Barrie Wilson PhD Conference 2023

Description

Paper title:
To Build Up Despondency and Despair, Rising to a Crescendo

Abstract:
The proposed presentation will briefly introduce my PhD’s case study—the National Trust’s Enterprise Neptune campaign—before focusing on the aesthetic work that went into 1314 annotated Ordnance Survey maps of the entire coastline of England, Wales & Northern Ireland which were in 1965 used to provide ‘hard evidence’ demonstrating the need for the campaign. The National Trust’s worry was a response to the loss of coastline to growing coastal development resulting from the British growing love for the sea. The threat was of aesthetic nature, and it was argued that in order to protect the coast as the very fabric of the British national existence individual (and collective) hard-fought leisurely patterns of behaviour needed to change.
The PhD thesis as a whole approaches the campaign as an apparatus of environmental risk that is mobilized in response to a sense of ‘urgency’ which it in turn aims to affectively modulate. The intention of the proposed presentation, however, is to stage the first scene/’event’ (out of four) that sees the maps in their initial stages of transaction: envisioned, discussed, walked, traced and assembled. More specifically, the talk will attend to compositional processes and patterns (both spatial and temporal) through which a sense of ‘urgency’ was produced and formalized. The aim is twofold: firstly, to demonstrate the interrelatedness of rationality and affectivity in the processes of Enterprise Neptune map-making; and secondly, to perform not necessarily its ‘meanings’ but some of the intensity and texture that animated the map-making process and propelled the maps forward.

Period	24 Feb 2023
Event type	Conference
Location	Edinburgh, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	Local