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On these pages here I will outline my original ideas, where they came from, by whom and how they were influenced and how they developed over the months of the ninepin residency.
My ideas for the Ports Proposal which I submitted for the Ninepin residency were based on two earlier project ideas which I had never fully carried out, the project Roamaz and the idea of port mapping, tentatively tried out with the project 'log' at DEAF 2003, but part of a wider framework that included the idea of modernising Otto Neurath's Isotype method for today's world. Obviously, also a general fascination with ports, port cities, harbours, the sea, etc., plays a role and a curiosity about what is going on in the here and now, locally and globally. There is obviously an analogy or some sort of overlap between maritime traffic and the connections that the sea facilitates and the virtual world of networks. Sea trade and the global projection of force through navies was the basis of the first 500 years of 'globalisation'. Now the control of information flows in networks is seen as the defining component of a new phase of globalisation in the so called information age. But how to bring those two layers together, how to map one onto the other? I hoped to find the answer by going to port cities such as Poole, Portsmout and Southampton and puting my onsite work into a framework of general research (web based, reading, libraries).
One of the earlier two project ideas my ports proposal was based on I had called 'Roaming Agent' or Roama/z (Roamaz if there is more than one). The idea was partly informed through my research into wireless community networks - in 2003 I have written a book about the topic, called 'Freie Netze - Free Networks', published in German language by Heise, Hannover Nov. 2003 - and on my own writing practice. Regarding my research into wireless networks I owe a lot to the whole community but most inspiring has been particularly the work of Adam Burns a.k.a vortex of 
free2air, London. Vortex had started a wireless mapping project called Air Shadow, where he would walk or bike around with a laptop in his rucksack and a GPS attached to it. Whenever the hardware detected an open wireless network connection the system would record its Network ID, the location (in longitude/lattitude) where the recording was made and the signal strength. Back at home the software would render the recordings onto maps of the cities where he had undertaken such walks (London, mostly, but also Berlin and Amsterdam).
Map of WLAN nodes in Berlin created with Air Shadow, by Adam Burns/vortex (free2air.org)
Air shadow has a lot going for it. One thing that motivated Adam to do it was that maps of wireless community networks usually show nodes as circles. Theoretically a wireless signal emitted from an omnidirectional antenna does indeed propagate circularly. But in practice it's almost never really like that. There are obstacles such as houses and trees, which dent the perfect circle, and there are different antenna types in use, such as directional and even highly directional antennas. Air shadow measures and renders the actual propagation, not the theoretical one. Another aspect concerns the quality of web tools that visualise existing community networks. The leading advocate of wireless community networks in the UK, Consume, has a great database where owners of nodes can register their nodes, the location and any additional information they want to give. The locative information in the data base is based on the OS grid. This has the great advantage that one can type in a UK post code and will see all the wireless Consume nodes in the area. But there are also downsides to that system. Not every owner of an open publicly usable node registers it in the Consume database. Some nodes registered have ceased to exist. Others remain 'speculative' or 'experimental' for years. Therefore the Consume database and visualisation tool offers a good approximation of what exists but is far from reflecting the actual reality of existing wireless open public nodes. Air shadow hoped to address this by becoming a community tool for wireless mapping. If enough people were constantly going around and shared their information online, the real wireless landscape would become visible.
The project idea that I had called Roamaz was not really centred on Air shadow but inspired by it. It was designed to make use of existing wireless public network connections for a different sort of mapping, a mapping of places, flavors, flows, of subjective experiences of city scapes, of deeply rooted local knowledge as well as of the fleeting impressions of the derivé. A number of things come together here. The main thing that I should mention first is that in summer 2002 I had started walking around in London frequently carrying a notebook with me; an old fashioned notebook in which I would scribble notes with a ball pen, sitting in a pub with a good view on a busy street, at a bus stop or a bench in a public space. I had always been fascinated by surfaces, or what I think is wrongly often seen as merely a 'surface'. In the dialectics of perception and reality as I understand it the inside is the outside, there is no mystical secret core, everything lays bare in front of our eyes, we only have to be able to spot it. In this sense we can 'read' cities or city quarters. I would be careful not to reduce perception, thought and expression to acts of reading and writing only, as is so often done in contemporary accounts, a legacy of the many hundreds of years of book culture. We also smell ourselves through the world, we feel it underneath our feet, and in our guts through our wants and needs, we hear it, constantly exposed to the many sounds of the modern world. But put that together we get through all our senses an impression of the world, one that is not merely passive but also tinged by our own feelings, guided by the selective attention we give to things on a certain day. For a long time, actually throughout my whole adult life, since I started to see myself as an artist and writer, I have been training myself to develop an attitude of maximum openness, of becoming a good screen or receptor of that what is going on. It is my favourite game, to observe, what is around me, what goes through me, the physicality of the experience as well as the thoughts that form in my mind while this happens. It was and is my highest artistic goal to find ways of recording and reproducing that in an intelligible way, with minimum distortion, with as few filters as possible.
With the formulation of the Roamaz concept I hoped to find a way of doing exactly that what is described above in a technologically enhanced way. Instead of only recording written words in a paper notebook I would carry a small laptop or PDA. While writing, through combination with a GPS, the laptop would record what is written where, geographically; additional parameters could be recorded, such as the frequency of typing, the outside temperature, maybe even my heart rate and other physical factors should be registered. This information would be stored together with the written notes on some kind of public weblog. This meta-information would allow to slice through the writing not only in temporal form (what most weblogs offer) but also following the 'story temperature', a heat curve calculated from the accumulated data interpolations. Those ideas were not formulated in that clarity in the original Roamaz concept, written in 2002 and then pretty much based on my own thinking, without much outside influence. In 2002 I saw the Roama as some sort of cyborg mobile sensor, half human (me), half machine (the gadgets I would carry around). I also realised that after a test phase it would be beneficial to open the project to more participants. Once the methods are tried and tested everyone who wants can become a Roama, thus Roamaz. The greater the accumulated data, gathered by more laptops, eyes, ears, the more interesting the story curve.
In 2003 another layer came into play with my growing awareness of so called 'locative media' projects and also my rather peripheral participation in the Cartographic Congress at Limehouse Town Hall. I realized that those ideas were pretty much 'in the air', that many people worked on similar projects and that some had done already substantially more technological development (which I am not very useful at doing myself). This was not a reason to abandon the project alltogether but to reconsider. Where are my strength, where can I make a unique contribution? Once it had been confirmed that I had got the Ninepin residency I started talking to Dave Mee, a former student at Ravensbourne College, where I teach, and someone who is technologically more skillful than I am and tries to be always informed about the latest developments. I started talking to Dave about my 'ports' ideas and we drafted some notes which we posted on his personal Wiki website. Dave has also a keen interest in the second train of thought that was informing my 'ports' proposal, the potential of using 'traffic data' for social analysis.
