​I want to reanimate the history and stories of the dramatic Portland Stadium Bowl, situated in a former quarry next to the Young Offenders' Institution (formerly the Borstal) in the village of Grove. Using focussed subwoofer speakers, I want to give visitors the sensation of being on a football pitch cheered on by the roar of 5000 ghostly supporters, where now there only stand terraces of trees. That Portland has such a grandiose amphitheatre, now rarely used, seems a metaphor for the quietened industries of the island, and the quarrymen whose hands now lie idle, mirrored by the forced inactivity of the young men residing at the Institute in Grove.
 
Using stories of the residents of the Young Offenders Institute past and present, I want to explore what dreams and realities are represented both by the space and the beautiful game. Surely every young footballing child dreams of scoring in front of a home crowd, with the attendant visceral and deafening aural wall of sound surrounding them?
 
The sublime immersion of this sonic experience would be in stark contrast to the empty and echoing space, scooped out of the island's structure, nestled and secret. The piece would offer a visual and auditory reminder of the slippage between the childhood dreams and the reality of a life inside.
 
Idea in more detail: 500 words
 
When visiting Portland as an exhibiting artist for 2016's B-Side festival, I was struck by the pervading atmosphere layers of history have lent the island, captured within its rocks, its structures, its various populations. The Portland Stadium Bowl, once known as the Quarry Stadium or the Borstal Stadium (http://www.portlandhistory.co.uk/portland-stadium-bowl.html), like many locations on Portland, evokes these narratives in a microcosm. The histories of industrial quarrying, the stories of those serving time, refrains of absence and presence are reiterated in its physical construction and location.
 
Fascinated by the grandeur and epic scale of its construction, I was drawn to the stories of those who created and played in the Stadium; the dreams it represented. From the ambitions of Burt Bridges, the 1931 Borstal officer and physical training instructor who first mooted its ambitious transformation, the Stadium offered a space for to the thwarted childhood dreams of the young offenders. For these young men, who levelled the quarry into a pitch and built the terraces, scoring goals offered a possible transcendence of physical incarceration through the realisation of sporting excellence.
 
After entering through the gates opposite the church, the visitor will walk down the ramp towards the pitch. Direct sight of the pitch could be screened off on the right and the last stretch of the journey could be through a darkened space (expanding temporary tunnels). Ideally, I would want the sonic experience to be limited until the last moment, so am considering the use of noise-cancelling headphones for the walk down to the pitch. The visitor would then be free to enter the pitch and walk to the centre, to taste the full sonic experience of playing before a noisy crowd (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUZRpkmctrc).
 
If possible I would love to arrange for one or more football matches to take place during the festival period so that the players can bathe in the sonic experience. This could be opened up to visiting teams; school teams or away teams that could be brought to play there. I plan to document the site and matches during the festival period to create an additional film work. Augmenting this work would be interviews and archival material from current and previous players and residents of the Young Offenders Institute, exploring the metaphorical importance of this space of physical freedom.
 
Arts practice: 300 words
 
Slightly embarrassed by my hankerings after the romantic sublime and simultaneously annoyed by its western, male-dominated, solitary overtones, so contrary to my own experiences of place, I became interested in generating physical, intuitive and often collaborative explorations of site, a layered and multi-faceted experience of place. The collective experience and simultaneous individual experiences offer fascinating potential cartographies of the ineffably distant and the uncomfortably close. Through performative explorations of sites, chosen for their potential representation of the anthropocentric sublime and activations of their history, you and I, as activator, audience or observer can come to a more intimate and embodied knowledge of a site.
 
In my recent project, ‘Crazywell’, I circled an old Dartmoor myth of a bottomless pool, whose depth villagers tried to gauge using church bell ropes. For the performance, groups were invited to walk together to Crazywell pool to be given the ends of ropes to pull upon, a communal effort required in four directions, to raise the sunken ropes and bell. I wanted to evoke an atmosphere of mystery and shared exertion, a communal tale telling. ‘Not to be Taken’, explored the industrial mining of arsenic along the Tamar Valley, and the exploitation of mineral resources both in digital media, its representation in video games and the hyperobjective tracery of arsenic through William Morris textiles.
 
In ‘Lacuna: Colour of Distance’ (shown at b-side 2016 as part of Weather Station by OSR projects), I used the prism of the orb to explore and situate myself within the industrially sublime landscape of Cornwall’s china clay industry, using the diminutive scale of my body in the sculpted landscape as a visual marker or scar of the Anthropocene.

