giving a job presentation

I’ve listened to a few job presentations recently. These are talks – usually fairly short, say 15 minutes – that candidates for academic jobs are asked to give to the department they’re hoping to join, as part of the selection process. Sometimes you’re asked to talk about your current research and future plans, and sometimes you’re asked to give an example of how you’d teach. Sometimes the interview panel is in the room, sometimes they’re not and they get feedback on your talk from the audience via a rapporteur. The talk is usually followed by a question and answer session. They are tricky to get right, so I thought I’d share a few tips.

As with my other post about how to write your cv and covering letter when applying for jobs, which I’ve recently updated, these comments are based on my experience at research-intensive UK universities. So, here are my top tips for giving a presentation in that context. With a few personal preferences thrown in for good measure.

attend some job presentations before you need to do one yourself. Go and listen to presentations on any topic, and listen for how the talk is structured and delivered. While you listen, take some notes about what the different candidates are doing well and what they could improve on. Jot down any really good things that you think might work when you’re the one up there talking too. Look at those notes before you start working on your own presentation.

do what you’ve been asked to do. If you’ve been asked to talk about your research, don’t talk about your teaching, or your hobbies. (Ok, a brief research-related remark about the former is alright, but the latter might come over as a bit unserious.) If you’ve been asked to talk about future research plans as well as your current work, talk explicitly about your future research plans – have a slide in your presentation titled ‘future research plans’. Conversely, if you’ve been asked to demonstrate how you’d introduce a key disciplinary concept to an audience of first year undergraduates, do not give a summary of your research (yes I’ve seen that happen).

if it’s a research presentation, describe a research trajectory. In a research presentation, try to give a sense that you’re on a trajectory with it. That you started somewhere and now you’re somewhere a bit different and that there’ll be future developments too. Conveying a sense of energy and ongoing creativity always helps.

stick to time. Rehearse and rehearse and make sure you come in a minute or so under time. Do not go over time then ask the chair “how am I doing for time”. (Yes, I’ve seen that happen too.)

pitch your talk to your audience, actual or requested. If it’s a talk to first year undergraduates, make it simple and engaging. If it’s a research presentation, remember that there’ll be people in the audience who won’t know much about your area of research, so begin with some basic orientation explaining what your topic is about and why it matters to your subdiscipline or specialism, or why it has significant non-academic impact. This is not about metrics: it’s about ideas and findings and why they are important. Then you can get more detailed (and mention metrics if you have to). But try to be clear about what your core interests are and how they are significant – don’t get too caught up in empirical findings or long lists of specific grant projects. It’s the ideas that matter for the presentation, I think – your cv is the place for lists.

design a good powerpoint. The presentation gives you a chance to demonstrate your communication skills, so spend time on the powerpoint. Make it clear, not overloaded – remember you might be presenting on a fairly small screen. Images are good but only if they are relevant to your talk – random stock images are distracting.

use notes if you need to but make eye contact with your audience (at least a key moments). A script can help you manage nerves and keep to time – but write it to perform it. If you can, don’t just stand there and read it out in a monotone – make it lively and make sure you look at your audience sometimes. And I know we all do it, but try not to talk to the screen showing your powerpoint. The screen is not on the appointment panel and in any case does not care what you say to it.

do make it sound like you know what the job description is asking for. Often a job description will specify a particular teaching or research area, and maybe you framed your research in a particular way to land the interview. Make sure that your presentation continues that framing. Mention the research/teaching area specified in the job description explicitly.

say something that suggests you know something about the department you’re applying to. You might mention a research grouping or a strategic priority that you think your work aligns with, or some individuals whose work you admire and you’d like to collaborate with. But don’t overdo this. Unless you know the department and its work quite well, you might characterise it wrongly. But just indicating that you know something about the department you’re applying to is a nice touch.

don’t mention the REF. This might be just a bugbear of mine, but: the last REF is done and dusted, no-one knows how their research was evaluated for it, and the next REF is too far away to pre-empt.

think about what to wear. This is not the most important aspect of the process, and you need to feel authentic and comfortable, and clothing choices are massively loaded in all sorts of ways… so I’m not going to be prescriptive about a particular kind of clothing. The only recommendation I would make about dressing for an interview is: don’t wear anything you haven’t worn before. I went to an interview once in a dress I’d only worn in the changing room of the shop I’d bought it in, just standing there looking the mirror at it and thinking, great, that’ll do it. It wasn’t until I was on the bus to get the train to the interview that I realised just how far up the dress rode when I was sitting, which was well out of my comfort zone…

And finally, get more advice. Rehearse your presentation with your mentor or a supportive colleague who has experience sitting on interview panels, and see what they think. Get them to ask you a few questions and practise concise and thoughtful answers.

