic opportunity to build an alternative connection through this area (Fig.1).
The micro-urbanist
The micro-urbanist or accurate-urbanist is an architect or urban designer who uses the strategy of micro-urbanism to deal with the complexity of the modern city. Micro means a small or even tiny thing, so how can this be translated into architecture? The definition of micro in this project means that small spaces, urban details, the in-between, user-based occupation and the informal or everyday context of the city become the focus of strategic urban planning. This approach is usually contrasted by urban design or macro strategies where large scale, top-to-down master planning and generic ideas dominate. The method of micro-urbanism is to create a tangible planning by interaction with local people and close looking into local environment and facilities. In his article “Micro-urbanism and ideal city” the Chinese architect Yung Ho Chang points out that “Micro-urbanism came out of a shifting paradigm of city and philosophy, which suggests there are internal realities to be investigated in order to describe how things interact and coordinate in the micro-scale realm, and which manifest the true spirit of a city and its people. Each city has a particular constitution of microcosms in relation to both natural environment and existing urban conditions, which are more vital and up-to-date than the conventional urban structure in terms of indicating the directions of contemporary urban development” (Yung). The famous Japanese architecture atelier Bow-wow applies this methodology of micro-urbanism in their practice as well. Founded in 1992 by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, and Momoyo Kaijima they conceptualized Pet Architecture which refers to nuanced micro architectures, produced as the result of their research/work as urban detectives. Based in Tokyo the duo uses the space in-between the buildings of the high-density city to create small functional buildings (Fig.2).
Methodolo
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ogies
proposal I used a variety hes to investigate the local ng photography, mapping, a asure survey, surveying user communicating with local ecording sound and image, ture, guess-estimate, observe, ng, sketching. (Fig.3, Fig.4) ollaboration and participation own understand the local context to employ alternative methiring information, e.g.: ommunity meetings to be a good way to meet e and enabled me to get a rstanding of current issues. In forum on 17/Feb at Somers unity center it became clear was a support for the new pment from parts of the local who proposed that it would ome for the community. This ant factor as currently the unor the Somers Town CIP area and the average household ver 10.000 pounds less than n average. The supporters ted that the HS2 plan will al business, environment However, other groups of nts raised concerns over the mount of passengers passing mers Town would have on the unity. in house viewings rivate housings to gain a erstanding of peoples living was a difficulty for obvious order to not miss out on this ation I visited some accommong house viewings organised ate agencies. In addition to rent spaces in the area and to take photos these viewings o be an excellent opportunity e background information on
buildings, such as age or ownership.
Conclusion
This project critiques this macro-scale proposal by Arup and suggests that the connection between the stations should allow the passenger to engage with the city at a closer scale – a micro-scale – by providing a mechanism for people to engage with Somers Town. My proposal is to build a connection that allows people to make contact with the urban grain of Somers Town - to come into close contact with the reality of city in all its complexity. This connection takes as its starting point the idea of a sky-bridge, an expedient device for people who would like to cross Somers Town. However, by incorporating the existing urban structure into the design by e.g. linking housing estates and providing additional community facilities (Fig.5) the proposal would also benefit local residents and businesses.
SOUNDING CITIES Art and the democratisation of the urban soundscape Luis Guiterrez (BA Arts and Design graduate LCC) How do our cities sound? Many urban residents would probably answer this question by starting to describe the noise, traffic and general rumble of their city. While urban art has begun to address our limited influence over public space and its homogenization in the hands of corporations and policy makers, not much has been said or done about the homogenization of the aural space. We live in a primarily visual society. City planning and urban design appeals mainly to the eye and visual information is the most employed medium to learn about cities. We decide to look at pictures, texts, diagrams and maps rather than listening to soundscape recordings of a square, street or neighbourhood (Hauser, 2008). Perhaps this is why even the debate regarding the democratisation of the public space takes place almost exclusively around its visual or tangible components and rarely around the aural one. However, changes have occurred in the urban soundscape at the same pace or faster than they have happened in its visual counterpart. All of these have somehow had a significant effect on the city’s inhabitants, often going completely unnoticed (Hauser). Whether they are negative or positive changes, development of new technologies has opened new ways for sound to be used to influence city dwellers. In order to understand the extent to which the transformation of the soundscape have affected urban life we must first understand what an acoustic community is.