Bearing the Sublime - What purpose can the sublime serve in the age of the anthropocene?

In this time of geological and meteorological upheaval, signalled by a “human-caused drive towards a sixth mass extinction of the species” (Parikka 2016), what use is a romantic aesthetic philosophy of place? In this paper, I argue that by exploring distances within Burke and Kant’s traditional notions of the sublime, we can reveal truths and complexities attendant to the anthropocene.

My artistic practice performs, explores and activates places that appear natural, beautiful and threatening, Looking more closely reveals uncanny traces of industry, agriculture, colonisation, the marks of mankind; scars of the ‘anthropocene’. My research explores the haunting layers of place: a palimpsest of histories, land use and people, remaining alert to the idea of place as a repository of slow violence.

If we examine distance as an “originary feature of landscape” (Wylie 2016), can we apply this term to degrees of immersion and bodily knowledge of sublime places? The anthropocene and sublime emerge from the beginnings of the industrial revolution when man’s distance from landscape – land sculpted for minerals or deemed barren in capitalist terms – led to a heightened awareness of the eco-aesthetics of environment. Embedded and folded into ideas of the anthropocene are material, capitalist and colonial perspectives of the use, value and materiality of place. Arguably, these perspectives can be seen as dominant discourses within traditional readings of the sublime.

In bearing the sublime, I aim to uncover more vulnerable and immersed experiences of the sublime anthropocene and I want to use this openness to illuminate a deep attentiveness to our common experience of place and wider global conditions. I draw upon current discourse on the anthropocene, that “humanity has been forced to a self-critical reflection on its place in the natural order. A neglected tool for understanding this is the sublime” (Williston 2016).

​

Melancolia - A Sebald Variation
Inigo rooms - Somerset House- Anself Kiefer's variationsof Durer's Melancolia, Guido van der Werve
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/Cultural/-/Projects/Melancholia-%E2%80%93-a-Sebald-variation.aspx

Everything at Once - Lisson Gallery and the vinyl factory
https://www.lissongallery.com/exhibitions/everything-at-once
Arthur Jafa - love is the message, the message is death
Ryoji Ikeda, Anish Kappor, Shiraez Houshiary, Rodney Graham
Wael Shawky - Al Araba Al Madfuna III

Arebyte gallery, met friend Debbie Kent who had been leading the Demolition Project Silvertown Sound walk ending at Arebyte: http://www.arebyte.com/concertina/4594061392. Richard Wentworth's piece Concertina was in place.

Then went onto the Whitechapel Gallery: ​http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/afi-luis-lazaro-matos-zheng-mahler-nguyen-phuong-linh/

John Akomfrah at the Barbican Curve Gallery - Purple
​https://www.barbican.org.uk/john-akomfrah-purple

​https://jasonwmoore.wordpress.com/2016/10/09/name-the-system-anthropocenes-the-capitalocene-alternative/
The Capitalocene is an argument about thinking ecological crisis. It is a conversation about geo-history rather than geological history – although of course the two are related. The Capitalocene challenges the Popular Anthropocene’s Two Century model of modernity – a model that has been the lodestar of Green Thought since the 1970s (Moore 2017a). The origins of modern ecological crisis – and therefore of capitalism – cannot be reduced to England, to the long 19th century, to coal, or to the steam engine. The Anthropocene’s historical myopia, moreover, seems to be immanent to its intellectual culture. In this respect, the Capitalocene challenges not just the earth system scientists – but also those on the “other” side of the Two Cultures (e.g. Pálsson et al 2013; Brondizio et al 2016; McNeill and Engelke 2016) – who refuse to name the system. The Popular Anthropocene is but the latest of a long series of environmental concepts whose function is to deny the multi-species violence and inequality of capitalism and to assert that the problems created by capital are the responsibility of all humans. The politics of the Anthropocene – an anti-politics in Ferguson’s sense (1990) – is resolutely committed to the erasure of capitalism and the capitalogenesis of planetary crisis.

“The challenge for us may then be to use descriptive tools that do not give to Capitalocene the power to explain away the entanglement of earthly, resilient matters of concern, while adding that no Capitalocene story, starting with the ‘long sixteenth century’, can go very far without being entangled with the on-going invention-production-appropriation-exploitation of… ‘cheap nature’. In other words, we should not indulge in the very Capitalocene gesture of appropriation, of giving to an abstraction the power to define as ‘cheap’ – an inexhaustible resource that may be dismembered or debunked at will and reduced to illusory beliefs – whatever escapes its grasp” (Stengers 2015, 142; also Haraway 2016; Moore 2015a, 2016a, 2016c).

