- Venue
- Geodecity Installed Dome City
- Location
- East Midlands
On the weekend of the 4 -5th August, myself and a group of friends left behind our failed cities and journeyed to the building ground of what promised to be a new Utopia, Geodecity. This pilgrimage was to be the first practical step in the latest project by Nottingham based art group Reactor. Those who remember my bewildered review of Total GHAOS in Last Hours 12 may be familiar with Reactor’s track record and interest in the audience as artwork, participants are presented with situations in which their reactions and participatory responses become the focus for experience and objective appraisal.
During the run up towards the weekend, the Geodecity anticipation had been built upon and accelerated via emails and post outs. We were first asked to choose new, set family names and a colour for use in the project. Secondly arriving via post were our neon pink, Arts Council logo, Geo Pioneer drawstring bags along with a card template for a tetrahedron in the colour of our choice, our instructions being to construct and write upon the four sides a quote or message which would be the foundation building blocks of the new Utopia. I think mine must have shown my punk roots of Bad Religion and Operation Ivy, it read something like ‘We must grow through unity and appreciation of diversity or be stunted in apathy and ignorance.’ Finally via email we received our final preliminary task, given an excerpt on a scientific theory linking thought to geometry in which the Geodecity project was founded, we were asked to visualize and describe our thoughts on Geodecity. A pretty open ended task for interpretation, so it was that myself an Artist wrote an account of a 2000AD style city of dolphin powered sonar trains and blind mouse operated clockwork suns. My girlfriend Sarah, a Chemist interpreted her vision based on the workings and correlation of carbon molecules and our friend McCarthy, an intellectual drunk, gave his idealist interpretation of warm summer breezes, friends laughing and the sweet smell of cider. These along with our other friends differing stories provided the start of what gives others and myself our great appreciation for what Reactor sets out to do. Already as the audience, we were learning and appreciating unrecognized aspects and ways of working with each other from just this one small task, the weekend itself had not even begun.
Our pick up on the baking hot Saturday afternoon was at Derby bus station, the other locations of Leicester and Nottingham being already fully booked. Here we were met by our guide to the Geodecity site Bonus Eliphas, along with the rest of the group of our fellow prospective Geo Pioneers. The site for the new city turned out to be an old quarry in Shepshed. When all three parties had arrived and adorned ourselves in colour-coordinated smocks, we were given our introduction by the Reactor. The old world had gone, as had its leisure and comforts, lost with the failed cities. Also gone however were the intrinsic flaws which had made those cities and old society collapse. It was our task as Geodecity pioneers to lay the foundations and blueprint for a new city for both ourselves and for others to follow.
Following ritualistic assembly by the group of a form using our combined tetrahedrons we then set off divided by name and colour to tackle the immediate needs of the group. These being food, a fire and shelter in the form of construction of eight giant cardboard Geodesic domes large enough to house six of us each. Each of the tasks was completed with relevant efficiency, the group had focus, direction and the enthusiasm nurtured from the event’s build up. It was hard work, and hot as the sun was in full mid afternoon glare and come the end of it all we were all grateful for the vege curries prepared, fire and getting to meet and talk to our colleagues before eventually collapsing, the majority of us exhausted.
The next morning saw a rather reluctant start by many, moods were fraught, a lot of us either tending red wine hangovers, aching from the previous day or beleaguered from lack of sleep. It had been an unexpected discovery that the geodesic domes not only proved an excellent form of strong shelter, but also provided the unique ability of magnifying the snore-echo intensity of its occupants. Furthermore the weather once again promised to be intensely hot. With all this combined the tasks set for the day were meeting somewhat adverse enthusiasm from the previously ever ready Geo Pioneers. The unspoken promise of our old world comforts being attainable by midday sullied the overall temperament further, ‘I mean what kind of Utopia doesn’t have coffee?’ asked a drained faced American.
Our task today was to come up with ideas on how we would make our new Utopian city flourish and to record these as a blueprint for others to follow in the future. What immediate problems would arise and how could they be tackled with our limited resources? What would be the demands our new society would impose both short term and long term? After throwing about ideas we again separated into smaller groups to tackle and think of possible solutions before regrouping to share with the others. It was here that personal obstacles began to manifest, personal beliefs and attitudes became probably the biggest hindrance to this exercise. As we were demonstrating, equality of our personal Utopian ideals was to be an impossibility, if we were to maintain overall satisfaction of the group. We found ourselves falling back more and more upon the familiar models and ways of the failed cities, although on a more unadvanced, tribalistic level. Was this through unimaginative ignorance? I’d categorize the overall group as left wing tendency artists and thinkers, however we were experiencing and demonstrating what we in our society and subcultures today frown and moan upon on a daily basis: the hypocrisy of our society in providing full proof solutions to our personal demands and requirements.
You may think from this account that as we walked away from Geodecity I was of the opinion that the experience or what Reactor had set out to achieve had been a failure, this is by no means the case. Geodecity was set up as an experiment, being both impartial and open to the discretion of its audience, what we took in was limited to a neon pink, Arts Council logo, Geo Pioneer drawstring bag and our personal attitudes and opinions. Reactor experiences, I’ve found, teach us more about ourselves and our personal hypocrisy. ‘We must grow through unity and appreciation of diversity or be stunted in apathy and ignorance,’ concepts born in idealism are easy to preach, more difficult to demonstrate.
Jon Williams, 2007
