John Timberlake recommended Frederick Sommer’s photography & now I’m obsessed by this chicken. Some of John’s own work can be seen here.
Roger Deakin writes on page four of Waterlog (1999):
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“Most of us live in a world where more and more places and things are signposted, labelled, and officially ‘interpreted’. There is something about this that is turning the reality of things into virtual reality. It is the reason why walking and cycling and swimming will always be subversive activities.”
Within a decade, wholly driven by the success of Waterlog, the media cult of “wild swimming” had taken off & was well into the process of commodification & interpretation. Significant points along Deakin’s journey–easily-available pools, beaches & rivers–were becoming stations of the wild swimming cross. You could buy a wild swimming holiday, a score of wild swimming guides & DVDs. Stratification of ambition had set in: some wild swims were clearly wilder than others. Soon you could buy a logbook in which to record your wild swimming ticks. Waterlog abounds in so many sad ironies of this kind I’m not sure I can re-read it. (At date of first publication, he was already wrong about walking & cycling, which had become part of the signposted, packaged & commodified outdoors–the indoor outdoors–long before.)
Finally today, a very short story in the New Weird mode, from an observation of Claire Marshall’s: “It seems darker than other supermarkets.”
“I could shop at Waitrose every day if I wanted to, but I want to be normal.” – Susan Boyle.
Many thanks for the link Mike, that’s very kind. Re Roger Deakin, slightly later (2001) the architectural theorist Iain Borden looked at the way skateboarders re-interpret urban spaces such as car parks, plazas and walls (Skateboarding, Space and the City). I recall at a discussion c.1997 at the ICA, in London, Borden made links between skateboarding (a mutation of West Coast surf culture played out across the concrete surfaces of Croydon or wherever) and the then emerging Virtual Reality.
When you’re on a skateboard, space is always space.
Hi John, Hi Zak. (John, meet Zak.) Does all use of space somehow virtualise it, & are some kinds of space more easily virtualised than others ? Is virtualisation even the best metaphor ? Deakin obviously means something different to Borden… From climbing I always had the feeling that you make a space, but is it the space ? (It was a feeling I distrusted later.)
Martin, that’s a very complex piece of positioning in retail space.
I’m still wondering if Susan Boyle on a skateboard would represent the subversion of urban space – or simply its negation.
And how that chicken might enlarge or define such a paradigm.
Obviously.
Well I’m a painter. And almost every other skater I know is, too. And we pretty much concur that it’s good to remember the physical space is the physical space. It has affordances theyyyyyyy do not want you to know about.
Like have you noticed the war against benches in any city worth living in? They don’t want the homeless on them.
Modern security is a force for virtualization: look but don’t touch. Go see Santa Claus at Macy’s–you can’t touch Santaland or do anything with it, it’s not a playground–it might as well be a video game.
A great deal of our movie fantasies (zombie movies, godzilla movies) imagine the sudden concretization of usually-virtual spaces.
It’s DeBord, I suppose: the spetacle.
Odd thing: when I write, I want the opposite–I want ONLY the symbolic and nonconcrete meanings (subjective) of space to come through. Is writing the opposite of skateboarding? It’s widely considered the opposite of sex, which I suppose is close.
In other news, I meant to type “spectacle”
Hi Zak. Have you read Mike Davis’ ‘City of Quartz’? There’s a terrifying bit in there on the origins of the war on benches in LA, written right about the time it was happening.
Well, Waterlog has now risen (floated?) from somewhere in the middle of my ‘to read’ pile to the very top, so that I can read it before it becomes entirely too late, or too obsolete, to do so.
Though to be honest, MJH, it was the last part of your post, that throwaway teaser for a brand new fiction, that most intrigued me. Especially the various possible nuances of ‘Finally’.
Hello Zac, and hello everyone.
>Does all use of space somehow virtualise it, & are some kinds of space >more easily virtualised than others ? Is virtualisation even the best >metaphor ?
I guess this hinges on what would be an acceptable definition of ‘to virtualise’. I think that must include some factoring in of embodied desire and fantasy, which makes one use said space differently. My old 1990-something OED defines virtual (clearly, no VR at that time..) as ‘that [which] is such for practical purposes though not in name or according to strict definition’ thereby implying (imaginative?) reinterpretation. To some extent I think ‘virtualisation’ must therefore involve some sensate departure from normative use or precepts. So I’m thinking that, for example, if an all weather football pitch is used as a pitch in all weathers to play football on, then it’s not a virtual space, unless the players are perhaps secretly imagining they’re playing at Wembley with the roar of the crowd behind them (or whatever). What I remember being refreshing about Borden’s comments in ’97 was that, in the context of a discussion that seemed to be rolling around in just how very very different everything was now that (digital) VR had arrived, Borden seemed to be saying something like ‘look, the claims being made for VR are simply the latest extension of the human activity of radically or transgressively re-interpreting and re-naming the world according to individual or collective desires (etc etc), and we can see this in an everyday activity such as skating’.
My apologies – I meant to write Zak, not ‘Zac’
A friend who did therapeutic massage said she didn’t think in terms of healing her clients, but making or holding a space where they could heal themselves.
I expect that’s no uncommon approach to such work, and dunno if it’s germane. But like a lot of things she said, it’s stayed in my head for years, and I miss her, and wanted to pass this little part of her on.