LIQUID CITY_ excerpts

MARC ATKINS is a freelance photographer. He has exhibited across Europe and North America, and his images have been published in books and magazines world-wide.


IAIN SINCLAIR is the author of many books, including Downriver; Radon Daughters; White Chappell; Scarlet Tracings and Lights Out for the Territory.


excerpts & texts of interest (all texts are by Iain Sinclair unless mentioned)


_ All I can do is suggest scenarios. - Marc Atkins
_ I wanted a single sentence to contain everything I Knew.
_ He will 'print the darkness' and give it a stronger, more disquieting element.
_ By excluding inessentials, he allowed fiction to creep in at the back door.
_ ' I understand who I was'. It is our job, as predators who exploit the photographer's skill, to  
   come up with the fictions, essays, improvisations that will grant darkness a history and draw it,
   tentatively, towards the light.


_ Poems that failed the audition.
_ Shadows infecting a shoreline that resisted metaphor
_ The cutesy surrealism of the minor celebrity who is annoyed to be recognized and suicidal if
   ignored.


_ CONDEMN THE BUILDINGS NOT THE INHABITANTS - Graffiti on BLACKWALL TUNNEL


_ We puzzle over a laminated map which has been placed at the entrance to this tame forest 
   with the sole purpose of confusing pedestrians, by making them doubt all the instincts that
   have carried them so far. YOU ARE HERE ! 'I am not', you want to scream. "I never was. That  
   was another person with my name".   


_ We walk the neat avenues invigilating tombstones for names that might be incorporated into 
   future fictions.
_ He doesn't want to photograph anything that will still be there tomorrow.
_ How it was more pertinent to ask, could I write about Whitehead's artwork, dedicated to
   memory, committed to erasure?

_ A sense of the upriver suburbs that owed everything to an engagement with surrealism.
_ Achieve an impossible balance between the nightmare of existence and a vision of Eden.
_ I have always believed that bringing the best writers, the sharpest intelligences to any location
   alters it forever.
_ Prophetic fragments of poems left for an instant on black boards, before being wiped out.


ABSTRACT
This book impinges the factual and fictional interplay of London as a city. The Photographs of Marc Atkins creates the necessary fiction for Iain Sinclair to create a sublime journey through the latent and relatively unperceived view of London. Its murky, fancied, sudden and at times blatant with its loudness of expression. London melts poignantly through the Thames and has already started changing my clichéd viewpoint as a tourist. 

clipped FICTION

fiction can also mean something that existed yesterday but not today.
i drafted this notion into a set of a play like scenario where sections of soho acts as a stage.
emphasis would be to 
CAPTURE THE LOCALISED EPHEMERAL EVENTS and SUBSETS TO CREATE A FICTIONAL INTERPLAY.


SECOND Meeting - 5 November 2009
/ story boarding and drawing
/ emphasis on the players of the play within stage (soho)


references
BOOKS
_ Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges
_ Empire of Signs - Roland Barthes
_ The Power of Myth - Joseph Campbell
_ Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
_ The Medium is the Message - Marshall Mcluhan
_ Exit Utopia - Martin Van Schiak and Otakar Macel
_ Utopia Deferred: Writings from Utopie (1967-1978) - Jean Baudrillard
_ Superstudio: Life without Objects - Peter Lan
_ The Situationist City - Simon Sadler
_ The Quantum Self - Dinah Zohar
_ "Live Grams; Warp Lies" p.94 in Semiotext(e)/ARCHITECTURE - Hraztan Zeitlian


FILMS
_ Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989) - Wim Wenders
_ Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) - Bela Tarr
_ Play Time (1967) - Jacques Tati


// French Photographer - GEORGES ROUSSE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Rousse
// Russian Film maker - ANDREI TARKOVSKY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Tarkovsky
   (movies - STALKER, THE MIRROR, SACRIFICE)


pondering's  
people's clothes as objects; objectify them devoid of race, culture and ethnicity
moods are asymmetrical.
elongated elasticity (DRAWING) 

CLIPPED CITY

the clipped city as perceived represented through a collage to show renewed possibilities.

FIRST DISCUSSION with Stuart Munro_ Thursday 29 Oct 2009

/ the intention after the discussion was to create more innate values for the place and develop 

  appropriate language for notation.

