Peripheral Vision

Peripheral Vision

I wanted to do this drift because of a feeling I got when we were drifting in woods during the Taxi To Westwood and Featureless dérive: ----- Original Message ----From: Phil Smith To: sandra reeve Sent: Monday, June 17, 2002 8:42 AM Subject: yesterday and in the woods Dear Sandra, Yesterday we went on the 'drift', taxi-catapulted. The experiences of the resulting journey have brought back to me questions that we corresponded on just a short while ago. The taxi left us in what the driver described as a "featureless" place. Which was a strange remark as the landscape there was distinctively featured with huge electric pylons humming and buzzing overhead, a theatrical driveway to one side and a large strange structure (never did find out) maybe two miles away. After some adventures - confronted by 24 hour video security, a public footpath blocked by a new barrier of chickenwire, the burnt and transported remains of a 1

house which we remade, and finding a church "for sale" - we arrived at and entered a wood. Simon saw deer in the trees but our arrival scared them off and we followed deer tracks deeper and deeper into an increasingly closely-grown wood of slim trunks. The deer paths bent us over sometimes. For forty minutes or so we were searching through the woods. For what? For me, it was searching for the edge of strangeness, lightly felt at the entrance to the thicker part of the wood, that is the beginning of Pan-ic, for the sense of 'everything' in a non-human place to which one's presence adds the final ingredient, the key that turns the lock to 'everything'. But, except for one moment, when the large tree trunks on the opposite side of a bridle path appeared in an illusion through the narrow trunks as the classical pillars of some folly or old house, the realisation of strangeness never came. And I began to ask myself "how should I be moving here?" "How should the four of us be moving?" And I thought of moving on the day with you in the woods. I was very aware of always leading with my eyes. Tending towards the linear. Not working enough with peripheral vision. Not feeling enough. Not letting the shape of the wood's floor lead us. Not letting our body weights be drawn by the shapes in time/space. Too Newtonian and not enough General Relativity! Using peripheral vision only to stay in contact with the other members of the human group and not extending it beyond. I see that I made a note on the 2

print-off of your email: "like to move with others through site... looking ahead - peripherally my colleagues… (a seeking outwards) not into mirror of others, but in moving (bonding?) thru' site". I'm not quite sure what this note means - me struggling for understanding - but what I do understand of it seemed inadequate in the wood yesterday. This engages, for me, with comments you made in your last email. "Presence" being the "there is context/I am context" - presence being what one is present in - perhaps a perfect description of 'sitespecificity'. The place as "imaginary partner", the everything (else) as "imaginary partner". In the presence of others (and properly present with them.......... so how should I have been properly present with my companions? Working with fallen branches felt no different to me from working with the discarded rubbish from a house fire – the forestry on this estate is a factory for making trees. There is nothing ‘natural’ here. Nowhere that I have been is. Everywhere one is playing on a patina, and sometimes along great shafts or planes of human intervention and organisation. And I can love that. In the shadow of the trees, the apparent aridity of the forest floor under the closely planted trees… this is the dark overgrowth of mythical pre-city, pre-village Europe, the thick green brown roof of trees. That may be just a nostalgia, a utopianising of the deep past – for the deep past may in fact have been more like a swathe of New Forest, more like a 3

human landscaped estate, with clumps of trees and small copses with clearings maintained by the feeding of deer, a friendlier, less Tolkeinesque, less darkly Teutonic European wood. But here modern forestry has re-made the nonexistent past – and in its aridity we find a hill of ants the shape and size of a small tent, alive with tiny scraps of twig and leaf. ----- Original Message ----Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2003 9:02 AM Subject: Finally - a moment to say thank you too! Dear Phil Thanks for your email ...is it really almost a month ago ? The day of drifting stays fresh with me which is unusual in itself as I usually have a very bad memory. I had such a good time, such a relief to just drift once I had got over relatively minimal anxiety about was I going to do it right etc.? I enjoyed having the theme to relate too, to remind myself of. I was interested by the whole interweaving of drifts and how as a group we lead, followed, did together, 4

came to certain decisions and not others. I enjoyed relating to people I did not know through drifting and sharing patterns of movement in time and space, exchanging preferences and memories as well as allowing myself to be taken by surprise. It almost felt as if you provided a situation and a space where I could share moments of perception through saying, building, walking, stopping which normally I take for granted and therefore hardly notice myself but suddenly they take on a completely different value as I realise that others are in fact noticing something completely different and in an utterly different way. I kept getting flashes of some black and white photos I have somehwere of the Pilgrimage /Stations of the Cross we all did in Wales in the snow.

