Negarestanian Diversion 5.0 (Porous Spaces/Memory Games)

 

All Images: Clifton, Bristol, February 2023

“If syntheses of memory are always time-dominated, memory distractions and memory gaps take advantage of the exploitation of time outside of chronological progressions. Memory holes introduce gaps, discontinuous tunnels and porous spaces into the chronological sphere of memory, thus making it more prone to time-lapses, abrupt schizophrenic katabases (personality-pulverizing blackouts, descents free from the hegemony of solid and void), and loss of wholeness. In Zoroastrianism, playing with graves and memory are both forbidden: While one deserves a physical punishment, the other will bring eternal torment – because playing with memory (i.e. inventing lines of iteration through memory other than mere remembering functions) sorcerously reinvents events not as localizable beings but as deathless (in the sense of demonic restlessness) and inexhaustible germ-lines. 

"Playing with memory, beyond the legitimate activity of remembering, enmeshes memory as a playground of agitated activities in the past which break the organizational consistency of the past in regard in regard to present and future. The past as a static chronological horizon intrinsically tends to sedentarize all time of activities in itself, or to make itself the stabilizing ground of activities in present or future: The past belongs to the Divine and tradition." [1.]

[1.]:  Reza Negarestani, ‘Cyclonopedia’, Melbourne, Aus., re.press, 2008

Tunnelling In Again

West Nottingham, April 2019

I never cease to be thrilled by the immersive complexity of cities.  For a long time now, I've had a kind of fantasy about urban environments resembling vast living organisms through which one might move - like in one of those imagined scenarios where submarine explorers are shrunk to cellular scale and injected into someone's bloodstream.  Such tales always seemed merely a preposterous trope of the cheesier end of Science Fiction from my childhood [1.].  However, anyone who has experienced an endoscopic procedure involving the medical insertion of a fibre-optic device, will know that fact has rather caught up with fiction, these days.

West Nottingham, April 2019

Anyway this sense of the city as a complex amalgam of interlocking systems, networks, ducts and sinuses is always magnified whenever my camera lens is drawn into a city's subways and other subterranean spaces - as it often is.  

West Leicester, May 2019

Subways and tunnels have long held a fascination, and have certainly featured on here before, a few times.  These images include several of the latest crop - harvested recently, while considering the possible resurrection of a proposed video project on the subject, a while back.  I'm still not sure if that project will actually emerge into the light, anytime soon - although I have started shooting a bit more related footage, of late - so we'll see about that one.

What is notable is that the regularly photographed foot tunnels, and road underpasses have now been joined by subterranean and basement carparks, as a recurrent motif.  Psychologically, the implications of these might be subtly different, although I'm yet to fully analyse exactly how.  For now, they just seem to offer another opportunity to burrow into the hidden substrata of the city - either in reality, or by just imagining what might be around one of those descending corners

West Nottingham, April 2019

[1.]:  I want to imagine having watched at least one film based on this premise, as a child - the kind of thing Doug McClure would have inevitably starred in.  Anyone know whether or not I'm just making this up?