David Barrie

Game cinema

I saw Spiderman 3 the other day.

To all intents and purposes, the film was a ride through a Playstation game.

There were dramatically extended action sequences - much like a single level in a game. The film constantly took us through deep, dark, long corridors and dropped us hundreds of meters down, down, down. The narrative was broken down in to exclusive character sections, rather than intercut character narrative. There
was no time for panning panels across peripheral settings, as in anime.

I noticed something similar going on in Casino Royale, especially the astonishing opening scene, that progressed the chase through endless different landscapes.

If the visualisation of Spiderman was to be a transposition of comic-like-imagery, there'd be juxtapositions of panels, diverse camera shots of a single scene and maybe action forcing itself out of the frame.

Am I imagining this? Is gaming changing the way in which we like our action served up?  Is multi-platform distribution finally having a story-telling impact upstream?

If there is some form of convergence going on, how amazing is that? For alongside working lives increasingly determined by and existing within bandwidth, we're entertaining ourselves not by bathing in the traditional light of cinema but in progressive narratives of digital gaming.

Fritz Haeg and Edible Gardens

This is a photograph of a community eco-art project in Los Angeles late last year, reported on Worldchanging. It's part of an on-going offensive by architect/artist Fritz Haeg and an initiative called Edible Estates to replace American front lawns and vacant lots with bountiful, self-sustaining, food-producing gardens.

In a recent interview withHaeg, he praises the virtue of producing food from your garden:

The garden is the perfect example of how we as humans can learn to occupy the planet in a more thoughtful way. The garden is what humans make to feed ourselves; it's like some reconciliation between what humans need to survive and what the planet needs to sustain that. Where we grow food, it's scary, industrial, there's chemicals and machinery - it's problematic. But when you eat out of your garden, you don't dump things in it that you don't want to eat. It's very direct: you understand the connection. And the more disconnected we become from the garden, the more reckless we become with the way we occupy the planet.

I love it!

Cheap holidays in other people's miseries

I've always had a good reputation in the mental health world.  So says Trisha Goddard, host of a new TV series on Five devoted to conflict resolution.

The vast majority of producers I know are socially responsible creators who want to make films that hold a mirror to the world we live in, and provoke debates that have been stifled or ignored. The participants are interesting not as 'freaks', but because of their humanity and humour, and because their conflicts reveal something of the world.

So says Big Brother producer Sebastian Doggart in an article in The Observer newspaper.

Suddenly, craftsmen of TV trash are coming over all pious. An extension of a-brand-called-Trisha pleads for the legitimacy of a role in resolving Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Maidstone. A self confessed voyeur pleads for the legitimacy of Big Brother in an age of cellphone footage of Saddam's death.

Guys, what's the problem? You work in the entertainment industry. If you wanted to be social workers, you'd have a career in social work. If you wanted to be social documentarists, you'd make social documentaries that no-one would watch and would make for a fascinating discussion in an over-heated seminar room in Rotherham on a wet Thursday.

The masterpiece Holidays in the Sun by the Sex Pistols opens with the immortal line

a cheap holiday in other peoples misery

This is what a lot of television is about. But don't apologise. To  mediate misery is to provide a useful social service.  But if you actually want to be mediating something else, best to step away from the media and journalism and find a new narrative paradigm.

Urban agriculture: Growing their own Greens

My urban agriculture project in Middlesbrough, North-East England has started.

Over the next six months, thousands of people in the town will grow produce in containers across town, from ordinary schools to posh department stores, from fat cat car dealers to patients in secure units. The council is also growing food in local parks and town centre 'tubs'.

The town's new 'urban farmers' will bring their harvest to 'kitchen playgrounds' - recipe-making sessions led by professonal chefs - and the final harvest will be cooked for a final 'town barbie' in front of the new Museum of Modern Art in October 07.

You'll find more on the project here and on Worldchanging.

Some of the design inspiration can be found in  Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes by architect Andre Viljoen.  

Time will tell if our first intervention in the landscape of Middlesbrough can help turn the town in to a food savannah, as opposed to a food desert; and start to popularise an urban design linked to permaculture, rather than monoculture.

As Matthew Taylor of the Royal Society of Arts recently wrote:

Encouraging healthier lifestyles is easier with people used to the idea they are in control of their lives and who can afford to join a gym or buy a good pair of running shoes.

Maybe our initiative will become an effective example of what Matthew calls a pro-social campaign: a new collective commitment to environmental and social change, led by voluntary behavior and that has a key impact upon local life and public management.

For sure, we've only just begun our project and cash is starting to flow in to regeneration projects that we're linked to and the council appears to now be developing some form of 'pocket allotment' strategy for the future.

I look to sister initiatives like the Massachusetts Avenue Project green with envy.  And  my collaborators - artist Debra Solomon of Culiblog, designer Nina Belk of Zest Innovation and Andre - as grand inspirations.

Update on project here.
 

This is England

This is England, British director Shane Meadows' latest film is one of the best films that I've seen in years.

The film tells the rite of passage story of twelve year-old Shaun's holiday off school and relationship with a group of local skinheads.

Oh my God! Skins. Bovver boots. Gorgeous New Romantic teenagers. And  a Jamaican skanker caught between deciding whether he should follow the racist crowd or assert himself.

Oh my God! Sean's loss and urban Nazism's gain is a generation of fatherless men seeking some kind of new nirvana in tin-pot Oi and local tyranny of the estate.

I saw the film on a flight and was the guy without the eyepatches sniffing in Row 12.