Some time into the drift Cathy became anxious about getting back – either to the car we had left in Newton St Cyres or to Exeter. I had no idea what the land between Newton St Cyres and Exeter was like, which was why I had chosen it. And I was surprised – we all were - to find that for 4½ hours we could walk through a single ‘property’, the estate of “Sir John and Mary Quick – the cheese people” we were told by a woman walking her dog, a woman with a scarred face… I went so see Dr Chris Williams, a clinical psychologist at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital. To talk about patterns in the mind, patterns in the world – he told me about work he did

5

with members of the rescue services, who in danger situations have to repress the brain’s natural response to close down its reception to a narrow tunnel of vision (focusing on a far point of safety) and instead widen their vision to the peripheries. The woman with the missing flesh warned us off a path with “dangerous rocks” though we followed it and found only a few loose stones; she had worried that the deer cull might have begun, and advised us “if you see their farmworkers…I’d run!” She expressed a deep sense of inequality. “I’ve got a degree just like her,” she said of Lady Quick. Once Cathy had introduced the idea of getting back, she also introduced, unspoken, the idea of not getting back, or not getting back without discomfort. The split halves of some predator’s jawbone intensified the peripheral vision for a while. Or did it narrow it? The ‘drift’ changed because it now had a dominant function – (to realize a safe and relatively comfortable return within a reasonable amount of time.) Sandra would write a month later: “ …as soon as that concept arrived, something changed in my way of being there, which I worked with but it became harder to just be there and see what was happening. I guess that WAS what was happening, but I felt that it immediately separated us humans from the environment in some way. I guess I had not even 6

thought about going back as I did not know how long we were planning to be and although I had forgotten my sandwiches (!) I felt too happy to bother at that point really ...The road back felt more like a hike as we had a goal, although there were still some magic moments for me around the guide dog centre.” And it was what was happening. In some ways the ‘drift’ could retain playfulness in the game of ‘hike’ and ‘tracking’ and guessing directions, except there’s no game in playing with people’s anxieties. Not only for obvious moral reasons, but also because ‘anxiety’ or ‘dread’, (Dread, Route and Time at www.reconstruction.ws/home2.htm ) met without discomfort, without the actual pan-ic (even though one might be mindful of its potential), is a key state for drifting, an elemental component of the low level paranoia that heightens the senses, widens the wide-eyed look of a drifter. Four months later, on a train to Dawlish to meet Nicola Howard by the sea front railway bridge, to discuss at Dawlish’s own Tilly’s Tea Rooms a mis-guided tours project, I asked Cathy if she would write something about her feelings on that Peripheral Vision drift. Specifically on her desire to ‘get home’ or ‘get back’. I was surprised at the intensity of what she wrote, of the way she opens up a description of the collapsing and widening connections between what Sandra calls “us humans” and “the environment”. The letter arrived that night, after dark, an envelope dropping through the letter box onto the tiles.

7

Drifting home We climbed into a field, beyond which lay another field, a wood and other fields. Phil said we would aim to walk back to Exeter. Then he said we would make no attempt to get there. Perhaps, if we had been in the city, I wouldn’t have minded these paradoxical statements. It would have been clear that should it begin to grow late, should we fail to stumble across ‘home’, it would be easy enough to take a bus, call a cab or at least take a break in a warm café – a homesurrogate, a place of safety. But here, it might well take hours to find the right road, let alone reach our destination. There were no shops or cafés in sight, no places of shelter apart from the pine trees. Surely we could at least use a compass? Or, if we were not going to look for the way home, could we not state openly that our walk was aimless? Somehow, it was not the lack of aim, but the lack of logic that frightened me. Because I was, in a sense, frightened, yes, experiencing a slight feeling of panic, feeling that I was in the grip of Pan’s natural wilderness (however cultivated and managed it actually was). I had the sense that I was being tricked off

8

the path somehow, that the decision to lose myself was not mine. Was it magic that was being invoked? The pine forests are full of wolves and witches and strange men, as every little girl knows. And all of them want to trick you off the path. Just keep your eyes on the light in the distance. My nightmares are usually of a home whose locks are broken, whose walls go missing, a house which is both inside and outside at once, or which is invaded by stalkers and burglars and unidentified watchers. The panic of undifferentiation. And here, not unrelated to that, the panic that often sets in when someone makes a decision for me. Particularly when that decision seems utterly divorced from logic. Particularly when that decision is made with absolute conviction. Bacchus trying to make a Bacchante of me, against my will. Just like my mother always warned me. Found a space on my own, twisting grasses together, making a delicate structure, a skeleton building there in a clearing, like a miniature shelter. Sandra moved gently among the trees. Simon and Phil lifted logs and balanced them on top of one another. We played there for a while, and I felt better.

