Berlin and hospitality club May 8, 2008

Here I would like to talk about a walk I conducted in Berlin. I wrote people from the traveling network hospitality club and asked them to join me at the airport and find Berlin by walking. I wrote to about 100 people, but unfortunately, my email was delayed in the system and only reached very few people in time (there is an optional spam filter which can delay messages in the network). With that said there was an amazing response even though it was too late, so I must attempt this walk again!

Anyways, I was met by three enthusiastic Germans out of the 10 that were supposed to come but didnt due to the awful weather. We walked for about 7 hours and only were able to get just to the tip of Berlin. All involved said they enjoyed the idea very much. I got some great footage of the walk however it has been lost in my recent move…stay tuned and i will add more footage in the comment boxes when they surface…there was some pretty juicy insight from an interview with one of the participants. Anyways I find networks such as hospitality club extremely useful links to interest groups from which to find participation. Conducting work which challenges notions of space and place should find a lot of interest from dedicated travelers as it serves them a challenge to get to travel at home. It is a funny notion that transportation enjoys recreational sentiment when its abroad and not at home. Wouldn’t it be nice if the tube was more relaxing…. haha

Berlin’s history made it an amazing place to do a walk. Notions of east and west, past and future became very disorientating. This was great for my goal of getting lost. Also I am thankful that I was able to explore it with locals, two of whom were native Berliners. Together we explored the surroundings of the airport, which I would imagine could never happen without suspicion in the US or the UK. Also it was very exciting to explore places where the Berlin wall used to be. I have agreed with the participants of the walk that this summer (for good weather) we should conduct a walk that attempts to follow the Berlin wall all the way around. Now that should be an interesting cyclical path!!!

Also airport walks are extremely interesting as they show the space bubbles we create through our everyday rituals by breaking them. There was actually a controversy surrounding Berlin’s airports I became aware of during the walk.  Apparently Tegel Airport which is close to the center was to be shut down and the more wealthy Berliners were upset with this prospect.  The airport ritual is such that it transports you from one bubble to the other. In Berlin’s case the airport even mark class territories as more expensive flights service Tegel and it is more convenient by car.

Will Self gives an extremely helpful lecture on youtube about his walk from London to New York which included a walk from his home in London to Heathrow and then his walk from JFK airport to Manhatten:

As I mentioned before the juicy bits of footage of the walk have been buried in my mountains of crap. For now I will have to give you the only clip I could salvage which is admittedly pretty lame, but still kind of cool, because it is the point when two of the participants took the camera off of me and did some of their own filming in an old restaurant we found on the outskirts of Berlin:

DISCUSSION/ FUTURE PROJECTS:

• Another Berlin walk where the email gets to everyone on time and in sunnier weather!
• Berlin wall walk
• More airport walks or other spaces where transport disrupts spatial continuity
• Making recreational spaces in public transportation

Magic and allegory May 7, 2008

One of my favorite reads so far in the study o finteractive media was words made flesh by Florian Kramer. In this essay Kramer discusses, the cultural imagination, the history of software and the history of computation with examples from the occult sciences. The relationship between the occult and technology is a fascinating subject. Thinking about culture in terms of calculations is very fruitful for the mechanical allegories I have been thinking about. Also, are rituals not methods of calculation, at least of identity?

These are all really huge questions but rather than ignore them I want to make a breif note here. I have currently been researching astrology and ancient treatments of the heavens. I am very interested in how I could use constellations and the zodiac in interactive art and psychogeography. Furthermore I find the occult distinction interesting as it seems to suggest that these sciences are irrational others. The surrealists’ mission to enchant the mundane is very much about questioning dangerous logics which make accusations of irrationality, thus mechanizing the human condition. I suppose the irony in the surrealist project, when thinking about magic and the othering gaze, is that surrealism also fell into the traps of its own critique.

I recently went to a discussion on the serious side of magic and the stars with Peter Forshaw and Nick Campion that was part of the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art at the Barbican. Forshaw and Campion are academics who specialize in astrology and other aspects of the occult. I found this discussion very useful as it spoke about the obssessive categorization of the ancients in order to understand the universe. Things on earth were reflected in the heavens and this takes me back to the notion of the allegory. The allegory can be seen to represent the paridigmatic pattern between large and small bodies. Can our own technologies also be seen to mimic these patterns? For example, can the architecture of the computer be an allegory for the architecture of the city?