A politics of nature premised on degradation rather than work renders the radical vision vulnerable to a powerful critique. This says, in effect, that pristine nature has never really existed; that we are living through another of many eras of environmental change that can be resolved through technological innovation (Lynas 2011; Shellenberger and Nordhaus 2011). Of course such arguments are rubbish. The counterargument – for the Capitalocene – understands the degradation of nature as a specific expression of capitalism’s organization of work. “Work” takes many forms in this conception; it is a multispecies and manifold geo-ecological process. This allows us to think of technology as rooted in the natures co-produced by capitalism. It allows us to see that capitalism has thrived by mobilizing the work of nature as a whole; and to mobilize human work in configurations of “paid” and “unpaid” work by capturing the work/energies of the biosphere.
​
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n05/benjamin-kunkel/the-capitalocene
​Two of the most formidable contributions so far to the literature of the Anthropocene come from authors who reject the term. Jason Moore in Capitalism in the Web of Lifeand Andreas Malm in Fossil Capital have overlapping criticisms of what Moore calls ‘the Anthropocene argument’. Its defect, as Moore sees it, is to present humanity as a ‘homogeneous acting unit’, when in fact human beings are never to be found in a generic state. They exist only in particular historical forms of society, defined by distinct regimes of social property relations that imply different dispositions towards ‘extra-human nature’. An Anthropocene that begins ten thousand years ago sheds no light on the ecological dynamic of recent centuries; modern Anthropocenes – usually conceived as more or less coeval with mercantile, industrial or postwar capitalism – either ignore the specific origins of the period or, at best, acknowledge but fail to analyse them. A concept attractive in the first place for its periodising potential thereby forfeits meaningful historical content. Moore proposes that the Anthropocene be renamed the ‘Capitalocene’, since ‘the rise of capitalism after 1450 marked a turning point in the history of humanity’s relation with the rest of nature, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture.’

Malm, a professor of ecology in Sweden, locates the headwaters of the present ecological crisis several centuries later, in the global warming set off by coal-burning industrialisation. He complains that in ‘the Anthropocene narrative’, climate change is ‘relocated from the sphere of natural causes to that of human activities’ only to be ‘renaturalised’ a moment later as the excrescence of ‘an innate human trait’. Anthropological invariables like ‘tool use, language, co-operative labour’ and so on may furnish preconditions for accelerating climate change, but do nothing to establish it as a predestined episode in the history of the species: ‘Capitalists in a small corner of the Western world invested in steam, laying the foundation of the fossil economy; at no moment did the species … exercise any sort of shared authority over its own destiny and that of the earth system.’ Nor in the time since has the species en bloc become ecologically sovereign: ‘In the early 21st century, the poorest 45 per cent of humanity generated 7 per cent of CO2 emissions, while the richest 7 per cent produced 50 per cent.’ For both Malm and Moore, capitalism must be recognised as the overriding determinant of humanity’s recent ecological career if the present era of natural history is to become a useful object of analysis, not merely of handwringing

http://artdotearth.org/pdf/LLS/John_Wylie.pdf

I will also argue that critical thinking in cultural geography and the wider humanities has, to date, tended to cast distance in a negative light. Whereas here I aim to elucidate the necessity of distance for our understanding of human relations with landscape...

But here, drawing in particular upon Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of landscape as uncanny and estranged spatiality, I will argue that the distances of not-belonging are actually the signature elements of landscape’s distinction as a mode of experience, imagination and presentation.

In particular, my arguments here open out into thinking that we must understand landscape in terms of distances, if we are to purge the concept of any - in my view problematic - association with rootedness, nativism and homeland.

But of course, as the work of many writers, not least geographers, has shown, this oftenhyperbolic vision of a world without distance, or of a world in which questions of distance and proximity have lost economic, political and cultural salience, is a simplification to the point of being a distorting misjudgement4 . The truth is that, far from flattening or shrinking, globalising technologies and cultures in fact produce for us more folded and more complicated worlds. And emphatically plural rather than singular worlds. To put that another way, we could argue that we increasingly inhabit spaces characterised by complex, wounded and vulnerable senses of distance and proximity.

