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From www.phdcomics.com

Whether due to my compulsive nature or my egregious energy levels, many of my postgraduate colleagues often ask me for advice on their PhD goals. It occurred to me, a few month ago while wandering through the derelict University of Liege campus in Belgium, that the strange model I have created for myself in my PhD has indeed been a good (dare I yet say successful?) one and that, in my last year, it might be useful to actually write down what has worked and what hasn’t for current and future PhD students. So here are 15 thoughts for PhD students.

Please keep in mind that these are not hard-and-fast rules, they are just ideas drawn from my experience. I hope they are helpful in some way.

1. Funding

My first thought is one of the most essential. Get full funding. I know this is harder now than it used to be but just keep fighting for it. Go pay for a one-year MA out of pocket and try again if you need to. Find the university you want to be at, contact the person you want to work with, wine them and dine them, write them love letters, write a killer proposal and get the cash. When they offer you partial funding (as Royal Holloway, University of London did in my first application in 2007), turn it down gently, when they offer you nothing, be offended, seriously. Most people don’t realize that funding is a negotiation and you can play hardball. My second application to RHUL landed me another £20,000 toward my work. Why is this important? Well, firstly, you will be a lot less stressed if you are not under under enormous financial pressures and anything you can do to alleviate stress during your PhD is pure gold. Secondly, it will give you confidence, and encourage you to live up to the investment the university has made in you (which is why I say if the university won’t invest anything in you, tell them to shove it!). Third, obviously, it looks awesome on your CV!

2. Create a great PhD topic

One easy way to get funding is to work under someone else’s research project. This, in my experience, creates the most miserable PhD students. It sucks, don’t do it unless you have to. Your PhD topic should be yours; you should love it inside and out. If you don’t dream about it and get a shiver of excitement when you think about the book you will publish at the end, just walk away because you will be miserable for the next big chunk of your life. As someone once told me, it’s best that you love your PhD topic from the beginning because you will most certainly hate it by the end!

3. Apply to work with an awe-inspiring supervisor

Yes, your supervisor should be kind, helpful, supportive and all that. But they should also be successful, powerful and intimidating. If your supervisor is (relatively) famous, well published and successful, you might get your stomach in knots every time you meet with them but it will also set the bar high. And, of course, it looks good on your CV.

4. Be brave, say yes!

As a professor at UCLA once told me, “if you are not a little bit afraid every day, you are not trying hard enough.” When you begin your PhD, regardless of where you came from, who you are or what you are think you are capable of, roll into town like Clint Eastwood after his saddlebags full of cash got jacked. This is seminal opportunity to redefine yourself as a force to be reckoned with and you should take it. Tell everyone that you intend to publish like crazy and attend every conference and then do it! When someone asks you whether you want to be involved with projects, say yesssss! with ridiculous enthusiasm. Be infectious about your passion for everything great. Propose ridiculous projects, take the lead on things. As my Dad always told me, “what the hell, why not just run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it?”

5. Network ruthlessly

In your first year especially, sign up for everything that looks remotely interesting, seminars, conferences, workshops, whatever, and network like crazy. Work the room at all of these events, make it known that you are one the scene and will be seen. When you attend talks, contribute something, even just one-on-one after the talk. Think back to high school. Do you remember being embarrassed about contributions you made? I don’t either. Just go for it. People will probably not remember if you say something daft, but they will remember that you got involved and were confident about saying something daft and that’s fun anyway.

Email people when and where you can to ask for papers you can’t find, let them know you are passing though town and would like to stop by and introduce yourself, comment on their blogs and send them your publications. All of it shows that you are active and engaged and will help to make the right contacts.

6. Read, watch, listen to your favourite authors through and through. Then go meet them!

Let me demystify this further – the most famous academics in the world are just people. They like it when you call them and tell them their work is awesome and you want to have coffee, buy them a beer or interview them for a video project. When you get to meet with them (it almost never fails, just ask), tell them that you would like to get involved with anything they are doing. Offering your services (for free sometimes yes) on their projects as a photographer, field goon, transcriber, whatever is a great way to get to know them. If you really like their work, it will be fun anyway. It’s also (surprise!) good for your CV.

7. Get organized

Okay so you’re in your PhD program, you’re getting involved, downloading articles, taking a bunch of notes in your Moleskin notebook, feeling all smug. Your life is now your PhD. There are going to be ups and down here, believe me (lucky up today after a long night of epic trespassing – woohoo!). In down times, my best suggestion is get organized. When I am cleaning my house, I am scared and retreating. When I have pulled all my books down and am organising them by thesis chapter, please take me out for a beer because I am slipping into the abyss.

But that time can be really useful. The need to have your shit together applies to your computer files and physical notes, books, article, field documents, whatever. I assure you that, however OCD it may appear, a militantly organized PhD is far less intimidating than your piles of scraps of notes and cameras full of pictures from the field last year you never downloaded. Seriously, if I get one more friend calling me saying, “I had all these pictures from the field but the hard drive doesn’t work any more…” Just take a weekend, strip everything down to the bone and create the space you need to work and an effective system to keep the rhythm and flow going. Remember, this may be the only time in your life that you have 3 years to invest in a project that is all yours with (almost) complete freedom. Create your own workspace heaven, however you need to do that.

