paul capewell's blog

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May 5, 2012

Station X – an exhibition at MK Gallery

Photo: Rachael Marshall

Milton Keynes on a Saturday afternoon can be incredibly disorientating and disconcerting. So it was with some luck that I happened to stumble into the MK Gallery – or more precisely, the neighbouring Project Space – and the new Station X exhibition.

I’m interested in the history of Bletchley Park – also known as Station X – and the blurb on the door piqued my interest.

Inside I found a collaboration between four artists, each from a different background, which aims to document the ‘visual and aural histories’ of  some of the Park’s derelict  buildings.

I went from the usual Saturday afternoon hubbub – of people coming and going from the theatre and shopping centre, and of the blustery April weather – into a small but self-contained area which instantly began stimulating my senses.

On the walls of the gallery are photographs taken inside the derelict huts by Rachael Marshall – oh, but what’s this? That one isn’t a photograph, it seems to be a physical bit of wall itself.  Maya Ramsay‘s work includes actual pieces of the walls and associated debris, carefully lifted off in one piece and pasted to the wall of the gallery.

All around me I could hear the work of sound artist Caroline Devine – cacophonous sounds of… birds, were they? And then they morphed into reverberating rhythms which I couldn’t quite place. At times they rose to a climax that I found almost disconcerting, before subsiding again to an ambient throb and thrum.

I watched a video piece at this point too, nicely displayed on an old CRT television, and where the video itself has been left to decay a little, as though watching on an old VHS tape or a badly-tuned station. But the picture was occasionally clear enough to see that we were being shown around more of the derelict buildings – a guided tour of urban exploration.

Together with Luke Williams, the four artists have combined to make a small but neatly formed whole which does very well to remove you from the busy urban bustle of Milton Keynes on a Saturday afternoon, placing you firmly inside the dimly lit and derelict buildings of Station X before they are due to be renovated.

The combination of the, at once familiar, yet other worldly, sounds and atmospheric photographs of dust, cobwebs and the odd decaying bird, along with the physical ‘casts’ of the walls themselves all give a very peculiar overall feeling.

I visited Bletchley Park recently, and was awed as much by the beauty of the main buildings as by the technological ingenuity contained within when it was needed most.

But while a visit to the Park itself reveals objects and buildings being restored and brought out on display – as they should be – the Station X exhibition at MK Gallery does a good job of capturing the areas not seen by the public, and the associated sounds and sights which have been left to decay and evolve alone.

With my interests in history and in archiving and preserving lost objects and environments – and particularly in field recordings and photography – I was very grateful to have stumbled on the exhibition.

Station X is on at MK Gallery Project Space (to the right of the theatre entrance courtyard) until 27 May. Entry is free. The Gallery is open every day except Monday.

http://www.mkgallery.org/information/

http://www.mkgallery.org/education/projectspace/station_x/

http://documentingstationx.wordpress.com/

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April 3, 2012

Christchurch In Panorama (with thanks to the National Library of New Zealand)

I’ve recently been playing with the National Library of New Zealand‘s excellent Papers Past archive, along with the Digital NZ website. The former is a resource I’ve long been a fan of – even to the point of printing off whole editions of newspapers held in the archive – while the latter is one I’ve known about for a while but never really used.

It turns out that the big search box that greets you on the Digital NZ homepage is basically a Google for digital New Zealand content. Excellent! Not only can you search just one resource at a time, but a whole host of them, refining the search with filters to drill down to find just what you want.

I can’t believe I hadn’t used it before, but it looks like Digital NZ and the NLNZ’s new beta website are both related and are currently under development. They both work great, sure – but they also look beautiful.

It’s not often that you can say that about a library’s public access catalogue!

One of the benefits of an overhauled new system is a system of APIs which allows developers to make cool stuff using the rich sources of data held by the library. One such project is Tim Sherratt’s QueryPicNZ – a simple tool which performs some pretty complex calculations.

It’ll show you on a graph the number of times a particular search term is used in the whole of the Papers Past archive. It’s great for visually analysing the occurrences of a particular event, say, or for easily identifying the unique uses of a particular phrase.

What’s more, the results plotted on the graph are all clickable, and take you directly to the article in question. Seamless.

Anyway, I stumbled on a 130-year-old article in Papers Past after playing with QueryPicNZ.

I’ve had Christchurch on my mind a lot recently. I can’t really work out why; I’ve spent some time there, but not a great deal. I don’t have family there. But the place resonates within me, and the recent upheaval the city is going through has been a source of constant fascination to me. I’m sure I’ll try and distill this peculiar feeling another time, but for now let’s get back to the matter at hand.

