TEXTS / CITIEs: from the 1970s to the
present
TVAD
Research Group in partnership with Photography UH, University of Hertfordshire
Thursday
January 23rd, 2014
B03 FMM Building, College
Lane Campus, Hatfield, Herts AL10 9AB.
Convened by Dr Daniel Marques Sampaio and
Michael Heilgemeir, University of Hertfordshire
Attendance is free, but delegates must register in advance by emailing d.marques-sampaio@herts.ac.uk or m.heilgemeir@herts.ac.uk with the
following information: Name; Affiliation/Institution/Role; Email address; Any
special dietary requirements; Any special access requirements.
Cities have often been compared to
palimpsests, their streets, buildings, and subways pleated, crumpled, written
and rewritten over and over again: as material texts, poïesis. What is at stake in this conflation of city and text? Can
the city be read, does it indeed operate like a text? How do urban spaces
relate to artistic, political, or economic texts and ideologies, and vice
versa? What transformations occur between the designing and imaging of urban spaces,
and the building and eventual inhabiting of those spaces? How do the
technologies employed in designing and imaging architectural and urban spaces
(computer modelling and simulation, CGI renderings of future buildings, etc.)
contribute to the ‘idea’ or representations of a city? In what ways can data
and imaging influence understanding of, and policies within cities?
This seminar brings together scholars within
an interdisciplinary range of art, design, and media practices to examine,
analyse and interpret the complex relationships between texts and urban spaces
in contemporary culture and society.
PROGRAMME
10 am: Arrival, FMM Building
10.40 am: Introduction, DMS & MH
11 am: Dr Erica Liu (University of Hertfordshire):
“Rebranding Cities, using narratives to transform city image through the
Olympic Games”
11.40 am: Carl Fraser (University of
Sheffield): “Public realm, critical spatial practices”
12.20 pm: Dr Barbara Brownie (University of
Hertfordshire): “Words Within Worlds: Kinetic and typographic cityscapes in
television idents and credit sequences”
1 pm: Lunch, FMM foyer
2 pm: Dr Rebecca Thomas (University of
Hertfordshire): “A city in pieces”
2.40 pm: Dr Marta Rabikowska (University of
Hertfordshire): “Urban narrative through the lens of the camera”
3.20 pm: Jaspar Joseph Lester (Royal College
of Art) and Julie Wesserman (Sheffield Hallam University): “Tegel: Speculations
and Propositions”
4 pm: DMS & MH, response and closing
remarks, followed by group discussion
4.20 pm: Coffee and tea, FMM foyer
5 pm: Close.
ABSTRACTS:
Dr Erica Liu (University of Hertfordshire):
“Rebranding Cities, using narratives to transform city image through the
Olympic Games”
Cities create compelling
narratives of themselves to bid for the hosting of mega events such as the
Olympic Games. The winning city
often needs to undertake drastic changes in cityscape and sometimes the city’s
image in order to materialise these compelling narratives. These narratives are more than text,
graphics, photographs and videos; they are visions and inspirations of a
country propagated from specific social and political contexts. Cities have identifiable images, for
instance, Paris is perceived for romance, Milan for style, New York for
diversity and dynamics, Washington for power, and Tokyo for modernity. The
objectives of rebranding a city sometimes challenges these established images;
especially when the images carry negative connotations. Former Axis power countries have hosted
Olympic Games to signify conciliation and rehabilitation – Rome 1960, Tokyo
1964, Munich 1972. The 1995 Rugby
World Cup in South Africa and the 1998 FIFA World Cup in France signified
social changes and a symbolic unity in dividing communities. The narratives used captivated the
emotion of the global communities; and transpired into a unique branding
experience that became legacy.
Through rebranding during mega events, cities expressed the way they
inspired to be, and the way they wished to be perceived by global
audiences. The agility and
longevity of the outcomes, however, depends on variable factors such as the
persistence of marketing campaign and the consistency of policy making and
implementation. Olympic Game host cities such as London and Beijing will be
used as case studies.
Carl Fraser (University of Sheffield):
“Public realm, critical spatial practices”
The public realm of London has
been transformed since the 1970s, politically, economically and socially. We
now live in a completely redefined set of shared public spaces to those which
existed previously. Most significantly the relationship between spaces, their
occupation and the notion of ownership and disruption have entered into a new
phase.
This paper will work with the
themes which are explored in my PhD, the understanding of public realm protest
as a spatial strategy of disruption whose narrative can be read as an indicator
of the changing relationship between citizens, their representatives and
powerful institutions, drawing on the protests which occurred in London between
2010 and 2012 as examples of this shifting relationship, and asking questions
over the efficacy of public space as a concept and a field of practice. The
paper will develop the notion of protest as a critical spatial practice.
Critical… “an evaluative attitude towards reality” (Peter Marcuse); spatial…
“the space of social practice, the space occupied by sensory phenomena,
including products of the imagination such as projections, symbols and utopias”
(Henri Lefebvre); practice… “transverse tactics do not obey the law of the
place, for they are not defined or identified by it… one can distinguish ‘ways
of operating’ – ways of walking, reading, producing, speaking, etc” (Michel de
Certeau).
