the Olympic Arcades project

“It’s your chance…”

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:

“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.

networks :: first thoughts

This Project is about, being built across and a part of ‘the Net’. The Net is wider than the Internet even when that is seen a s techno-social or political-economic form. ‘The Net’ is a power full structure and site of struggle. Its protocols and distributed/controlled form and practices must be addressed in ways that do not fall into utopian, egalitarian cyber-optimism nor conspiracy pessimism.

Rather, this convolute will seek to map these spaces, relations and practices as sites of struggle and seeing, open to exploitation ¹. Mobile seeing and being seen as well as ‘2012′ and the ‘Edge of London’ are network phenomena and this convolute looks for ways of intervening in those relations.

the fence :: first thoughts

The iconic Blue Fence is being replaced by razor wire. The edge of the site is still being patrolled by the same security guards in the same uniforms but what was hidden is now partly visible.

I want to explore the ways in which the Fence is part metaphor, part discourse – a way of seeing not only the Olympics and ‘2012′ but also the ‘Edge of London’. As it delimits space it establishes a ‘regime of truth’ and a ‘regime of space’.

Paralleling this, I will map the ways in which the Frame of the mobile phone camera screen similarly structures space, place and practice in relation to historical conceptions of windows and frames.

This convolute will explore how the liminal structures ‘2012′ and the mobile scopic regime.