ALING, Mike (2013): Digital Cottage Industries, Architectural Design

ALING, Mike (2013): Digital Cottage Industries, Architectural Design

3

A global renaissance in cottage industries is currently underway, fuelled by a wide spectrum of digital communications –from Smart phones to the Internet and, increasingly, the technologies of virtuality (…) A growing number of products –digital or otherwise- floating on the pervasive cybermarket are being developed and distributed form the home.

(…) Up until the digital age, cottage industries were located on sites disconnected from industrial and urban centres. Today, however, following William Gibson’s recent identification of the ‘ageographical and largely unrecognized meta city that is the Internet’, it is increasingly difficult to identify spaces that are outside of the urban process.

With the city/country antinomy ever blurring (a dialectic that the city has come to dominate), the Digital Cottage Industries project concentrates on the rural side of the blur as a site for small-scale cottage-industry architectures in the UK (…) this project advocates various advanced technologies (such as augmented reality, developments in stereoscopic camera mapping, hypersonic sound and nanotechnology) as a mechanism to engage with the manifold social issues present across our rural landscape-as-urban extension. These range from the erosion of rural communities and erasure of public services to contested land ownership and public access rights.

4

Dyspastoral Cinema

The truth of the vision of nature lies in the way in which it discloses the complacency of the urban celebration; but the opposite is also true, and the vision of the city exposes everything nostalgic and impoverished in the embrace of nature

Fredric Jameson (2004)

Cinema represents landscape in a way that no other media can. The cinematic lens has acclimatized our viewing of films to one of continual motion, and it is perhaps the relative stillness of the natural landscape that often comes across as extremely powerful (…) However, when it comes to utilizing rural environments for contemporary narratives, the number of films decreases enormously. Furthermore, pastoral futurology is surprisingly nonexistent in cinema, and the future is largely depicted through urban environments. We have to look back to late-19th-century literature to find pastoral narratives by socialist writers such as William Henry Hudson (A crystal age, 1887), William Morris (News from nowhere, 1890) and William Dean Howells (A traveler from Altruria, 1894).

There have been a select number of British independent films produced since the Second World War that film theorist Peter Hutchings describes as ‘anti-landscape’ cinema, films that relish in the ‘dyspastoral’ as a menas of allegorizing the ever-challenging urban condition (…)

5

These dyspastoral films have quite possibly garnered an audience due to the recent recession, fuelled by an increasing fervor of distrust towards the finance sector and other negative attributes associated with the late capitalist urban process (…) Cinema itself, due to represent the dyspastoral, the camera lens gazing at an inanimate landscape as an unresponsive ‘sublime object’.