Anthony Iles is a cultural engineer and writer researching and making experiments in the disappearing public sphere. He is Assistant Editor of Mute magazine. http://www.metamute.org
I'm currently working on a text/visual collaboration with Alessandra Chila that relat es to Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price's proposals to site a 'Fun Palace' in the Lea Valley Regional Park in the 1960s, the current site of the 2012 London Olympics. I see many of their 'radical' ideas being carried through as farce: 'participation', 'leisure' and work-discipline and policed consumption in the current plans to turn the area into a mega-event real estate sacrifice zone. (see: http://saladofpearls.blogsome.com/2007/11/08/olympics-flame/) . . .a 1960s utopian collapse of distinctions between work and leisure, play and entertainment >>> falling into a distopian disciplinary land grab regen sacrifice. Thus continuity between Old Labour and New - 60s and 00s Post-war experimentalism and wartime endo-colonisation. The idea is to present Price/Littlewood's scheme as utopian - proto situationist and then pull that to pieces. Mark Crinson covers a little of this in "In the Bowels of the Funa Palace" http://www.metamute.org/en/In-the-Bowels-of-the-Fun-Palace - but not the Olympics angle and not the tendency for regenforces/capital to pickup old plans and breath new death into them.