Sunday 2 September 2007

notes from 'Skateboarding, space and the city' (Iain Borden)

"On one level this activity appears as urban escapism... it was a repositioning of the urban... The modernist spa e of surburbia was found, adapted and reconveived as another kind of space, as a concrete wave." (refers to erly surf-style skating) (p.33)

"New hillside housing tracts lost their hideous urban negativity and emerged from the metamorphosis as a smooth uncrowded ribbons of winding joy." (33)


"This recombination of body, image, thought and action lies at the heart of skateboarding - an integration of abstract and concrete, object and performance..."

"the third stage [of skating up a bank that goes vertical] is that stalling space-time where the skater reaches the top of the trajectory, hangs momentarily, and begins the kick-turn - for the skater, this is a highly phsyical yet simultaneously fantastical and dream-like experience, where space-time are confronted and frozen in a dynamic, yet stable instance." (35)

"these aural salvos remind us that 'space is listened for, in fact, as much as seen, and heard before it comes into view," that hearing mediates between the spatial body and the world outside it, and that it is therefore not only in a cathedral or cloister that 'space is measured by ear'. This is 'sensuous geography' created by a phenomonal experience of architecture, a 'sensory space' constituted by an "unconsciously" dramatised interplay of relay points and obstacles, reflections, references, mirrors and echoes." (35)

note: 'sensuous geographies' (Paul Rodaway)

"...'working the surface' involved thinking less about the pool wall as a concrete wave, and more as an element which, together with the skateboard and skater's own body, could be recombined into an excited body-centric space." (36)