In general, the interview is going to be more important than the presentation you give. Nonetheless, you want to come over as strongly as possible to your potential new colleagues. I hope these tips are useful for achieving that.

Conceptualising aesthetic power in the digitally-mediated city

Happy to report I have a new paper out, co-authored with Monica Degen. It’s online and open access at Urban Studies and this is the abstract:

Aesthetics, generally understood as an intensified emphasis on the sensorial look and feel of urban environments, has become an important perspective through which urban scholarship is examining the economic, social, political and cultural processes of urban regeneration projects across the globe. Much of this aestheticising work is now mediated by many kinds of digital technologies. The entanglement of digital technologies with the sensorial feel of urban redevelopments manifests in many different ways in different urban locations; it is deeply reshaping the embodied experiencing of urban life; and it enacts specific power relations. It is the focus of this paper. Drawing on the work of Lefebvre and Jansson, this article develops the notion of ‘textured’ space in order to offer an analytic vocabulary that can describe distinctive configurations of urban experience at the intersection of specific urban environments, bodily sensations, and digital devices. Analysing embodied sensory politics is important because various aspects of bodily sensoria are central to human experiences of, and relations between, both self and other. Hence bodies are enrolled differentially into different expressions of these new urban aesthetics: while some are seduced, others are made invisible or repelled, or are ambivalently entangled in digitally-mediated aesthetic atmospheres. The article offers some examples of the power relations inherent in the textured aesthetics of three of the most significant, and interrelated, processes of contemporary, digitally-mediated urban change: efforts to be seen as a ‘world-class city’ and to facilitate gentrification and tourism.

It takes the argument of our book The New Urban Aesthetic a bit further by drawing on an excellent range of studies by other scholars to look more carefully at the embodied power relations implicit in different examples of digitally-mediated urban aesthetics.

on Oppenheimer, again

From all the hype it seemed inevitable and indeed came to pass: Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer won various Best categories at the Oscars on Sunday night. I just want to reiterate why I think it’s a really bad movie (I blogged about it just after I saw it too). Specifically, I do not understand why Nolan gets a pass on the gender politics of Oppenheimer while inches and hours are spent dissecting Barbie.

I haven’t seen anything written about the masculinity that’s embedded in and celebrated by Oppenheimer. But the Oppenheimer character in the movie deserves some attention in those terms, I think, because he seems to me to be doing quite a lot of advocacy not just for Oppenheimer as a historical figure, but also on behalf of contemporary digital tech innovators. For all Cillian Murphy’s excellence as an actor, the character he is given is a cipher for the genius-inventor that seems very common right now in digital dude world: the scientific genius who invents something incredible (“moves fast and break things”), then gets to perform being really worried about that invention (“oops”), and then gets to decide to be the saviour who will prevent the rest of us from being harmed by his invention (“here is the oversight board I’ve convened”). It’s all about him. Genius, Tortured Genius, Genius-with-a-Conscience. This is exactly the position occupied by the contemporary techbro elite running corporations from Meta to OpenAI, who invent whatever and then want to work out how to manage its downsides themselves, while sacking the people (often women of colour) who have done the actual work of pointing out the problems with their creation.

This Genius-multiple position is one that only certain kinds of men can occupy. Indeed, Oppenheimer clearly demonstrates that being any variety of genius also makes you incredibly attractive to the ladies: the very few women in the film are all loyal to Oppenheimer regardless of what he does – abandon them, betray them – they even die for him! Yay!!! As for that ENTIRELY gratuitous scene of a lover writhing in Oppenheimer’s lap during a legal hearing while his wife looks on… unbelievable. It basically suggests that we live in a world in which a key scene in a major movie that shows a Genius being taken down a peg or two (mistakenly, of course) nevertheless has to reassure us that his masculinity is unscathed because he has not one but two women desperate for him, one of which actually is. In the room. No, sorry, in his fantasy. Except, since we can all see her, also in the room. Seriously???