Sonic Imperialism, The Acoustic Community and “Schizophonia”
Barry Truax (1994, p.58) defines an acoustic community as “any soundscape in which acoustic information plays a pervasive role in the lives of the in- habitants [regardless of the size of the group or community]. In short it is any system within which acoustic information is exchanged.” The functionality of an acoustic community can be measured by its acoustic definition, meaning soundmarks and sound signals that are heard clearly within the soundscape and are recognisable by any member living within the acoustic boundaries of the community (Truax). Having an acoustically well-defined community means that those sounds are an effective means of communication for either regular or unique events (Truax). Examples of this are church bells or the voice of the muezzin projected from the top of a minaret. These two have nearly the same function but are only mean- ingful to certain communities and can,
if necessary, be used to communicate different messages. The industrial and later the electronic revolution are both the cause of the rapid change in the urban soundscape as well as the main culprit for the decay of acoustic communities. By turning the hi-fi soundscape of prein- dustrial times into a lo-fi soundscape characteristic of every urban settlement (Schafer, 1994) in which the acoustic community lacks in acoustic definition and where technology has played a very important role in the implementation of sonic dominance. Some clear examples of this sonic dominance, or what R. Murray Schafer calls sound imperialism, involve the usage of modern technology such as loudspeakers for advertising by politicians, religious proselytisers or commercial companies. The usage of loudspeaker technology mounted on buses caused at least three U.S Supreme Court cases between 1948 and 1952 , it played a crucial role on the 1937 presidential campaign in Argentina (Sewald, 2011) and according to Hitler himself the Nazi party would have never been able to take control without it (Schafer). There are cases in which sonic dominance has also become a daily part of urban soundscapes. In The Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis describes the usage of loudspeakers as part of security systems in Los Angeles that make use of sonic messages to warn trespassers that they are being watched and that the police are on their way (Davis, 1998 cited in Goodman, 2012). Another example can be found in Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, which relies on an operating speaker system used to deliver messages to the population. Originally installed in the 1960’s and 70’s, the messages transmitted through the loudspeakers went from political propaganda to, more recently, bank advertisements, causing various reactions among the population that either see these as an unnecessary disturbance in a digital age or as a traditional effective way to deliver messages equally to all sectors of society (McCool, 2006). Volume is a very important characteristic of some types of acoustic dominance. From the first moment it passes the threshold of 80 dB, sound causes a physical effect on our bodies; our blood pressure rises, the stomach and intestine work slower, pupils become larger and our skin gets paler. Regardless of our personal interpretation of such sound or whether we find it pleasant, an evolutionary functional nervousness inherited from our days as stone age beings remains. Even after 200,000 years of evolution, our brains will respond to a loud noise
associating it with danger, which will trigger a state of alertness in our bodies (Virilio, 1989 cited in Goodman, 2012, p.56). Perhaps it is this instinctive reaction to sound that influenced Jaques Attali’s definition of noise as “a language of resistance used against hegemonic powers to bring social change” (Attali, [no date] cited in Sewald, 2011, p.763). A similar thought process must have been behind the usage of sonic guerrilla techniques during the 1982 riots in Berlin that confronted Richard Nixon’s visit, as a German film crew would accidentally discover. Influenced by William S. Boroughs Electronic Revolution the 1984 German film Decoder had its lead character start a sonic rebellion against the leader of the consumerist West German society. For the final scene of the movie, the director decided to use tape recorders containing warfare sounds to attract anti-riot police to the cameras. Surprisingly, on the day of the action, they found their sci-fi film to have become a reality when they noticed anarchists already handing out tapes of war sounds with instructions for playback and reproduction in order to enhance the crowds anger and produce disorientation (Goodman). All of these cases are clear, though not absolute, examples of schizophonia, a common phenomenon of the modern urban soundscape. The term was coined by Murray Schafer to refer to “[...] the phenomena of the split between an original sound and its electroacoustic reproduction.” This consequence of the electronic revolution, that transforms sounds from their original sources and gives them an independent existence, has made it possible for a sonic environment to become any other sonic environment and aid sonic dominance (Schafer). Muzak is used so commonly and among various spaces that it has become embroiled into our daily soundscape as we let the designed artificial acoustic environment impose a mood on us. We now respond less to natural sounds and more to sounds coming from the walls or ceilings (Truax). As the amount of truly meaningful sounds around us decreases with the quality of our acoustic environment, electroacoustic technology and corporations develop new listener habits that go as far as creating psychological dependencies. With the visual world already conquered, brands seek to create a dominant presence in the public soundscape, except that this time the loudspeaker trucks have been replaced by the more subtle Earworm , “[...] the result of using echoic memory recall [the memory of things heard] to implant an
