Venture Ethnography 2: excerpts & anchors

photo credit: justinpickard (incorporating Andreas Pizsa, Barry M, and the Seattle Municipal Archives)

Following last week’s introduction to Project Cascadia (and accompanying reading list), I thought I’d share a couple of passages that have been firmly lodged in my brain this week.

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First, the very beginning of Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, an extraordinary novel-slash-history of Soviet cybernetics. In this extract, the author grapples with some of the peculiarities and nuance of his writing:

‘This is not a novel. It has too much to explain, to be one of those. But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story; only the story is the story of an idea, first of all, and only afterwards, glimpsed through the chinks of the idea’s fate, the story of the people involved. The idea is the hero. It is the idea that sets forth, into a world of hazards and illusions, monsters and transformations, helped by some of those it meets along the way and hindred by others.’

– Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (2010), p. 3.

(‘The idea is the hero.‘ How do you approach a biography of an idea? An idea of a region; a utopia; shared – at some vague, subconscious level – by millions of people? Approached obliquely … glimpsed through gaps, and attacked from strange angles? Ambushed with some strange hybrid of fact and fiction? Hmm.)

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Secondly, a couple of lines from Wild Bill Gibson’s ‘The Gernsback Continuum‘; a meditation on legacy futures in the form of a short story:

‘She was talking about those odds and ends of ‘futuristic’ Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing: the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious energy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of transient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she wanted me to photograph them for her.’

– William Gibson, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, Burning Chrome (1988), pp. 38-39.

(‘Segments of a dreamworld.’ Hunting traces … gathering evidence … detective work, pinning down the imaginary and the nebulous in something tangible. The process of documenting the imaginary drives Gibson’s photojournalist protagonist to the brink of madness, as he begins to slip sideways into the obsolete retro-future he’s been sent to document. It’s an excellent short story, and a key insipiration for some of my earliest work on this project.)

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photo credit: justinpickard

And, finally, the opening lines from Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, a strange, tangential, and exhaustively-referenced biography of Los Angeles:

‘The best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future. Standing on the sturdy cobblestone foundations of the General Assembly Hall of the Socialist city of Llana del Rio – Open Shop Los Angeles’s utopian antipode – you can sometimes watch the Space Shuttle in its elegant final descent towards Rogers Dry Lake.’

– Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990), p. 3.

(‘From the ruins of its alternative future.‘ If you want to understand the ways things will turn out, you have to understand what’s already failed, and why? These are words that echo (rhyme with?) Sterling’s oft-repeated aphorism: ‘The ruins of the unsustainable are the twenty-first century’s frontier.’ The mission, then, is to locate sites where the past and future collide with an unexpected ferocity, bringing long-buried cultural detritus to the surface. Atemporality, located in space.)

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More to follow, in time.