The Euro Bridges and Other Imaginary Architecture

“Everything you can imagine is real.” - Pablo Picasso

Robert Kalina’s bridges are amongst the most well known landmarks in Europe. The only problem is that they don’t actually exist.  

When the European Union introduced its common currency in 2002, Euro banknotes were introduced in seven denominations. One side of the notes displays images of windows or gates drawn from Europe's cultural history from the Classical to the modern, representing Europe's openness and cooperation.

With respect to individual national sensitivities of the Euro nations, Austrian artist Kalina designed seven fictional bridges to illustrate the reverse of the notes.  This use of imaginary architecture artfully avoided the difficulty of allocating any specific nationality to banknotes that would be shared across the union of 23 countries.

Now, a decade later, Dutch designer Robin Stam is building all seven bridges for real.  They will span the canal that borders a new estate in Spijkenisse, a suburb of Rotterdam.  The first six bridges have been completed, beginning with a red Romanesque bridge from the €10 note and an orange bridge in the Renaissance style from the €50 note.  These were followed by the €20 Gothic, €100 Baroque and Rococo, €200 iron and glass and €500 modern bridges, each tinted in the distinctive colours of their respective banknote designs. 

  

Robin Stam's Bridges of Europe

For Stam, the proposal began as something of a playful joke until the enthusiastic Local Authorities in Rotterdam encouraged him to realise the project.  This whimsical demonstration of the direct influence of art on life, however, is not a particularly new idea.

Leonardo da Vinci may not have invented the helicopter but he did draw the first picture of one.  Unrestrained by humdrum practicalities, artists and writers have long dreamed up countless theoretical ideas, situations and inventions.  It stands to reason that eventually many of them will become a reality.

It is often observed how writers of Science Fiction have informed much of our science fact.  Carl Sagan, the noted scientist and writer of Science Fiction, reflected eloquently on this relationship in Pale Blue Dot, a non-fiction book that explores the place of humanity in the universe:

"As far as I know, the first suggestion in the scientific literature about terraforming the planets was made in a 1961 article I wrote about Venus. The idea was soon taken up by a number of science fiction authors in the continuing dance between science and science fiction - in which the science stimulates the fiction and the fiction stimulates a new generation of scientists, a process benefiting both genres."

Conceptual pioneers from Da Vinci to Sagan not only inspired technological advances but also the language and look of the future.

The proposed Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid and its fictional inspiration, the Tyrell Building
from Blade Runner (1982).  The Mega-City Pyramid is currently awaiting the sufficient technological
advances to allow its construction.

In a similar but vastly more ambitious example of a fictional architecture made real, the Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid is a proposed project for the construction of a massive pyramid over Tokyo Bay in Japan. If completed, the structure would be 14 times higher than the Great Pyramid at Giza and would be the largest man-made structure in history.  The design is directly inspired by the iconic headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation as featured in the 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner.  That such a real life act of unrestrained hubris could be inspired by such a fictional depiction of unrestrained hubris might even be enough to make some more paranoid purveyors of fictional dystopia just a little more careful with sharing their nightmare fuel in future.

Science Fiction, of course, is often intended to be prophetic by design, yet the influence of art on our real life extends much further than mere design.  Countless academics have explored the complex relationship between art, perception, imagination and reality.  The ideologically driven architecture of the Bauhaus school pretty much invented the modern cities of the late 20th Century whilst  Leibniz's theory of Possible Worlds posits that if we are capable of imagining something then it must exist – at least in a parallel universe.

I find the most subtly compelling of these theories to be the philosophical position of Anti-mimesis, which holds that art actually has the power to dictate the way we see and understand our world.

Anti-mimesis holds that art does not imitate life but rather sets the aesthetic principles by which people perceive life. What we observe in life and nature is not what is truly there but is instead that which artists have taught people to find there through art.  A famous proponent of this theory was Oscar Wilde, who noted that although there had been fog in London for centuries, one only notices the beauty and wonder of the atmospheric phenomenon because "poets and painters have taught the loveliness of such effects...they did not exist till Art had invented them."

