about the Olympic Arcades
the Olympic Arcades project is a ‘practice-based PhD’ taking its inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, that Paul Caplan of the Internationale is developing at Birkbeck, University of London.
Taking its method from Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘dialectical image’ in the Arcades Project and One Way Street, the project seeks to explore and critique the new mobile scopic regime and the imag(in)ing of the London 2012 Olympics.
The project is being built to work on a mobile phone with the aim that a reader/writer will be able to sit at the opening ceremony and engage with the argument and the distributed images by reading my work, seeing others’ images and adding their own.
the Olympic Arcades Project is being built in three spaces
- this images. Responding to Taylor and Saarinen’s clarion call to “philosophize with images” (1994:15), I pull together and analyse images of 2012 taken on mobile phones from across the distributed Web. I also collect and analyse visualisations of 2012 generated by Government, designers and the 2012 industry.
- the fragments. Using Evernote’s mobile notebook, I collect the “rags, the refuse” of 2012 that Benjamin saw, in his Arcades Project, as offering a new way of writing history (N1a,6).
- the chapters. Although the fragments and imagologies create ‘dialectical images’ as they collide here and in the finished App, I will also be writing longer analyses around the themes of the Project.
The three forms of content are collected in the Olympic Arcades convolutes. Like Benjamin’s folders of notes, these miscellaneous categories hold the images, fragments and chapters generating a montage. The convolutes (as at October 2009) are:
- Reading: Notes and analysis of those who’ve talked about similar things before
- Mobilities: Notes and analysis about mobile practice
- The Fence: Notes and analysis about liminality, the edge and the frame
- Visuality: Notes and analysis about scopic regimes
- Networks: Notes and analysis about distributed media and practice
- Practice: Notes and analysis about practice-based reasearch.
You can also explore the network of images, fragments and writing via the tags ‘n themes that link them together.
My aim is to create an accessible, integrated work in and about mobile space not a written PhD with pictures. My analysis is part of the imag(in)ing of 2012 just as much as is my photography and collecting. I will be looking to build an App that foregrounds that issue of practice and allows the ‘chapters’ to become ‘fragments’ and all to become (dialectical) images.
The project is developing here so that it can be open-source. Each ‘imagology’ image and fragment is open to comments. What is more the chapters allow anyone to comment paragraph by paragraph. Simply click on the icon by each paragraph and comment specifically on each chapter fragment.
