UK: Olympic Phi-Fi


Location: London 2012 Olympic Site

Name of Participants: The-Fold (M. Beatrice Fazi, Jonathan Fletcher, Caroline Heron) and Dr. Luciana Parisi

Name of Emissary: Jonathan Fletcher
The process has begun. A whole city breathes and sweats for what is next-to-be. A cityscape is being rearranged for the facilitation of a 17-day spectacle. The London Olympics is capital’s grand carnival, the greatest show on earth, a post-modern Barnum. In the UK we all have a vital stake in this, we are all literally “investing”. This is our duty-bound display of wuthering empire, an opportunity to flush out the bluster in a day-glo explosion.
During the Society of Molecules The-Fold intends to complicate the envisioned Olympic narrative through a practice-based fiction of speculative thought. In an article in Radical Philosophy Andrew Bowie took various philosophers to task for experimenting in “continental science fiction”, the practice of which he asserts as being both ‘immature’ and ‘unhinged’. Can we think of finer compliments when it comes to the creation of concepts and the practice of being? Maturity seeks to abandon the child, to be realistic and to accept the possible and reject the impossible. To be unhinged is to invite madness and abandon the rational, to refuse to accept Knowledge and to be accepting of anything that could be lurking round the corner. What could be more sci-fi than Deleuze & Guattari’s processual and differential creation of concepts? Speculation asks you to be a potential, of thought, action, experience: life! To speculate is to challenge stasis form an attentive posture – infinite planes yet to be imagined and yet to take place.
Ballard, Burroughs and Dick: the foremost thinkers of a future that clarifies the now whilst simultaneously erasing it and opening it up to possibility. For the Society of Molecules we intend to create a hyperstitional portal at the construction area of the London 2012 Olympic site. We will generate a time machine at the nexus of collapsed temporal zones, offering a travelogue around the site from the perspective of its future dismemberment. Where the foundations of an imminent celebration are being laid, we come to see the residues of what was a dream of glory. Where there are plans for imminent construction, we walk the archaeologies of machines and humanities. Amongst intuitions of presence and absence, we will encounter an emergent environment from the stand point of its material relations – erased, denied, consumed, reassembled by a posteriority we can now only imagine.
Regeneration then becomes the speed of life – its micro and macro velocities. Too fast to compete with for any discourse and narrative lamenting “what it used to be”. The only way to escape the spectacle is to go beyond its reach, to go past it and to deny its becoming. The spectacle thrives on its own anticipation, its very existence is its own becoming. We propose to catalyze participants in speculating upon positions and conditions of the site, to walk upon its very concrete and induce the “after” of the new city that we are all constructing.
The-Fold
www.the-fold.net
The-Fold is a London based group of three friends who met in 2007 during their MA in Interactive Media at Goldsmiths. Upon its completion the set of individuals decided to join forces and establish a creative project group for the purposes of research and production within the field of interactive aesthetics. Through The-Fold they expand upon their theory and practice by engaging with thought-processes through abstract and material capacities of intervention in media ecologies.

MOVEMENT PROFILE

name: caroline heron
molecule: london, the-fold
email: heron.caroline@googlemail.com

routes and activities:

Leslie road
In the kitchen cooking
At the local 24hr shop
Asda
At my brother’s house in Leytonstone
Stratford shopping centre
Collecting parcels from the sorting office on james ray road
Walking around the phi-fi site
Reading maps of the area

On the tube
My favourite line is the DLR from Stratford to Greenwich however my movements dictate what lines I use, I have grown to use only specific anchoring stations that I then walk from and so i always seem to find myself at:
Tottenham court road station
Stratford
London bridge
Leyton
Oxford circus
Mile end
Baker street
Euston
Whitechapel
the N26 night bus home when the tubes have stopped

In my car
I love to find my way around and have a stupid pride issue over using sat nav. i find i remember the routes by the road numbers rather than names and so they read like this
To the airport to pick up my friends and family; On the A12, the A406, the M1
To my old house in Manchester; On the A12, the A406, the M1, the M25, the M6, the M56, the M60, the A5103
To my aunt’s house in London; On the A12, the A2, the A20, the A202, the A23

At Work
I exist in areas in and around the office while i’m at work;
Mute Magazine office @ The Whitechapel Centre
On Skype to various parts of the town and wider world
Sending emails to Simon sitting beside me
Meeting in the yurt
Eating a curry for lunch @ Cafe Marrakesh or Tybbals
On googlemail chat to bea
On the phone
In Brick lane furniture shops on the way home

On my Mac
like many other people i am surgically attached to my laptop and find every possible occasion to use it, these are the most popular uses i find
google search engine
googlemail, google calander, google docs, google chat, google maps – especially googlemaps as i use it all the time on my phone about town
all of my bookmarks
wikipedia
facebook
youtube
the-fold.net
metamute.org
amazon.co.uk

With my friends
It’s difficult to actually get to someone’s house here as it is so big therefore i find that we establish regular meeting points around town and they become an anchoring point;
Outside Topshop at Oxford circus
Zavvi opposite Tottenham Court tube station
Trisha’s bar on Greek st
Bradley’s bar on Hanway st
Walking from Old Compton st to Poland st
Liverpool street station
Old Compton St
Shoreditch High St / Old St cross road
Baker street Weatherspoons
Gordon’s wine bar on the Embankment