Several reviewers have pointed out that Oppenheimer was a rather different character from the man in the film. And of course it’s a movie, not a historical document. But that makes its fictionality all the more important. Why is Oppenheimer the best movie now? What is it showing us, exactly? I think it’s so successful precisely because it’s a fantasy – a beautifully-made, visually striking fantasy – of a form of white masculinity that remains very powerful, and its enthusiastic endorsement at the Oscars speaks to that power.

Nolan has never been good at making the women in his films actual characters of course. But perhaps this new low actually speaks to something that Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins discuss in their recent book Believability. In that book, they argue that the current moment is definitely one in which a certain kind of hero masculinity is asserting itself, but in their analysis this is because it is also a moment in which, sometimes problematically, criticisms of straight white patriarchy are increasingly making themselves heard. So perhaps Oppenheimer should be seen as not only as a celebration of the tech bros, but also as a symptom of their anxiety that their control of the world might be slipping… perhaps. We can but hope.

tips for planning research leave

I spent the autumn of 2022 as a Visiting Scholar at the University of California Berkeley, hosted by the Geography Department there. It was a truly wonderful experience, not least because it was the start of a year of research leave that’s my entitlement after being Head of the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford for three years. Quite apart from the things I’d hoped to do as Head, those three years took us through strikes, the pandemic, the resurgence of Black Lives Matter and its many implications for academic work, and the REF, among other things: their various demands pretty much wiped out my ability to undertake new research.

I’m incredibly fortunate to work in a university which gives year-long sabbaticals. I also knew that this opportunity was unlikely to come again, so I asked around for some advice about how to make the most of it. I thought that advice might be worth sharing – and I hope the principles are useful even if you only have a few weeks of research leave rather than months. So, assuming you have talked with your line manager and they have agreed to your leave so that your non-research obligations are sorted, here goes.

plan well in advance. Basically, it’s never too early!

think about your overall objective. What is it you want to achieve during your leave? What kind of research work do you want to do? Reading and discussing and listening and generally getting back your intellectual groove? Or do you want to write a paper, develop a grant proposal, edit a film, plan a book, write a book, join a new lab to learn new skills? Be as clear as possible about what you want to get from your leave. Ask yourself what a successful period of research leave would look like at its end. Discuss it with your mentor and line manager.

plan the practicalities. Then consider practical implications of what you want to achieve. Early planning is especially important if you need to apply for funding to be able to travel, or if you want to visit somewhere, or if you need to do some pilot work or learn a new skill before the leave work begins. It’s also really important if you need to find accommodation, or a school for kids, or to rent or sub-let your own house.

identify specific tasks. Figure out what you need to do to achieve your objective – break it down into component tasks.

schedule the tasks. And then schedule the tasks, roughly but realistically. Are you really going to catch up with two years of missed reading in one month? No. Be real. Allocate a sensible time for each task and then put them in some sort of logical order over the period of time you have for your leave. I use a spreadsheet for this sort of planning, you might prefer a hand drawn timetable or a project management software flow chart. Whatever, but make it realistic.

don’t over-commit. Research leave can appear to offer endless time to do all sorts wonderful things that you’re usually too busy to do, but be careful not to over-commit. It’s a chance to be a better academic citizen and to do more reviewing for example, reference writing, undergrad talks, PhD exams and so on. But still, be careful not to fill your time with those sorts of things to the extent that your own, different objectives are jeopardised.

clear the decks. As part of your advance planning, and especially if you don’t have a long period of leave, get the decks cleared before it starts. If you possibly can, don’t start your leave with lots of little jobs left over from your usual workload. They will take up more time than you think, and will keep you tethered to your usual workplace and its emails. Complete as many of your non-leave-activities before your leave as you can.

make your (relative) unavailability clear, to everyone and to yourself, in advance. Tell relevant colleagues and students when you will be on research leave well in advance, and what they can expect from you while you are on leave (you should check your department’s rules about this too – I am still expected to do exam marking when on sabbatical for example, and to supervise research students). When your leave starts, put an out-of-office message on your email letting folk know your response will be delayed. Then delay your response.

go easy on yourself. Above all, enjoy your leave. University work is really demanding, and I bet you’ve worked way over what you’ve been paid for in previous years. So treat this as a time to refresh yourself as well as achieve your objective. Work steadily but not all the hours, be prepared to take intellectual detours, and to visit new places, eat well, watch the sun set or the plants grow. Read slowly. Let ideas germinate in their own time. Pick up those pleasures that term-time so often squeezes out, whatever they are.

