Live To Win

Some years ago while shoplifting from a major hardware store I experienced a type of old fashioned security system – one that needs no technology, or cameras or electronic tags and yet has the possibility to be everywhere. I’m speaking of the undercover security guard, and I found the experience remarkable because it caused me to reflect on how systems of fascism and state control have always relied on the impulse that humans have to turn on one another. Much like the panopticon (a circular prison system designed around a central tower from which guards could, in theory, always be watching), centralised states with heavy surveillance – like the former German Democratic Republic, or the Stalinist USSR, keep their citizens in check by making sure that there could always be someone watching. Lets call this “someone”, Mr Invisible – because he is everywhere, yet only reveals himself at strategic moments. Mr Invisible is the shadow that walks just a step behind you, keep...

I like airports. It's the sense of their potential, alongside their transitory emptiness that makes a strange poetic harmony. They are waiting to be filled with meaning. Which gives you the sense that anything is possible in an airport, that every choice you make has significant effect on what comes next. It's usually with hindsight that we identify the moments or spaces where our lives change. It's hard to be inspired by these moments because seen in retrospect this is where possibilities die, where futures are locked into place and where unchangeable reality is formed. Everyone has played the 'what if' game at some difficult point in their life, but at some level we all know that it's an unhealthy exercise. The events which have led to a situation can't be changed, although the readings of them can, so generally it's better to accept the present and focus on planning for the future. So what do you make then, of a situation where the present could ...

There's something beautiful about comics - the way they freeze and crystalize moments of crisis like nothing else can. The spastic jump of objects knocked from a table as a body is hurled through a window. The look of awe on a face as something epic is revealed before it's beholder.  What is the way without artifice to capture the moments and places and scenes of life in this city that seduce with their temporary brilliance. It's difficult to avoid the (capitalist) logic of progress while documenting a time - the implicit idea that all things must/will develop and grow bigger, firmer, more exposed to the appreciation of a wider audience, so that we can look back with feigned respect to when they were small and "real". Appreciation here has a financial ring to it.  Placing a moment into a sellable capsule must inevitably starve and kill off the creative vibrant energy which made it burn so bright in the first place. Instead I seek a lasting means for admiring that...