Most people are not really aware that whatever happens on the internet is recorded in so called log-files in one way or the other: web-servers record all the interactions between user clients (browsers) and the server; machines that serve as gateways between a local network and the internet record which types of data packets pass through; email servers and routers -- basically all machines on the internet where traffic just passes through -- also routinely 'log' that data traffic. The traffic of 'information packets' is associated with 'ports' at the receiving and sending machines.
A 'port' is basically a virtual communication interface. There are thousands of ports identified by numbers. The first 1024 ones are called well known ports because each port number is associated with a certain 'protocol' which stands for a specific type of data traffic or interaction. For instance, one of the most widely known ones is port 80, which is used for HTTP requests (the technical term for when a browser asks for a web-page from a server). By monitoring port 80 of a web server with some sniffer software information can be gained about which web pages are visited by which clients. Recording and analysing this traffic to some extent is done by system administrators for technical maintainance reasons. When something goes wrong they must know where the problem occurs. Open ports are exploited by 'crackers', people who try to get access to other people's machines.
But the existence of this type of data has also spurned the data hunger of a number of institutions. Companies involved in marketing and internet ad agencies are careful to register who (which browser/client) looks at their banner ads or maybe even clicks on them. Some telecommunications providers have deals with 'data warehousing' companies to whom they forward all their traffic data for storage and analysis, to build up customer profiles. This is regulated differently in different countries and a lot of murky business is going on.
But its is the law enforcement agencies who have the biggest appetite for this type of information. For years now a battle has been going on between civil rights advocates and law enforcement agencies -- not only the police but also secret services -- who are demanding that all telecommunications providers, phone companies and ISPs retain their traffic data for a considerable length of time, between 1 and 7 years. The according laws are called data retention laws. The assumption is that once some crime has happened that involves, in one way or the other, the use of the internet, the law enforcemnt agencies can get clues about the perpetrators through analysis of the retained traffic data.
FIPR, Foundation for Internet Policy Research: Retention
Statewatch on Data Retention
All kinds of justifications have been and are used to argue why data retention is necessary, from organised crime to child pornography. Civil libertarians argue that data retention is an assault on our liberty, because it makes everyone a suspect. The state has no right to record everyones movements through real spaces, so why should this right be granted in cyberspace? And once such data pools exist the state can go on 'fishing expeditions', trawling through the data of many innocents to discern a few bad apples, a practice associated with totalitarian states.
The 11th of September 2001 has delivered a blow to defenders of digital 'privacy'. Law enforcers got the upper hand and data retention laws are now in place in many countries with varying degrees of intrusiveness. The US even embarked on a project called Total Information Awareness (TIA) whose aim it was to gather and analyse all traffic data centrally. The project was stopped after a few months, partly because of its impracticability, partly because the US Congress understood that this was going a step too far. But TIA was only the tip of the iceberg. Even before 9/11 the FBI had developed a tool called Carnivore which is able to be targeted at specific net resources and can analyse all the traffic that passes through the virtual ports there.
In 2002 an American art group around New York based Alex Galloway organised a project also called 'Carnivore' which drew attention to the topic and invited other artists to process collected traffic data and convert them into something else. The project got a lot of attention and won a few prices. So a step in the right direction maybe, I was less happy with the project. I thought it trivialized the issue and some of the invited artists did nothing more than aesthetisizing the collected data. Most (not all) projects gave the audience little chance of knowing what was going on. Instead of enlightening the issue was further mystified.
By that time, in autumn 2002, I had developed another thesis. Even so I agree it is necessary to communicate those issues surrounding data retention and analysis to the wider public in any way possible, there is also a chance here for a more positive approach that does not only focus on the secretive side and surveillance issues. The traditional position of cyber-libertarians to oppose all data retention in principle was already a lost case. Data retention is going on, is legally sanctioned and those laws are in the process of being strengthened even now. So why not, when we cannot stop it, use it to the benefit of everyone? The assumption of both law enforcers and marketeers is that from those data clues can be gained about peoples habits and interests and their social networks. Maybe they are right, otherwise they would not pursue this so forcefully. So then, why not lay that open for everyone? Make traffic analysis in public, with everybodies participation? Let everybody have insight into what those data reveal? In winter 2002/2003 with Kingdom of Piracy at the DEAF festival in Rotterdam we embarked on a project, with the help of Adam Burns, called log. We exposed the origins of all the clients/browsers who visited the KOP website, excluding the noise from the data but otherwise not interpreting or aesthetisizing them. Everybody can have access to the data and can come to their own conclusions or do something with it, whatever they like.
At the same time my ideas went a bit further. I thought that traffic data can also be used to construct something like a 'cultural geography of cyberspace'. The evasiveness of abstract data could be turned around, the flow of information on the net could be made a useful tool of social science by combining algorithmic methods of data filtering and skillful visualisation; a visualisation that is not aesthetisizing but would reveal the 'meaning' of data and display the knowledge gained in a way comprehensible to everyone. Those ideas were influenced also by another favourite pet project of mine, the idea to use Otto Neuraths method of Isotype, developed and practiced in the 1920s -30s, in a computerized and networked context.
I communicated this idea to a few people, including Matthew Fuller. He pointed me to the work of Richard Rodgers who goes exactly into that direction. He and his research group at govcom.org do not use traffic data but search engines and computer linguistics to, for example in one project, called Infoid, show the agenda setting power of NGOs - how topics they talk about on their own websites make it into the mainstream news. Infoid is smart, easy to use (it works as a screensaver at peoples machines, a bit like Seti at home), aesthetically pleasing, but it does not work that well. At a time when the war in Iraq started the indicators for human rights and sustainable development went up, not down. Nevertheless, it confirmed that I was on to something. At about the same time Dave Mee showed me the Daypop website which establishes the trendiest words on the internet for each day, a service that quickly became very popular (the artist group Ubermorgen followed a similar concept years ago but never got mass market recognition). The potential socially beneficial use that can be made of filtering the traffic that goes through virtual ports made it into my 'ports' proposal and became the second name giving entity.
Since then I had a lot of second thoughts. I still think that the basic idea, of using port filtering and visualisation to convey meaning to the public, could be a valid one, even so it may be still too vague and not well defined enough. Specific ideas and methods will have to be conceived, it is something that can only be tested in experiments. But then, informed and guided by conversations I have had with Adam Burns, Dave Mee, Shu Lea Cheang and particularly also Graham Harwood, I got aware of the nature of what I was trying to do. Here I was, artist, writer, whatever, trying to step into the shoes of a social scientist; use the power of numbers to establish some sort of knowledge about the world, about the people. Even so my approach was guided by a very well meaning, social democratic impetus of creating something that is of benefit for the public, it operated on a much too abstract plane. I was putting myself into the position of someone who was looking at quantitative information gained on the net to establish some sort of truth, however shaky, about people. Looking around one can see easily how this is done by many people, by scientists, sociologists and, increasingly, also artists. It is a trend in art that has been going for a number of years - that whole mapping thing. It reiterates a very Western idea of the concept of knowledge, of strength in numbers, of an abstract layer of information that is quite far from lived reality. Do I want to be in that position? Well, no, not really. I don't want to contribute to that sort of knowledge that is above the people, that dominates them, that exerts this specific type of souvereignity - which is also the way insurance companies work, the health system, the focus groups, the polling and think tanks. As an artist, I want to be down with the people, on an equalitarian level. That does not mean I should not use abstractions and the power of the intellect as far as it goes. But maybe we should leave the social science to the social scientists. In artistic practice we need specifity, what philosophers of science call 'situated knowledge', or even more, an applied situated knowledge; we need to get our hands dirty and we need emotions to be involved. The idea as such should not be totally abandoned but carefully reconsidered, evaluated in which ways it is applied, in which context, with which methods. Realising this, I took a step back and I am glad I did.
