Papers by Bradley L Garrett
Illegal ethnographies
Research Ethics in Human Geography, 2021
The World War II cultural landscape of Townsville, Queensland: management, interpretation and research opportunities
Last Breath: unofficial pre-demolition celebrations
cultural geographies, 2015
Last Breath is a project that invites artists to contribute a piece of work to a building which i... more Last Breath is a project that invites artists to contribute a piece of work to a building which is soon to be destroyed. Artistic offerings are recorded in photographs and on video, records released once the building, along with the art, has been demolished. These place-making events perform a kind of audio/visual memento mori, reminding us not only of the perpetual transitoriness of urban existence but also of the potential for participation in such processes. In this article, words, still images and videographic footage are blended to explore and imagine what sorts of affective capacities the project might afford through its creative interventions and mediations.
London’s Olympic waterscape: capturing transition
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2013
Abstract The waterways of London are an essential component of the city, with the River Thames pl... more Abstract The waterways of London are an essential component of the city, with the River Thames playing a prominent role in the heritage, history and identity of place. The upcoming 2012 Olympics are highlighting the Lea Valley waterways in east London as another important part of London's waterscape, expanding London's global presence as a 'water city'. As part of the Creative Campus Initiative, we undertook a project based on the broad themes of water, London and the Olympics that would give voice to the changes taking ...
Recent scholarship has drawn attention to a ubiquitous 20th-century political space that was long... more Recent scholarship has drawn attention to a ubiquitous 20th-century political space that was long overlooked – the bunker. This body of work draws on a variety of theoretical influences and explores multiple historical contexts, yet most remains wedded to the late Paul Virilio's influential 1970s study of the Nazi Atlantic Wall. Enlightening as his 'Bunker Archeology' is, Virilio's theorization has constrained contemporary debates around the function, materiality and temporality of the bunker. Here, we seek to counter this set of limitations in three ways. First, we contest the idea of the bunker as a simple space of human protection and argue for a more expansive conceptual-ization that is attentive to the bunker as a site of extermination. Second, we challenge the assumed concrete materiality of the bunker and suggest an expanded typology, utilizing a range of materials and milieux. Finally, we take to task readings of the bunker as an obsolete relic by highlighting the continued construction, re-appropriation and reimagination of this architectural form.
Drones Caught in the Net
This short experimental essay reflects upon our video Points of Presence. In producing the video ... more This short experimental essay reflects upon our video Points of Presence. In producing the video we used unmanned aerial drones to visually and vertically examine undersea fibre-optic cables of the North Atlantic. We reflect upon how the drone’s flying technologies allow pilots to creatively engage with the atmospheric element. We argue that the drone’s optical and object-avoidance technologies share similarities with the mammalian senses. In concluding, we examine how drones and information infrastructures reflect each other as complex and imperfect systems designed to extend the human body and senses across geographies.
Extended Flight: The Emergence of Drone Sovereignty
Landeyjarsandur, Iceland is a long expanse of black beach stretching down the southern coast of ... more Landeyjarsandur, Iceland is a long expanse of black beach stretching down the southern coast of Iceland 1.5 hours southeast of Reykjavik. We took the journey to this place with two Icelandic internet engineers to make a film about how North Atlantic islands are linked by communication networks consisting of fibre-optical cables and cable stations. Landeyjarsandur’s features are largely organic – even the remains of long-abandoned fishing boats and washed up cultural objects seem to have long folded themselves into the environmental matrix. One feature remains distinct however: a small well-fortified building that houses the submarine communications cable landing point between Denmark and Greenland. Part of our methodology was to deploy drones with high-quality videos cameras to follow the cables from the air. However, in taking to the air, we experienced a methodological disjunction, a moment when our expectations and desires as pilots were outstripped by an event. This article, and the accompanying film, is about a situation where our previous experience of autonomy in relationship to the drone–that it listened to us and followed our direction–was replaced, however temporarily, by drone sovereignty, wherein it appeared to have agency in the atmosphere.
Area
There is an ongoing movement towards situated and relational, rather than static and transcendent... more There is an ongoing movement towards situated and relational, rather than static and transcendental, understandings of research ethics within Geography. Yet this tendency has not yet succeeded in destabilising a priori judgements of ethnographic engagements with unlawful spatial practices. As such, many socially and politically important projects are either sidelined or eschewed for fear of liability or complicity. In cases where ethnography is deployed, primarily in the field of participatory action research, the tensions between ethics and legality are not often explicitly engaged with. We want to suggest here, in light of increasing interest amongst geographers in 'subversive' spatial practices, that ethnographies of illegality raise a range of important ethical concerns for research practices that also inform broader understandings of situated ethical frameworks. In this vein, the authors draw on past and ongoing ethnographic experiences into illicit spatial practices (or what criminologists have termed 'edge ethnographies') to think through the entire process of research engagement – from planning to data retention – with consideration to the incommensurable relationship between ethics and law where we take situated ethics seriously.
