Another in an occasional series exploring design typologies. (Previously: a survey of Lightships here)

What can you say about a cigarette lighter that projects an image of Osama bin Laden?

Except, that it provides more evidence that novelty products are the place where the most frightening conceptions of culture coalesce. Forget Milan and its multiple takes on what we would like to be. It's objects from the periphery where we see what we really are. The bargain bucket at the toy shop, knock-offs on the market stall, gift shop detritus ... these are the places where plastic is moulded into objects that hybridise the contemporary condition faster than we can comprehend. So fast, its hard to describe them, or work out quite what they mean.

I've no idea what this piece of video is, where it came from, or what it's for. But it seems an appropriate eulogy for J.G. Ballard, perhaps the only Briton who really understood modernity.

Perhaps the most disquieting development in the candy novelty world is the 'Candy Pistol'. You place the barrel between your lips and pull the trigger to fire a candy bullet into your mouth. (These photos show a spontaneous quasi-performance piece that could have been titled 'Candy Darling' at the Lisson Gallery.)

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Rock My Religion (1982-84)
1982-84, 55:27 min, b&w and color, sound

Rock My Religion is a provocative thesis on the relation between religion and rock music in contemporary culture. Graham formulates a history that begins with the Shakers, an early religious community who practiced self-denial and ecstatic trance dances. With the "reeling and rocking" of religious revivals as his point of departure, Graham analyzes the emergence of rock music as religion with the teenage consumer in the isolated suburban milieu of the 1950s, locating rock's sexual and ideological context in post-World War II America. The music and philosophies of Patti Smith, who made explicit the trope that rock is religion, are his focus. This complex collage of text, film footage and performance forms a compelling theoretical essay on the ideological codes and historical contexts that inform the cultural phenomenon of rock `n' roll music.

Original Music: Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth. Sound: Ian Murray, Wharton Tiers. Narrators: Johanna Cypis, Dan Graham. Editors: Matt Danowski, Derek Graham, Ian Murray, Tony Oursler. Produced by Dan Graham and the Moderna Museet.

Painting of Junction 7 of the M25 / M23 by Michael HirshVia

What Florence was to the Renaissance, what Paris was to Modernism, so was the hinterland of the M25 to a particular generation. For a fleeting moment this non-place became the ephemeral capital of a brief moment in time.

The big outdoor raves of the early nineties changed the way we could occupy landscape. As The Orb put it in the layered samples that made up Little Fluffy Clouds, "to the traditional sound of the British summer - the lawn mover, the smack of leather on willow - has been added a new sound". It was as though traditional events like the Stoneleigh Royal Show (as eulogized by Cedric Price in this very column see here) were ramped up and accelerated via man-machine-Detroit-fantasy, Kling-Klang-Jam-Stall, and Motorik picturesque to a hypnotic futurist vision. In between the urban acid house warehouse parties which preceded them and the commercialized metropolitan super-clubs like the Ministry of Sound, these events marked out a different kind of territory.

They played out over the landscape of early 1990s Britain, organised through the technologies of pirate radio, telephone recorded messages, flyers with graphics fresh from newly accessible desktop publishing. What these devices gathered together was not so much a place as a network of transport and communication infrastructures overlaid with coincidences of chemicals, decibels, and demountable structures. Powered by generators, the technologies of pleasure - soundsystems, funfairs, lights, lasers - were wired up and switched on to form an instant city. Or at least what felt for a moment like something with its own instant and ephemeral geography, townscape, public spaces, neighborhoods, and other urbanistic tropes. It was almost like Archigram had predicted: phones, electricity, and gadgets with the suburbs and Home Counties as a backdrop. Vast crowds of us became versions of David Greenes "Electric Aborigine" dressed in performance fabrics, splashed with neon, threaded with shreds of new age, faux hippyness.

