Throughout Human History, We've Always Needed to Break out and Escape from Time to Time

Contemplation Throughout human history, we've always needed to incommunicable, as is the secrecy of private break out and escape from time to time to contemplate life in general, regarding life. Unfortunately now the impulse towards 'getting away' has been distorted by the lens of capitalism into Guy Debord the 'getaway' or 'break'. The torrent of advertising logic Of course those pitiful documents, (which in Urban that slushes around in our minds as we go about our Exploration tend to be JPEG files passed through photo business directs us toward believing that moments of software and compressed for web display in flashy Java quiet contemplation are just another commodity, and a portfolios), are better than nothing. And it seems that we very expensive one at that. do need to say something. When we contemplate we apparently do so with the intention of bringing That is why UE has a glimmer of simple genius about it. something back to the mundane world of survival and You don't need to spend money on renting a bijou social hierarchy that constitutes our daily routine. Even hideaway in the Alps just to get away from it all'. Heli, if it is just an increased sense of the poetic and epic you don't even need to go the countryside, Your dimensions of our existence, even if it is just a little moment of peace, outside of the everyday worid and far more inner peace, then surely a moment of from the thundering of life toward death, is only a NO contemplation is cheap at any price? ENTRY sign away. . . The urban ruin is not, however, a blank canvas, a space The modern urban ruin is, if you think about it, the ideal devoid of its own story for us to hide in and get all starry place for contemplation. The original significance of the eyed about the cosmos, What such sites do is to bring word contemplate itself is 'to take something from its history into focus as an imminent and real thing. Then environment and enclose it in a sector'. In other words, surely the type of contemplation that they invite is you have to take yourself out of your life in order to truly inevitably about time, about death and about the past? contemplate yourself and thereby your life. In this way Our lives are super-abundant in 'somethingness' and the ruin provides a kind of objectivity chamber, a place we are constantly over-stimulated. This over-stimulation outside the world from which the world can be gazed is what makes us numb and the numbness is what we upon serenely Once outside of the world you can drop call boredom. The abandoned place, with no functioning your roles and stop playing for advantage and step back purpose has the antidote we require to all of that: from your own subjectivity. It's a breath of fresh air, nothingness albeit fragrant with the erotic aroma of urban decay "Here, nothingness is the vantage point in When explorers babble on about 'the atmosphere' of a which the absent past is traceable in the location, Perhaps this is what they are trying to say. But unformed present.. .Nothingness is thus a seriously, nobody should be criticised for being unable volatile and active force, which gathers to express what contemplation is; poets have driven thought rather than destroying it." themselves mad and died trying to master that trick. Dylan Trigg Haven't you ever felt that the veil has been lifted and that you can Bee what it all means for just a few It is a quietly hopeful thought if you care to decipher it. moments'? And then haven't you been horrified when Imagine: the explorers are out there now in the someone asks you what you were thinking and you netherplaces of the city, gathering their thoughts in the can't say anything that doesn't sound. . .inadequate? nothingness, invoking the hidden history of the city and "The sectors of a city... are decipherable, but we can only hope that they bring back some nothing to the personal meaning they have for us is save us a!t from a!l this something. History They say that history is dead. They say it ended some This is the thrill, the shiver of fascination that rewards time toward the end of the last millennium Weil, why the explorer. This other life is suddenly revealed in an should we mourn for the closing of a club we were not immediate and exceedingly intimate way. It is history invited to join? Their history is dead. BIG history is unmediated, in its raw pure form. dead. It was a monolith constructed against us and without it blocking our view we can see more clearly. This encounter between the living and the dead is the source of the stories that we teil to make sense of being Our history is in the whispers that surround us and the alive, and to be that explorer at that moment is to be tales passed on from those who came before. It is a given back the power to tell those stories for yourself. history of people like us who did what they did, just like We don't want to be passive consumers of History with we do, as a response to the strange world they found a capital H, neither spoon fed to us by the Discovery themselves in. They knew that in some ways they were Channel or intellectualised beyond our reach in the vulnerable and weak and in others strong, and that is lecture hails. the power of real history; it is true and strange and everyday and it is relevant and it gives us power and These are modern ruins and that is the key to dignity. It does not support the rights of tyrants. It understanding their historical fascination. They are not whispers that the emperor wears no clothes. dead fragments of a previous way of life; they are glimpses of our current way of life as if it were already Urban Explorers have stumbled across this history, this gone. History in this sense is extraordinarily vital. It not folk history (the history of folk - not the history of power) only allows us to feel an intimate human connection and in many ways it is the treasure that these urban with the people immediately before us but also begs us pirates seemed to have been seeking all along. It may to think about where we are going next. be an irrational impulse to leap over the metaphorical wall into the ruined gardens of the It is no wonder, then, that so many Urban Explorers haunted house but once there the treasure found is very have adopted the practice of researching sites both real in an unexpected way. before and after