Crazy Chester followed me and he cut me and he falls. He said I will fix your ass. Thank you very much for coming tonight. We are very happy to... We just have started the second project of our new residency program. And this program invites groups and collectives to basically take over this upstairs space and to transform this space in whatever way they wish. And we are very happy to welcome our second guest, Urbanomic, who just have arrived. And Urbanomic is a publisher and arts organization based in the UK
that engages in interdisciplinary thinking and production and also publishes Collapse, the Journal of Philosophical Research and Development. And yeah, we are very happy to welcome Robin McKay, the director of Urbanomic, and Paul Cheney, the artist, and they will be presenting the ideas behind the residency project tonight. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm really happy to be here. It's a great opportunity to come and do some work, some research, and it's a very strange, unusual residency program in so far as you've invited
me. I'm not an artist. I've invited Paul, who is an artist. But just to say, we've only just arrived so of course what you'll be getting is not the results of a project but a kind of a random walk around a set of ideas that we've been working with for some time and which we're hoping to use this time to develop and refine and to put into some kind of practice. And all these ideas are based around the broad concept of plot. Now, plot is a really interesting word because it automatically has a great deal of different meanings. It has a graphic meaning, of course,
to plot. It has a narrative meaning, which is the one we're most familiar with, and it has a kind of conspiratorial meaning. So it's this very rich concept which is kind of ideal for the sort of work that urbanomics do, which generally involves bringing people from different disciplines together to talk around some kind of theme or topic or concept in order to create a kind of overlapping montage of different perspectives, which may help to kind of broaden our view of these concepts. Whereas in philosophy, one tends to narrow down a concept and define it and work with it very precisely. Sometimes it's actually of a benefit to bring people from other disciplines and to take on board the very different ways of thinking that go
on in different practices. And I'm a firm believer that a certain kind of philosophical thinking goes on in almost any practice, no matter what you're doing. You come across concepts that you have to work with, that you develop within the course of the work. So the project is on one hand to develop some theoretical work that I've been doing for very slowly over many years now, mostly through conversations with others, and which the first stage of which led to a symposium at Goldsmiths last year, I think the year before last in fact, which will be published soon in a volume called When Sight Lost the Plot. And one of these people I've been in conversation with is Paul Chaney, who is joining me here
for these two weeks. And Paul is going to develop a very specific project that he has been working on for some time. And so the idea is, in a sense, these projects came out of the same soup of ideas. And the conception of what we think we're going to do together is that Paul's project will provide a kind of focus for the inquiry that I want to carry out which is to do with epistemological methods that is questions of questions of knowledge and questions of how we relate to and define objects and
sites so let's start with this concept of site specificity which is often something that's associated with artist residency projects. What does it usually mean? Usually today an artist is invited to come somewhere and to respond to a site. It's not entirely clear what that means to respond to a site. It means some very different things to different artists. But what could it mean for a philosopher in so far as a philosopher is someone who He tries to develop cognitive tools capable of relating any local phenomena to a set of universal principles that is unpacking local appearances to trace them back to their ultimate
grounds and to think beyond what's given. So the first note to make is that there's a kind of tension here between grasping the singular nature of a location or a site and this process of of analysis and trying to reach some kind of wider broader account of where this local site fits in and if common sense is guilty of a kind of localist myopia That is, our common sense view of the world is that we tend to transfer what we know to what we don't know.
That is, we tend to take the methods which we use to relate to our everyday surroundings and to apply them everywhere else as a heuristic aid. On the opposite side, philosophy cannot very often be accused of universalist incompetency, which is to say it can develop very powerful universal accounts which it's very difficult to bring back to specific sites, to specific objects. Art, when it's dealt with sites, I think very often has been in danger of responding in a kind of whimsical and idiosyncratic way.
And this is really the problem that we started with, this problem of could there be a methodology for site-specific art? Could there be a set of principles with which to approach this question of a specific site? What are really needed here are tools for navigating between scales, between different perspectives, between different modes of relating to a site and being able to integrate them. So just to step back a little, I'm going to give a very short account of site specificity. I don't claim to be an art historian. but the original artists who made site-specific work were concerned I believe with overturning
a certain conception of what the artwork was that is the artwork imagined as an autonomous object which was able to bear the artist intention into the world and to be transported to another place and to continue to channel that intention and that will. The artwork is an autonomous object as a kind of fetish which meant the same thing wherever it was. And of course what this tends to obfuscate or conceal are the environmental, spatial, political, discursive and commercial relations within which any artwork is always entangled already.
So site-specific works tended to be artworks that refused autonomy and found ways of gluing themselves visibly onto their environs or of manifesting the place where they were. So for example, Hans Hucker's condensation cue, which reacts differently depending on where it's taken. one of the most powerful works and in fact one of the only site-specific works to really cause problems is Hans Hacker's Schapolsky work where he's exhibiting this in the museum in New York and basically giving an account of the ownership of all of the real estate in the area.
So he's talking about the wear of art. And there's Michael Aschel work where the wall between the gallery space where the autonomous object is supposed to be freed of any context and the room next door, the office where the real work of the gallery goes on and where it's connected to the rest of the world. So what's key for me here I think is the acknowledgement that the artwork is made of something that you didn't put into it. That there are plots that are working through the artwork that are not of the artist's making. What seems to have happened is that the concept of site specificity has really undergone this strange slippage where now the artist is
asked to come and visit a site and to be a kind of a value adder to extract something singular from the site and to re-represent a site to make the site speak its singularity so it's a very different conception and I'm a part of what I'm interested in is the process by which you get from one conception of site specificity to the other and what these different conceptions are really expressing. So as a way of thinking through this question we seized on this opportunity back in 2010 when we were invited to do precisely one of these
kinds of projects. We were invited to show a group of curators and artists around an area in Cornwall in the southwest of the UK. If you don't know where Cornwall is. It's this extreme southwest peninsula. So we were asked to do this field trip and what we didn't want to do was to represent the kind of superficial tourist image of Cornwall, the kind of sunshine and sea because it's important to know Cornwall used to be a highly industrialized area. Tin and copper mining were very intense there during the 18th and 19th centuries.