I know much of this will rub salt into the wounds of the ever-growing number of academics who don’t have research leave, or who had it once but not any more (I know of at least one UK university who hasn’t reinstated research leave after withdrawing it during the pandemic). I hope though that it’s useful for those of you who do. Please feel free to add your own tips and suggestions!

The End We Start From and things not really ending

Another film reviewed in this post: The End We Start From, directed by Mahalia Belo and starring Jodie Comer, Joel Fry and fifteen babies, apparently, among other actors. It’s adapted from the book of the same name by Megan Hunter, which I haven’t read. I enjoyed the movie a lot, and I’ve thought a bit about not endings but survivings since.

There are lots of good things about The End We Start From (or at least, things I enjoyed). I liked the early extended attention to a pregnant body. A massive flood is very effectively filmed from within the water rather than from the aerial view that would be favoured by big budget VFX. There are some narrative gaps and jumps which I thought were quite powerful in suggesting Comer’s character’s traumatised memory. There are some beautiful bleak landscape scenes, and lots of rain. In general I felt the film was strongest in these more evocative moments, helped by Anna Meredith’s fab soundtrack. And all the performances are great.

But the film does suffer from what I’m really beginning to think is a fundamental issue with environmental disaster films (and novels, maybe): they are pulled towards the visual realism, emotional heft and narrative resolution which dominate mainstream filmmaking, but these are simply incompatible with picturing actual disaster. I’m no expert on actual hazards and disasters, but it always strikes me that apocalyptic kinds of films are pretty selective in the kinds of disasters they picture. Power failures, TV broadcasts surrendering to static (though only after they’ve conveyed the gravity of the unfolding situation to the characters and to us the audience), phone networks going down: all signal disaster apart from the disaster itself, whether that’s a flood as in The End or a meteor strike or alien invasion. But other things often keep going, oddly and illogically. In The End We Start From, cars are still on the roads and thus presumably petrol supplies remain; water continues to be safe to drink; our heroine and her baby survive long treks in good shape (do the filmmakers understand just how heavy a four month baby is?); there is nary a rat or a cockroach to be seen (though I did notice an ‘insect wrangler’ in the credits so maybe I missed one of the latter); and I am pretty sure that our heroine’s eyebrows would start to look a little more unkempt and her skin a little less dewy than Comer’s after months of privation. There is also the same character that appears in the novel The Survivors: Pandemic, by Alex Hern, which I blogged about: an older woman who against all the sceptical teasing has been hoarding food in case of just such an emergency. As in The Survivors, this is very handy in The End for a few scenes of marital and parental bliss before disaster recurs. And I won’t give away the ending but safe to say it’s not an actual ending.

Of course all disaster movies make these sorts of illogical moves – and that is my point. I seem to recall a tweet from a military historian (when Twitter was useful for this sort of fairly reliable random info) saying that in the face of the kind of disaster picture in The End, cholera and infected teeth would be the biggest and swiftest killers. But movies seem not to be able to envision such slow, messy and painful things. Even The Road, an environmental disaster movie that perhaps comes closest to a grimly real vision of an apocalypse, ends up with the dying father watching his son meet another mom-pop-and-dog family who take him in. I mean, a DOG survives in a situation in which people are turning cannibal?! And don’t get me started on the mother-son reunion at the end of the otherwise-excellent TV adaption of Station Eleven…

Using The End as a prompt, geographer Oli Mould wrote about films and the climate crisis for The Conversation earlier this year. He says films are good at communicating the consequences of climate change because they can visualise its consequences effectively, especially by embedding them into everyday scenarios and engaging audiences emotionally. Maybe. But if my hypothesis above is correct, maybe not. A movie can’t visualise the full awful consequences of environmental disaster effectively precisely because it has to do the emotional work too. As a movie, it has to give us characters to feel for and with, characters with some kind of agency, who survive, and they have to give us hope for happy endings too, apparently. So the end of this movie – like that of so many other films and novels – is precisely not the end of the world, it’s the start, the start of another human story, the nuclear family re-united and human life continuing.

