2 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 3

Into the Meld

Interview with Bradley Garrett 4 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 5

‘Place-hacking’ as a form of urban of people exploring urban environments in trespass: and infiltration eliminates fear in the by creating legal exploration has burst onto the scene with similar ways, I had to get involved. Urban you briefly mention the ‘tendrils of affect constraints and cultural taboos around publications, documentaries, and a long- exploration has always been, for me, a conjured by shared fear and excitement’ access to certain types of information and, running court case. But getting to know the kind of adrenaline-fuelled archaeology, a (p.9) amongst urban explorers. Could you importantly, this applies to physical space detail of what urban explorers do, how they way of getting close to history, or indeed tell us more about the role fear plays for you as much as virtual systems, though the feel, and what their philosophies are remains infrastructure or construction, without and those you have explored with? latter tends to dominate our conversations a challenge. With a special interest in the guides or interpretation. So my fascination and concerns these days, understandably. interactions between fleshy human feeling came from those intersecting interests in BG: There is certainly a very particular kind and mutable, powerful technologies, Politics history and the politics of place, especially in of bonding that takes place when you are Most people accept urban surveillance as of Place approached Bradley L. Garrett finding hidden and secret places in the world. exploring with people. This is something that positive, assuming it makes them safer for an interview. Dr. Garrett is the author has been well-documented in war, where – and it does in some ways. However, of the much talked-about book Explore That being said, this is, for obvious reasons, people come together, often people who might when the city becomes more secure Everything: Place-Hacking the City (Verso, a very difficult group to do ethnographic not have met under any other circumstances, and controlled, when ranges of fear are 2013). Following research at Royal Holloway work with. Urban explorers are notoriously and experience (or create) highly pressurized, eliminated, a fundamental way people and Oxford, he has been appointed as suspicious of outsiders – though once adrenaline-fuelled moments that, unlike bond also becomes lost, replaced by states lecturer in the School of Geography and you get in it’s an unbelievably welcoming many representations of the events, are of internal chaos like drunkenness which the Environment at the University of community. It took me about eight months often almost completely chaotic. Very often temporarily satisfy our inherent desires to Southampton. to really to build up enough trust that people having these experiences together builds life- deal with complicated situations. So urban were willing to invite me out on weekend long bonds as you are forced to intellectually explorers reintroduce fear into the equation, PoP: Could you tell us how you first became expeditions and then on longer road trips. contend with something that is, by definition, in a way that is, for the most part, playful. interested in urban exploration, and how If you think about how anthropologists almost incomprehensible, so the collective Here, the philosophy of Henri Lefebvre, you found entering the UE community? undertake fieldwork though, often it takes imagination gets activated in interesting ways. and more importantly, Guy Debord and years to begin to assimilate enough get the Situationist International, is key to BG: I was raised just outside of Los Angeles, glimpses of the culture under study from the Richard Sennett famously argued that the understanding how explorers reintroduce on the edge of the Mojave Desert, and I used inside, so I didn’t find this to be a prohibitive modern city (the late capitalist city or neo- play as a coping mechanism for dealing with to drive into the desert looking for old mines process in any way. liberal city) is constructed to, in many ways, a society that encourages spectatorship over and structures, in them for days at contain our experiences and pacify our participation. But through that playfulness, a time. I was naturally drawn to archaeology PoP: Your book Explore Everything: bodies. He argued that spaces are built to explorers are making room for fear and chaos when I began studies and spent many years Place Hacking the City is full of stories circumscribe discovery, creating limitations that I argue are existentially fundamental travelling the world doing both terrestrial of infiltrating ruins, scaling building about what can be experienced and, even to human happiness, contradictory as that and underwater archaeology, digging, diving developments, abseiling into tunnels, and more nefarious, what can be imagined. might seem. and mapping. When I moved to so on, that would terrify many people. The modern security apparatus, in effect, and found there was a whole community In your paper Undertaking recreational 6 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 7