All of which brings us back to Stam’s bridges.

Robin Stam's 200 Euro Bridge,

To avoid any unpleasant surprises, Stam asked the Dutch Central Bank and the European Central Bank in Frankfurt whether they had any objections to the project but they gave him their full approval, unconcerned that these universal European symbols would soon be Dutch.

Nevertheless, there have been some dissenting voices who have suggested that the construction of the bridges in Holland is contrary to the original intention of European solidarity.  I would argue quite the opposite: that Stam’s project actually adds another, more enriching layer of universal meaning to these symbols.  To me, these fictional vistas that have been conjured into existence may now serve to celebrate the power of our dreams and ideas, remind us that the function and form of the world is not preordained and serve as a reassurance and modest inspiration for all those who long to see our world change shape and move forward again toward something new and better.

Perhaps I’ve given too much credit to the symbology of money but to extrapolate a quote from the great Saul Williams: words, ideas and dreams matter because words, ideas and dreams are matter.  Or, as Pablo Picasso put it more succinctly, “everything you can imagine is real.”

Surely that’s a better thing to celebrate than the musky nationalism of old dead white men and the baleful antipathy of weary monarchs?

A Brief History of Rhyme: The Place of Space in Popular Music

"I think a future flight should include a poet, a priest and a philosopher . . . we might get a much better idea of what we saw." - Michael Collins, Astronaut, Apollo 11  

From our earliest beginnings, Space has been a constant and incalculable influence on the development of humankind. Its vast unreachable beauty has seduced philosophers and theologians to establish the fundamental belief systems of our world. The challenge of cosmic unknowability has inspired scientists to achieve technological developments of great audacity and hubris. It has also had big impact on popular music of the last fifty years.

The original Satellite of Love:
The Tornados Telstar (1962)

The birth of rock and roll coincided with our first faltering steps into Space and so it is little surprise that the airwaves of the late fifties were cluttered with cosmic boogie. The post-war baby boomers of the fifties embraced the modern and looked to the future, keen to hip-shake away the austerity of the past. In 1957, as Sputnik became the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, the airwaves below were cluttered with such songs as Skip Stanley’s Satellite Baby, Jackie Lowell’s Rocket Trip or Sonny Sheather’s Orbit With Me. One of the biggest hits of this era was Telstar by The Tornados, an instrumental that reached the US Number One spot in 1962 and was rather unromantically named after one of the first communication satellites.   

Space travel represented an aspiration for a better world and the Space Race imagery of this new technology would come to define a generation. Between 1961 - when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin undertook the first human spaceflight – and 1969 - when Neil Armstrong became the first man on the moon - Space exploration would remain a pop music preoccupation. However, for the hippy generation unlike the unreconstructed rock and rollers before them, it was no longer the technology of the establishment that seduced them.  

We can see this conceptual shift in the cheery country rock of The Byrd’s Mr Spaceman (1966).  Here, frontman Roger McGuinn asks not that humankind reaches out to conquer Space, but instead begs that some alien being comes to invite us to the stars and release us from the boredom of our little world. Presumably, McGuinn immediately regretted this plea to “take them away” as his band members would thereafter be abducted by west coast supergroups on a frustratingly regular basis.  

It’s no coincidence that a cosmic theme would dominate an era of astral projection and chemical experimentation. For a youth who longed to be free from the ridged conventions of oppressive conservative society, Space was the ultimate trip, man. It was a place to find freedom and transcendence.  

Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon (1973):
the soundtrack to countless teenage
stoner daydreams.

The Grateful Dead’s epic Dark Star (1968) was literally a psychedelic space capsule designed to carry the listeners out to the farthest reaches of cosmic consciousness, without the necessity of multimillion dollar technology, whilst Deep Purple took us on an altogether more raucous and booze fuelled musical tour of the solar system in Space Trucking (1971). Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive (1966) - complete with a musical nod to the Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme – would be a practice launch for their later progressive rock journey to The Dark Side of The Moon (1973).