If you have a Mac, I will suggest 3 programs that will change your life: Endnote, Super Duper! and Papers. Get them and use them. If you don’t have a Mac, stop wasting your time dicking around with that retard of a PC and get one. And get an iPhone to take notes, photos, etc when and where you can. I have written roughly 1/6 of my thesis on my iPhone while on the London Underground. In terms of your PhD (or any self-motivated project) productivity, efficiency and organization trumps your need to “fight the man”, make a statement, or whatever it is you are asserting by using that clunky machine. But, whatever you use, BACK IT ALL UP! Once a week at the least. Better yet, once a month give a third copy to your supervisor to hide in their office. They like it when you entangle them in your paranoia, don’t worry.

8. Mix it up

The old idea of breaking your PhD into three isolated sections of reading, doing and writing is stale and boring. As Alf Rehn scribbles (see endnote) “one definite upside to a frontal lobotomy is focus, and you should keep this in mind when your supervisor talks about focus.” Go do your fieldwork whenever you want/can. Take your reading with you. When you have a lull, hit the library hard or go read on the beach with a cocktail. Write constantly, ferociously, channel Kerouac writing on the road until you burn out. Maybe it doesn’t look anything like “thesis” writing but that doesn’t matter – you never know what is going to be valuable 3 years down the road or what weird little gem will be hiding in that mania. The trick is, I think, when you are inspired to do any of these things, do them. Follow passion first and foremost. Do valuable things that have little or nothing to do with your PhD. Be utterly busy with everything awesome and worthwhile. Which, by the way, looks awesome on your CV.

9. Treat your PhD like a (really cool) job

Make no mistake – if you have full funding and you spend the majority of your day playing World of Warcraft (unless it’s your research topic), you are an asshole. A PhD is a job. You are paid to do something and you should, just as you would if you were getting paid for any other job, put in 40 hours a week on it. I mean, seriously, if your university has invested a big chunk of change supporting you, what are you giving back? And please don’t say a thesis. No one cares about your thesis. But they are all watching what you do outside of it, that is the real marker of a rockstar student. In the end, if you developed a thesis topic that blends work and play, fun and critical engagement, home and field, than you won’t notice that you work endless hours anyway (I just chuckled to myself, realising I was writing this a 9pm on a Sunday night).

10. Present your work (in the right places!)

Connected to this (no) work ethic is the impetus to present your work. Do present. Based on what I have heard, 2 presentations a year is a fine minimum bar. But keep in mind that presenting will not get you a job (as publications will) and does require a lot of effort. Sometimes, you might get a book chapter or special issue article out of it but you usually don’t know this until afterwards and book chapters are not as valuable as journal articles in the end anyway. Try to send abstracts for chapters for section you need to write, using the pressure as motivation to get on with it.

Contrary to popular belief, presenting at small conferences (20-30 people) will do more for your career that large ones I think, though the large ones often have better parties and this should obviously be taken into consideration. I say do one of each every year. Also, before your PhD is over, make sure you organize at least one session at a conference. It’s not that hard and it shows that you a more driven than most. And it’s fun. And, you guessed it, it looks good on your CV.

11. Publish or perish

It’s not a joke people. If your supervisor told you that you shouldn’t worry about publishing until you are done with your PhD, they are sabotaging your career and you should slash their tyres in retaliation. Just think of it this way – when you graduate, you will graduate that year with a couple thousand people (just in the UK) who have the same degree you do. There will be about 12 academic jobs that year if we are lucky. The new minimum bar for a job after your PhD is 2 publications in high-ranking journals. I often publish in other places, sideline journals, online magazines, interviews on other people’s blogs, etc. but these are always in addition to my primary work thread. My best advice, passed on from my magnificent supervisor, Tim Cresswell, is to write each chapter of your thesis first as an article, submit it and then fold it back into the thesis after it gets published. Not only do you get publications out of it, you get comments and feedback on your work before it even makes it into the thesis. For instance, what will largely be my methods chapter (chapter 2) is now published in Progress in Human Geography and chapters 3 and 4 are sitting with reviewers right now at other journals. Your supervisor will love you for all the marking you saved them. Not to mention how much they are going to love your 7-page CV (just kidding, that’s obnoxious – see mine)!

If this all sounds mad, let me assure you that despite our wonderful moments of collaboration, this is a competition. Coming out on top requires a bit of strategising, just be sure not to become so entrenched that you pull the ladder up behind you like the current UK government administration is doing. Succeed so we can all succeed. It’s always better to create a job than to get one anyway so go forth, kick ass, and create new opportunities.

12. Write diversely, work creatively

The publishing system completely blows and does not acknowledge, for the most part, that people work in different ways. I know that many people are not the best writers (me included) or work more productively in another media or format (me included). Other people are better at writing, say, fiction, than academic articles. I say go for it. As long as you hit your bar of two journal articles in high-ranking journals, you should spend the rest of the time doing whatever you love. Just make sure you balance the time you spend doing to the time you spend producing. For instance, I have three writing outlets to keep me producing. One is this blog, for half-baked and still formulating thoughts (okay haters?!), one is popular publication for those moments when I write about my direct experiences or try new creative stuff, the last is my academic publications where I exercise the full force of my abilities. I also juggle writing, obviously, with photography and videography. The most important rule here is what my supervisor told me at the beginning of my PhD: do what you love and keep doing it. When you love your work, it shows.

