Experimental Futurology: A semi-real, semi-fictional story about three Canary Wharf men.
Louise Ashcroft, 2015.
Martin Shipman was made redundant on 1st April 2015. I hardly knew the guy, I mean I didn't know him at all, but I'd taken a keen interest in him since I found his Citibank ID card at the bottom of the chrome escalators in Jubilee Place. Dough-grey face staring up at me, thrusting against the stark metal teeth of its mechanical impaler; like the Freudian slip, slip, slipping of his ‘Pigtronix Infinity’ guitar loop pedal, applied to the twitchy transition from player to zombie in his Xbox apocalypse edition of Dead Rising 3.
I picked the security pass up but never returned it.
Fascinated by his realness, I Looked Martin Shipman up on LinkedIn.
I visited Phoenix Heights, his mixed-tenure apartment block overlooking Millwall Dock, and thought I'd caught sight of him several times while loitering on the DLR platform at rush hour, enjoying the grind of frantic bodies sliding against mine; a reluctant group hug.
Martin Shipman's LinkedIn page says he is on sabbatical. He has told his former colleagues he is taking a gap year in Jamaica. Only the fervour and regularity with which he updates the photographs of himself in tropical paradise betray this; revealing his cut, paste, clone technique to any keen observer such as myself who shares his interest in Photoshop 6.0 (with its patented liquify effect and 'venus in furs' coding). I print each profile picture out and magnify them so that every pixel covers my entire palm.
Digital rip. RIP.
Amie Hughes-Gage in accounts tweets: 'Just watched the police finally remove that poor bankers body, 4 and half hours later with only a white sheet over him.'
Hetal Patel tweets: 'The 9th floor roof of JP Morgan is visible from my office window. For a long time the body was left cordoned & unattended'.
In my dreams, Shipman's body is made of mercury - like walking through Heron Quay. Hall of mirrors. Distorted. Visual auto-tune repeating the hook "You can't break fluid, it's already broken".
It wasn't his body though - it belonged to a 21-year-old American intern. Comforted by the sight of the corpse, the tragedy made Martin's own last day feel less final. He'd become too distanced from his body to think of destroying it, anyhow.
Shipman looped the revolving doors eight times on the way out of 25 Canada Square because he knew he wouldn't be able to do that every day any more. In graph theory, a loop (also called a self-loop or "buckle") is an edge that connects a vertex to itself.
The feeling of hysteria mingled with futility reminded Martin of the same day the previous year when his colleagues had set his stress squeezer in jelly, recreating that famous scene from TV sitcom The Office in which Tim sets Gareth's stapler in jelly. At the time, Martin laughed it off, but he had found the object intensely emotional, and thought about it most days after that. Something about the proximity of the textures of the jelly and the foam of the stress squeezer caused his nerves to tingle.
Martin Shipman is friends with SneakyPete Bailey who is the Deputy Manager of Coral betting shop in Canada Square. The men share an interest in experimental futurology. In February 2014, SneakyPete gave Shipman a book entitled 'The Giant Book of the Unknown' which he bought from that shop in Manchester where the owner has Victorian wooden hands and gives a free banana with every purchase. He had been in Manchester because Chelsea were playing City in the FA cup. Every time SneakyPete says something sensitive or philosophical (which is surprisingly often) he follows it with a put down like 'not that I give fuck'.
SneakyPete thought his mates would rip the piss out of him if they knew he was an intellectual, but secretly Mike ‘The Walrus’ Quinton and Lee Gobbins were both studying medieval history at night school. None of them ever discussed these pursuits though, because they didn't want to look gay.
Martin Shipman doesn’t like reading, except in languages he can’t understand. He is an avid collector of corporate stress squeezers. Likes the rare ones best. His top three (in order of preference) depict: a floret of broccoli, the former prime minister Gordon Brown, and a realistic human prostrate promoting a cancer charity. He likes them for the same reason that he collects chewing gum - because they evidence the obsoleteness of the human body.