First was the fatherless-ness - something I know from personal experience. Then, there was England. England then. Subways. The color of your boots. Eyeliner. Fucked up local tin-pot dictators. And a cynicism and innocent dunder-head dysfunction that never let truth out.  An age of  knee-jerk directionless.

Then there is England now. Gorgeous Paris Hilton-ness. Nu everything. Poles in Middlesbrough. Simon Cowell. Isolated pockets of old England.  New  pockets of Al-Quaeda.

Trash pop culture may at times be shite: our century's version of the disco diva-dom we despised back in 1977. But at least, all the alienation and post-industrial detritus appears to have slipped away.

Today, England may be more like Malibu beach mashed with wall-to-wall beige. We may be tripping on consolidated debt, New Look heels and snazz-tastic dayglo pendants. But at least that sense of dead-end-ness seems to have passed.

Maybe that's why I cried.   

Who is holding the risk?

In the latest edition of U.K. property magazine Estates Gazette, journalist Chris Bourke questions whether total lending in the commercial property sector can continue to rise at the rate it's currently going. In the first quarter of 2007, lending rose to £6.4bn. In the past three years, borrowing has increased by £60bn.

Bourke writes:

In this rapidly changing sector, it is becoming difficult to gauge just who is holding the risk. Only five years ago, the entire lending risk lay with the issuing bank. Since then, according to figures from DTZ, securitised debt has grown by 150% of world GDP, and derivative issuance to a staggering 800% of world GDP. So who is holding the risk?

Who is holding the risk?

In all of the clamor and excitement for mega private equity deals and debt finance, to the  financially illiterate like me  it all seems shockingly complex and opaque. If something catastrophic goes on in the  world economy and financial markets, will we be able to quickly know who owes what? And to whom?

The first rule on entering a dangerous place is to work out how you are going to escape. I feel sure that the corporate financiers have an exit plan. But do we? And do we know how to find the door?

Tank Loft

Today I visited Tank Loft - Chongqing Contemporary Art Center, a non-profit art organisation rebuilt on a used tank-storehouse in the grounds of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in the city in southwest China.

Every liberal sensibility says "How fabulous! artist studios! real artists! a place for mutual support, cheap rent, a room to breathe" etc. etc. But then every true sensibility says "Factory for extracting surplus value! Foreign investment! Burnished doors! Faux fab!"

Look, I studied art. I love art. It's fantastic. But to me, BoHo is dull. It's been so Wallpaper-ed that it's become a parody. It's become a luxury good for the super-rich to buy in to - and the super-poor(ish) artist to survive by.  A studio is a place to work, not a market place. And a factory's not a product - but a place that produces it.

Because most of us - including me - have long lost the ability to make things, an artists' complex is as fascinating as a stock trading floor.

But wouldn't it be great if the revival of a burnt out shop was as gratifying to the super-rich investor as the foundation of an artist's quarter? Artists could afford to work without being contaminated by the Biennale circus? And creative quarters could be allowed to emerge by accident, without being written in to the master plan?

In other words, not allow ourselves to programme creativity in to our lives but create the social, economic and political conditions that allow it to thrive.

The value of "middle-up"

Minxin Pei's China's Trapped Transition is a brilliant and fascinating examination of the discrepancy between economic progress and political change in modern China.

Pei draws out two things that stand out for me in the context of governance and social change in the U.K.

The first is the co-optation of the intelligensia in local politics.

The second is the value of "middle-up" initiatives - risk-taking ideas implemented by progressive local officials to remedy local problems. In China in the 1990s, this was manifest in township and village-level elections.

In the U.K. a wristy, anti-intellectualism or splendid isolation prevails that separates the 'hedgehog' from the 'fox' and disallows the engagement of scholars and professionals in local politics and administration.

Then there is our emphasis upon the state or the individual, their effectiveness and  power, those at the top or those at the bottom. We have forgotten the opportunities that "the middle" - local government, for example - can realise through progressive, distinctive policy.

Olafur Eliasson and Public Service Art

Danish artist Olafur Eliasson recently gave a speech at the Netherlands Architecture Institute. Afterwards, he talked to architectural writer Michiel van Raaji. The conversation's blogged here.

Eliasson had a fantastic five-star dig at the attention-span of architects and then sketched a new kind of artistic practice that he described as

a combination of art and architecture that can attain a 'new responsive criticality' [and]  provide people with the sense that their lives matter, and that they are part of a community.

This is all very nice. But it does in the end really wind me up.

First, this 'new responsive criticality' stuff just sounds like a pseudy way of saying, err, "I make art that's popular, entertaining and grabs you".

Then there is the community thing: is this a fascinating example of creatives seeking to fill the democratic void? An emerging manifesto for 'Public Service Art'?  Or should we park well-meaning-ness to one side for a moment and say: isn't it actually staggeringly dull for an individual with the power of an artist to commit themselves to a career in social work?

Tony Smith and the New Jersey Turnpike

    

In 1961, architect and sculptor Tony Smith had a car accident on a curving, precipitous road between Albany, N.Y., and Bennington, Vt.. After the accident, Smith stopped practising architecture . He had developed a rare blood disease and could no longer safely drive to building sites without the fear of blacking out. He decided to teach. And just a few years later, he had this revelatory experience: a nighttime drive on the unopened New Jersey Turnpike that became a foundation statement for the development of conceptual art:

When I was at Cooper Union, someone told me how I could get on to the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. I took three students and drove from somewhere in the Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and colored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn't be called a work of art. It did something for me that art has never done. It seemed that there was a reality there which had not had any expression in art.

Thanks to architectural writer Kazys Vernelis for referencing it in a recent essay.