I might also mention that a lot of what that might unfold. This is why Margaret is pinpointed as something necessary to Mead made attempts at creating ‘objective’ avoid stems from fear of the biological (in ethnographic films, setting up cameras and a Foucauldian sense) because we all carry then leaving them to record on their own, with us this modernist sensibility that our like a weird precursor to CCTV. That was bodies should be closed off from the world. such a naïve notion, that the machine, So one of the things people always bring up, somehow lacking consciousness, would when I show them a picture of us wandering therefore not influence human behavior, around in a sewer or derelict building for as if the camera didn’t have a gaze. So the instance, is their concern about the fragility balance here, methodologically, is in being and porousness of our bodies, how we are present, acknowledging the way everyone’s making ourselves unnecessarily vulnerable, behavior is affected by the pen, the camera, that this is ‘foolish’ and that our lack of fear the Dictaphone, and indeed our very bodies, points to a fundamental dysfunction in and then deploying those tools in the right our rejection of social taboo. While this is place and right time, respectfully. Often probably true to a degree, there is also much this involves a bit of social engineering, like benefit in making ourselves vulnerable that making a joke about how you’d better ‘write should not be overlooked. that great quote down in the toilet’ during a conversation and sneaking away. People PoP: Some of your work makes use of think you were joking but you actually did field notes, and they often appear to have just that. Doing good ethnographic work is been scribed at times of imminent action always about playing a double game and or danger. How did you find fitting the being adept at code switching. The danger physical process of ethnography in amongst is in straddling lines of dishonesty, and that the fraught and swift movement of urban is where, again, we have got to be really exploration? critical in our engagements. That’s why good BG: It was honestly very difficult. The ethnographic work is so exhausting; you are problem with any recording technology, always crosschecking your positionality. whether we’re talking about writing, taking In terms of those more dangerous moments photos or making audio recordings, is that in my own research, walking in sewers, it changes the nature of the event and that, running live train lines, abseiling down as researchers, we can’t anticipate how 8 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 9

ventilation shafts and evading security, work in the world, add a multiplicity of the concurrent spread of internet access allows us to inhabit those spaces virtually ethnographic observation gets deprioritised unpredictable meanings and force to the and portable digital photo and video and then, hopefully, to incite others (and when things get raw. However, at times you images that confounds the expectations technology as a necessary condition for ourselves) to go back into the world to can get around this by keeping an audio and anticipation of the photographer (we this development? continue the journey of discovery. There’s recorder going in your pocket, for instance. might consider Jacques Rancière’s work on a hint of a politically conservative arms BG: I’m sure urban exploration has existed Sometimes this happens accidentally – I’ve the emancipated spectator). race here, a notion that every experience as long as the notion of private property got this video footage from Poland when must be ‘trumped’ by another, that has led – there will always have been somebody we’re running from a security guard and I’ve The thing about CCTV technology, then, to some recent forms of urban exploration sneaking into off-limits spaces throughout forgotten to turn the camera off. Watching that is a key difference, is in the voyeuristic that seem to be devoid of critical thrust – history. What the Internet facilitated was that nauseating footage later was really control over the consumption of the they’re simply about shocking the viewer, the connection of individuals for whom this useful when I was writing up and trying imagery. We can of course imagine a bleary- entertaining rather than inviting. A recent was a primary interest, which inevitably to relay the moment of euphoric panic in eyed security guard sitting in a cold hut, Channel 4 documentary called Don’t Look led to the creation of the development the text. eyes darting between screens, who might Down comes to mind here. be our spectator. But what urban explorers of an urban exploration community (I PoP: Indeed, the camera seems to hold an prove again and again is that most of those use that term loosely). It also led, as the However, I’d like to be more optimistic interesting place in your work; acting as recordings often actually have no human anthropologist Marc Augé wrote in Non- about this. I think what’s happening is that both an emblematic tool of surveillance audience - they are visual archives to be Places, to the inevitable co-option and the nature of technology is changing so fast and prohibition (CCTV), and as a tool with delved only if ‘needed’. So classically, as fragmentation of any coherent sense of (during my PhD, the body-mounted POV which to catalogue and communicate Foucault might argue, the point of the monolithic motivation to the practice. camera was brand new technology) that exploration. Is this representative of a wider CCTV camera is not to record images, experimentation is running rampant. So You are right to point out that this is ambivalence around technology for urban it’s to condition our bodies by making there’s an incredible sense of reaching, trying not simply a matter of scaling up and explorers? us think we are being watched, that an and, dare I say it, hacking, involved with connecting, it’s also a matter of circulation. audience exists. The technology, in both the deployment of these new technologies A photo taken and shared has far more BG: That’s a good point! I’m glad you get cases, conditions the body in different ways in ways that might actually shock the impact than a photo taken and hoarded. that the camera isn’t just a recordation tool and that is the assemblage between body, people developing them. Essentially, in The Internet allows for, and encourages, for explorers. As Harriet Hawkins and I camera and place – an assemblage that’s this formulation, we co-opt the capitalist that sharing of experiences in a way that, wrote in Antipode recently, the imagery being reworked constantly as technology, forces working on these projects and recruit in one sense, simply satiates narcissism urban explorers produce encourages and our perceptions of technology, morph. them to our cause, which in turn spurs on us to think about relationships in the but in another sense allows us to relay a their investment in the development of assemblage of body, camera and place. PoP: Talking of technology, you have politics of potentiality which, I argue, has more technology, most of which no one can The distribution of imagery, and further, argued that the period 2000-2005 was democratic and emancipatory potential. So anticipate the use of. And that’s the point, the ways in which people consume, share a key moment in the development of the record of the exploration, be it in the in the context of the Situationist project, and rework that imagery when it goes to organized urban exploration. Do you see form of a photo, a video or a forum report, 10 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 11 12 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 13

