Photo by Matthew Christopher
Objects have lives. They are witness to things. –This American Life, “The House on Loon Lake”
Atlantic Cities’ feature on the psychology of “ruin porn” is worth a look–in part because it’s interesting in itself, in part because it features some wonderful images, and in part because it has a great deal to do with both a piece I posted previously on Michael Chrisman’s photograph of a year and with the essay that piece referenced, Nathan Jurgenson’s take on the phenomenon of faux-vintage photography.
All of these pieces are, to a greater or lesser extent, oriented around a singular idea: atemporality – that the intermeshing and interweaving of the physical and digital causes us not only to experience both of those categories differently, but to perceive time itself differently; that for most of us, time is no longer a linear experience (assuming it ever was). Technology changes our remembrance of the past, our experience of the present, and our imagination of the future by blurring the lines between the three categories, and introducing different forms of understanding and meaning-making to all three – We remember the future, imagine the present, and experience the past. The phenomenon of “ruin porn” is uniquely suited to call attention to our increasingly atemporal existence, and to outline some of the specific ways in which it manifests itself.
A quick primer: “Ruin porn” is a somewhat contested term for a category of photography that focuses on images of abandoned human constructions, often urban in setting. Factories, theaters, hospitals, schools – all in states of abandonment and decay. As I indicated, there has been a fair amount of heated debate around the term “ruin porn”, some of which I will deal with directly. First, however, I want to talk about the physical side of the creation of the images, before they implode with the digital and become images that we consume.

The Carcass of the Ruined Space
In order to capture these images, photographers must enter the spaces themselves – physical presence is necessary. If physical presence is necessary, then physical experience is unavoidable: Digital images of ruined and abandoned spaces therefore must be understood to have fundamentally physical roots. They are about bodies in space, even though the body – the photographer – is usually unseen in the produced image.
This seems self-evident, but it is significant in light of the fact that there is a deep connection between the photography of urban decay and the practice of urban exploration (though the two factions have also butted ideological heads). Photographers document these physical spaces because, in the moment of their experience, there is something remarkable about the spaces themselves. The physical experience of the space is not a by-product of capturing the image; it is often an end in itself. The photographers interviewed by The Atlantic speak about an experience of “realness”, of building a relationship with the past that they cannot through abstract means. This speaks strongly to Jurgenson’s discussions of authenticity in photography, but it’s also about more than that.
We can and should understand abandoned places as atemporal spaces in and of themselves – they are physical spaces in which the experience of linear time breaks down. Through the experience of the space, explorers and photographers (and blends of the two) break out of a conventional experience of the present and into a space where the artifacts of history feel at once fresh and new, and ancient and decayed. Imagination is key to the atemporal experience of these places: One can exist in an abandoned, ruined space and see shards of a dead past on which one can construct a live imagining – who were the people who lived and worked here? What were their lives like? What were their stories? What happened to them? What happened to them in these spaces?
Imagining along these lines explicitly carries one forward into the future; it’s at this point that the construction of the unruined past becomes the imagining of the ruined future. Ruins serve as a kind of spatial memento mori for people embedded in a culture marked by production and consumption (and prosumption) of the new and by the invisibility of the discarded: They are gentle reminders of our own transience. They lead us to questions just as the imagining of the past did: What will our contemporary structures look like in fifty years? In a hundred? Who will remember us? Who will stand in our abandoned spaces and wonder about us? We can imagine these things because they suggest an end without really being an ending – there is always, after all, someone else to look and wonder, comfortingly embodied in ourselves. As Will Viney writes in his essay on the “Ruins of the Future”:
The future ruin, then, is an incomplete end achieved by an incomplete transition between now and then. It might fill us with a “sense of ending”, to borrow a famous phrase from Frank Kermode, but it is not quite the end itself. The politically, theologically and philosophically rich gesture of projecting ruins, of prophesying the demise of a building, as well as the people and activities associated with it, depends upon an end that can be experienced, a sense of dénouement that is not absolutely terminal. This is not the apocalypse as such, but an end to be seen, to be retold and represented – it is a telling end.
In considering ruined spaces as atemporal, it’s also useful to consider Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia – spaces of fundamental otherness that exist outside what is conventionally known or knowable, that may contain profound conceptual conflicts, and that will often be both physical and mental in nature – both interior and external. In this sense, ruined places are temporal heterotopias,1 containing complex interminglings of past, present, and future as well as of both objective existence (always assuming, for our purposes, that there is such a thing) and imagined constructions of how things were, are, and will be.

Photo by Vincent J. Stoker
So where does technology enter the frame? At this point we should return to Jurgenson’s discussion of the faux-vintage photo. As he describes it, the act of capturing digital images and sharing them via social networks encourages us to “view our present as always a potential documented past.” This is a crucial feature of the experience of abandoned spaces by the photographers who enter them: They experience the spaces not only through their own perception but through the anticipated and actual mediation of the camera with which they document images of atemporal space. There is always another dimension – the image that will be captured, possibly altered, and shared, and the people who will view the image in a form mediated by their own technological devices. Photographers of urban decay are therefore not only imagining a potential ruined future, but a potential future viewer of the present image of a ruined past.

Photo by Jim Potter/Blind Owl Underground
I want to emphasize the importance of physicality here–one of the crucial – if not the most crucial – ideas behind atemporality in the sense in which I use the word is the profound connection between our perception and understanding of time and our relationship with the enmeshed physical/digital world that our technology is increasingly helping to create. In short, we cannot discuss the digital in this case without first establishing why and how the physical matters.
But now I want to focus on that move from physical to digital, the point of entanglement where one shades into another and the relationship between the two becomes truly complex. I want to talk about the image itself, both in terms of its production and its consumption.

The Ghostly Construction of the Ruined Image
In the section above, I’ve discussed the actual experience of the ruined space that necessarily accompanies capturing its image. I emphasized the importance of the imagination in the atemporal nature of this experience–the construction of both an imagined past and an imagined future in light of the perception of the present. I have characterized these spaces as heterotopias – spaces outside the realm of the static, the linear, and the knowable. What I turn to now is the idea that there is a subtle but important difference between the physical experience of these spaces and the digitally-mediated experience of viewing their images.
First, there is the removal of aspects of the experience of time itself – even if the spaces are temporal heterotopias, one still experiences one’s own time within them: there is the process of finding and approaching the space, of entering it, of spending time inside it, and then of leaving it behind. If the important thing about the atemporality of ruined space is the construction of imagined pasts and futures, that construction may work quite differently when the spaces are experienced through immediate static images rather than gradual entry and exit. The nature of the space itself is changed when its image is all that is perceived.
Second, the image may or may not hold a close connection with the place itself. In her work on the philosophy of photography, Susan Sontag presented the act of photographing something as simultaneously the documenting of fact and the creation of fiction. There is a real space that is really photographed – but the photograph will never capture all of the space. It is the image that the photographer chooses to capture and share; it is an artifact of the photographer’s own perception of a space. Further, the image will frequently be altered in post-production.
The point is that by the time the image is shared, it may or may not bear much resemblance to space from which it was created. If we understand these spaces as time-laden as well as atemporal, then it makes sense to suppose that the aesthetics of the images of these spaces can shape the constructions of pasts, presents, and futures on the part of the people who view the images. Just as a photographer brings her own understandings and imaginings of ruined past and ruined future to the experience of a space, so the viewer of the photograph of a ruined space does not and cannot experience the image in isolation from her own internal narratives regarding what the past was, what the present is, and what the future may be.

Photo by Sigma
Then there is the question of the context in which the image is viewed – and this is where we must turn to a discussion of the term “ruin porn” itself, and why it is at once both useful and problematic. It’s practically impossible to be in a ruined or abandoned space and have no idea at all of its context; the explorer or photographer sees the surroundings in which the space rests, sees where it is embedded in the larger structure of a city or a rural area, and can usually draw at least rough conclusions about what the space is, what it was, and what happened to it. Though the space is atemporal, it does have a history, and being inside the space gives one at least a chance of making a passing connection to that history simply by virtue of being there at all.
But a digital image viewed on a screen is inherently disconnected from that context, unless that information is presented with the image, or unless the viewer of the image cares enough to seek that context out – which, in a digital space, can mean an extremely diverse set of paths to an extremely diverse set of resources and media. And this has direct consequences for how the various imagined timeframes associated with the image are constructed. What do we know about a place from an image and about its past? How do we know it? What are we simply assuming or making up out of whole cloth? And how do these forms of knowledge and these assumptions shape our understanding of our presents and our imagining of our futures?
In an instant, we can see a constructed image of decay and ruin that leads us to further constructions of past, present, and future. And these constructions may be wildly diverse and wildly divergent depending on the perspective and knowledge of the viewer. Abi Sutherland of Making Light characterized these images as “like a story prompt, the visual equivalent of a Mad Lib gone melancholic, and the topic is our own lives.” What is atemporal on this end lies in the fabric of the stories we tell to ourselves about ourselves and how we weave those disparate stories together. And we can do this in the way we do this because of the digital nature of these images and because of the digital nature of so much of our accumulated knowledge, and of how we accumulate that knowledge. There is no single authoritative source in this accumulation. If we are poets and scribes, we are also digital magpies; we pick and gather and aggregate from everywhere. As Bruce Sterling notes in “Atemporality for the Creative Artist”, what we have now instead of a singular accepted narrative is a multiplicity of narratives drawn from a multiplicity of sources, expressed in a wild multiplicity of ways.
A story of my own: Not far from where I live in Maryland there’s a park that contains the ruins of a mill town that was mostly washed away in a flood in 1972. Not much of it remains, but one day I and my husband went exploring to see what we could still find. In the process of compiling the images we captured, we did a fair amount of research on the town itself, including digging up old photographs of the town as it was when it was inhabited and intact.

