Reconnecting with darkness: Gloomy landscapes, lightless places

This paper investigates the effects and affects of darkness, a condition that is progressively becoming less familiar for those of us in the over-illuminated West. In countering the prevailing cultural understanding that darkness is a negative condition, I draw attention to other historical and cultural ways of positively valuing darkness. Subsequently, in drawing on two sites, a gloomy landscape at a dark sky park in South Scotland, and a tourist attraction in which a simulation of New York is experienced in a completely dark environment, I explore the multivalent qualities of darkness. In foregrounding the becoming of sensory experience in gloomy space, I highlight the mobilisation of alternative modes of visual perception in as well as the emergence of non-visual apprehensions, and suggest that the potentialities of darkness might foster progressive forms of conviviality, communication and imagination. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

Seeing with light and landscape: a walk around Stanton Moor

© 2017 Landscape Research Group Ltd. This paper focuses on the much-neglected contribution of light to the conceptualisation of landscape. I discuss how light circulates through our visual system and around the spaces we see, refuting notions that we can be detached from the landscapes that we view and characterise. Though we see with the vital light and the landscape, I emphasise that our experiences are invariably entangled with prevalent cultural values, meanings and representations. By drawing upon the experience of walking around an area of raised moorland in the Peak District, I suggest that the experience of particular landscapes can be distinguished by the changing light that radiates upon them and to which we continuously become attuned. By composing an autoethnographic account that highlights key moments when its effects seemed particularly acute, I exemplify the distinctive ways in which the shifting light interacts with elements within this particular landscape

Enigmatic objects and playful provocations: the mysterious case of Golden Head

This article explores community responses to ‘Golden Head’, a guerrilla artwork that was installed covertly in a Melbourne park in early 2020 by unknown persons. Focusing on local residents’ reactions to this mysterious, unsanctioned statue, we document an ongoing array of playful speculations, creative responses and imaginative interactions that unfolded both in situ and via social media. We argue that in eliciting an outpouring of jokes, memes, stories, photographs and other creative rejoinders, this enigmatic object has strengthened and renewed a collective sense of place. We also consider Golden Head’s reception in light of recent challenges to the legitimacy of many traditional memorial statues, and as a response to the increasingly over-regulated city. We conclude that this outpouring of imaginative local reactions to Golden Head constitutes a playful form of collective place-making that implicitly critiques the grandiose ambitions of official statues and affirms the oft-neglected ludic potential of urban space

Keeping the family silver: The changing meanings and uses of Manchester’s civic plate

This article explores the shifting uses and meanings of Manchester civic plate, a huge silver dining service purchased in 1877 to coincide with the opening of the city’s neo-Gothic Town Hall. The authors explore how the silver collection has successively forged relations with a host of different people, places and objects, exemplifying the changing processes through which objects are understood, utilized, valued, maintained, stored and curated. Three key processes are deployed to illuminate these shifting entanglements: the use of the silver to express municipal prestige and advance particular cultural values, the maintenance procedures that have responded to the silver’s vital material constituency and practices of display, storage and curation. In accounting for these diverse and volatile processes, the article argues for the virtues of theoretical breadth in exploring the multiplicities of material culture

Entering the Fifth Dimension: modular modernities, psychedelic sensibilities, and the architectures of lived experience

In this paper, we elaborate on the Fifth Dimension, an extraordinary, largely overlooked architectural example of 1960s psychedelia that was installed in a small Scottish resort town. Made up of 17 domed chambers, each designed to stimulate psychedelic sensory experiences for its intrepid visitors, the Fifth Dimension was the creation of London-based environmental artist Keith Albarn using his experimental “Ekistikit” modular building system. We argue that the qualities and impacts of this highly inventive, utopian “fun palace” interrogate stereotypical depictions of countercultural, psychedelic creativities. We discuss how they also intersect with current geographical scholarship concerned with sensation, play, and the built environment. Two key elements of the Fifth Dimension are examined. First, building on critical geographies of architecture, we focus on Albarn's innovative system to exemplify how pioneers of environmental design used advanced modular technologies to radically re-configure the possibilities of dwelling and working in flexible building structures. Second, drawing on aesthetic theories of the sensory, we demonstrate how the structure was designed to stimulate transformative psychedelic sensibilities as a novel form of disruptive politics to induce critical dispositions towards the built environment. Our argument is underpinned by the call for a recuperation of sensational and affective experience in the design and inhabitation of built environments. We contend that this bears particular significance for an emergent geography of play and enchantment

‘Always like never before’: learning from the lumitopia of Tivoli Gardens

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Drawing on a detailed analysis of the historical and current development of lighting in Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, this article addresses how this site of extraordinarily diverse illumination exemplifies a carefully orchestrated balance between (1) muted and more vivid forms of lighting, (2) curation of historical styles and promotion of contemporary innovations in illumination and (3) artistic luminaires and those more aligned with popular tastes. Through these themes, we argue that the current strategies towards urban lighting that predominantly promote energy conservation, security, commercial imperatives and place-branding may be supplemented by place-specific design strategies that implement multiplicity, connect past and present, and accommodate diverse desires, dreams and realities. These attributes contribute to the ongoing emergence of what we call a ‘lumitopia’, a space in which an intensified attention to illumination is integral to the particularity of a place or landscape. In the case of Tivoli, this offers a lens to manage nocturnal space so that it becomes more aesthetically complex, inclusive and convivial

Open borders, closed minds: the discursive construction of national identity in North Cyprus

The article investigates the discursive construction of a Turkish Cypriot national identity by the newspapers in North Cyprus. It questions the representation and reconstruction processes of national identity within the press and examines the various practices employed to mobilize readers around certain national imaginings. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, the article analyses news reports of the opening of border crossings in Cyprus in 2003, based on their content, the strategies used in the production of national identity and the linguistic means employed in the process. In this way, the nationalist tendencies embedded in news discourses, as well as discriminatory and exclusive practices, are sought out