Through this theoretical
understanding of physical public space I aim to compile a series of ‘situated
knowledges’ (Donna Haraway) around the contemporary production of protest
within public territories of action.
Dr Barbara Brownie (University of
Hertfordshire): “Words Within Worlds: Kinetic and typographic cityscapes in
television idents and credit sequences”
In fluid typography, letterforms
emerge from apparently abstract or pictorial arrangements, challenging viewer’s
assumptions about the nature and meaning of on-screen objects. Increasingly in film credit sequences
and television idents, this fluidity occurs in architectural environments.
Computer-generated cityscapes, which initially present themselves as
architectural, become typographic as letters and words emerge from the scene.
Directly-filmed and CGI models of
cities can be treated as navigable environments, containing verbal meaning
which may be revealed through kineticism or parallax. MPC’s Channel 4 idents
(2004-2013), in which the figure ‘4’ emerges from computer-generated
architectural environments, and the opening credits for Sin City (2005), in which an aerial view of skyscrapers reveals
them to be arranged as a collection of letters, initially present architectural
landscapes. In spectacles comparable to theatrical illusion, viewers are
invited to seek out verbal meaning within these cityscapes.
This paper will apply Eduardo Kac’s discussions of ‘fluid
signs’ (originally applied to holographic poetry) in the reading of credit
sequences and idents. Fluid events will be compared to theatrical illusion, in
which the illusionsit’s tools – the ‘city’ – are shown capable of spectacular
and unexpected transformation. The emergence of letterforms from these scenes
will be explored as a paradigm shift, from city to text.
Dr Rebecca Thomas (University of Hertfordshire): “A city in pieces”
This presentation will examine
the curiously overlain city of Nicosia (Cyprus), especially in relation to a
recent visit there (June 2013), and the potential narratives to be generated
from that trip. Although one might claim that all cities are by definition
layered with numerous histories, constructions and erasures, in the case of
Nicosia the layering is particularly acute. As with Berlin in an important
period of its history, and Jerusalem even today, Nicosia is a city whose
territory is penetrated by a wall. This border turns the city into a kind of
force-field of opposing energies and points of view, creating immense tensions
between the separate segments, but also a heightened sense of political and
personal identity and engagement. The existence of the wall, and the visitor’s
awareness of the Turkish zone (which it is forbidden to enter) may repel the
outsider, but at the same time it morbidly acts as a means of attraction.
Wandering about the city, one is constantly reminded of its partitioned,
traumatic nature, a “coherent” geographical location simultaneously fissured,
rife with the potential for further conflict and division.
T S Eliot’s phrase “Unreal city”
(from The Waste Land, 1922) feels
very relevant. Its “unreality” comes from the on-going territorial and cultural
clashes, but also from the posters and graffiti used to express these
differences, deployed in texts and images found throughout Nicosia but
especially in the areas close to the barricade. Visiting Nicosia brought home
the power and importance of graffiti and other unofficial forms of
communication as ways to “give voice” to otherwise unrepresented ideas. One
reason for my visit, to be discussed in my paper, was to contribute to an
international conference on typography at the city’s university, a discussion
theme of great relevance in such a place of repressed but proliferating
voices.
Dr Marta Rabikowska (University of Hertfordshire): “Urban narrative
through the lens of the camera”
In this argument a visual narrative of one south-eastern
suburb of London will be analysed, while the context of performativity of urban
ethnography will be critiqued and philosophized in light of Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology and Michail Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony. The city and its
polyphonic fabric are represented here in an observational documentary produced
by the author. Her footage will
undergo a detailed analysis in parallel to her self-reflection on the processes
of research. Methodologically, polyphonic narrative, as identified by Bakhtin
in Dostoyevsky’s novels, will allow for an insight into the fragmented identity
of an urban community. The aim of analysing the film footage is to observe what
the camera ‘sees’ and how the city narrative is affected by perception. The
city is regarded as ‘being’ which cannot be separated from the observer, and
which unfolds performatively to the camera, if prompted by an act of filming. Through
a close analysis of the video representation of the metropolis’ suburb, the
author tries to ‘see’ through the politics of belonging, which governs the
narrative of exclusion and inclusion.
Jaspar Joseph Lester (Royal College of Art) and Julie Wesserman
(Sheffield Hallam University): “Tegel: Speculations and Propositions”
Tegel: Speculations and
Propositions a culmination of our
interest in the way collaboration, interdisciplinary research, and
experimentation can produce new spatial knowledge. Over a period of eighteen
months, a selected group of international artists and writers focused their
attention on Tegel airport, they observed how it is used, they engaged in new
activities and imagined how the building might function in the future. This
book and DVD is the outcome of what might be described as an open-ended enquiry
and, as such, embodies new perspectives on, and approaches to, urban renewal,
regeneration, social organisation, mobility and the legacy of modernist
architecture. This approach to site is central to imagining how art practice
can slow down, re-orientate and redefine the successive cycles of master plans
and regeneration schemes so that we can begin to consider what is at stake in
the spaces we occupy. The paper interrogates the ethos embodied in the
utopian design and the legacy that it leaves. The paper explores the influence
of an architecture that embodies an age and an ideal, and reflects the politics
of the city.
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