9

We found a city of ants and watched them working. I wandered round writing messages on leaves. Leaving an ‘almost invisible’ trail. Gretel dropping pebbles in a wood. Somewhere, there were deer in the darkness of the pine trees. Somewhere, (so the ‘No Trespassing’ notices said) there was a shouting farmer. We did not know whether the teeth we found belonged to a dog or a fox. I kept remembering the girl in ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’ who was so good at tracking and found her way home over thousands of miles. I know that my limit for a day’s walking in Devon is not much more than 26 miles. I kept hearing a road that wasn’t there. A field scooped out like an amphitheatre. One banana shared between four. I let myself sit still at last, watching the green stage show me nothing. I know that I want these adventures, small as they are. I know that I seek out people who will trick me off the path. I don’t know how we managed to find the city. Suddenly, at the edge of the wood, there it was. Perhaps it was some kind of homing instinct. I don’t believe in magic.

10

But by the time we found it, we had, in fact, been looking for it for some time. Cathy Turner 28.10.03 Cathy’s experience was a reminder to me that drift is a disruption, a disruption of the norm of fear and fright (as well as of the norms of work, institution, commodity consumption, etc.), taken to unfamiliar places (even those within familiar spaces). I’m not convinced of the model of ‘drift’ as a way of life, like Gilles Ivain’s wandering, apparently, for months, or the devout Hindu saint who walked naked into pilgrimage leaving her sari in her husband’s hands. Rather than the extreme action of special individuals I hope the ‘drift’ becomes a model for many people, an emergent model. But not everywhere is susceptible. Places of art seem to be deadly for the drift. Places of commercial leisure. Unless disrupted in turn. But the meme of drifting becomes rather more complex in conflict. And less accessible in allowing people to meet ‘dread’ without fear. Rather than the explosion of reactionary space or/and the construction of utopian space, ‘drift’ is about the heterogenous sliding of different spaces together, creating change not in binary subversion/construction, but beside the hybridity delayed of Third Space, not a 11

conflictual/simple synthesis of opposites, but in allowing complexity, in allowing meshing, in finding and energizing ambient hubs. This is a practice of delicacy rather than revolution. The day after Cathy dropped off her writing, I came across, looking for something else, a piece on the Fortean Times website by Jim Colquhoun, a psychogeographer – who coincidentally I’d been put in touch with two days before by Bess Lovejoy, who had come across him in connection with the Pre-amble Festival in Vancouver: PAN(IC) IN THE WOODS Jim Colquhoun, Glasgow I was around 10 years old when I had my one and only encounter with The Great God Pan. I was walking alone through a place known locally as the 'Witches Wood' in Pollok Estate (now Pollok Country Park) on the south side of Glasgow. It was a bright summers day and the wood was well known to me. All I can really remember is a sudden and shocking increase in the insect noise in the wood. As is appropriate in these situations I panicked and legged it right out of there! It's one of those instances that has stayed with me all these years (I am 41).

12

It was as if that ordinary summers day had somehow suddenly 'intensified'. (www.forteantimes.com/happened/panic.shtml ) Just before we found the field/amphitheatre near Rowhorne House Farm ‘showing nothing’, a great weighty emptiness hanging in it, the city of Exeter had appeared painterly through some trees – like one of those 18th century canvases of the city occasionally retrieved for display from the store rooms of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum.

