This Concrete 'O': On Serotonin, the M25, and the Motorik Picturesque
Painting of Junction 7 of the M25 / M23 by Michael HirshVia What Florence was to the Renaissance, what Paris was to Modernism, so was the hinterland of the M25 to a particular generation. For a fleeting moment this non-place became the ephemeral capital of a brief moment in time. The big outdoor raves of the early nineties changed the way we could occupy landscape. As The Orb put it in the layered samples that made up Little Fluffy Clouds, "to the traditional sound of the British summer - the lawn mover, the smack of leather on willow - has been added a new sound". It was as though traditional events like the Stoneleigh Royal Show (as eulogized by Cedric Price in this very column see here) were ramped up and accelerated via man-machine-Detroit-fantasy, Kling-Klang-Jam-Stall, and Motorik picturesque to a hypnotic futurist vision. In between the urban acid house warehouse parties which preceded them and the commercialized metropolitan super-clubs like the Ministry of Sound, these events marked out a different kind of territory. They played out over the landscape of early 1990s Britain, organised through the technologies of pirate radio, telephone recorded messages, flyers with graphics fresh from newly accessible desktop publishing. What these devices gathered together was not so much a place as a network of transport and communication infrastructures overlaid with coincidences of chemicals, decibels, and demountable structures. Powered by generators, the technologies of pleasure - soundsystems, funfairs, lights, lasers - were wired up and switched on to form an instant city. Or at least what felt for a moment like something with its own instant and ephemeral geography, townscape, public spaces, neighborhoods, and other urbanistic tropes. It was almost like Archigram had predicted: phones, electricity, and gadgets with the suburbs and Home Counties as a backdrop. Vast crowds of us became versions of David Greenes "Electric Aborigine" dressed in performance fabrics, splashed with neon, threaded with shreds of new age, faux hippyness. We gathered in places that were nowhere in particular: underpasses, fields, warehouses, fallow fields, and old airstrips, places that were neither urban, suburban nor rural. The kinds of places between infrastructure & destinations that are hardly places at all. Non-places: The M25, service stations, the fields of the not-so-rural southern east England, the bits in between housing estates, agriculture and big box retail. Though it was often hard to pinpoint exactly where you were there was never any doubt that you were in the strange reality of the contemporary British landscape. For a moment disparate populations of indie kids, football fans and travelers amongst loose agglomerations of equipment were held together by music which itself created a type of space. Piano breaks, squelching bass, trebly, speeded-up vocals and what the Criminal Justice Act described as "a succession of repetitive beats' formed a kind of immersive, sonic urbanism. The sound itself was spatial - it was non-linear, formed of juxtaposed incidents and layers of sensation suggesting distance. The music was overwhelming, relentless and constantly on the edge of a futurist sublime. Deep in the moment, the ephemeral construction felt endless and timeless. Could 20 000 people standing in a field for a weekend be a town any less, or any more than 20000 people in houses, flats, places of employment, education? For a couple of summers, the M25 became a serotonin soaked ring of infrastructure, a periphery became both a destination and a symbol. In Shakespearian terms, it was a concrete O crammed with potential and possibility. This road without destination showed is that its possible - or almost possible - to re-tune the infrastructures of contemporary landscape. It tweaked the channels of Thatcherite free-market neo-liberalism into in order to deliver something different, a brief alternative. These were imaginary landscapes and were always provisional. They never really existed beyond their immediate experience. Though rave culture itself was idiotic, hedonistic and a-political - a shallow ephemera that achieved nothing of lasting significance - we might still be able to learn from it. Networks intended to deliver one kind of ideology also might be able to deliver quite another. We might be able to inhabit what seem soulless, anonymous landscapes in ways that allows them to host exaggerated sensations of humanity. We might be able to believe there is a latent magic in the banal, everyday landscape that is powerful enough to transform the miserable landscape of late Thatcherism, even if only for a weekend. And that that might be enough.
