citysited / University College London

pulling down the sky

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 21:12:36 +0100

I don’t know how often this happens, but my biggest thrill in looking at this satellite image was to discover the jet plane frozen on the bottom right corner. Through the foreshortening of perfectly clear satellite vision, the plane appears to be just grazing the tops of the trees in the park at Russell Square!

citysited/1 Cities Methodologies: 4 to 7 May 2011

Sun, 8 May 2011 18:18:47 +0100

This was the first in a series of short experimental choreographies to be presented during my artistic residency in 2011/12. An exhibit in Cities Methodologies at UCL’s Slade Research Centre was the starting point for a choreographic experience travelling through the building and out into the neighbouring streets. Visitors were told: “You are invited to explore. Everything is important...”

Numerous technical problems delayed the start of citysited/1. Despite heroic efforts, we sadly missed being a part of the opening night. Finally halfway into the second day, all the elements were in place and functioning. As part of an exhibition packed with over 24 urban researchers and their exhibits, it was a challenging context within which to place a guerilla performance event. Especially a subtle performance that hoped to lure academics out of the building and into the surrounding area. However, it was an interesting experiment which allowed us to try out several ideas during the remaining two and a half days of the exhibition.

For those who followed it through, the choreographic journey led first to a ‘secret lab’ filled with mysterious samples of liquids and vegetation, haunted with a river of voices...then moving out into the streets to follow a trail of gum-stains along the pavement. Most evocative were reactions to our memorial to a river (that never was). Passersby became inspired to add their notes of condolence to those we’d hung on the railings. In re-imagining this forgotten, overgrown scrap of land (next to a bus stop by Russell Square park) as a forgotten riverbed, we inadvertently triggered an outpouring of grief for a river that was never actually there.

bodily traces, urban flow

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 20:19:47 +0100

It was my Canadian father on a visit to London some years ago who first pointed it out to me. “What are all those round markings on the sidewolks?” he wondered. I realised that I’d been here too long as they had been completely invisible to me until that moment. How odd, we both thought. Now, as I wander this deeply layered and ancient city site wherein the UCL Urban Laboratory is situated, I am again looking at those round stains on the pavements.

Their distribution, colour and frequency varies according to their exact location — their proximity to traffic, to bus stops or other places that people gather. I imagine them as some sort of urban water distribution strategy, each tiny measure of spit evaporating and altering minutely the ambient humidity of the surrounding area. More usefully, I decide to let these marks guide my choice of where to walk — they become a trail leading me along and away from my starting point at the Slade Research Centre. As I tune into their visual pattern I’m aware of it as almost an audible rhythm: at first intermittent and tentative, then popping and crackling in a crescendo of increased frequency, finally exploding in a burst of spots so close together that they seem to merge. No one else around me has seemed to notice.

I decide to ‘highlight’ the gum stains, in an attempt to share my discovery with the world. So I spend several days trying different colours and styles of paint application. This concentrated activity of bending over and carefully colouring in every bit of gum on the pavement attracts many hilarious comments from passersby...”Hey, you’re Banksy! I know you are....it’s Banksy! It’s Banksy!” I realise that the action (not the colour) of highlighting these stains on the pavement is all that is needed to bring them into focus and momentary significance.

finding the lab

Mon, 4 Apr 2011 19:51:23 +0100

The UCL Urban Laboratory is an umbrella for a collection of intersecting research strands — rather than one physical place. And yet, its work adds up to something very real, grounded in many real places: its geographic locations/buildings; the local/international locations upon which its research is focused; the particular locations that contain the everyday lives of the researchers.

Mapping or understanding or even interacting with this collection of real places and research strands has proven to be a tall order however. As much as the university is a place of dialogue and ideas, it is also a place of long dark corridors lined with closed doors. Territories are protected. Exchange is accomplished through a complex mix of published works, lectures and talks. I am trying to absorb as much as I can find...