Photo by Rob Wanenchak
That process made me experience my memory of the town differently than I had when I was physically there. It also made me see our captured images of the town differently. Suddenly they were contextualized. It isn’t that the images made no sense before they were placed in context. It isn’t that images of ruin without historical context are senseless and meaningless. Far from it. But we must understand the sense that is made of them as potentially very different in that case. What we know shapes what we know. What we see shapes what we know. And what we know shapes a great deal of what we see and imagine.
It is in this sense that many people find both the term and the idea of “ruin porn” a problem. Many of the American-produced images that arguably fall under the category of “ruin porn” are artifacts of buildings, industries, and communities that have been casualties of modern American capitalism, and especially the process of deindustrialization that has occurred in many American urban centers, which has been devastating to minorities and the urban poor. Many of these images have come out of the shell of the American Rust Belt, leading to criticisms on the part of some that the images do not do justice to either the historical context or the present state of these spaces – as evidence of rampant social inequality and a failed welfare state – and that the photographs essentially construct the present of the spaces as more ruined and abandoned then they really are, given that many people may still live in or near them. In essence, they are accused of constructing a romantically gritty and melancholic vision of a past that allows viewers to avoid the more unpleasant understandings of a present or the even less pleasant prospect of a future marked by the scars of social inequality. As Sean Posey of Rustwire writes,
One of the best criticisms of photographs of abandonment, especially those made by photojournalists, is the failure to include people who live in these areas. There are still 700,000 plus people in Detroit, most of whom are African American. Their invisibility in photographic documentations is directly related to their invisibility in policy circles, or in discussions of urban revitalization. In a way, accentuating the lack of people leads to notions that no one lives in these areas. Ruins become more about the past and what once was, instead of the present.
But Abandoned America photographer Matthew Christopher takes issue with what he feels is the distraction that the term itself presents – a way of dismissing what the images represent and what they suggest without engaging directly in a discussion of what capturing and viewing these images actually means for artists and consumers of art, and for all of us as atemporal storytellers in an augmented world:
While the term is extraordinarily useful for brushing off the significance of an entire genre of work, it is much less useful for entering an actual discussion. It breezily dismisses the subject as perverse and pointless with the same carefree lack of thought and responsibility that the original photographers who were described with the term were accused of having. When examined more thoroughly, much like the topic of abandoned spaces, it reveals a wealth of material worthy of pondering. What are the responsibilities of an artist or photographer to their subject, and should they be chastised for attempting to make a profession of documenting ruins?…More to the point, is existing as an object of beauty justifiable in and of itself or must it ‘accomplish’ something? Must a photograph present both sides of a story?
The questions I would add to those posed by Christopher have to do with time and our perception of it. What do images of ruined places mean for our understanding of history? What do they mean for how we understand our own mortality and transience? What do they do to our perceptions of time itself? What implications does the fabric of our constructions of past and future have for how we accumulate and value various forms of knowledge?
If the term “ruin porn” has any utility, it may lie in the reminder it presents that what we see is only what we see, and what we see is often the construction of a gaze separate from our own. Just as pornography is a mediated creation based on sex without being an actual, unmediated representation of the act itself, we should understand images of anything in the same terms without mistaking them for the “real thing” - if for no other reason than because the “real thing” may prove impossible to pin down, both in terms of time and in terms of space. Images of ruined spaces are like temporal ghost stories: it is difficult to be sure if what we see is truly a fragment of an objective past, an echo of our own future, or simply a shifting chiaroscuro–a play of digital shadow and light.
1 This idea should not be confused with Foucault’s own idea of temporal heterotopia, which is related (places like museums, which contain artifacts of many times but that sit outside time itself) but which I think is slightly different than what I’m talking about here.



Ruin Porn: As Dirty as You Need It to Be

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I like ruin porn. To many I am nasty. I am aware of this. But please, hear me out.
First, let me back up a minute. If you aren't from the Rust Belt you need to know something: vacancy lives here. In fact, its ubiquity has granted it a presence in our post-industrial culture.
Take art, for instance. Abandonment has seeped into painters' canvases and into the inkwells of writers, yet the crux of abandonment's aesthetic value has mainly been argued within the field photography, particularly the practice of photographing industrial and urban ruins. This has been dubbed "ruin porn." And it has been an uphill battle for the genre's supporters ever since.
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Enter the power of language. Because even before you get to analyze the practice of ruin photography on its own merit, you get the connotations of porn filmed over your judgment. And so the act of filming ruins becomes the act of filming filth, meaning the resultant audience is less interested in artistic quality than they are titillation. After all, it's pornographic. It says so right in the name.
Framing, it's an old trick, used by preschoolers and politicians alike, as the name "tattle-tale" sticks no less than "flip-flopper." Framing can destroy in that sense, even in art. Just look at that period in the country's history when being called a "communist" meant your films were socially perverse.
But in the end, framing on its own won't hold up. And so evolve reasons to give the "porn" label some weight, if only to convince folks that ruin art is light, cheap, voyeuristic: a still shot of Hoarders mixed with Intervention, or, for that matter, all things reveling in America's happiness with another's pain.
One critique is journalistic laziness -- out-of-towner flies into Detroit and captures yet another over-dramatic shot of Detroit's Michigan Central Depot before bolting. There's validity to this argument, but in and of itself it doesn't disqualify the potential of the medium. After all, isn't that on the schmuckiness of the artist instead of on the quality of the genre?
Another critique centers on the fact there are no people in ruin porn shots. For such critics, it's tasteless to document the ruins of cities without showcasing the people who live beside the decay. One critic writes:
The one thing they (ruin photos) have in common no matter who has taken them is that there are never any people in them. And to me, that points to the problem. There are no people interacting with the ruins.
Well, in Cleveland I have yet to see many folks "interacting with ruins" outside of copper thieves and the general sleepy/drunk squatter, and believe me: they don't want their pic snapped. But beyond that: ruin porn is a thread of landscape photography, and I don't remember Ansel Adams getting criticized because his epic landscape shots didn't have backpackers milling about. Of course, critics will contend that traditional landscape shots aren't intertwined with a city's (and thus, a people's) demise, which brings us to the next most common critique: ruin porn sensationalizes the poor.
For example, in this post the author critiques German photographer Christian Burkert's series of photos titled "Last Exit Detroit" this way:
What's problematic about this approach (ruin porn) is that it does little but gawk at the cities and people in distress. In other words, it actually contributes to the problem by fueling the notion that Detroit (and depressed cities like it) are beyond help.
Two things here: First, I feel documenting abandonment can in fact out the conditions of poverty, showing -- like Jacob Riis' seminal work did back in 1890 -- not so much how the other half lives, but what the other half lives with. Lord knows this is necessary. Plight and blight are to the eyes like one's hand is to fire: instinctually distanced. (See Mitt Romney's famous quote about not being concerned about the "very poor."). Then pause to reflect how what has happened to us is needed here. Show it. Debate it. Shutting it down under the auspices of porn actually makes the living images dirtier than they are.
Second -- and this speaks to the ruin porn critique in general -- there's something of an amorphous/ambiguousness nature to the attacks that tells the creator and supporter of the medium that: you can't win for losing. For example, here is one of the photos from Burkert's series, here's another and there are many more like it.
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Photo credit: Sean Posey
Yeah, I don't get it either. Far from "gawking" or "fueling" the notion that Detroit is beyond help, you know what I see? The aesthetic of a world I live in every day. Rust. Wear. And folks trying to fix what's broken.
And about that indefinable nature of the attack, well, it often works. Note the frustration and confusion in Matthew Christopher's great post Confessions of a Ruin Pornographer: A Lurid Tale of Art, Double Standards, and Decay:
The nebulous nature of the term and its use as an insult means that it can be employed without much consequence and is frustratingly difficult to rebut.... Because the core definition is ill-defined and constantly shifting, there is no way to adequately defend yourself: whatever it is that you're doing, you should be doing something else, but in the meanwhile your work bears the sleazy stigma of comparison to that of such esteemed photographers as those found in Hustler or Penthouse and you, by extension, are less an artist than a pornographer.
And finally, there's the latest, almost subtle attack -- or that's it time to move beyond "ruin porn" and talk about what's next. To some extent I agree, yet the truth's more complicated, as the term "ruin porn" has disallowed a true discourse on the understanding of modern America in ruins no less than the term "family values" has hindered the discourse on the state of the modern American family.
So: Shut it down. Do something else. Stop making the gawking. Stop documenting decay. Ruin ain't pretty.
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Photo credit: Sean Posey
Behind the "porn" grenades, these are the core messages that can be teased out. And I am coming to the conclusion that they are fed not so much by the more surface message that ruin porn is bad per se, but rather by something deeper -- or an incapability in the American psyche to incorporate failure into the American dream.
To that end, I recently came across this 1972 gem of a paragraph that touches on this incapability perfectly. It's from a book prophetically entitled Urban Wilderness by urban historian Sam Bass Warner Jr.
American Urban Life confuses us in its intermingling of endless repetition with ceaseless change. Consider our habitual responses. We do not see in the brand-new downtown apartment towers or the freshly carpeted suburban model home the inevitable repetition of failure which surely awaits them...The newness is a goal for family achievement, the reality of aging is either to be obliterated or escaped [italics mine]. The past is not seen in the present... These are deep habits of mind.
Warner Jr. goes on:
Since at least the founding of the Republic we have been concealing failure from ourselves with newness.... Thus for generations we have dwelt in a self-created urban wilderness of time and space, confounding ourselves with its lusty growth and rising to periodic alarms in the night. It is no accident that we have no urban history.
But of course we do have history. And it's messy -- tinged with both beauty and filth. And it will exist regardless if its documentation is shamed to a halt.
Now, if you would excuse me, I am going to take my laptop and look at some ruin porn. Alas, I will be far less titillated than thoughtfully wondering.

The Politics and Archaeology of “Ruin Porn”

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An enormous number of artists, urbanites, and even archaeologists have begun to focus their attention on the aesthetics and materiality of ruin in a discourse commonly dubbed as “ruin porn.”  The pornography metaphor invokes the focus on a purely self-centered gaze and seeing urban and industrial ruination for sensationalistic if not purely emotional and instinctive reasons.  Some commentators are unnerved by the implication that the mostly visual documentation of ruination simultaneously shares with pornography the un-expressible and purely self-centered satisfaction of voyeuristic viewing.  Yet artist Matthew Christopher thoughtfully defends his photographic “autopsy of the American Dream” as a “sort of modern archaeology,” making a truly persuasive case for the political might of documenting urban devastation with images and archaeological analysis alike.

Perhaps no building has appeared in “ruin porn” more often than Detroit’s Michigan Central Station. Completed in 1913, the Beaux-Arts landmark stopped receiving trains in 1988. (Image courtesy Chad and Steph)
The story of urban America is undeniably one of dramatic post-war decline that could truly be likened to social and material apocalypse in some communities, and in many ways similar tales can be told of many industrial and urban landscapes throughout the world.   Many of the chroniclers of American material devastation are criticized as hipster photographers accused of simply engaging their fascination with urban decline as they reclaim cities, a point made thoughtfully and fairly by John Patrick Leary’s brilliant analysis of “ruin porn” in Detroit.  Detroit has perhaps witnessed more of this discourse than any other American city.  Sometimes Detroit is taken as a lamentation on the fate of American (if not global) cities; Andrew Moore’s photographs of Detroit might be circumspectly placed in this category, with one observer seeming to applaud that “Without straying into politics, [his book Detroit Disassembled is] an eloquent plea for new national policies aimed at helping places like Detroit and Cleveland survive and become more competitive,” though Moore is one of the rare artists who includes people in his images.  For others Detroit is a visual challenge to Americans’ historical amnesia about the stability of auto industry and broader corporate capital; sometimes this risks lapsing into a shallow commentary on the tolls of auto industry mismanagement and union greed (a point made by Mitt Romney in a 2008 op-ed sensationally titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” that he subsequently has revisited), but it is difficult to capture the mechanics of abandonment and the human tolls in a photograph alone.