But even if the tie-dyed daydreams of the hippies and rockers were the privileged affectations of a predominantly white middle class, the promise of freedom delivered from beyond the stars still proved a universal and multicultural attraction.

In the Beyonder cycle, prototype hip hop collective The Last Poets embraced the ‘otherness’ of African American culture by reflecting on a fictional history of a black diaspora literally descended from an powerful alien race. Perhaps this was the only way to explain the terrible inequalities and indignities of segregation and - in this narrative - there was also the promise of cosmic emancipation at some point in the near future.

Jazz bandleader Sun Ra and funk icon George Clinton both took this concept of 'Afrofuturism' even further.

Sun Ra claimed that he was of the "Angel Race" and was not from Earth, but Saturn. He developed a complex persona using cosmic philosophies and lyrical poetry, leading his "Arkestra" on a free jazz journey that pioneered the electronica and the space rock genres.

Pass the peace: 
George Clinton arrives on the Mothership.

George Clinton also adopted an outrageous extra-terrestrial persona, who arrived on Earth and onstage in The P Funk Mothership, accompanied by his agents of Supergroovalisticprosifunkstication. An integral part of the P Funk mythology, the Mothership existed both conceptually as a fictional vehicle of funk deliverance and as a physical prop central to P Funk concerts. Powered by unknown means, presumably The Funk and simple stagecraft, the Mothership appeared over the Planet Earth many times during the second half of the Twentieth century and was even seen to physically land at a number of live music venues in the United States during the 1970s in order to disgorge its Funk to the people.

Perhaps The Arkestra and the P Funk Mothership weren’t exactly what easy listening and uneasy siblings The Carpenters yearned for in their rather odd cover of Klaatuu's Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft (1977), but at least they too tried to reach out to the zeitgeist.

During the 1970’s, the counterculture and the Space industry both faced a dramatic comedown. Each had searched furiously for something greater beyond the confines of our little world and had discovered little more than a vast, empty nothingness. Encapsulating this mood, jazz poet Gil Scott Heron was more concerned with down to earth matters and saw the Space Race as an unnecessary technological distraction in times of great social and racial inequality. After all, how relevant was the arrival of Whitey on the Moon (1971) when “the man just upped your rent again”, “the price of food is going up” and you “can’t pay no doctor bill”. Here, Heron angrily vocalised the ambivalence of deprived, impoverished and segregated communities still here on earth to the fabulously expensive and ultimately futile endeavours of the entitled establishment. Even Elton John’s hit single Rocket Man (1971) reflected the bittersweet notion of astronauts no longer being perceived as heroes, but in fact as an "everyday occupation". 

Loving the Alien:
David Bowie in Nicolas Roeg's
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

Nevertheless, whilst increasing scepticism that our utopian future might be written in the stars dampened enthusiasm for the psychedelic excesses of the cosmic, Space still proved a compelling canvas upon which to project the rhythmic, melodic poetry of our teenage symphonies to lust and longing. Proof that more alienating times only serve to increase the allure of the alien can be found in the career of David Bowie. Bowie practically pioneered the persona of the pop star as alienated alien - quite literally in his eponymous role as The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976). Bowie’s Space is a surreal and strange place of dreams and malleable meanings. Space Oddity (1969) may reflect either the plight of the Apollo 8 astronauts or simply Bowies own drug use and desire to let go of the world. Life on Mars (1971) is like a love song as painted by Salvador Dalí. The infinite possibilities of Space offered a context for Bowies abstract cut-up lyrics and invested them with an anthemic believability that would have been quite impossible if tethered to the gravity of our everyday lives on Planet Earth.

