Digital Ruins

Geography has seen a rebirth of interest and appreciation of the ruined and abandoned spaces of industrial modernity. This work has often considered such ruins largely in terms of the phenomenological or affectual experiences of material decay, disorder, and blight. This chapter is an investigation into ruined spaces that do not have materiality or temporality: digital ruins. Existing in a kind of eternal present, such spaces do not decay, yet still demonstrate many affective and phenomenological experiences of what we understand to be ruin. Using ethnographic research of three abandoned and nearly abandoned virtual worlds, these landscapes provide a unique opportunity for a critical analysis of digital ruins as spaces of disconnection: particularly in their relationship with time, their algorithmic disconnection from the social imaginary of the Internet, the phenomenological disconnection one experiences in these places, and their founding premise as spaces of utopian disconnection from the limitations of materiality.

Digital ruins

In recent years, Geography has seen a rebirth of interest and appreciation of ruins, abandoned and neglected spaces of industrial modernity. This work has often emphasised the sensuousness of the material contextualisation of industrial ruins largely in terms of the phenomenological experience of decay, disorder and blight, or the affective elements of these spaces through concepts such as ‘ghostliness’ and ‘haunting’. This article is an investigation into ruins or abandoned spaces which do not have materiality or temporality: digital ruins. Existing in a kind of eternal present, such spaces do not decay, yet still demonstrate many of the affective, phenomenological and existential experiences of what we understand to be ruin, abandonment or blight. Using autoethnographic research of a variety of abandoned and nearly abandoned virtual worlds, this article will reconsider the notions of ‘ruin’ within the increasingly important context of digital spaces, the utopian rhetoric which framed the development of these worlds, and situate the digital ruin within a wider critique of digital prosumerism.

“The Atmosphere is Permissive and Free”: The Gendering of Activism in the British Adventure Playgrounds Movement, ca. 1948–70

This article explores how gender shaped activities on British adventure playgrounds, designated abandoned spaces where children engaged in free play with urban materials under loose adult supervision. It argues that as these bold experiments emerged in postwar Britain in a period when women’s traditional roles were beginning to be scrutinized and questioned, they might have been expected to develop into spaces where traditional gendered norms were challenged, girls and boys were offered different forms of play, and mothers were drawn into wider community activism. This potential was limited through the emergence of the figure of the heroic playleader, a charismatic man capable of taming potentially delinquent urban youth through extreme displays of masculinity. Consequently, it was not until the late 1970s, a decade after the establishment of an autonomous Women’s Liberation Movement, that adventure playgrounds began to challenge gendered play behaviors.

indeterminate duration

Interiority, in relation to my practice, is the inherent curiosity to the notions of process, time and duration. It is a practice of mark making, marking time, making time, and time making; foregrounding duration and marking an occurrence. My technique is one of working responsively to interiors, allowing particular temporal conditions to surface within specific sites and situations. The marks – whether they be on a canvas, a house, a building, or within a gallery – materialise immateriality and allow the residue of particular processes to be assembled as collections of materialised and spatialised time. This paper discusses an artist residency undertaken in Detroit, USA 2017. Informed by existing watermarks, stains and rust encountered within abandoned spaces in Detroit, I initially responded by using found materials such as charcoal and ash from burnt houses, plant materials and liquids, to assemble process-based compositions on canvas. Further temporal interventions were then assembled in a number of situations within Detroit. This paper, and practice, notions that interiority is a field of interiors where the indeterminate is celebrated through the force of duration; immersion in time as ow. The temporal, material and immaterial are considered as a dynamic and confluence of forces; assembled in time, materialising immateriality.

Miasto niekończącej się tułaczki. Pejzaż Los Angeles w twórczości filmowej Michaela Manna

DOI 10.24917/20837275.9.4.2W Los Angeles, przestrzeni ciągłej podróży, wątpliwą ostoję dla znużonych nomadów wyznaczają wyłącznie pokoje hotelowe, niewyposażone domy i centra handlowe. Terytorium miasta jest zaś wytyczane przez labirynty dróg, torów kolejowych i pasów startowych, które stanowią z jednej strony drogę ucieczki z metropolii, z drugiej zaś częstokroć prowadzą z powrotem do opuszczanej przestrzeni. Namysł nad ekranową konstrukcją ponowoczesnego miasta jest elementem analizy czasów niekończącej się tułaczki, charakteryzującej dynamiczny ekosystem współczesności.A city of neverending wandering. Landscape of Los Angeles in the film work of Michael MannIn Los Angeles, the space of constant travel, the dubious refuge for tired nomads are hotel rooms, unfurnished houses, and shopping centers. The city’s territory is defined by a labyrinth of roads, railroads, and runways. They allow to escape from the metropolis but they often lead back to the abandoned spaces. A study of representation of the postmodern city is an element of the analysis of the world of endless wandering which characterizes the dynamic ecosystem of the present day.