Image

The article in The Star newspaper described a panoramic photograph of Christchurch’s Cathedral Square, taken from the recently-constructed (and now destroyed) Christ Church Cathedral, giving a view of the city in 1881. The article compares the photograph to a particular watercolour which was “a faithful presentment of the Christchurch of 1852.”

The article goes on: “When the tower of the Cathedral had been completed, some of the citizens took advantage of the opportunity to look down, upon the City of the Plains…Beyond the Belts they could see thriving and populous suburbs, and, in every direction, indications that the growth of the community is proceeding with undiminished rigour.”

It describes how Messrs Wheeler and Co. captured “as perfect a panorama as could reasonably be desired.” The panorama affords “much surprise of an agreeable nature, inasmuch as they are not the mere ‘pictures of roofs and chimneys’ which might perhaps have been anticipated.”

Image

The article closes, praising the panorama as “a most effective and highly creditable example of the status in this Colony of one of the artistic pursuits.”

Praise indeed. But what about that photograph? It sounded great, and I really wanted to see it.

Knowing that I had NLNZ’s excellent tools at my disposal, I performed a few searches, but turned up nothing. (Actually that’s not quite true; I turned up about ten other items of interest which lost me about an hour in researching those in turn!)

Eventually, however, I found a lithograph from 1889 which made reference to the Wheeler photograph. It turned out that it was actually based on the panorama itself, and coloured in. So although I couldn’t find the original Wheeler image, here was a tracing of that image, with added colour!

And the icing on the cake, that comes with so many National Library of New Zealand searches: the image has been scanned and is available to view online instantly. So here it is:

Potts, William, 1859-1947Edmund Wheeler and Son (Firm). Willis, Archibald Dudingston (Firm) :City of Christchurch, N. Z. W. Potts, lith, E. Wheeler & Son, Photo. A. D. Willis lithographer, Wanganui. [1889]. Wakefield, Edward 1845-1924 :New Zealand illustrated. The story of New Zealand and descriptions of its cities and towns by Edward Wakefield; also (by various writers) the natural wonders of New Zealand (past and present). Wanganui. A. D. Willis, 1889.. Ref: PUBL-0019-09. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23041986

It’s a stunning image, I’m sure you’ll agree. The newspaper article wasn’t exaggerating.

But the great news doesn’t end there.

NLNZ haven’t just scanned the above image; no, just like a whole load more images you can find in their archive, they’ve scanned it at eye-searingly high resolution, which you can view and zoom into just by clicking the catalogue link, then clicking ‘See original record’, then ‘View archived copy online’. It’s a slightly fiddly process, but the results are worth it.

Here’s a snippet of the image at full resolution:

Image

If you ever find an image on the NLNZ catalogue – particularly a photograph from that era – and there’s a link to view it online, do so. The resolution of the scan will be huge, and the quality of those large-format images of the time is insane. I’ve lost hours panning around a street scene from the turn of the century, reading all the shop signs and scrutinising the faces of whoever happened to be in front of the lens the day the photograph was taken.

Related: Check out a recent NLNZ blog post about just this subject: embiggening images.

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March 21, 2012

The Tube

I love The Tube.

blast! Films has put together a really fun, interesting series looking at the life both in front of and behind the scenes of London’s Underground railway. I’m coming at it as someone who’s rather fond of the Tube, and I can see that it might not appeal to everyone. But for the most part, like any good documentary, it’s just a story about people.

Episodes have focussed on ticket inspectors, drivers, station staff, track engineers and head office  and many more. It’s slickly edited to give a broad view of the system over the course of a day, night or weekend, with lots of interwoven ‘stories.’

You can catch The Tube on BBC iPlayer. All episodes to date are still online. Episode one is here.

As a series of vignettes, I can’t help but find that it reminds me of HV Morton‘s series of essays, brought together in little volumes with titles like Nights of London, The Spell of London, or The Heart of London.

Although Morton’s London was studied and written about in the 1920s, the London Underground features regularly in his writing – as it will in most London stories from the 20th century onwards.

Morton’s writing is detailed and vivid – but not without humour. His observations are often as amusing as they are serious. One of my favourite things is that he writes about scenarios and people that you can still find in London today – just as much as he writes about ways of life that have all but vanished.

I love Morton’s books on London – it’s a joy to flip through slices of life from all over the city, all walks of life, from almost a hundred years ago. He also wrote books about travels in England and beyond.