Stress squeezers reintroduce physicality to the office worker in an aesthetic form, now that the only necessary movements are fingers on a keyboard or a touchscreen.
Gum reintroduces chewing as a leisure activity in an age where the stomach has been outsourced to industrial processes and where protein shakes, lattes and smoothies are king.
Shipman is Facebook friends with Rob Rhinehart, a software developer from L.A. who has invented a food powder that contains all the necessary human nutrients; provoking the Wall Street Journal to ask the pseudo-rhetorical question 'Is this the end of food?'. The product is named after the 70s Sci-fi film 'Soylent Green', in which the eponymous food supplement is made from human remains.
Like Rob Rhinehart, Martin is a software developer. His job title had been 'lead architect' at Citi Bank. He liked his job title because the word lead could be read as lead, like the metal, lead architect, which always conjured in his mind an absurd vision of buildings made out of the softest metal.
Martin is particularly sensitive to the aesthetics of materials. He had once slipped over on the remains of a crayfish and avocado wrap. These were the menace of Canary Wharf - the equivalent of South London's ubiquitous fried chicken bones, but with even less mastication involved.
Shipman felt the slippage of his own identity as he left the Citigroup Tower for the last time, clutching a box of stress squeezers. His reflection marbling the buildings around him, turning his Marks and Spencers Savile-Row-inspired washable suit into metallic goo, as though made from silver-hallide film stock with too much gelatin emulsion, so that the images slid off into solution. A kaleidoscopic montage reminiscent of news-reels from 2008; sacked bankers, grasping boxes of desk clutter as though clinging to the driftwood of a shipwreck.
Even in his prime, Shipman was much less macho than SneakyPete, whose raw masculinity was performed through a series of Facebook profile pictures in which he is either: holding a machete, making a crude hand gesture or swigging a can of Carling. The frequency with which these images are posted is directly proportional to the soppy, public dedications he makes to his wife Dian, who he has been married to for eight years. On the 22nd November 2012, SneakyPete updates his Facebook status to “I love my wife more than life itself, she is my queen”… followed by the comment “and I would take out any cunt that even spoke different to her”.
Back home, in his one bedroom apartment at Phoenix heights, Martin Shipman updates his Facebook status to “Leaving drinks at the Slug #gonnagetmessy #payoff #canarywharf #playboybanter”. In reality, Shipman goes straight home and spends the evening alone, repeatedly listening to an electro track, which he forgets the name of, but describes as: 140 BPM heartfelt bro-step instrumental with autotuned hook, smooth synths, wobble bass and aggressive breakdown in the bridge, followed by a vocal drop of ‘Oh My God!’ before the launch into a barrage of growling dub-basses, uplifting house synth-lines, and a fresh, sharp thorax leading to a spikey jabbering bass muddled by clever variations in tempo, and the creepy euphoria of the vocal ‘I want to kill everybody in the world’.
For Shipman, this track is the elegant waste disposal unit of sonic culture - tracing a line from American rock n roll to Jamaican sound system clashes, South London dubstep, and Californian Nu Metal; then mashing these all up together. The structure of the track reminded him precisely of the skip outside Astons wine bar after the fire. Early noughties interior squeezed into one dusty, drippy cube, out the back, by the quayside - you know, Astons, where that party boat 'Absolute Pleasure' is moored - the one they hired out for the IT departments annual meeting.
For Martin, absolute pleasure was achieved in less conventional ways. He'd spent a childhood gazing at fly-tipping sites around the Woodpecker estate in Lewisham. 1998, watching the estate's demolition. Pegasus tower falling down and replaying in the mind like epileptic audio equaliser bars.
Martin experiences a peculiar feeling of synaesthesia whenever he stares into rubble. Perhaps this is because the utter uselessness of detritus makes it somehow luxurious - not in the way that Radox adverts are luxurious, but in the way that art is. Beyond function. Shipman denies this – for him, art is like instant mashed potato and over-evolved fingers; symptoms of civilization's ridiculous crescendo.