visiting them. The research gives the imagination greater scope to visualise the ghosts of the The artefacts scattered in the ruined factory give ruins. In so doing the explorer can invoke the spirit of glimpses of the life of the place, and the life of the place the location, in many ways like a shaman. The devil is in means the people who used it and how they did so. the details. An old shoe here, a rusted machine there... Risk Why are explorers, among other urban tribes, attracted profoundly aware of 'being’. When you are safe and to risk? Is it because modern life is too easy for us? comfortable your mind gets bored and wanders off. Perhaps we have lost something along the yellow brick When you are at risk you are present in a total way. So road of progress, something difficult to capture but risk, then, is a method of living in the ever elusive something that we still need nevertheless. moment. Consider for a minute why risk might be enjoyed and Or is it the hormones? The fight or flight response kicks sought after. We are supposedly designed by evolution up a powerful package of free drugs, courtesy of the to avoid danger and yet... hypothalamus. Hiding from a potential mugger in a huge, deserted industrial site may sound dangerous but, "Who wants a world in which the guarantee that statistically speaking, it's a relatively healthy way to get we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of high. dying of boredom?" 'Health is Fascism.’ Raoul Vanegeim Graffiti, Abandoned Factory, East London The crushing sense of wasted time, ennui and existentialist angst that characterises the average The risks involved in UE range from the negligible to the Sunday afternoon watching TV is perhaps a worse mortal. Most explorers have at least one war story to tell horror than whatever lurks out there beyond the 'No by the fireside. Abandoned buildings are not necessarily Entry' signs. The unknown and its associated risks are a deserted To be harassed by a bored security guard may way to escape this vegetable mental state well be the least of your worries. Territorial squatters might take offence at your presence. Perhaps more "People get bored easily because in our world likely would be the appearance of a desperate junky, almost everything is comfortable, most of the time willing to take advantage of your isolation to steal your you just have to press a few buttons and your wish expensive camera with the application of a little comes true." violence. Tweaky242, Urban Explorer There was the guy who narrowly missed taking a There is a theory that happiness can be measured in concrete block to his head while exploring a Spanish terms of the size of your triangle. Your triangle is traced prison. He had to hide from the gang responsible. along the lines of travel between the three main Others, too, speak of the chilling realisation that there is geographical points of your everyday life; that 's to say someone else in the building and that they are hunting your home, your job and your supermarket. The theory you. One man spoke of hiding for hours while listening suggests that the smaller the triangle, the happier the helplessly to the horror story soundtrack of creaking and person. I suspect most Explorers would choke on their slamming doors while somebody was looking for him coffee to hear that. I aspect that the UE map of with god alone knows what intention in mind. happiness would look quite different. Then there is the heavy hand of the law. There is a whole world of difference between walking SuspiciousMinds found himself on the wrong end of a down a street You know and walking on a surface you SWAT team complete with dogs, guns and knee-in-the- don't even know you can trust The difference primarily back tactics. They were looking for copper thieves. lies in the stale of mind. When you are out testing each Legal questions vary from country to country but nobody step like a cat, with your senses heightened, alive to all wants to have to talk themselves out of a charge, much the possible dangers of the moment, you are also more less a bit of 'appropriate' use of force. Although an inopportune meeting with security is at best decisions carry the full weight of consequence. That is a an embarrassment, it's nothing compared to taking a fall type of freedom that we may have forgotten about as a through a rotten floor. The risk of personal injury is quite culture When you explore a building, you make the low for a careful and intelligent explorer but it remains, of decision about whether or not that floor is safe enounh course However, this seems to be the point. As an to walk across. The decision and therefore your life for individual you are at last in a situation where your own that moment, belongs to you. Explorers vs Romance? The Explorer, like the Pirate, the Wizard or the Mad scientific objective in mind; They do it to try to capture Scientist, is a Romantic figure. Ever since the old epic 'the magic', 'the soul’ of a place. They are poems of the Vikings told of the deep longing for the unknown that they felt when they stood on the shore adamant that these buildings should be secret, gazing out to sea, the explorer has been seen as a protected from the damaging gaze of logic and its mysterious and brave adventurer. restless redevelopment and classification. Explorers are outsiders; they participate in a secret society and have their own codes of honour. They see There is a deep need in the human psyche for something precious that cannot and should not be exploration that is, perhaps, a function of our genetic defined and controlled in their experiencse and they need for expanding the gene-pool, or simply the seek to keep it safe. increased survival value of having wider access to th resources. However, for now let's allow science to deal Urban Explorers are Romantic in the 19 Century sense with all that logical pretence. of the word. They value beauty, feeling and content rather than order, function and underlying form. Like Exploration is cool. And cool is another word for 19th century Romantics, they are concerend with 'Romantic'. individual freedom and the unfettered following of personal fascinations. Urban Exploration is a Uban Explorers are, without doubt, romantics. They fundamentally poetic practice. If it were not, it would be collect data in the form of photographs but not with any simple to define its objectives.