Wednesday 18 January 2017

Tuesday 17 January 2017

The Spectres of Modernism

High Rise, 2016, Michael C Coldwell

From the series


In memory of the late great Mark Fisher




Here lie the artefacts of progress. As Derrida put it, "the time is out of joint."

That so-called Modernism should now reside so far behind us feels uncanny, a temporal disjunction if not a contradiction in terms. Brutalist buildings, these great concrete totems from that utopian future which failed to materialise, are now being destroyed and transformed on a mass scale - they are effaced and mourned, and also increasingly lionised. Park Hill flats are now protected. Some of this vast site is being renovated, but huge tracks are likely to remain abandoned - a meta-anachronism, a distant past future, forever in the present.

Sunday 15 January 2017

The Light Web

Denial of Service, 2016, Michael C Coldwell



What does the internet look like? It pervades all modern life, yet most of us are in the dark about how it works. In media theory it is seen as Baudrillard's great simulation, a comlete virtual world for us to explore and inhabit, a completely immaterial space. But this view of the web belies the fact that this apparently immaterial world is totally dependent on an incredibly complex material infrastructure - one that is often surprsingly old-fashioned when examined closely.

These are photographs of that physical 'web' that we routinely ignore.

Womb with a View




Saturday 7 January 2017

scir ac


historical graffiti uk conflux coldwell self-landscape

where the great oak once stood spectral photography michael coldwell

Headingley



from The Spectral Forest

the marks and traces of those who came before, here at the site of the

Skyrack Oak or scir rac (shire oak)

the old tree finally collapsed in 1941

I wonder if there are still roots beneath the pavement?



Friday 6 January 2017

The Skyrack Wapentake

photography of Leeds Headingley
The Skyrack Wapentake I (2017)

hauntology
The Skyrack Wapentake II

the dead-centre of an ancient kingdom

reflected in the window of a empty office unit

a tree stood here for one thousand years

now gradually forgotten