Interior of the Michigan Central Station (photo copyright: Jeremy Blakeslee)
Critics often argue that ruin photographs are inevitably fetishized depictions of complex social processes that hazard effacing those processes, and the High Dynamic Range photography that is often used in “ruin porn” does indeed aestheticize and drench the most bland spaces in color.  Yet the dilemma of rejecting such images as fetishized is that any photograph is a selective representation of reality that cannot hope to capture concrete experience.  Pornography does at least visually own up to its desires; in contrast, urban renewal commonly aspires to efface all material and aesthetic remnants of heritage and conceal the ideological interests that produced the contemporary urban landscape.
Urban abandonment is of course a historical process that happens over time and is driven by concrete material and social processes, but photographs of ruins belie much of that temporal depth and those processes of change.  Camilo Jose Vergara has photographically documented American cities since the 1970s with the goal of visualizing change over time, which variously involves abandonment, rebirth, and social transformation alike, and Vergara does not restrict his gaze simply to impoverished contexts in inner cities.  His collections in places as disparate as Richmond, California, Harlem, and Camden, New Jersey have a historical depth that is nearly non-existent in other ruination photography.  But apologists are reluctant to concede the historical depth of these material processes and sometimes seem sensitive that “bad press” will hinder their favored forms of growth and revival.  Other projects like Can’t Forget the Motor City simply hope to temper the picture of a complex place like Detroit otherwise painted in “soulless images.”

Much of “ruin porn” illustrates the decline of once-stylish cities like Detroit (courtesy calamity_hane)
The class and racial dimensions of this discourse run quietly and somewhat uncomfortably beneath the surface, and those social dimensions may distinguish “ruin porn” from the numerous people who have been fascinated with ruins over several centuries.  Many assessments of gentrification in places like Detroit capture an uneasiness that the city is being “revitalized” by a mostly White educated “creative class” (to use Richard Florida’s well-known term) or “millenials.”  Salon circumspectly characterized Detroit and similarly declining Rust Belt cities as ideal landing points for otherwise disaffected and marginalized 20- and 30-somethings in a movement sometimes referred to as “Rust Belt chic.”  In July, 2011 the New York Times reported optimistically about the stream of young entrepreneurs, artists, and associated hipsters who have flowed into Detroit peopling abandoned neighborhoods with trendy business districts, urban farms, and an arts community.  Good News reported that much of this newly established community is sensitive to its privileges, committed to serving the whole community, and not consciously driven to displace former residents or set up new divides (compare the Guernica piece “Food among the Ruins” on urban farming in Detroit).  Nevertheless, many of these businesses and social networks remain divided across race and class lines, and some locals are never going to be baristas, art aficionados, or part of the IT workforce.

This Gary, Indiana church sits in the heart of the Midwestern “Rust Belt.” (courtesy Paul J.S.)
At least obliquely the porn metaphor suggests the covert excitement of viewing ruins from the privileged standpoint of the bourgeois, and in this respect it borrows from a long-established tradition of slum tourism by White bourgeois that swept Europe and America in the late 19th century.  In 1899, for instance, Scottish traveler William Archer’s America To-Day concluded that New York’s “slums have a Southern air about them, a variety of contour and colour—in some aspects one might almost say a gaiety. … For one thing, the ubiquitous balconies and fire escapes serve of themselves to break the monotony of line, and lend, as it were, a peculiar texture to the scene; to say nothing of the opportunities they afford for the display of multifarious shreds and patches of colour.  Then the houses themselves are often brightly, not to say loudly, painted; so that in the clear, sparkling atmosphere characteristic of New York, the most squalid slum puts on a many-coloured Southern aspect.”  This reduction of impoverishment to an aesthetic was its own pornographic gaze, but for some contemporary critics it shares with “ruin porn” the very removal of living people from the description of cities whose impoverishment and abandonment are driven by a complex amalgam of classist, racist, and corporate self-interests.
Archer’s contemporaries included many activists intent on changing everyday life for impoverished people, and they did create consequential change using tools that were not radically distinct from the contemporary documentors of abandonment.  Jacob Riis’ landmark 1890 study How The Other Half Lives was a photographic survey of New York tenements that aspired to use jarring images to motivate reform, and numerous other social science studies (all admittedly with their own class and racist baggage) used images to emotionally move the state and citizens of privilege into action.   There is something powerful about an image of a contemporary ruin that compels many observers to question how monumental buildings and vast swaths of cities were systematically and intentionally abandoned, but to reduce it simply to “landscape photography” is at best naïve and at worst socially reprehensible.  Matthew Christopher has been among the most prolific and reflective of the abandonment photographers, and he likens abandoned buildings to spaces of death in which the collective heritage of myriad people—those who worked in a factory, attended a school, were baptized in a church—are effaced.

There is an undeniably fascinating aesthetic to abandoned amusement park images like this one from Spreepark in Berlin (courtesy CxOxS)
The aesthetics and politics of ruination are different in different sorts of spaces, including churches, Cold War missile ranges, industrial spaces, shopping malls, and fallout shelters.  For instance, many ruin artists flock to amusement parks, which evoke past innocence and provide all sorts of compelling aesthetic devices like decaying rides, fiberglass figures or animatronic John Waynes overtaken by nature.  Examples include Michael John Grist’s fascinating photo-logue of abandoned Japanese parks, many with American themes; Catherine Hyland’s series on the never-completed Wonderland amusement park in Chenzhuang Village, China (which also includes a video of the park); Buzzfeed’s photographs of the Wichita park Joyland; Environmental Graffiti’s pictures of Michael Jackson’s Neverland; or WebUrbanist’s photo survey of six abandoned parks.  On the other hand, Buzzfeed’s tour of the Six Flags New Orleans park abandoned after Hurricane Katrina (which also has a few YouTube videos) is potentially a somewhat more complicated picture of abandonment that could very cleverly be linked to an ambitious narrative.  After Katrina rendered nearly the whole of the park a loss in 2005, Six Flags wanted to abandon its 75-year lease, and New Orleans sued the park for $3 million in 2009 and ordered them to vacate the lease.  In March, 2012 plans were announced to turn the site in an upscale outlet mall, though these remain unresolved as the admittedly aesthetically haunting park continues to rot in place.  Beyond those compelling aesthetics, Six Flags New Orleans could be interpreted as an abandonment narrative involving the forces of nature, poor planning (drainage pumps failed in the storm, and the park was long one of the least profitable of all the Six Flags parks), and a corporation forsaking its own legal responsibilities (though Six Flags filed for bankruptcy and made a cash payment to New Orleans).

The interior of the Buzludzha Monument today (courtesy MK13Y)
Overtly political spaces present their own issues of abandonment. For instance, the Buzludzha Monument in Bulgaria is an astounding concrete monument placed atop a mountain in 1981 to honor communism, but the fall of communism left the monument to decay.  The site is inevitably politicized by allowing it to ruin, which compels us to ask how the absence of preservation or intentional effacement of it constitutes a different sort of abandonment, but the truly compelling aesthetics of an ideologically inelegant modernist monument allowed to be re-taken by nature make analysis of the site and preservation strategy challenging.

Buzludzha viewed from the base of the mountain (courtesy Pavel Tcholakov)
These are completely archaeological questions, of course, but there are not all that many scholars focusing on the confluence of contemporary materiality, abandonment, and aesthetics.  The most interesting archaeological project examining these issues is Ruin Memories.  Ruin Memories examines “a ruined landscape of derelict factories, closed shopping malls, overgrown bunkers and redundant mining towns; a ghostly world of decaying modern debris normally left out of academic concerns and conventional histories,” with case studies drawn from northern Europe, Russia, Equatorial Guinea, and the US.  Their scholarship plumbs precisely what is framed as “waste” in contemporary society in discourses like heritage that value certain sorts of preservation yet place other materiality in a class of “waste.” The ruins of modernity in cities like Detroit are problematic symbols that risk illuminating the failures of modernity and replacing the pristine and aesthetic historical monument with neglected, vandalized, and unsightly ruins.   We certainly go to museums to view the material remnants of other cultures and moments without the charge of engaging in a pornographic gaze, so it is interesting that the most prosaic and familiar material decay around us becomes social and politically charged when we view it and begin to think about it.  The scholars in the Ruin Memories project focus on sites whose materiality is what Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal refers to as “too recent, conflicting and repulsive” to be part of collective memory.  Many of these ruins remain largely outside our conscious apprehension in a state they refer to in a study of a Russian mining town as “inconspicuous familiarity” despite being the fabric of our everyday material experience, so much of their research complicates what scholars take as meaningful materiality and probes how archaeology expresses the fundamentally inexpressible meanings of material things.  Much of their work assertively borrows from photography and uses aesthetic representation of things and ruins to expand archaeologists’ normative narratives about things that tend to lapse into description and particularism and skirt the complicated meanings of materiality.

The aesthetic ruins of modernity in Taiwan (courtesy netman)
There is tremendous archaeological potential to develop reflective narratives about modernity that weave the decaying ruins of contemporary cities or industrial sites to a complex range of social, political, racist, and class factors that would illuminate how archaeologists, states, and communities value spaces, heritage, and things.  It is not all that likely that contract archaeology firms will soon be retained to produce such scholarship, and its equally unlikely that local governments will begin to see old buildings as something other than preservation problems or shallowly defined blight, but the work has the potential to provide interesting illumination of how we value our collective heritage and place.  We should obey our own fascination with and curiosity in these old spaces—the decayed amusement parks, ruined factories, asylums overtaken by nature—and accept that there is something far more consequential in that curiosity than simply compelling aesthetics.  If “ruin porn” helps us see those spaces in new ways, then photography, narratives, and material analysis might collectively provide us an exceptionally powerful way to interpret such places and dissect the concrete social and material forces that create abandonment and ruination.
References and links
There are quite a few “Ruin Porn” boards on Pinterest and tons of pinterest images tagged “Ruin Porn”.  Also see the AbandonedPorn reddit for numerous images.  If you really hate “ruin porn” and want to defend Detroit’s honor, Love it to Death apparel actually has a pretty clever t-shirt for you.
Elin Andreassen, Hein B. Bjerck, and Bjørnar Olsen (2010) Persistent Memories: Pyramiden – A Soviet Mining Town in the High Arctic Tapir Academic Press
William Archer (1899) America To-Day, Observations and Reflections. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.
John Patrick Leary (2011) “Detroitism” January 15 Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics may be the single most prescient analysis of “ruin porn”
Matthew Christopher (2012) Abandoned America is one of the most expansive and thoughtful blogs by an artist linked to “ruin porn,” however much he dislikes the term
Chris Mottalini (2012) After You Left, They Took it Apart (Demolished Paul Rudolph Homes) is a compelling preservation and artistic study of a series of Paul Rudolph modernist homes in abandonment that were ultimately razed.
Jacob A. Riis (1890) How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York.  Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.
Image references (all images Creative Commons License non-commercial and unmodified)
Jeremy Blakeslee image Michigan Central Station http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jblakesleemichigancentral.jpg See his web page for a host of abandonment images reaching well beyond ruined urban cores alone.
Calamity_hane image Detroit home http://www.flickr.com/photos/calamity_hane/5225733822/sizes/o/in/photostream/
Chad and Steph image Michigan Central Station http://www.flickr.com/photos/chadlewis/6083710267/
CxOxS image Berlin amusement park http://www.flickr.com/photos/cxoxs/1075209699/
M31KY image Buzludzha Monument http://www.flickr.com/photos/m1k3y/5186925202/sizes/o/in/photostream/
Netman image Taiwan beachfront http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmx/2475997226/sizes/z/in/photostream/
Paul J.S. image Gary, Indiana http://www.flickr.com/photos/61066736@N00/6516003439/sizes/l/in/photostream/
Pavel Tchlokaov image Buzludzha http://www.flickr.com/photos/pavel/5264178925/sizes/l/in/photostream/