I first encountered Martin’s friend SneakyPete Bailey when I noticed in a photo on Meetup.com that they met at Aston's wine bar a couple of summers ago. They were both tagged in photos on Meetup.com/Canary-Wharf-Nightlife alongside Paul Cosens (a corporate hypnotherapist) and his wife Polly (a Taiwanese activist). Polly and Paul met at university in Liverpool before reconnecting again in London through a Neuro Linguistic Programming workshop they both attended. Last week I spent a day repeatedly watching Paul and Polly’s wedding video on Youtube; a lovely ceremony at St Oswald’s in Shropshire’s third largest town of Oswestry.
Having researched Cosens, Shipman and Bailey for several months, I have begun to imagine the development of their friendship. In my recurring dream, they have stayed in touch and formed a club which meets regularly to discuss ‘experimental futurology’, a term that means either gambling, the after-life or commodities trading, depending on which of the men you are talking to and when.
The trio have adopted the motto 'Humilitate homo salvatur, superbia aberrat', which they stole from his holiness Pope Francis who they all follow on Twitter.
Paul Cosens has printed the motto onto A4 paper, adorned it with clip-art deities, and laminated it for use in his forthcoming confidence-building workshop at HSBC.
SneakyPete Bailey has booked an appointment at TJ’s Inks in Rainham, where he will have the phrase tattooed on his right arm above the Chelsea shield and the image of winged foetuses commemorating his wife Dian’s miscarriages.
Like Paul and SneakyPete, Martin Shipman has no interest in the semantic content of their latin motto, but enjoys reciting its syllables in a rhythmic chant, finding the abstract nature of the phrase so poignant that he is compelled to add it to the spreadsheet named ‘Martin’s favourite five-worded statements’, where it ranks second - beaten only by the phrase 'this sentence has five words'.
'Humilitate homo salvatur, superbia aberrat'.
'Humilitate homo salvatur, superbia aberrat'.
It didn’t matter that none of them knew what it meant. It kept them together.
Louise Ashcroft, 2015.
Martin Shipman was made redundant on 1st April 2015. I hardly knew the guy, I mean I didn't know him at all, but I'd taken a keen interest in him since I found his Citibank ID card at the bottom of the chrome escalators in Jubilee Place. Dough-grey face staring up at me, thrusting against the stark metal teeth of its mechanical impaler; like the Freudian slip, slip, slipping of his ‘Pigtronix Infinity’ guitar loop pedal, applied to the twitchy transition from player to zombie in his Xbox apocalypse edition of Dead Rising 3.
I picked the security pass up but never returned it.
Fascinated by his realness, I Looked Martin Shipman up on LinkedIn.
I visited Phoenix Heights, his mixed-tenure apartment block overlooking Millwall Dock, and thought I'd caught sight of him several times while loitering on the DLR platform at rush hour, enjoying the grind of frantic bodies sliding against mine; a reluctant group hug.
Martin Shipman's LinkedIn page says he is on sabbatical. He has told his former colleagues he is taking a gap year in Jamaica. Only the fervour and regularity with which he updates the photographs of himself in tropical paradise betray this; revealing his cut, paste, clone technique to any keen observer such as myself who shares his interest in Photoshop 6.0 (with its patented liquify effect and 'venus in furs' coding). I print each profile picture out and magnify them so that every pixel covers my entire palm.
Digital rip. RIP.
Amie Hughes-Gage in accounts tweets: 'Just watched the police finally remove that poor bankers body, 4 and half hours later with only a white sheet over him.'
Hetal Patel tweets: 'The 9th floor roof of JP Morgan is visible from my office window. For a long time the body was left cordoned & unattended'.
In my dreams, Shipman's body is made of mercury - like walking through Heron Quay. Hall of mirrors. Distorted. Visual auto-tune repeating the hook "You can't break fluid, it's already broken".
