THE ENCHANTMENT OF THE SNARK
I think it is fitting to begin the blog with my first hunting for a snark. This was the first hunt I conducted after reading Lewis Carroll’s poem. I began this project with my dear Baroness Von Heron, AKA Caroline. She had a thrist for psychogeography and I for fiction and poetry. We saw an obvious corrolation between the act of fiction and the act of space. In fact, psychogeography has primarily found its expression in works of fiction (I will elaborate on this in the next blog). The correlation between these two interests and our mutual interest in participatory creative actions, provoked our collaboration, and hopefully, teach us about provoking further collaboration from others.
What I found very enticing about the poem was the circularity and absurdity of the hunt. I related to the poem’s voyagers as hunters searching for an inconceivable creature with the best map, a blank. I am often frustrated with the constructs of the academy and having a blank map was very appealing. I imagined this map to be my escape from control cultures and debates about the post-cybernetic condition. Interactive art is often swallowed by the hell that is technological discourse. I call it hell because it is a place where the soul dare not enter. Yes! Technology provides excellent new passages for interactivity. However, I have been to one too many technology infused art displays which have made my heart bleed. And no, this is not an overly dramatic reaction; Art, theory, whatever without poetry is hell. I will shout it from the mountain tops!
The horror of the Futurist project was that it was, in principle, fascist. Turning away from the past is not only foolish, it is an act of violence. Naturally Futurism was no stranger to violence, as physical violence stems from conflict of the spirit. I do not mean to degrade the art of technology by any means; the realms of technology should not be reduced to the realms of gimmickry. However I do feel that there is often a use of cutting edge technology that translates art into gimmickry. Furthermore these techniques are not strange to the unplugged industry of contemporary art either. Because technology (and art is a technology) is an extension of our being, for it to be invoked through the gimmick is to degrade our being. This degradation is very much a consequence of the ubiquitous screwiness of consumerism.
I am reminded by Alfred Gell’s The Enchantment of Technology and Technology of Enchantment. In this paper, Gell argues that art is the employment of the technology of enchantment at its very basis. However, I would like to make a distinction between the enchantment that is found in the gimmick and the enchantment that shakes your being to its core. The gimmick is such that it should feed off of human emotion in order produce a particular response from the audience. This is what commercial art seeks to do. I have felt in many art shows as though someone is trying to sell me something. This becomes even more frustrating when I realize that the only thing I am being sold is the same piece of crap that is selling me something. Basically selling is being sold….Oh the splendors of the art industry! Actually, no thank you. I think I will go and admire the window displays at Selfridges. At least I can buy a perfume or something if I get the urge.
I digress. Yes, the poetic of the snark I found to be brilliant as I thought a hunt through the city could provide inspiration to turn anything into an object for the imagination to run wild. The poem left things very open as they actually are if you ignore cultural constraints. However this everything can be very empty and lonely. Vastness is a very frustrating poetic to work with. It is a challenge to point a group nowhere, especially for a hunt. Producing clues for something that does not exist, believe it or not, is hard to do. We thought of lying and saying there was something in order to get people to start finding clues of their own. The poetic of a snark hunt is that all should be lost and anything is left to interpretation. This can be slightly disorienting and I think it should require a lot of practice and dedication to master the art of the snark dance. Vastness is a method, not a project. I think this was a major lesson for the Baroness and I.
THE WALK
Our snark hunt began with staying up all night together watching Avante-Gard movies. The significance of the Avante-garde, especially with regard to cinema, would become apparent later (I will save this for the next blog). I love surrealism and was hoping that some sleep deprivation might be an interesting way to wake up the imagination for the next day. We hoped that this tactic would allow for us to become less familiar with our surroundings so that we could see them for our mission rather than the daily grind. This did not prove useful for anything but crankiness.
We set out from Liverpool street station. In the theme of tale chasing we went on the circle line and thought we would look for clues to tell us when to get off. I cannot recall why we got off at Baker street but someone holding a sign with an arrow soon led us in the direction of the residence of Sherlock Holmes. The keeper of the Holmes’ residence was very helpful for our snark hunt and even went to fetch Mr. Watson on our behalf. However, Mr. Watson could not help us find the snark and so we carried on to regents park. I must see keeping up with the fiction of the snark hunt soon proved to be very tiring. However I do feel that we explored areas of the city that were off the beaten path. We also found some pretty amazing clues, some of which I have included below. I think the trouble with the project, at the end of the day, was finding a way to frame it in an engaging way. Framing the project was to be Caroline and I’s major collaborative challenge. We struggled for weeks to write a project proposal together, but I will discuss that at another time.
Number clues:
A swan gives us a clue
John’s 2 cents:
FUTURE PROJECTS, DISCUSSION?
I will have this section at the end of every blog in order to get some blogging happening. This way every post might lead to a new project or projects if we are lucky!
What does everyone think about testing the seas of openess to the point of vacuous vastness? How might this help thoughts concerning open source culture, for example??
If the city is left completely to be reinterpreted by a certain poetic, how might this be acheived? Possibly by spreading a myth through the internet. I am thinking about how rumours might cause actions??
Also using found objects (clues) in such a way could prove really useful for collective story telling. Here a see fertile grounds for the snark hunt in all of its vastness.
A project concerning numbers and the landscape?
