The Thames from Blackfriars Bridge

I have an ongoing fascination with the Thames. The strap to this blog was originally “Tales from the riverside”. And my  first proper blog entry was one such tale. A lot of it comes from working in Vauxhall for 3 years and getting to spend at least a few minutes by the river most days.

The Thames is the seam that separates – and joins – north and south London. Through its 15+ urban tributaries all of London flows into it. It’s the biggest single focal point of the city. It’s something with which we [Londoners] all have our own personal relationship, something that we all experience differently.

With this in mind, I’ve been thinking of ways of collating these experiences. A twitter search is an obvious way of doing this but, as is the way with twitter, there’s a lot of noise to the small amount of signal.

I love the simple elegance of what @riverthames and @towerbridge do, giving life to objects by translating data into twitterness. But that’s something different to this.

I also love the idea of someone taking on the mantle of an object and giving it a sassy personality, as @imlondonbridge does. But that isn’t what I’m about either and anyway, @riverthames has started to do that itself.

So my offering is humbler, more human and probably less sustainable in the long term. I’m cherry-picking tweets about the Thames and re-tweeting them as @thamesstories. There are no rules at the moment, other than they’ll be stories, rather than news or informational bits. I might include pictures. I’d like to take this somewhere else eventually, but for now I just want to see where this goes in this format, if it goes anywhere at all.

And then I remembered Bruno Latour and Aramis and how he wrote precisely about the transport system we (or at least the Parisians) never had. I wonder what others are out there. There’s still room for technological autopsy, isn’t there?

Anyway, I’ve been messing around with something different. This is my first attempt of a long still photo. I reckon a still photo with a soundtrack should be able to draw you in in a different way to both ordinary still photos and long photos. The idea is that they take the moment of a shot and extrapolate either forwards or backwards (or both) in time around that moment.

For this one, I took the photo with the iPhone and then switched to the iTalk ap to record the audio, so it’s not quite authentic as a soundtrack. I think in future I’d rather take a still from a movie (or traditional long photo) or, better still, choose the moment and take a separate photo while recording the audio.

Have a look:

What this shows (other than that the video camera on my phone is shite):
The orange  digger in the foreground has the job of crushing the mess of sheet metal and steel gridding in the oversized skip. But it’s been struggling to compact it down. The yellow digger behind it finds a girder and places it within reach of the first digger, which picks it up, swivels, stops, readjusts, pauses and  then bludgeons the skip’s contents.

It’s mechanical violence that’s more than just controlled by a human hand. It doesn’t come across in the video how much the cabin of the digger shook with each hammer blow. The driver/pilot physically feels a jolt with each smash, and is one with the machine. It reminds me, quite clumsily,  of this. But in reverse, obviously; with a man wearing a bigger, stronger arm.

So it’s great on a man with machine level. Also lovely is the dirty grace that the diggers show in working together. A bit like gorillas picking fleas from each other’s hair. I love the possibility of silent understanding and assistance. That the yellow digger notices the orange digger is struggling to do its job and,  unprompted, lays down a girder. And that the orange digger immediately understands why the yellow digger has placed the girder there, picks it up and goes to work. I love that the possibilty exists that that’s what happened.

Well, I remembered, and it’s lovely. Look:

Lawns, terraces, shrubs… What is it? Can anyone go up there?

Large cat, originally uploaded by meltingman.

The new turbine hall installation by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster is good.

As soon as you push through the plastic curtains and find yourself looking at banks of bunk beds, it feels like a sort of mass evacuation isolation ward. There are raised wall-mounted industrial lights and a constant dripping. Like ‘The Crack’ from last year, it places you in a new, uncomfortable post-event London. The Crack gave a feeling of physical insecurity (or at least it did me), that maybe our foundations aren’t as solid as maybe we’d like to think. This seems more of an amalgamation of fears expressed. Biological. Social.

The separate items at the far end of the hall don’t sit as well together, but an oversized cat skeleton and a large screen are a fantastic combination for anyone with a camera.