DISCUSSION, FUTURE PROJECTS:

I kept the occult discussion brief because I personally do not know enough about it. I will keep up the research and keep it posted here at a later date.

For now I want to think about how the body can be used as an allegory. I want to do walks that transpose the macroscopic and microscopic through the paradigm of the bodies and address the following themes:

• The cosmos: using astrology?
• The Earth as a body/ the elements
• The political body: National museum as setting, using traveling networks such as hospitality club
• The human body: Hospital or hygienic walks like cleaning the city
• Microbes/atoms

I have been thinking about settings like the British museum or a country field at night where i can expirement with constellations.

Treasure hunt: to go back to the hunting theme…The goldbug hunt got me very interested in the science of cryptography. One method of cryptography is transposition codes. I wonder if a transposition code could not be worked out through the body allegory in order to create an interesting space for expressing relationships between the macrocosm and the microcosm. The process of decrypting is why I enjoy the hunting poetic very much as it puts you in the position to suspect everything and create strange relationships. I want to develop a hunt that enables the surrealist technique through the relationship between objects and ideas in the creation of clues. Again a big challenge to the snark hunt is creating a context that enables automatic clue formation.

Also, one project I have started working on is creating zodiac poetry. this is a collaborative poetry project based on the exquisite corpse game of the surrealists. However I have been experimenting with ordering the poems in terms of the participant’s zodiac configurations. So for example I will order the participant’s astrological relationship to the alignment of the planets to inform the sequence in which each verse is placed.

Messy Reflections: snarks, dialectics, surrealism and mirrors May 7, 2008

Here I would like to speak about the difficulty Caroline and I encountered in reflecting upon the snark hunt and how we wanted to take our psychogeography further.

We found the absurd, circular-like logic of the snark dance as something useful. We loved absurdity in so far as it made thoughts move in messy directions so that ends could not meet. Even still there is something in this movement I find very meaningful. I think this makes a mess of dialectics and I am pretty sure this is what the surrealists had in mind in their use of strange juxtaposition as a creation of new spaces for thought to roam freely from the fascism of linear logics. The cycle of absurdity is very interesting especially when we look to how this can apply it to the space between polarities (which might be understood as the gaze) in relation to recursion or the application of the absurd to reflection and the infamous gaze.

A side project I had been working on was a documentary or ethnography of a pie and mash shop in East London. A major challenge to this project were the many mirrors within the setting that kept revealing the camera in our footage. This made me very aware of my own Western gaze towards East London. Seeing myself behind the camera and in front of the camera made a maze of my thoughts in determining where I could situate myself in a responsible representation of this project. I reconciled the situation by juxtaposing the mechanics of my cinematic project to the mechanics that were in the shop. The winding sound of the machines used to make pies echoed the sound of a film projector. Using the allegory of mechanical production was actually a very interesting technology with which to confront the gaze. I think that allegory is a useful device in which to make some sense or meaningful experience within the labyrinth created by complicated modes of reflection.

In thinking about the history of cinema in relation to the history of anthropology and this thing called colonialism I began to think about the surrealists. One thing Caroline and I loved about avant-garde cinema was its creative use of the mechanics of documentation in order to produce surreal content. One major critique of surrealism is the feminist critique as the surrealist movement has a very sexist undertone. For example the ubiquitous objectification and disfigurement of the female body in surrealist painting (think Dali). The surrealist manifesto was not signed by a single woman and female contribution to the surrealist project is severely marginalized. Leonora Carrington (a contemporary of Breton) has produced writing and paintings that blow many surrealists out of the water! But I bet even some of the biggest fans of surrealism have never even heard of her.

Magritte (1929): Je ne vois pas la (femme) cachee dans le foret meaning I do not see the woman hidden in the forest. A great example of the surrealist objectification of the female, it depicts prominent figures in the surrealist movement. This image was found in a fantastic article on the blog: Letters from a Librarian.

Now I would like to argue that the objectification of the woman in the surrealist project stems from the movement’s relationship to the history of cinema. The camera is the technology of objectification as its very mechanics are the gaze hatis higly gendered. The cinema allows for the audience to see as flaneur not flaneuse (the prostitute).

