Bradley Garrett

Videographic geographies: Using digital video for geographic research

This article is a review of the ways in which human geography has engaged with film and video. Beginning with a look at the history of cinematic analysis within the discipline, the paper outlines different possible uses for digital video, focusing on its merits as a multisensory ethnographic method. The article encourages geographers to make the move from analysis to production, citing examples from successful recent projects which have done so, endorsing further integration of video into fieldwork and an increase in digital publication to create what we might call videographic geographies.

Assaying History: Creating Temporal Junctions through Urban Exploration

This paper discusses the role of encounters with the past in the practice of urban exploration through ethnographic research undertaken with communities of urban explorers. Urban exploration is an activity intimately connected with places that have largely reached the end of their capitalist use-life. In this paper I argue that the practice enticingly complicates understandings of places by unveiling unexpected material traces and immaterial affordances that build resilient personal attachments where the ‘present’ tangibly intersects with the ‘past’. In the process urban exploration exposes possibilities for a cultural use-life of abandoned buildings beyond the event of abandonment, with or without formal historical interpretation.

London’s Olympic waterscape: capturing transition

The waterways of London are an essential component of the city, with the River Thames playing a prominent role in the heritage, history and identity of place. The upcoming 2012 Olympics are highlighting the Lea Valley waterways in east London as another important part of London’s waterscape, expanding London’s global presence as a ‘water city’. As part of the Creative Campus Initiative, we undertook a project based on the broad themes of water, London and the Olympics that would give voice to the changes taking place. The result is London’s Olympic Waterscape, a 20-minute film comprising both ‘expert’ interview material discussing broad themes and developments and an embodied record of our engagement with the Olympic area during a brief period in the construction process. The present article is about the journey we took through and around the east London ‘Olympic’ waterways as we attempted to capture this transitional moment on video.

Picturing urban subterranea: Embodied aesthetics of London’s sewers

As cities around the world are tunnelled and hollowed to new depths, geographers are giving increasing attention to infrastructure in the context of verticality, often framed through urban planning or geopolitics. This paper responds to calls from geography and the wider geohumanities for ethnographic and aesthetic consideration of vertical infrastructures by reflecting on London’s sewer system as a site of embodied engagement and creative imagination. Once venerated by the press and public as engineering, medical and aesthetic triumphs, London’s sewers are thought to have morphed into sites of ubiquitous obscurity. This paper counters this understanding by considering bodies, technologies and activities through time that have shaped imaginations of London’s main drainage, including the work of contemporary urban explorers. I argue that although the current aestheticization of infrastructural spaces in London is connected to particular technologies, politics and geographical concerns of the present, it also echoes body-space interventions and affects across a 150-year span. This aesthetic legacy is a crucial pillar in our understandings of urban verticality.

Entering the Maze: Space, time and exclusion in an abandoned Northern Ireland prison

This article is an autoethnographic account of the authors’ trespassing in the abandoned Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. For three decades before its closure in 2000, the Maze was the site of intense political struggle. The ruins of the Maze – a space once built to let no one out that now allows no one in – exist now in a state of limbo, between the conflicting narratives of the prison’s troubled past, and an uncertain future. We present a brief historical account of the Maze, and explain our unconventional choice of ‘research method’, before introducing Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia. We suggest that the Maze is an archetypally heterotopic space and our experience of exploring the prison can equally be described as such.

Last breath: unofficial pre-demolition celebrations.

Last Breath is a project that invites artists to contribute a piece of work to a building which is soon to be destroyed. Artistic offerings are recorded in photographs and on video, records released once the building, along with the art, has been demolished. These place-making events perform a kind of audio/visual memento mori, reminding us not only of the perpetual transitoriness of urban existence but also of the potential for participation in such processes. In this article, words, still images and videographic footage are blended to explore and imagine what sorts of affective capacities the project might afford through its creative interventions and mediations.

Non-human Sensing: New Methodologies for the Drone Assemblage

Consideration of the drone as a component of an audio/visual methodological assemblage prompts post-phenomenological questions about how bodies act with technologies. Piloting a drone through a live video stream appears to create a sensory extension. Yet the increasing autonomy of the drone, facilitated by exponential innovation in sense-and-avoid technologies, point towards future amalgamations that are increasingly more-than-human. In the context of a plethora of work on the ‘terror’ of the drone, where operational autonomy is politically non-negotiable—for autonomous machines cannot yet be held to account—we suggest here that the non-human, multi- and extrasensory visuality of the drone are more plentiful than terrible, more evasive than invasive, and create practical and imaginative space for experimentation. Here, we first think through the relationships between bodies, ex-bodies and objects in the imaginaries and practices of drone piloting. Then, we suggest that where drones—as aerial avatars—are reshaping methodological imaginations through the unique sensual amalgamations they afford, future drone bodies will be less stringently tethered to the hand and the eye of a human host as the drone flies off on its own, in swarms or alone.