And it's only really since the 1920s, I guess, that it's really more and more become a place where, a place that recognizes its assets as being aesthetic assets. So it's really selling its surface appearance. And the interesting thing, one of the key things that we noted, right, at the beginning was one of the emblems that was used to sell Cornwall on kind of tourist trinkets and tourist board advertising was the empty Cornish mine engine house. These are all around Cornwall, they're a kind of regular feature in the landscape and they're all of course derelict relics of this industrial past but they've become just a kind of stamp
a kind of symbol which doesn't really have any meaning so we began thinking about this this history and how it's manifest still in the landscape and Paul and I began to plan this trip on the basis of well how could we talk about this specific place and locate it within a wider history and because I'm a philosopher I thought we should at least take this to megalomaniac extremes and so then the conception became well let's try to locate this site with respect to the history of the entire solar system because that's really the
way to do site specificity. To go under the surface and to see what's at work and what forces have molded this landscape and also to understand how geological history is compacted and enfolded in human culture and to map the connections between these different layers and to map the way in which the contingencies of this landscape, the fact that certain minerals just happen to erupt through the surface there has really directed the destiny of this region. Now superimposed on this was this model borrowed from psychoanalysis, the model of trauma, which I became very interested in at the time. I think mostly through the Iranian philosopher
Reza Negaristani's work in his astonishing book Cyclonopedia. So Freud and Breuer, at the beginning of Freud's writings, when he first begins to try to develop a model of what is going on in hysteria, you immediately get this model where you have a core of trauma and certain surface symptoms. and as soon as he introduces this he uses a geological metaphor and it's really interesting that he immediately starts talking about geology and then he says but of course this is just a metaphor there's nothing substantial to it but it's a really interesting metaphor because you have these surface symptoms
which have to somehow be related back to this historical process which has kind of encrusted these layers upon the original trauma. So of course for the earth, the trauma is the burning core. That's the relic of when the earth was part of the sun. That's its repressed memory. So in this sense, the whole surface of the earth can be understood as a series of symptoms. and human culture equally can be understood as a series of symptoms which all flow from this originary trauma or in other words you can see the surface of the earth as a crime scene
and you can trace it back to the original perpetrators which I now call again after Resanegar Astani, the core of the Earth, the insider, the sun, the kingpin and importantly, very importantly for Cornwall, the go-between which is water. Now there's something very suspicious about the planet Earth. The conditions are in place for water to exist in all of its three states and it's a very strange thing that that's happened and that kind of happenstance is behind the whole evolution of the biosphere. And water has played a very interesting role in the history of Cornwall because it's the magmatic movement
of the eruption of the original trauma from the core of the earth which mixed with water produces the minerals in the first place. It's the water which acts as a surface upon which the tin and the copper can be carried and commerce can be carried out. It's water that seeps into the mines, which then has to be pumped out, which led to the development of the steam engine, the steam technology, and that's the reason why the engine houses are there, to pump the water out of the mines. So in brief, we talked about the entire history of this region as a conspiracy plotted by the core of the earth
in league with the sun. with water as a kind of go-between or lackey. So the superficial aspects of Cornwall, in fact, this wonderful tourist image of water and sun has this kind of dark underbelly, this backstory, which you can trace back further and further and further. So interestingly, the surface symptoms are related in a very non-trivial way to the real fundamental physical causes. So this is a kind of CSI Earth. And it's interesting that as you trace it back, it's not simply a matter of kind of peeling off layers and going deeper and deeper into the Earth.
It's actually a matter of discovering different distributions. So, I mean, as soon as you get to the core of the Earth, you can't go any further in, but that's not the end of the trauma because you have to then account for the fact that the protoplanetary mass of the Earth was spun off the sun millions of years ago and you have to then start looking into the physical properties of the universe pre-terrestrial existence. So it's this matter of this kind of different distributions and you can always go further back and understand the story in a different way. So at each point you have this kind of shift of perspective. It's kind of a matter of these steps between these different ways of cognitively mapping
the phenomena you're faced with. So, in short, we took this tour and we took people to all these different locations where various mining activities had taken place. we took a philosopher and a geologist and an ecologist and myself and Paul as the tour guides on this little bus driving around Cornwall and it was all very interesting but we also wanted to give something to people like some kind of memento so we started to think about how we could diagram this whole thing so we have the map of this area here and then we started to think about the concept of unfolding because in a way it's to do with unfolding the surface to reveal what's underneath.