Connected to this, I want to just mention that being a perfectionist is crippling. In the wise words on my friend Adam Fish in anthropology at UCLA, “get into it, get on with it and get over it.”

13. Cultivate a public image

If you Google yourself right now and get no results, you are failing your PhD. Like it or not, your Google ranking is just as important as your publications or, in a real life analogy, your credit rating. It requires active work to bump up the things you want on that list and push others down. Not to say that even bad press can be good at times. A recent blog posting I posted infuriated a whole bunch of people and drove 1200 hits to my blog in 2 days. I say that’s a victory (thanks, naysayers!). You also have to destroy anyone’s ranking with the same name as yours or change your name (I became Bradley L. Garrett at the start of my PhD because I couldn’t compete with this guy). Be sensible but ruthless about this. A blog is the single best way to have a strong public image but also be sure to keep your university webpage up to date as well. Get on Twitter and Facebook, Academia.edu, LinkedIn etc. if you are not already and use them as publishing and promotion platforms and to push other people with your name down the list until they are publicly dead. It works. Oh, by the way that CV I keep mentioning? Make sure it is hyperlinked, updated, formatted beautifully and all over the internet. It works wonders.

Also, keep those connections in mind you made back in the beginning. Collaborating on public projects with noted scholars and artists based on those earlier relationships will help immensely. For instance, my documentary urban explorers, quests for myth, mystery and meaning connected my research to the work of Caitlin DeSilvey, Hayden Lorimer, Tim Edensor, Alastair Bonnett and David Pinder. In addition to getting the fantastic opportunity to meet and work with them, their names are indelibly attached to mine online (in fact, the last time I saw Caitlin she told me “I was a little dismayed when I Googled my name and your blog was the second hit!”).  Being an epiphyte can be very valuable. Seek these collaborations wherever possible and lock them down.

14. Protect your time

Remember in the first year when I told you to network with everyone? Forget that in your third year. If you did this well, they are watching you now. What you now need to show them if that you are not just going to show up to their conferences and make contributions and pitch cool projects that only a slightly-weird postgrad could dream up, you are now going to effectively guard your time to be sure you can produce the best work possible during your PhD (my current moment). If there’s a really good offer, like an invitation to speak at an important and relevant conference, of course, take it. But do not, under any circumstances, go to conferences, workshops or events where you have no funding to attend or are not presenting something, it’s just a time drain for the most part. And it, frankly, looks a little sad this late in the game. Participate or get back to your main thread!

More importantly, you have to protect your day-to-day time with extreme militancy. Unsubscribe from as much crap as you can to liberate your inbox for work, set-up email filters, learn to turn off your phone and wireless connection when you need to. Tell your friends they can only come over if they proofread your new article (just kidding). Stop spending worktime trolling through your friends facebook pages. I once called my brother Pip moaning because I was getting 130 emails a day and couldn’t keep up with them, let alone get to the “real” work. Pip (who owns a very successful cabinet company) told me,

“look bro, there’s a big difference between being productive and being active. Productive is getting the shit done you definitively set forth to get done in a particular ‘work’ session, while keeping in mind that there is nothing else that matters other than what is on that list. Granted other distractions (non-list items) are sure to and will arise, phone calls, e-mails, whatever… Fuck ‘em… and realize that ignoring them until your session is over will not be the end of the world… that’s productive. Being active on the other hand is doing anything else not on the list, regardless of how ‘busy’ you think you are are.”

So after you have gotten organized and handled your business, take time off. Lot’s of it, in big blocks. Reward yourself at the end of everyday with a big spliff and bad TV, and take a week or two off every few months. Just make sure you deserve it. If you don’t, lash yourself and eat only lettuce for a day (no don’t do that). This the joy and the curse of being your own boss – you’re supervisor will probably not tell you you don’t deserve the holiday you’re taking. One last thought here on being your own boss. Realize you can work wherever you want. If you feel like going off the snowy Swedish wilderness to drink beer in a hot tub and write for a few weeks (I did!), you should. No one can stop you but yourself.

15. Prepare for life after

As much as your PhD may dominate your life (if you’re doing it right), by the end of your 2^nd year, you need to start thinking about the next step. And the game starts all over again. Go hit the streets for coffees, meet and re-meet all those brilliant people you have collaborated with and followed in the past few years. Let them know that you are ready for the next step and want that post-doc or whatever. Of course, no matter how good I feel about my PhD at the moment, whether or not I have been successful at the next step of this game remains to be seen!

My last bit of advice is the most important. Love every minute. We could never be in a position of more privilege than we are – 3 years to do whatever on earth we dream up. 3 years to make yourself a little wiser and (hopefully) mildly well-known writing a whole bunch of funky things for notable journals and telling people over drinks how important your research is while they roll their eyes. This is the best job in the world. Make use of every minute as if it was your last, breathe it in through the belly and treat each day as sacred.

Good luck everyone – hope this was more useful than strange!

___________________________________

For more on this topic, I suggest reading Alf Rehn’s fantastic free book The Scholar’s Progress.

Drop in

Watching the US government scramble to patch up the PR damage being done through Julian Assange‘s leak of 250,000 private cables got me thinking more about the political implications of my notion of place hacking. The hacker ethos is clearly aligned to libertarian socialism, at times straddling the intersection between libertarianism on the right and anarchism on the left. This intersection was evident in the hails of praise for Julian Assange from both Anarchists and from Ron Paul, one of the leaders of the US Conservative Tea Party movement.