By the time I came to Southampton for the first time I had thrown out most of my preconceptions. I was not going to do a locative-gps-blog thing. I was also not going to make a massive community website. And the traffic analysis of internet traffic might be difficult to implement for privacy reasons and other concerns of the involved institutions.
I arrived in Southampton in February 2004 travelling by car with James Stevens, Backspace and Consume founder, and John San, one of his technicians. We went to the Civic Centre, a white sandstone structure from the 1920ies that houses a gallery, the library and other public institutions. The official Ninepin launch was going to happen here.
I had forgotten an adaptor plug for my laptop which I would need for my presentation, so I left the Civic Centre to look for an electric store. It was bright afternoon and although the Civic Centre is practically in the middle of town the area seemed eeriely desserted. Passing by closed shops, some nightclubs and having to avoid only very few cars, I entered the pedestrianised area. There I soon found myself in front of the West Quay shopping centre. It is a huge shopping mall, like an entire city district, which accommodates shops by all the major British brands, from John Lewis to M&S. I soon found a Dixons and happily returned with my plug.
After the presentation we drove on to Plymouth. The visit there was not related to the Ports project but it gave me an impression of another British port city. The lasting impressions I picked up there: the dockyards and other navy installations are nowhere to be seen; the city centre is totally dominated by the university which has just opened a brand new building, a shiny temple of knowledge in glass, steel and brick. The whole infrastructure around the uni is geared towards student needs such as copy shops, caffe latte and cheap booze. I went down to the old harbour and read with great interest the inscriptions on the outside harbour wall. Many historically important ships had left Plymouth as the last British port before they sailed towards the Americas. The Mayflower had got dedicated to itself not just an inscription on a marble plate but a memorial portal in fake classicist style, with the British and the US flag waving side by side in the cold winter breeze. I found this demonstration of 'special relationships' with the two flags together and the whole way the puritan founding fathers spirit was celebrated here a bit unsettling - especially in the light of the recent Iraq war and occupation . But what really caught my interest was another inscription which told about a bunch of communists stranded on the sea-shore not far from Plymouth and killed by police. Oh, that beautiful late Victorian age, the good old times when the police would shoot before asking any questions! This small memorial plaque reminded me of the huge gap between the official history, those milestone events such as the battle of Trafalgar and the numerous lifes lost by those who don't fit the whitewashed version of defenders of civilisation and christianity. I decided I would try to direct my attention to such events and stories which usually get overlooked.
On my next trip to Southampton I was greeted at the railway station by Andy and Helen. I was surprised by the small size of the station. It is not like a proper station at all, there is no large built structure, just a few platforms and some small shops and ticket offices, more like a train stop in the Pampas. We drove to Mount Pleasant where we met Martine and Caroline from the Mount Pleasant Media Workshop. In our one hour conversation Martin and Caroline dropped quite a few good hints for further research.
Afterwards, Helen had to leave for an appointment in Pompey, and Andy and me set out to drive to the headquarter of Ordnance Survey. We were told that they had a little shop there where we could buy any Ordnance Survey map. Andy is not familiar with Southampton, so it took us a while to find the road to Shirley. When we finally arrived at Ordnance Survey, a grey concrete bunker, we were told by a voice at the gate that the shop had been closed, but we were advised that we could get maps at a map shop on Shirley High Street. The voice sounded grumpy and did not give very clear directions. So we found ourselves driving up and down long Shirley High Street, looking for a map shop. It was a bleak afternoon, daylight almost gone, very few pedestrians fighting the elements on the wet and windswept pavements. Finally we found someone who knew the shop and gave us fairly good directions, so I got my maps. Then we had lunch at a classic greasy spoon, basically the only place open except for a chinese take-away.
The problem with Ordnance Survey is that this great British institution which surveys the country since hundreds of years acts like a private for-profit company. That means that the geographical knowledge that has been created with tax payers money is available only for paying customers. If I had stuck to my original plan to do something more seriously locative, this would have been a great obstacle. The Ordnance Survey maps are good. They are probably the best maps in the world. They are vector maps, so you can zoom in to very high resolution. If one had access to OS maps a gps based mobile weblog would make much more sense. It would be relatively easy to combine a personal narration, gps waypoint information and maps to create nice web based applications. If I really had insisted on doing that we could have tried and obtained sponsorship from OS to get Soton maps. But I would not want to do that. As an artist, maybe I can get the privilige of having access to those maps for free, but it would not seem the right thing to do for me. Everybody should have access to those maps for free or for a very small nominal fee. The OS problem repeats itself all over Europe. Somehow European nation states have decided to privatize geographic information. In the US free digital maps are available which is a big boost for locative media art projects and also for commerce. The privatization of maps is a barrier to innovation and essentially undemocratic. (About those issues see also the following Guardian Article)
Later we met Mike and Nick from Southampton Wireless Network (SOWN), an initiative to create a grassroots free wi-fi network. They described the network they had built so far. It covers the university campus and some surrounding areas. They had some antenna and node positions on high buildings, which is exactly what you want to have for such a project, but said they faced some yet 'unknown' trouble with electric static which ruined the access points. Mike and Nick talked also about their ambition to start a wireless mapping project which would not only map the network they have created but all free wireless nodes in the Southampton area. Unfortunately the OS problem makes that a hard thing to do. They were also developing some mechanism to make 802.11 networks (the official name for what is called wi-fi in common language) more secure and generally appeared to be very active and forward looking. I thought it would be good to work with SOWN in case I wanted to do anything with free networks in Southampton. When Andy dropped me off at Southampton Airport railway station I was tired but cheerful.
I have lost the notes of my second Southampton visit early in springtime 2004 but I remember a few things. I went to look for the port. Leaving the station at the side of the Toys R Us I walked past the West Quay shopping centre. This time I was at the back of it where you can really see its dimensions - the relatively small main street entrance is deceptive in this regard. The multi-storey car parks alone cover a few football fields. There are very few pedestrians at this side of the building and those who stray around there get lost against huge walls, entrances with automatic barriers for deliveries by truck and a generally alienating fortress architecture. This time I realised that the mall occupied the very centre of the city. If the shops nearby were struggling the reason was easy to identify. Instead of regenerating the whole central area the council had decided to bet all on this behemoth of consumerism. The whole outlay of the streets is optimized for getting people in cars as quickly and as easily as possible into the West Quay car park and out again. Usually such giant malls are built outside of town but here they had dumped it right on the centre. I don't know what is more destructive for the life of a city and local commerce. And I have a suspicion at the back of my mind that some people may have made a lot of money with this, from real estate and other associated business dealings.