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 20:04:34 -0000 Phil Smith < > wrote: > Cathy, > > Thank you for the absolutely wonderful piece of writing! I want to put it all into the pamphlet. Do you have it on file and could you send it me as an attachment or in the body of an email? It's a tremendous description of the drift and a wonderfully vivid account of your feelings about it. I made some major errors that day - I didn't find a way of engaging with the whole 'moving' thing, 13

the going to Exeter/not worrying about going to Exeter thing was contradictory - but one tries to learn from mistakes. > > Thanks again, > > Phil ----- Original Message ----From: "Catherine Turner" < > To: "Phil Smith" < > Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2003 11:50 AM Subject: Re: thank you Ø

Glad you like it. I'm not sure the contradiction was really > a mistake. >

The taxi back alone was strange! I realised as you kindly paid for it and waved me goodbye that I had had the expectation that whatever happened we would all go back to the car and then I would deliver people to their door steps! (perhaps I secretly wanted the role of a Javanese local bus where they go off their official route and take people to their doors. ) (or else it is just my childhood terror of abandonment rearing its head again) It was such a strong feeling that I had not imagined any other kind of closure so it was quite a shift to chat with the driver, although fine as he started to share 14

his memories of where we had just walked, so it was as it was, but I thought I'd let you know that bit. Other than that, I wish I had had a little bit more courage to do more movement in the woods to explore that within the context of the drift, but I wasn't sure if it was "allowed", or at least I guess I wondered if it might be seen as odd, showing off etc. The ways we trap ourselves into not doing what we need to do, or being who we need to be. I would also like to have moved very slowly but I did not want to get left behind or hold people up! So many thanks Phil for sharing the day with me. and I would love to join another drift when possible. I'd like to do an urban drift too. "I like to just have the faith that the deeper in you go the more likely you are to magically pop out just where you want to be ...” (Phil Smith) Me too! With love Sandra x Without claiming any specialness, I think of this popping out in the right place as a giving up of some of the decision-making to the ‘field’. Not walking blindfold. Not us backing ourselves against the alien. But the negotiated exchange of different kinds of geometries passing through each other. “Intuition”, the angel at the crossroads, twinkling astronomical consciousnesses – I recall a moment on that ‘Pilgrimage/Stations Of The Cross’ 15

paratheatrical walk along Offa’s Dyke in the snow that Sandra had remembered, sometime around 1975, I saw up ahead of me Yvonne (now Anna) running and then David running, around each other, then I lost sight of them and when I gained height again I saw Yvonne alone, holding a large stake, blood dribbling down her forehead and I was scared, but I was there, I wasn’t running away and I walked straight towards her and I remember almost nothing of this and maybe she would tell it another way, but she drew back the stake and I just blacked out for a moment as I walked into it and the next time I was aware again I had the stake in my arms clutched to my chest, nursed like a baby, with no clue how it got there – the Grotowskian ‘total act’… … like carrying Steve on my back that day far further than I would usually be physically capable of, playing Mau Mau – a card game almost purely based on chance – with Roger, for hours and hours, and knowing absolutely clearly at one moment that I was going to win even though I was well behind, but only if I could stay in the particular mental state I knew I was in, holding myself there for a few hours as the winning cards flopped down in the way I knew they would… in some way connected up, gently trembling like a too much coffee feeling at the same frequency as the probability of the cards. Resonance. I 16

don’t have any resource to know or not know if there is a connection between our ‘classical, Newtonian’ physicality and the quantum ‘world’ (for Sir Roger Penrose that connection may be consciousness – quantum ‘choices’ in the microtubules - for Rupert Sheldrake it’s the map of preference among pigeons), but I can as-if walk in the publications of others, in the diaphanous academic gowning of the landscape, on the knobbly, wobbly, gulping, lavic, probabilities – knowing that knowledge of place and momentum are not simultaneously possible, that it is best not to know too much about where you are or where you’re going lest you collapse that wonderful bouncy castle of probability into a sclerotic or viscous map and pitch into Bunyan’s Slough of Despond. “Already the present and immediate future are beginning to gel. To escape from its ever-hardening clutches requires that you project your desires into the future – project them too near and the effects of the past will have already loaded the temporal disc to such a degree that it may be unable to accommodate the program you envisage.” (p. 282 Geneset: Target Earth, David Wood & Ian Campbell, Sunbury-On-Thames: Bellevue Books, 1994) But that means explaining more. And that is why I’m hanging on to ‘documentation’ – not as the ‘real’ artwork, not as a post-mortem, but as a provocation to others’ next walkings – in the hope, one day of a virtuous loop in which I become continually so provoked by theirs. This is why I’m still struggling in my head about what kind of form, 17