Now I do not want to go into this much further. But why the gaze whether it be gendered or colonialist is important to this blog is that it presents something for the interactive project to think about. The gaze should be complicated in interactive based projects and media. The potential for reflexivity in these projects could compromise the simplicity of the gaze and therefore the process of objectification. If the gaze is reflected upon itself it was in my recent experience then what is then objectified?? Does this not echo the complexities of the digital postcolonial age. Do internet networks do the work of multiple reflections opening up passages for the gaze to be distorted?

Using the mirror or echo allegory has really helped me in my filmmaking but I also hope for it to challenge my research for the creation of interactive activities. I think part of role playing is our individual rituals of gazing… Who are we allowed to gaze at and in which context?

Returning to the snark… how does an empty signifyer affect this discussion? What happens when a hunt is for an object that does not exist? This is something that caroline and I did not take into enough consideration before hand. I think in order for this to work we would have to really implement our theatrical skills. Maybe our acting abilities just arent up to par for such a task. However until then, I think something to take a away from this experience is this rethinking of the dialectics that I believe the surrealists were aware of in their praise of the absurd. Through the absurd I think we are able to fill inthe gaps of strange juxtaposition in order to form a new space for synthesis. I am not saying that the surrealists advocated the unraveling of absolute spirit. However, I think there is something to be said for this process.

Also the Surrealists were able to create a playful atmosphere for our thoughts to roam. This is something I really love about the genre. So what I ultimately would like to do is to take surrealist technique and exorcise the gaze. I think this has to come from reflexivity from all sides.. the technology of recursion could underline the labyrinth of our being inorder for us to escape modes of othering. Now if this soundslike a complicated mess, I think it is supposed to be, but maybe such a mess can be magical.

FUTURE PROJECTS?

I think that putting absurd cycles into movement would be great. Maybe tryingto walk in a perfect circle around the city. Or playing with the circle line. Implementing different typesof cycles in these walks…The moon cycle, the day cycle, a bicycle?

circulation as allegory: This again approaches my interest in documentation. Circulation of products, the body, etc. Reproductive cycles and the digital age.

Using mirrors in order to create interesting film projections or installation.. This is something I have been thinking about using besides editing for film experimentation.

recurssion in programming and networking…messy feedback loops to reflect the messy dialectics

the technique of absurd juxtaposition in networking

Immersing into theatre May 6, 2008

My partners in crime in Interacive Media at Goldsmiths mostly seem to be allergic to the word theatre. Everyone except the Baroness Von Heron who is in a wild love affair with Judy Garland, so go figure. I think that many of them they see the gimmick light flashing on Broadway whenever I bring this up…I guess they are revolted by the idea of it in a similar vein to myself and other artforms that uses gimmick tactics. With that said, yes the theatre is just as guilty for employing these tactics as any other. However, I think that there is a lot to learn from the theatre. As someone interested in creating processes rather than products, I think I am a performer by default. Where I find the theatre particularly interesting for participatory practices is where performances question the role of the audience. London, especially, has many interesting companies that have moved out of the theatre and into other avenues and venues. One site that comes to mind is the Shunt Vaults. This is a site for performance and art installation. In fact, the founders consider themselves curators rather than dramaturgs. So maybe even contemporary performers are starting to be allergic to theatre. Places like shunt (which began as a site specific theatre venue) is where I think the future lies in terms of practicing processual artforms, especially for the psychogeographically inclined.

Now I want to discuss a few of my theatrical encounters over the past few months and what I have learned from them in terms of being a person with a vested interest in participatory art practice. As Bill Shakespeare once said, life is a stage, and this is exactly why performance art might have some good insight for interactive projects no matter what stage they may leap from.

MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH

When I first started thinking about the snark hunt I went to the Masque of the Red Death, produced by Punchdrunk. I found this project hugely inspiring as it materialized many thoughts I had pertaining to the snark project. Soon after I saw the performance I began working as a steward for the production. This was not the average steward job as it required that I dress in a cloak, black mask, and top hat. Immersive theatre turns the whole stage/backstage distinction on its head. Being able to take part in immersive theatre, and a relatively successful one at that, helped me better understand my role in my own work as an interactive mediator.

