Time is a rubbery thing

The last few months, I’ve been rather entrenched in writing my PhD. With 5 chapters now done and under review, things are well on their way. However, this time for reflection during my self-imposed exile here in the Mojave Desert has also been fruitful for other writing projects, including 2 book chapters, 5 journal articles and 3 web publications. This work has pulled my attention from Place Hacking for the moment. However, I thought it might be worth rounding up what’s gone down lately in this scattershot update.

First, I was invited to write an op-ed piece for the Domus architecture and design magazine on the fragmentation of urban exploration. Essentially the article is about how an unlikely mix of media attention and marketing exploitation threatens to polarize an otherwise apolitical practice. The article can be found here. Immediately after publication, Control from the LTV Squad in New York City posted a great response which has sparked renewed discussion about the social and political salience of urban exploration as a practice. That can be found here.

In a more academic context, a few weeks ago Luke Bennett published an article in Environment & Planning D: Society and Space entitled Bunkerology – a case study in the theory and practice of urban exploration. Stuart Elden and Deborah Cowen were kind enough to allow me to respond to the article on the Society and Space blog. That response can be found here. Bennett then replies in an excellent post which is here.

Finally, Otter at SilentUK has uploaded a trailer for the film “Crack the Surface” which myself and JD at sub-urban are co-producing with him. More exciting than tinfoil in the microwave.

All and all, it’s been a heavy few months for urban exploration but I am heartened by the new debates and discussions sparking everywhere about the practical and theoretical issues around the practice. As I wrote recently to Snappel, I think that it’s really vital those of us who are willing to engage with our practice on more than a superficial level do so and, as such, I am really encouraged by the thoughtful responses from both Control and Bennett.

Urban exploration is at a crossroads right now and it is up to us which path we take. As it should be clear from these publications, I for one am not content to allow herds of ruin fetishists, bitter armchair commentators or corporations define what history will see us as. Urban exploration seethes with potential as a critical spatial practice at a time when space is rapidly constricting under the control of pseudo-apocalyptic forces manufacturing fear and distraction daily to keep desire and dissent at bay. It is my hope that through these publications and exchanges, the potential for urban exploration to sap those illusions is slowly being unleashed.

It’s time fellow earthlings. Smash and grab it. Explore everything.

With love from Sin City, USA

Share/Bookmark

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.

Choose a quiet place, a ruin,
a house no more a house,
under whose stone archway I stood
one day to duck the rain.

The roofless floor, vertical
studs, eight wood columns
supporting nothing,
two staircases careening to nowhere,
all make it seem

a sketch, notes to a house, a three-
dimensional grid negotiating
absences, an idea
receding into indefinite rain,

or else that idea
emerging, skeletal
against the hammered sky, a
human thing, scoured seen clean
through from here to an iron heaven.

A place where things
were said and done,
there you can remember
what you need to remember.
Melancholy is useful. Bring yours.

There are no neighbors to wonder
who you are,
what you might me doing
walking there,
stopping now and then

to touch a crumbling brick
or stand in a doorway
framed by the day.
No one has to know you
thing of another doorway

that framed the rain or news of war
depending on which way you faced.
You think of sea-roads and earth-roads
you traveled once, and always
in the same direction: away.

You think
of a woman, a favorite
dress, your old father’s breasts
the last time you saw him, his breath,
brief, the leaf

you’ve torn from a vine and which you hold now
to your cheek like a train ticket
or a piece of cloth, a little hand or a blade -
it all depends
on the course of your memory.

It’s a place
for those who own no place
to correspond to ruins in the soul.
It’s mine.
It’s all yours.

___________________

For Toby Butler

–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

We live a free life. Very few people can say that.
–Marc Explo

Stretching

Following from Rapp, where does disappointment start? Why did we have expectations to that lead to anxiety to begin with? Are disappointment and anxiety internally or externally imposed conditions? Finally, what is the organic link between urban exploration and infiltration?

In the course of the following visual spectacle, I present two important case studies: an exploration of a derelict London Tube station paired with a live infiltration of a number of Paris Metro stations sprinkled with a sugar coated topping of French cathedral brachiation. The link between these seemingly disperate case studies in time-wastery, I will suggest, is desire.

