In Ships Not Shelters, the Peckham Outer-Space Initiative (POI) has produced a publication creatively renouncing the stasis inherent in the idea of a shelter, and instead embracing the ship as a vehicle (physically, mentally) for some diagonal forward thinking. Primarily comprising of Anvil and El Ultimo Grito, whose studio/gallery Shopwork serves as the weekly meeting place for the Initiative and the springboard for all the productive solutions to come out of POI. In need of further explanation – and with them being the sorts of people who promote dialogue as a mode for making – it made sense that we ask them a few questions about the whole endeavour.
The underlying premise behind Shopwork is to encourage and develop writing about production, practices and personal approaches to work, with the aim of creating a greater level of understanding about what design is, and could be.
With these aims in mind it was paramount to find an open arena in which to generate this discussion. This is how what we call the ‘Shopwork Dialogues’ started. This is a space where an open group of designers, thinkers, practitioners, etc. could meet and discuss ideas of design as a form of applied philosophy.
Now it’s finally on our cisterns, shelves and tables we are able to defer and refer to it as part of the canon and feed it right back into the dialogue and the everyday, an underwriter of our reality.
Ships Not Shelters (SNS) is the battle cry of this campaign, a cry for a progressive view of the world which is represented by the ship, a tool for the prospect and fascination of the uncharted. The shelter sits in sheer contrast to this, it is where we hide away, scared to venture out into the unknown. Amongst other things we are working on a prequel to SNS which will work as a direct manifesto for POI. That is POI not just as the “Peckham Outer-Space Initiative” but also the broader “Point Of Interest.”
SNS is also simply a handy (170 page) reminder to GTFO of Earth.
It’s important to make it clear that our dialogues are both a means and an ends, as much a part of the work we do as a process to generate material. It is in discussion, which is by its very nature collaborative, that we probe and explore our thinking. We work out turns of phrases, cliches, opinions, views, and understanding.
Another important part of our current process is making what could be called fanzines: a super short-run of awkward and impenetrable documents that chart how we have applied our emerging half-baked thinking into our practices. So when it came to put ‘Ships not Shelters’ together, we butchered the zines and built on them, replacing and refining the material.
Although we are currently focused on understanding and developing motives for leaving and analysing outer-space as a cultural living condition, the Peckham Outer-Space Initiative is a libertarian organisation that encourages the development of individual utopias and therefore actively promotes and supports any individual’s efforts to leave Earth.
With regards to a POI PLS (physical leaving solution) we both collectively and individually make daily attempts to overcome and free ourselves from our planet’s gravity grip. But to date the Earth has remained defiant in the face of these efforts, and so for the time being we remain grounded, slaves to the surface.
Words
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Date
5 September 2011
https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/peckham-outer-space-initiative
RESEARCH APPOSED TO INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION > Why this mass produced pint glass is research? > First POI depicted dialogue. 31.3.12 > ref. The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers's issue 7. 'Come Down' 1982 by Shelton, Sheridan and Mavrides
POI
POI (Peckham Outer-Space Initiative, Point Of Interest, Person Of Interest,...) is an “All Action Research Group” that sprang out from our weekly Shopwork Dialogues.
Shopwork* was the name that we gave to the studio that we first rented when we come back to London after spending three years in Berlin. It was a high street shop with a space open to public view. We had been thinking for some time about developing an open facility for independent design learning and this new space gave us the opportunity to start. We began with Saturday Dialogues, open house morning dialogues from 11am onwards. We instigated a series of exhibitions where the emphasis would be on a publication with the mere intent of promoting design writing within the design community. We have just published Abandoned Architectures*, a collection of essays and thoughts around our practice. Writing this book helped us to understand that, ultimately, design is what we do in order to understand design and this fact had influenced greatly our practice, so we wanted to see more designers writing. Shopwork became both a space for practice and an on-demand publishing enterprise*.
Although Shopwork was open to anybody, and remained so till the end, Stuart, Mike and us became the consistent core. Take-away coffee from Petitou, Ginger Beer for Mike. The dialogues gained fluency, we built Shopwork references from things we have seen or heard that week and from the recurrent themes, design, education, internet features, films and series, books and comics, rock&roll, punk and death-metal. Fantasising about the future via analysing the present while developing a whole landscape of theories. After 3pm, we would change venues to The Montpelier, pints, and more dialogues. After one year of prolific dialogues we decided it was time to capture these onto some format. We have considered recording them for pod-casts but discarded the idea, there would be too many hours to go through. Then is when we started producing zines. Only a few pages long, a mix of sound bites of the previous week's dialogue and ideas triggered by those. But we were also exploring ways in which all these dialogues and ideas would feedback onto design.
We created POI to build research generating new concepts to exploit their potential as a creative medium. Scrutinising ideas and extrapolating them to diverse contexts in order to provoke non sequential examination of the subjects. This research is generative, meaning than rather than finding and processing information, it functions as a means for active production of outcomes that explore the subject, offering new perspectives.
*Shopwork address from September 2009 to July 2012 was 155 Bellenden Road, London SE15 4DH.
*Abandoned Architectures. El Ultimo Grito. [NAME] Publications' Objects Aside Series, edited by Ernesto Oroza and Gean Moreno.
*Shopwork published:
“My Name is …..
‘SHIPS NOT SHELTERS’ BY POI (Stuart Bannocks, Roberto Feo, Rosario Hurtado and Mike Patrick) published by Shopwork, London. ISBN 978-1-4507-8151-0
COLLAPSCAPES AND
COLLAPSCAPES AND TECTONIC MOVEMENTS
‘Collapscapes’ describes a man made geography resulting from artificially compressing time and space for production purposes. We derived this concept from the observation of early industrial models, which brought together ‘under one roof’ all the previously, autonomous, auxiliary processes. This collapsing of a geography resonated as a massive collage that forcefully removed resources, people and jobs, production facilities, businesses, etc.. and rearranged them in a new structural geography that generated a new reality that responded to a different sense of space and time. Maybe closer visually to tectonic movements, that brought about the world’s geography we know today.
‘Collapscaping’ could then be described as a technical approach to the facilitation production by means of artificially altering the relationship of time and space. When collapscapes or collapscaping is thought about as process or technique we can see that it describes an approach to shaping the world into a human dimension. We could reinterpret the transition from a hunter-gatherer community into a farming one as consequence of this early attempt at collapscaping their world into an easier, less time consuming, comfortable and reliable than the existing one. The farm probably represents the first collapscape, where man willed crops and animals into a one location and in doing so transforming the way he thought and experience time and space.
What is interesting for us when designing a new concept, it is not only its ability to aid our understanding of a situation but also it’s potential as a creative medium. For us the scrutiny of the idea and its extrapolation to diverse contexts is essential to generate a non sequential examination of the subject. When generating new ideas, it is important that these are open, suggestive and even contradictory, this only makes its examination more enjoyable and the research outcomes more interesting.
Collapscapes and Industry
Collapscapes and cinema.
The idea of a collapscape is probably nowhere clearer than when thinking of cinema. We have all wondered and realised how in many of our favourite movies are inconsistencies in terms of space an time.
I had a friend, Juanico, he grew up in Almeria. This region of Spain is famous for its dessertic landscape, sun and these days for its vast poly-tunnel fields which blur the landscape in the intense summer heat (another collapscape on its own right) In the 60’s and 70’s was also known because it provided the backdrop for all those Sergio Leonne spaghetti westerns