not to condemn the spoils of capitalism In my book, I describe what I call ‘the been granted to him to open a trap-door entanglement of the whole assemblage. and the relentless accumulation of stuff meld’. It’s a classic non-representational in his own chest, to look upon the long- PoP: In Explore Everything: Place Hacking like camera technologies, but to meld those formulation where the urban explorer, after hidden machinery of his up-to-this-point the City you see urban exploration as being technologies into our desires, to entangle sustained and intimate association with mysterious body. Obviously Hollingshead about ‘taking back rights to the city from the spectacle by its own means. the hidden features of the city, and with was going through something similar here, which we have been wrongfully restricted an understanding of the history of those where he can feel the existential panic through subversions that erode security and PoP: You describe exploring the connections, attempts to lace associations bleed through as he embraces the failure threaten clean narratives about what one technological underbelly of the city: between places, connect whole networks to clearly articulate his experience, when can and can’t do’ (p.8). Is this idea exclusive sewers, communication networks, and and actually reconfigure conceptions the boundaries between his body and the to urban explorers, or would you advocate underground transport. These are parts of of connections – so buildings become city suddenly dissolve and he’s left staring a more widespread change toward how the city that are invisible, though essential, networks. But the understanding doesn’t at a piece of brick that he’s sure is sweating, we occupy and engage with urban spaces? to most people. Could you tell us more about start or end there, those attempts are often in a tunnel that appears to be breathing, how it felt to be in the flow, or at least in the frustrated by the immediacy of the felt watching the contents of bowels, maybe BG: Urban exploration is, of course, a pipes, of networks which we usually only moment. It’s felt, most importantly I think, partially his, flow over his feet. temporary occupation and many people experience as end-users? in the body, before it is apprehended in You could argue that explorers are just level criticism at explorers for that. A few a way that makes much sense rationally. BG: Absolutely. Standing in the flow of adding to the distracting simulacra because friends who are squatters, for instance, Those encounters then seep into our underground rivers, the imagination they use these technologies and produce have told me that explorers are missing an awareness and colour the way we see spaces inexorably stretches to distant bubbling representations. You could argue that about opportunity to effect real social change by that are constructed, as Sennett argued, to sources and conjures up an imagination of Hollingshead’s journey too, since Dickens opening spaces for others. The spaces urban present us with pre-packaged qualities that the water’s journey. By the time it gushes past commissioned him to go and he was writing explorers do open, as well as the spaces pre-empt our inherent desires to discover our feet, wedding fishing waders to skin, it’s for a journal. However, I think that as they occupy, are largely an imaginative by offering us simulacra of discovery. I don’t a murky grey mess of floating turds, tampons explorers reveal urban cracks and gaps space and I don’t accept that this has no want to create a problematic binary here, and toilet paper, sometimes accumulating through the representations they produce, social value or that physical occupation but I do want to argue that not all spaces into little islands just solid enough to traverse they also open those fissures out through of space is inherently more political then are created equal! (with trepidation). In that darkness, the visual persistent exploration, creating imagery virtual or imaginative occupation of space. In making transparent the world around often gives to the aural. Beyond the ceaseless This stuff isn’t new – John Hollingshead, a that does more than simply document, it us that has been closed to access, and in stridency of rushing waters and car tyres writer commissioned by Charles Dickens, creates blocks of sensations, new creative making clear that those spaces can be popping manholes out of the tarmac, you traversed London’s sewer system in 1861 imaginary space opened through the accessed if the desire is strong enough, we can sometimes hear car horns and screams in and ventured into a drain under a house he (continued) collective force of the images, create a politics of possibility that does in the city above, another indication of porous once owned in London’s West End, where connecting dusty archives to stinky street fact resonate quite strongly in an age where boundaries. I guess in a Burkian sense, it all he wrote that he felt as if the power had gratings. That’s the meld, the political gets pretty sublime. we are told security is rapidly reaching a 14 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 15

