Plural Machine

Despite its undoubted cultural vitality, Glasgow has often had a grim reputation, especially south of the English border. Yet the very bleakness, exacerbated by epic mismanagement, aggressive deindustrialization and sectarianism has also made it a site of constant and sometimes tragically over-ambitious attempts at utopian regeneration. This can be seen in the now highly poignant film Glasgow 1980 , which was already being quietly forgotten and surpassed by harsh reality even before the city had reached the year the film is supposed to depict. It poignantly promised a gleaming, post-industrial future in which "muscle gives way to automation." Yet in between the completion of the film and 1980, the oil shock and economic slowdown shattered the dreams of its makers and backers. Relatively little of the utopian plans (which to some already seemed dystopian) was ever built and many of the hopes of the "white heat of technology" era came to nothing. Other buildings...

Quatermass is a story of the future ... but perhaps only a few years from now. What might be in store for us if our civilisation were to come under terrible unforeseen strain. Nigel Kneale, 1979. I saw the final Quatermass TV series as an impressionable 10 year old. Like many of my generation, it's stayed with me ever since. The earlier Quatermass films and TV series are more respected critically and writer Nigel Kneale himself had reservations about the way the 1979 instalment was realised. Yet however imperfect it is, it does have great poetic dystopian power. At the time, the urban warfare and mad cults it depicts were (correctly) taken as Kneale's somewhat bitter look back in anger at the social and political chaos of the 1960s and 1970s. It's forgotten that Kneale was looking forwards as much as backwards. In a feature for the TV Times to promote the series, he argued that the near total collapse of civilisation that he foresaw might be just a few years awa...

Istanbul Brutalism. Photo by Alexei Monroe. Architectures against Strategy is a new base for my expanding work around architecture. The page will initially be more focused on architectural photographs and links but I'll also be developing some of the concepts presented at my recent talk in Maribor dealing with monumental London architecture as an ambivalent setting for the unfolding of cultural and political forces. This in turn was a sequel to my Tate Modern presentation discussing monumentalism and the work of the NSK architecture section Graditelji (The Builders).

Demolition of  the Island Block, October 2006. Photo c. Alexei Monroe On December 1 st I'll be taking part in an event in Maribor entitled A conversation about the formation of national iconographies and their framing . This is a closing event for a complex and challenging exhibition by the artist Jasmina Cibic.   My talk, Unacceptable Faces of Monumentalism?, is an interpretation of competing utopian and dystopian tendencies in London architecture, culture and politics. It's an experimental approach to analysing architecture, a subject I'm increasingly interested in. It's also a conceptual sequel to my Tate Modern presentation in April. Here's a sonic cue, Shockwork by Test Dept...

Montage by Vera Bremerton.  Next Friday I'll give an experimental presentation at Noise=Noise on the strange parallels between the sonic and conceptual dystopianism of Doctor Who and first generation British industrial music. Dr. Who exposed mass audiences (often very young) to a combination of experimental electronic sound and dystopian themes, a combination that could also summarise industrial music. Dr. Who frequently presented post-apocalyptic scenarios of mutation, mind control and para-militarised societies and, in the process, at least implicitly criticised actual political and technological developments of the time, particularly those associated with the Cold War arms race. Due to budgetary constraints these visionary scenarios were often realised in a rudimentary ad hoc fashion; an approach that also applies to industrial. The early industrial groups highlighted the most serious social and political themes using very primitive electronic equipment, creating a kind of...