At it’s heart, pop music promises escapism and the greatest escape of all will always be into the stars – whether literally or figuratively. Sci-fi Hi-Fi is the embodiment of aspiration, whether lofty or - in the case of Mötley Crüe's longing for a "lady with a body from outer space" or Ash's whimsical Girl from Mars (1995) - lustful. It’s no surprise that during the Acid House explosion of the late 1980s Space again became a preoccupation of the ravers of the self-styled Second Summer of Love. In terms of intergalactic obsessions there were many parallels with the First. Psychedelic electronica outfit The Orb made many ambient musical journeys into Space, most notably on U.F.Orb (1992), a concept album of bizarre soundscapes documenting the bands fascination with alien life. One of the defining anthems of this period would be The Prodigy’s Out of Space (1992), which samples from the Max Romeo’s classic reggae track, I Chase the Devil (1976). Romeo's lyrical cry - “I’m gone send into Outer Space, to find another race” - was originally a call to reject the Devil and banish him to a distant galaxy, but in the hands of Ecstasy kids it became the chant of another jilted generation once again reclaiming their birthright to escape to the stars. 

 

Pop star astronauts from likely the most intolerable Space mission in NASA's history:
(Clockwise from top left) Lil' Wayne, Moby, Lily Allen and Christina Aguilera.

There is still no shortage of galactic longing. Since Bowies defining first appearance it has become a regular occurring trope for the distinctively unusual, idiosyncratic or just plain kooky pop performer to present themselves as something quite alien. Kate Bush, Tricky, Bjork and Lady Gaga have all flirted with this at some point in their careers. It was even recently reported that Beyonce and Jay-Z were in talks with commercial spaceflight provider Virgin Galactic to shoot the first music video in Space.

As Oscar Wilde observed, whilst we are all in the gutter, some of us will always be looking at the stars. In fact, in more austere times, those who look to the stars appear even more glorious and alien.

What the music of these eras share is optimism, sometimes for what we have achieved up to now and sometimes for what we could achieve in the future. On reflection, Space seems most often associated with hope and, in these challenging and distinctly down-to-earth times, perhaps we could all do with a little more cosmic in our boogie and sputnik in our bowl.

The Strange Case of Philip K Dick & Other Movies Inspired by Classic Works of Science Fiction

I recently watched The Adjustment Bureau, a movie ‘inspired’ by a story from Science Fiction writer Philip K Dick.  It was an amiable romantic fantasy about love and fate, in which Matt Damon plays a young senator whose chance encounter with an impulsive young woman inadvertently leads him into conflict with sinister forces who secretly govern our world.

The notion of a mysterious conspiracy to control the fate of the planet, along with their regulation 1950’s men-in-black wardrobe, is in keeping with the cold war paranoid tone of Dick’s source material, but little else bears more than a passing resemblance to the more sinister short story from 1954.

Philip Kindred Dick (1928-1982)
He saw the light...and a portal to ancient
Greece in his refrigerator.

From humble beginnings writing for pulpy magazines, when Dick claimed that he “couldn’t even afford the late fees on a library book”, the prolific PKD has risen in stature over the years since his death.  In 2005, TIME magazine named Ubik one of the hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923.  In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.  Despite this literary and genre acclaim, however, it is through the movie adaptations of his work that Dick has most prominently entered the popular public consciousness.

Dick’s posthumous rise to cinematic stardom began with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, released in 1982, the year of Dick’s passing.  Loosely based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), the film depicts a dystopian Los Angeles in which the powerful Tyrell Corporation manufacture genetically engineered robots called replicants, visually indistinguishable from humans. Their use on Earth is banned and the replicants are exclusively used for dangerous, menial or leisure work on off-world colonies. Replicants who defy this ban and return to Earth are hunted down and "retired" by police special operatives known as "Blade Runners". The plot focuses on a group of recently escaped replicants hiding in Los Angeles and the burnt out veteran Blade Runner, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), who reluctantly agrees to take on one more assignment to hunt them down. 

Blade Runner (1982)

Blade Runner was a visual treat; a hardboiled detective story reset to a dark and raindrenched future of deteriorating hi-tech and oppressive neon. The narrative jumped ably between sporadic bursts of brutal action and the more sombre reflections of a weary Deckard, his uncertainty over his assignment and even his own humanity.  Although key scenes were replicated from Dick’s text, the broader world around Deckard and his prey was stripped away in favour of the existential detective story.  The movie stays within sight of the original story, although much is changed or excised – notably the religious elements – and Scott himself admitted that he hadn’t actually read the inspiration for Blade Runner.  In this case, Dick had the last laugh following an early screening of only major adaptation of his work he would see in his lifetime.  When asked what he thought of it, the famously hallucinatory writer apparently reported simply that he “loved the lightshow.  It looked very cool.” 

