The Concrete Seed

At 12:45pm today – The Concrete Seed: A New Town Fable by Glasgow based artist Jamie McNeill.

A strange and eerie essay-fiction critiquing the legacy of Scotland’s new towns through a mix of narrative, soundscape and leftist hauntings. A personal and experimental take on planning, place and the weird edges of modernity.

‘The Concrete Seed’ is an essayistic fiction that offers an idiosyncratic critique of the post-war British new town project, specifically in its relation to Scotland, and of top-down spatial planning more generally. Idiosyncratic, in that it presents a critique bound up in a satire that avoids didacticism in favour of an experimental approach combining a subjective voice with text and sound steeped in Scotch ostranenie.

The narrative comprises a power struggle between the abstracted archetypes of Planner, Dwellers and New Town.

“They envision objects given over to illegibility, cut through with desire lines and a hallucinatory organicism. Vertical and horizontal surfaces deliberately damaged to encourage rapid biofouling. Buildings that contract. Windows that sing. Occulting the cadastral gaze.”