Fragments

Of Time

Less interesting

Our desire to seek ruins is as obvious as the motivations behind the expeditions. We seek them to find pieces of what was, was is, what could have been. The failure of planning, execution and participation found in this empty station is comical and sad but not necessarily disappointing. We assure ourselves that the only thing that could make the situation more amusing would be if a train were suddenly to pass though, disrupting our notions of what we thought we barely understood. By the time we leave, we are pretty sure something happened. We can see it on our skin, taste it in our teeth, wash it out of our clothes but the experience remains so ephemeral that to speak about it is almost blasphemy. The satisfaction that comes with that feeling is almost as wonderful as the peals of laughter that ring out from our throats as we leap from the back of the speeding train into the dark tunnels, drunk on the screams of platform perambulators who are sure that we are the demons they heard about on the 10 o’clock news.

The multiplication of the third rail

The eminent anthropologist Marc Augé is disappointed with our play space. Throughout his entire book on ‘non-places’, poor Augé is a victim of one postmodern monstrosity after another, striking out at remnants of what remains with a panicked grab, decrying the end of history, implying that there is no place for us in a world of machines, of mobility, of ‘urban concentrations, movements of population, and the multiplication of what we call “non-places”, in opposition to the sociological notion of place…”. But as Alastair Bonnett writes, this ‘sociological’ notion of place is was a false consciousness imposed by bureaucratic minds ‘colonized by the language of academia’ be begin with.

Your illusion

I contend that place is what you make it and the responsibility to make space viable, vibrant and interesting, the responsibility to create places of desire is only limited by our individual and collective capacities for love and the level of our energies devoted to giving a shit. As Sartre has taught us, since we all share in the same situation, we must embrace our awesome freedoms, deliberately rejecting any (false) promise of authoritative moral determination. Freedom is not given, it is obtained. I hear Marc Explo teaches a seminar on the rooftops of Paris with beer in hand on this very topic.

7.5%

My comments are not intended to be solely derogatory. I am not suggesting that a vision of life which is guided by another person’s ideals is inauthentic. Indeed we are all, to some degree or another, remixing, reusing, embracing, contesting and disputing all that has come before. Individuals that I quote, in speech and text, have quoted others before me, a lineage stretching back as far as communicative origins. This continuum of thought and energy should be celebrated with toasts to the heavens for the graces of wisdom. We have inherited more knowledge, more beauty, more potential, than any human beings who have come before. To suggest that that knowledge and the possibilities that cause fragmentation of self awareness are disappointing is in itself disappointing. Join the party Augé, I have a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau waiting. Make no mistake, it will be messy, it will be confusing, it will be the ruin and the construction site, Battersea Power Station and Heathrow Terminal 5. It will be the informal state of constant becoming but ‘to embrace the chaos is not to slide toward entropy but to emerge into an energy like the stars’.

Forming

Spontanous combustion

While we can all clearly see that within a capitalist system, the invitation to co-produce place often has a price or that the output of that production is expected to become commodified, we may choose to operate outside of that system. Maybe that operation requires giving up watching East Enders tonight. Maybe it requires operating at a loss. Maybe it means writing a shitty Ph.D. because you were in a sewer instead of resting up for the next wrestling match with Microsoft Word. Fuck it, people begin participating in informal modes of cultural production because they want human bonds and community to take precedence over outcome. People want becoming over being. People want the freedom of the present! ‘On the other hand, anyone trapped in the anemic and atomized everyday routine of our residential deserts might doubt that such determination could be found out there anymore. Reconnecting with such gestures, buried under years of normalized life, is the only practical means of not sinking down with the world, while we dream of an age that is equal to our passions.’

Marinetti

As the Invisible Committee reminds us, the primary component of that freedom is not just enthusiasm but passion. And the passion for joy, for bonding, for shared experience and community goes beyond the specifics of the practice (read: UrbEx). The one thing ALL explorers of space share is a passion for life, ‘an exuberant and playful negation of the alienation and exclusion provoked through axiomatic consumeristic machinations.’ And here, we begin to see the contemporary critique of traditional notions of exploration in the rejection of the idea that only some can be involved or that a passion for adventure can only be satiated through grand international expeditions. Urban exploration teaches us that those stories, those adventures, are found in our backyards also – if you choose to chase them.

The Rabbit Hole

Follows no cardinals

If this sounds polemic, that’s because it is. I am tired of disappointment, resentment and critique being the only accepted modes of critical academic engagement. We do what we do because we love it. It produces nothing. It hurts no one. It endangers our lives. That is our choice and no one else’s. And in expectation of the showering critique, the next person who tells me that my happiness is subject to an economic audit can keep chewing on that corpse because my fingers are in my ears.

There's no such thing as ghosts!