Blade Runner was not an instant hit and took almost a decade before it would creep from cult favourite to mainstream classic.  It would not be until 1990 that the eventual recognition of Blade Runner would see Dicks name once again bothering the cinema marquees.   This time, the fragmented and dreamlike We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (1966) was mangled into the hysterical Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Total Recall.  In the hands of splatter satirist Paul Verhoven, this was a high point for the Austrian muscle man and a lot of messy fun, but took only the principle character, theme and outline as a starting point for Verhoven’s own comic book stylism.

Three onscreen faces of Philip K Dick: Harrison Ford (Blade Runner), Matt Damon (The Adjustment Bureau)
and Arnold Schwarzenegger (Total Recall)

The successes of Blade Runner and Total Recall would see casual cinemagoers begin to associate Dick’s name with intelligent yet muscular science fiction – wild action with a little cerebral depth for good measure.  In an attempt to emulate the following of these two movies, the rush to market his properties over the next 20 years would be staggering, but fuelled by a principle misconception: what actually connected these two movies was not Phillip K Dicks writing, but the work of auteur directors at the top of their game.

Neither movie was truly representative of Dick’s staggering imagination, his unique blue collar spin on science fiction tropes or his wild conspiratorial fantasies, but at least they were genuinely inspired by his work and used key concepts, ideas and themes.   In stark contract, Dick’s tropes would be simplified to the point of parody in the slew of adaptions to follow. 

Screamers (1995), Impostor (2001), Minority Report (2002), Paycheck (2003) and Next (2004), amongst others, all recognise Dicks name as a marketable property but demonstrated ever diminishing evidence of the original stories.  It’s probably unsurprising that over half of all Dick’s adaptations to date are from short stories rather than his substantial canon of novels, the most acclaimed of which remain unfilmed. In a mess of good, bad and indifferent titles, the disappointment is that they clearly attempt to reimagine Blade Runner or Total Recall, whilst somewhere along the way, Dick became little more than a brand name and a handy double entendre for reviewers.

It is interesting to note that the two most faithful adaptions of Phil Dick’s writing to date are of books that contain the least science fiction elements.  A Scanner Darkly (1977) does have the misdirection of a dystopian near-future setting and a digital McGuffin that allows an undercover narcotics agent to conceal his identity, but primarily this was a device that allowed Dick to pen a tribute to the psychosis and paranoiac breakdown of the lost souls of early-Seventies suburban Californian drug culture.   In his animated 1997 adaptation, director Richard Linklater clearly recognises this and concentrates on the more domestic themes.  Linklater follows Dick’s text closely, concentrating on the characters and resisting the temptation to introduce any additional action. The focus is firmly fixed on psychological rather than phaser disintegration and the narrative is much stronger for it.

Alongside this is the French film Barjo (1992), based on one of Dick’s handful of non-science fiction novels, Confessions of a Crap Artist (1977).  Aside from the European resetting, this tale of bitter and complex marital conflict in 50’s suburban California, is a very faithful translation.

Neither Frank Herbert's 'Dune' nor Isaac Asimov's 'I, Robot'
would make it to the screen entirely intact

With this in mind, perhaps the problematic element is not Dick’s sociological, political and metaphysical themes, but actually the genre itself.  On reflection, it becomes startling apparent that, of all the many genres of fiction, science fiction alone inspires such wilful lack of respect in movie adaptation.  After all, Dick is not the only Science Fiction luminary to suffer such shameless misrepresentation.

In the hands of David Lynch, Frank Herbert’s masterpiece Dune (1965) became a typically Lynchian nightmare that takes extreme liberties with the novel in the service of its somewhat psychedelic journey. It was long hoped that Isaac Asimov’s similarly lauded and influential I, Robot stories would make it intact to the screen, but the considered and respectful screenplay developed for Warner Brothers by sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison was eventually ditched in favour of using the title alone for an existing project originally called Hardwired.  This entirely unrelated robot murder-mystery, once injected with a few additional references to Asimov’s laws of robotics and populated by a few of Asimov’s characters and Will Smith, stretches the credibility of the adaptation to breaking point.  In the resultant 2004 feature, Asimov is reduced to the indignity of a “suggested by” credit.

