Deleuzian Fields

While Deleuze and Guattari consider these two spaces to differ fundamentally in nature, they also believe that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture.

Potential site for a larger pop up. The space underneath the Birmingham BT Tower. The top of the Birmingham & Fazeley canal Farmers Bridge locks. I am in discussion with Ikon and Roundhouse to secure funding to use the space in November for the Horror in the Modernist Block exhibition that I will be involved in. Hopefully with Spaceplay, brutalist model specialists.

The former Yugoslavia brutalist monuments were probably the most amazing examples of the form. With titles like ‘Monument to The Revolution of the People of Moslavina (nickname: The Flying Death Star) they felt like something out of a Tarkovsky film... There’s a link... John Madin designed the HRT tv studio headquarters in Zagreb. This mid-century Cold War functionalism led to some really epic structures back here in Blighty. Totally inhuman the Pool Road Car Park is a hotspot for suicide, drug users and anti-social behaviour. But it’s still in use, and was recently repaired. When we got there, although open, it was devoid of a single parked car - an alien landscape. Unable to contain his excitement, spot-picker @section_8 was at the top of this modernism monolith, before me and @magnetic_mirror had even got the kit out of the car. At the end of our amazing day of filming, everything snapped into place, the light was right, the view was amazing, and my modular patch totally clicked.

“I have never been very certain as to the value of tangible links with the past. They are often more sentimental than valuable... As to Birmingham’s buildings, there is little of real worth in our architecture. Its replacement should be an improvement... As for future generations, I think they will be better occupied in applying their thoughts and energies to forging ahead, rather than looking backward.” Thus Herbert Manzoni built the Birmingham ringroad, dividing communities, ghettoising areas by design, clearing slums but urbanising once and for all what had once been a market town that had been ravaged by industry and war... In those underpasses and tunnels weird islands where no one wanted to linger other pastimes arose, outdoor drinking havens, cathedrals to street skaters... Fastlands (I’m reliably informed by old school skater @jonmoore1972 that’s what the skaters a call it) is under a part of Birmingham’s ‘Aston Expressway’ that soon becomes Spaghetti Junction or the Gravelly Hill Interchange...

The concrete used for the smashing cathedrals of brutalism was the ideal material for building roads - and birmingham brought the motorway right through the heart of the city... Herbert Manzoni’s ringroad kept traffic flying around at a pace as passengers and freight came through the heart of the UK. Urban populations went underground - literally we became tunnel people. 

On the commercial end of the #Calthorpe Estate is one of the “finest post war offices designed by a leading architect” (Historic England), St James’s House “Designed in the 1950s by the noted Birmingham architect John Madin for the Engineering and Allied Employer’s Federation, his was a ground-breaking industrial relations building, cleverly planned to ease employer and Trade Union encounters. It therefore embodies one of the leading themes of the 20th century’s social history.”

John Madin, Architect & Planner, before his large municipal projects in town centres, mainly Birmingham, designed commercial housing for his first large project, redeveloping the area in the well-heeled #Edgbaston on the non-industrialised side of the Worcester Canal, (as inner-city areas were required to increase their population density, post WWII) the #Calthorpe Estate. Here I am in the shadow of Warwick Crest tower - still leafy, still loved, mid-century modern living that has endured, here at least... And, in brutalist style alongside the modular synth I’m using a 1-bit drum machine - The Lunchbeat!

Wind (& water) study for smooth spaces

D & G also talk about two planes of interaction. There is the plane of organisation where things interact in a vertical form, with hierarchy and in a specific order where if one of its parts is missing, then the whole structure collapses. The second plane would be the plane of consistency. The rhizome takes action in this plane. It is a horizontal alliance with no specific direction where all multiplicities that make part of it, interact with one another.

The doctrine or theory of immanence holds that the divine encompasses or is manifested in the material world. It is held by some philosophical and metaphysical theories of divine presence. ... It is often contrasted with theories of transcendence, in which the divine is seen to be outside the material world.