Project Developments

Back from being a visiting artist on the ‘Abandoned Practices’ Summer Institute at Chicago Art Institute and thought I’d contribute my first blog post. Whilst there I was thinking that utopian thinking is something of an abandoned practice and our attempt to draw the future of Soho engages with this. Whilst I was in Chicago I was staying on Michigan Avenue and they were filming Transformers 3 outside the apartment. One day I woke to see Michigan bridge raised, with a burnt-out car hanging over the edge of it, smoke billowing and explosions shooting fire into the sky. Luckily there was a notice outside the lift to inform residents that this was special effects and not for real. Anyway, I took some shots of the set they unloaded from trailers and built beside the Chicago river to make the street appear to be blown apart. Polystyrene made to look like broken walls, buckled concrete and tarmac, jutting from the sidewalks and fallen onto pre-crushed cars. This was a dystopian Chicago staged on top of the real city, a possible destructive future that became a temporary tourist destination and drew the crowds. We’re not going to be modeling our possible futures in 3D polystyrene, but our drawings will attempt to conjure them up and layer them onto the city participants are walking through.

So, to Sandbox, firstly I wanted to add the concise description that we wrote as part of the first workshop, as I’ve just referred back to this:

A walk through Soho and into a shared future, enabling performers and participants to conjure-up a dystopia/utopia. The interface is a mix of conversation and a networked map you carry, which appears and changes before your eyes.

We’re pleased with the breakthrough of using mini projectors the participants wear to project onto blank maps or blank pages of an A to Z. We imagine an A to Z cover, which when you unfold it firstly reveals some instructions, then a white map, with nothing drawn on it yet. A frame in the corners of the map would help people to line up the projection. Duncan’s been researching mini-projectors that don’t get hot enough to fry bacon on and how participants could comfortably wear them.

In discussion with Nina we’ve been discussing possible narrative trajectories. I’ve been thinking about walking into the future and whether it is enough to leave Soho Theatre and walk further into the future with each step. Alternatively there could be a movement in time in each location we take you to, so that when we arrive in each place it is the present day and as the performer walks away they shift from speaking about 10 years time to 20, to 40 to 100 years time. I’ve started re-reading H.G.Wells The Time Machine and wondering whether your guide or guides could be time-travellers or people who’ve returned with messages from your possible futures. Between us we’ve become keen on an idea that came-up from Nina proposing we work with young people to gather their imaginings of future buildings and society. We’ve been considering teenage performers guiding you and speaking about the future like seers. There’ll be a poignancy to them speaking about the future they’ll have to live in, and a real sense of responsibility as participants when imagining futures for these young people and hearing them speak these back publicly. In terms of narrative structure, the other thing we discussed, when meeting with Brad King, was whether participants will need to know something of the histories of Soho, so that they grasp how these futures relate to the past. We considered a preface that sketches in some of the histories of the place and brings the audience up to date, arriving in the present day. There’s also the possibility that the pasts of buildings could be woven-in, when we predict the future, references back to provide some context. Makes me think about this Frederic Jameson book: Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.

Went to Soho on Tuesday and began by doing Duncan’s previous soundwalk, What We Have Done. It’s a good starting point as this work’s also about predicting the future, though in this case a dystopian future imagined at the point of financial meltdown. We discussed how our work with live performers could draw on and differ from this piece Duncan made for Soho before. We think we’ll need more time to enable the interactions between performers and participants to take place and develop, we like that audience members could be guided or follow performers so they won’t be distracted from narratives by the need to follow audio directions, and we’d like to develop the depth of exchanges that happen between participants when they return to the theatre. We really enjoyed the sense of another participant walking at the same time as us, going through a different experience on the streets, and imagining where they were.

We imagined a performer guiding you; beginning their description in the present, they walk away from you and at a certain distance say ‘5 years from now’. At a distance, maybe on a doorstep or at a window she says, ’she stands in a window’, talking about herself in the future and in 3rd person. We also imagined being guided, as in Duncan’s previous soundwalk, by a recorded voice, perhaps that of a younger child, who leads you from performer to performer, the performers in situ, on location awaiting you and you seeking them out, finding them reading say, on a bench in Soho Square.

We noticed that there are a number of buildings being demolished, large-scale building projects, empty plots and buildings covered by hoardings. We photographed building sites, gaps where nothing has been built and buildings covered in scaffolding and obscured by plastic. These are potentially good places to imagine future architectures, for the participants to project their futures onto. Duncan has uploaded some of the images. This lead us to try to trace the planning applications and plans for these developments. On the Westminster Council site we found a map and zoomed into Soho, which revealed hundreds of dots marking planning applications agreed and pending, sometimes more than one in the same building. We became interested in a particularly big development site on Dean Street, where a whole row of Georgian / Victorian houses, one of which looks burnt-out, are being demolished. We discovered that this is to make way for one of the Crossrail ticket offices and stations and searched for the plans for this, by far the largest civil engineering project undertaken in years. We discovered that this new high-speed underground railway will run directly beneath Soho Square and will bisect Soho beneath the streets. We found the  elevations for the new Tottenham Court Rd. Station, all glass and steel, beneath the Centre Point tower, but not the drawings of the Dean Street ticket office. We’ve since worked on a description of the Tottenham Court Road entrance to Crossrail, that tries to conjure-up the architect’s impression of this station in 2017 using text.

We tried some detailed live-writing on location, writing everything we saw and heard, a little like making location recordings. Jess named shops and listed signs, then noted ‘a wolf whistle, a wave over the shoulder, a searching in a bag for a precious belonging, a little laugh’. Duncan zoomed-in to writing the narrative of a street-sweeper and imagined what was taking-place in each of the buildings around us, which we couldn’t see into. We wrote for 10 minutes at the iconic Bar Italia, then surrounded by the eclectic architectures from every era and trees from every continent of Soho Square. The idea with these writings is to transpose them into the future, to re-write every reference into a time 20 years hence.

We also wanted to begin to speak to local people and were recommended to chat with the owner of the Algerian coffee store near The Soho. Outside the shop on the street, amidst the strong smell of coffees being ground and the sound of the shop’s bustle, he spoke to us about 37 years as a shopkeeper here. We realised that in order to ask people about how they’d like the future to appear, it’s useful to discuss what’s changed over the years, what’s changed for better or worse and what you’d like to bring back. The owner of the Algerian coffee shop spoke about community and how Soho used to be like a small village, how the chainstores, coffee shops and many bars have replaced the independent shops. In his future the fishmonger and the fruit and veg market return. We realised that people’s futures are likely to draw on the past, to bring back what they miss. People’s futures may look a lot like the past they’re nostalgic for.

This made us think about narrative progression, how we could begin with describing an actual planned development, which really is to come and will be realised by 2017, working from the artists’ impressions. Then we could move on to a fictional future 20 years from now, clearly rooted in references to the present, weaving what people miss from the past into the future. Finally we could reach a more science-fiction, fantastical future, with only a few traces of now remaining, like the spire of a church. Imagining this we looked at Anthony Lau’s proposal for flooded London 2030, a floating city of aquatic architecture, anchored around the Thames, homes built on recycled container ships and decommissioned oil rigs. We imagined describing this from a bench amongst the green retreat of pastoral Soho Square, but maybe this is too obviously dystopian and too much in the air. We’ll see.