The Faux-Vintage Photo: Full Essay (Parts I, II and III)

by nathanjurgenson

I am working on a dissertation about self-documentation and social media and have decided to take on theorizing the rise of faux-vintage photography (e.g., Hipstamatic, Instagram). From May 10-12, 2011, I posted a three part essay. This post combines all three together.



a recent snowstorm in DC: taken with Instagram and reblogged by NPR on Tumblr
This past winter, during an especially large snowfall, my Facebook and Twitter streams became inundated with grainy photos that shared a similarity beyond depicting massive amounts of snow: many of them appeared to have been taken on cheap Polaroid or perhaps a film cameras 60 years prior. However, the photos were all taken recently using a popular set of new smartphone applications like Hipstamatic or Instagram. The photos (like the one above) immediately caused a feeling of nostalgia and a sense of authenticity that digital photos posted on social media often lack. Indeed, there has been a recent explosion of retro/vintage photos. Those smartphone apps have made it so one no longer needs the ravages of time or to learn Photoshop skills to post a nicely aged photograph.
In this essay, I hope to show how faux-vintage photography, while seemingly banal, helps illustrate larger trends about social media in general. The faux-vintage photo, while getting a lot of attention in this essay, is merely an illustrative example of a larger trend whereby social media increasingly force us to view our present as always a potential documented past. But we have a ways to go before I can elaborate on that point. Some technological background is in order.
The first very popular app that made your photographs instantly retro was Hipstamatic app. Instagram is even more powerful with its selection of multiple “filters,” that is, different flavors of vintage (a few not-so-vintage filters are available, too). Instagram also features a popular social networking layer that allows users to contribute and view a stream of Instagram photos with “friends.” Other retro photography applications are available as well.
What do these apps do? Among other things, they fade the image (especially at the edges), adjust the contrast and tint, over- or under-saturate the colors, blur areas to exaggerate a very shallow depth of field, add simulated film grain, scratches and other imperfections and so on. And, importantly for the next post, the photos are often made to mimic being printed on real, physical photo paper. And many of our Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, etc. streams have become the home to one of these vintage-looking photos after another.
Why Faux-Vintage Now?
This trend was made possible due to the rise of smartphones because smartphone photography has at least three important differences from the previous (and increasingly endangered) point-and-shoot digital cameras: (1) your smartphone is more likely to be on you all the time, even while sleeping, than was even the most portable point-and-shoot; (2) the smart phone camera exists as part of a powerful computer-software ecosystem comprised of a series of applications; and (3) the smartphone is typically connected to the Internet in more ways and more often than previous cameras were. Thus, the photos you take are more likely to be social (opposed to for personal consumption only) because the camera is now always with you in social situations, and, most importantly, the device is connected to the web and exists within a series of other apps on your smartphone that are often capable of delivering content to various social media. Beyond being social, the applications make it far easier to apply different filters to photos than did point-and-shoot cameras or using photo editing software on your computer.
But the question I am asking with this essay is not just about the rise of digitally manipulated social photography, but why these digitally manipulated photos showing up in our social media streams are manipulated specifically to look vintage. Why do so many of us prefer to take, share and view these faux-aged photos?
Is Picture-Quality the Reason?
Perhaps, as another blogger noted, it is the low quality of phone cameras that has lead to the rise of faux-vintage. Maybe the current quality of smartphone cameras tends to produce stale photographs which are then made more interesting when given a faux-vintage filter? Photographers have long known that, depending on the situation, a gritty photo can be as good as or better than a technically perfect shot, and now everyone with a smartphone can take an interesting picture with just one additional press of a button. But, this explanation does little to explain why we equate vintage with interesting in the first place. [Also, many current smartphone cameras are of high quality].

Susan Sontag
Poets and Scribes?
Another reason for the rise of faux-vintage photography might be that these apps allow us to be more creative with our photos. Susan Sontag in the wonderful On Photography discusses how photography is always both the capturing of truth as well as a subjective creation. In this sense, when taking a photograph we are at once both poets and scribes; a point that I have used to describe our self-documentation on social media: we are both telling the truth about our lives as scribes, but always doing so creatively like poets. So, if “photography is not only about remembering, it is [also] about creating,” then the rise of smartphones and photo apps have democratized the tools to create photos that emphasize art, not just truth. But, again, this explanation would only explain why we might want to manipulate photos in the first place. It does not explain why so many of us have so often chosen to manipulate them into looking specifically retro/vintage.
So far I have described what faux-vintage photography is and noted that it is a new trend, comes primarily from smartphones and has proliferated on social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr and others. However, the important question remains: why this massive popularity of faux-vintage photographs?

What I want to argue is that the rise of the faux-vintage photo is an attempt to create a sort of “nostalgia for the present,” an attempt to make our photos seem more important, substantial and real. We want to endow the powerful feelings associated with nostalgia to our lives in the present. And, ultimately, all of this goes well beyond the faux-vintage photo; the momentary popularity of the Hipstamatic-style photo serves to highlight the larger trend of our viewing the present as increasingly a potentially documented past. In fact, the phrase “nostalgia for the present” is borrowed from the great philosopher of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson, who states that “we draw back from our immersion in the here and now [...] and grasp it as a kind of thing.”*
The term “nostalgia” was coined more than 300 years ago to describe the medical condition of severe, sometimes lethal, homesickness. By the 19th century the word morphs from a physical to a psychological descriptor, not just about the longing of a place, but also a longing for a time past that, except through reminders, one can never return to. Indeed, this is Marcel Proust’s favorite topic: the ways in which sensory stimuli have great power to invoke overwhelmingly strong feelings and vivid memories of the past; precisely the nostalgic feelings that faux-vintage photos seek to invoke.
Faux-Physicality as Augmented Reality
One important way in which the digital photo does this is by looking like it is not a digital photo at all. For many, and especially those using faux-vintage apps, photography is primarily experienced in the digital form: snapped on a digital camera and stored and shared via digital albums on computers and websites like Facebook. But just as the rise and proliferation of the mp3 is coupled with the resurgence of vinyl, there is a similar reclaiming of the aesthetic of the physical photo. Physicality, with its weight, smell and tactile interaction, grants a significance that bits have not (yet) achieved. The quickest way to invoke nostalgia for a time past with a photograph is to invoke the properties of the physical, which is done by mimicking the ravages of time through fading, simulated film grain and scratches as well as the addition of what appears to be photo-paper or Polaroid borders around the image.
This follows the trend of what I have labeled “augmented reality”: the fact that physical and digital are increasingly imploding into each other. And by making our digital photos appear physical, we are attempting to purchase the cachet and importance that physicality imparts. I’ve noted in the past this trend to endow the physical with a special importance. I commented on the bias to view physical books as more “deep” than digital text. I also critiqued those who label digital activism “slacktivism” and those who view digital communication as inherently shallow. Why would we grant the physical photo special importance?
Perhaps the answer is because the physical photograph was scarce. Producing a photo took longer and cost more money prior to the advent of digital photography. This is one of the main differences between atoms and bits: the former is scarce and the later is abundant; something I have written about before. That an old photo was taken and has survived grants it an authority that the equivalent digital photo taken today cannot achieve. In any case, that the faux-vintage photograph aspires to physicality is only part of why they have become so massively popular.
Nostalgia and Authenticity
I submit that we have chosen to create and view faux-vintage photos because they seem more authentic and real. One does not need to be consciously aware of this when choosing the filter, hitting the “like” button on Facebook or reblogging on Tumblr. We have associated authenticity with the style of a vintage photo because, previously, vintage photos were actually vintage. They stood the test of time, they described a world past, and, as such, they earned a sense of importance.
People are quite aware of the power of vintage and retro as carriers of authenticity. Sharon Zukin’s book Naked City expertly describes the recent gentrification of inner cities as the quest for authenticity, often in the form of grit and decay. For those born in the plastic, inauthentic world of suburban Disneyfied and McDonaldized America, there has been a cultural obsession with decay (“decay porn”) and a search for authentic reality in our simulated world (as Jean Baudrillard might say).
The faux-vintage photos populating our social media streams share a similar quality with the inner-city Brooklyn neighborhood rich with authentic grit: they conjure authenticity and real-ness in the age of simulation and the vast proliferation of digital images. And, in this way, the Hipstamatic photo places yourself and your present into the context of the past, the authentic, the important and the real.

Jean Baudrillard
But, of course, unlike urban grit or the rarity of an expensive antique, the vintage-ness of a Hipstamatic or Instagram photo is simulated (the faux in faux-vintage). We all know quite well that these photos are not really aged with time but instead by an app. These are self-aware simulations (perhaps the self-awareness is the hipster in Hipstamatic). The faux-vintage photo is more similar to a fake 1950′s diner built many decades later. They are Main St. in Disney world or the fake checkered cab in the New York, New York hotel and casino complex in Las Vegas. These are all simulations attempting to make people nostalgic for a time past. Consistent with Baudrillard’s description of simulations, photos in their Hipstamatic form have become more vintage than vintage; they exaggerate the qualities of the idea of what it is to be vintage and are therefore hyper-vintage.
The very thing that a faux-vintage photo provides, authenticity, is thus negated by the fact that it is a simulation. However, this fact does preclude these photos conjuring feelings of nostalgia and authenticity because what is being referenced is not “the vintage” but “the idea of the vintage,” similar to the simulated diner, modern checkered-cab or Disney Main St.; all hyper-real versions of something else and all quite capable of causing and exploiting feelings of nostalgia. Therefore, simply being aware that the authenticity Hipstamatic purchases is simulated does disqualify the faux-vintage photo from entering into the economy of the real and authentic.