So when we recently explored a Ministry of Defense nuclear bunker, I could not help but make the connection between the militant existentialist ideology, shared by other groups such as graffiti writers who assert, as Tim Cresswell writes, that “everywhere is free space” and the Wikileaks ethos of populist-enforced democratic transparency which I assume Jim Hightower, the celebrated American liberal populist, must approve of. Both system hacking and urban exploration are about making the invisible visible and technology helps us to force transparency in both virtual and meat space. I created a podunk media flurry in Riverside California, my home town, last summer by sneaking into March Air Reserve Base with my brother Pip and photographing the remains of millions of dollars of government investment rotting in an abandoned military hospital while they planned to spend $80 million to build a new one one the same base during an economic meltdown. It therefore came as little surprise when we cracked this bunker and found equal waste in the UK. Which we of course, in both cases, we loved for the surreal playgrounds they create.

Planning

For transparency

Dsankt writes on Sleepy City that “whether you’re hacking transit systems or computer systems they’re all fissured, all possessing those little cracks just wide enough to wriggle your dirty little fingers into and force to sneak a peek into what lies beneath the shiny smoothed over façade most take for granted every single day”. I have suggested “place hacking” as a phrase which encapsulates the different types of explorations we undertake (urban exploration, infiltration, draining, buildering, unauthorised spelunking, urban adventuring, underground parties, etc.) as well as the more intangible themes of localization of heritage, political subversion, critical spatial practice and “alternative” community construction and identification. But I wasn’t the first. As early as the 1980s, the term “hacking” was applied first to physical space by the Technology Hackers Association at MIT who learnt to pick locks and infiltrated the steam tunnels underneath the university. Students began climbing rooftops on campus, conducting freshman on what is called The Orange Tour. Only later was the term appropriated by the computing community. As Löwgren writes, “the word ‘hack’ was used to refer to… practical jokes or stunts. Its meaning shifted to the technology needed to perform the prank, and later came to mean a clever technical solution in general”.

The 7^th entry under the term “hacker” in the New Hacker’s Dictionary defines a hacker as “one who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations”, importantly pointing out the physical foundations of the art.

Place

Hackers

We worked for hours into the night, checking the walls for hidden tunnels to gain access to the bunker and crawled out some hours later covered in mud, tumbling in front of two large security cameras. Figuring we had already been seen and praying that no one was watching them, we pushed forward, all scared witless but determined to know what was contained within. Alan Rapp writes in his MA thesis that the practice of urban exploration “provides a tart reminder that the areas that we have regular access to are not just quotidian, but also normative, if not repressive. The patterning that we can infer from the sanctioned environment is absent from the spaces that urban explorers go; they have been deprogrammed”. In the same way the “the techniques dérive and détournement offer the possibility to explore spaces in new ways, and to rearrange existing aesthetic elements into new forms of expression”, urban exploration fits geographer Alistair Bonnett’s description of offering “a new form of geographical investigation that can enable the revolutionary reappropriation of the landscape”.

But while the organization and politicisation of the practice may be novel, a question remains whether the practice itself actually is. Urban exploration, though it looks similar to the dérive, or surrealist parodies, has learned from the successes and failures of preceding critical spatial practices, leading to the creation of a network that is truly horizontally structured, without leadership and completely decentralized, while adopting an opaque public image of apolitical benignity, at times even presented as a type of heroic preservationism. Urban exploration, as a result of this decentralised power structure and well-groomed public image, is political in action but not in assertion, rooted in freedom of personal choice that comes across as what I see increasingly as libertarian in ideology aligned with the work of Wikileaks and individual anarchists. As Marc Explo recently told me on a trespass into the quarries of Paris, “I don’t need anyone to tell me that I am free. I prove that I am free everyday by going wherever I want. If I want to drink wine on top of Notre Dame, I do that, if I want to throw a party underground, I do that.” The impetus to do so becomes even stronger when we feel excluded from the government decision making process that we are paying for. And so, as Marc Explo asserts, where right are not given, they are simply taken.

Information

Not offered

As Bonnett again points out, we tend “…to assign creative spatial behaviour to performance artists and other specialists in provocation.” He writes that he feels these groups somehow owned “the subversive imagination” but on closer inspection sees that “ordinary urban behaviour fairly sizzles with errant activities…” Indeed, as spectacular as urban exploration and infiltration may seem, it’s simply an act of walking, climbing, inspecting and recording, activities which are far from spectacular and certainly do not hold the same glamour that is assigned to the consumption of the records produced by these activities. Organized transgressions against normative daily behaviour, what Oli Mould and I have termed urban subversions are in fact rarely riotous.

Creative resistance may take the form of refusing to move in places where you are expected to, such as in a flash mob event where large groups of coordinated participants freeze in unison in public spaces designed for movement or in rural areas designated private property where groups such as the Ramblers Association of Britain hold yearly ‘Forbidden Britain’ mass trespasses, a simple act of walking somewhere you are not supposed to. Some spatial incursions into places do not even take place physically, such as Trevor Paglen’s visual trespasses onto United States military property through the telephoto lens of a camera, or his more recent work photographing US spy satellites that supposedly do not exist. Like many other activities, urban exploration, while conceptually provocative, is almost dull in practice, with many participants refusing to even acknowledge deeper implications. “Gary” told after reading some of my writing that, “what you do Brad, it’s just words, this doesn’t have anything to do with anything”.  I can’t fault “Gary” for preferring action over words.

