Resident Alien. Part 17
Psychogeography. Part 4
In the shadow of The Spectacle.
In 2011, in the early days of my interest in psychogeography I planned a trip to Florida with the intention of exploring how The Great Swamp Spectacle of Orlando was contained. I had this idea about going there, but not entering through the main gate, but to instead spend my time walking around and photographing it from the outside. I had no idea what I expected to find there or what this perimeter actually looked like or even if it had one at all. I did little or no research before I left, preferring to dérive (drift) wherever my camera decided to take me and I would respond to that rather than a pre-planned schedule of activities. I had my flight booked, a hotel room, a rental car waiting and a day ticket to The Spectacle itself and the rest I was going to play by ear once I got there.
Like all photo expeditions I have taken in the past, I spent the weeks leading up to it trying to anticipate and carefully pre-visualize the sorts of photographs I might find myself making once I arrived. What was I expecting to see? What ideas about the place would I be bringing with me and where had I got these ideas from in the first place? It has taken a long time for me to learn to pay attention to these questions and to let go of everything else. I understand that nothing can truly prepare me for the actual reality of spending time in a place I have never before visited with my camera because context is always subject to unforeseen juxtapositions which will materialize in the moment they are created (ie, life). Any expectations I might have are really nothing more than wishful thinking anyway, a leaning personal bias filled with an unhealthy dose of anxiety. Truth is always stranger than fiction after all and any successful photographs that I ever returned home with were all previously inconceivable to me while sitting on the couch driving myself crazy thinking about it all beforehand.
During these times I can generally feel my creative influences (whatever they may be at the time) rise to the surface and let their presence be known, especially if the photo expedition is based around a location, rather than a person or event. Locations can be extremely evocative for me, with visions bathed in William Eggleston light, Mark Power views and with the bright wit of Martin Parr everywhere. This heady mix of photographic masters can be a struggle to get to grips with at these times as they push and shove for possession of my psyche. They represent my most aligned visions and personal aspirations for my own work and hold both my sweetest hopes and most secret fears for it too.
The relationship we have with our influences runs deep in all of us and they can be private and complicated relationships too and for these reasons I do my very best to keep them all at home (chained up in the basement) before I leave. If anything at all can have a bearing on what photographs I will end up making, it is of course, myself, and the attitude I decide to take with me will be my strongest influence in any given moment and will be forever present in the photographs I make. On one hand I wholeheartedly trust in the falling photographic tarot cards of destiny and the fates, and on the other hand, I can be an emotional spinning top who needs to take a moment and breathe before lifting the camera.
And so the serenity prayer ignites again in a cold blue flame and burns down to a dirty black ash on the tin foil then blows away as I begin to weigh up my past-life karmic-debts against any future photographic mojo conjurings of hocus-pocus F-16 at infinity focus..
Magical thinking is what all this really is and photography for me, is filled with it.
So, was The Great Spectacle of Orlando going to be surrounded by tall unscalable walls topped with leaning razor wire? Were there intermittent guard towers along these walls, manned by our favorite cartoon characters in Kalashnikov silhouette? Was the Spectacle a castle island perhaps, surrounded by a swampy Everglade moat and stocked with starving Alligators? Or maybe the moat was an asphalt one where The Spectacle leans up against the sky like a great jagged quartz stalagmite, rising up through the centre of a massive parking lot, packed to the hilt with the steel, glass and rubber of vehicles and boiling with tar beneath it, while the thick Florida sun beats down relentlessly on everything and from which there is no shade or shelter? Maybe..
Acknowledging expectations (photographic or otherwise) from the on-set has been an integral part of my practice as a psychogeographer because these expectations will be the platform from which my first encounter with The Spectacle will take place. They must be made conscious and regarded as they are, because they can help sharpen the intuition later.
My interaction with The Spectacle will also refer back to these expectations and it is in this space, in the dialogue between both, where some of my most personally meaningful photographs have been made. My own crude and initial psychological mappings of these phantom territories, not yet visited or photographed, exist only as dream-scapes, inside of me, and often stand in stark and ridiculous contrast to actually being present before The Spectacle itself.
Just like The Spectacle’s image of itself, my ideas about The Spectacle are like that of a child’s. They are left handed crayon drawings scribbled on the walls of my psyche, full of prejudice and preconceptions based on hearsay, reputation and its ancient myths and legends, while the images self-generated by The Spectacle of The Spectacle short circuits my imagination with a scientific glamour that is not designed to fade.