It wasn't his body though - it belonged to a 21-year-old American intern. Comforted by the sight of the corpse, the tragedy made Martin's own last day feel less final. He'd become too distanced from his body to think of destroying it, anyhow.
Shipman looped the revolving doors eight times on the way out of 25 Canada Square because he knew he wouldn't be able to do that every day any more. In graph theory, a loop (also called a self-loop or "buckle") is an edge that connects a vertex to itself.
The feeling of hysteria mingled with futility reminded Martin of the same day the previous year when his colleagues had set his stress squeezer in jelly, recreating that famous scene from TV sitcom The Office in which Tim sets Gareth's stapler in jelly. At the time, Martin laughed it off, but he had found the object intensely emotional, and thought about it most days after that. Something about the proximity of the textures of the jelly and the foam of the stress squeezer caused his nerves to tingle.
Martin Shipman is friends with SneakyPete Bailey who is the Deputy Manager of Coral betting shop in Canada Square. The men share an interest in experimental futurology. In February 2014, SneakyPete gave Shipman a book entitled 'The Giant Book of the Unknown' which he bought from that shop in Manchester where the owner has Victorian wooden hands and gives a free banana with every purchase. He had been in Manchester because Chelsea were playing City in the FA cup. Every time SneakyPete says something sensitive or philosophical (which is surprisingly often) he follows it with a put down like 'not that I give fuck'.
SneakyPete thought his mates would rip the piss out of him if they knew he was an intellectual, but secretly Mike ‘The Walrus’ Quinton and Lee Gobbins were both studying medieval history at night school. None of them ever discussed these pursuits though, because they didn't want to look gay.
Martin Shipman doesn’t like reading, except in languages he can’t understand. He is an avid collector of corporate stress squeezers. Likes the rare ones best. His top three (in order of preference) depict: a floret of broccoli, the former prime minister Gordon Brown, and a realistic human prostrate promoting a cancer charity. He likes them for the same reason that he collects chewing gum - because they evidence the obsoleteness of the human body.
Stress squeezers reintroduce physicality to the office worker in an aesthetic form, now that the only necessary movements are fingers on a keyboard or a touchscreen.
Gum reintroduces chewing as a leisure activity in an age where the stomach has been outsourced to industrial processes and where protein shakes, lattes and smoothies are king.
Shipman is Facebook friends with Rob Rhinehart, a software developer from L.A. who has invented a food powder that contains all the necessary human nutrients; provoking the Wall Street Journal to ask the pseudo-rhetorical question 'Is this the end of food?'. The product is named after the 70s Sci-fi film 'Soylent Green', in which the eponymous food supplement is made from human remains.
Like Rob Rhinehart, Martin is a software developer. His job title had been 'lead architect' at Citi Bank. He liked his job title because the word lead could be read as lead, like the metal, lead architect, which always conjured in his mind an absurd vision of buildings made out of the softest metal.
Martin is particularly sensitive to the aesthetics of materials. He had once slipped over on the remains of a crayfish and avocado wrap. These were the menace of Canary Wharf - the equivalent of South London's ubiquitous fried chicken bones, but with even less mastication involved.
Shipman felt the slippage of his own identity as he left the Citigroup Tower for the last time, clutching a box of stress squeezers. His reflection marbling the buildings around him, turning his Marks and Spencers Savile-Row-inspired washable suit into metallic goo, as though made from silver-hallide film stock with too much gelatin emulsion, so that the images slid off into solution. A kaleidoscopic montage reminiscent of news-reels from 2008; sacked bankers, grasping boxes of desk clutter as though clinging to the driftwood of a shipwreck.
Even in his prime, Shipman was much less macho than SneakyPete, whose raw masculinity was performed through a series of Facebook profile pictures in which he is either: holding a machete, making a crude hand gesture or swigging a can of Carling. The frequency with which these images are posted is directly proportional to the soppy, public dedications he makes to his wife Dian, who he has been married to for eight years. On the 22nd November 2012, SneakyPete updates his Facebook status to “I love my wife more than life itself, she is my queen”… followed by the comment “and I would take out any cunt that even spoke different to her”.
