‘ok computer’ and the new landscapes – a tirade (or a semi-paper)

the western express highway is the space of this new world- of erasures and displacements. a non-place. all the old landmarks are gone. old homes lie half eaten on the hills that used to resist free vehicular movement. soon these fragments will also disappear and be replaced by concrete walls or domesticated nature. the flow of the river must not be quelled.

this is the architecture of the new world-. lubricated, reflective and smooth- and i am the ideal subject. i travel in air conditioned cars and click photos of the devastation from my camera phone. i find my pleasure in disembodied music that moves with me.

with the rains now finally beginning, the landscape takes on a more surreal nature. through the twisting lines of water on the windshield the buildings are distorted in a cold blue haze with the yellow tires of puncture repair men hung above the temple tops.

the only soundtrack imaginable for the new landscape of the western express highway nowadays is radioheads’ ‘ok computer’. here speed and stillness collide in an exquisite vision of the present. it’s a world of unending movements forward, to an unknown destination- a place where we all shall be automatons, following every instruction spoken by the voices that speak of a fitter, happier, more productive future. the thrust is forward to a place where we lose all out identity and history seems nothing but a haze of misinformation and fetish.

one day a few summers back ninad, sonal and me in a urge to document, took a ride down the highway to photograph the new landscape. it was a day in late summer much like it is today. it was impossible to stop anywhere on the road. there was no real shelter anywhere. the sun was beating down and there was no edge to the highway. even today it much like that and actually even more hostile to any stationary human presence. a body lingering purposeless on the edge of the road has no reason to exist.

it’s the machine that is still the metaphor for the city – this time in a new form. it is not the machine where differing parts work in unison to produce energy. instead the machine now produces images of safety and security - the appearance of docile tamed pleasures. every part now is more removed from one another than ever before. the distance is necessary for all parts to believe in an inner peace. the in between / or those who want to survive on the physical joints in between are to disappear. exist somehow – but not where they might cause any distraction from an eternal silence that stands for peace. how can nature be absent from this peace?

after all, it is the myth of nature where we return to our pure savage selves. this is a safe nature though – no wildness - flowers to be plucked and arranged in vases- not fruits that might attract stray animals and other vagrants.

it’s the urge of architecture to be pure. to rid itself of its internal contradictions. even more so after modernism promised an egalitarianism that previously did not exist- as if an aesthetic could set us free of ourselves. there is also phenomenology to this. the phenomenology is one of emptiness- or of a loss of specific historicity or memory. minimalism of reference to anything that might emerge out of locality. instead it is based upon supposedly universal desires for freedom through relentless movement. accessibility and freedom are the excuse for the void.

the emptiness also enables the isolation of a body in space. it allows a surveillance of all under the guise of security. there is a hard white light around us all where we lay claim to our legitimacy in the space of the city. and if we don’t subscribe consider ourselves evicted.

vulgar set theory and arrow diagrams are the tools of planning purity. we group, we connect. in this we also disrupt. slum rehabilitation projects are necessitated instead of slum upgradation, anonymous high rise entities instead of the tangible rough ridden houses of the poor.

‘mind space’ is more than merely a name for an area – it is also an entire way of imagining retreat from the city. into the only space where we think we are safe- inside our minds. call centers glow on the streets here with an inner life late into the night. glass facades that only reflect the barrenness outside, glass windows that no one is permitted to look out of less the simulation is revealed. in this perpetual daylight new desires are manufactured, new lives created. i am born again as a new person in this world. my time, my space and my identity are all reconstructed / reconstituted.

i think that is why i loved ‘john and jane’ and its world of liquid interior corridors and artificial light.
i think it was one of the few places that i have seen this new landscape described. and it was through the relationship of the characters of the drama –glen and his anger and/or irony at losing his identity or naomi and her complete loss of selfhood that we approached it.

on the other hand there a form of resistance to the loss of identity that seems emerging. in the neo-conservatism of tv serials or the moral policing of the city at night. there is the urge to re-fabricate identity through manufacturing history. but this history is a fiction serving more as reactionary rhetoric. it is a simulacra far removed from the history as lived.

there is no better example of this perhaps than the reconstruction of that one building on d n road. the old building disappeared once the finances to keep the ruin alive vanished. a new building was built in its place that pseudo resurrected the old building- in glaringly fake classical detailing. built in completely new materials the new building was not even a pale imitation of the old- merely bore a surface resemblance to a pastiche of what an old building might have been. not a brick of the old building lies on the plot and yet this is a part of the heritage listing for the city. the justification for this being that even this obvious charade of history is better than succumbing to the glass and steel of the present.


i am wondering why is there this ridiculous choice between the two. why are we constantly reacting to appearances, unable to penetrate the layers of image. perhaps there is a power to praxis to in the way that lefebvre imagines it. the power invested in an individual for freedom within the practice of everyday life.

i think what i love about ‘ok computer’ is its ability to capture the spectacular landscape of the present city for all the exhilarating headiness it gives me as i drive along the new roads; and also the sinking sadness of alienation that seems ever present. but all this would be purely theoretical crap if it was not for the absolutely fantastic music with the drone of the guitars, the blips and beeps of the soundscape, the moan of thom yorkes voice and all those fragments of beautiful melodies that lie in the middle of it all.