The rise of faux-vintage photography demonstrates a point that can be extrapolated to documentation on social media writ large: social media users have become always aware of the present as a potential document to be consumed by others. Facebook fixates the present as always a future past. Be it through status updates on Twitter, geographical check-ins on Foursquare, reviews on Yelp, those Instagram photos or all of the other self-documentation possibilities afforded to us by Facebook, we view our world more than ever before through what I like to call “documentary vision.”
Documentary vision is kind of like the “camera eye” photographers develop when, after taking many photos, they begin to see the world as always a potential photo even when not holding the camera at all. The habit of the photographer involuntarily framing and composing the world has become a metaphor for those trained to document using social media. The explosion of ubiquitous self-documentation possibilities, and the audience for our documents that social media promises, has positioned us to live life in the present with the constant awareness of how it will be perceived as having already happened. We come to see what we do as always a potential document, imploding the present with the past, and ultimately making us nostalgic for the here and now.And there is no better paradigmatic example for this view of the present as always a potential documented past than the faux-vintage photo (why I have chosen this as a topic for essay). The faux-vintage photo asks the viewer to suspend disbelief about the authenticity of the simulated nostalgia and to see the photo–and who and whatever is in it–as being authentic and important by referencing at least the idea of the past. While, technically, all photographs, indeed all documentation, conjure the past, the faux-vintage photograph serves to vividly underscore and make even more clear our efforts to display our lives in the present as already a past to feel nostalgic for.
The faux-vintage photograph is self-aware of itself as document. If regular photos placed on Facebook walls document that we exist, the faux-vintage photo is this but also more than this: it is also a reference to documentation itself. This double document–a document of documentation–becomes further proof that we are here and we exist. The rise of faux-vintage photographs, snapped on smartphones and shared via social media, is centrally an existential move that is deployed because conjuring the past creates a sense of nostalgia and authenticity.
But the ultimate irony is that while these tools, just like all of social media, help us reinforce to ourselves and others that we are real and authentic, but they do this by simultaneously divorcing us to some degree from experiencing our present in the here and now. Think of a time when you took a trip holding a camera and then think of when you did the same without the camera; most of us have probably traveled both with and without a camera in our hands and we know the experience is at least slightly different; some might claim radically different. With so many documentation possibilities (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Yelp, Foursquare and so on), we are always, both literally and metaphorically, living with the camera in our hands. When discovering a new bar or a great slice of pizza we might think of posting a review on Yelp; when overhearing a funny conversation we might think to tweet it; when hanging out with friends we might create a status update for Facebook; and when at a concert we might find ourselves distracted by needing to take and post a photo of the event as it happens. When the breakfast I made the other week looked especially delicious, I posted a photo of it before even taking a bite.
My larger dissertation project will be to explore these points and demonstrate specifically how this newly expanded documentary vision potentially changes what we do. Does knowing that you will check in on Foursquare at least slightly influence what restaurant you’ll choose to eat at? In what other ways is our online documentation not just a reflection of what we do but also sometimes (or always?) a cause? To go straight to the extreme case, I once overheard a young inebriated woman on the subway around 2am state that “the real world is where you take pictures for Facebook.” She was, I thought, the smartest person on that train.
What Will Become of the Faux-Vintage Photo?
Let me conclude this all by coming back to faux-vintage photos specifically. I think they might be a passing fad.
Faux-vintage photos devalue and exhaust their own sense of authenticity, which portends their disappearance because, as I described in part II, authenticity is the very currency by which they have become popular; there is an inflation as a result of printing too much currency of the real. For instance, the faux-vintage photo will no longer be able to conjure the importance associated with physicality (another point made in part II) if the vintage look begins to be more closely associated with smartphones than old photos. The novelty begins to wear off and the nostalgia fades away.
Most damning for Hipstamatic and Instagram is that these apps tend to make everyone’s photos look similar. In an attempt to make oneself look distinct and special through the application of vintage-producing filters, we are trending towards photos that look the same. The Hipstamatic photo was new and interesting, is currently a fad, and it will come to (or, already has?) look too posed, too obvious, and trying too hard (especially if the parents of the current users start to post faux-vintage photos themselves).
To be clear, photographic techniques like saturation, fading, vignetting and others are not essentially good or bad (for instance, I love these faux-vintage shots). But when so widely used they seem less like an artistic choice and more as if they are merely following a trend (what Baudrillard called the “logic of fashion”). The ironic fate that extinguishes so many trends built on suggesting and exploiting authenticity is that their very popularity extinguishes that which made them popular.
The inevitable decline (but not full disappearance) of the faux-vintage photo will be our collective decision that the style is beginning to appear increasingly posed, contrived and passé, and thus negating the feelings of authenticity that were the very reason we liked them in the first place. Another retro-looking photo of a sunny country road, a dandelion, or your feet?



Will Viney: Ruins of the Future – An Extract


If waste is taken to denote change, a coming to be by having been, then the anticipation of ruins mark out the present as the condition of the future. One of the narratological effects of imagining the present in a ruined condition is the strong emphasis that this places on ruins’ relation to the present and the dynamic vigour of ending. As a form of waste, the ruin is both an end and a continuity, both the end to use and the muted remainder of that activity. Whilst future ruins frequently suggest the termination of some time, people or structure, there is a lingering or remaining sense of time, a time that is particular to the condition of being ‘leftover’. This waste-time, which marks the termination of use and its cindering persistence, means that projected ruins represent a disrupted continuation of present events. Projecting ruins discloses the duration and shape of time and dramatises a conflict between material permanence and material transience. This conflict between continuity and cessation makes the ruin an end that remains, an end that is imperfect, unreliable. The ruin marks that sense of termination that has not quite come to its end. I call this temporal unreliability a narratological effect because imagining the ruins of the future gives a means to envision a story that both locates a possible landscape and relates that landscape to present surroundings. This is not only done in order to imagine what the future might look like but, as we shall see throughout this chapter, provides an opportunity to re-examine the present. As Ricoeur writes, “In reading the ending in the beginning and the beginning in the ending, we also learn to read time itself backwards, as the recapitulation of the initial conditions of a course of action in its terminal consequences.”  (1984: 67 – 68). In fiction, film and the painterly arts, the anticipation of a ruinous end is frequently a narratological means by which to return to and make sense of the present; by ‘traveling to the future’ we might make and give meaning to the present.

Still from The Planet of the Apes dir. Franklin J. Schaffner (1968)
When in The Planet of the Apes (1968) Charlton Heston’s character confronts the toppled remnant of The Statue of Liberty, he exclaims, “Oh my God! I’m back. I’m home.”  In the comparative exercise of managing the disrupted continuity of the future ruin, between imaginary times and familiar places, we encounter not only a future in itself but also a future in which the present has been abandoned, cut off, terminated or forsaken. This is the broken continuity, the interrupted endurance that the future ruin offers. The consummation that a ruin might represent does not necessarily become imminent to the present, but ruins are felt to become immanent in present events, thus, we come to see the ruinous potential of things that have not yet been discarded and identify the long held association between ruins and vanitas. It is precisely this uncanny distance, achieved through a sense of arriving at and travelling to the estranged familiar, that gives the future ruin the power to relay the present and the future as an object that persists by passing away.
Confronting the future in ruins is by no means a formulaic exercise. The interpretative gaps that energise the exigency of this form of waste are motivated by the irresolvable questions they raise. Particularly in their painterly and cinematic manifestations, the ruins of the future frequently leave out how or when or for what reason these structures have reached their terminal condition. For instance, in the paintings of Hubert Robert and Joseph Gandy we are given no explicit explanation for why the structures they depict have fallen into ruin; their visual impact plays upon the disjuncture felt between the building existent and the future ruin represented. Robert’s Design for the Grand Gallery in the Louvre and his An Imaginary View of the Ruins of the Grand Gallery in Ruins (see images below), manipulate a dual vision of the future: one image presents a new and ideal view of a Republican art institution, the other represents a more ruinous and terminal condition of this institution. As such, the work has often been read as an ambiguous commentary on France’s new and emerging attitude to the public control of artworks and, by implication, condemns the futility of the Revolution.  For Daniel Brewer, Robert seems to dramatise “the inevitable transience of precisely the institution whose current function is to preserve the artwork from physical [deterioration].” (2008: 192). Furthermore, viewing the images together – as they were at the 1796 salon – emphasises the transition between architectural shelter and exposure, museum and ruin. But the nature of this transition, the causal events by which one moves from one condition to another, is a transition rich in absence and enigma. Time has been accelerated in An Imaginary View, leaving the Louvre at both the end of time and at a place where time seems to have resumed. The inclusion of the Apollo Belvedere, seen in the foreground, is just one indication of the intervening years and the exigent potential of imagining ruins. The statue came to the Louvre with Napoleon a year after Robert pre-emptively included it in this painting.  In this small detail we see how Robert does not simply give an image of his present as ruin, but a particular, albeit elliptical, history by which the future ruin is contextualised. The presence of the Apollo Belvedere is one indication of this causal absence, which the ruins of the future envelop.

Hubert Robert, Design for the Grand Gallery in the Louvre (1796)

Hubert Robert, An Imaginary View of the Grand Gallery in Ruins (1796)
The English parallel to Robert’s work might be found in another double vision of future ruins. Joseph Gandy’s A Vision of Sir John Soane’s Design for the Rotunda of the Bank of England as a Ruin (1798) and Soane’s Bank of England as a Ruin (1830), constitute attempts to imagine ruin in construction, ruin which marks the conception and completion of Soane’s bank. In his painting of 1798 Gandy was commissioned by Soane to project the building into a future state of ruin. Gandy draws directly from the picturesque style of Robert to give the material foundation of the bank a corresponding ruin. The painting’s companion piece, which Brian Lukacher has described as a “Piranesian ruinscape” (2006: 162), was commissioned by Soane when the building of the bank was nearing its completion in 1830.

Joseph Gandy, A Vision of Sir John Soane’s Design for the Rotunda of the Bank of England as a Ruin (1789)

