Ruins III

Modern Ruins: Apocalyptic Visions and Ruin Tourism

The anxiety and uncertainty created by the processes of rapid technological change have fuelled both a dramatic bi-polar futuristic optimism and passive nostalgia through photography. Arnold argues that a combination of economic factors and industrial decline, coupled alongside an inherent appreciation of the ruinscape as a visual aesthetic helps to ‘fetishise’ photographs of decay and demise.  Speaking in particular about the negative associations brought about the continual representation of Detroit’s industrial abandonments, such aestheticisation it is suggested does little to represent the multifaceted nature of the city, effectively memorialising sites of ruin in a static iconography of decline and dereliction that the author describes as tailoring to a ‘post apocalyptic imagination’ that fixes dystopian narratives thereby thwarting alternative and progressive notions of the city that portray Detroit in a more positive perspective.

Tegtmeyer agrees, citing MacCannell’s model of the ‘semiotics of attraction’ to suggest that the significance of photography in capturing Detroit’s decline turns the city into an attractive destination for urban tourism that alludes to the economic function of site memorialisation, commodifying Detroit’s negative image as urban wasteland and shifting urban decline into that of a post-industrial archeological treasure that might be embraced for profit. The question remains as to how the politics of representation are managed within the malleable and contested politics of the visual realm.  Pohl, while acknowledging that the aesthetics of ruin appreciation do little to represent an individual city’s complex social realities, seeks to legitimise the ‘post-apocalyptic’ designation as fundamentally emblematic of an ontological circumstance that accurately views the planet as residing in a cultural condition of permanent crisis, arguing that there is “no more suitable image for the present than the ruin”.

Rather than viewing the photographic output here as purely an avenue to commodification of visual representations of decay, cementing the post-apocalyptic depiction of cities such as a Detroit in an echo chamber of abandonment, cultural as well as literal, Zylinska points out that ‘urban explorers’, a subcultural social formation that uses photography to document modern ruins often sharing these images and anecdotes to internet forums, are engaged and attracted to the practice not just from an aesthetic desire to capture the transitory nature of places, but also as an engaged, active experience of being present in the awareness of the transitional space. The witness is experiencing affective associations with the site of ruination, where an act of personal mediation takes place alongside this engagement.  Garrett attests to this mediation claiming that the act of accessing sites of ruin, usually prohibited and discouraged by societal norms, democratises the privatised urban landscape becoming a reactionary social practice that, if not political in assertion, is political in action.  The author (and photographer) views the exploits of urban explorers as performing assertions of autonomous, spatial freedom while defining the practice as a reactionary social adaptation to the ‘sanitisation’ of public space and escalating securitisation.  The suggestion is that through embodied physical explorations of the temporary, obsolete, abandoned, derelict and infrastructural areas of the urban landscape, recreational trespass acts as a form of spatial engagement that subversively tests the boundaries of the built environment in a transgressive, political reaction to accepted social expectations of urban space. Consequentially, practitioners  develop affective and emotional responses and enhance the formation of personal relationships within the city.  In a review of the phenomenon within urban exploration toward images that represent the ‘aesthetics of decay’, otherwise termed ‘ruin lust’, the research places prominence in the attraction to ruins as being borne out of a desire for ‘unregulated, derelict playgrounds’ and aligns this as being as result of the contemporary economic instability and the increased sense that urban space is sterilised and over-regulated. Curiosity and creativity performed in the urban landscape, therefore, is coupled with heightened forms of sensory experience to confound the socially accepted boundaries of the sanitised city. Despite this, Garrett too predicts a scenario where the activities of the urban exploration community might well become subject to forces of appropriation by monetised media interests, a view that seems problematic, if not unsustainable, as if the aforementioned public sharing of images and anecdotes is to be seen as a vital outcome of the practice, then the inter-related challenges entailed with this increased awareness and public exposure might lead to manifestations of increased securitisation and general commodification.

In the article, “Urban Exploration: From Subterranea to Spectacle”, Kindynis argues that urban exploration is best understood as an ‘embodied spatial practice’ while challenging the notion that the subcultural practices associated with the phenomenon can be described as subversive or transgressive, asserting instead that urban exploration is more easily linked to modern consumerist influences and the contemporary effects of ‘consumption of images’ than it would care to be associated to. Kindynis goes on to suggest that the traits of visual representation of urban exploration is increasingly concerned with presenting ‘spectacular visuality’ as a means of identity construction in the social media driven environment of internet culture, containing a greater sense of social and individual functionality than as a product of any form political formation. The author suggests that recreational trespass practices should be viewed as ‘rhizomatic’ social formations, where the complexity is such that more rigid structures of understanding might not pertain to the many divergent possibilities and modes of analysis, allowing for the possibility of forces of transformation, hybridity and connection to shift analytic focus.

Through these understandings, it becomes possible to view an inexhaustible potential of arrangements and orientations that become independently dependant on a specific focus and gaze. The flows of connected data, ideas and concepts becoming coherent and tangible via many pathways and processes of organisation, revealing complex and multiple manifestations of conceptualisation.  Ruins are subject to a multiplicity of individual and collective imaginings in the contemporary condition of society where dissemination, connectivity and social formations interact with ruination in a variety of assemblages.