And through an incredible feat of origami, and through, you can see here, this is really like the beginning of Paul's experimentation with this kind of diagram, which we have a rather more ambitious version here. so all of these stripes show the different kind of material flows which are feeding this landscape shaping it so we have nitrogen which was brought from Peru in the form of bat shit we have what was that for Paul for making gunpowder to blow out the mines yeah the wood we think there's timber which came in from Norway
and I believe it very probably came from Bergen and then you have these different types of water the water which is an irritant to miners and the water which produces the minerals so all of these flows are kind of underneath the landscape so this is just showing how the map works we have some copies here so how is this a question of plot plot being a way in which we diagram these relations between
different distributions and somehow try to follow a thread from a local situation from what is immediately given back to the forces that are really behind it you know who's really behind this what's really driving this scenario these forces whose influence is encoded in the local situation so if these two poles that I talked about the the local situation and its resolution into some kind of global universal logic constitute the poles of tension of the story then as we thought about it this point I think the plot is this kind of thread which runs between them and the question is how you navigate that thread how you navigate that passage from one to the other
without it simply becoming a matter of a whimsical association so I guess by now it should be obvious why there's a relation here to detective fiction so I'll talk a little bit about that. There's actually a long-running connection between philosophy and detective fiction because I guess philosophy is the practice that is not only concerned with discovering the truth but also with a critical reflection on methods of discovery or methods of construction of truth. Wittgenstein was a great fan of the American detective magazines and as As you can see here, I think he wrote a letter to mind,
the great Oxford philosophy journal saying, why would you bother reading mind when you can read detective stories and you'll get far more out of them. More recently, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze introduces his book, Difference in Repetition, saying, a book of philosophy should in fact be a type of detective novel with concepts coming resolve local situations and the concepts themselves change along with the problems. So in the quite, I mean there's quite an extensive literature on detective stories and their evolution and it's often remarked that the detective story is a peculiarly modern form and that it coincides with the emergence of what we could very
schematically call a scientific rationalist paradigm and in particular a kind of empiricist paradigm. That is to say that at the core of a detective story there's a local site, an event or a series of events which stands out from a ground. So it's a kind of a figure-ground relation. Something stands out against the ground of consistent causational attribution. So if we believe we can attribute the cause to everything and that everything in the end adds up the crime scene is precisely something that doesn't quite add up which is to say that it's only in a world where that paradigm reigns that one can have a detective story if you live in a world and in a
culture where you accept that events can happen for no reason that divine visitation can cause these strange events happen then there couldn't possibly be the tension that is absolutely inherent to the form itself and each detective you could say has each detective represents a particular mode of inquiry a particular epistemology a particular theory about what knowledge is, how knowledge is attained, how one resolves this strange event back into this ground where everything once again makes sense.
So of course you have Sherlock Holmes' deductive method, which in fact is more like what the philosopher Perse calls the abductive method, that is, it involves hypothetical reasoning. More recently, in one of the most popular forms, the forensic drama, you obviously have a model of knowledge and a model of truth there, which is very different. So it's a matter of this kind of resolution of this strange anomaly back into the ground of correlated causality. but at the same time I think there's a more complex dynamic there which relates to this
diagramming of trauma and of plots because what is the predicament of the detective the predicament of the tech detective is precisely that he needs to discover a non-trivial passage from the local that is the crime scene to the global that is the background to the crime we can't and we can't map the wider situation in terms of the local situation that is we can't take our bearings from the crime scene and immediately know what's behind this situation. So we have to broaden our view and we have to take these kind of shifts of perspective and construct our own way to these new perspectives. So it is really an epistemological problem.
So if we go back to this model of this procedure of reintegrating the local situation into its background. We can develop this a bit further. So in any situation, the agent, the detective, along with its apparatus of conception, that is the detective along with his schema of knowledge, finds himself immersed in a global situation whose coordinates he doesn't have access to. This is precisely what constitutes a mystery. This is why there's any tension at all. so at first it seems like it's just a straightforward murder but there's something that doesn't quite add up there's something that's still bothering me and a methodology in this situation concerns the procedures by which the
detective determines some kind of stability between the local and the global environment and is able to make these connections to make this passage from one to the other and this moment of this passage from the local to some wider distribution is something that we're all really familiar with in a very direct, affective way in our experience of these stories. It's the moment of the plot twist. It's this moment of a strange reorientation where we suddenly realise the story isn't quite what we thought it was. It's this shift of perspective where we suddenly realise, it goes deeper, it goes deeper than that. And the most superb example of this, I think,
is the Bourne Identity, where one unravels wider and wider implications and in the end, the agent becomes implicated himself in this background that he's trying to discuss. And that's precisely to do with trauma because the story begins with this traumatic incident where Bourne is able to use the parts of his brain which enable him to be a detective and to be this incredible kind of dynamic special operative, but he's not able to remember who he is or why he's doing it. So it's precisely this moment of trauma where he has to actually dig deeper and deeper and deeper
to be able to get back to his own identity. so in the conventions of the genre though what comes before this breakthrough what comes before the plot twist well i think it's precisely this the yarn work and this is this this is the specific figure that we've kind of used as a central image for the project and it's also called murder board but the term yarn work is quite a funny joke from this movie which is a kind of spoof of the genre. So the yarn work is interesting in several different ways. Firstly, I find it interesting.
It's a specific invention of the movie and TV form. So I don't think you get it in written detective fiction because it becomes necessary at the point at which one needs to visually represent the point of blockage, the point before the plot twist happens. It happens at the point where one needs to represent thinking visually. And a second remove then, it kind of also illustrates the task of the detective but it also illustrates the task of the movie maker. the movie maker's predicament in having to somehow show the mechanisms of plot and investigation which is really just about thinking you know how do you show that on screen and the various developments in the genre
which have been kind of emerged over the lifetime of the detective and the cop show are really interesting to track so this figure of the yarn work has become something of a cliche, I guess. And it's used very knowingly in movies and TV. So let's just have a look at Jump Street. So we stayed up all night making this. It's awesome. You're really going to like it. All yarn work was done by Janko. Okay, Captain, look. The dealers are the popular kids, but they're not normal popular. They're these crunchy granola dudes that have convinced everyone that they're cool, and they're not cool. It's backwards and unnatural, and it's got to be stopped. Lead dealer, Eric Molson, alpha dog, sick chicks, killer steez, He did the AIDS run this year, he's getting into Berkeley early at Mish, and he totally gets me.