In a world whose screens are currently showing so much terrible terrible actual violence and death, I guess some might feel that such fantasies are permissible. But right now, they do indeed feel like fantasies, the illogical fantasies of those who can afford to indulge in a frisson of risk which is survived and, at its end, generates a new start.

The Kitchen: a review

The Kitchen is a new Netflix movie, directed by Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares. It’s an excellent addition to the genre of film in which a working-class London neighbourhood is invaded by hostile outsiders (see also Attack the Block (“INNER CITY VERSUS OUTER SPACE”) and Cockneys versus Zombies (“This city ain’t big enough for the both of them!”), both made around a decade ago).

The Kitchen in the movie is a housing estate in near-future London. Netflix bills The Kitchen as sci-fi, but the Kitchen’s invaders aren’t aliens, as in Attack the Block, or zombies: they’re the police enforcing the evictions that’ll allow the Kitchen to be redeveloped. Zombie and alien invasion films are often taken as metaphors for contemporary concerns: nuclear war, capitalist alienation. In the case of The Kitchen, though, the invasion and destruction of poor neighbourhoods by property capitalism is not allegorised in any way: it is made viscerally real.

This literalism reminded me of something NK Jemisin wrote about her two Great Cities novels. Those books are also about a city being invaded (New York), this time by an actual alien (you know what I mean), and the alien is both convincingly real in terms of the story and clearly metaphorical: white, tentacular, extractive, plugging into bodies and minds to render resistance useless. There are certainly many analogies at work in these two books: the first especially is a great, challenging read. At the end of the second book, The World We Make, Jemisin explains that she intended to write a third but by the time the first was finished, what was actually happening in New York had outstripped satire. “I had to change one of my initial planned plots for this book—a monstrous president waging war on his own hometown—because Trump got there first,” she says. “The Great Cities trilogy that I’d initially planned became a duology because I realized my creative energy was fading under the onslaught of reality”

While it certainly can’t be accused of lacking creative energy, I got the feeling that as a creative intervention, The Kitchen occupies a similar relation to urban change in cities like London and New York, and many more, as do the Great Cities novels. The movie clearly didn’t lack the budget to show aliens or zombies, because the digital visual effects are impressive, but it chose not to: economic, social and political relations and dynamics clearly understandable from our contemporary moment are frightening enough.

I can’t close without saying more about those visual effects, because they are both part of the film as it’s meant to be seen by us spectators – they visualise the near-future city of which the Kitchen is part – and also because onscreen digital images play a role in the film’s narrative. Lots of critics have remarked on the film’s VFX and they are very good. London’s existing built environment seems to have been intensified: the London Eye has been upgraded; the skyline has even more striking tall buildings; the Kitchen is a huge building over which drones hover and sweep. Watching on a tv screen I could see how that urban landscape would scale up impressively in a cinema. There are smaller pleasures too: the vibrant market of the Kitchen has lots of floating glowing signs which look rather lovely; bits of what I looks very much like the actual Barbican complex in London have been modified to become a crematorium (maybe that’s metaphorical).

Digitally-produced images of cities also feature in a key scene in the movie where one of the main characters finally accesses a new apartment provided by the company wanting to redevelop the Kitchen. There’s no actual window in the one-room apartment (the decor of which looks very much like what’s pictured in endless CGIs of new apartments now). Rather, there is a wall-size screen with a selection of aerial urban views of exactly the same kind that property developers now frequently use to sell their apartments: a view from on high of a city at dusk, lit buildings twinkling like urban fairy lights. And the streets of the London we see in the movie are full of billboards picturing new developments in just that style. So it’s not just the physical landscape of this London that’s being reshaped by big developers, but also its visual culture.

I’m probably a bit over-focussed on such things, but it did seem to me that there was a strong and interesting convergence between these computer-generated marketing images and how the city as a whole was pictured in The Kitchen. The VFX are good but they’re not quite at the level of Dune, say, or The Creator, or San Andreas. There was a slightly sketchy quality to them, a slightly washed-out, pale colour palette. While this did make me wonder that perhaps future London has at least benefited from being a low emission zone, I was also strongly reminded precisely of the computer-generated images frequently used by property developers, pitching their apartment blocks in the ever-sunny uplands of property-owning capitalism. Just like the characters are only offered CGI views when they leave the Kitchen, then, so too it felt that as viewers of the film, our vision of the city also has been infected by real-estate-VFX.