associated memory linked to a positive memory already anchored on the individuals mind”(Goodman, year, pp.116). This can come as a song or something as simple as a mobile phone ringtone, e.g the ‘Nokia Tune’, heard an estimated 1.8 billion times per day worldwide in 2010 (Tresure, 2010). The electronic revolution’s effect on the urban soundscape is not only noticeable in the audio media’s influence on our every day’s life. If any urban resident would stand in a quiet location, that person would without doubt find that, no matter how far they are from a busy part of the city, there is a sound that does not disappear, that sound is the hum of the city. The lo-fi urban soundscape’s richness in drones and hums is a consequence of the high amount of electronic machines and electrical power, or to be precise, the high speed of their revolutions which produces an unnatural amount of 1-4 Hz frequencies rarely found in acoustic sounds, causing the human auditory system to become more sensitive within that range. However, the characteristic uniformity of these sounds represents a contradiction to the human brain in its function to interpret differences in incoming stimuli, eventually fatiguing the auditory system and decreasing the levels of sensation, any constant level of sound will eventually raise the ambient level and mask other sounds with less presence or from more distant sources, thereby diminishing the acoustic horizon. The norm for the aural urban environment is to have sounds that lack any identity as they have mostly become part of an overall texture, poor when it comes to aural contrast. City dwellers adopt these listening habits resulting in the reduction of the acoustic community (Truax).
Acoustic Design
In 1969, urban theorist Michael Southworth conducted a field study on the perception of the Boston soundscape by taking five different groups of three subjects on a soundwalk of Boston. The trios where composed of an auditory subject who could hear but not see, a visual subject who could see but not hear and a visual auditory subject with normal seeing and hearing. The three main conclusions to his experiment were as follows: First, most spaces were sonically uninformative and in consequence lacked identity, the few spaces in which sounds were more informative and unique were preferred over the rest. Secondly, in addition to being unique and informative, preferred settings allowed a certain level of interactivity: alleys and places with interesting
acoustics allowed the subjects to use their voices, whistles or footsteps to interact with them. Surprisingly, warm natural sounds that symbolised tranquillity were considered weak and less interesting. The last conclusion came from the visual subjects who found themselves in a two dimensional, surreal world. Imperfections became more evident and a general feeling of monotony dominated most of the settings. In Southworth’s opinion, his study suggested that ‘’...the visual experience of cities is closely related to sounds that accompany it.’’ (Southworth, 1969. pp.65) He suggested a new approach to urban design and city planning inclusive of the soundscape, and even though he called for more research to be done before taking any action, he did include a few suggestions and hypotheses for what this sonic design could be. Research on the subjects of vehicle design and road materials as well as new approaches to city planning considering residential areas were some of his suggestions to reduce noise pollution in the urban environment. Open spaces lacking sonic identity could be provided with sonic objects or sculptures, which could be periodically activated, preferably with the possibility of including a variety of recreational activities. Even more responsive spaces could be used to stage events or install sonic objects in order to raise awareness of the soundscape and test subjects’ responses. Sonic messages to communicate public information could be used to a community’s advantage and possibly provided with a special character to strengthen the identity of said community (Southworth). In The Tuning Of the World, Murray Schafer describes how the Bauhaus movement invented the revolutionary subject of industrial design when they brought together the fine arts and the industrial craft. He then called for a similar revolution to happen among the various fields of sonic practices under the flag of acoustic ecology and acoustic design. Acoustic ecology is to be understood as “...the study of sounds in relationship to life and society” (Schafer, 1994, pp.205). This is only possible through the implementation of field studies to measure the effects the acoustic environment has on its inhabitants (Schafer). Such studies, similar to the one implemented by Michael Southworth in Boston, are necessary qualitative analyses of the needs of the urban sonic environment (Truax). However, without the implementation of new means of sonic communication, we may not ever identify those that prove effective from the ones that do not. The idea of a democratic soundscape would then be no more than that, an idea in need for implementation (Amphoux and Chelkoff, 2008). Acoustic design regards the world’s soundscape as a vast composition constantly unfolding around us. Every life form on this planet is its audience, performer and, to a varied degree, its composer. Only a conscious appreciation of our acoustic environment and its importance can give us the resources needed for the improvement of lo-fi soundscapes. Furthermore, it should not become something that is controlled by any kind of authority as it is a matter of repossession of our aural communication and therefore a task for everyone to address (Schafer). By referring to acoustic design as a communal responsibility, Schafer calls for composers to play a more important role in this retrieval of aural culture. Being a composer himself, he envisions composers as architects of
sounds, experienced in devising effects to provoke specific reactions amongst the listeners, only to discard the idea himself in the next paragraph by pointing to the contemporary composers’ lack of interest in such matters. The true acoustic designer, he says, “...must thoroughly understand the environment he is tackling; he must have training in acoustics, psychology, sociology, music, and a great deal more besides, as the occasion demands”(Schafer, 1994, p.206). If it is not composers, who then is the avant-garde of this re-building of the acoustic community?
