Jaunted Embedded Travel Guides: The Tate Turbine Hall

April 12, 2007 at 3:20 PM | by benji | 0 Comments

Jaunted Embedded Travel Guides: London 2007

We are constantly searching for the most timely and useful travel information on locations around the world. We have always found that boots on the ground is a great way to sift through the marketing clutter and bring you the travel tips, information, and opinions you crave. However, now it is time to kick it up a notch. First, we are searching the world for folks who can take you on a field trip of their "backyard." When we find these folks, we then embed them into their local travel scene and ask them to be our eyes and ears out in the field.

We are expecting the same sort of grainy video, choppy sentences, and snapshot photos that you are use to seeing from embeds. The rub is, at the end of the day we should be left with a backyard travel guidebook like no other.

Our first embed is Benji Lanyado of London, UK. He is a budget travel columnist for the Guardian Newspaper in the UK. He also is the fearless leader of Youngin Europe, so expect his guide to skew young, but not that young, we intend to keep this thing legal. He lives in London and enjoys ranting about football.

Now that you have all the particulars, sit back and enjoy the trip.

London :: Art
Sound, sun, polythene and slides at London's biggest modern art venue.

When it comes to modern art, I'm something of an interested philistine: I like quite a lot of it, but I don't know why. The modern art mecca of London is undoubtedly the Tate Modern on the South Bank, and their current centrepiece has to take the cake for I'm-entertained-and-if-that's-art-I'm-in funny business.

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The Tate Modern's exhibits are all wrapped around a vast turbine hall (it used to be a power station) where each year a different artist is invited to fill it with a mega-installation. Over the last few years we've had Bruce Nauman filling the hall with staccato audio clips (an `audio installation'), Olafur Eliasson recreating the sun and sky complete with mist and humidity (this was truly brilliant), and Rachel Whiteread filling the hall with 14,000 translucent, white polythene boxes.

The current exhibitor is Carsten H�ller, whose installation is...wait for it...a collection of metallic slides winding down from the various floors. Any art that involves me saying "wheeee!" gets the thumbs up as far as I'm concerned.

[Photo: jeroen020]

More shots of the slides are available at Flickr user victoriapeckham's stream.

Specific questions about London? Ask away in the comments area below.

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Related Stories:
� Blair Cashes Jumps on Tate Bandwagon, Others Raise Eyebrows [Guardian UK]
� Columbian Guerilla Named As New Turbine Resident [BBC]

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