cosmopolitan scum

The Burj Dubai during a storm.

It would be foolish to deny that our public space is increasingly regulated. With Community Police and increased TV surveillance, we not only feel that we’re being watched more, we are being watched more. But in what way exactly? Derm’s series of beautiful prints of CCTV cameras highlights an ambiguity however. Derm’s caught these cameras in isolation or abstracted them to form a floral pattern. He’s not just highlighting their existence but turning them into a beautiful shape. He no doubt hates what they represent but he’s separated them from their intent and, blimey celebrated them as part of our urban environment. Stunning. The series called, Focal Range is in a variety of media including photography, spraypaint and screenprinting.  

Read the Manifesto Club’s briefing document on the Hyper-regulation of Public Space if you haven’t already. It is an important document because it highlights the fact that we are losing our autonomy  and that this freedom to act is being taken from us by stealth. The opening of the document bears repeating: 

Over the past few years, there has been a massive growth in restrictions  on drinking in public, including: the ban on boozing on London Tubes and buses, brought through by new Mayor Boris Johnson on 1 June 2008; 613 designated areas of the country where drinking is restricted by local authorities; Scottish bylaws banning drinking from many town centres, beaches and beauty spots; and a ban on bring-your-own (BYO) alcohol at summer music festivals. Similar regulations have been brought through on beaches and town centres in New Zealand and Australia, on San Diego beach in the USA, and in city centres in the Czech Republic. 

But what the document also suggests is that we have a responsibility to ensure that we resist the attempts to prevent us from using our public space as we see fit. It asks us to concentrate not on the CCTV’s but the frequently confused application of dubious by-laws. I’m not a believer in a conspiracy of observation. If you want to know how I think we’re being watched, I think it’s part of a clumsy attempt by the authorities to reassure themselves and us, not a big brother style era of government. By watching the watchmen, we’re slowly beginning to understand the psychology of surveillance. 

David Aaronovtich has questioned the statistic that we are viewed by 300 cameras on average on the way to work and shot this film with people from Liberty. As he points out at the end, it’s a bit pointless trying to count cameras when you don’t even know if they’re pointed at you. However his comment that cameras reflect our fear of crime rather than our morality gets to the heart of the matter. 

If we accept that there is no conspiracy of surveillance, that the array of agencies who own CCTV are as incapable of co-ordinated action on an individual or group then why do we fear them? Why not make pretty of them? We have nothing to fear but some cameras which often aren’t on or even attached to anything. And a slow mission creep by security guards and quasi-policemen.  

Catch Focal Range at the Pageant Store in Edinburgh. But hurry, the exhibition runs until Sunday 24th May.

I still think that it’s going to be a bit silly when its finished and its wrapped in muslin or whatever. Good to see that the death of the UK construction industry has been somewhat exaggerated.

Good ol’ Igster has become the darling of the London Paper and BBC London AND the Metro with this lovely little film, which turns Google’s Streetview into a narrative device as opposed to an orientation device. Tellingly Igster created the film first, taking about 6 hrs to record the footage. Then he sped it up around 1500%. It was only then that the he wrote the song and recorded it with friends as a bit of a laugh. 

I’m not a huge fan of the song but the video is brilliant. (It might be worth turning it down.) Without wanting to get too BLDGBLOG about it, the film imagines what it would be like if the underground was overground, which is a nice inversion. It’s a lovely bit of wish fulfillment too speeding through the city.  It also neatly references the London to Brighton series of films, which began in 1953 with a 4 minute time lapse of the journey, then went down to three minutes in the 1980s. And then two minutes a bit later. Igster’s journey though was never undertaken by a single individual. It is the result of one individual finding his way through the exhaustive photographic work of a whole fleet of photographers. 

Despite having several branch lines, the Northern is still the spine of the city’s transport infrastructure north to south and much improved on the dark days of the 1990s. It would be strange to have it split into two separate lines as was planned, although this does seem to have gone on the back-burner since Crossrail was announced and the Olympics development got undeway. It seems as if London is becoming increasingly divided along its east-west axis by planners rather than its north-south one as it still the way most of its inhabitants do, I think.

Great little documentary on Pirate Radio in London, first broadcast around 1995 or so if the total fixation with all things Jungle is anything to go by. The documentary comes down pretty firmly on the side of the broadcasters and all the more admirable for doing it in their slightly stuffy voices. “From trip hop to handbag house” “it’s all very different from Radio Caroline” – all pronounced in perfect RP.

Nice bit in the third part of the documentary in which a police appears on a pirate radio station to talk about race relations and another nice little bit in which one of the Department of Trade Industry’s foot soldiers expresses sneaking admiration for the pirate broadcasters ingenuity, technical skills and determination. 

However, it does reveal how little the ridiculous situation has changed. Authorities have been increasing their efforts to crack down on pirate radio stations in the UK. Now though it is the regulator Ofcom which is trotting out the tired old line that the broadcasts interfere with emergency service frequencies. In 2008 Ofcom raided 43 studios used by illegal stations and shut down 838 illegal transmitters. Even if technology is getting better, the pressure by big business on smaller illegal operations is getting stronger.

This top little documentary also highlights the fact that mainstream broadcasters are today operating at a level consistently below standards just over ten years ago. So as underground broadcasters hold the line, the mainstream ones deteriorate.