Words

Into action

Clearly, in an existential libertarianism framework where “freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you”, the desire to explore unseen space could be seen as a reaction to a growing existential angst in urban inhabitants. I see place hacking as a proportional response the the closure of the majority of urban space in combination with the blatant and frivolous waste of of tax money constructing structures like secret nuclear fallout bunkers designed to shelter only the corrupt government that created the potential of nuclear attack in the first place. And like Assange, I say hey, keep building that shit, keep wasting our money. In fact, keep trying to patrol and lock it up. We will be right behind you to liberate that space for absurdity and play. Your move.

Just words

This posting is dedicated to the kids who have been protesting to be heard and fighting the police in the streets of London this week. Apathetic generation indeed. Solidarity!

–Hunter S. Thompson, Playboy Magazine, 1974, discussing drug use as edgework

Keep looking

Edgework was a term first used by gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson in his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to describe the necessity some people find in pushing boundaries to find fulfillment. The idea is to work as close to the “edge” as one can without getting cut (or at least not too deeply). For Thompson, this meant putting himself in perilous situations such as doing ethnographic research with the notorious Hell’s Angels Biker Gang, ingesting various intoxicants to the point of near overdose or taking drugs of unknown origin in unexpected combinations.

The term edgework was appropriated by the socialist Stephen Lyng as a blanket term for anyone who “actively seeks experiences that involve a high potential for personal injury or death.” In his 1996 article Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking (expanded in 2004 as an edited book), Lyng goes on to explain edgework as a negotiation between “life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, and sanity and insanity”.

Relatively conscious (photo by Otter, Yaz and Goblinmerchant)

It seems to me that most urban explorers not only feel the need to test those limits, but to push them. We find those opportunities in drain systems, where the obvious risk comes from flooding and drowning to abandoned buildings which have both short term (collapse) and long term (respiratory problems, cancer etc.) negative impacts on our bodies. Many urban explorers also frequent high places where falling is always a possibility. In these locations we are free to do our edgework, pushing these boundaries by hanging from cranes, balancing on edges of long drops, precariously tiptoeing over weak floors and scrambling under collapsing roofs.

Edging (image courtesy of nocturn.es)

In wider society, inevitably connected to the concept of “liability”, is the notion that these activities are trangressive. UrbEx, like street art, skateboarding and parkour, is a practice which reappropriates urban space for an unintended or unexpected use that may result in bodily harm and one of the common reactions to people choosing to take unnecessary risks is, of course, suspicion that these people are “out of place”. But as Christopher Stanley has written, “these subcultural events [could] assume the status of resistant practices not in terms of ideology but rather in terms of alternative narratives of dissensus representing possible moments of community.”

Sinking feeling

As Lyng rightly points out later in his article, “risk taking is necessary for the well-being of some people” as individuals work to “develop capacities for competent control over environmental objects” (see Klausner 1968) inspiring edgeworkers to sometimes speak of a feeling of “oneness” with the object or environment while undertaking these risks.

I know that the places where I feel most embedded in the “fabric” are places where I have taken risks. In those places, I have bonded not only with Lyng’s “object and environment” but also with my friends who shared in those risks.

Alternative cathedral use, Paris (image courtesy of Marc Explo)

The desires to explore for the sake of exploring, to take risks for the sake of the experience, with little thought to the “outcome”, is something that runs deep in us when we are children. Urban explorers are, in one sense, rediscovering and forging these feelings of unbridled play, of useless wandering, of trivial conversation and of spontaneous encounter, all of which lead to the creation of very thick bonds between fellow explorers who use play as a way “to de-emphasize the importance of work and consumption and their pervasive monetary components.”

These explorations bond people in an emotive embrace, tendrils of affect conjured by shared fear and excitement, experiences that have become increasingly hard to find in many modern city spaces which Guy Debord argues “eliminate geographical distance only to produce internal separation.”

Perched

Despite the ways edgework may be seen as trangressive, the empowering and inspiring process of undertaking edgework is exactly what is lacking from many people’s lives in global cities. Edgework may in this sense be seen  healing rather than severing, a hot blade that melts. Physical human connections through shared experiences of peaked emotions build stronger bonds of community, and I am proud to belong to this tribe of urban bodhisattvas.

Tribe

Vision

3am. Antwerp. Pissing down rain. Lovingly cared for yet hopelessly abandoned, the Antwerp metro never came to be. Halfway down the 30 meter drop into the network, my hands burning down the slick rope, stomach twisted in knots, fear welled up in my throat with my held breath, I already know that I am in love. It’s that feeling that you have known each other for ages, finishing each other’s sentences, laughing until we cry about the absurdity of it all. That’s the moment that I knew you and I were destined for this encounter.

Lemon

Drop

The love affair with places begins as a tumultuous panicked grab, pinned against the wall in a desperate attempt to hold on to something we both know is sacred. The problem with smooth, clean glass, polished metal and concrete that there is nothing to hold on to, fingernails scratching in a desperate attempt to make a mark.

Here I find chunks of concrete delicately separated by little tendrils of green vines which grab at my legs as I repel down the wall, terrified that the rope hanging over the edge above is fraying against the sharp concrete edge of the drop zone. But she wouldn’t let that happen to me, she is already too curious to let this pass.