Joseph Gandy, Soane's Bank of England as a Ruin (1830)
Just as Robert’s images of the Louvre were viewed together to emphasise their chronological yet antagonistic pairing – in which ruin is conceived as the beginning and the end of a creative process – so Gandy’s paintings of the Bank of England were displayed together at the Royal Academy in 1832.  The genesis of Soane’s bank, its design, construction, and eventual use, was surrounded by images of its dissolution; the imagination of its present was permeated by the state of ruin it would fall into. Again, the idea of the ruin is used to fashion the future and narrate the trajectory of built environments. But, to renovate a formulation exercised earlier in this thesis, whilst these images of future ruin invite us to consider the idea of ‘waste’, the events of waste and the particular sequence of events whereby the useful is transformed into the non-useful is a transition frequently left to our imaginations. In the paintings by Joseph Gandy, for instance, a subtle exchange occurs between image and viewer, where the temporal absence implied by the image is shaped by the perspective on and texture of the ruin represented. The abundant vegetation contained in A Vision and the rustic scene occurring within the sanctuary of the rotunda, means that we are led to assume that this future ruin has come about slowly or without catastrophe, left to collapse gently like the ruins of antiquity. In Soane’s Bank of England as a Ruin, on the other hand, with its elevated perspective, the bare and uninhabitable interior, and the confrontational figure in the lower right hand corner, suggests fire, earthquake or holocaust, in short a cataclysmic event that has brought the bank to ruin. In this respect, ruins of the future provide a means to visualise consequences before knowing precisely what their cause might be. They are images of the future that stand prior to our reconstructive acts of narration, yet their ruins shape and inform our interpretative responses. Robert’s and Gandy’s future ruins provide us with objects within incomplete narratives, narratives with absent middles. Whilst suggesting a material continuity between the contemporary and the futural, the future ruin can also appear as cast off from any neat or continuous reconstruction of events.
So far we have considered the narratological effects of the future ruins, but these compensatory acts of narration implicitly search for ends, to the temporal terminus that ruins promise and frustrate. Michel Serres argued that historical thought searches for an impossible zero point in time, “That point inaccessible– it is a point of accumulation; another point always interpolates itself, iteratively, in front of it” (1991: 29). This is because, for Serres, historical thought “seems linear, as if progressional, as if it followed the current of time” (1991: 42). Although Serres is describing the activity of working backwards through time, towards the zero point of an origin, we might take this characterisation of historicism and consider how the future ruin confirms the accumulative, progressional nature of future thinking; that is, the way in which ruins help us to think towards an end. In a way not dissimilar to the ever-receding vanishing point of Robert’s paintings, Serres describes the impossible and ever-receding point of the origin; just as we might think that, finally, we have determined the source we find another, a time yet more remote that frustrates our neat conclusions.  In their capacity to stand as a consummation and continuity of the present, future ruins form part of a visual repertoire of an incomplete or provisional end. This is, as we have noted in previous chapters, a key condition of waste-time. It must suggest both an end and the contingency of that end, a form of material and temporal punctuation; the already-and-not-yet of waste. This makes the ruin, particularly the future ruin, a very odd object for historical contemplation. Historiography, argues Serres, takes for granted a transition from the indeterminate to determinate, “indetermination precedes the determinate” (1991: 45).  That is to say that the historian’s explicatory task is to transform the indeterminate into the knowable, the scripted and the sequential. What, then, is the historical quality of the future ruin? The ruin of the future neither fulfils this trajectory from indeterminacy to determinacy, nor flatly contradicts this progression. As Robert’s works demonstrate, there is an implicit relation between the Louvre represented as a functioning space for the public display of objects, and its consequent condition as a ruin. In one sense the ruin is always that which comes afterwards, it is always the ruin of something. Ruins, then, are the outcome of a linear, progressional transition from use to waste; future ruins are an outcome of the present. On the other hand, they are frequently the outcome of events that we do not witness, the cast offs from a time that is yet to occur. In this respect, the fragile terminus of the future ruin is laid bare; the indeterminate does not necessarily precede the determinate when the future ruin frustrates the continuity of thought between the determinate present and indeterminate future.
The future ruin, then, is an incomplete end achieved by an incomplete transition between now and then. It might fill us with a “sense of ending”, to borrow a famous phrase from Frank Kermode, but it is not quite the end itself. The politically, theologically and philosophically rich gesture of projecting ruins, of prophesying the demise of a building, as well as the people and activities associated with it, depends upon an end that can be experienced, a sense of dénouement that is not absolutely terminal. This is not the apocalypse as such, but an end to be seen, to be retold and represented – it is a telling end. The didactic, moralising potential of the future ruin depends upon its evidential nature.  Kermode writes that, “We project ourselves–a small, humble elect, perhaps–past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle” (1967: 8).  Whilst projecting ends might give us a sense of the whole and a position before this time, projecting oneself past the end proves that this is no end at all, but just one step further from the ever-receding zero of the end. Moreover, the future ruin frequently plays upon the fact that ‘the whole’ is not immediately apparent, meaning that the end it is held to represent becomes even more provisional. This is, in part, a consequence of the ‘empty middle’ mentioned earlier, which is the narrative structure of end-orientated things in which an emptiness stands between the now and the then. Kermode links peripeteia, the unexpected and penultimate twist in the plot that motivates a narrative’s finale, to this sense of ending. If peripeteia, by definition, is something we do not expect, then by assimilating the unexpected Kermode argues that we are “enacting that readjustment of expectations which is so notable a feature of naive apocalyptic.”  Imagined ruins, in contrast, do not show us the end of the world or an apocalypse as such, but the end of a temporally co-dependent relation between humans and their architecture. Looking upon images of ruin we might experience a readjustment of expectations – feelings of shock or surprise – and we might even assume the peripeteia whereby structures of use fall into objects of waste, but the relationship between ruinous futures and our narrative responses must traverse the mid-time between the use of the present and waste of the future. The periods of time that ruins seem to call to an end allow us to read ends and beginnings into time; the future ruin, then, performs an important periodising function and represents an ally and an antagonist in our attempts to bring the future to order.
Although these truncated narrative structures might not be the sole domain of the future ruin, the divergence felt between the projective times of use and the slack times of waste exaggerates the terminus that ruins are so frequently held to represent. The comparative relationship between human and architectural time means that the futural dissolution of architecture, far in advance of our own dissolution, confirms the relative endurance associated with buildings and the temporal distance their ruination creates. Indeed, the future ruin depends upon our expectation that the usefulness of a building should outlast the demands of an individual user, intensifying the disparity we feel between the time of buildings and the duration of human life, as well as increasing a building’s propensity to stand for collective use. The sense of the end that the future ruin generates plays upon the way in which buildings are felt to outlast these multiple relationships with individual users, reflecting an accumulation of uses and users.
[...]