This article complements and further contextualises our film Points of Presence (2017), an experi... more This article complements and further contextualises our film Points of Presence (2017), an experimental narrative created as part of the ongoing System Earth Cable project (Fish, Garrett, Case, 2017, 2016). In the film and on the project, we employ a consumer drone to extend our sense of the digitally networked environment by tracking the Internet infrastructure
across the North Atlantic from Iceland to the United Kingdom, via its intermediary nodal connections in the Faroe, Shetland, and Orkney Islands. Reading this data as a materially complex narrative, we reveal an emerging stratigraphy where digital mobility is both freed and compromised between vast open spaces and extreme confinements. Through co-reflective editing of the footage with found online sound and imagery, we speculate that the Internet-drone assemblage forms an enclosure of communication inside of which the digital and the organic merge. We argue that an evolving symbiosis disrupts sense as both
affection and understanding and suggests an opportunity for reframing digitally networked
communication in material-organic terms.
The extent of urban areas is rapidly expanding across the globe, both horizontally and vertically... more The extent of urban areas is rapidly expanding across the globe, both horizontally and vertically. While natural and social scientists have examined the impacts of this urbanisation on earth system and social processes, to date researchers have largely overlooked how in turn earth system processes can act on this urban fabric to produce hybrid landforms. Unique pseudokarst landforms are found within the urban fabric, including urban stalactites and urban sinkholes. Additionally, both the chronic and acute degradation of urban buildings can form rubble and dust that, if left in situ, will be shaped by fluvial and aeolian processes. For many of these urban geomorphological processes, the neglect or abandonment of parts of the urban network will facilitate or accelerate their influence. If there are economic, climatic or social reasons for abandonment or neglect, these processes are likely to reshape parts of the urban fabric into unique landforms at a range of scales. We contend that researchers need to explicitly consider the urban fabric as an Anthropocene landform and that by doing so important insights can be gained into urban hazards and geomorphological processes. Shelley's Ozymandias, in which the eponymous king failed to account for the effects of earth system processes acting on 'mighty' urban structures over time, serves as an important reminder of the impermanence of our urban works and the need to recognise and understand the processes acting on them.
'Exploration', Bradley L Garrett, International Encyclopedia of Geography, 2017.
As cities around the world are tunnelled and hollowed to new depths, geographers are giving incre... more As cities around the world are tunnelled and hollowed to new depths, geographers are giving increasing attention to infrastructure in the context of verticality, often framed through urban planning or geopolitics. This paper responds to calls from geography and the wider geohumanities for ethnographic and aesthetic consideration of vertical infrastructures by reflecting on London's sewer system as a site of embodied engagement and creative imagination. Once venerated by the press and public as engineering, medical and aesthetic triumphs, London's sewers are thought to have morphed into sites of ubiquitous obscurity. This paper counters this understanding by considering bodies, technologies and activities through time that have shaped imaginations of London's main drainage, including the work of contemporary urban explorers. I argue that although the current aestheticization of infrastructural spaces in London is connected to particular technologies, politics and geographical concerns of the present, it also echoes body-space interventions and affects across a 150-year span. This aesthetic legacy is a crucial pillar in our understandings of urban verticality.
liminalities.net
The thriving jute industry, which at one time employed over 50,000 of the city's inhabitants... more The thriving jute industry, which at one time employed over 50,000 of the city's inhabitants, led to Dundee's 18th century designation as Juteopolis (BBC). This industry of spinners, manufacturers and merchants, which met its demise in the 1970s after a prolonged period of decline, ...
Archaeology is the academic discipline most preoccupied with what is underneath us. It is also a ... more Archaeology is the academic discipline most preoccupied with what is underneath us. It is also a field of study that until relatively recently has been predominated by work in non-urban areas. We are three urban scholars who have our own fixations with the underground. In fact, we have just compiled an edited collection called Global Undergrounds (Dobraszczyk et al. 2016), which surveys 80 underground sites from every continent, including Antarctica. This process coincided serendipitously with this call
to consider whether we are indeed all archaeologists now.
Last Breath is a project that invites artists to contribute a piece of work to a building which i... more Last Breath is a project that invites artists to contribute a piece of work to a building which is soon to be destroyed. Artistic offerings are recorded in photographs and on video, records released
once the building, along with the art, has been demolished. These place-making events perform a kind of audio/visual memento mori, reminding us not only of the perpetual transitoriness of
urban existence but also of the potential for participation in such processes. In this article, words, still images and videographic footage are blended to explore and imagine what sorts of affective
capacities the project might afford through its creative interventions and mediations.
Bradley L. Garrett's foreword to Alice's Derives in Devonshire by Phil Smith, Triarchy Press.
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Papers by Bradley L Garrett
across the North Atlantic from Iceland to the United Kingdom, via its intermediary nodal connections in the Faroe, Shetland, and Orkney Islands. Reading this data as a materially complex narrative, we reveal an emerging stratigraphy where digital mobility is both freed and compromised between vast open spaces and extreme confinements. Through co-reflective editing of the footage with found online sound and imagery, we speculate that the Internet-drone assemblage forms an enclosure of communication inside of which the digital and the organic merge. We argue that an evolving symbiosis disrupts sense as both
affection and understanding and suggests an opportunity for reframing digitally networked
communication in material-organic terms.
to consider whether we are indeed all archaeologists now.
once the building, along with the art, has been demolished. These place-making events perform a kind of audio/visual memento mori, reminding us not only of the perpetual transitoriness of
urban existence but also of the potential for participation in such processes. In this article, words, still images and videographic footage are blended to explore and imagine what sorts of affective
capacities the project might afford through its creative interventions and mediations.