what kind of technology, could a mythogeography be? How it can be added to and notated and emblazoned and redrawn, while all the time it travels as it grows as it is exchanged? Widens as it becomes more detailed and probable? On the web – it is only relatively flexible – but how portable? Would a pocket book be best – essentially a plastic pocket-book-shaped holder with fragments of maps – overlaid maps of dread spaces, Third Spaces, intuitionspace, historical space - and annotations to which the walker could add and subtract and carry, site and non-site? (Perhaps a thing cheap enough to buy multiple copies of and to add to and then leave for others to pick up and add to and leave and so on… “…please feel free to leave the book on a bus when you next come to London… have you heard of this project where there’s a little note inside (the) bookcover to invite the finder to read the book and pass it on, by leaving it again in public space…” (letter from Anna Best, author of Occasional Sights – a London guidebook of missed opportunities and things that aren’t there, London: The Photographers Gallery, 2003 ) There’s something appealing about the ruined nostalgia of a collapsing book shape: transparent, dismantleable, accumulative. “To overcome a limitation in a conceptual space, one must change it in some way. One may also change it, of course, without yet having come up against its limits. A small change (a ‘tweak’) in a relatively superficial dimension of a conceptual space is like opening a door to an unvisited room in an existing house. A large change (a ‘transformation’), especially in a relatively fundamental 18

dimension, is more like the instantaneous construction of a new house, of a kind fundamentally different from (albeit related to) the first.” (p.27, ‘What Is Creativity?” by Margaret A. Boden in Creativity In Human Evolution and Prehistory, ed. Steven Mithen, London: Routledge, 1998) What if the change fell between the two – like the house in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House Of Leaves – unvisited rooms that sink into caverns, halls that stretch and yawn? Steven Mithen proposed a change from specialised ‘chapels-minds’ to an overarching ‘cathedral-mind’, a modern human mind of cognitive fluidity that appeared between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago. So, what variation on the modern mind is appearing now? What shape is the dériviste mind being walked in/to? Mythogeography is a history that can be physically constructed, in fact, it is only realisable in a process of multi-dimensional modelling (of course, two dimensional maps may be deployed in jest, to emphasise an absence, or assist a sliding between planes, for a drift in Flatland, etc.). It can only exist as the geometrical text of a half-serious ritual, a wholly (multi-dimensional) walking of space and time (landscape and history), walking in the field of tension between the big shape (relativity) and the small exchange 19

(quantum), at present un-resolvable, and express it historically as the stress between overlapping utopias (rational and official) and nostalgia (hoaxful, boastful, esoteric, heritage haunted, tourism deceived), realised as webs of signs and symbols. “A carpet of understanding” (Sandra Reeve.) Linear narratives of individual strands of journeying soon webbed by multiple walkings, then broken up into simple memes, winding back the clock to primary units of ideology and then re-running the whole process of meme-complexing forward again, and then back and forward, again and again, like a BZ process, creating spirals, branch shapes, camouflage – all in a neosymbolist astronomical charting of the ideological reproduction of what it serves. Ideology, denarrated, becomes psychological – so we can think it backwards. Mythogeographical maps are blatantly provisional, their surfaces unstable, inviting meshing and welcoming translucent others to bounce through. The new dériviste mind should be a ‘bouncy castle 20

mind’, a pneumatic, crenellated wobble in a patchwork landscape of grids. A bouncy castle of bouncy castles – with the smooth outlines of a ‘mother castle’ and the granular surface made of miniature populations of bouncers; so the whole, apparently smooth surface is seething with probabilities. The bathos should be explicit. The ‘cathedral’ is too medieval an architecture to serve as a metaphor for the postmodern mind, but it is saved from redundancy by the bouncy castle in the Close on Cathedral School Fete Day. The hybridity goes on in the master-masonic manner, but also in absurd, delayed, trashed, deflatable discourses too. Hybridity is hybridded and disrupted. The map should become more architectural, inflatable and ruin-like. The city more map-like: so, draw new, poetic symbols on the city’s surfaces and across its existing signs and symbols like The Interdimensional Pixie Broadcasting Network have done in Exeter – (http://www.mythogeography.com/2009/12/presentsexeter-3182000-coming-soon.html or p.164-5 World Without Words, Michael Evamy, London: Lawrence King Publishing, 2003). Construct new ceremonials on the site of the old Bonfire riots, Cholera burials and Skimmerton Riding, insert mythogeography into the city’s planning process – submit plans for filling all the empty plinths in town, on St Peter’s empty plinth at the Carfax a crystal statue of Uri Geller, his big house somewhere else under his arm, crushing the Conference beneath his shoe (to monumentalise the stamina of mythogeography in cryptic 21