Who put this together? Are you autistic? It is artistic, sir, because the thing is, the yarn actually indicates all the different people. I'm probably going to have a list of suspicious types of people. The users are here, this kid was actually talking to a tree this morning. Cut the bullshit! And so just as a kind of illustration of the prevalence of this, Now what's interesting also about the yarn work as this kind of generic figure is that it's also this kind of moment of madness, right? Because you can always add another pin, you can always add another connection. So it not only represents this point where a breakthrough is just about to be made,
not by means of the yarn work because pinning things on a board never solved anything, but it's just a way of showing that that's the moment at which you're at. But it's also this kind of unstable point at which things can really start to go wrong. So the problem is you can always go deeper. You can always find deeper and deeper conspiracies. conspiracies and when Paul talks to you you'll see how this can lead to some strange symptoms so for instance the movie Beautiful Mind we see this kind of mania for connections this
megalomaniac associationism but also it's to do with conspiracy theory which has an interesting connection back to the detective genre I think and it's very interesting to look at the work of Mark Lombardi whose work is to do with plotting these connections of power between public figures and Lombardi's work is really interesting because on a first glance it seems it has a very directly political motive it's looking to reveal something It's looking to construct this truth in front of us to shock us, to make us realize, look, look at all these connections. But as soon as he's done one of these, it just becomes this kind of sublime informational spectacle, which actually makes it impossible.
It kind of almost induces a kind of inertia. Frederick Jameson has talked about this in terms of cognitive mapping and the fact that we have to find some kind of tool to map this complex environment. In fact, when you try to do this, it becomes kind of madness inducing. So there's always, as well as this relation of knowledge, there's always also this relation to power and to the suspicion of power and to the question of who's plotting behind the scenes and how can we plot all of these threads. So you see this most clearly in the international thriller
Where you always have these multiple moments of It goes deeper, it goes deeper, it goes deeper So in another way, the yarn work is actually the inverse of the plot And this is something that I discovered recently Which I think is really interesting to do with the history of the word plot So plot now, I'd say, is kind of a poor cousin, a poor literary cousin. It relates to the mechanics of storytelling rather than its literary merits. But what's very interesting is if you look at the origins of the term, and this is in a book by Henry Turner called The English Renaissance Stage.
It's actually a word from the theatre, and it gives you a different perspective perspective on this question of mechanics. So this is what's called a plat and it's a kind of a schematic of the entries and exits in a play across the period of a play which would be pinned between the backstage area and the stage. This is what a plot was. It's a kind of diagram that transports information or that articulates the information of the story
into the movements on the stage. And what's very interesting during this Renaissance period is with the emergence of a kind of more naturalistic mode of theatrical presentation. Playwrights found themselves in the position of having to justify the strange feats that were possible on a theatre stage. That is to say, how can we put on a play where some scenes happen in France, some scenes happen in England, and it spans a period of 30 years on this tiny stage here. And you find very explicit kind of apologies and justifications in the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries to this effect.
How did they justify it? They justified it in terms of their own milieu, namely the emerging milieu of an artisanal class who were becoming well versed in the popular practical arts of geometry. So playwrights actually belonged to a class along with surveyors, carpenters, people who used space to construct. And this is the way they saw the play. so the plot is this kind of projective diagram and you find this language Turner talks about this at length you find this language in many of the playwrights reflections
that the stage is a kind of projection just as a ground plan a plot the plot that a surveyor would make is a geometrical projection of the land that he's surveying so in a way this this kind of plot which tells which tells us how to change a complex story into a series of movements on a local space is the inverse of the yarn work which is that we're coming from the other side we've just got the stage we can see what's happening and we're trying to find out what's going on behind there. I'll just turn lastly to one of the most prevalent contemporary paradigms.
And I think this is where the project comes into connection with the fantastic show that Martin's created downstairs, which is concerned with the objects and the object as a kind of fossil object as a kind of compaction so objects there become a kind of site in their own right and in contemporary crime drama indeed I think you can consider forensics as this practice that treats a single object from the crime scene as the staging of a story the forensics detectives job obviously is to try to plot out the story from within the traces of the object to try to unfold.
So in a sense there we come back to site specificity and to this question of an object which expresses its belonging to a certain site, an object that far from being autonomous embeds within it a whole history and this kind of whole embedded series of environments within which it was formed. And so I think ultimately this question of plot is actually a question about how we can prosecute any kind of metaphysics of the object or any kind of ontology which seeks to, let's say, provide universal account of all objects whatsoever.
Because once you get to that stage, you've completely lost the specificity of an object. So the question is, how do you hold on to that specificity while also operating this passage towards the universal? So if plot or the practice of emplotment isn't simply to do with stories and narrative, but is a set of practices that project information between different spaces, depending on a theory of knowledge, which in its turn depends on the selection of certain indices from phenomena and their projection into a cognitive space. so indexes interestingly indice the French word for index is also the word
for clue in a detective story so it's to do with picking out these indexes and projecting them into a space it relates in a certain sense to questions of the local and the global and it has these spatial overtones and these involves these questions of diagramming so I think in that sense it's a very interesting question for visual art and for philosophy. And the yarn work is an interesting figure, not in so far as we think the yarn work is a really good way to represent anything. It obviously isn't. It's obviously kind of highly impoverished. But what's interesting about it is what it represents in the process of knowledge, in the process of the construction of truth. So following on from this work
that I've already talked about which we did back in 2010 this project with Paul now is as I said an attempt to kind of bring forward this theoretical elaboration of the concept of plot in tandem with Paul's pursuing his specific case study which he's going to come and talk to you about right now I think. No, go ahead. Go ahead.