Atemporality for the Creative Artist

*An unrepentant sympathizer took the trouble to type up a full transcript of my speech at Transmediale 10 on February 6.
*Since this volunteer made such a noble effort, it deserves to be pitched straight into the “Internet meme ooze” of blogs and social media. Here you are.
“Atemporality for the Creative Artist”
Bruce Sterling
Transmediale 10, Berlin, Feb. 6, 02010
I would like to talk about this slogan ‘Futurity Now,’ and how the idea of ‘futurity now’ might become common sense. Not a contradiction in terms, which it obviously is right now, but a legitimate demand. Or a claim, or a lament.
So, what is ‘atemporality’? I think it’s best defined as ‘a problem in the philosophy of history’. And I hate to resort to philosophy, because I am a novelist. But I don’t think we have any way out here. It is about the nature of historical knowledge. What we can know about the past, and about the present, and about the future. How do we represent and explain history to ourselves? What are its structures and its circumstances? What are the dynamics of history and futurity? What has happened before? What is happening now? What is really likely to happen next?
History is not a science; history is an effort in the humanities. It’s about meanings, values, language, historical identity, institutions, culture. The philosophy of history is about very standard philosophical issues, like ontology, hermeneutics, and epistemology. And I know that’s true, and I can’t help it. But we only have forty minutes here.
So I want to deliver a speech that’s in two parts. The first is about atemporality as a modern phenomenon. What does it look like and feel like, as it actually exists? And the second part of the speech is: what can creative artists do about that? So this is ‘Atemporality for the Creative Artist’.
Now let me start with an anecdote, because I am a novelist rather than a philosopher, and I kinda like to tell stories. So what makes an atemporal situation diferent from a post-modern situation, or a modernist situation, or a classicist situation, what’s really different about it?
Well, let me take a guy who I am very fond of, a very immediate, hard-headed scientific thinker – Richard Feynman, American physicist. Richard Feynman once wrote about intellectual labor, and he said the following: ‘Step one – write down the problem. Step two – think really hard. Step three – write down the solution’.
And I really admire this statement of Feynman’s. It’s no-nonsense, it’s no fakery, it’s about hard work for the intellectual laborer… Of course it’s a joke. But it’s not merely a joke. He is trying to make it as simple as possible. I mean: really just confront the intellectual problem!
But there is an unexamined assumption in Feynman’s method, and it’s in step one – write down the problem.
Now let me tell you how the atemporal Richard Feynman approaches this. The atemporal Richard Feynman is not very paper-friendly, because he lives in a network culture. So it occurs to the atemporal Feynman that he may, or may not, have a problem.
‘Step one – write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already. Step two – write problem in my blog; study the commentory cross-linked to other guys. Step three – write my problem in Twitter in a hundred and forty characters. See if I can get it that small. See if it gets retweeted. Step four – open source the problem; supply some instructables to get me as far as I’ve been able to get, see if the community takes it any further. Step five – start a Ning social network about my problem, name the network after my problem, see if anybody accumulates around my problem. Step six – make a video of my problem. Youtube my video, see if it spreads virally, see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem. Step seven – create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. Create some gadget or application or product that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it. Step eight – exacerbate or intensify my problem with a work of interventionist tactical media. And step nine – find some kind of pretty illustrations from the Flickr ‘Looking into the Past’ photo pool.’
(If you don’t get what atemporality is by the end of these few images, I probably can’t help you.)
So, old Feynman, who was not the atemporal Feynman, would naturally object: ‘You have not solved the problem! You have not advanced scientific knowledge. There is no progress in this. You didn’t get to Step three – solving the problem.’ Whereas, the atemporal Feynman would respond: ‘It’s worse than that. I haven’t even done step one of defining the problem and writing it down. But I have done a lot of work about its meaning, and its value and its social framing, combined with some database mining, and some collaborative filtering, which is far beyond you and your pencil.’
Now, history is a story. And to write down the story of the fourteenth century, to just ask yourself – “what happened in the fourteenth century?” — Feynman style — is a very different matter from asking the atemporal question: “What does Google do when I input the search term ‘fourteenth century?’” I think we are over the brink of that. It’s a very, very different matter.
History books are ink on paper. They are linear narratives with beginning and ends. They are stories created from archival documents and from other books. Network culture, not really into that. Network culture differs from literary culture in a great many ways. And step one is that the operating system is an unquestioned given. The first thing you do is go to the operating system, without even thinking of it as a conscious choice.
Then there is the colossally huge, searchable, public domain, which is now at your fingertips. There are methods to track where the eyeballs of the users are going. There are intellectual property problems in revenue, which interferes with scholarship as much as it aids it. There is a practice of ‘ragpicking’ with digital material – of loops, tracks, sampling. There are search engines, which are becoming major intellectual and public political actors. There is ‘collective intelligence’. Or, if you don’t want to dignify it with that term, you can just call it ‘internet meme ooze’. But it’s all over the place, just termite mounds of poorly organized and extremely potent knowledge, quantifiable, interchangeable data with newly networked relations. We cannot get rid of this stuff. It is our new burden, it is there as a fact on the ground, it is a fait accompli.
There are new asynchronous communication forms that are globalized and offshored, and there is the loss of a canon and a record. There is no single authoritative voice of history. Instead we get wildly empowered cranks, lunatics, and every kind of long-tail intellectual market appearing in network culture. Everything from brilliant insight to scurillous rumor.
This really changes the narrative, and the organized presentations of history in a way that history cannot recover from. This is the source of our gnawing discontent.
It means the end of post-modernism. It means the end of the New World Order, which is about civilizing the entire planet, stopping all the land wars, repressing the terrorism. It means the end of the Washington Consensus of the nineteen nineties. It means the end of the WTO. It means the end of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’; it ended. And it’s moving in a completely different and unexpected direction.
The idea that history ended, and that the market sorts that out, and that the Pentagon bombs it if that doesn’t work – it’s gone. The situation now is one of growing disorder. A failed state, a potentially failed globe, a collapsed WTO, a collapsed Copenhagen, financial collapses, lifeboat economics, transition to nowhere. Historical narrative, it is simply no longer mapped onto the objective facts of the decade. The maps in our hands don’t match the territory, and that’s why we are upset.
Now, a new master narrative could arise on paper. That would be easy. On paper, if it were just a matter of paper, we could do it. But to do that via the Internet is about as likely as the Internet becoming a single state-controlled television channel. Because a single historical narrative is a paper narrative.
I don’t think we are going to get one. We could conceivably get a new ideology or a new business model that is able to seize control of the course of events and reinstate some clear path to progress, that gets a democratic consensus behind it. I don’t think that’s likely. At least not for ten years. I could be wrong, but it’s not on the near-term radar.
What we are facing over a decade is a decade of emergency rescue, of resiliency, of attempts at sustainability, rather than some kind of clear march toward advanced heights of civilization. We are into an era of decay and repurposing of broken structures, of new social inventions within networks, a world of ‘Gothic High-Tech’ and ‘Favela Chic’ (as I’ve called it), a crooked networked bazaar of history and futurity, rather than a cathedral of history, and a utopia of futurity.
That’s just the situation on the ground. I don’t want to belabor this point. I don’t want to go on and on about the fact that this is a new historical situation. If you don’t get it by now, you will be forced to get it; you will have no other choice.
The question is: now what? Given that we have atemporal organized representations of verbal structures, what can we actually do? Where is the fun part?
Where is the fun part? And I think there could be some, actually. We are living in an atemporal network culture, and I don’t think that requires a moral panic. I think it ought to be regarded as something like moving into a new town.
We’ve moved into a new town, and the first order of business is like : ok, what gives around here? Well, there seems to be this sort of decayed castle, and there’s also a lot of slums…. That’s not the sort of thing which requires a punk ‘no-future’ rage. Like: ‘You’ve taken away my future, and I am going to kill you, or kill myself, and throw a brick at a cop!’ I don’t really think that is helpful.
What’s needed here is like a kind of atemporality that’s like agnosticism. Just a calm, pragmatic, serene skepticism about the historical narratives. I mean: they just don’t map onto what is going on.
So how do we just — like — sound out our new scene? What can we do to liven things up, especially as creative artists?
Well, the immediate impulse is going to be the ‘Frankenstein Mashup.’ Because that’s the native expression of network culture. The “Frankenstein mashup” is to just take elements of past, present, and future and just collide ‘em together, in sort of a collage. More or less semi-randomly, like a Surrealist “exquisite corpse.”
You can do useful and interesting things in that way, but I don’t really think that offers us a great deal. Even when it’s done very deftly, it tends to lead to the kind of levelling blandness of ‘world music.’ That kind of world music that’s middle-of-the-road disco music which includes pygmy nose-flutes or sitars.
The kind of thing is tragically easy to do, but not really very effective. It’s cheap to do. It’s very punk rock. It’s very safety pins and plastic bags. But it’s missing a philosophical high-end, really an atemporal meaning of life. High-art.
And I would like to see some of that. I think there is a large hole there that could be filled, from an atemporal perspective. Not at the lowest end of artistic expression, but way up at the top philosophical end.
Then there are things like that increasing vogue we have for ‘lost futures’: steampunk, atompunk, dieselpunk. You’re finding earlier methods of production, pretending that they’d never become defunct, and then adding on to those. I would add to those: you could do a lot of good work with the materiality of dead regimes and also with colonialism.
These have been hobby activities, and even sci-fi fan activities, I think they could be classed up very considerably.
Then there are other elements which are native to our period that didn’t really work before, such as generative art. I take generative art quite seriously. I’d like to see it move into areas like generative law, or may be generative philosophy. The thing I like about generative art is that it drains human intentionality out of the art project.
Say, in generative manufacturing, you are writing code for a computer fabricator, and you yourself don’t know the outcome of this code. You do not know how it will physically manifest itself. Therefore you end up with creative objects that are bleached of human intent.
Now there is tremendous artistic intent — within the software. But the software is not visible in the finished generative product. To me, it’s of great interest that these objects and designs and animations and so forth now exist among us. Because they are, in a strange way, divorced from any kind of historical ideology. They are just not human.
There are potential and new forms of collaborative art that have no single authors. Open source arts, multiplayer arts, multimedia collaboration. Online world building is of great interest. That was not physically possible before. It’s something we can do that nobody else can do.
I am listing these methods; some of them will work, some of them will turn out to be dead-ends. The thing that interests me is that they could be done from this particular perspective, and they can be fresh.
The ‘pre-distressed antique futurity’. William Gibson wrote about this when we was writing about atemporality, associating it with his ‘Zero History’ novel that he is working on. Gibson was saying that if you have a genuinely avant garde idea, something that’s really new, you should write about it or create about it as if it were being read twenty years from now. In other words, if you want to do this, you want to strip away the sci-fi chrome, the sense of wonder. You want it to be antique before it hits the page or the screen. Imagine that it was twenty years gone into the future. Just approach it from that perspective.
No longer allow yourself to be hypnotized by the sense of technical novelty. Just refuse to go there. Accept that it is already passe’, and create it from that point of view. Try to make it news that stays news.
Refuse the awe of the future. Refuse reverence to the past. If they are really the same thing, you need to approach them from the same perspective.
‘Recuperating forms of history that cannot be written.’ This is of tremendous interest. I think it escapes the literary traps of history. Just history that could not be written about. History about people who were not the winners, history about people who had no literatures. Pre-history. Human experience before the historical record was created.
We can trace this now through genetics, we can trace it through archeology. Times before humanity existed. Cosmic chronology. The way we learn about our things, through non-literary sources such as garbage, pollen counts, environmental damage, even corpses. You can look at what’s been learned from the corpse of ‘Otzi,’ this Bronze-Age European. Fantastic things.
‘Humanistic heavy iron’: it’s taken a long time for the humanities to get into super computing, and into massive database management. They are really starting to get there now. You are going to get into a situation where even English professors are able to study every word ever written about, or for, or because of, Charles Dickens or Elizabeth Barrett Browning. That’s just a different way to approach the literary corpus. I think there is a lot of potential there.
Information visualization is of great interest to me. I think it’s an art form, a potential science. And also design.
Becoming ‘multi-temporal’, rather than multi-cultural: it used to be a very big problem for historians that they supposedly could not divide themselves from the outlooks and interests of their own age. I think we are approaching a situation where the outlooks and interests of our own age make very little sense. They just don’t bind us to anything in particular. We don’t have a coherent outlook or interest that can enslave us. This means we are closer to a potentially objective history than anybody has ever been.
There are interesting potentials for a complete digital recapturing of earlier artifacts, earlier means of production. Instead of just theorizing about what people could have done with the steam engine, you just model a steam engine. You can print a steam engine out.
There are things that could be done with the museum economy in Europe that have not been done. I quite like the idea of a personal museum economy. For instance, rather than dressing up your downtown as some kind of relic of the eighteen hundreds, why don’t you just dress up your vacation home as the seventeen fifties? Or just refit your own home, really, as with the devices and services of an earlier century. Why feel that it’s not modern? If they are all the same thing, why not just go ahead, get off the grid and make your own butter and use your own well? Just go there with a kind of immediacy and just experience it as a contemporary thing.
Why not designer fiction as life? Why not role-playing games in real spaces? Why not become the change you want to see?
If, for instance, you think the future should offer ‘personal space flight’ – perhaps you are an enthusiast for that? – why don’t you just dress up as an astronaut? Just invent the whole thing, just go out and carry it onto the streets! Just invent the Jezz Bezos Blue Origin spacecraft, make your own spacecraft suitcases, spacecraft astronaut gear.
Yes, you will look ridiculous. But by what standard? By what standard can you be held to be ridiculous? Why not just go and make yourself a personal public testimony for a future that doesn’t exist? Why not just carry it out with a kind of Gandhian dedication, and see what happens?
There are other methods that I have not described. They will be rediscovered, or they will be invented. But I think there is tremendous creative potential in atemporality.
And I want to warn you, and also promise you, that this too shall pass. It’s just a period.
We are in a period which I think is dominated by two great cultural signifiers. An analog system that belonged to our parents, which has been shot full of holes. It is the symbol of the ruined castle. “Gothic High-Tech.” The ruins of the unsustainable.
And the other symbol is the favela slum, “Favela Chic,” the informalized, illegalized, heavily networked structure of the emergent new order. The things that the twenty first century is doing that are genuinely novel, that have not been domesticated or brought into sociality.
The Gothic High-Tech and the Favela Chic. These are very obvious to me, as a novelist and creative artist. Perhaps you won’t see things this way — but I think the life-span of this will be about ten years. A new generation will arise who does not need things explained to them in this way. They will not wonder at a slogan like ‘futurity now’, because they will have never known anything different.
They will not have to forget how things used to be. And at that point, we will be on a different playing field.
But we don’t get to choose the era of history that was given to us. We can only choose what we do within the parameters of what exists on the ground.
Now, no matter how confusing this may seem or how poorly phrased, there is a very good chance that you can physically outlive this era with your own body. It’s just ten years! ‘Futurity Now’ in some ways is like a slogan that means ‘Make me grow up’. That’s what you are demanding when you say ‘futurity now’. It’s like ‘make me get older’, ‘make me get wiser, now!’.
That’s doable.
We are going to have Early Atemporality, where we are struggling with what it means and how it’s different from post-modernism, and we are going to have Late Atemporality, where we pretty well get it about what was going on, and we can see the limits of that, and we know that something else is going to happen. That’s going to take ten years. You can physically outlive the period in which explaining things in this way makes sense.
Atemporality is a philosophy of history with a built-in expiration date. It has a built in expiration date. It’s not going to last forever. It’s not a perfect explanation, it’s a contingent explanation for contingent times.
Futurity was expected, futurity is here now, there goes futurity into the past, so long futurity, thank you for an exciting, fulfilling and worthwhile time.
Thank you for your attention.



Photos of Detroit Need to Move Beyond Ruin Porn By Pete Brook

In the mid-’90s, photographer and scholar Camilo Jose Vergara proposed preserving the vacant skyscrapers of once-great downtown Detroit as a ruins park. He called it “An American Acropolis.” The locals called it bunk.
As a symbol of the U.S. economy in general, even before the crash of 2008, Motor City has been the subject of much “ruin porn” – photography that fetishizes urban decay.
“The portrayal Detroiters are used to seeing – crumbling buildings with no people to be seen – is frustrating because they know their city is more than that,” says Detroit photographer Brian Widdis. “Nobody here denies that those things are real, but seeing the city portrayed one-dimensionally – time and again – it’s like hearing the same awful song being played over and over on the radio. Detroiters want to hear a different song once in a while.”
While images of a Detroit-in-bits may be photogenic, and tourists are undeniably still drawn to the decay, for the most part our consumption of collapsing buildings is fleeting, disconnected – gratification on the cheap.
Widdis and Romain Blanquart, another Detroit photographer, think there are other tales to be told. They characterize images of Detroit without people as “soulless.” Four years ago, they began collaborating on Can’t Forget Motor City, a project to focus on the people of Detroit, themes of home and family, how people live and relate to their city.
Detroit Disassembled by Andrew Moore and The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre are two of the most well-known photography projects to bask in glorious dilapidation. Sean Doerr made photographs for Dan Austin’s book Lost Detroit, mining the stories behind the city’s “majestic ruins.” You don’t have to search for long on Flickr to find images either.
Ruin porn worships the 33,000 empty houses and 91,000 vacant lots of Detroit and overlooks the 700,000+ residents. It doesn’t come close to describing the city.
“I still do not understand her. The complexity of Detroit makes many give up, move out or move on, if they can. But for others, we want to further that relationship with her,” says Blanquart.
In some ways, Widdis and Blanquart are an unlikely partnership; their photographic styles are quite different, most obviously in that Widdis shoots black and white and Blanquart shoots color. Blanquart, who grew up in Tahiti, France and Italy, moved to Detroit 10 years ago in search of work. He landed a staff position with the Detroit Free Press, set down roots and now concludes he’ll be in Detroit for life. Detroit-born, Widdis moved away as a young boy and only returned recently.
“Within our own histories, there are issues of native vs. non-native and resident vs. outsider,” says Widdis. “We’re also two white guys talking about a city that is over 80% black. So of course, being both insiders and outsiders creates a contradiction that informs our perspective.”
The pair do not claim to encapsulate Detroit with their project, but simply outline a part of it they think has been invisible. Can’t Forget Motor City is about relationships in real life and relationships between images.
“We’re constructing the story through the sequencing of the photos and relationships suggested between the singles and diptychs,” says Widdis.
The project not only avoids predictable and sensational images of a city in decay, but also simplistic and overly positive images. Widdis and Blanquart have found that photographs of utter normality are the best counter to negative, shallow depictions of Detroit.
“Yes, there are empty houses and factories and yes, there are urban farmers with conviction and energy. But on a day-to-day basis, most citizens are barely affected by either of those extremes,” says Widdis
While a book of the project would “make sense,” the photographers are in no rush. Commentary on Detroit and photography has crescendoed in the past couple of years, but that could actually diminish its relevance or reception.
“Detroit is close to bankruptcy, unemployment is stubbornly high, and a shrinking tax base has left the city struggling to provide basic services. There’s a plan to turn off the power to half of the city’s streetlights! So it’s not surprising that in 2012, four years after the auto bailout, housing bubble, and countless news stories about ‘The Ruins of Detroit’ (or its opposite ‘Detroit is Actually Not That Bad’), a kind of ‘Detroit Project’ fatigue has set in,” says Widdis
Ultimately, Can’t Forget Motor City is a project built upon the awareness of photography’s boundaries.
“Mostly people are too busy living their lives to care too much about photography projects – ours or anyone else’s. Photographs don’t fix infrastructure or give people jobs, so our project flies pretty well under the radar,” says Widdis.
Blanquart and Widdis are just trying to do their bit.
“Detroit is not a tragedy. We attempt to show its humanity,” adds Blanquart.