A detailed and fearless inventory of these expectations and ideas about a place must be made before departure and jotted into a notebook, so they can be seen outside of one’s own head and committed to a time in space. They represent the original points of orientation within the drift-zone, from which all further coordinate points will be measured and plotted against and psycho-geographically speaking, will inform you that, “You - Are - Here”.
The drive across The Specacle’s undeveloped land is through lucious tropical vegetation on a perfectly paved parkway with frequent signposts and on every signpost there are cameras mounted. It is impossible to get lost on the property of The Spectacle because you are always being followed and the cartoon character in a security guard uniform sitting in a small dark room can point to where you are, at any given moment, as you pass from one monitor screen to the next as the live feed shows you taking a piss behind a bush. A tiny camera mounted on the back of the friendly Cricket sitting on a blade of grass records the whole thing in 4K HD for your own personal protection.
The Spectacle sits in the middle of 43 square miles of a property containing 3 other satellite Spectacles which, I imagine, from above, forms the constellation of Orion. The ways in and out are carefully curated to avoid any unscheduled, out of the car, photographic driftings to take pictures of things The Spectacle would rather not let us see -
- such as the cloud-busting atmospheric conditioners, the size of apartment buildings. The valley of the meat pods. The vast cooling lakes of boiling mercury. The roaring industrial furnaces stocked 24 hours a day with all manner of legal documents pertaining to itself. The ancient sky chimneys, shielded by tall evergreens, that bellow thick noxious smoke under-cover of darkness and out across the face of a full piss moon. The smell of sulfur at the end of every breath is ever present in these spectral Interzones and lest ye be met out there, off path and in the dead of night, by one of the snarling youths that are always waiting behind every tree with Walkie Talkie and immaculate Kaki’s and “here to help”, for—-ever.
“It's 4pm!” a toothless drone rasps, “turn on the rain and set the timer for 20 minutes”.
The Spectacle may well be the image-symbol personification of capitalist consumerism dedicated solely to the preservation of the continued and sustained illusion of its own image, but I am not really interested in all of that. The Spectacle can keep all its secrets as far as I am concerned. I am interested in what writer, Will Self, calls the “free association of place and space”. To be drawn with my camera by whatever inclination and chance encounter that might arise and to explore and interact with the “latent or repressed psychological content of the spaces themselves”. I am interested in spinning parallaxes where history splices with the memories of images recalled from dreams on drugs. I believe that it is in the connective tissue of these liminal spaces, in the shadow of The Spectacle, where I can begin to form my own relationship to it and then, by making spectacle of what is not, attempt, with my camera, to understand what is really there and what is really going on.
I left my car at a floating off world satellite parking lot where I boarded the monorail and was shuttled to the entrance of The Spectacle. I remember a great glass cathedral hotel with a tropical air-conditioned panoramic mezzanine with vistas that looked out across prehistoric floodplains in what was for me a genuine moment of pure science fiction wonderment..
I write these words 10 years after my visit to the Great Swamp Spectacle of Orlanda and I am in no doubt that my battered memory has flickered and glitched in its prompting today. But, in this brave new world without context, where facts, history, science and biography are all up for re-interpretation, without fear of reality getting in the way, this shouldn’t be a problem for us.
What I can absolutely be certain of is every single one of my psychogeographical plans for photographing the perimeter of The Spectacle had been thwarted from the moment I arrived on its property. My visit having already been foreseen a long time ago in uncle Walt’s late night magic mushroom mind and then baked right into The Spectacle’s blueprints the very next day, and thus committing the deterrent of the psychogeographer to The Spectacles ultimate vision of itself at inception.
And so, I would return home with only one photograph worth anything but with which made the whole trip worthwhile. 1/250th of a second for a weekend costing, what was for me then, a small fortune and, just like that, is exactly how I resolve my life of photography. Photography having forced me out into the world to engage with it directly with what has felt like, at times, a visceral purpose. Whether there was a photograph to be conjured along the way or not, I’ve followed the possibility that there might be one out there anyway. Perhaps, if I had never owned a camera, I would never leave my house at all and my life would simply continue inside of it, until I’m found, later, in a room gone dark, playing the guitar badly, tangled up in agoraphobia and incoherently muttering elaborate excuses for postponing all my life experiences to an undesignated future time which I have carefully planned to never arrive soon. And, as my restraints are tightened on the gurney, Adult Protective Services wheel me out of the house and into the sunlight, while in the background “Alright Now” by Free, plays softly on a distant radio, again..
All illustrations by Gavin Bragdon with Midjourney.
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