If we could just go to... Okay, well thanks Robin for fleshing the whole project out and making the ground for me to talk and thanks very much to the council for inviting me via Robin and thanks for everyone for coming. It's really nice to be here. I'm looking forward to whatever happens in the next two weeks. So I'm just going to keep it quite short, hopefully, and just introduce the project, which is a complete follow-on from Hydroplotonic Kurnow, the work with the
map and the tour which we developed collaboratively in Cornwall. I was invited in 2012 to go to Ukraine to work in Donetsk for residency for six weeks. And when I arrived in the city, I kind of saw immediately that it was going to be the perfect place to kind of try and extend this methodology to the next level, the methodology which Robin's been talking about. So I spent quite a long time developing this work. Worked on it for two years in total, actually.
And then the whole thing just recently became hijacked by events in eastern Ukraine. So at the moment, it's on hold. And it's pretty amazing to be able to come here and sort of unpack the box and get it out again and have a look at pushing it in a different direction, maybe. But still kind of not knowing if it will ever get shown or ever get completed or ever get installed in a building that it was actually designed for. So obviously Donetsk has been in the news a lot recently. It's a city of, well it was a city of 1.2 million people. It's an intensely industrial city with an incredibly strong culture of work. The culture there is work and football.
That's kind of the maximum that you get. It's also, upon arriving, I could sort of see immediately, like anybody could, I guess, as an outsider, that a lot of the typical problems of the post-Soviet state haven't been resolved at all in that part of the world. It's very polluted, very violent, and incredibly corrupt, with absolutely no provision of justice or social protection for ordinary people. you can see from this photograph that the industrial centre of the city is actually, it is the city the residential areas of the city and the industrial areas are completely
interspersed with each other the city's got about 20 coal mines within what you would call the residential area it's really incredible so I began to sort of like It was a really incredible place to be able to just ask the question, or the only question I could really ask having arrived there was what are the conditions that lead to the creation of a city like this? So essentially, I began my forensic investigation, having found the body and trying to work out how... Hmm. Okay. What do I do about that, Robin?
Okay. Sorry. The first thing I discovered was that the city was actually founded really recently, 1863, by a Welshman called John Hughes who grew up in the valleys of Wales which is a coal mining and iron founding area in Great Britain. He was basically before John Hughes arrived in 1863. There was nothing where Donetsk is now. It's just an empty step, just a rolling step with maybe some people living in small villages, just self-sufficiently basically. So John Hughes trained as a miner in South Wales
and he made several sort of technical developments and improvements to mine engineering. He worked his way up to becoming an engineer himself and then founded his own business and carried on innovating within the realm of mining technology and mining engineering technology and iron founding. He was a completely self-taught guy who even up until the point when he was running what became the biggest ironworks in the whole of Europe, he couldn't actually read or write. So he's a pretty incredible guy. So he's got this really, like this force, this individual who's quite unusual. So he moved from South Wales
and started to develop a military technology company in London. And this is where the next stage of the story starts because the Tsar of Russia was like headhunting for somebody to improve military technology after the failure in Crimea in the 1850s when the Russian army was defeated by the French and the English, essentially, I think. So he was commissioned by the Tsar to improve the fortresses at Kronstadt. Is that how it's pronounced? I think it's more local to here than it is to where I come from, anyway. So he was commissioned to build iron cladding,
or develop iron cladding for that sea fortress. He refused the commission and told the Tsar that actually it would be much better if he would allow him to make a factory-making railway track, because that's what led to the defeat in the Crimean War, was the inability of the Russian military to get materials to the front line. And so they didn't have a railway system in the Russian Empire at that time at all, so they were way behind the rest of Europe. So he formed, and he left London in 1863 with like seven ships full of equipment, a lot of Welshmen on board, and formed this new company, this new town on the steppe in Ukraine. And formed this company called the New Rush Company,
which of course carries all sorts of irony right at the moment. You can see in the memorandum of the company that the main items which they were to manufacture were railway carriages, wagons, turntables, every description of rolling stock, rails and railway plant, armour plated and other iron forts, turrets, shields, embrasures, other war equipment of iron and other materials, shot, shells, weapons, munitions and materials of war of all and every kind. So the city immediately gets this kind of huge connection to this military-industrial complex, an association which it obviously can't shake even up until this day.
So yeah, they landed in Mariupol with these seven ships and trekked out across the steppe in minus 30 degrees of winter to build this first ironworks. And then the ironworks grew in size incredibly rapidly, becoming the largest ironworks in the Russian Empire. And it then later became the largest ironworks in the Soviet Union as well. So the city was called Yusovka after John Hughes, and it was destroyed several times. Firstly, with the revolution, civil war, the scorched earth policy of the retreating Russian army before the Third Reich came to occupy it, and the Third Reich then destroyed it again. So this is all because it's got this, you know, the materials there that the city was founded upon
have this attraction to have this capital and this potentiality for making the machines of war which somehow attract violence towards it, you know. Also, of course, the Holomador was in that same area, So this horrific genocide by starvation in the 30s. The city was also extremely Sovietized. It became Stalin's favorite city, actually, out of the whole of the Union. Because it was basically everybody who lived there was brought there from somewhere else. Stalin's program of deculturalization didn't actually need to happen here because the city didn't have a culture. It was the perfect model for his theory.