We gathered in places that were nowhere in particular: underpasses, fields, warehouses, fallow fields, and old airstrips, places that were neither urban, suburban nor rural. The kinds of places between infrastructure & destinations that are hardly places at all. Non-places: The M25, service stations, the fields of the not-so-rural southern east England, the bits in between housing estates, agriculture and big box retail. Though it was often hard to pinpoint exactly where you were there was never any doubt that you were in the strange reality of the contemporary British landscape.

For a moment disparate populations of indie kids, football fans and travelers amongst loose agglomerations of equipment were held together by music which itself created a type of space. Piano breaks, squelching bass, trebly, speeded-up vocals and what the Criminal Justice Act described as "a succession of repetitive beats' formed a kind of immersive, sonic urbanism. The sound itself was spatial - it was non-linear, formed of juxtaposed incidents and layers of sensation suggesting distance. The music was overwhelming, relentless and constantly on the edge of a futurist sublime. Deep in the moment, the ephemeral construction felt endless and timeless. Could 20 000 people standing in a field for a weekend be a town any less, or any more than 20000 people in houses, flats, places of employment, education?

For a couple of summers, the M25 became a serotonin soaked ring of infrastructure, a periphery became both a destination and a symbol. In Shakespearian terms, it was a concrete O crammed with potential and possibility. This road without destination showed is that its possible - or almost possible - to re-tune the infrastructures of contemporary landscape. It tweaked the channels of Thatcherite free-market neo-liberalism into in order to deliver something different, a brief alternative.

These were imaginary landscapes and were always provisional. They never really existed beyond their immediate experience. Though rave culture itself was idiotic, hedonistic and a-political - a shallow ephemera that achieved nothing of lasting significance - we might still be able to learn from it. Networks intended to deliver one kind of ideology also might be able to deliver quite another. We might be able to inhabit what seem soulless, anonymous landscapes in ways that allows them to host exaggerated sensations of humanity. We might be able to believe there is a latent magic in the banal, everyday landscape that is powerful enough to transform the miserable landscape of late Thatcherism, even if only for a weekend. And that that might be enough.

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Floating Church of the Redeemer, Philadelphia, 1847

Lieb House, 13th March 2009

Ok, so the Lieb House was in New Jersey, but at least its conception was Philly-centric. Today, the Venturi and Rauch designed house sailed under the Brooklyn Bridge on its journey to Long Island, waved on from South Street Seaport in the early morning by its architect and a gang of onlookers assembled by Storefront.

In a strange coincidence, on a recent trip to Philly to meet with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown - which included a road trip to see the Lieb House in its original location - I was idling in a bookshop and stumbled across a precedent for Philadelphias floating architecture in the shape of the Floating Church of the Redeemer.

This, on the floating church from Plan Philly:

"Moored off Dock Street from 1847-1851.This mobile house of worship was built in Bordentown NJ in 1847, and towed to Philadelphia's bustling Dock Street wharf. Believed to be the first floating church on the East Coast (predating a similar church in New York by three years), The Floating Church of the Redeemer was a project of the Churchman's Missionary Association for Seamen, an arm of the Episcopal Church, and was devoted to serving sailors. The church left Philadelphia in 1851, when its pier was leased for more worldly purposes. Towed to Camden, it was hauled ashore and dragged on rollers to the corner of Broadway and Rayden Streets where it served a small congregation under the name St. John's. The land-locked river-church was consumed by fire on Christmas morning several years later."

I'm in Lausanne, where tonight I'll be chairing a discussion with David Keshavjee & Julien Tavelli (Lausanne), Rafael Koch & Urs Hofer (Bern), and Jeremy Schorderet & Cem Sever (Lausanne). We'll be talking about tools and automation processes in graphic design, and what architecture might learn. (My guess is that architecture has a lot to learn!).

Forms of Inquiry, The Architecture of Critical Graphic Design (27 February - 9 April 2009),
opening at Archizoom, Lausanne, presents alongside the exhibition, its ongoing Public Program.

All events will take place in the Archizoom exhibition space, EPFL, ENAC.