Archigram, Instant City (1969)

The concept of city-as-media is not new. Since at least the 1960s and 70s, with the explosion of cheap consumer electronics and the accessibility of telecommunication systems in urban centers around the world, artists and architects have been at the vanguard of creating images and theories that elaborate this reality of contemporary urban life. In the 1960′s, London-based architectural collective Archigram represented a new generation of students plugged in to popular culture and mass mediated urban living. Departing from the architect’s directive to produce plans for buildings, they began to create images (drawings, cartoons, collages) that mirrored the emerging spatial organization of the city, and reflected the realities of young urban dwellers.

In later projects, such as Instant City (1969), Archigram created plans and images for a mobile city, based upon the use of existing technologies and the imagination of future ones. As the project statement elaborates:

In the most civilized countries, localities and their local cultures remain slow moving, often undernourished and sometimes resentful of the more favoured metropolitan regions (such as New York, the West Coast of the United States, London and Paris). Whilst much is spoken of cultural links and about the effect of television as a window on the world (and the inevitable global village) people still feel frustrated. Younger people even have a suspicion that they are missing out on the things that could widen their horizons. They would like to be involved in aspects of life where their own experiences can be seen as part of what is happening. Against this is the reaction to the physical nature of the metropolis: and somehow there is this paradox—if only we could enjoy it but stay where we are.

The Instant City reacts to this with the idea of a ‘traveling metropolis’, a package that comes to a community, giving it a taste of the metropolitan dynamic—which is temporarily grafted on to the local centre—and whilst the community is still recovering from the shock, uses this catalyst as the first stage of a national hook-up. A network of information—education—entertainment—‘play-and-know-yourself’ facilities.

For more images of Archigram’s work, click here.

There seems to be funding in Britain available from AHRC and the ESRC for research that takes creative forms, and that overlaps with curatorial and artistic practice. Some of the speakers on the panels have quite practical advice about how to go about getting such funding, and thinking through creative research practice.

Beyond the Academy
Research as Exhibition

(from a paper, given with Barbara Adams, at the Royal Academy of British Architects, London, July 2009)
I remember the first Michael Jackson music video I ever saw; in my grandparents’ living room in Lagos, during the evening hour when state television showed the latest in American, British and Caribbean black pop music.

The glowing halo of curly black hair, the even skin, shy white smile. The fragile teen-aged body. Tuxedo jacket open, with a large, loosely-tied bowtie, sleeves pushed up to the elbows, one hand finger-snapping, one hand in pocket. White socks, black loafers.

Falling suddenly, into a marbled sky, and to me, an avid marble collector, and fan of blowing soap bubbles, this seemed like a dream—I want to be there! I want to be where he is. He splits into 3 loosely synchronized selves in this music video, each one imploring me, in stereo, not to stop til I get enough rocking, snapping, spinning, freezing.

Here, I should tell you what this is not about:

This is not a psychological account of an individual experience.

This is not an account of a social experience.

In theorizing sensual experience, social scientists tend to begin from a split between the individual and social. The individual’s body is constructed as a set of openings, orifices through which the separate senses might receive sensory and psychic input or stimuli, through which it is shaped, and through which it shapes. The individual’s sensory experience is understood to be psychologized, contained separately from that of other individuals, and from the mass. The job of the social scientist is then to construct a system of influence, what yesterday’s keynote speaker Elizabeth Edwards in her analysis of a corpus of photographic images, called collective systems, through which each individual’s experience or material might likened to others, and then explained. At the heart of this social scientific project is a certain kind of liberal, representative politics, in which the many is privileged over the one, the macro, over the micro.

My sensory experience of the image of Michael Jackson is difficult to understand if we begin with this split in scale of sensory experience, or between visual or sensory and material practices.

This story of encounter with Michael Jackson is about experience in a nonpsychological, transpersonal register. This is about friction generated in movement—mine and his and ours—in the proximity of bodies both organic and inorganic. In this story, my body is a living center of indeterminacy, in constant molecular motion, in constant motion through space. In this story, Michael’s movements on the screen are critical—smooth and economical, urgent and emergent. Each snap, jerk and soulful lean extend towards me, imploring me to match my movements to his, to make myself complimentary. His movements, meeting mine in the real space of my grandparents’ living room, show me that my body is malleable, open to new trajectories of motion through which other subjectivities may emerge. He extends his body into mine, through the color television set, offering me a new range of possibility for (e)motion. I just have to keep moving, and never stop til I get enough.

Michael’s moves are really in my heart, in my body. They have been with me since I was a child, providing a template for soulful, fluid, expressive motion through the world, and I now realize just how important that vision he created was.

The openness of his body—the combination of strength and fragility—is something I really admire, and hope one day to have: a special kind of freedom in your own skin, a joyful way of moving that cuts swathes through the trajectories of other lives, in a folding of bodies into one another. I don’t know how to go on and move towards this freedom. I often feel very trapped by life circumstances, and when I look at Michael, I wonder how did he do it? How did he find so many moments of freedom to move even within the constraints of forms and circumstances? The answers to these questions are a matter of truly living, or dying.

Waacking is a form of house dance which had its heyday in the 1970s. But these London rockers are part of a new wave of dancers keeping this New York City tradition alive. I love this video, in which you see the way the dance itself is a response to the atmosphere of the night time city. In the deserted streets of London’s Chinatown, they glitter and glow like lanterns.

The city of our imaginations was London. In Lagos of the 1980′s “London” was a magic sound: its very utterance conveyed unattainable sophistication, hipness, style, escape. London stole my father for a few years of study. London bathed the in-crowd at school with the “been-to” glow. A wash of light followed even those whose cousins-fathers-sister-friend-daughters-boyfriends were rumored to have visited that fabled city.

Like many schoolchildren, I knew the London of Dickens, of the Queen; the London of black taxis and Big Ben. So when this Terence Trent D’Arby video slid into heavy rotation on state television, I was unprepared for this other, intensely romantic London, of warehouses and dive bars, of motorcycles, dandies and miscegenation. This is when London became a real place, a tangible desire of mine.

Of course, this desire maintained intensity for a brief season, and I spent my adolescence in that unlikely emerald city, Seattle, and later New York. With each new city, London’s call grew fainter. I doubt I will ever live there. But thanks to the internet, I’ll always have Terence.