In designing the i-Doc I wanted it to not just evoke pop-up’s imaginaries but to generate a critical, nonlinear way of seeing those imaginaries. As previously argued, in order to be critical of pop-up’s nonlinear imaginaries a nonlinear way of seeing is necessary because it enables attention to the ongoing production of the city as a precarious assemblage and to pop-up’s role in normalising and thereby stabilising precarity within it.
Earlier in the methodology chapter I explored Crary’s argument that particular mediums can ‘overcome’ disorientating spatiotemporal sensations such as fragmentation by providing a perceptual apparatus that makes sense of them. I suggested that this raises concerns around how creative media and methods could acclimatise us to troubling conditions and thereby reduce our desire and ability to respond to them critically. This is something that I have been concerned, in developing my own methodology, to avoid. As the thesis argues pop-up’s nonlinear imaginaries play a key role in normalizing precarity. Rather than reinforce that normalization by using the i-Doc to realign perception with pop-up’s imaginaries – thus in some way acclimatizing potential users within the precarious city - I have aimed to use the i-Doc to engage a critical perception of the construction and instrumentalities of those imaginaries. To do this I have included features in the i- Doc that explicitly resist the normalisation of pop-up’s imaginaries, prompting potential users to instead see outside of pop-up’s spatiotemporal logics and critically consider the role those logics themselves play in acclimatising people to precarity.
The key feature of the i-Doc for enabling a critical nonlinear imagination is the integration of the ‘outside the pop-up city’ pages. The ‘outside the pop-up city’ pages
are offered to users as options at the end of certain clips. These links open up text and image based information boxes which discuss impacts that pop-up culture has on the wider city, or some of the broader socio-economic and political issues it is tied up within. To make these pages I used images from google searches as well as stills from my video footage to create collages on Adobe Photoshop, including text in the collages too. Skelly then added these into the i-Doc. The aesthetics of the collages were intended to be in keeping with ‘the temporary city’ as presented in the i-Doc, but the text in them offers a perspective that jar’s with and critiques pop-up’s imaginaries. For example, the clip about The Artworks, a shipping container mall, ends with an option to see ‘outside the pop-up city’. The page that opens up explains how the mall occupies the site of the former Heygate Estate, a council estate which was controversially decanted, sold at a loss by the council then knocked down to be turned into expensive flats. The page offers a critical insight into the mall, showing how it is being used by the developers Lend Lease to rebrand the site and attract the middle class buyers the new flats are aimed at. This information problematizes the notion that pop-up’s transformations of sites are ‘temporary’ and shows how its imaginaries of the urban fabric as ‘flexible’ correspond to forced urban changes through displacement and demolition.
Figure Twelve: Now-here
Although the outside pop-up city pages are in keeping with the i-Doc’s aesthetic, their content undermines rather than reinforces the pop-up affect. Their inclusion in the i-Doc aims to ensure that it doesn’t just immerse viewers within the spatiotemporal logics of pop-up culture but also contains provocations which prompt them to critically consider what is not included in, or indeed masked by, the stories pop-up tells about itself. The ‘outside the pop-up city’ pages encourage users to
engage not just with the experience of space-time in pop-up culture but with how pop-up’s imaginaries are put to work in stabilizing and transforming the urban
assemblage; maintaining a faltering economy, normalising reduced provision of welfare (for example the provision of council housing) and being mobilized for state and developer led gentrification. In addition, the ‘ending’ of the i-Doc offers another critical perspective. After ten minutes in the i-Doc’s ‘play’ view the i-Doc is interrupted by another ‘outside pop-up city’ page which takes over the whole screen and informs users that their time in pop-up city is up because development is due to commence. As will be explored later in the thesis, this ending encourages users to think critically about pop-up’s role in urban transformation and its value (and lack of value) to
stakeholders.
Through the i-Doc the nonlinear geographical imagination; which recognises the city as a transforming assemblage within which different actors have different levels of power, is brought up against pop-up’s own nonlinear imaginaries. This encounter
exposes the politics of pop-up, but it perhaps also exposes a nativity within geographical conceptions of nonlinearity, which tend to assume that nonlinear logics are always conducive to progressive politics, as indeed is often assumed of pop-up by those who take its imaginaries at face value (Iveson, 2013; Nemeth & Langhorst, 2014).