or imaginary stone), plans for an empty museum waiting forever to display the artifacts dropped at Scoriton by the ufo carrying the recently deceased George Adamski and brought to and lost in Exeter by a ‘researcher’, the reopening of the Catacombes for simultaneous burial and tourism, a tent at the Living History weekend for dead things, for the removal of the signs for the Two Counties Way to be replaced by an official signing of the path of the Devil’s Footprints, for the purchase of a small piece of land to be advertised widely as empty but its location never revealed – and likewise with the local history industry, flooding it with Mis-Guides and mis-guided tour-guiding, among the commercial racks everywhere 22

deploying pamphlets like those of A Company of Vagabonds’ Jim Colquhoun. This was a city bathed in sectarian theology with a nationalist tint, yet its susceptibility to narratives (particularly ones of class) meant that a non-evangelical Catholic figure like that of Father Oliver, and his theatrical presence during the Cholera outbreak of 1832, could deflect ideology inwards (away from the scapegoat). St Michael and All Angels, Mount Dinham is a defiant symbol of visuality against the protestant textual ascendancy, just as gothic romanticism of the same century ‘saved’ the murders at Lidwell Chapel or whatever it is they might filmically bathe through the dissolution of grammars and the escape from the melodrama of dialogue. Gothic eyes work a darshana: “a way of touching, of making actual contact solely through the gaze… based on a theory of the eye as an active transmitter rather than a passive receptor”, but one that disrupts “the ‘optical unconsciousness’ triggered through the structure of film grammars and image flow (its diegesis)… connected to hidden emotional drives of the spectator…”(Negotiating New Systems of Perception, Margot Lovejoy and Preminda Jacob, in Reframing Consciousness, ed. Roy Ascott, Element). Exeter and Exmouth’s cinemas are rare provincial points of occasional defiance (of the digital) of the passive; the naked spectator attempting to climb into the X Files Movie at the Savoy, Exmouth – where everything else was being purged, washed and dispersed – the West Quarter, death (no longer would a city entertainer and leader like Andrew Brice display himself in life or 23

death as he did for 6d a gawk at his corpse in the Masonic Rooms on the High Street), idea amputated from popular theatrical performance and divided between different theatres, the 100,000 bodied graveyard of Cathedral Close leveled for picnics – the skeletons in the Well House subversively pop through the pub’s foundations, labour decentred despite the march of insurrectionary working class mathematicians from the college explicitly defined at its foundation by its exclusion of Catholics and Jews, criminals silenced and hidden – all under the slow throb of low-level iconoclasm, discouraging and punishing all visuality: “two persons fantastically dressed in garments of huge proportions and gaudy appearance, followed by a mob … of 700 to 800 persons… Charles Bragg was dressed in a huge light grey coat of vast dimensions, with a hat of corresponding extent…and carrying a birch broom. (John) Croker was disguised in a lady’s dress, ornamented with a profusion of ribbons of divers colours, and led a dog, trimmed in the same …(Bragg and Croker) were overtaken by (Inspector) Stuches, who desired them to disrobe, which they did with much dissatisfaction… The bench fined (them) 10s (shillings) each, and in default of payment ordered them to be committed to prison for a week.” (p.5, Woolmer’s Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 1.3.1851) Local and global synchronicity, the role of the mediated working class educational and institutional organisations of the nineteenth century now taken over by a global media manifest in the verbal abuse from casual passers-by of Sue Palmer’s cycling ghost bride in Pilot Navigation (1998), the dark shadow of what has been claimed by the authorities in exchange for ‘democratic’ empiricism, the ‘leisure’ space

24

exposed as performatively unfriendly and visually intolerant. “The human eye constitutes a vulnerable, unscreened surface, always prone to intolerable intrusion, in its position within a vast network of ostensibly enclosed, homogenous urban façades; in that process, film forms a kind of archaic ally with the human eye, with its historical capacity to pierce urban surfaces, to unsettle…” (p. 155-6, Stephen Barber, projected cities) Filmic bathing, nostalgic alliance-making and ideological washing need to be charted by an ambient geography – one that can chart turbulence in the meeting of one fluid memecomplex with others. The city as ocean of sound, interpreted by the geometry of tone. Ended up at The Mill On The Exe eating mediocre food – so much better if we had ended it at doorsteps. Or parted in the middle of woods. Avoid retail outlets. Avoid compliance with the cash flow. Avoid ending before its ended. End the drift before returning to the circulation of commodities. This ‘drift’ – like them all – became something other than itself. Phil Smith

25