Mottled, warped, streaked and pockmarked silent archival footage

The fifth fragment: notes on cities and things fragmented, ruined, re-used.

James Joyce on Ulysses:

I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book

(Ulysses, 15: Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger.)

Alfred Jarry, bike rider, world destroyer:

We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.

Re-using the ruins (precursor to adaptive design):

• Roman buildings into Anglo-Saxon churches
• Ships' timbers reused as roof and floor joists in houses throughout England
• Stone from Roman roads used for a villa (and when the Roman government stopped administering Britain, the economic structure fell apart, followed by the buildings)
• Canal routes repurposed for railways and Power stations into galleries

Dissolving, decaying dice: Ricky Jay's decaying dice became a book, Dice: Deception and Destruction, with photographer Rosamund Purcell.

• More Ricky Jay, more dice: a profile of Ricky Jay. And a taxonomy of dice.
• More Rosamund Purcell: Owl's Head, 2004; Two Rooms, 2003; Swift as a Shadow: Extinct and Endangered Animals, 2001; "Purcell's prints are actually 20" by 24" Polaroid shots, taken with one of four such cameras in existence capable of the shot", 1984.

Bill Thompson's Decasia: a film "composed entirely of decaying, nitrate-based archival footage", found film stock as memento mori. Reviewed by Charles Schoellenbach (And reminiscent of: Roszak's 1992 novel Flicker? The Footage. Rosebud. Marie Muchmore.)

Risky buildings:

The majority of these buildings are made from concrete. Crumbling and stained, they lack the romance of polished marble or rough-hewn stone. Desolate car parks and redundant shopping centres seldom attract the sympathy and support of the public, despite being of potentially great architectural importance. [via Chris]

How to photoshop modern ruins and The Decay of a City (uses some material from Laura Spinney's New Scientist article)

Previous fragments:

1. Fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of words
2. The worlds are dust: Kolmanskop and Elizabeth Bay
3. All the way was ruin: after London, Chernobyl, New York, civilisation
4. The ruined control tower; a concrete labyrinth
5. Eliot: I will show you fear in a handful of dust

Comments

[Chris]

Note that some of Ricky Jay's collection are on display in the rather fine Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA.

http://www.mjt.org