Back home, in his one bedroom apartment at Phoenix heights, Martin Shipman updates his Facebook status to “Leaving drinks at the Slug #gonnagetmessy #payoff #canarywharf #playboybanter”. In reality, Shipman goes straight home and spends the evening alone, repeatedly listening to an electro track, which he forgets the name of, but describes as: 140 BPM heartfelt bro-step instrumental with autotuned hook, smooth synths, wobble bass and aggressive breakdown in the bridge, followed by a vocal drop of ‘Oh My God!’ before the launch into a barrage of growling dub-basses, uplifting house synth-lines, and a fresh, sharp thorax leading to a spikey jabbering bass muddled by clever variations in tempo, and the creepy euphoria of the vocal ‘I want to kill everybody in the world’.
For Shipman, this track is the elegant waste disposal unit of sonic culture - tracing a line from American rock n roll to Jamaican sound system clashes, South London dubstep, and Californian Nu Metal; then mashing these all up together. The structure of the track reminded him precisely of the skip outside Astons wine bar after the fire. Early noughties interior squeezed into one dusty, drippy cube, out the back, by the quayside - you know, Astons, where that party boat 'Absolute Pleasure' is moored - the one they hired out for the IT departments annual meeting.
For Martin, absolute pleasure was achieved in less conventional ways. He'd spent a childhood gazing at fly-tipping sites around the Woodpecker estate in Lewisham. 1998, watching the estate's demolition. Pegasus tower falling down and replaying in the mind like epileptic audio equaliser bars.
Martin experiences a peculiar feeling of synaesthesia whenever he stares into rubble. Perhaps this is because the utter uselessness of detritus makes it somehow luxurious - not in the way that Radox adverts are luxurious, but in the way that art is. Beyond function. Shipman denies this – for him, art is like instant mashed potato and over-evolved fingers; symptoms of civilization's ridiculous crescendo.
I first encountered Martin’s friend SneakyPete Bailey when I noticed in a photo on Meetup.com that they met at Aston's wine bar a couple of summers ago. They were both tagged in photos on Meetup.com/Canary-Wharf-Nightlife alongside Paul Cosens (a corporate hypnotherapist) and his wife Polly (a Taiwanese activist). Polly and Paul met at university in Liverpool before reconnecting again in London through a Neuro Linguistic Programming workshop they both attended. Last week I spent a day repeatedly watching Paul and Polly’s wedding video on Youtube; a lovely ceremony at St Oswald’s in Shropshire’s third largest town of Oswestry.
Having researched Cosens, Shipman and Bailey for several months, I have begun to imagine the development of their friendship. In my recurring dream, they have stayed in touch and formed a club which meets regularly to discuss ‘experimental futurology’, a term that means either gambling, the after-life or commodities trading, depending on which of the men you are talking to and when.
The trio have adopted the motto 'Humilitate homo salvatur, superbia aberrat', which they stole from his holiness Pope Francis who they all follow on Twitter.
Paul Cosens has printed the motto onto A4 paper, adorned it with clip-art deities, and laminated it for use in his forthcoming confidence-building workshop at HSBC.
SneakyPete Bailey has booked an appointment at TJ’s Inks in Rainham, where he will have the phrase tattooed on his right arm above the Chelsea shield and the image of winged foetuses commemorating his wife Dian’s miscarriages.
Like Paul and SneakyPete, Martin Shipman has no interest in the semantic content of their latin motto, but enjoys reciting its syllables in a rhythmic chant, finding the abstract nature of the phrase so poignant that he is compelled to add it to the spreadsheet named ‘Martin’s favourite five-worded statements’, where it ranks second - beaten only by the phrase 'this sentence has five words'.
'Humilitate homo salvatur, superbia aberrat'.
'Humilitate homo salvatur, superbia aberrat'.
It didn’t matter that none of them knew what it meant. It kept them together.