Category: Politics
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geography of fear / fear of geography
Back when I used to live in Velcro City’s original namesake, I remember being told many times over, by many different sources, that difficult cases of social exclusion or dysfunction were often tagged by overburdened social workers in the area with the acronym NFP—“normal for Portsmouth”. Quite how normal (or not) those cases actually were—and…
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konst för alla
From a visit to Malmö Konsthall yesterday afternoon. The have-a-go workshop is of course familiar from UK museums, particularly during school holidays. What was quite a surprise for me was that here, this stuff is just sat there, waiting to be used, without permission or supervision or justification… I’m pretty sure I could have just…
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fragile, non-fixed ways of thinking
A bunch of snips from an interview with Matt Ward [via Matt formerly-of-BERG Jones], until fairly recently Head of Design at Goldsmiths: Speculative Design can act as a mode of inquiry or it can be a form of strategic practice within industry. At its worst it’s an aesthetic, a step-by-step guide or corporate vapourware, at…
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weapons of mass distraction
Geoff Manaugh / knows the score*. Your outrage is exactly what they want: … an endless landslide of trivial distractions has been steadily eliminating the ground needed for systemic political change. People who might once have been an opposition—or, even better, people who might once have been leaders capable of articulating a clear way forward,…
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scumbags and maggots
Huw Lemmey on the establishment of “Fairytale of New York” as a trench-front in the UK culture wars: Sometimes I wonder if not engaging is the answer, but I’m rapidly coming to the opinion that these disputes could be about anything, and will be about anything. The point is not necessarily about the etymology of…