Event overview
Join us to discover the work of artist and PhD researcher Dan Newton. All welcome!
So much for the streetlights
They’re never gonna guide you home
No, they’re never gonna guide you home
(Doo, doo-doo-doo-doo, doo-doo)
-The Thrills, Big Sur
“Lamppost! Can you see the lamppost? Say lamppost. See it there? What is it? Say lamppost”. It feels like everybody and nobody and anybody is talking about lampposts. This particular conversation between a parent and their young child ensued on the upper deck of a London bus one weekend afternoon in an interstitial moment of static traffic, temporarily framing the beyond-the-bus as an exhibit, before its subsequent dissolution back into ambient motion at each moment of re-acceleration. Focussing on the lamppost struck me as curious given the array of other objects available for investigation; shop fronts, clouds, traffic lights, surveillance cameras, other buses, cars, bicycles, scooters, a phone box, a letter box, road signs, a passing aeroplane, trees, flowers, advertisements, birds and of course people. But despite having passed dozens of uniformly erected lampposts since boarding the bus, it was indeed this singular grey structure, swaying ever so slightly in the breeze, that announced itself as worthy of linguistic education.
If the conversation had occurred just after the gloaming, described in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere as the moment when the light becomes that “strange, strained gray one only sees shortly before dawn and for a few moments after sunset […] when the world washes out into gloom, and the colour and distance become impossible to judge”, would they have said lamppost or streetlight?
Whilst commonly employed interchangeably, some sources claim lampposts to be shorter and more ornate than taller utilitarian streetlights. For others, the lamppost is the structure itself, whereas the streetlights are the lights atop them, meaning that all lampposts are streetlights, but not all streetlights are lampposts, as many streetlights are suspended from wires or protrude from the sides of buildings. Adopting the latter, it’s safe to say that the lamppost is a different object when the streetlight is illuminated, at which point individual lampposts transmogrify into electrical collectives of lucent (in)activity. Yet we are increasingly bearing witness to the peculiar situation in which financially stretched councils are resorting to the phenomena of part-night lighting; of designated moments of the night in which the lights are extinguished, resulting in the proliferation of dark, ambient streets, of unlit space.
There are no streetlights, just lampposts.
For questions about the event, contact Dan Newton: dnewt002@gold.ac.uk
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 14 May 2024 | 11:00am - 1:00pm |
Accessibility
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