/ to come with more precise or simply put the idea in 3 words.

references 

_ SCOPIC REGIMES OF MODERNITY - Martin Jays

_ the language and to notate drawings - John Cage - Daniel Libeskind (CHAMBER WORKS)

_ Stereoscopic method of image production

_ VISCERAL PLEASURES - Vaughan Oliver

_ DOUBLE EXPOSURE - Stuart Munro - Yorgoz Loizos

_ TANGENTS AND OUTTAKES - Thom Mayne (MORPHOSIS)

_ LIQUID CITY - Marc Atkins and Iain Sinclair

_ THE SPACE OF ENCOUNTER - Daniel Libeskind

INITIAL WORDS OF EXPRESSION

// EXPLICIT    // LEVITATION    // VERTIGO    // BLIND SPOT   

// INDULGENCE    // RECURSIVE SPECULATION   // MODALITIES - CONVERSATION  

SOHO the way i look at

the air street was a construction site for a new hotel. the sky was at its best, enabling it to be more bluer by silhouetting out the buildings; accentuating the cranes and the construction elements. i was carried away by the sweeping continuous sky and the silhouettes it sketched. it led me to an oblivion, where i felt the verticality more empowering as i wandered the streets of soho. indeed soho is special; for its latency throughout the day, though it being very nocturnal. the idea of clipping objects from the tower cranes gradually started to weave around in my mind.

   CLIPPED CITY _ to accentuate the explicitness of SOHO from the 80's

SLIGHTLY OFF THE Ground

The brief by Stuart Munro enacts us as surveyors, who will notice the unnoticed in SOHO. 
The initial weeks of work would be to come up with some notions and notate them sequentially.


Information about SOHO
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soho
Our reference site for this year's work is within enclosure of GLASS HOUSE STREET, AIR STREET and BREWER STREET.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________


' I BEGAN TO LIKE NEW YORK, THE RACY, ADVENTUROUS FEEL OF IT AT NIGHT AND THE SATISFACTION THAT THE CONSTANT FLICKER OF MEN AND WOMEN AND MACHINES GIVES TO THE RESTLESS EYE.'

                                              

F.SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE GREAT GATSBY

PERRY KULPER workshop

The Light Warped MOTEL

– Gestural Translation Method

The Three Gorges Dam – Edward Burtynsky

- Workshop by Perry Kulper (October 2009)

“The only impossible thing is to define and delimit the impossible.”

_ CLARK ASHTON SMITH

The process initiated from the very attraction of the Three Gorges Dam, with its intricate elements which accentuate and induce a sense of real chance to play.

We started to observe the ephemeral in the gesture with more deliberate attempt to equate natural gestures with induced human gestures. The collective processes resulted in an array of opportunities to express the gesture without any formal or prejudicial methods. The initial mould revolved around the possibility of natural gestures like the eruption of the lava, water from the dam trying to cool it off to crystallize the molten lava to a state of unpredictable formalizing structure.

The confluence of gestural ideas slowly evolved when we understood the human initiation of a gesture and its subsequent induced and natural gestures within and outside the system. This made us to interpret the site as a giant machine inducing varying gestures with varied levels of intensity and temporariness.

This resulted in a deliberate gesture of moving lights. We moved two light sources like torches to capture a sequence of events through the time-lapse photography. The result helped derive conditions for the possibility of light as a building material. Light is always ephemeral, fuzzy, structured and manipulative.

These qualities lead us to explore techniques on how to warp a light source to create a sequence of translations. The initial idea of puck, press or pull developed into more matured light disintegration methods like warping. We also absorbed a set of natural gestures like the algae plant to produce the required air / CO₂, smoke screen ionisers to absorb light in a more denser form of information. The particle deflector which is clung on to the crane helped capture the warp of the light.

The series of momentary and frozen layering of gestures resulted in a combination of light warps over an electron field generator to generate the necessary gravity or feeling of weight. The resultant spectrum of light warps in a very informal manner to trap the voids and spaces and spatial interlaces like a differential cloud.

The MOTEL evolves through these frenzy holes of influence to entrap, instill, charm and captivate to an amazing rendezvous before night fall.

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PREM BALASUBRAMANIAN_ DHARMESH THAKKER_ MOEEN AFZALKHANI