point of complete ascendance, where our spaces themselves and more interested in every movement will be traced by facial exhibiting athleticism at the risk of death by recognition and motion tracking software . hanging from construction cranes hundreds of meters high, standing on top of teetering What urban exploration does in masts and jumping big gaps. There’s also disseminating these stories and imageries an escalation in ‘ruin porn’ photography is to help us perceive worlds other than the taking place now, where photographers are ones presented to us. As David Harvey has sneaking elaborate costumes and models noted, the freedom to make and remake into derelict building for ‘illicit’ photo shoots. our and ourselves is one of the most I’m sure researchers will be doing work on precious and neglected of our human rights, these emerging aspects of the practice in and I don’t think I’m overstating the case the next few years. when I say that it’s vital to the maintenance of what few rights to place we have left to As far as my research, my first book, Explore continually make transparent and subvert Everything: Place-Hacking the City has the boundaries that are constantly being done well and was recently translated into circumscribed around our bodies and Japanese! I also worked with my project imaginations. I think technology can help participants to release a collaborative us in that and we shouldn’t be so quick photobook called Subterranean London: to dismiss technologies as being anti- Cracking the Capital that visually dissects intellectual or somehow prohibitive to underground London layer by layer. It was critical deployment – everything can be published by Prestel (Random House) and it hacked. contains 120 gorgeous photos, some writing from me and others, a forward by Will Self PoP: Finally, what are the latest directions and drawings by Stephen Walter. in urban exploration, and what can we look forward to seeing from you in the future? That book actually sold out in four months and is now going to paperback in the BG: Urban exploration is at an interesting Autumn. There still seems to be a lot of point right now. There is a sort of new branch interest in urban exploration! The release reaching out that is a meld between parkour of Subterranean London also coincided (free running) and urban exploration. These with a celebration of our court victory. people seem to be less interested in the Some readers may have heard that eleven 16 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 17

of my project participants and myself were charged with ‘conspiracy to commit criminal damage’ in 2012, which carries with it a 10-year jail maximum sentence. We worked very hard to get everyone out of the dock and the charges were dropped against seven explorers late April 2014. I was given a ‘conditional discharge’ by the judge in early May 2014. My life as a nocturnal trespasser is likely over in the UK since the ‘conditional’ in the ‘conditional discharge’ means that if I am charged with anything in the next three years, I can be brought up on those conspiracy charges again. I’m not overly perturbed about the inability to do urban exploration here since that project is complete. However, the broader result of that ruling is that I’ve also been barred, in no uncertain terms, from doing research on any social practice that may cross legal lines for the next few years. That is, I would argue, an unfortunate byproduct of an already disconcerting attempt to stifle reasonable academic research that was undertaken to public benefit. However, the world is a big place and I’ve got plenty of ideas for new research projects, along with a new permanent lecturer position at the University of Southampton – I’m just going to use this time to realign my interests a bit.