Barthes writes that pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced and defeated, in favour of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, etc. It seems that our society refuses (and ends up ignoring) bliss to such a point that it can produce only epistemologies of the law. Well if that’s the case then fuck the law. I never consented to it’s construction in the first place and I am pretty sure that democracy isn’t supposed to resemble a Mafia extortion scheme. But don’t take that as a threat, it is rather a populist invitation to playfully reinterpret what the state holds so sacred, it’s an invitation to critically and playfully engage with the humiliating notions of ‘morality’ and ‘progress’ that dehumanize, commodify and deterritorialize our places of occupation to create what Guy Debord called “an impotent utopia of pretensions and complicities.” We intend to end the humiliation of a sham democracy by resituating ‘strategic sites of power beyond the depersonalized representation of an impotent democracy and back into the multitude.’ Following Laurie Weeks’ Theory of Total Humiliation: “we don’t erect monolithic reified barriers against the humiliation; rather we welcome it, embrace it; then everyone wants to fuck us, for mysterious reasons.”

Fuck us

So that we come full circle here, what does an exploration of a derelict London Tube station paired wimh a live infiltration of a number of Paris Metro stations and some rogue climbing of outdated religious architecture have in common? The answer is desire. We desire, and take, opportunities to ‘slip into a paradoxical position between the “real “and “not-real” in that it incorporates “real” words, gestures, hopes and intentions, that are framed as “unreal” through playful context.’

_________________________

We play out of desire

Desire sprouts love

Love is like oxygen

Sloping

The blood bubble

It was a night to remember, wandering around in a team of 5 dressed as construction workers. Even at 2am, the yellow vest and hard hat that signifies us part of an invisible working class, rendering accessible the cavernous depths and dizzying heights of the city never ceases to amaze. I find it fascinating how many people in London ignore these hidden verticalities of the city – not just in a physical but in a social sense. People don’t touch spaces above and below because that is not where their class belongs. The middle class, true to its name, moves horizontally.

Tonight was a drift tonight tinged with a particularity lovely glow, plans of sewers flooded by rain landed us underground where trains sped by as we ran down the tunnel laughing. Our desires for a complete and situated urban verticality led us from low to high in search for adventure, insatiable in our lust to escape a capitalist suicide by instalment plan, spontaneously mapping sites of urban tenderness one after another.

Tender

That night, we once again forsook the pact the modernism asked us to make, seeing it as yet another impotent utopia, and found our own phantasms, cultivated during chemical visions in the sands of the Black Rock Desert, the swirling concrete flow  and smooth-waxed rails of skateboard parks, in the melted organic mental materialities of peyote festivals.

We weren’t really resisting anything because the resistance would eventually “turn to irony, irony to realism, realism to pragmatism, and pragmatism to solace in spectacular visions, consumerist monsters, development triumphs, and nostalgic dreams.” Perhaps, Vidler tells us, in his article Air War and Architecture, “such anxieties, brought once again to the surface, will stimulate new resistances, desperately needed right now – resistances that will not take the critical understanding of the past as mere pessimism or wrongful authority, but as salutary instruments against a globalising development frenzy that insists on burying history” (Viddler 2010 :39). All true, yet that as we rise and rise again to meet this city in all of its grandeur, in all of our might, these histories can’t be buried because we are building them one exploration at a time, a history of hidden dreams, of decay and of class and capital in all of its tropes and treats. And that is a geography of love.

Tropes

Treats

With love, ever-renewable

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/2010/06/16/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.

Clearly not accurate

Above me, the heavy round metal doors into this underworld shake with a pinging metallic scream that reverbs down these watery tunnels, slowly fading into a seemingly endless succession of dull thuds that migrate down the street above us, some racing black cab speeding a jilted lover home from the pub after the last trains have stopped running. This overworld scenario interests me far more interpreted from below the undercarraige of the cab, little bits of shit-sticky mud dislodging themselves  from the freshly-pried manhole cover edges, plopping onto my bald head. Cue a shuddering shake, aural spell broken.

Water races around my feet faster than the cab, pinning my waders in a strange plastic comfort to my legs, little bits of used toilet paper and raw sewage which we lovingly call “the fresh” blocked by my PVC barrier, pushing around me angrily in an effort to make it down this old river and into the Thames like salmon swimming not toward their spawning ground but the river Styx where the boat will sink halfway across and they will float lazily to the bottom, never to move again. As drainers, we learn to love the waste just as we learn to love the trash left behind in the streets of London at 4am on a Friday night. It is the detritus of passion passion for life that staves off our impending deaths, as Michael Dibdin writes in Cosi Fan Tutti:

This place reeks of mortality.
I thought it reeked of rancid oil and bad drains.
It comes to the same thing in the end.