You can read his 1936 book The Call of England online, and the chapter on Manchester is great. It opens with: “I came into Manchester over a road as hard as the heart of a rich relation,” and goes on to say: “I have been told that it always rains in Manchester. This is a lie; it had just stopped.”

Read the chapter (and the whole book) online, thanks to archive.org. (Tip: if you click the ‘i’ button, top right of the ebook reader, you can download the entire book in other formats.)

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February 22, 2012

“Nuke it from orbit”

The concept of nuking it from orbit has been following me around recently, like a dark shadow. It’s a phrase I’ve loved for however long I’ve been aware of it – I think it’s a bit of a meme (with its roots in the film Aliens) used frequently on the Web when “kill it with fire” just won’t cut it.

“Kill it with fire? Nah, nuke it from orbit.”

Such graphic, violent language always makes me smile – it tickles the same part of my monkey brain that delights in seeing people slip over on hard, wet surfaces on You’ve Been Framed!, for example.

It was used the other day by The Mancunian columnist Lloyd Henning as he dissected the irritating recent explosion in ‘university memes’. Quite rightly, Henning said the same, unfunny jokes were being repeated over and over,

…until the meme is not only beating a humourless dead horse – it’s nuking it from orbit.

Indeed. I also came across the phrase in another blog article the other day which, alas, escapes me.

On a related note, Gizmodo UK also recently featured something I think I’d heard of before – the BBC’s script, which was to be used in the 1970s if the worst happened, and the UK was nuked.

“This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service,” the recording would begin. “This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons. Communications have been severely disrupted, and the number of casualties and the extent of the damage are not yet known. We shall bring you further information as soon as possible. Meanwhile, stay tuned to this wavelength, stay calm and stay in your own homes.”

Chilling. For some cozy bedtime reading, the full BBC PDF can be found here.

And as if those sort of vague, distant threats weren’t frightening enough, I was dozily browsing the BBC News site earlier this week, when I found a story which opened with this little doozy:

“The government must take more seriously the threat of a nuclear weapon being exploded in space by a rogue state”

Jesus. Alright, then.

The chairman of the Defence Select Committee calmly stated that such an attack was “quite likely.” Strewth.

If all this talk of, like, actually nuking it from orbit is getting a bit much for you, then you might, like me, enjoy this gallery of high-res images of nuclear tests from the 1960s and 1970s, collated and displayed in Alan Taylor’s wonderful In Focus feature on The Atlantic.

Image: U.S. Department of Defense

Eerily beautiful. Sleep tight.

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February 22, 2012

Cycling to Stony Stratford

As we pedalled harder, the natural curve of the cycle path took us, mercifully, away from the noise of the busy A5. That’s when I saw a sign reading ‘bird hide’.

The paradoxical nature of the area we were in kept surprising me. On the one hand, we were riding along a perfectly paved cycle route, part of a car-free network from the centre of modern Milton Keynes out, to the more ancient countryside and villages. Never far away, either, are the busy arterial roads that dissect the area, connecting up with ever-larger roads leading away in all directions.

But on the other hand, we were always surrounded by green vegetation, muddy footpaths, rivers, canals and nature. Any time we stopped for more than a few seconds, the overwhelming sensation was the sound of birdlife.

Darting through the woodland as it grew denser, I caught sight of the previously signposted bird hide. To our delight, we had found a very sturdy wooden construction, painted black, consisting of steps leading up to a box sheltered on three sides – save for a slit in the front. Inside the box were a bench and small shelf – the perfect place to sit and have our sandwiches.

As we draped our picnic blanket over the bench and unpacked our lunch, we cast our eyes through the narrow slot towards the wetlands that our vantage point overlooked. There, in the first lake in front of us, stood proudly, was a heron, calmly watching the waters and skies around it.

As we tucked into our lunch, hungry by now, we also caught sight of a host of smaller birds coming to feed on peanuts and other treats situated just to the right of the hide. We saw blue tits, great tits, sparrows and a couple of finches, all of which took me back to watching birds in my childhood back garden.

We took a moment to appreciate how lucky we were to happen upon the hide at the time we did, it being the perfect way to get out of the rather bracing breeze, and providing a place to sit and eat our lunch, whilst admiring one of the finest views we had encountered on the ride so far.

Shortly after, we folded up our picnic blanket, attaching it once more to the rack on the back of the Pashley, and we mounted our bikes again, before heading off to see what surprises lay around the next corner.

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