When I my feet touch the ground again, wet and smiling, I look to either side and realise that we have entered a new world, a world all our own. That is how I begin this love affair, with a tacit acknowledgement that neither I, or this beautiful unfinished beauty, will ever tell anyone about this love affair.

Conjunction

Junction

And yet those pictures in the scrapbook of our memories are just too much. All those photos of us laughing and playing together, falling in love for the first time. It was all so new, so pure. Not only do I need to experience that again, I need to share it. I need to scream out loud to the world that someday, somewhere, I found something sacred. So listen up planet earth: she was modern and stoic, sleek and brutal but knew sadness and tribulation just like us. I love her dearly and fear, above all else, that this was a one night stand.

Looking

For Love

Are we at the top of the ladder or at the bottom of a new ladder?    -Silent Motion

Saddle up for

On our recent ProHobo trip into Europe, lovingly (if in the end somewhat flippantly) referred to as 3.0: ProhoBohemia, we pulled back from the infrastructural infiltrations that have become our daily grind here in London and went looking for ruins again. Coming back to ruins was like returning to a pleasant dream.

Magical realism

In our hired car, which we intended to push 3300 miles into Poland, our most ambitious trip to date, we cut through the corner of France as we have twice before and headed into Belgium. After a brief climb up a notable public building in a major capital city, we crept into an old train yard to spend the night. As you do.

Industrial nights

We woke up early full of enthusiasm and over the next week, we moved through Europe like a storm with an efficiency built over the course of three trips to the continent over the past year. We knew the sites we wanted to hit, we knew how to avoid security where necessary, we knew what to pack and, more importantly, what not to. We had, in fact, taken being temporary nomadic vagabonds to a whole new level. During the trip, we read passages from Tim Cresswell’s book The Tramp in America where he discusses the work of homeless-turned-Chicago-School-sociologist Ben Anderson. As we came to the realization that we could all likely keep this nomadic lifestyle going for a very long time (if not forever) I couldn’t help but think that we were working the other way around – there was a real possibility, is a real possibility that we could in fact drop it all and live like this indefinitely.

Probo

Looking for

Pure living

But the further East we went, the heavier our bourgeois baggage became. As we crossed the border into Poland, the car was filled with excited cheers quickly followed by confused murmurs. While the landscape here offered what we have come to expect from Europe – endless ruins – we found ourselves confronted with a place in which the relationship to derelict space was entirely different.

Secular

Imaginaries

Remembered

Here ruins were spaces not of bounded exclusion but of potential utilization. After driving for hours through a forest hunting for a soviet base called Keszwca Lesla, we arrived at 10pm to find rows of buildings, clearly Soviet-built, surrounding an undecipherable war memorial that looked like our standard fare with the addition of satellite dishes hanging off the sides of buildings. It seemed the local population here had turned this place into a summer holiday encampment after the collapse of the USSR and the abandonment of the base. Gangs of teenagers roamed the streets late at night in track suits and mullets, running in and out of the derelict buildings and bunkers. Inhabited buildings looked derelict, folding them right into the fabric of a lived landscape. There were no fences or security to be found, no rules, boundaries or exclusionary practices in evidence. It should have been paradise for us. Except that things felt different here.

Clearly

Something else

To be found

As we moved on from this site, we became more brazen, braving the sullen stares of thick-necked Polish men who could clearly throw us across a room to run in Soviet concrete blocks, shutters snapping. But what we captured in these places looked less like the western notions of the aesthetic sublime than we were accustomed to encountering and more like the war-ravaged Chechnyan ruins depicted in The 3 Rooms of Melancholia.

USSR

Afloat

No more

Site after site, I kept feeling that something was different here, something was missing here, but I couldn’t pinpoint it. It was something missing beyond a buoyant economy and door frames.

And then it hit me. It was nostalgia. As David Lowenthal writes, ‘nostalgia is memory with the pain removed.’ There wasn’t a hint of nostalgia to be found here. No one cared about stripping soviet blocks of all they were worth because they were still in pain here. It was probably, rather, a delicious catharsis to smash out those windows and excavate the rusting hunks of artillery from the ground.In the same way that we, in London, feel a need to write our own stories of places and to define our own boundaries for space, the Polish people who lived under communist control probably felt a need to assert their rights to newly reclaimed space by destroying the remnants of control that the Soviet Union has exerted over them for so many years. Like Scipio Africanis at the end of the 3rd Punic war, the only thing that would satisfy the pain of generations of struggle is to do everything possible to erase the memory of that pain, razing the buildings and sewing the Earth with salt.

The heritage manager in me is terrified by these ideas but the anthropologist and geographer in me tells me I have no right to dictate how others should interpret and interact with their places. We can’t know their memories; we can’t know their pain.

Pain

Lived

There a was a particular guilt that came with exploring Poland.  I think that guilt came from the clashing of different value systems in regards to derelict space. Perhaps it is an indication of a larger clash between capitalism and communism. Where east meets west, desire meets utility, nostalgia meets future promise and mobility meets placemaking. We all knew we brought the West with us and we all knew, deep down, that the social conditioning that resides in those templates can never be erased.

