The BBC’s You and Yours programme on Radio 4 features an interview with Tessa Jowell MP tomorrow (27.10.09) . In preparation, the show’s website is asking listeners to send in questions:
“If you live near an Olympic development – do you see it as a bonus or a curse? Will it give companies across the country opportunities to be part of the building programme and and [sic] create long term local jobs… or will its legacy be no more than a than a summer of sport…”
Once again the hook is around ‘legacy’ and myth/reality but this is being positioned here in terms of a local view. Here the question is being aimed at those on the edge of the developments, those who can see that ‘development’ and place that picture alongside their local experience.
Leaving aside a call-in show’s desire to create a debate, the call is based on those local viewers having a particular perspective. Those quite literally around 2012 – arguably those kept outside (literally by the Fence as well as discursively) – are positioned opposite the woman from the inside.
Posted 4 months, 3 weeks ago at 3:45 pm. Add a comment
The London2012 site has a video launching the new exhibition at City Hall.
The site does not allow its videos to be embedded elsewhere on the Net so this is a screengrab. The Blog entry reads:
“The exhibition is free and is on for three weeks. It includes a new interactive simulator that allows visitors to navigate their way around a computer-generated version of the Olympic Park. There are also models of the Park and major venues such as the Olympic Stadium and Velodrome.
Come down to City Hall to take a look!”
The video features Mayor Boris Johnson talking to schoolchildren, one of whom asks him which is his favourite venue, a question he then asks them.
With a little over 1,000 days to go before the event, 2012 is being articulated around the twin poles of ‘legacy’ and ‘architecture’. Johnson says:
“We’ve got to get the message across to everyone in london that the Olympics are a great thing, aren’t they? Do you think they’re a great thing or not?… Yeh that’s the spirit. It’s a massive investment that will help to give jobs and growth in areas of London that need it.”
While the narrator from the ODA says:
“Come and see what London 2012 is all about.”
While the ODA uses a visual discourse of Great-Exhibition-like spectacle and wonder, it positions that in terms of ‘discovery’, hailing the viewer into a phantasmagoria, but one that reveals a truth.
Johnson similarly imag(in)es a ‘wonder’ but one underpinned by economic and political legacy.
What both do is locate those discourses around visualisations, models, ‘interactive fly-throughs’ and images – a power-full scopic imag(in)ing.
Posted 4 months, 3 weeks ago at 3:18 pm. Add a comment
The BBC’s You and Yours programme on Radio 4 features an interview with Tessa Jowell MP tomorrow (27.10.09) 1. In preparation, the show’s website is asking listeners to send in questions:
