Principal Investigator: Patrick Keiller, Communication Art & Design
Co-Investigators: Professor Doreen Massey, Open University and Professor Patrick Wright, Nottingham Trent University
Project studentship: Matthew Flintham, PhD student, Communication Art & Design
Amount awarded: £410,247
Year of award: 2006
The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image is a collaboration between three researchers – the geographer Doreen Massey, the cultural historian Patrick Wright, and the film-maker Patrick Keiller – that sets out to locate economic, social and political aspects of the current global predicament in the UK’s landscapes.
The researchers are collaborating in the production of several works, each primarily identified with one of the three: Patrick Keiller is researching, photographing and writing a feature-length film, a document of journeys through the UK’s landscape in search of images of urban and rural landscapes, and what is generally understood as ‘nature’, as the basis for a critical commentary, so far envisaged as a re-imagination of the UK’s landscape as that of a semi-fictional near future. In parallel with this, Patrick Wright is researching and writing a book, a critique of past and present ideas of deep settlement, and their engagement with landscape. These will be accompanied by an essay by Doreen Massey, in which she will argue for a sense of place as open to elsewhere; for place, as she puts it, as event.
The project follows similar studies by members of the project team, including Patrick Keiller’s films London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997); Patrick Wright’s books On Living in an Old Country (1985), A Journey through Ruins (1991), The Village that Died for England (1995/2002) and recent essays; and Doreen Massey’s influential essay ‘A global sense of place’ (1991), her book For Space (2005) and a forthcoming book on London in the UK and the world.
The researchers’ collaboration dates from Keiller’s Robinson in Space, which was informed by Massey’s essay, and its expansion as a book that included a conversation between Keiller and Wright. Doreen Massey was interviewed in Keiller’s film The Dilapidated Dwelling (2000) and all three contributed to the anthology The Unknown City (MIT, 2001). All are or have been based both within and outside London. Robinson in Space investigated England’s economic geography in the mid-1990s, a period characterised by a particular interpretation of the world’s economy. This project is a further evolution of this mode of research, after a decade during which perceptions of the world’s economy have changed, suggesting a study of the new predicament, with its many anxieties.
Funding included a three year PhD studentship which was awarded to Matthew Flintham for an analysis of military land-use in the UK, and how this is evolving as a result of recent developments in technology, mobility and communication.