and with unlimited objectives (Neset, 2013) and it is that diversity as well as their deep un- derstanding of the sonic that could make sound artists the most qualified to assume the role of acoustic designer suggested by Schafer. In The Tuning of the World, Murray Schafer talks about the association between noise and power in the human imagination and how it is not about having the means to make the biggest noise, but rather, having the authority to make
Sound Artists: Acoustic Designers?
Sound Art has emerged from the worlds of both music and fine art. Its boundaries are not clearly defined and, as in any art form, the backgrounds from which sound artists originate are as diverse as their ideas and mediums. Good exam- ples are the works of sound artists like Ximena Alarcón dealing with socio-po- litical issues like migration, (Furtherfield, 2014) or Turner Prize winner Susan Philipsz,
whose work largely involves the psychological effects of sounds in order to heighten awareness of the space in which the listener is placed (Corner, 2010). Other artists have created deeply meaningful work by incorporating natural phenomena, as is the case in a number of Max Eastly’s installations, or deciding to bring the Brazilian rainforest to the courtyard of a London gallery, as was done by Christina Kubisch in Oasis 2000 Music for Concrete Jungle. Among other artists taking part in the same exhibition, artist group Disinformation has dealt with the relationship between architecture, warfare and sound in their work and Angela Bulloch who at the time was exploring the role of the viewer with- in the artwork (Toop, 2000). Sound Art manipulates the way we perceive sound to expand the possibilities of our aural experience. It embraces science, music, noise, political activism, ecology, anthro- pology, memory, literature and more. Presenting itself in a variety of forms presented in multiple ways,
it without censure. In order to counteract sonic imperialism, technology should not be understood as an undemocratic force that in certain hands exercises an inevitable influence on society, but rather as an empowering tool with which to extend our awareness, increase our creativity and improve human communication (Truax). The essential communicative qualities of sound in the human psyche hold an important creative potential neglected by our highly visual society. However, once we understand sound as a communicative tool and integrate the sonic into urban development, we might be able to apply aural communication to bring up certain situations or conditions as well as to expand and manipulate certain perceptual spaces. Sound is a socially open system, it is analysable, reproducible, can be multiplied, saved and recalled. It can be technically and architecturally amplified, multi-directionally distributed, but can also be focused and controlled (Pagels and Stabenow). Although a communal good, the urban sonic environment is handled by only a few members of society. It is that individual handling of the urban environment that provokes and asks for the adjustment of artistic practice in order to join the debate. The motivation for it can be a desire for “active participation and interference...” or simply “...a representation of interests, a survival strategy or a way to secure a location”(Pagels and Stabenow, 2008, p.97). What is more important is the potential that artistic production possesses as a suitable showcase in the debate on the public soundscape. No matter whether this comes as critical intervention, constructive suggestion, or cultural comment in order to provoke or challenge, what really matters is the debate it can trigger. Photographs by: Mr. Underwood and Urban Cricket
LITTIVE GARDENS Mark McWilliams
CITYSPHERE
Sylvia Moritz (BA Graphic Design , Camberwell)