Author: Georgia Weston

The majority of people have seen this picture without realizing it. Photographed on January 20, 2017, from the summit of the Washington Monument, it depicts the National Mall during Donald Trump’s inauguration, with large expanses of space and sparsely populated areas. The same view from Barack Obama’s 2009 ceremony is next to it. The clarity of the contrast is almost unsettling. A press secretary stood in front of the nation and declared that the photograph was incorrect, which was even stranger than the image itself. Some people simply stopped caring about the image, even though it was clear and documented,…

You’ll eventually notice them if you stroll down practically any street in a city with a vibrant neighbourhood culture. This is not because they demand attention, though they frequently do, but rather because they just won’t be ignored. A face the size of a structure. Reaching across a crumbling wall were faded hands. What was once a utility maintenance facade was crossed by a timeline of a community’s sorrow and resiliency. Although murals have been used for centuries to accomplish this task, there seems to be a recent renewed awareness of the strength of a painted wall. This is neatly…

Walking through a field of dead signs has a subtle, unsettling quality. The letters are massive, their glass tubes cracked or missing completely, and their edges are rusted. Some still have names you only vaguely recognize, such as casinos that are now only visible in old photos and the recollections of people who drove down the Strip in the 1970s and believed it would last forever, and hotels that collapsed years ago. It is difficult to avoid feeling as though you are in the middle of a cemetery and a museum when you are standing in the Neon Boneyard in…

When you spend time in a city that has been closely observed for decades, you notice something right away. Most people no longer find the cameras fascinating. They are pieces of furniture. The amount of conscious thought recorded by a CCTV unit mounted above a London Tube entrance is comparable to that of a drainpipe. A generation of artists has been attempting to address and, in certain situations, take advantage of this indifference. It wasn’t Facebook, Edward Snowden, or the enactment of the Patriot Act that sparked the idea to create art from surveillance. It is at least 20 years…

Somewhere, there’s a pediatric hospital. It’s the kind of place where the clinical, grey hallways used to feel like an extension of the diagnosis itself, with no help from the lighting. Someone decided to repaint. Vibrant hues arrived, including yellows, delicate blues, and intentional greens. It was not referred to as a mood intervention. It was presented as a modern aesthetic. However, the staff observed a change in the rooms. The kids appeared slightly less terrified. It’s difficult to quantify and discount that kind of thing. It’s not quite as abstract as it sounds to ask whether a building can…

The air on Hackney Road beneath the railway arches has a subtle linseed oil and clay scent. A pot is being thrown upstairs, and it won’t be finished until next week. A violin maker is working on a seam down the hallway that is so accurate it hardly seems like work. This is Hoxton, but it’s not the Hoxton of tech co-working spaces and cocktail bars; rather, it’s the quieter, older Hoxton that existed before the glass buildings came and, hopefully, will continue to exist after they do. Craftspeople are reviving traditional disciplines in East London, which has long been…

The phrase “it was only supposed to be temporary” reverberates eerily throughout city planning offices, workplace break rooms, and immigration forums. After five years, no one can recall who said it or why anyone thought it. The pattern predates all bureaucracies. In a 2008 article for the Long Now Foundation, Stewart Brand put it simply: a quick hut becomes a house becomes a hotel, and a walkway becomes a road becomes a highway. When you consider that he was describing the architecture of contemporary civilization, the observation seems almost whimsical. The majority of what we consider bedrock began as a…

When a developer commissions a massive sculpture after spending millions on a public plaza, a certain kind of tension arises as the public votes with their feet and their rage. This unbreakable bind was symbolized by Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc. It was a 120-foot arc of weathered steel that cut across Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan in 1979, disrupting what had been a typical civic area and forcing pedestrians to take detours. It stood there like a rusted prophecy. After a protracted and intense public outcry, it vanished five years later. destroyed. Instead of enhancing a public plaza, the sculpture…

People used to have to cross the road to avoid Battersea’s railway underpass. It was the kind of area that a city learns to ignore; it was dilapidated, dimly lit, and sandwiched between pricey penthouses and council estates. Yinka Ilori painted it after that. People abruptly stopped, raised their heads, and sensed something. This change from avoidance to engagement, from gray neglect to something noteworthy, is not a coincidental aspect of his work. It’s the whole idea. Born in 1987 to Nigerian parents who had relocated to London in the mid-1980s, Ilori grew up in Islington, surrounded by color in…

A curator is the person who chooses what hangs where and why, and their name is typically displayed on the wall of any modern gallery. It’s a powerful name. It suggests a viewpoint and a series of decisions made fully conscious of what was being omitted. Open Instagram now. There, decisions have also been made by someone or something. The subjects echo each other, the colors are harmonious, and the rhythm of the pictures seems hazily deliberate. However, the wall bears no name. Only code is present. Researchers at Oxford’s Internet Institute have been discreetly investigating whether algorithms have assumed…