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1996 1
nettime: Sadie Plant‐Field Experiments
Geert Lovink (geert@xs4all.nl)
Tue, 15 Oct 1996 09:07:52 +0200 (MET DST)
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From: Sadie Plant <sadie@plants.demon.co.uk> Subject: Re: nettime/zkp3 txt ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
Field Experiments by Sadie Plant
Some English friends of friends of mine spent the early 1980s taking lots of drugs and
travelling around the fairs and free festivals which then rolled on all summer long. This
year, 1996, they paid =A335 to go to a three day event called the Big Chill. It was held
in Norfolk, and promised to deliver some of the best in ambient, drum 'n' bass and
experimental dance music, with acts like Spring Heel Jack, Oscillate, Mixmaster Morris,
and the awesome Talvin Singh. They knew it wouldn't be anything like the free events of
the 1980s, but the levels of policing and social control which they found astounded them.
This is what they wrote during the weekend.
****
We didn't know about the travellers before we met them that first day. Someone had told us
there was a festival planned, but we only had the faintest awareness of what that meant.
Even when we hitched a ride in a little yellow van whose driver said: "have you seen the
rest of the convoy?" we still didn't know what he was talking about. We pulled into a pub
carpark to wait for whatever it was we were waiting for, and after about twenty minutes
the first of a very long line of buses and trucks, kids, dogs, goats, cats, tarpaulins,
and tepee poles drove by and waved and smiled at us. They were bronzed, wild, and out of
their heads. They had disrupted the traffic, won several minor battles with the police,
and were now arriving at a stretch of common land alongside a military base.
It was just after the election of the first Thatcher government. The US bases dotted
around the UK had acquired a new and sinister significance, and an older festival culture
was being joined by an exodus of city punks and squatters, crusty anarchists. We had never
seen hostility like that which greeted this caravan. The servicemen on the base were
implacable when we threw spliffs through the fence to them, but there was hatred on the
part of the police who, having made the site virtually inaccessible, had pulled down trees
and dug trenches in what seemed like an orgy of determination to enforce the law. But the
travellers were more determined still. The convoy drove for miles through muddy woodland
to reach the site. We stayed for a week, long enough to learn about all the good ‐ and bad
‐ things that happen when people try to live in the absence of any overt social control.
We spent most of the time taking too many drugs thinking: how is this possible? how come
we're getting away with it? Surely it can't last? Is it happening at all?
It was then possible to spend whole summers in those mobile self‐assembling cities called
free festivals. But, fifteen years later, sitting in a cold tent with no warmth, no smell
of woodsmoke, no music, a secretive spliff, and nothing else to do but write this down,
those days seem so inconceivable that we're really beginning to wonder whether they ever
happened at all. We're at a festival, or so we think, but we might as well be in one of
the military camps which, in those days, we'd camped outside. There are more rules and
regulations than in our own backyard. Tents must be pitched at least two meters apart.
There can be no fires, no dogs, no generators, no drugs, no brewing up, no music after
midnight. Every participant has to wear a badge, and tickets are carefully checked against
names. The site is policed by regular patrols of stewards. There's a "morning, campers" PA
system rigged around the site, council officials with walkie‐talkies and clipboards, and
no shortage of uniformed police.
Of course the rules are being broken: we've just made some tea on a calor gas stove, the
drugs are in plentiful supply, someone within earshot has enough batteries for their
ghetto blaster, and a few people have got in for free through the fence. But these are
minor misdemeanours in relation a situation whose policing, back in the early 1980s, would
have provoked a riot, or something... We're thinking: "why aren't we... we should be... "
But what should we be doing, eh? A moment. Suddenly it seems there's nothing to be done.
There's nothing to attack, in deed or word. The police are not lined up with bulldozers
and sledgehammers in quasi‐paramilitary style, but are instead wearing the smiles and
armbands of the friendly community helper armed only with a clipboard and all the time in
the world for the good citizens of little england. Worse still, as the stewards patiently
explain about fire hazards and the dangers of overcrowding, even the petty rules and
regulations begin to sound horribly plausible. We feel as though something has been
defeated. Our young friends don't even have the memories. Nothing to compare with the
field they're in.
What happened between then, the early '80s, and now is no big mystery. Numerous brutal
police attacks and several pieces of pernicious legislation (not least the infamous
Criminal Justice Act, but also including changes in welfare provision which make the old
"dole culture" increasingly difficult to sustain), have certainly taken their toll,
driving much of the energy which once fuelled the festival circuit into bedsits, onto the
canals, or out of the country: Goa, Europe, Australia... But the legal situation is
symptomatic of a far more deep‐rooted, distributed, and pernicious shift which the law
simply legitimizes, a shift into soft‐cop social control which, unlike its 1980s
predecessor, presents no front lines, no violent antagonisms, but governs with the
maddening efficiency of apparent consensus.
Which is why it may well be a nostalgic waste of time to mourn the passing of traveller
culture and free festival circuits, and certainly no point fetishizing that ‐ or any other
‐ particular scene. Perhaps things have simply moved on to the point at which it is not
even necessarily a matter of seeking out new possibilities of confrontation equivalent to
those of the 1980s: maybe such antagonism, always in danger of becoming reactive, was
itself a strategy whose time has passed. While they were rarely represented or judged in
these terms, perhaps what was always important about festivals was that they carved out a
transient space in which something could happen, if only for a while: something
unexpected, unanticipated, unplanned, unpredicted and unpredictable. The festival circuit
was a great breeding grounds for intensities and connections, events and communications
emergent from a vast remixed soup of vehicles, people, sounds, smells, chemicals...
But if its particular mixture no longer thrives, the festival recipe hardly monopolizes
the possibilities. In some ways, it too was closing them down: the old festival scene may
have threatened the territorial claims of the British establishment, but it also had
plenty of reactionary impulses and conservative drives of its own. And, driven out of the
countryside, many of the most dynamic tendencies which fuelled this scene are now feeding
into experiments which, albeit in very different contexts, produce nomadic syntheses of
their own. The explorations of rhythm, frequency, and sound which populate the margins of
house, techno, ambient, jungle, and drum 'n' bass emerge from cultures whose nomadism is
less literal than that of their predecessors, but no less intensive for that. Drum 'n'
bass thrives wherever faces, names, races, sexes and sexualities are as easily confused
and difficult to track as the white labels of the records its DJs play. These
microcultures may be less spectacular than their predecessors but, for obvious reasons,
this is no bad thing. They may not count their assemblies in thousands, but large‐scale
events and big numbers are not necessarily the best criteria by which to judge the impact
of any specific attempt to interrupt the smooth walls of social control.
It's now Sunday night, and we'll soon be going home. Ten, fifteen years ago, we would have
been returning to a city whose music stopped at midnight or maybe at two, where the sex
was predictable, and the drugs were difficult to find. Now the situation is reversed. For
better, worse, or simply for a change, next weekend's adventures in the city will be
infinitely more nomadic, full of potential, and certainly far less regulated than anything
which can now happen in an English field.
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