While we didn’t necessary find the ruins we were looking for in Poland, we did find a meeting point on that shifting frontier of Western values that is pushing its way inexorably East, met not with open arms but with suspicious stares. After what Poland has been through over the last 100 years, who can blame them?

Easterly

]]> http://www.placehacking.co.uk/2010/08/11/meeting-the-east/feed/ 1 http://www.placehacking.co.uk/2010/07/11/playing-with-power/ http://www.placehacking.co.uk/2010/07/11/playing-with-power/#comments Sun, 11 Jul 2010 20:39:58 +0000 Bradley L. Garrett http://hackingplace.com/?p=989 Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

-Kahlil Gibran

We are not depressed; we’re on strike. For those who refuse to manage themselves, “depression” is not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a sidestep towards a political disaffiliation. From then on medication and the police are the only possible forms of conciliation. This is why the present society doesn’t hesitate to impose Ritalin on its over-active children, or to strap people into life-long dependence on pharmaceuticals, and why it claims to be able to detect “behavioural disorders” at age three. Because everywhere the hypothesis of the self is beginning to crack.

- The Invisible Committee

Prison

Exploration is the only medication my body subscribes to. My trembling fingertips reach for the sewer keys on my way out the door and my bowels twist in satisfaction. This addiction began as research, then I went native, then I lost my way. My love for ruins, my love for old stuff, slipped quietly into the present without even a little wink to let me know what was happening. A life spent looking for material traces of the past morphed into a series of events connected only by my churning belly that vaguely resembles art or a job in construction.

Please don’t expect me to say I found my way again because I didn’t. I was at Tate Britain the other day listening to Joseph Heathcott talk about digging through a photo archive. He said that as he dug, he became more and more confused, buried in images that he didn’t know how to contextualize. When he reached the bottom of the box of images, all he could see was himself.

We explore not to find places but to find meaning. Place hacking is only partly about architecture, history, dereliction or photography. It is about reminding ourselves what in life is worth experiencing. Our explorations embody a consistency between action and thought where what we dream becomes real. The addiction that comes along with that is the point at which your synapses start firing in new directions, making connections you didn’t know existed or that you lost somewhere along the way. It’s the point at which you realize you never want to work again, the instant at which you understand you never want to own a home, the moment when the revelation occurs that the terrorist threat is as non-existent now as it was in 1972 and 1023 and that most of the world, despite what the media would have you believe, is full of love and attachment, not hate and fear.

Thinking of you

I have lost my way. I hardly know the (a?) government exists. I have forgotten about commitments. I have widened my focus to the point that I can barely see anything not in front of me and yet eschew almost nothing, an optic of total stimulation. I spend all day with my friends. I am in love with every moment. I know my neighbourhood, my city, inside out. I just described childhood.

We have built up a shell around ourselves to defend our bodies and minds from the barrage of victimisations they are subjected to. We are left staring stupidly at what it is we are being asked to do, wondering again and again “is this it?” Joshua Ferris, in his novel And Then We Came to the End sums it up in this tidy moment seen through the eyes of Carl, a copywriter for an ad agency: “Directly to his right, something curious was going on. Two men in tan uniforms were hosing down the alleyway – a small dead-end loading dock between our building and the one next to it. Carl watched them at their work. White water shot from their hoses. They moved the spray around the asphalt. The pressure looked mighty, for the men gripped their slender black guns, the kind seen at a manual car wash, with both hands. They lifted the guns up and sprayed the dumpster and the brick walls as well. They spot cleaned, they moved refuse around with the stream. For all inert purposes, they were cleaning an alleyway. An alleyway! Cleaning it! Carl was mesmerized….good god, was work so meaningless? Was life so meaningless?”

We have become desensitized to the everyday. We have become part of the spectacle, ignoring emotional engagement with the world because we are so alienated by it. We formulate emotional shells that lock out beauty as well as pain and stop us from taking action. We are left in a state of perpetual isolation, mouths open, ready to pour in pills to fix what we lost. We are left inert, flaccid, empty. As Raoul Vaneigem once said, “people who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.” Raoul’s thesis is outlined succinctly in the following diagram.

I suggest a different sort of medication to cure that corpse-filled mouth. Explore everything, shatter the shell and live free.

Dreamers

get vertical

Playfully

Move beyond your conceptions of exploration. Explore your mind, explore the dance floor, explore your broken family that your are ignoring while you read this drivel. Move into abandoned buildings, take locks off of doors, turn CCTV camera so they only see each other, light off fireworks randomly. Scream at people in the streets, talk to strangers, photograph police. Stop paying the state until they give something back other than the promise of a good pension if you join the military and avoid dying through war X. Take what’s in front of you and pour your heart into it. And if you have to quit your job to make that happen, then go. But do it in style – run out screaming into the sky to invoke your freedom. Even better, abseil out of your window and rappel to freedom.

Play is power. Freedom is power.

We don't need 4th of July or 5th of November as an excuse to explode things in celebration (Marc Explo).

Our work ethic

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]]> http://www.placehacking.co.uk/2010/07/11/playing-with-power/feed/ 4 http://www.placehacking.co.uk/2010/06/16/cavendish-crematorium/ http://www.placehacking.co.uk/2010/06/16/cavendish-crematorium/#comments Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:46:17 +0000 Bradley L. Garrett http://bradleygarrett.com/?p=908 The Silken Hotel wasn’t open yet. We were standing there at the hoarding, Silent Motion and I, with that jelly of a man in his yellow vest pointing his finger accusingly, shaking with rage in a kind of mild convulsion, the orbed camera behind him spinning around and zooming in on our faces, like an eyeball rolling back in a head, making the convulsion a complete yet disembodied visceral experience for this lamentably flabby being.