Steven Segal as I imagine he would look in
'Hard To Kill a Mockingbird'

Few writers of equivalent stature outside of science fiction have suffered such abuse.  I admit, by virtue of mass recognition alone, it’s probably understandable that the acknowledged classics of literature have escaped such blatant disrespect.  If, after several rewrites, an adaptation of Lord of the Flies evolved into the time travelling adventure of a group of young people lost on a mysterious island, their attempts to unravel the mystery of a mysterious scientific initiative, hindered by attacks of a time-slipped Tyrannosaurus Rex, I’m certain that William Golding’s name would be quietly discarded.  Likewise, Steven Segal waging a one man war against a small town racist hit squad in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is something I doubt that devotees of either Lee or Segal could tolerate. Of course, there have been a multitude of cinematic reimaginings based on classic tales, but even at the extreme and even when recast with garden gnomes or Leslie Nielson and space monsters, the narratives of Shakespeare are recognisably retained.

It could be added that science fiction is a pulp genre of niche interest which requires broadening in order to appeal to a popular audience.  Where this view immediately falls over is in the comparatively faithful treatment of other pulp literary genres, from the crime thriller to the western.  Even adaptations of lurid horror paperbacks are given better treatment.

Fans of the iconic horror writer Stephen King often rage against the cinematic treatments of his canon.  Even Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece The Shining (1980) is presented as an example of the Hollywood brutalisation of his work.  Whilst it is true that the narrative is condensed and trimmed, Kubricks glacial visuals and Nicholsons unhinged performance overwhelm and some plot elements are excised completely, the basic story is at least maintained.  In comparison to the wholesale evisceration visited on translations of classic works by Dick, Asimov or Clarke, The Shining renders King’s novel practically verbatim.

I’m afraid the explanation may just be more cynical.  The adaptation of established written works will always be a challenge; the magic of the word allows the reader to conjure their own images and own the look and landscape of familiar stories.  A movie adaptation has to reconcile and placate billions of very personal adaptations.

With recognisable historical or contemporary settings, it is much more likely that a realisation will land relatively close to audience expectations.  Conversely, Science Fiction as a genre is persistently popular but often immensely hard to visualise.  A high level of creativity and imagination is required to bring often wild and fantastical – thus very personal - imagery onto the screen.  I am not going to repeat the familiar accusation that there is no creativity or imagination left in popular cinema, but it does seem that, of all the creative industries, this most lucrative medium appears to employ the highest disproportion of distinctly uncreative people.

The end result is that those who lack imagination or creativity are incapable of bringing the classics of the science fiction writing to the screen with any resonance or recognisability, often misunderstanding and reducing the work to the simplest narrative or lowest common denominator.   Alternately, as demonstrated by Total Recall and Blade Runner, those filmmakers who are capable of genuine artistry are unwilling to be confined by the desire to exercise the slavish restraint necessary to appeal to the broadest audience and instead interpret these stories into their own very personal creations.  There is no shortage of quality science fiction cinema unencumbered by source material.  As an example, consider Moon and Source Code, the first two rich and rewarding movies from director Duncan Jones.  These original features evoke far more of the spirit and tone of Phil Dick than the majority of lacklustre, officially ‘inspired by’ adaptions.

Regardless of the critical reception, as long as literary adaptions open the wallets and purses of a built-in audience, they will continue to be a mainstay of popular cinema.  The obvious butchery of science fiction only makes the gulf between storytelling techniques more apparent, but it applies to all genres equally.  Perhaps fans of both words and moving picture should take some comfort in the disparity of such adaptations, as it proves the unique individuality of both media.  In digitally obsessed times, it’s reassuring to know that the written word still has a power that resists complete translation.