The performance took place over about 30 rooms in the Battersea Arts Centre, where different narrations inspired by the work of Edgar Allen Poe, were performed in two loops over the entirety of the building. I learned from the Co-Director that music helped synchronize the performance that, as it happens, was all over the place. I could relate to this through my experimentation with editing and documentation. Music greatly guides me through choreographing, if you will, the clips into a continuity. This is especially helpful when dealing with non-linear narrative structures. What was special to me about thinking about my editing work in relation to theatre was how I might think in spatial terms about narrative. This also has interesting implications for issues in documentation. The impossibility of the camera to capture the experience of narrative theatre is fascinating more me as an editor that wishes to push the limits of cinematic capability. However, key to the success of this show was that the audience was masked. This masking cut perception to the cinematic gaze, a gaze that was not confined to the walls of the cinema.

The masks also allowed for audience members to find more freedom in movement through anonymity. In fact, many found so much freedom they began to really push the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. One time where I was watching over Pluto the cat in the seance room I was tackled by a huge man because I was trying to guard the Victorian wonderland that was the set from being polluted by the image of the office in the next room.

None the less, masking the audience was a very sensible decision. I think masking is key to creating participatory artforms. Again why I think theatre can inform those of us working outside the theatre is that it allows us to see the world for the role playing of daily life. These roles are scripted through ritual and to interrupt these rituals can cause embarassment to the participant. Therefore the role of the mask is very helpful. This need not be an actual mask but something that might relax the constraints of daily identity. This allows for the actor to become more playful and investigative.

One thing I was very surprised to find in conversation with the co-director of the producution was that psychogeography was not something they had thought about in creating the production. Perhaps I had superimposed my own research, but still many things in the setting alluded to the history of psychogeogeographic practice. Perhaps this is due to the recreaton of Poe’s man in the crowd and his obsession with the flaneur. I have come across many comparisons of flaneury and the cinematic gaze. It is interesting that the mask could perform as a facilitator of this sort of gaze turning the audience member into the wandering silent observer, a flaneur. The gaze is something that strikes a chord with psychogeography and situationism. Situationism is one that experiments with the spectacle put what happens when we play with the gaze? I think thinking of media as masks should be very fertile ground and crucial to the documentation of snark dancing.

THE GOLDBUG HUNT

What really made the MOTRD a special experience for me was the Goldbug hunt that, as it turned out, was a separate production from Punchdrunk. It stll remains a mystery to me who exactly is responsible for these hunts but I know that rabbit is key. This is interesting as before the snark became a key feature of my own hunts, I was thinking of using the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland as a symbol of invitation. The Matrix also comes to mind.

Anyways, I found out about the hunt by following instructions from the woman that led us into the entrance of the play. She told us to seek Benoit in the Palais Royale if we dared. I went to Benoit who gave me a note instructing me to go to the Opium Den at half 8 to see what I found and then report on the blog they had set up. Here you can find my report to the goldbug website. I cannot go into full detail about the hunt as it was a very impressive project. However the blog serves as pretty good documentation- gotta love the blog! This blog enabled a community of very curious hunters to crack codes in order to reenter the play and discover more clues. In the end everyone involved (about 80-100) were invited to excavate the treasure from the BAC basement. This Rabbit whatever it is, is very very good. However I think their success was hugely about being able to work in the fantastic world that Punchdrunk had created. This I think is key to Caroline and I’s problem for the snark hunt. We do not know which world to set it in. I think site specific work is good food for thought. Dealing with the city as a whole is a project far too ambitious for the time being but one |I am still willing to consider in the future.

FUTURE PROJECTS, DISCUSSION?

I am still thinking about the snark hunt and how we could contextualize it to make it work?

Also I am thinking about a project where the masking happens behind the camera or the screen?? Something that can point out the mediations that shape behaviour and experience.

Also Sherlock Holmes fever! I have been seeing treasure hunts everywhere. Turns out that idea was not so original after all. However, I am still thinking of how media ecologies can be used to solve a mystery or create a mysterious setting.

Last but not least….The blog! The goldbug hunt would have been impossible without blogging, what other clever projects can blogging provide….I am thinking of gaze play implementing the blog…

There’s a thirst for everything May 6, 2008

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?