Book review: American Visual Culture. By Mark Rawlinson. Oxford: Berg Publishers. 2009. xi—248 pp. 40 b/w illustrations. £17.99 Paperback. ISBN: 9781845202170

but also presents opportunities for visibilities and the contestations of heteronormativities. Tucker refuses to focus only on marginalization, examining empowerments that cannot be located in ‘oppression’ or be lost to hopelessness. Instead, this book inspires hope as well as understanding, demonstrating how heteronormativity can be usurped and homophobia challenged, such that queer men become visible. Yet, he illustrates that not only do queer men resist and transgress heteronormativities to create diverse visibilities, there are also possibilities because of the operation of oppressive regimes, for example the clampdown on gay bars in the De Waterkant area increased excitement in attending these events. In pointing to the dangers of gender violence for cross dressing coloured men, Tucker notes that whilst it is important to attend to the dangers and experiences of gendered violences against these men, these should not be used to dismiss or erase empowerment and the successes this group of men have attained in wider communities. This has implications in how we approach studies of sexualities, explore visibilities and empowerments, even where violence is present. This does not negate such violence, but neither does it allow it the predominance in discussions of (in this context) gender expressions. This book offers a rich engagement with urban spatialities, that refuses a reduction of sexual visibilities to ghettos and territories. It explores how identifications and enactments of queer male sexualities are spatially constituted and historically located. Finding that sexual expressions are not ubiquitous even within Cape Town is a challenge for urban investigations of sexualities, particularly those which are focused on closets and coming out. Such an investigation has clear implications for the study of other urbanities. For example, what would a similarly nuanced account of the sexual spatialities of other cities (within and beyond the Global North) reveal? How would this alter the focus of what we are looking at and for when foregrounding investigations of sexuality?

Book review. Are we there yet? The golden age of American family vacations by Susan Sessions Rugh

Susan Sessions Rugh’s second mass-market monograph, Are we there yet? The Golden Age of American family vacations, is a well researched and enjoyable to read but marred, unfortunately, by numerous minor inconsistencies in the theoretical framework and technical details. The book is extremely wide ranging in both topical coverage and use of historical references adding to its readability but leaving the focus somewhat unclear. Dr Rugh describes an age of family vacationing stretching from 1945–1973 (if you refer to the book’s sleeve) or from 1945 ‘until the 1970s’ if you refer to the text (p. 2). It would seem that Rugh has bounded this ‘Golden Age’ with the conclusion of World War II at one end and the disappearance of ‘families who fit the family ideal of the period’ at the other (pp. 11–12). It is unclear whether the end of Rugh’s ‘Golden Age’ is envisioned as a death or a transition. Rugh implies at times that the period ends when American family road trips decline in popularity (p. 2, an unreferenced comment), possibly due to the 1973 oil embargo (p. 4), increased travel to Europe (p. 4), the decline of consumption (p. 5), a travel industry marketing shift to ‘countercultural themes’ (p. 4), hippie culture (p. 11, p. 180), technology (p. 183) or some combination of these, and by the end of the book suggests that ‘It’s not that the family vacation went away, but it did cease to be recognized as a mass phenomena’ (p. 180, again unreferenced), a statement that was challenged by my own experience while reading the book. I read Are we there yet? on a road trip through the American West where I witnessed hundreds of American families cruising through the landscape in recreational vehicles, minivans and small cars spilling camping equipment out of the back hatch at rest stops. In one instance, at Badwater in Death Valley National Park, a minivan pulled into the parking lot. Children threw open the sliding door, shrieking with excitement about visiting in the driest, hottest and lowest place in the USA as they ran into the salt plain. The parents emerged moments later, speaking Chinese quietly to each other, holding hands and calmly following the children. Later, one of the children, a boy about 8 years old, said to his mother, in very Californian-inflected American English, ‘Hey mom, is this the American Landscape?’ After some consideration, she responded with a thickly Chinese-American accent ‘yes, I think so’, prompting the boy to once again yell out in excitement and inscribe the place with the title of ‘super cool’. This encounter led me to wonder if the ‘end’ of this age may actually just be an indication of the increased multiculturalism, dynamism and diversity of America at the end of the cold war.