Also, in terms of thinking about trauma and these repeating traumas and how we were talking about earlier, and Robin was talking about it in his talk, in a strange way, the Sovietisation of the city and the sort of bringing in populations from all over the place made this deculturalised place with no identity, but it also sorted out the demographic because for the last 500 years previously, that area of Steppe had been raided every summer by the Crimean Tatars and the Turks to take all of the male population who could work. So it was kind of like stripped, harvested every summer of healthy men. So Stalin actually corrected that. So those are just some little examples
of the kind of information which I was discovering and of this really strange and singular city. So I needed a methodology for collecting all this information, ordering it and visualising it, so this is where the timeline comes in, kind of logically. So then I started to think about all of this within the context of geophilosophy, within the context of Reza Magrastani's work, which Robin mentioned earlier, Psychonopédia, where he basically describes oil as an entity that has control over the human. So in this book he kind of like proposes that the Gulf War happened because the oil demon wanted it and George Bush was kind of like possessed
by some remnants of some spiritual entity from the desert. So geology, like through capital, has this kind of agency over the human. So the timeline, this is an example of some of the things which they were building with the iron from Yuzovka. So they were basically industrializing the whole of the Russian Empire, and then after the revolution, the whole of the Soviet Union. The whole rail network of the Soviet Union was made from rails and tracks that were made in this city, which is now Donetsk. so the timeline should also describe these things enable me
to understand them and people to look at them and understand the chronology but they should also describe the geological conditions under the city and the origins of the geological formation so we start to get to this problem which Robin was talking about when do you stop if you start trying to map this out trying to cognizate this thing where do you stop so where do all the geological formations come from you need to make iron, you've got iron ore, coal and limestone basically so we need to begin to connect this whole story to the origins of those materials you have to understand where those elements come from the formation of the planet, the solar system, the stars where the elements are formed by stellar nucleosynthesis and then all the way back to the Big Bang so I ended up designing this diagram that was 136 metres long
and there's bits of it here. Some sections are at full scale, this one here. This at the bottom is at 1 to 20 which describes how the whole diagram would snake its way through this small building which was given at the site in Donetsk. So the real innovation of this diagrammatic work is the timeline's attempt to describe how all things come from the same origin all on the same continuum. So each one of these stripes This represents a different element. This one is hydrogen. Then we have calcium, nitrogen, oxygen. Oh no, sorry, that's carbon, and that's calcium here, and then iron at the bottom.
So basically, yeah, the Big Bang gives birth to the universe. The universe, so we have to start with the Big Bang, which is all the way down over there. I can stand up, can't I? Here on this 1 to 20 scale diagram. The Big Bang was in a little cupboard in this building and I found a hole in the wall in the right place at the right height that the universe could expand from, which just existed there before I arrived. That's what the universe comes from. The universe gives birth to the solar system. The solar system gives birth to the planet. The planet gives birth to the sea and the atmosphere. The sea and the atmosphere give birth to the biosphere. The biosphere gives birth to the human. The human physiology gives birth to cognition. The cognitive human re-enters geological time and gives birth to the technosphere. The technosphere gives birth to capital.
Capital gives investing power back to expand the technosphere. And the human part of the biosphere expands. So this diagram had to show all of these things all made from the same materials within the same continuum and how they relate to each other. I'll just show you some pictures. Here's the building that it was going to be installed in. This little part on the right-hand side of this larger building, which was quite an interesting little space at Izalutia in Donetsk. This was the condition of the building when I found it. and I had a whole renovation plan to actually sort of working with an architect,
with a site architect, to restore this building so that this diagram could be put inside it. And then this is how it would work through the space, going from one room to another, just following around each wall into the next room, around into the next room. And then it went up over a ceiling at several points, so it would go above you, and then go up a staircase into the next level. So we come to the question of the now. Well, no, I suppose the diagram had to show how these different spheres interact with each other. Especially, it becomes incredibly complicated in the last part, in the Anthropocene. So the Anthropocene on this diagram,
which is 136 metres long, happens in the last 0.1 millimetre of the 136 metres. So that necessitated a change of scale in the last section. So the Anthropocene happens in another suite of rooms. It sort of changes scale. So we can then begin to talk about John Hughes and the Soviet times and all of these things that are bringing up to the present day. And then, of course, now, because the work was put on hold, In some ways, it's a really fortuitous thing, because one of the most interesting questions becomes of the now. You know, what's happening in Donetsk now? What's happening in eastern Ukraine? And the ramifications of the Klan Wars in the 90s, which, you know, at the end of the Soviet Union,
when businesses were privatized and the mafia kind of stepped in and basically stole everything, and the Klan Wars, which in Donetsk were really intense for the whole 90s. Thousands of people were murdered, just gunned down in the streets in that city. And of course Yanukovych somehow ended up at the top. Nobody quite knows how, but he certainly ended up there. So the conditions of the city that led to having this population devoid of identity, severely affected by lack of confidence in his own image are conditions which arrived because of the geology of the city, because of the industry that was attracted by the geology. So what's happening in Donetsk now is, I believe,
can be put onto this diagram and can be shown to relate to the geological contingency of the city. Maybe it's a bit of a big jump, and you can contest this and it would be good to have questions or discussions afterwards if anybody wants to but I think that not to get too heavily into the politics but I think that it seems to me really obvious that Vladimir Putin is completely aware of how Donbass is within itself and how to manipulate this sensibility right at this moment and and use it to full advantage in this geopolitical game. Also, sticking with the materiality of the diagram
and thinking about this material continuum, these things are happening now, so the forensics have to be undertaken every day because the situation changes every day. One little case is the fact that the coal, which has been mined in Donetsk for the last year, has been all taken over the border into Russia and is now being offered for sale back to Kiev as a goodwill gesture to help Ukraine of its impending energy crisis, which has obviously been controlled by Putin as well. So there's these huge ironies, which are still all wrapped up with these materials. The white trucks, which we've all seen on the TV, coming in, bringing the blankets and the food,
return back to Russia full of stolen mining equipment and machinery from the steel plants. So, yeah, the story of material contingency still unravels. The forensic is now taking place in real time. So I'm hoping that during this residency, we'll develop some tools and some methodologies for sort of applying to this work and understand how this work relates to the idea of the yarn and how individual yarns, these individual intricate sort of contain situations of politics and individuals' lives like John Hughes can kind of like reach down into the material continuum and kind of make a cut into all of this stuff
that's just traveling through time with us as part of it as well. There we go. So, yeah, we'll see what happens. Thank you. It's good. I think it's fascinating, especially in light of what the conversation has been happening here in the Kunshan.