Posted by anothersam at March 19, 2009 9:19 PM. 1 Comments
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Book Review: The Infrastructural City
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Absurd Car Crashes: A Eulogy for J.G. Ballard
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This Concrete 'O': On Serotonin, the M25, and the Motorik Picturesque
Church of the Literal Narrative
Philadelphias Floating Architecture
Now Viewing: Married To The Eiffel Tower
Le Corbusiers Image Hoard: Poeme Electronique
Giant American Signs: Original Learning from Las Vegas Footage
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Bricks Melted Into Icicles: Napalm Decorative
C-Labs 'Unfriendly Skies' & 'Bootleg' Volume
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Viva Sectional Cinematography!
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Geography in Bad, Festive Drag.
Simulations of Industry: High Tech Architecture and Thatcherism
From The Factory to the Allotment: Tony Wilson, Urbanist
Koolhaas HouseLife / Gan Eden: The Revenge of Architectural Media
Ruburb-ric: The Ecologies of the Farnsworth House
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham Redux
Acts of Un-Building: Timelapse Demolitions
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Stonehenge: A Black Hole At The Heart Of British Architecture
The Popemobile: Mechanised Robes & Motorised Architecture
The Secret Language of Surface
Information Fields: Agriculture as Media
My Bloody Valentine: Sound as Substance
A Cubist Copse: Gehrys Serpentine Pavilion
Spouting Off: Some Thoughts On The Fountainhead
Form Follows Dysfunction: Bad Construction & The Morality of Detail
Vintage Tradeshow Surrealism: International Grune Woche
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Desktop Study: The Strange World of Sports Studio Design
Married to the Eiffel Tower: More Objectum Sexuals
60 Years of The Crazy Horse Memorial
Married to the Berlin Wall: "The Best and Sexiest Wall Ever Existed!"
Inflatable Icebergs: Sublimated Guilt Has Never Been So Fun
The Cinderella Effect: Phantom Architectures of Illumination
Two Deaths and a Retirement: The Strange Shape of British Architecture
If London Were Like New York: Antique Schizo-Manhattanism
If London Were Like Venice: Antique Geo-Poetic Speculations and Hydro-Fantasy
41 Hours in an Elevator: The Movie
NASA: Mapping the Moon with Sport
Lemon Squeezy: Design Tendencies after the Juicy Salif
The Nihilistic Beauty of Weapons Arranged in Patterns
Dogs: Britains Greatest Design Obsession
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Authentic Replicas: Football and the Franchising of Place
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A Wishing Well with a Fat Up Pipe
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The Ghost of Christmas Futurism
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Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham
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Scary Suburbanism: Why Horror is at Home in the Suburbs
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Revisions to the Architecture of Hell
Crufts: Dogs, Design and Aesthetic Genetics
Eos Airlines: Executive Bubbles over the Atlantic
Google Earths Vertiginous Mapping
Church of the Ascension and Descension
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Reading Lines: Skateboarding and Public Space
Chris Cornish: Prototyping History
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2000 Years of Non Stop Nostalgia. Or How Half Timbering Made Me Whole Again.
Backpeddling into the Future: The Historical-Futurism of British Architecture
Miss Selfridges' Feeling for Fake Snow. The Oxford St. Lights and Why We Need Artificial Winter
New Tory Logo: A Hazy Shade of Politics
Jeff Koons, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Serpentine
Celebrity Scents: The Bittersweet Smell of Success
Imperfect Pitch - Football, Space and Landscape
Product Placement: Making the Impossible Possible
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Perfect Sound Forever: The Secret Function of High End Stereos
A Little Light Product Placement
Some Advice To A Young Designer
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Topsy Turvy VSBA: Inverted Heros of an Upside Down Avant Guard
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The Psychotic Utopia of the Suburbs and the Suburbanisation of War.
In a Lonely Place - Under Construction
Mach 3 Nitro Gel - Design that's foaming at the mouth.
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Interview: Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane
An Incredible Smell of Roasting Coffee
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Architectural Criticism gets Sharp
Venturi, Scott Brown and my love that dare not speak its name.
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Everything Counts - The Sound of Geography Collapsing.
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So I was very disapointed that when I went to the Junction of the M23 & M25 it looked nothing like your illustration. Being a keen adventurer of "Non PLaces" created by transport links, i went to said junction.
This is what I saw
http://www.morganodonovan.com/show.php?p=174
the real romantic misses the dirt track though.