I also found out that it is all but impossible to find the sea in Southampton. Well, to be precise, there is no open sea, only the Solent, but access to it is also very limited. Basically the only place where you can get to the waterfront is at Mayflower park. It was cold and windy as usual. There were very few people. An Asian family was trying to have a picnic. Some other people sat in a car and there were a few homeless on a bench. But there was a kiosk selling drinks and chocolates and the public toilet worked, at least. So this was Mayflower park. I didn't stay long ... All other waterfront areas are either port installations, cordoned off by fences and guarded entrances, or yuppie developments around the old docks. No wonder that the people of Southampton have lost the connection with the sea.
On my next visit I first went to Sway to meet Helen. Romantically located in the middle of New Forest it gave me a glimpse of that myth of the English countryside. As a city dweller, Epping Forest was as far as I had got so far. There, on a visit with a friend years ago, we were almost clubbed to death by golf players angry about us city scum crossing their holy green. We had lost our way and did not want to walk back to the station on the dangerous road. The snobbish golf club members sneered at us when we asked for a better way to get home. On another occasion, when I visited Somerset with some friends who had a house there, we were almost shot at by a home owner when we tried to consume our right to roam. We had used an old map that showed a nice footpath through a small river valley, but that path was blocked by a huge villa surrounded by a meticulously kept lawn. When we tried to find a way round the obstacle a man with a shotgun appeared on a mini tractor. That was when I gave up on the English countryside but I have heard rumours that it is beautiful. In New Forest I found some confirmation of those rumours but I also learned about the downside. The area has been colonized almost completely by wealthy people from London. Real estate prizes are now so high that local people cannot afford to live there anymore. The farmers who work on land in New Forest actually live in Southampton.
Helen drove us to Poole that day where we met Olivia who showed us around Lighthouse. As a concert venue Lighthouse serves the whole South-West. Bournemouth philharmonic orchestra plays there, as well as theatre companies and rock and pop groups. After our guided tour we went for a walk. On the main shopping street at least a few odd local shops survived offering things such as toys and swimwear. Later, when we had a drink at the waterfront, Olivia answered my many questions as well as she could. But I could not suppress the feeling that nothing much was going on in Poole. There seemed to be hardly any local art scene, except for pottery, and not much of a subculture at all. Young people who want to go out go to Bournemouth. In Poole the sidewalks are rolled up after 7 pm. People who live here and are under 70 need to be into outdoor activities such as walking, swimming and sailing, otherwise there is nothing much to do.
After spending the night in New Forest we drove to Portsmouth the next day. Since we had some time before we were due to meet Aspex gallery, we tried to find the waterfront which proved again difficult. Next to the naval dockyard a huge shopping complex was under development. Streets were cut off or lead into dead ends. We gave up and went to Aspex gallery where we had a long chat with Joanna, Emma and Susie. The picture that emerged was that the development of the city was shaped by the presence of the Royal Navy. Because the port here is military it is self-contained, only people who work there go in and out. The very busy port did not stimulate the growth of industry outside of it. The naval dockyards have been privatized but are still high-security zones. Last not least, Britain has nuclear submarines and some of them are stationed in Portsmouth. Aspex, as a public institution, has to participate in safety exercises. If anything went wrong with the nukes the gallery would be one of the places where people should meet and get tablets which should help against radiation.
When my questions turned away from macro-economic facts towards social aspects of life the women were a bit reluctant to speak up. Basically, the picture that emerged for me was that there is an underlying sense of violence on the streets of Portsmouth. If you don't fit in by being not white or openly gay or anything like that there is a high chance you suffer some forms of harrassment, from verbal abuse to beatings and even murder. Not that this does not happen elsewhere but maybe it is stronger here because of the particular navy 'culture' of 'rum, sodomy and racism'. Knifes are a part of this culture, a friend told me. You don't even need to be told about this potential for aggression, you can feel it when you walk the streets from the way people look at you. The one who spoke most openly about it was a young girl who worked as an intern at Aspex that summer. She hangs out with the skaters who are the only subculture here, she said, and get harrassed all the time. I was glad to leave Portsmouth early that evening.
Having seen the three places, Portsmouth, Poole and Southampton, it was time for evaluating my initial ideas. What I had found out was that the similarities between the three places did not go very deep. They all were port cities, or had a port, but the relation between port and city was of a very different kind in each place. I decided that I needed to go deeper in order to find anything substantial. But going deeper basically means a lot more focus on each individual place. It is near impossible to do that with three places at the same time, so I decided I had to set priorities. I settled for Southampton. This should not be seen as a discrimination of the other two cities. Each have their charm, and if Portsmouth is a tough place that does not mean it is not interesting. But dealing with the navy industrial complex and its side-effects on the social life of a city is a huge challenge on its own, a challenge I was not ready to meet at this point. I decided to focus on Southampton because it is a commercial city, it has a certain vibrancy and affluency and I could even detect trace elements of a civic life. Most importantly, its port is a major hub of imports and exports and therefore most suitable for the original theme, the investigation into ports as hubs of globalisation and the link between the local and the global.
I stepped up the internet research. The net is still a great resource for all kinds of topics if you know how to cut through the layers of commercial crap that have accumulated there since ca. 1999. Up until that year relevant information was much easier to find but now you have to think much harder about which search phrases to use. When typing Southampton, I got a lot of returns about beds & breakfasts and car rentals in Southampton, Long Island. A few clicks further and I landed at a website that traces immigration to the USA. It is quite interesting to know, maybe, that a Mr. and a Miss Bloom travelled on the ship Washington in 1851 from Southampton to New York, but there is nothing known about any connections with Molly Bloom, Dublin, Ireland. I could easily let my imagination fly, do some further research into such journeys and connections and write some short stories about emigration to the New World. But that was not what I had set out to do and life writes the better stories usually anyway, as I should soon find out.
I will leave the chronological order of my narration now, as it starts to impede the flow of thoughts. I did find some very useful resources, in the end. Of particular help was the Plimsoll website. Here, librarians and organisations with archives about shipping and ports work together to present an insight into the maritime history of Bristol, Hartlepool, Liverpool, London and Southampton. It is connected with the Port Cities consortium, a group that has come together to 'open their collections on the internet'. A leading role in this effort plays Mr.Steve Grace who is head of the Special Collections of Southampton City library, so it comes as no surprise that Southampton is featuered strongly on this website. Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to meet Mr.Grace but I had the pleasure of using the Special Collections. In a relatively small room in the basement of the library in the Civic Centre you can find a wealth of useful documents, from newspaper clippings, thematically sorted, to Lloyds Registers, other shipping information, minutes and protocols of council sessions, historical maps and much more. To bring more of this online is a laudable though labour intensive process. Ideally everything would be digitized and brought online quickly, because the tooth of time is gnawing away on some of the older documents and books.
