23rd November 2007 — 3rd February 2008
A revised vision of urban living would be timely. 2007 was the year in
which the number of people living in cities surpassed the number living
in rural environments and apparently this is a trend that must continue
if life is to be economically and environmentally sustainable (1). What
is it going to be like? As part of his ongoing investigation into the
transformation of rural and urban space, (Robinson in Space, 1997,
Dilapidated Dwelling, 2000), Keiller appears ready to risk ridicule and
tell us once more how things are going to be.
But just as space has moved on, so have the types of things that get
said and the way they are presented. The open hand of Ebenezer Howard,
George Orwell or Ridley Scott has been replaced by a more guarded and
systematic approach, beginning, of course, with the archive and the
text. Keiller's archive- that of British Film Institute - contains 68
single shot 'actuality' films of about three minutes in length and
dates from between 1896 and 1906. His text is a short quotation from
Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory written in 1896, in which Bergson
tackles the problem of representing time. Together they form an
interactive multimedia projection involving walls and screens which the
viewer can walk between and menu stations from which films may be
selected by choosing a place where they were shot - something like the
Google Earth interface, only the revolving globe is substituted by a
19th Century global map with Britain, not the US, at its centre.
There are two or three videos that require repeated viewing. One of
them depicts heavy traffic circulating round the junction at Bank.
There are all manner of vehicles: horse-drawn coaches, carriages,
motorcars, bicycles, steam-powered busses negotiating each other with
remarkable speed and precision despite the lack of signage or formal
rules. At one point a boy attempts to cross the road. He HeHHkksteps
into the street, seeming to judge instinctively the speed, position,
and direction of travel of each vehicle that bears down on him,
calculating as he does so his best option for survival. As he nears the
kerb the film cuts. Bergson's quotation comes to my rescue. "Images are
perceived when senses are open to them. These images react to each
other in accordance with laws I call laws of nature and, as a perfect
knowledge of laws would probably allow us to calculate and foresee what
will happen in each of these images. The future of the images must be
contained in their present." (My emphasis.) I study the boy's centre of
balance, the position of his feet, his speed, the direction in which he
is looking. It's a close call.
If there is anything portentous in this archive about the city of the
future, the implication is that it can be discerned in the same way as
the boy's fate at Bank, that is, by repeated examination of the initial
conditions that the footage reveal. Most of it records street scenes,
it immediately invites comparison and contrast between the occupation
of public space then and now. A trajectory can be plotted and, all
other things being equal, forecasts provided as to what public space
may become. One significant comparison includes the use of
advertisements and the range of shops - evidence that by the end of the
19th Century the middle classes are the dominant force in exploiting
the public sphere effectively. Surfaces are papered with advertisements
for everything from food to gold, while general stores are interspersed
with niche shops: tarpaulin dealers, cosmetic retailers, mint rock
specialists. But the un-worldliness of the subjects, unwittingly framed
and under surveillance but now within a highly produced exhibition
contrasts with the viewer's own sense of knowing (represented in the
ability to globe trot at the click of a mouse). This narrative is
underscored by scenes in the archive: the motorcar is tracked by the
camera as if it is a newly identified species, the ship is just being
launched, the train in Canada is heading out into mountainous
territory, the soldiers dug into a trench in South Africa are still
slogging it out (presumably with the Boers) for imperial control. This
footage is of what is arriving rather than what is disappearing and
there is an overriding sense of expansion, transition and change. The
archive and its display thus suggests a lack of understanding on the
part of late 19th Century middle classes of the global character of the
public sphere and, by implication, therefore, of the complications that
ensue when locally acquired knowledge is applied globally.
This use of history would appear to constitute something of a U-turn on
the part of Keiller, and makes the City of the Future a very curious
work indeed. For in his film Robinson in Space Keiller took up quite
the opposite idea, that of Doreen Massey that space is open and in a
state of 'continuous becoming' (2) rather than closed: Robinson's tour
of the country revealed that England had moved on in unpredictable ways
and its development was not part of any trajectory that could have been
predicted at the height of empire. Moreover, the unpredictability of
space was an argument formerly made of time by Henri Bergson, as part
of his rejection of science and the idea that processes were
repeatable, and a-temporal that the future could be contained within
its initial conditions. From its' context, The City of the Future would
appear to take up the baton and run with a theory of becoming.
Difference and multiplicity are key to ascendant philosophies of space,
Bergson is ceremoniously cited in the wall text and the installation
forms part of a wider collaboration with Massey under the umbrella
project heading The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image. In a
strange twist however, the footage undermines Keiller's position,
generating a scenario in which Bergson is cited against himself, and an
argument for the openness of public space is difficult to sustain.
References
1. 'State of the World Population'. 2007.
United Nations Population Fund. Retrieved 7th January 2007 from
http://www.unfpa.org/swp
2. Massey, Doreen. For Space. Sage Publications, 2005.
NF
