Third space
I sit in the crowded cafe of the Tate Modern looking across the water at St Paul’s on an unremarkable Tuesday. I told myself I’d come to the art gallery to explore their new space, soak up some culture, and use the art as a cheap anaesthetic for my mind to help insulate it from what feels like an endless parade of horror stories presented every second of every day in the contemporary news cycle, the script to which Paddy Chayefsky would throw out dismissing it as not believable enough.
I failed to complete my noble aim of being one of those people who look at art and have interesting, meaningful things to say about it. I don’t even own a damn black turtle neck. Instead I clutch for something safe and familiar, burning my tongue on the thick viscus black coffee and accidentally being recruited as personal photographer to some American tourists. Lesson learnt I suppose. I should’ve avoided the gift shop and pegged it for the room with the art. I daren’t bring up Trump with the Americans as I suspect their motivation for coming to the art gallery might be a similar desire for escapism as mine. I return their iPhone and continue to burn my tongue again on another addict-like gulp of black sludge.
I watched The Big Short the other day. I also watched a talk from the artificial intelligence company DeepMind on the same day. That probably explains the sick daydream I have of using artificial intelligence to play the stock market. This probably isn’t the venue for those kinds of thoughts, I scold myself. This is a temple of culture. But then again, the first information plaque that I came across accompanying the artwork in the Turbine Hall had more detail about the commercial sponsor than it did the artwork itself. Maybe this is the ideal venue for those kinds of thoughts after all? And maybe I should buy a Hyundai?
Third Space. I keep hearing that phrase. Third Space. I’m probably on the lookout for it, or my pattern-spotting lizard brain has atrophied so much from the lack of tiger patterns that it evolved to spot, that it’s getting its own back by playing banal tricks on me to amuse itself. But I reckon there’s something to it, the whole ‘third space’ thing. Not work, not home, a third thing. That would explain why there are so many awful coffee shops springing up every five metres. Just last night the kitchen in my own house became a Costa coffee — sure it’s over-priced, but I’m one stamp away from being allowed to look in my fridge again.
This morning I had a meeting in a co-working space in Shoreditch. It was a space so eager to be subversive that they had applied chipboard to every available surface. The constructed subversion had flipped it all the way back around to cliche again. I believe the thinking goes that you can directly correlate the level of ‘disruption’ happening with the number of splinters you get from any one meeting. There’s a hashtag in neon scrawled on the wall, which probably means we’re trending. So that’s exciting. At least I’m not in a breezy up-cycled freight container this time, I think to myself. Those are spaces so irreverent that you accidentally get mailed to India while trying to hold a board meeting.
Surely we can do this better than this. We live in a world where digital reigns supreme, but in all that online fetishism and effort to become digitally connected we’ve become physically disconnected. We’ve totally forgotten what community means in the meatspace, manifesting in all sorts of IRL social disorders. Social disorders as heinous as using terms like ‘meatspace’ and ‘IRL’.
I’ve been talking to a group of architects, policy makers and designers who all seem to think the root cause of many modern societal problems is a paucity of real-world space. Brexit Remainers weren’t aware that Brexit Leavers existed because they were so trapped in their digital filter bubble, echo chamber, Plato’s cave — whatever you want to call it — because they had no physical space to interact with them, to develop empathy and understanding for one another. The exact same reasoning can be applied to any fractured group of disconnected society. The Trump supporters; the Colombian peace contrarians; the immigrant fearful. Lack of understanding for one another’s point of view only solidifies and becomes more pronounced if we don’t have spaces to interact and open up dialogue, instead we have replaced dialogue for an online world of news feeds that only serve to reaffirm and deepen the views that we already hold.
We need that Third Space. Not a space trying to sell you coffee. Not a space trying to sell you a Hyundai under the guise of art. And not a space trying to make you co-work. How about a space built by communities, free of commercial requirements. What would that space look like? Our little group have accidentally stumbled across 4,000 square feet of free space in the centre of Manchester City Centre. Let’s fill it with ideas and make that third space together. Seriously, get in touch.