There’s a lot more to say about the film, of course. Fantastic acting, rather slow pacing but with some great set pieces, fails the Bechdel test. It’s a fascinating watch, and has certainly given me a lot of food for thought as I ponder the implications of various digitally-created images of urban life.

call for papers: being(s) and difference in digitally mediated cities

Ivin Yeo and I are hoping to organise one or two sessions at this year’s Royal Geographical Society conference in London in late August on the theme of ‘being(s) and difference in digitally mediated cities’. Here is our call for papers!

If “the urban is the embodiment of difference and the machinic production of difference ” (Simone 2022: 16), how are digital technologies entangled in the emergence of urban difference? The digital has become a core feature of contemporary urban life, not only shaping the way inhabitants live and work in the city but also giving rise to new forms of posthuman subjectivity. This session focuses on the multiplicity of the everyday experiencing of digitally mediated cities, exploring the deepening relationships between diverse digital technologies and different forms of urban life and living. More broadly, it seeks to foster discussions in digital and urban geography around what everyday life in digitally mediated cities entails, its accompanying social and political implications, as well as what kind of posthuman urban life is valued in the digital era.

We invite empirical, theoretical, and conceptual papers on topics including but by no means not limited to:

• The political and social implications of the digital mediation of life in cities, including gender, race, dis/ability, class and other forms of difference.
• The atmospheric and affective aspects and implications of urban digital mediation.
• Embodied and embedded accounts of everyday encounters with digital technologies in cities.
• Uneven urban geographies of digital mediation and their implications on everyday life.
• The role of digital technologies in the making or unmaking of posthuman subjectivity.
• Novel methodological approaches for examining the digital mediation of everyday urban life.

We are hoping for 15 minute, in person presentations with plenty of time for discussion. Please send a title, 250-word abstract and your full contact details to Si Jie Ivin Yeo (ivin.yeo@ouce.ox.ac.uk) and Gillian Rose (gillian.rose@ouce.ox.ac.uk) by Wednesday 14 February.

‘Beyond the page’ and beyond geometric perspective

I went to see the exhibition Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Today yesterday, at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. The show was fabulous – it ends on 28 January so go if you can.

At the core of the exhibition are the ‘miniatures’ (actually sometimes quite medium-sized) painted on book pages by artists working in South Asia from the seventeenth century onwards, and some of the diverse work that kind of painting has inspired, from artists exploring them in London museums in the twentieth century searching for forms of visual resistance to colonial rule, to later artists also intrigued by their formal qualities.

Unknown artist, A late Mughal Album of Calligraphy and Paintings, c.1720-1740

One of the exhibition’s many pleasures is its concern to emphasise that this tradition of painting was in dialogue with other forms of visual art practice from 1600. One miniature has a crowd of very European angels lurking in its clouds for example; there’s also a large canvas by a seventeenth-century Dutch painter bringing the Netherlandish ‘art of describing’ to Mughal carriages made of composite images. This is hybridity as weird and wonderful.

The exhibition also served to remind me how very specific Western techniques of geometric perspective are. I don’t think any of the images in the exhibition used any of those techniques to organise their space. Even a video had been edited so that four boats apparently filmed on a river together floated among patches of ripples in a larger blank space. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about geometric three-dimensional space and its organisation of the visual field recently, since so much digital imagery builds on that geometry; here is a visually compelling exhibition which for the most part (the Dutch canvas excepted, I think) works in very different spatial registers which seem to hold much greater potential for spatial and temporal multiplicity.

I’m going to try to be more active on this blog this year (I know I said that last year…) and reviews are one way to do that. I’ll try to give you more notice of excellent shows in the future though…

picturing suburban utopia

The images in a newspaper report about plans for a “55,000 acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites” caught my eye at the weekend. The ‘utopia’ is called ‘California Forever‘ and its promotional images are striking. They’re a kind of 1930s graphic-cum-landscape, pastel colours, little shading. Bits remind me of iPad painting software, others of English interwar driving guides. But mostly I thought – they must be generated by AI, a generative AI like Midjourney, Dall-E or Stable Diffusion.

