If you’re in London this Wednesday 23rd September Liam Young will be speaking at the Launch for the first issue of the Bookazine Beyond: Short Stories on the Post Contemporary. The first volume is themed Scenarios and Speculations and includes contributions from Bruce Sterling, SuperStudio, Wes Jones, Aaron Betsky, Sam Jacob, Shumon Basar and many more. The event will begin with a presentation on Urban Fictions by Colin Fournier followed by a roundtable discussion with Liam Young, Sam Jacob and book editor Pedro Gadanho. (more…)

Drifting endlessly above the earth are the suburban dwellers that occupy these visions of 70’s space utopias. In the looming shadow of the cold war fears of nuclear apocalypse led us to envision new worlds above the crust of the earth drifting endlessly as orbital suburbs with all the comforts of home. (more…)

Nothing dates like images of the future. As a wide eyed child I remember sitting cross legged on the floor, with the flickering images of the Jetsons illuminating my saturady morning, thumbing through the pages of the Usborne books of the Future and the World of Tomorrow series. (more…)

Five hours from Tokyo and a half hour boat ride across the Setonaikai, one finds Naoshima. This island retreat once was a fishing village, but is now an art-themed Elysium inhabited by sculpture parks, two spectacular Ando museums, and a fishing village exquisitely retrofitted with site-specific artwork. Even the ferry terminal is a Sanaa bespoke. (more…)

"The 21 Steps" by Charles Cumming screenshot

It begins suggestively “I was the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.” This is the opening to “The 21 Steps” by Charles Cumming. It is the first of six stories written in answer to the Penguin challenge to reinvent fiction through the medium of the internet. This narrative unfolds across the birdseye London of Google Maps. Click after click you follow the story from the air, familiar places of the city, overwritten with the invisible trials of our intrepid protagonists. Here Google Maps is not just a tool of location and navigation but an excursion into daydream and fantasy. read it here

phantom bird nests

I am reminded of my recent trip to Beijing where I played architectural tourist, scouting out a preview of the Olympic icons guided by my Google Map print outs. Just like our ‘21 steps’ hero I was consistently the wrong man in the wrong place, this time however it was the misinformation of my Google guide that led me astray. I had to track down each building from somewhere within a point cloud of misguided user added Google markers. Like a roadtrip couple bickering over who gets to use the map, it seems the collective intellegence of the web is yet to reach a sightseeing consensus.  I was walking a fictional Beijing, filled with eight imaginary Bird Nests, a new reading of place built from the mistakes of hundreds of Google literate, lost tourists.

So here we are, iphone at the ready, Google Maps in hand, embarking on journeys of strangeness and novelty as our cities are imbued with the traces of invisible maps of fantasy, mistakes, and misdirection, all uploaded by the connected population of the world/web 2.0.

OSCAR NIEMEYER WANTS — the big gesture. the curve of the land. the sensuousness of the female body. the purity of form. the aesthetic experience. the freedom of space.
[The result ---- the master architect. the icon. the averagely-detailed one-liner. impressive from fifty metres, average from five]

LINA BO BARDI WANTS — subversion of society’s repressive structures. art to be sociable. recreation to be productive. the user to know their place in the world.
[The result --- ungainly structures. social condensers. buildings that become more meaningful with inhabitation]