...the figure who gazes upon landscape is an aloof, distanced figure, detached from the life of the land. The explorer scoping out the distances to be mapped. The landowner contemplating their property from a detached vantage-point. Here, the distances of landscape involve an ethically-problematic detachment and indifference – a 16 distance which enables command and control, which enables command and control, which facilitates an uncaring and remote perspective. The distances of landscape can, in this critical light, be understood as harbouring arrogance and indifference. In another sense, as the art critic Robin Kelsey argues, this kind of distance is a sort of indulgence, or what he terms a ‘romantic landscape fantasy’. In this reading, landscape is a technique for setting the world at a distance from us, but only so that we can deny our involvement, our belonging. Or, rather, so that we can on the one hand claim that we do not belong to the world, while on the other acting as if it belongs to us, as our property. 

But, in response and partial contrast to Kelsey, I would argue that fantasies of belonging – fantasies of a holy communion between land and life, of oneness – are potentially every bit as ethically and existentially damaging as the fantasies of not-belonging that underwrite exploitation of natural worlds.

In Corpus, Nancy is at pains to stress that touch – of all the senses the 19 one most commonly associated with the proximate and intimate – is a matter of exposure and separation. When, with my body, I touch something, or am touched by something or someone else, then, yes there is contact and immediacy, and yet, in the same gesture, I am ‘distinguished and differentiated’ from that which I touch, I am realised and made distinctive, exposed as a body, and thus, in a way, displaced and distanced ​- in the very gesture of the touch itself. Touch is a simultaneous separation-in-contact, to quote, ‘remaining a stranger to contact in contact: that’s the whole point about touching’31 . Human lived environments here are a distancing. They are always as much exposure and exscription as they are implication and involvement.

The Anthrobscene - Jussi Parikka - University of Minnesota Press

p1 Antonio Stoppani - 1870's theory that humans initiated a specific geological period.
p2 "By now the ancient earth disappears under the relics of his industry. You can already count a series of strata, where you can read the history of human generations."
p3 "whether or not they are perceived in terms of media, deep time resources of the earth are what makes technology happen"
p5 "instead of seeing technology as extensions of material, technology is aggregated and 'made of the raw material of the earth'" ref Robert Smithson
p6 "Why the Anthrobscene?
In short, the addition of the obscene is self-explanatory when one starts to consider the unsustainable, politically dubious and ethically suspicious practices that maintain technological culture and its corporate networks"
p15 "Media history conflates with Earth history; the geological material of metals and chemicals gets deterritorialized from their strata and reterritorialized in machines that define our technical media culture."
p17 "the other pole of media materiality : less high-tech, defined by obsolescence and depletion; the mined rare earth minerals essential to computers and advanced technology industries from entertainment to the military."
p25 "influential thinkers such as Rosi Braidotti have built on the anthropocene discussions to connect them to a wider geo-centric perspective, which orders us to rethink fundamental notions of subjectivity, community and political attachment. For Braidotti, the notion is to be connected to ongoing struggles involving post-colonial and feminist agendas as well as to avoid technophobia and nostalgic homeostatic fantasies of the earth."
p30 "Geological interest since the 18th and 19th centuries produced the concept that was later coined "deep time", but we need to be able to understand that the new mapping of geology and the earth's resources was the political economic function of this emerging epistemology."
p30 "temporalities such as deep time are understood in this alternative account as concretely linked to the non-human earth times of decay and renewal but also to the current anthropocene of the obscenity of the eco-crisis - in one word ANTHROBSCENE"
p36 "the anthropocene - a concept that maps the scope of a trans-disciplinary problem. The concept of the anthropocene becomes radically environmental. It does not mean purely a reference to "nature" but an environmentally understood and defined by the technological condition"
Subjectivity and agency (as a critique of the human-centred worldview) and a critique of such accounts of rationality that are unable to talk about non-human as constitutive of social relations."
Geology is deterritorialized in the concrete ways in which metal and minerals become mobile and enable technological mobility"
p37 "Benjamin Bratton's words could not be any more apt when he writes of how we carry small pieces of Africa in our pockets"
Trevor Paglen - Satellite trash - Addressing Arthur - Halo
"An analysis of dead media should also take into account this aspect of the earth, and its relation to global logistics and production."
p39 "Hardware does not die...instead, it is abandoned, forgotten, stashed away, and yet retains a toxic materiality."
p42 "The future geo(physical)politics of media circulate around China, Russia, Brazil the Congo and S. Africa as key producers of raw materials"
p43 "Geology itself transforms into a contested technologically conditioned object