In summer 2009 whilst making a film about the architecture and psychology of airports I made enquiries as to how I could go about gaining legal permission to film in Heathrow International Airport. I had no interest in filming passengers or workers simply its empty walkways, halls and concourses. This, I was told, should be fine as long as I had a public life insurance deposit of £10,000,000. Looking to the smaller airports I found that Gatwick, Stanstead, Luton and City Airport did not even offer such a tariff, with the banning of all recording media in terminal buildings outright.
Similar obstacles, in the wake of 7/7, present themselves for the amateur filmmaker in most large commercial shopping centers and railway stations across Britain.
Put most simply the zones and spaces in which we are spending, and are encouraged to spend increasingly more amounts of our time, remain perpetually out of reach to us. They exist within a context of repression and denial. And so they become unreliable memories, which we are unable to measure against a reference of reality as any visual reproduction of them is banned. Our visualization of them remains fleeting, peripheral and always retrospective.
Or highly regulated. On the 27th of October 2010 the advertising company Saatchi and Saatchi, in patronage to T-Mobile, capitalized upon the success of their previous ‘flash mob’ television adverts in Trafalgar Square and Liverpool Street Station by filming a new staged event in Heathrow Terminal Five in which bemused and delighted passengers were greeted in the arrivals arena by a crowd of over 500 paid and choreographed actors disguised as airport baggage handlers, stewards and security staff. All singing and performing songs centered around the theme of travel such as Iggy Pop’s ‘the Passenger’ and Mark Morrison’s ‘Return of the Mack’. The event was captured through sixteen hidden cameras and was the result of extensive collusion and communication with the BAA control tower. Most gloriously of all however the ban on recording media within the terminal building was temporarily lifted as T-Mobile made the most of the sight of the public all filming and documenting the event on their own mobile phones.
For the sake of achieving this illusion of relaxed spontaneity, seemingly ‘accidental’ spectacle and free public documentation T-Mobile spent well over £100,000 on budget and several weeks extensively planning and mapping the movements of their actors throughout the building. A gamble that seems to have been worth it though as a quick trawl through the You Tube comment boards proves quite how successful the advert has been:
Clearly there is a tangible desire within the public to impose upon such spaces a sense of both personality and surrealism to make sense of somewhere that has become entirely internalized and denied to them in age in which everyone films everything.
Outside of such commercial instances the free documentation of airports, shopping centers and stations tends to exist only on the margins: in the background of fuzzy YouTube clips made by planespotters or children mucking about with a new phone on holiday and then uploaded out of boredom.
For the interested filmmaker however Xtube remains the most useful and extensive source. In the backgrounds of its burgeoning array of acts of public sexuality in stations, airports and shopping centers one finds an invaluably extensive record of the unregulated depiction of public non-places.
Porn in Outer Space uses these images to explore and document locations that in non-virtual terms have become almost entirely un-recordable.
Captured on cheap (T?) mobile phone footage it explores the defecation and transfiguration of hyper ‘clean’ spaces such as Terminal 5 through abjection and uncontained sexuality. And the desperate desire to impose permanence and individuality on a transient topography caught halfway between dream and reality.
Matthew Reed has a blog at 9london9.blogspot.com