The Collectors Cabinet: Port_Talbotism

Port Talbot: Some more specimens from the Collectors Cabinet

1 See Interview with Reynolds:

NG: Chasm City is a diseased metropolis, a utopia gone radically to seed. What inspired your vivid portrayal of this warped locale?

AR: I can't, and wouldn't, claim any originality for it -- it's just a fusion of all the great, festering fictional cities I have loved. Nothing too surprising, either: Blade Runner's LA; Judge Dredd's Mega City one; the Radiant City of the Mr X comics...dozens of others. Also Port Talbot, the steelworks down the M4 from where my family still live in Wales. At night it's the most amazing sight -- mile on mile of illuminated chimneys, belching smoke and flames. Oddly enough, I've even heard that Ridley Scott's vision of LA in Blade Runner was itself inspired by a drive past Port Talbot, so it's all circular in the end.

2 A further Port_Talbotism

See Situationist Raoul Vaneigem's concluding chapter of The Revolution of Everyday Life, a touchstone of May '68- a utopian-revolutionary impulse, just in case all this dystopian cyberpunk stuff colours our vision too much:

Chapter 25 "You're Fucking Around With Us? - Not For Long!"

In Watts, Prague, Stockholm, Stanleyville, Gdansk, Turin, Port Talbot, Cleveland, Cordoba, Amsterdam, wherever the act and wareness of refusal generates passionate break-outs from the factories of collective illusion, the revolution of everyday life is under way. The struggle intensifies as misery becomes universal. What for years were reasons for fighting specific issues - hunger, restrictions, boredom, illness, anxiety, isolation, deceit - now reveal misery's fundamental rationality, its omnipresent emptiness, its appalling oppressive abstraction. For this misery, the world of hierarchical power, the world of the State, of sacrifice, exchange and the quantitative - the commodity as will and representation of the world - is held responsible by those moving towards an entirely new society that is still to be invented and yet is already among us. All over the globe, revolutionary praxis, like a photographic exposer, is transforming negative into positive, lighting up the hidden face of the earth with the fires of rebellion to ink in the map of its triumph.

3 The Collectors Cabinet

The otaku impulse-

pattern recognition or apophenia ?