Parallel Reality Tour Operator

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Project Ideas

What if we did a game....

  • about looking for someone who has gone missing or who may be living in a jungle area? where all you go to is a place where there are signs of human habitation in an overgrowth wasteland? where everyone receives a different message or fragment on where to start looking and then have their paths crisscrossing in a zone? everyone is given a fragment of a life to start with.
  • about a different city which should experienced in another city? like for example, a tour of singapore's cbd in Raffles Place and Marina Bay, comparing architectural similarities and dissimilarities in London's canary wharf? (boring)
  • about an agency advertising for recruits... for making people roam and finding and reporting back colours in an area for a fictitious "London Colour Bureau"... or some other interesting property such as word fragments... finding the alphabet sequence "XY" next to each other like in a dixy chicken sign
  • etc...

some angles

  • "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad-hoc plot device" —David Langford, "A Gadget Too Far", as a corollary to Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law


  • inspiration from b-tours in berlin
    • audio tours which are beautifully done with augmented sound, everyone listens to the same track and sometimes there is a voice which tells everyone to do something. like stop in the middle of a busy street with sudden silence. the effect is chilling. when a group of people stop moving through a street suddenly and close their eyes...
    • teepee land and warschauer strasse - community gardens and squatter land next to berghain - interventions with a spade left in a plastic bag at the end of a concrete column - what plant would you fertilize and why? and walking around in a place where lots of drunk people and homeless people are disgorged into the city.... makes me think we should have tours for weird hours of the day like dalston on a friday night. "what are you doing?" "i'm on a guided tour." "at THIS hour?"

project notes


Lectures / etc

Talk by Public Works (Andreas Lang and Torange Khonsari)

  • architecture - right to roam? vs the reality of monoculture production
  • made their space flexible so that they could host events - everything in the middle had wheels
  • to share culture, peer to peer, taking institutional context out of it
  • Publishing.... Fanzine - to capture what happened
  • "... a new kind of architecture scene where the office becomes exhibition space, bar, platform for discussions and exchange outside the institutional structure"

mobile pod

  • a pod where you could open it up into different shapes
  • 50 events in the pod in 2 months
  • (reminds me of jesper's kitchen)

Polish People in Iran

  • the sight of many polish people in iran - but why were there so many poles?
  • the answer was that polish prisoners were trained in iran. people walked from poland to iran. uniforms = army. war = ticket out.
  • 1983 Film "The Lost Requiem" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry5ERzEOU5c
  • Persian Corridor - Meanwhile Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, under pressure from the British and the Polish Government-in-Exile, began releasing some surviving Polish prisoners-of-war captured in 1939, and also Polish citizens subsequently deported by the occupying Soviets to the Soviet republics, with the aim of forming a Polish army to fight on the Allied side. General Władysław Anders was released from the Lubyanka Prison, and he began assembling his troops. However, continued friction with the Soviets and their refusal to adequately supply the Polish troops with war equipment and food, as well as the Soviets' insistence on dispersing unprepared Polish units along the front, led to the eventual evacuation of Anders's troops, along with a sizable contingent of Polish civilians, to Iran. These troops formed the basis of what later became 2nd Polish Corps which went on to serve with distinction in the Italian campaign but some civilians settled permanently in Iran.
  • The Hospitality of hosts in iran was roundly praised and spoken of
  • On Hospitality - derrida: As Derrida makes explicit, there is a more existential example of this tension, in that the notion of hospitality requires one to be the 'master' of the house, country or nation (and hence controlling). His point is relatively simple here; to be hospitable, it is first necessary that one must have the power to host. Hospitality hence makes claims to property ownership and it also partakes in the desire to establish a form of self-identity. Secondly, there is the further point that in order to be hospitable, the host must also have some kind of control over the people who are being hosted. This is because if the guests take over a house through force, then the host is no longer being hospitable towards them precisely because they are no longer in control of the situation. This means, for Derrida, that any attempt to behave hospitably is also always partly betrothed to the keeping of guests under control, to the closing of boundaries, to nationalism, and even to the exclusion of particular groups or ethnicities (OH 151-5). This is Derrida's 'possible’ conception of hospitality, in which our most well-intentioned conceptions of hospitality render the "other others" as strangers and refugees (cf. OH 135, GD 68). Whether one invokes the current international preoccupation with border control, or simply the ubiquitous suburban fence and alarm system, it seems that hospitality always posits some kind of limit upon where the other can trespass, and hence has a tendency to be rather inhospitable. On the other hand, as well as demanding some kind of mastery of house, country or nation, there is a sense in which the notion of hospitality demands a welcoming of whomever, or whatever, may be in need of that hospitality. It follows from this that unconditional hospitality, or we might say 'impossible' hospitality, hence involves a relinquishing of judgement and control in regard to who will receive that hospitality. In other words, hospitality also requires non-mastery, and the abandoning of all claims to property, or ownership. If that is the case, however, the ongoing possibility of hospitality thereby becomes circumvented, as there is no longer the possibility of hosting anyone, as again, there is no ownership or control.
  • outdoor installation - in a truck... memories of siberia hauled around
  • iranian fruits as sound pieces (listen to the fruits, polish-iranian sweets if you host a stranger

public right of way

  • bourn wood - cambridgeshire walk - talk by story teller - sarah butler / walk on land ownership - trange khonsari / walk by the landowner william
  • a small building in the outdoors.... struts and cloth...... creating temporary public space of discussion!

the relational encounter

  • chompost bar
  • squirrel fun park - if you get a squirrel to jump through hoop you get the keep the hoop toy

urban resillience

  • "newham, the last great development opportunity in london"
  • al-jazeera studio - opening up the debate on what happens to these open half empty social housing estates
  • urban resilience is based on education, self learning processes
  • hackney wick... lower lea valley / beyond received wisdom.....

comfrey

Walking tours hosted by Joe Kerr and Helen Kearney

  • robin hood gardens, balfron, etc zz

NEXT STEPS

  • get copy of Knowledge of London (320 routes)
  • RENEW INTERNATIONAL DRIVING LICENCE - can i do it overseas?

TEAM FIRE'S LONDON ADVENTURES

TAKEOVER OF THE ROYAL AMATEUR EXPLORATION SOCIETY

  • to speak to ritz
  • a monthly publication (like the old days! i think of the old tea ceremonies which the twickenham bee keeping society had... of which there is a footnote and a realisation that the footnote was so much more)
  • dungeness, hastings, lizard point, aran, other sites of geological interest
  • to focus more on exploring amateur archaeology, geology, fossilling, marine biology, literature, etc

See Also