At some point in London’s Victorian Age, the separation between “river” and “sewer” became blurred. Technically, I am standing in the River Westbourne which no one but sewer workers and daring drainers have seen for a hundred and fifty years. Despite the fact that no one has drank the water from this river since the 1400s, it remains a vital waterway of this city, a throbbing vein of live humanness, rushing underneath our unknowing feet as we run to work on the pavement above. Seeing it is a reminder that, as Gay Hawkins writes, “our rituals of cleansing and disposal are enfolded with this landscape, our personal secrets are implicated in the public secret of sanitation.” This misadventure into the bureau of public secrets is the newest in our chain of London infiltrations, our most recent attempts to make sure that this city is documented from every possible angle through experience, fear and love. Just as I wouldn’t wipe the ass of somebody else’s baby, only London’s sewers interest me.

We view the stigma of what is flushes on these journeys both literally and socially. Our preferred mode of access to these hidden waterways is hiding in plain sight and the classism of London society works in our favour, with both police and the public ignoring everyone dressed in high-vis and a hard hat, benign foreign workers who make their living in places where no “respectable” Londoner would ever step foot. Our team of 4 digs into their toolbelts of large screwdriver, t-shaped keys and crowbars to break the seals into underdiscovered territory, finding what the city forgot existed, our brazen crew seemingly as hidden as this river when we actually look like we work for a living.

Cracked

Pull this bird

The addiction to infiltration does not lay in the adrenaline rush of the experience. Infiltration creates unwieldy complications, difficult mental junctions and moments of crises that confuse, inspire and complicate our existence. My second identity as the underclass, the role that I play to gain access to urban secrets, is slowly becoming my primary identity. My clothing, my language, my social class, all now defined by my behaviour “on the job.” Leaving this tunnel late on this night (early the next morning?), we were greeted by “real” workers at a tube station who tossed slight nods our direction, eyeing us with confused interest, suspicion, respect and likely some revulsion given we were covered in underground wetness that smelled even worse than the rank pub toilet across the street.

We have been systematically exploring London’s subterranean features for the last few months, cracking every stormdrain, abandoned railway, cable tunnel and sewer we can find in the city – elements of this urban environment that Steven Smith, in his book Underground London, calls “London’s best kept secrets.” We know why. Not only are they some of the most beautiful and surreal places in the city, they are also the most foul.

Pour your heart out

The sewer is a place for alterier cartography, a place where no one may reside but where one can pass through, cameras capturing endless angles of the oldly new, remapping our mental conceptions of where the verticality of the city begins and ends. Our embodied experiences move like the stinking water, shifting from one chamber to the next, chalk marks on walls marking our way home, level after level of underground run-off continually sinking into what we imagine to be an endless succession of metal grates covered in dried up cakes of unknown substances, unidentifiable pieces of fabric and scraps of food. Matthew Gandy, in his article The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space contends that “by tracing the history of water in urban space, we can begin to develop a fuller understanding of changing relations between the body and urban form under the impetus of capitalist urbanization.” Pretty sure he wrote that line from the Paris sewers.

Alterier chamber

We trace these cultural lines and flows, finding here that nature and culture drift at the same rate in an interdependent foulness. London’s legendary sewer rats are in full effect tonight, running from us in a terrified scamper, climbing the round slippery walls of the tunnel in inexplicable ways and disappearing into holes we can’t even see into. I want to explore what they can see. At one point, some sort of nest is disturbed and they came at our lights, their little claws feet screeching all around us. Staying in the middle of the slimy sticky mud, shit and runoff where the rats won’t swim was clearly our best option.

We spent 4 hours sliding around these chambers, building up our immune system with aching stomachs upon exit and mouth sores to come. As we emerged I felt, as I often have, that tonight was another attempt to document my own disappearance in the course of making the city reappear in alternative iterations. As I sink deeper into my PhD, I sink deeper in this city, still so in love that there isn’t even room for another human being. I can only hope that either I or the thesis emerges at the end of this torrid love affair, unsure I will survive the potential breakup. Until then.

Own the night.
Cherish these secrets.
Wield this power.
Love this life.

Explored

Beneath your pub crawl

More playful than righteous

________________________________________

This author’s endeavour should be to make the Past, the sense of all the dead Londons that have gone to the producing this child of all the ages, like a constant ground-bass beneath the higher notes of the Present.

-Ford Madox Ford, The Soul of London