Monthly Archives: July 2012

Sound City

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Sometimes you find yourself being a tourist in your own city. Yesterday after work, I got caught up on the crowded Circle Line on my way to the Tate Modern, along with the hoards of Olympic Ceremony goers making their way to the Stadium. After I surfaced from London’s underground, I walked across the now affectionately called Wobbly Bridge, that was thronging with people from far flung places. We all found ourselves suddenly immersed in unexpected stereo sounds: single words and sentences booming from big speakers hanging over the bridge cables, resonating like a wall of deep sound.

Having gotten a little tired of our mayor, Boris, chirping all week his heartfelt recorded message ‘Get Ahead of the Games’ – on the buses, trains and in the station concourses – I found this unexpected 3D soundfield, suffused with our pattering feet, delightful. I discovered later that it was called Tales from the Bridge and created by Martyn Ware (founder of The Human League) in collaboration with the poet Mario Petrucci. Lines of poems and strings of local anecdotes about the life and times of London ran and rang alongside us as we strode forth across the Thames. They did not stream together as a coherent narrative but faded and overlapped, acting as emotive heart-string pullers. I was transported back to being much younger, vividly being reminded of special times when I had gone to see a Shakespeare play outdoors at Regent’s Park and a trip to the Museum of London. This jolting of childhood memories was a refreshing change, making me focus on the potency of words rather than having to navigate my way through the visual overload of garish Olympic mascots, banners and flags. From the accompanying website, it suggests it will “immerse the listener in an oasis of peace and contemplation, half-remembered dreams and thoughts, of meditation and learning.” Indeed, instead of worrying about something at work I drifted back in time.

I eventually met up with Rafael at the Tate where we stumbled into one of its latest installations located in the bowels of their massive oil tanks. The first darkened enclosed room we went into had just a hanging microphone that emanated with powerful 360 degree voices. Again, my ears were seduced by a singular form of audio art. I sat and just listened. Appreciating art through sound is ephemeral. But such momentariness triggers visceral emotions and memories in such a sharp shard way. I wanted to linger in the moment in quite different ways to being immersed when looking at visual art.

Back in the underground we heard several buskers, strumming and singing in the echoing tunnels. Again, it took me back in time to when I first heard those songs.

Such is the magic of a tune when walked into an unfamiliar context but very memorable time.

Hearing the city, augmented with mellifluous voices and sweet sounds, is such an arresting contrast to the “cha, chee, chee, cha, boo, booom” we hear so often and resent so much leaking out of our fellow commuter’s ear buds. While city dwellers enjoy their personal playlists reverberating through their inner worlds, serrendipitous street-shared sonics pervading our cities are, in my mind, infinitely more pleasurable for all.

“I’m not in love. So don’t forget it. It is just a silly phase I’m going through.
I’m not in love, no no, it’s because…”

10cc’s mid 1970s ethereal song reminds me of long gone summers. To top the day, I caught a snippet of it when walking past a store. And even now, it continues to hit a sweet spot: melancholic, romantic, and full of teenage-angst.

Olympic Mordancy

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The big countdown has begun. The media is beating its drum for the London 2012 Olympic Games to finally begin. Everywhere you look you see the Olympic logo. It should be a fantastic festival, a great time for everyone to share magical moments, with Usain Bolt breathtakingly running like lightning. But nearly everyone I know who lives in or commutes to London is planning to escape from the metropolis or stay indoors for the 3 week duration. It has become a sentence to be avoided at all costs. In contrast, a massive influx of visitors from all over the world will descend and decamp in London, filling the hotels to the rafters, and paying extortionate prices, seemingly not worried about crowds, congestion or commotion. How is it possible that a vibrant city can empty and alienate itself so spectacularly of its own citizens?

Reams of angry words, laced with caustic humour, have been written about the Games by indignant bloggers, journalists and tweeters. Simon Jenkins scathingly sums up the overblown-ness:

“What the Victorians reinvented as a herbivore festival of amateur athletics has become a parody of Hitler’s chauvinist hysteria. It starts with flags and anthems, moves on to medal tables and “heroes”, and ends as the most important thing on Earth.”

The irony is that while everyone outside of London is getting excited, those living in London and the outskirts are not. Long gone are the days when the locals could show up on the day and buy a ticket to see a track event. Tickets had to be bought a year in advance, from a website that was incredibly complicated, followed by an enormous long tail email trail (informing you of every merchandise, mode of transport, etc under the sun, bar actually sending you the tickets). There were very few of the millions from London who could be bothered to wade through the lottery website maze.

