BigShinyThing

We were shocked yesterday to hear from our friend Stephen, of the death (apparently suicide) of blogger and video-game author Theresa Duncan, and the disappearance of her partner Jeremy Blake.

Duncan was known and respected for her work in the late 90s designing girl-friendly video games, and more recently for her witty and opinionated culture blog The Wit of the Staircase. Blake is (was?) an animator and artist. Both included a passion for perfumes amongst their wide-ranging interests.

Theresa was an early supporter of BigShinyThing, and her recognition meant a lot to us back then and since. A proposed interview sadly never happened and now never will. Our thoughts and condolences to her family and to Blake’s.

Perhaps aptly, what has been made public of her death and Blake’s disappearance is shaping up as a modern blogosphere noir. Read the news on the New York Times, and some of the mythmaking and speculation here.

HM Redsands was built in 1943 to counter German warplanes. It was abandoned in the 1950s but a decade later became home to a number of pirate radio stations. Today is stands derelict and unloved apart from a group of enthusiasts who have vowed to save the structures for posterity.

The fort, designed by Guy Maunsell, is made up of seven towers. Each of these has a two-storey house (36 ft by 36 ft) on top of four 65 ft concrete legs. in 1943, the towers, complete with crew, were towed out at spring high tide and hand-winched on to the seabed. They were then linked by steel walkways.

The fort was home to 265 men on six week tours at a time. Not surprisingly, the solitude led to a spate of suicides after which knitting was instituted as a hobby to keep the men busy. In total, the army forts in the Thames shot down 22 planes and 30 flying bombs but amazingly were never hit.

Both The Times and BBC Breakfast have picked up on the story in recent weeks. Meanwhile, artist Stephen Turner is planning to spend six weeks on one of the towers. He will be keeping a diary in order to produce a book about the experience, funded by a $42,000 Arts Council grant. He says on his website, “The Seafort Project is an artistic exploration of isolation, investigating how one’s experience of time changes in isolation, and what creative contemplation means in a twenty first century context.”

We shall see.