Week 40: 'Listen to what is underground.'

Wonder spawned in: Not so long ago.
Wondered into being by: Some of the people.
Wonderspan: about 5 minutes.
To experience this wonder at its best: For the films, make sure you can hear the sound and click 'full screen'.

How do you love your own society, in practice?  Last week we were sharing in the stories of soldiers and their families, who were struggling in their own ways with how to reconcile their wish to protect the life of their societies and the inhuman realities of war.  This week, we are still with people who feel some sense of social purpose, but one that could not be more different.  Today's wonder is about how people can make something magical out of an otherwise dull place using nothing but themselves and a bit of creativity

Pick one!

Supermarkets - why do they make them so ugly, boring, overlit, so so so SO the same, and spend so much money doing so?  Mystery.  Well, they need bombing!  That's where Dizraeli comes in, where 'to bomb' is graffitti slang meaning to use your art to reclaim a place for yourself/people.  It turns out that Tesco is a musical instrument waiting to be played:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTIaeTPaCR8 (thanks to Mel H for suggesting this one)

Jim Power turns lampposts into mosaics in New York - simple, beautiful, for everyone:

• https://vimeo.com/45865095
  

The Situationists are an interesting bunch.  They noticed that the spaces we occupy tend to determine how we behave, which usually means how to conform.  They said, 'Hang on a minute, why are we letting our surroundings tell us how to behave?'  Society is a 'spectacle', they said - it's basically pushing a fake reality onto us.  By reading their 'situation' and trying 'forbidden' behaviours, they found a powerful new way of critiquing and challenging an oppressive status quo.  The following Situationist-inspired performance art will give you a flavour.  It's a radio ballet, which is an ensemble performance choreographed in real-time using invitations to perform certain actions broadcast through personal radio sets.  Usually, anyone can join in like a flashmob.  This one is in Leipzig organised by the Ligna group in 2008:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI3pfa5QNZI (thanks to Jonathan B for proposing this one)

You might like to try something similar at lunch today.  You're walking down the street, perhaps, and just stop for a minute and look at the sky.  As the Ligna radio stream says, 'Lingering makes situations uncontrollable'.

Robert Montgomery says he 'works in a poetic and melancholic post-Situationist tradition'.  His main thing is taking billboards normally used for.... yaaaaawwwwnn... advertising and making them work for something more beautiful.  For example...

• http://www.robertmontgomery.org/robertmontgomery.org/7.html (suggested by Mel H)

The Open Council is runs alongside the real Council in Newcastle promoting experimental policies for the city.  Among these are manhole dancing, public bonsai, orange charming and, my favourite, bin spreading, which is exactly that - spreading bins about.

• www.opencouncil.co.uk (thanks to Kate M for suggesting this one)

This film of a huge elaborate flashmob in Moscow caught the eye of Akila, who suggested it for www.waysofloving.com - this is wild:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgoapkOo4vg

Hernando Guanlao turned his house into a library with no lending rules - if you want the book, keep it.  It's all free and people bring him so many books he's run out of room:

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/magazine-19547365  (thanks to Sunniva S for suggesting this)

And here's - oh, look, it's me - outside the perfectly sterile 'Chimes' Shopping Centre in Uxbridge.  I don't know why it's called Chimes - it doesn't have anything as beautiful as a bell and it doesn't chime with anything (marketing men from London with Armani specs name all the provincial shopping centres, I guess).  Anyway, by laying a line of local conkers and beech nuts across the entrance I'm trying to manifest an ecological threshold in the same place as the shopping centre's threshold.  The police didn't like this at all but they let me carry on because it was a peaceful protest, although the shopping centre security staff... well, you could say they went bonkers about the conkers and paid scorn to the acorn(s), and can guess how they felt about the beech nuts.

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