One of my favourite pieces written by Andrew Gilligan in the Spectator this week (14th July) was called ‘a matter of taste.’ Instead of having a go at the inconvenience or the price of everything, he chose to focus on the ‘naffness’ of it all, “being run by people with no taste, no imagination, and no idea how to have fun.” He notes, too, how everything is either grey or in bad taste: the buildings, the logo font, the mascot, the souvenirs, the advertising, the signs, and the volunteer uniforms. I know exactly what he means as I look around me when I make my way through London. Whereas Disneyland is cute, colourful and magically choreographed, the Olympic package is “a face of regimentation, ugliness, and mediocrity.”

I am reminded of the challenge Heston Blumental set himself to change the face of the Little Chef eateries that adorned desolute parts of our A road arteries up and down the country (sadly many have gone into administration). The cartoon logo of the Little Chef was instantly recognizable by all, as was the comfort artery-clogging food they served to the piles of families that tumbled into them from their family estate cars. Heston made a Channel 4 documentary entitled Big Chef takes on Little Chef about his mission. It was absorbing TV viewing; watching Mr and Mrs Huddersfield try braised ox cheeks for the first time. Ironically, his revised menu included the all new Olympic Breakfast, where the dodgy old ingredients were replaced with fresh, good quality ones: “outdoor-bred British pork sausages,
 two rashers of Wiltshire-cured back bacon, two griddled free-range eggs, a slice of Ramsay of Carluke black pudding, a roasted field mushroom served with either Heinz baked beans or a chargrilled tomato. And a slice of toasted bloomer bread and butter.”

If only Heston had been commissioned to help organize the citizen’s experience for the forthcoming Olympics, people in the city might have really looked forward to them, instead of being utterly cynical about corporate Britain dressing London in sponsor-correct ribbons, banners and logos. I am sure he would have come up with much better ways to simply and purely enable us all to admire the human body in all its elegance and glory – which is what the Olympics should be about.

Google Art

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The diversity of tools Google keeps churning out each year to help you search, check out and be nosey is mind-blowing. My early favourites were Google earth, Google image, and Google scholar. But recently I have been enjoying Google street view.

Like a lot of people, I love typing in a place I have lived in or visited before and letting Google transport me back there; then taking control to click and zoom through at street level looking at familiar places, houses and the cars parked outside them. Google street view displays stitched together images taken from a fleet of cars that have poles stuck on them with nine directional cameras.
While creating effective facsimilie 3D worlds, the roving medusa heads can sometimes throw up a few unexpected and quirky images. The front of a car can sometimes appear again in front of the whole car like a forward shadow. There was a craze last year, to collect funny, morbid or bizarre images that should not have been there, such as nude people, cyclists accidentally knocked over by other cars and pedestrians appearing twice but in different parts of the pavement of the same street.

The Montreal-based artist, Jon Rafman, collects screen captures of the never intended for public consumption incidents that have somehow slipped through Google’s screening software. The result is his ongoing series The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, part of which will be shown at the Saatchi Gallery later this month. There is something dreamy about many of the ones he has chosen to show on his website. No doubt we will be in for a treat when the show opens.

But in my mind, a far more creative use of Google street view to make art is Rafael’s appropriation which he stumbled upon during his forays and experimentations. To begin, he gets himself in the zone and comfortable with a glass of wine at hand and some good music playing in the background. Then he starts picking places in the US Midwest he knows, checking out the objects and detail in the neighbourhood or scenery. The technique involves a series of follow the street view arrow, create the circle and zoom to it. His trick is to capture part of this movement in interesting and distorted ways by using the combination of shift command and 3 keys. Then he collects a whole set of these and puts them on a flash drive, drives to Kinkos to get good quality prints made up of them. Then he looks at them and selects parts that he thinks will come together well. Then he draws a collage of a place made up of different perspectives and shapes. The one above is his drawing inspired by several images he screen captured in street view Bloomington, which he is familiar with both physically and digitally. It took me right back to the core of the Midwest experience. Menacing clouds in big skies matched by brooding big trees and melancholic bushes that grew in front of you on deserted wide streets where nothing much else happened. Nature’s force and a lack of human nature.

I had a go myself at capturing and distorting my street and although a bit tricky at first, quickly got the hang of it. I could understand the joy of his technique. The screen capturing pan over the digital terrain reminded me of using water colours, where part of the thrill is in not knowing quite what the paint will do and where it will go.

Last week when I was in the US, however, I got a little freaked out by Google. I was doing some research on people and noticed how the page of search results was full of images – typing in someone’s name can show immediately an annotated profile, with image, date of birth, place of school and whatever else. I know this stuff is readily available on Facebook, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, 123, Google scholar, image etc, but Google search now brings it all together for instant viewing as a digital footprint. I don’t know why it surprised me – maybe it was the immediacy of getting so much personal information about someone all on one page just by typing a few letters of their name. Here in the UK (google.co.uk), we don’t have that facility yet. I am sure it wont be long, but you can see what it looks like by using the Google Chrome browser and typing in google.com/ncr.