I found some more useful online resources such as the Solent Forum, a website concerned with the socio-economic development of the Solent, plus a number of websites from departments of Southampton University.
The overall impression which I got from my research on the web, in the library and through footwork is that Southampton has turned its back to the sea. The importance of the port for the development of the city cannot be overstated. Without the port Southampton would hardly exist. A good record of the history of the port from ancient times till the 1960s can be read in A Survey of Southampton And Its Region, published in 1964 by the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Southampton offered itself as a port because of the character of its natural environment, the Solent, sheltered from the high seas by the Isle of Wight and enjoying frequent high tides because of the flow of the currents which makes the water navigable even for the biggest ships. Southampton went through a prosperous period in the 16th century. Then England was growing many sheep and the emerging textile industry in Flandern needed wool. The proximity to London has always been an advantage, in a certain way, because Southampton served as an outport for the capital. In that period Southampton also enjoyed some trade with the Mediterranean, particularly with Italy. Some Italian merchants even settled here and one of them is said to have become a locally politically influential person. But, as the authors of the BA survey point out, it was a short lived boom. Already during the reign of Elizabeth I. the port went into decline and with it Southampton. It was a long decline that lasted until 1800 when the modern development of the port began. As a reason for the decline the survey holds responsible the mentality of the local merchant class. They failed to build local industries around the trade that came through the port. This is a pattern that should repeat itself to a certain degree.
Southamptons life as a modern port city truly began with the opening of the railway line London - Southampton. At first it was mainly a passenger port, hence the Bloom's journey on the Washington in 1851. Gradually the local authorities decided to develop the docks significantly. It is hard to imagine what the docks must have looked like around 1890, for instance, when there was no environmental concern what-so-ever and the cranes were driven by steam. Nowadays we consume the fruits of global commerce but we give hardly any concern to the logistical machinery behind that. At the turn of the 19th century to the 20th Southampton was a major port for import of fruit and other agricultural goods to the UK, goods such as sugar and tobacco - things that need storing, cooling, processing once they arrived. The 1910s, -20s and 30s were the age of the great transatlantic passenger ships. The fate of the Titanic is too well known for me to dig into it here, but it is worth noting that many of the not so priviliged people who worked on the ship and died were from Southampton. Many families lost their breadwinners with one big blow. At that time going to the sea or working in the docks was the natural thing to do for working class people from Southampton. Yet again, the commercial elites did little to build up a local industry. What existed as industries was directly related to the maritime sector, such as ship yards and storing and processing facilities. But those facilities, together with the port itself, are exposed to the ebb and flow of global commerce.
After WWII transatlantic passenger business lost its importance because of the beginning of long distance air travel. In the 1960s containerization began. The first container terminal was finished in 1969. Throughout the 1970s the port authorities worked hard to keep the port competitive, by winning contracts for importing fruit from South Africa and later the Canary Islands, by improving facilities for car import and export and for bulk transport such as liquids and grain. Few people who down a Bacardi in a London bar will have any idea that it probably arrived in a tanker in Southampton and was filled into bottles there. After a dip in the eighties and another one in the early 90s the port seems to be working again and flying to ever higher record numbers of tonnage. Passenger business has also recovered because of the renaissance of large cruise ships. The development of the traffic that goes through the port reflects the overall development of the economy.
The history of the port can be read as a succession of technical improvements, here another dock opened, there a container terminal built, here a railway line connected. But the same history can also be read as a succession of social struggles. Nowadays any strike is presented in the media as a nuisance. Its as if the people who strike have not read the sign of the time which says shut up and put up. As a matter of fact, the local working class has been hit hard by the succession of technical improvements. The visual display of statistics Maritime Industries in Southampton 1957 - 2002 shows that double the tonnage can be processed by a fifth of dock workers. The Association of British Ports now directly employs only about 200 people in Southampton, 500 people work in the docks alltogether and a further 12.000 jobs are directly dependent on the port. But that is insignificant compared to the past and with the shrinking of their number because of 'modernization' dock workers have also lost their negotiating powers. It was not always like that.
The year 1890 saw the great dock workers strike. The dock workers rose up because of their truly appalling labour conditions. There were no contracts, no fixed employment, they had to queue at the gates to wait to be called up by the gangmasters. They did not get any working clothes or protective gear and had to do very dangerous work with what they had or could afford At the same time workers in other industries already enjoyed some level of rights and protection. But the authorities left strikers in no doubt about their intention how to deal with the strike. The maritime riot act was read and a naval gun boat placed in the Solent. Strikes were frequent in the 1920s and the dockers also joined the general strike in 1927. The communist party gained a strong foothold in Southampton and the 1930s saw examples of workers solidarity unthinkable today. After Hitler had come to power in Germany and started an alliance with Japan dock workers refused to unload Japanese ships. They also supported the fight of the Spanish republicans against Franco. Fast boats were used to break the blockade and bring supplies to repblican held ports. When it appeared that the republicans were loosing 4000 children were evacuated from Bilbao to Southampton. Because there was not enough space to accommodate them a tent city was built on Southampton commons. Walter Mosley, the English fascist, did not get such a warm welcome. When he came to Southampton commons to hold a rally he was greated by 500 dock workers who were not afraid to take on the heavies from the East End whom Mosley had brought with him as body guards. Mosley did not hold a speech that day on the commons and narrowly escaped. (Many of the details in the paragraph above are pulled from one interview in the oral history archive.)
Containerization triggered another wave of strikes in the 1970s which peaked in 1983 - 'the worst year in living history' (local newspaper headline) in terms of labour relations. Then the port was privatized and in 1989 the National Dock Labour Scheme finally got abolished. While the port itself flourished in the 1990s the maritime industries went into further decline with shipyards closing and finally also the Pirelli cable factory shutting down. The decline in maritime industry was partly compensated by a rise in health and education, but those sectors have very different needs and employ very different people.
Taking a train westwards from Southampton station lets you understand the true dimension of the container terminals. Mile after mile there is nothing to see but ships, cranes, containers and new cars, but hardly any people. The 'box business' as container traffic is called in insider jargon, is a higly technological affair. Customers of ABP can get access to a website where they can follow the journey of their containers through the system step by step. The analogy between containers and data packets on the internet is hard to avoid. Maybe, as a friend of mine speculated, the technical structure of the internet as a connectionless transport of individual 'packets' was directly inspired by box business. The invention of the internet happened at roughly the same time when containerization began.
