These are the eight composite images around which I want to build my Surfaces and Strategies WIP portfolio. Click on the image to get full screen.
Each image is made from three constituent images (human activity, the changing built environment, the natural environment) from the same location (in this case Ilford and Barking town centres, each of which is undergoing substantial planned redevelopment) through a process of channel mixing. Each image in the portfolio is accompanied by an ‘image code’ which gives a clue to its construction (example below: see here for explanation).
To contextualise the work, I have included two quotes from Fitzgerald et al (2018), which indicate the themes being explored.
‘The Neuropolis is the city understood as a matrix of transactions between urban life and the always-developing, malleable brains of urban citizens. Its object is a real conurbation, and not an ideological fiction: it describes an organization of physical spaces and social lives, of interpersonal exchanges and chance encounters, of economic relations and commercial transactions – and all of these simultaneously lived and transacted through the embodied lives of Neuropolitan citizens’ (p.223).
‘The Neuropolis is old, and winding. It’s easy to get lost there. To think about good life in such a space means not only grappling with history, but also coming to terms with a complex simultaneity of past and present – of the ideas, people and inclinations, that persist, in the shadows, across them’ (p.235).
A major theme in my work (and in the work quoted above) is relationship with the environment. I think this is clear in the images, but not in the quotes. Whilst I could have included more, I think this would have over-complicated the portfolio format and content. I will discuss this in my presentation (and also relate this work to the participatory ‘micro-projects’ and the photography for advocacy work that I am doing as part of the wider project).
The draft WIP portfolio (to be discussed with Cemre on Tuesday) previewed below.
NeuropolisWIPfinalReferences
Fitzgerald, D., Rose, N. and Singh, I. 2018. ‘Living Well in the Neuropolis’, The Sociological Review, 64: 221–237.