over the last few weeks, that there's 0.1 of a centimetre at the end of yore, and that you chose to expand that. 0.1 of a millimetre. 0.1 of a millimetre, the insignificance of, in the grander scheme of things. Were you conflicted at all in your decision to expand that and give it more importance in the... Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, bang on. Yeah, it was a big decision. there would have to be two completely separate diagrams or choose to join them together. I chose to join them together just because I wanted to sort of like, I guess I'd started the project getting excited about John Hughes and the people that I was working with in the Arts Centre in Islazio
were very excited that I was excited. This sort of sense of pride that I was getting. here's this English guy who's getting interested in the origin of our city. Of course, they didn't quite understand that John Hughes was Welsh, and if he'd have known that me being English, it wouldn't have really worked for him. I'm sure he would have had something to say about it. But they just rolled it all into one. So I had to, yeah, I felt like I had to give that story enough space. But then, yeah, like, I don't know. The thing I was saying to Martin earlier, it's like a work that could go on and on and on, and I don't really know when it will stop.
I've just now become interested in the clan wars in the 90s and kind of mapping that out as a yarn work, applying this kind of analysis to the hierarchy and the structure of the gangs in Donetsk in the 90s, which led to the recently deposed administration of the whole country. Completely fascinating. So you could go backwards and expand each point, one millimetre to another room and another room until you have the whole city mapped. Where do you stop? Will I ever have a life? Just from a very, very different perspective, I'm not an artist at all, but I do investigations.
And that's quite interesting in this context. I think that if you want to identify the specificity of the site, that is the wise way to move from one scale to a very different one. Because you've gone back, you've tried to get all you need and then to find exactly what is it that has erupted in this particular place. What is it all about? You're diving into the background. I assume is aimed at the specificity of the site. And I find it, or from both of your presentations, wonderful. It was very, very intriguing.
Thank you so much. And the investigation? Well, I'm a judge, but I did investigate war crimes in former Yugoslavia for the Security Council. So what you explain about these kind of things are not so unknown. Yeah, quite, yeah. So thank you. Thank you. It's not really a question, and it's more of an observation. And it comes from what the two previous questioners have said. But there seems to be something really interesting in this idea of scale. And it's something that I wasn't thinking so much about
when we were making the show necessarily downstairs, but it's something that's come up again and again. And I think something about reality operating differently at different scales, and the fact that, as Peter said and pointed out, that it's the last point whatever of a millimeter in terms of the scale of the history of the universe from the Big Bang. But the fact that somehow we are, we're only able to deal with reality on the scale that we are at. So we deal with reality at kind of monkey scale, I've heard it described as before. And so the things that we're able to, and that's one of the criticisms of some of this kind of thinking and speculative realism
is I think that it can seem very either dismissive at best, or it kind of ignores a lot of what many of us have been engaged with over many years in terms of identity politics and social politics and gender studies and all of these things which are to do with the society and the culture and that entanglement that we find ourselves in. And when you come out to a certain scale, all of that suddenly becomes meaningless in a certain way, as kind of demonstrated by your 130-something meter plan. And yet there's something, and as I said, it's not a question, and I'm really just thinking out loud, but there's something about scale and the way that we think both
the kind of quantum and then the kind of holistic, and again in what you were talking about, Robin, with these kind of thinking about the scale in terms of the earth and the geology of that, that feels really important to think about more somehow. I wondered if you had a comment. Yeah, that raises a huge number of philosophical issues for me, which are completely at the core of what I'm trying to get at, whether I'm successfully managing to get that across or not. I don't really want to speak about speculative realism because it kind of gets us into this whole question about what that is and who's a part of it and who isn't and so on.
But yeah, the question of scale, obviously it's just a shorthand to talk about scale because it's not simply about things being bigger and smaller. It's about different modes of distribution. And any epistemological stance, any cognitive model of the world has to selectively take its indices from the phenomena it's faced with and assemble them in a certain way. So it's not simply about, as I said, it's not simply about kind of going down a layer or getting bigger and smaller. But using that shorthand, I'd say what we need is something like the attitude of the engineer or the artisan. That is to say, you know, the engineer knows that if you're building a bridge, you need to consider what happens on an atomic scale.