I would have liked to get access to the high-tech centre of Southampton port but somehow never managed to. The port is now, after 9-11, a high security zone. American security personal works side by side with British customs officials. All freight ships above a certain size have to be equipped with a special satellite system which beams information about the goods on port and the position of the ship to coastal data centres. This information goes directly to the headquarters of secret services. The biggest fear of the authorities, or at least the stated reason for these new measures, is the container as a weapon of mass destruction. Some terrorist could put a 'dirty bomb' in a container and launch it once it has reached a British port. How likely that is I am in no position to judge, but as a consequence access to the port is now much more restricted than it was before.
I was not too sad about not being able to take any pictures. I am well aware of the work of Allan Sekula who has documented the impact of containerization on dock workers and port cities (see his book Fish Stories). How could I do better than this outstanding artist who dedicated 30 years of his life to this task.
My visit at the Oral History Archive was eye-opening in many ways but one of the interviews stood out. It was marked 'for internal use only'. A very articulate man talked about the legacy of British imperialism, particularly in regard of the West Indies. We all know about the Windrush which brought immigrants from Jamaica to Southampton in 1947. The main point that he was making was that imperialism was not over, it had just changed its clothes. The inequalities created through the exploitation of slave labour on the plantations had not been remedied but carried on. Slave labour financed the industrialization of Britain in the 18th and 19th century. This, enforced by the navy and merchant navy, gave the country a headstart in global competitiveness. Now, Jamaica is exporting agricultural goods which are getting very low prices on the world market, while Britain is exporting back to Jamaica cars and electronic consumer goods. The trade gap keeps impoverishing Jamaicans and lessens their chances to get proper education and health services. The legalised crime of the global economy allows Britain to subsidise its farming industry so that grain can be exported at dumping prices which farmers in poor countries cannot meet despite their best efforts. At the same time Jamaicans here are still subject to institutional racism, be it in school or in the judicial system. The man who said such things, it turned out, was a former head of the Commission for Racial Equality. Due to his status as a public figure the interview cant be used, which I find a pitty, because I have rarely ever heard anyone spell out those things so clearly, things of which I gave here only a rough summary from the notes I had taken.
The interview highlighted for me the fact that ports like Southampton are truly those gateways where, through looking at what goes in and what goes out, a certain truth about economic relationships can be established, relationships which in turn form the basis of social relationships. Trying to find those meaningful connections became a sort of programme for me after I had digested that interview. Unfortunately since its privatization ABP does not provide detailed port traffic statistics anymore. I would be very interested in detailed traffic analysis of which types of flows are exchanged between Britain and its former colonies, flows which consist of goods, money, information and people. For instance, where do Britain's arms exports go? The defense sector is still one of the biggest industries in this country, securing well paid jobs. How do the buying countries pay for those expensive commodities, with cocoa beans and sugar? How many Indian farmers have to work for how long to finance one British fighter jet? Where are the doctors and nurses coming from who are so urgently needed by the NHS, because Britain seems incapable of educating enough doctors and nurses itself? And aren't those doctors and nurses needed even more urgently in their home countries? What makes people emigrate and come to Britain, where obviously the weather is bad and the food either disgusting or horribly expensive? Who is coming? Are it really those low skilled lazy people who only want to exploit the social system, as the Daily Mail would have it? Or isn't this social security system anyway one of the weakest in Europe? How can you survive on 50-quid-something a week? And how do immigrants really fare once they arrived? Through research in the library and on the net I got some answers to some of these questions. With the help of graphic designers Yippieyeah, Gunnar Bauer and Tina Borkowski, some of the statistics I had collected were transformed into visual displays using the Isotype method, invented by Otto Neurath and collegues in the 1920s. I want to let those displays speak for themselves, hoping to have selected the right datasets. I just want to add here, because we were unable to make a graphical display for this particular dataset, that against widespread prejudice immigrants from African countries and other developing nations tend to be more socially upwardly mobile than the resident population, and also, that more than 50 percent of immigrants (this number includes EU countries) tend to be in managerial and other 'white collar' positions. The story about the 'flood' of unskilled migrants, the great unwashed who just want to jump the dole queue and steal the butter from the bread of hard working English people is a dangerous myth. Why are the media allowed to spread such lies? And why isn't the government doing more to dispell those myths and is instead bowing to the pressure and trying to impose ever more tougher measures against immigration? At the same time I want to add that immigrants and ethnical minority groups have no monopoly on suffering and being oppressed. The forces of capitalist globalisation are also hitting the native working class and sub-proletariat hard.
Through a number of visits and the research that I had done I had come to the conclusion that, by and large, Southampton has turned its back to the sea. Except for the relatively few people who still work in the maritime industries the majority feels no connection with the world oceans which have been so important for the cities development. When I was in Southampton I always could see some cranes or some ship masts in the background, but the emphasis is on background. You know the port is there but you have no connection with it. I thought about a way of bringing the sea into the city. Historically this was done by painters who painted ships and the sea. The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich hosts a website that shows hundreds of such paintings where people tried their skills on the not so trivial task of fixating that unstable element into the timeless frame of a painting. But this is an obsolete method. Nowadays scientists are probing the sea with high-tech instruments of measurement. Real-time data are collected from floating buoys, ships and fixed moorings and relayed via radio and satellite links to research institutes. Those data are not 'images' but realistic measurements, accurate representations in numerical and mathematical form of what is going on in the sea. For evaluation the data are then again rendered into a visual representation. Through my previous work I knew that this kind of thing was being done in a number of places and I started to look for such projects that harvested ocean data in this way. The idea was that if I could get access to such data I might be able of rendering the information in a different way than the scientists do it. My goal would not be the visualisation of data for the sake of evaluation of a theory but to give people something to look at, something to contemplate about. (Elsewhere, in a catalogue essay for a Japanese exhibition I have written about this topic under the title of Landscape Painting for the Information Age.)
I got lucky fairly quickly. The Southampton Oceanography Centre is involved in a whole range of projects that gather data electronically from the sea. One project in particular stood out, the project Animate, an EU funded project with a number of institutions involved. One of the requirements to obtain the funding, it seems, was to publish the data on the net. I had found the web-page and downloaded the data. I could have just walked away with it and tinkered around to find a solution for the visualisation. But I thought it would be nice to talk to the scientists involved and see if some form of collaboration was possible, especially since they are based in Southampton. So I sent out an email and was lucky again to get an answer and a suggested meeting date fairly quickly. So, in July, I went to the Oceanography Centre to meet Dr. Richard Lampitt. I had prepared myself by reading more about the subject on the net and I had given some thought to what exactly I was going to try to do. So my thinking had evolved from the original idea. It would not be enough to just produce a poetic rendering of oceanography data, it somehow should relate also to social reality, it should have an impact on the psychology of normal people. I was far from any solution to that question when I went to see the scientist but it seemed obvious to me that it is not enough to point out that climate change is happening, it is even more important to make people think about it and maybe react in such a way that they would be motivated to act against it reaching catastrophic dimensions.