The sergeant arrived, blue lights painting the walls, tires screeching. He almost rolled out of his car “UrbEx huh? Yeah, we get your kind around here sometimes. Tell you what, see that boarded up building across the street there? Let’s see if you can get into that one!” We meekly accepted the challenge as they frantically tried to fix the zip ties on the Heras fencing we had snapped off in our aborted miniature vertical scramble.

Challenge Issued

Across the street, we found that this building, Cavendish House it was called, was boarded up exceptionally well, stone gargoyles on patrol in moody up-lighting, three stone Furies screaming insults at us as we hung from ledges over the road, tugging on widows.

Stoney stares

Furies

With a pop, a seal on one gave and Silent Motion swung it parallel to the floor. We dove through headfirst and when the window closed with a sharp bang, we were surrounded by silence. I crawled to the dirty pane on the other side of the room and peeked across the road. The sergeant was there, his belly still threatening to rip his utility vest in two. He was smiling, staring at the building and smiling. Creepy fuck.

Popped

Marauder

The exploration proceeded as we opened doors and windows for the next team of rogue adventurers, torches moving around like little bugs on walls looking for a hole to hide in. Silent motion found a generator running and hooked up to a small TV. He powered it up and we spent an hour watching an old Bollywood classic, a brief respite from the endless stairs. Room after room of blue and orange light comforted us behind the boarded up first floor. Unlikely to see, impossible to catch, invincibility ensued. Down or up? Up.

Dance music invoked

Creepy

The top of the first building (indeed we now realized there were three of these concrete monoliths, these plywooded Thatcherite government lumps of cement) had a roof that sat level with some office blocks. I peeked in the clean windows across, imaging the illicit affairs in office chairs that took place during our work hours, suits humping secretaries and capitalism. A blue church to our left looked like a plastic Disneyland air-filled jump house, replete with nostalgia for the abbey it was until Henry VIII seized it and ravaged it like a conquered Irish queen in the 16th Century.

Little things

Pink

The millennium eye approached us on the other side, that little monument we all love and love to say we hate. “Ride on that thing? Never!” Its millennium glow bounced off of the Thames, offering no apologies for its slow creep our direction. We did handstands, climbed radio antennae, pulled ourselves around in monkeyed feats of post-adolescent strength. We lost track of time. We didn’t care. Damn the horror of the night buses, we’ll ride ‘em!

The Furies descent

Eye

The lustful runs across the roof deteriorated eventually into a pink sky, and we knew that the time for morning coffee and a long walk to Elephant and Castle would soon be upon us. Time to go down. And down. And down. The building suddenly became distinctly subterranean.

Nuances of texture

It was wet here. It stunk like old dog, soaked in a summer-time sprinkler and shaking all over the children who uniquely appreciated the horrible musky shower, full of love. The empty corridors offered room for thought and made my stomach tense up, knot and twist, crying foul at the late (early?) hour. One turn revealed a large room with a safe, a thick door with twisty dials and an unsettling echo. We spun the lock, robbing the history from the place.

Sort of safe

The watery passage continued until we could stand it no longer, blistering feet soaking in the liquid filth. We went for the ProEx shot to cap off the night, twisted and intoxicated, drunk on our own success at pissing on every wall in this building. Lighting was essential, we decided, draining camera batteries and making film strips roll back on themselves in our multiple attempts to get it right.

Pr0 Shadows

Suddenly, the sharp slap of metal on tarmac stopped us cold. Voices. A quick retreat. How could it be, this UrbEx fortress infiltrated? The retreat continued into a side room where we sat, a gentle humming behind us. Suddenly, Silent Motion sprung up, hitting the hum with his torch and there is was – a meat grinder, working with no electricity to speak of, begging for fodder. I screamed a little, quickly covering my mouth to stifle the alarm, pride on the floor. The voices were closer now, finally clear enough to make out the distinct sound of someone saying “they’re over here.” I knew that voice.

Ground

We fled down the hallway once more, trying to keep the drips and splashes from reverberating, a considering how long the water ripples that announced our direction of departure would continue their hideous radial momentum. The smells of the place began to change as we moved. It smelled… like burning. When we found out why, it was already too late. The swollen bellied sergeant and the jelly-man sidekick were on either side of us, laughing as we both stared in horror at the door to what looked to be a huge furnace.

Burned

“Welcome to Cavendish Crematorium!” The sergeant yelled, spit streaming from his plump pink lips. “The last stop for nosy UrbExers!” Next to me, Silent Motion sighed, staring into the murky water.

The exhibit was broken into 3 parts. In the first, we displayed 10 photographs from Mike Seaborne, a photographer at the Museum of London, depicting the Olympic Waterscapes prior to construction of the stadium site. Opposite these, we displayed a number of photographs from our own journeys (undertaken as a geographic triathlon) up, down and around these waterscapes documenting the changes taking place there.

Finally, we made a 20 minute film about the past, present and future of these olympic waterscapes which I am proud to present for the first time here!

Here are some pictures from the exhibit. All photographs are by Danny Pack.

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Please also visit the project website