I think there are two reasons for this. One is the visual content. There are weird shapes in every image: look at the green things on the roof of the building in the image above. There’s a canoeing scene in which the figures in the kayak are splodges and the daisies next to them oddly large. In fact, in each of the images on the California Forever website I spotted some strange shape which doesn’t work as a representation of even an imaginary urban space.

Also, there’ is a slightly odd ‘utopia’ vibe to the images which is not dissimilar to something Roland Meyer has identified as typical of Midjourney’s generated images. As Roland has demonstrated, Midjourney seems to like an early- to mid-20th century US public visual culture style (with apologies to any art historians out there wondering what on earth I’m talking about). It’s kind of heroic public art/messaging, but more suburban and, as Roland also showed with his image of a ‘family barbecue in a redwood valley’, with very traditional social content: white straight families, in Roland’s example. Roland also shows how Midjourney’s images can become really strange if expanded. These images of California Forever are much less surreal (overtly anyway); it’s all pastel colours and sunshine and sunsets (hence my reference to a certain kind of English interwar aesthetic). But the very conventional and normative social content remains, albeit specifically West-Coast-ised. It’s all very trad, men installing solar panels, women chatting in the town square. And no mention, textual or visual, of the Patwin tribe who lived on the land when the Spanish arrived.

Why use this visual style? Well, one thought is that there is one other recent proposal for a very large-scale urban redevelopment project which also promises to bring a green utopia to a dry land: Neom’s The Line. When I’ve given various talks about the digital visualisation of new urban development projects, it surprises me how many people mention The Line – and not in a good way (see too the comments made about its YouTube promotional video). The many criticisms of this sort of urban utopia vision might have fed into existing widespread scepticism about computer-generated images of new urban redevelopment projects that go for the ‘photo-real’ sort of look that the Neom promotional materials adopt (although always saturated with a golden glow – there’s something to say here about the aesthetic that Unreal Engine has enabled, I think, too). They are perhaps beginning to look more absurd and even offensive than simply a bit of typical marketing to be cynical about. So maybe the developers of ‘California Forever’ want to distance themselves from that critique and that visual style. (I recall that Google’s images for its ill-fated Sidewalk project in Toronto also used what looked like pen-and-watercolour sketches as well as CGIs in their publicity materials, perhaps for the same reason.)

There are surely other reasons too, though, for the use of these visuals. Not least, that using AI to generate these sorts of illustrative images – if that’s what was done – is surely much cheaper to the developer than paying a visual artist to do the work.

But also, if, as Roland suggests, all you need is a vibe from your image, then AI is your tool. And since urban (re)development is increasingly working with the aesthetic and atmospheric (as Monica Degen and I argue in our book The New Urban Aesthetic), then vibe is indeed what you need. So it’s an interesting moment for the production of images of new development projects. Accuracy or vibe? But of course both are now produced digitally so in some ways it’s no choice at all.

Oppenheimer: Man, man and oh man…

Yes, I’ve been to see Barbie and Oppenheimer. Here are some thoughts on the latter. Well, one thought really: Oppenheimer the movie is so deeply wedded to the idea of the white straight male scientist hero that it gives its lead actor no room to manoeuvre. We get Oppenheimer the Tortured Youth, plagued by visions of Physics and Molecules and Atoms and Energy (beautiful and a bit overwhelming, admittedly); then we get Oppenheimer the underestimated Scientific Genius at Berkeley; then the inspirational Leader, motivating crowds of young men, mostly, at Los Alamos; we also get Oppenheimer the manly Man, having sex with pretty much all the female characters who actually get to talk in the movie (all three of them); then we get Oppenheimer the Tortured Genius, having Moral Crises while not, in the end, becoming the victim of a petty bully hoorah.

This is all done with the utmost seriousness: there is no suggestion that lives can be shaped through such discursive figures but not reduced to them. There is no irony or self-awareness. It’s actually a really grim vision. Given all the discussion about feminism and gender swirling around Barbie, the lack of discussion about Oppenheimer‘s view of masculinity is disappointing, to put it mildly, especially given that several of the masculine figures the film works through have have appeared recently in various discussions of AI. I despair. (And I imagine so too do many actual scientists.)