I approached the Oceanography Centre on foot, which is a bit odd, because it is located in the docks and the distances and the whole environment are not really pedestrian friendly. I was surprised about the size and shape of the building. It is a major complex with few windows towards the entrance side and some funny structures on the roof, like giant chimneys. At first all seemed to go well. I was picked up at the entrance by Dr.Lampitt and we went to the cantine to have lunch together. I told him a little bit about my project, the ports project in general, not so much the data visualisation bit. I was more interested to hear from him what exactly his department was doing and what it meant in the context of climate change research. He was quite excited because he had just returned from a trip on the research vessel Charles Darwin. On that trip they had installed some new instruments to measure the downward particle flux. In the upper, warmer regions of the oceans which get a lot of sunlight all kinds of living matter is formed, usually summarized under the term plankton. Dead plankton is sinking down to the seabed. Through socalled sediment traps the plankton is caught and preserved for analysis. This gives scientists all kinds of information about which types of plankton and how much of it exists in a specific region of the sea. This is relevant for climate change because like trees, some types of plankton are able to absorb CO2, the main greenhouse gas that causes the earth to warm up. But there is also another aspect to it. Down at the bottom of the sea, in a depth of about 5 kilometer, on the socalled Porcupine Abyssal Plane a number of sea animals exist. Their only food, in this featureless dark landscape, is the sediment coming down from the surface level. A relationship can be established between the quantity of available 'food' and the survival and reprocication chances of the deep sea animals. This is what interests Dr.Lampitt most, he said, because originally he is a sea biologist and not a climate change researcher.
After lunch Dr.Lampitt became a bit more probing about my intentions. What exactly was I going to do with the Animate data. Maybe it was the food, and maybe also the fact that I had walked so much, but I was a bit tired and braindead at that moment. I tried to answer diplomatically. In the context of my research on ports, I said, I would try to establish some connection between the Animate data from the middle of the ocean and socio-economic data from Southampton port. By doing that, in a kind of animated, audiovisual way, I would hope to make people think about the sea and about climate change. But what kind of connection would there be, he asked? He seemed genuinly concerned about linking one set of data with another one, a kind of illegitimate connection in scientific terms. The more I tried to explain the more I got myself in trouble. Then I asked if I could also see his office. We went there, and in front of the entrance, on the corridor, he explained to me a scientific poster about the Animate project. I love scientific posters. These posters, I think they are A0 size, are a way for scientists to condense a whole project, the data, the method and the theory, into one format, a printed poster that gives a clear overview. What I really wanted to know was how the data fitted into the bigger picture. Besides the sediment traps, which are a kind of special feature, the instruments on the PAP mooring measure windspeed, temperature, salinity and other factors. Each set of measurements on its own is quite meaningless. Only together, by applying the right formula that brings those measured data into relation with each other, scientists can establish how much CO2 the ocean is able to absorb. Only the CO2 that is absorbed and sucked downwards is taken out of the CO2 cycle and therefore, temporarily at least, cant contribute to the greenhouse effect anymore. CO2 sinks to lower water layers and stays there for considerable time. However, through the socalled conveyor belt it can be transported around the earth, rise again and be released into the atmosphere. The exact working of the conveyor belt is disputed. The term itself is just a metaphor, a word that hints at the existence of such a mechanism.
What makes the whole thing even more complex is that the Animate project has only three moorings. At each mooring data from a 'water column' are taken, data about one specific point in the sea from the surface down to considerable dephts (around 800 meters). To make those data meaningful regarding climate change they have to be put into context. The greenhouse effect is a global phenomenon that involves the atmosphere, the landmass, the biomass and the oceans. A measurement at one point can only say so much. Oceanographers, Dr. Lampitt explained, are putting the data through a box model, a computerized model of the earth's and the ocean's physical reality. This comprises the weather, the winds, the main currents, generally everything that science knows about what is going on physically between the seabed and the sky. By comparing the expected changes that the simulation creates with the real changes measured by the instruments scientists get can find out if their assumptions are right or wrong. Dr.Lampitt proudly pointed out that so far the data matched exactly the predictions.
At this point I may have made my second and my third mistake. For some reason I automatically assumed, and made a remark in this direction, that the global weather simulation was computed in the USA. I know that such a simulation needs supercomputing resources and stupidly I thought they only have them in the USA and Japan, maybe Germany too. But no, I was corrected, the Oceanography Centre was capable of doing that itself. Then I made a philosophic remark about the objectivity of scientific research. It occurs to me that any simulation of the global weather system and the oceans, run on any computer, no matter how well the programme is written and no matter how much knowledge and research goes into it, is still a simulation, a mathematical approximation of what might really be going on. The world is still more complex and unpredictable than the mathematical abstraction we can glean of it. Dr. Lampitt seemed quite genuinly annoyed about me questioning the validity of the model. He had already been a bit impatient, explaining the poster in high-speed tempo, so that I hardly could take notes. Now he was irritable. It is clear to me that scientists have a busy life, like I have. I was grateful for the time he had granted me and thought it was about time to leave. He guided me back to the exit, walking through long corridors, passing by some rooms where scientists were hunching in front of expensive SGI computers.
When I left the building I was still obsessed with the question that he had asked me repeatedly. What connection could there be between oceanography data and the socio-economic reality of the port? I had not come up with a good answer. Walking back to the exit of the docks and looking around it hit me like a brick: cars. There were cars everywhere. Huge car parks with cars for import and cars for export. Giant ships full of cars. Cars burn fossile fuel. The burning of fossile fuels creates CO2 which enhances the greenhouse effect. In that moment the connection was as clear to me as anything could be.
Further attempts to correspond via email with Dr. Lampitt gained little results. I had developed a real interest in the subject. A 'poetic rendering' of the Animate data, my original plan, would not be sufficient anymore to satisfy my own standards that I put to my own work. If I wanted to work in this area I would have to get a much deeper understanding of the subject. I would have to understand the data, the formula, the box model, the questions and doubts scientists had about it as well. Only then I could maybe do something different. After I got a non-response from Dr. Lampitt I also wrote to another scientist who works at the Oceanography Centre. I was told he might be more open to artistic ideas. He wrote back that it all sounds very interesting but that he would have no time for any collaborations for the foreseeable future. Being not someone who gives up easily I decided to try another approach, namely coming in through the front door and contacting the people who are responsible for external relationships and education. With the help of Helen Sloan, who put a lot of effort into this, we managed to get an appointment with the person responsible for external relationships and a man in charge of the education and outreach programme. We met them at the Oceanography Centre, again at the cantine. I would describe the atmosphere as almost hostile. I was very relaxed because I had no expectation whatsoever. It was pointed out to me that my intentions were malconceived. I had no right of using the data that the scientists obtained through very hard work in a different way. There is only one way of rendering, visualizing, presenting those data and this is already being done by the scientists. I calmly looked on as the education guy demolished not only my project and idea, but basically everything that I stand for, the idea of being involved in an artistically inspired critical practice that engages with science and technology on its own terms. This is not wanted. Thanks. Good bye.