but you also need to know what happens on a physical scale when you have girders that are 100 at 10, 20, 30 metres long. So you need to work on all of these scales. None of them are negligible, and none of them obey the same principles. So really, as I said, the question for me is this question of finding a passage between scales. That's really the important thing. And you're right that... So for me it's a question about not neglecting anything. I agree with people who say, who find philosophy disappointing when it tries to eliminate a certain one or two or many of those models. I think it's very interesting to try to keep hold of all of these different modes of distribution,
all these different ways of processing the world, and to try to understand how we pass from one to the other. But I don't think the way to do that is to create some kind of overall model of objects or things or material that can apply to all of them. I don't think there is such a thing. I don't think there is anything that operates on all those scales. And I think then you're in danger of simply kind of collapsing everything down into one layer. so what I'm really interested in is these is yeah just acknowledging that there are these different registers and these different layers all kind of coexisting within any object or any site and understanding how we pass between them and then that
brings you to the question of the plot and how this passage can be operated in a way that's compelling that is you know how can we look at something like this and hold it all together how can we hold it all together as a thought how can we pass through it without simply becoming victim to this kind of informational sublime that just makes us feel completely powerless and overwhelmed and so that's kind of the question of the yarn work that's that's where you are with the yarn work maybe slightly related to that as well
I wondered how you how you begin thinking about the way that you're going to diagram things so what set of principles do you try to establish in where you will diagram something in a certain way because the yarn work thing is a very simplistic relationship in a sense, because relationships, I mean, it kind of nullifies the differential, possible differentiation within that relationship. So how do you go about creating, before you even put pen to paper, that always problematic stage is like, right, how am I going to actually diagram this? What are going to be my criteria for this? And how do they suit this specific situation,
I mean, talking about specificity, better than another possible diagrammatic mode or something, I'd say. It's quite tricky. And, I mean, just talking personally about the process that I use, it's pretty chaotic. I mean, with this kind of method, which I did try once previously before in a project in Czech Republic, it really, it's sort of like trying to aim for something that you kind of know how it should be, but you've got no idea how you get there. You have to aim to it from both ends and backtrack all the time. Like, so for example, with this,
I did a hell of a lot of work on the diagram and then realized that actually at some point later on, I've got to have, so for example, all of the elements here are more or less in correct proportion to each other in terms of their quantities. So at some point later on, I discovered that I had neglected in my research to understand how the, I don't know, for example, say here, this part here shows how the atmosphere
gets an addition of carbon and oxygen from the lithosphere during the volcanic period in 3.9 billion years ago. There's this point where there's a huge off-gassing from volcanic activity which add carbon and oxygen and creates the atmospheric conditions for life. So this is incredibly important. Before this event, there was no possibility of the development of cyanobacteria. And cyanobacteria then, they're the things that are responsible for stratifying the iron,
which previously, before that, was in solution in the sea. So there was no such thing as solid iron within the crust. it was within the core but it wasn't within the crust so there was no way that later on the human could get to it but if I then had miscalculated the amount of carbon which needed to be in that stream at this point then I had to go all the way back to the beginning and add it in from the front and widen the track of all of, you know, it was just a nightmare but that sort of like exemplifies how it works, I didn't I find it very difficult to like logically map it all out at the beginning. It's a process of reappraising all the time. There's just one thing about your question earlier on, actually, that I wanted to show you, because I think it's
up here. You won't see it from the back very well, but you can come and have a look later. This is the point where the biosphere kind of ejects life. So you were saying about the change of scale and the important thing was at some point in the making the diagram I realised that I could change the scale and it wouldn't bring a sort of higher significance to the Anthropocene as long as I kept on portraying the Anthropocene and the human as still as part of this material continuum so it changes scale but it's still the same quantity of materials as a proportion to the original part which made the planet. So it keeps everything in context even though the scale has changed. I just thought I'd check that in.
Did you want to answer that last question as well? No, I was just going to say it's trial and error. It is trial and error. Yeah. Find out what it was. Yeah, I can't quite remember what started this process of... Because obviously in the map, the hydroplutonic map, which Robin showed earlier on, which you can look at over there, the coloured lines, the bars, are just... They're not actually... There's no element of chronology there, there's no time. It's just like showing the relationship, the exchange of materials between one location and another location, but there's nothing to do with time or to do with the origin of those materials in time,
apart from, you know, it's just locational. So you've got an arrow coming out of the bottom of the map on the, which we've discovered since we've arrived here probably should connect to Bergen, which is nice, but, you know, it's not, it doesn't actually have anything, it doesn't show the relationship of that timber. compared to the tin or the copper in the ground. That timber is obviously within what I call the solar contemporary. It's become a solid form through the agency of the sun within the last 50 years or something.
But everything else you might be talking about billions of years. How is it a trial and error? When would it be at the colonists? If you find out that you need 54 more pieces of paper, like this size, sometimes I think you're like, do you need the colonists? That would be an error. You'd have to go back and rescale and rethink how you were drawing a drawing. I mean with the map that Robin described as this you know his feet of origami it really was I mean I think you had the eureka moment on that one didn't you of how it should actually work with
the folds and yeah but we knew what we needed it to do we knew what it we needed out of it but But there was a real disconnect between how to achieve that for quite a long time. I guess there's something that your question made me think about, though, which is quite interesting, which is there is a particular, I don't know whether it was what you were standing at, but there's a very particular language that you're using within the kind of schematic. And it's not just that there's a given language for doing this. there's a kind of old aesthetic and industrial and scientific history to the idea of diagramming things in this particular way.
And I guess what your question made me think was maybe it's interesting to think further about that and what the kind of aesthetic language of this kind of diagrammatic schema means. Yeah, absolutely. The colours that I chose, which will, if it ever gets made, you'll be familiar with the rather nicely muted tones of the Soviet industrial paint palette. It's like a little aesthetic point. There's all manner of shades of slightly odd pastel green, which you can appropriate into diagrams when you're working on things
based in the Soviet realm. It's quite nice. Thank you very much. Robin in Poland. Thank you everybody. You know that they will be staying here for two next weeks and you're very welcome to come back and to ask more questions if you get them and also just follow the development. of this process and just to have a look out and pull it out. You should mention that there's a block. Yeah, please. Yeah, you can click and find all the updates and all those, yeah, things that are happening with diagrams and thinking and facts.
You can find the link to this macro blog both on our web page or on the Govonomic website. and also we will, yeah, on the last day of this residence period, Robin and Paul will be joined by more colleagues and they will run this seminar or roundtable discussion and they will be discussing the results, and also just this process and where they ended up two weeks. So please welcome on the 7th of February. I think, am I right in saying that we'd both be very open to any input from anybody?