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Picking up the signals –
spectral transmissions
from the agora of public dreaming
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Now playing: Charlemagne Palestine + Tony Conrad – An Aural Symbiotic Mystery
Categories
Urban Dreamcatchers
.
Picking up the signals –
spectral transmissions
from the agora of public dreaming
.
Now playing: Charlemagne Palestine + Tony Conrad – An Aural Symbiotic Mystery
Murdo Eason - From Hill to Sea 
10 replies on “Urban Dreamcatchers”
Lovely. I’d not thought of them like this before. They’re a gas! This is one of my favourites – http://blog.rowleygallery.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/0111.jpg
Thanks. Yes that one is a real beauty.
“The agora of public dreaming.”
Exquisite.
Thank you Dawn
Reblogged this on Susan Oliver and commented:
Titonomachia . . . in response to “Urban Dreamcatchers,” from the Fife Psychogeographical Collective.
While commuting around London’s North Circular, I’ve noticed an accelerated downward mobility in gasworks buildings. Two near Tottenham Hale are currently staggering earthward. Those Titans of our fossil fuelled anthropocene bring to mind John Keats’s Hyperion poems. I feel sure the towers’ strut-and-girder “carved features wrinkle as they fall.”
I worked for a while in Salford, where Ewan McColl wrote and set his Romantic ballad “Dirty old Town.” There’s a resonance to McColl’s bleak urban pastoral – the incongruous imagery of crofts and gasworks set in a Landscape with Chimneys (the title of the play for which the song was written) was intended to fill an awkward gap while scenery was changed.
Thanks for the reblog Susan and very interesting comment. I read recently that gasholders will become an increasingly rare sight in the landscape as their function is now largely superfluous and very few are actually used. They are being progressively dismantled and the land on which they stand is being sold off for development. Aesthetically they appear to generate mixed feelings but I was also interested in their symbolic localism as originally used to store ‘town gas’. A nice reference to Keats and to Ewan McColl. Didn’t know that ‘Dirty Old Town’ was originally written for a play and interesting to revisit the ‘bleak urban pastoral’ of the lyrics. Have read that the line “smelled the spring on the smoky wind” was indeed originally “on the Salford wind” which the local council had objected to. Thanks again.
Urban dreamcatchers – a wonderful idea. I love them and will be sorry to see so many go.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30405066
I wonder if wind farms (dream churners?) will one day initiate the same feelings although they do already make a very good brooding shot in films and docs.
Thanks Alex. Yes read that same article. Wonder if the turbines will eventually merge into the landscape like pylons often do?
Lovely – I’ve never thought of them as such but it just feels right.
What happens to the captured dreams when one of these is dismantled? (There used to be one on my route into work in Battersea, now gone, which I daresay caught quite a few of my daydreams…)
Thank you. Hopefully once dismantled the dreams are set free to circulate once again … 🙂