Having engaged with Southampton, I felt it was my duty, on the terms of my residency, to also engage with Poole and Portsmouth. I decided to go to Poole in August, selfishly, in the holiday season. Even before I had been to Poole for the first time, months ago, I had stumbled across a story in the media. A woman had been murdered in Sandbanks, an exclusive part of Poole, a very small peninsula, in her own house. In the media she was described alternatively as a masseuse and as a business woman who sold lingerie. Sandbanks was described as a kind of millionaire's retreat. An areal photograph of Sandbanks was shown in one of the papers. The story stank from 100 miles distance. The dirty section of my mind assumed the woman could have been working on the luxury end of the sex trade. She must have crossed someone important or annoyed one of her clients. I decided that this was probably the most interesting story that Poole had to offer. I wanted to make this story the centre of my attention when I went to Poole.
With the help of Olivia I got myself booked into a bed&breakfast. The owner was John, who also worked at the Lighthouse, a very nice guy. I was also promised the use of a bycicle, but this did not materialize on the first day. So I set out on foot, again. I like nothing more than walking when I explore a new place. You have to feel a place through your feet. You perceive so much more. But it was a long walk to Sandbanks from the centre of Poole. Buses go there only twice a day, or so. Sandbanks was kind of like I expected it to be. You could see that there was a lot of old money, some really nice villas, with parks, old trees. There were also new houses, architect dreamhouses, modernistic, cool. And there was a third kind of building. Relatively new buildings offering flats for people who wanted to buy into the Sandbanks dream. The place is not big, you can walk around the main street that circles around the peninsuly in half an hour. I took the ferry to the other side, where there are sand dunes and people hanging out on the beach. It was a bit cold that day, so I did not stay too long. On the way back I took the bus.
Back in Poole central I went to the waterfront to have a pint outside at one of the historic pubs. There I watched a strange procession. A group of people emerged from a pub. They were all dressed as sailors, except for a few drag queens, very flamboyant classic drag queens in big dresses with big hair. They went from the pub to a boat where they were obviously going to have a gay party. The professional, glamouros drag queens were making gestures to the watching public at the entrance to the boat. A little bit behind everybody was another drag queen, a small guy in high heels and a dirty little mini frock, beard stumbles emerging from his chin, a stupid wig hanging halfway off his skull. I thought if I really wanted to find out things about Poole I should join that party but I was acting wimpish. I drank my beer, pretending not to look (too much) like everybody else.
I spent the rest of the evening with John and his son, also a very nice geezer, at their house. They offered me beer, for free, from their private fridge, and we watched television and had a conversation. Of course they knew about the story of Miss Chiu. She had been stabbed to death in a most gruesome way by a client. The guy had confessed, allegedly. While we talked the reality of it all hit home to me. If I really wanted to investigate that case I would have to talk to the police, to some local journalists. Suddenly it was not an abstract case any more, it was about a real person who had died a horrible death circa a year ago. Did I really want to go into that? No.
John told me that he was not a native son of Poole, but he had spent most of his life here. He had come with his father and mother as a child. His father was a gardener, originally from Manchester. He had spent most of his life working on Compton Acre, a famous garden in an area that formally belongs to Bournemouth but is quite close to Poole. The vegetation here is magnificent anyway but with the additional care given by gardeners truly wonderful things can be done. But then, maybe 20 years ago, an appartment building had been erected right in that garden area. And the authorities that be decided that the building had not taken away too much from the garden. So further buildings went up. Each building, on its own, did not do too much damage. But alltogether, over the years, the garden almost vanished behind the appartment blocks. I decided I would go there the following day.
The rest of the conversation is not so easy to recapitulate. It appears that John and his son are struggling. There must be a reason why you convert your family home into a b&b. The son was unemployed. His last employment was as a fork lift driver and he wanted to get into that again. He had also been to London, close to an area where I live. The resumme of the message is that people like them are struggling in Poole, just to keep the place where they live. It is all about property here, about expensive appartment blocks for wealthy old people. It is a bit like J.G.Ballards description of southern Spain in Cocaine Nights, the quiet of the near dead, with satellite dishes mounted to the roofs of their expensive gated communities.
The next day I had a bike, but it was raining cats and dogs. I went to see the garden but by the time I got there I was so wet, I had to dry up in the restaurant first. The garden can now only be viewed by paying a small fee. By the time I was feeling warm again I decided it was better to bike back rather than wait for the next rain shower to come. I explored Poole central a bit. I found out that the centre was actually dominated by a large Sainsbury's. Everything open for business here. The main industry is the Sunseekers luxury yacht building business. I learned an important lesson in Poole. In this country its all about property, about home ownership, about real estate. I had known that before but now it became cristall clear. The international relationships that I wanted to explore through investigating the traffic that goes through ports is actually less important than the domestic affair of owning flats, houses and land.
The ownership syndrom that I discovered in Poole is actually repeated all over the South West and all over Britain. It is matched by another syndrom, the disappearance of public space. Maggie Thatcher was magically successful in ripping apart social cohesion and replacing the notion of society with the notion of selfishness. This philosophical turn has not been swung around again by the New Labour government. The anti-social tendencies of the market economy are matched by the spatial lay-out of the cities. Southampton is optimized for getting through it very quickly. You come and catch a ferry to France or you come and get on a cheap flight with Flybe. You drive into the city to get to the West Quay shopping complex, you almost don't need to get off the motorway to get there, and then you drive back out again. On foot it is much harder to get around because you face those inner city highways as obstacles wherever you go. As a result Southampton appears to have no centre in the sense of a space where an urban, civic life can take place. Or maybe I have not found it, but I tried. People are either in transit, at work or at home. So the lack of public space is not so much only a spatial phenomenon - Southampton has beautiful parks right in the city centre - but a mental image, a way of thinking. If this becomes all pervasive, and I don't say it has gone that far, yet, it would mean the death of the soul of the city. The Blairite agenda of stressing the importance of the communities is no remedy against the death of the city because communities are fragmented by ethnicity and religion. To counter this trend of the disappearance of public space I have proposed the Oral History Trail, a public art installation which would bring the wonderful Oral History Archive into public space and create awareness for the historic roots of the city. I have also been mulling over ideas to create a very public wireless network, a celebration of a virtual town centre, in collaboration with SOWN, but this work has not been developed into a project proposal due to lack of time.
In autumn I went back to Portsmouth again. I strolled around the Naval History Museum and also went to see the local history archive. This permanent exhibition about the cities history only highlights what a great job Southampton is doing with its Special Collections in comparison. It's as demented an exhibition concept as it can be. There is no information value at all in a romantic, nostalgic look at the past combined with an unreflected nationalism that glorifies militaristic adventures. With the help of Fiona I went in search of the skaters but the skate board ring was closed.
There is no summary. My conclusions are in the project ideas which I have developed, some of which may be carried out, some maybe not. I had a great time and I am grateful for having had this opportunity. I want to thank Helen Sloan in particular and everybody else I worked with.
Armin Medosch, London April 9, 2005