Ruin porn

By

Can't Forget the Motor City: Detroit (photograph by Brian Widdis)
Can't Forget the Motor City: Detroit (photograph by Brian Widdis)
Images of urban decay, loss, dilapidation, and disinvestment - images that detail the passing of time - have reached pornographic status, at least, linguistically speaking.
“Ruin porn worships the 33,000 empty houses and 91,000 vacant lots of Detroit,” writes Pete Brook at Wired.  “It overlooks the 700,000+ residents. It doesn’t come close to describing the city.”
Photographers Brian Widdis and Romain Blanquart are trying to change that. Can’t Forget Motor City is an online photography project telling a pointedly different Detroit story.
Can't Forget the Motor City: Detroit (photograph by Romain Blanquart)
Can't Forget the Motor City: Detroit (photograph by Romain Blanquart)
“The global media and many visiting photographers see Detroit as an abandoned and dead city,” Widdis and Blanquart write in their artist statement. “We are shown picture after picture of our modern ruins, buildings that were once the pride of our city. What is constantly absent from these soulless images are the people.”
But not everyone agrees that ruin porn is “soulless”. In fact, calling visual subjects of decay and dilapidation “porn” might be more provocative than meaningful.
Do the iconic images of Detroit Disassembled by Andrew Moore and The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre unfairly abandon a city not yet dead?
Urban researcher Richey Piiparinen thinks not.
“I don’t feel the modern ruins littering the Rust Belt landscape are a negative,” writes Piiparinen for Rust Wire. “Rather, I feel cities like Cleveland and Detroit that have physically borne the brunt of a broken system are also home to something else: a possibility tied to the ubiquity of so many vacant and crumbled things.”
A resident of Cleveland himself, Piiparinen urges residents to wink at each other in self-confidence instead of making self-flagellating comments about the state of the Rust Belt.
“Because that America of Times Square and Texas growth is an illusion that is barely keeping itself from falling apart,” writes Piiparinen. “Whereas the Rust Belt has been able to stare at the pieces of a broken paradigm for some time now.”

"Ballroom, Lee Plaza Hotel" The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

"Atrium, Farwell Building" The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

Can't Forget the Motor City: Detroit (photograph by Romain Blanquart)
Piiparinen says, “Ruin Porn—or the artistic movement centered on photographing the scenes of post-industrial decay— has been called a lot by many. It has been referred to as condescending to Rust Belters. It has been called a necessary evil. It has been called masturbating-the-eye art.  I call it a breath of fresh air, or more exactly: a tool for a change in perception.”
In the end, whether ruin porn is condescending or not, it has definitely had it’s artistic heyday.
“Yes, there are empty houses and factories and yes, there are urban farmers with conviction and energy. But on a day-to-day basis, most citizens are barely affected by either of those extremes,” says Widdis.
And while Can’t Forget Motor City is trying to transcend the clichés of Rust Belt photography projects, Widdis and Blanquart recognize that a Detroit photography project is something of a clichés in and of itself.
“Detroit is close to bankruptcy, unemployment is stubbornly high, and a shrinking tax base has left the city struggling to provide basic services,” says Widdis. “There’s a plan to turn off the power to half of the city’s streetlights! So it’s not surprising that in 2012, four years after the auto bailout, housing bubble, and countless news stories about ‘The Ruins of Detroit’ (or its opposite ‘Detroit is Actually Not That Bad’), a kind of ‘Detroit Project’ fatigue has set in.”
Let SmartPlanet know what you think. Is there still a place for ruin worship? Is it naive to see images of decay as symbols of change? Is it fair to call ruin porn “soulless”?


Atemporality: A closer, more holistic look

So, to clarify, here’s some more info on just what we talk about when we talk about atemporality.
There’s an old-ish essay here by Adam Rothstein juxtaposing Atemporality against the faux-vintage photos that are all the rage today (Spoiler alert: they’re not the same thing), that you can produce in Instagram and other simiCourtesy Mini OzzYlar photo apps.
To define it myself in short terms: atemporality is the act of refuting the order of temporality, through the means which temporality is usually applied. We all use an interior sense of time, or temporality. It’s, you know, Time! We keep track of the order in which things happen, and form a baseline t axis by which we keep track of the world.
Atemporality thwarts our attempts to order time as we have known it. It’s in the name. Atemporality describes not something from the past or the future, but something which exists outside of time. The atemporal object is not an object that appears outside of its appropriate time frame, it’s an object which has no time.
Atemporality is, in the present day, selling space suitcases to moon tourists. And doing so sincerely. Take this from  Bruce Sterling’s speech that I mentioned in the last post.
Gibson was saying that if you have a genuinely avant garde idea, something that’s really new, you should write about it or create about it as if it were being read twenty years from now. In other words, if you want to do this, you want to strip away the sci-fi chrome, the sense of wonder. You want it to be antique before it hits the page or the screen. Imagine that it was twenty years gone into the future. Just approach it from that perspective.
And so the object seems to come at us from the future, just like jetpacks and flying cars. It treats what is your subjective future as its past, and time gets muddled. It’s a type of ideological time travel, like what Slavoj Zizek gets from Lacan in saying that the effect precedes the cause. It’s the kind of thing that retrofuturism deals with–that we can be fascinated by steampunk and space age fantasies like rayguns and steam powered…well, anything.
But how is this possible? Rothstein compares time to a river in which we’re floating. There’s the past that we’ve already gone through, and can remember, and there’s the future that we have yet to reach, which we can only imagine. “The river of time spreads out into a brackish salt marsh delta, and we know time is still flowing, but we don’t remember where it was we were trying to go.”
Courtesy mynameisharsha (flickr)
What’s at stake, what’s important to note, is that this brackish marsh becomes fertile ground for narratives to grow. The dominant historical discourse–the dominant historical narrative–gets fractured into something different. It gets atomized in a sense. (There’s a point here where we can tie this into neoliberal capital, and the way the forces of wealth and power also get atomized and spread out into the atmosphere, attaining a global reach that goes beyond the nation and the nationalistic narratives that colored the past century or two–but I don’t want to get dragged into the much of a Marxist critique in this small space.) It’s easy enough to blame the rise of ubiquitous computing (smartphones) and new media (social networking) for this fracture. And to some extent that’s true. Our circles are getting smaller–like Rothstein points out, there aren’t as many people who can see the “big picture.”
Perhaps its my own inclination to look at issues holistically and semi-historically, to see what about society is spurring on such cultural changes. And, by and large, it is technology which is impacting our perception of time. We no longer have to experience time as unilateral. There is past and there is what the future might be, but atemporality insists that we experience cultural movements not as historical relic, but as the Now.
Atemporality is not your 20th Century post-modern critique. It is no longer enough to wrily point out a bit of irony that no one else caught, and think yourself Zarathustra for doing so…We access all recorded time periods with equal veracity and reach, until time periods cease being temporal. Anything that we can do with anything is only Now. Any of us, all of us, one of us. The temporality that anchors us to reality is atemporality.
But I digress. We’re in an era where the forces of history that governed our ancestors don’t necessarily hold sway over us–us being the networked, first-world. It will take a much more in-depth scholar to look at the effect of the network culture and atemporality to those places outside of this first world (Another spoiler: it’s not pleasant). There has recently been a perfect storm in which this can arise: the rise of ubiquitous computing and social networking like I mentioned above, the preservation of old texts–especially those pertinent to the maintenance of old technology (I can find typewriter manuals on google, and my typewriter will not be obsolete anymore), the revolutionary zeitgeist. “If something is replaced by a better tool, that former tool is either sold online or goes into the free box, where it is quickly grabbed by someone who could totally use it, or take it apart and make it into something else.” Atemporality is merely a symptom of the networked culture. Help is readily available to anyone who needs it, through message boards and sites like Wiki Answers. FaCourtesy Will Scullincebook and twitter allow for the political mobilization of thousands of protesters, as in Egypt last year. And, to go back to the main point of this, any and every cultural movement becomes accessible to anyone who wants it.
What all of this leads to is the idea that this networked culture, the fracturing of traditional narratives, can ultimately offer an escape from the grip of old ideologies. Atemporality, as Rothstein points out, is against authenticity, because “Anyone offering authenticity has something to sell you, and likely, a something you do not need. They try to convince you that the way you are doing it is not as “real” as something else. Funny–because reality was just fine before they came along.” Not to say that reality is structured by subjective experience–reality is just one more object that exists outside of you (or maybe reality is the intersection of object and subjective experience, I don’t really know right now).
But seeing as I can’t get too far from the idea of Neoliberal capital and the grip it holds on the world, it’s hard to see Atemporality as the possibility of escape from an all-too imprisoned world, a world where capital can be extracted by international actors that then move on to another source of wealth and labor. In a world where people are entirely replaceable, Atemporality offers a uniqueness, not a flattening, but a way to express individuality, to tap into niche markets. “There is no such thing as un-cool. You just haven’t found the other people who think it is awesome yet.” It is the individual in touch with like-minded individuals, and anytime that kind of power gets mobilized, frightening changes happen.
Or not. I’m pretty much just spitballing here. All of this, of course, could be completely wrong. Atemporality is a relatively new philosophy. And despite its attempts to distance itself from post-modern philosophy, the idea of a multiplicity of narratives, of an attempt to imagine other worlds, just smacks of the Postmodern to me. - Grayscale Studios

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