Collaboration on the Open City project

A photo-essay of documentation from a recent project in which I worked in collaboration with Open City is going to be published in the forthcoming issue of Drain magazine focusing on ‘Psychogeography’. The work will be displayed online as a slide show of still images in the Art Projects section of the magazine. A series of postcard instructions and the serialised essay (viewed as postcards in use in the public realm) will provide a critical structure for the photo-essay, which will also include documentation of collective actions undertaken as part of the project.

We have been trying to identify areas of our project, which we want to focus on whilst in Japan, and which also resonate with the context of the dislocate festival

At the moment these seem to be the areas that we wish to explore:

Creative inhabitation

– How technology can be inhabited to produce slowness and stillness

– How stillness and slowness can be inhabited in complex and often contradictory ways, where movement, flexibility or potentiality are revealed within situations perceived as static or stable

– What are the implications/possibilities of this in relation to wider social or political situations that are also perceived as static or stable

Synchronicity and rhythm

– Playing with and disrupting the habitual flows, patterns and rhythms of movement in the public realm by creating moments of performance that are out of sync or which playfully refuse to behave according to the rules

– Explore our preconceptions about urban ‘flow’ – and develop models of affecting disruption to habitual speeds of urban navigation

– New context: how our expectations may be challenged/questioned, and how unexpected ‘speeds and flows’ might be experienced.

– Using synchronised or collective action as a way of creating ‘communities of experience’

Invisible performances

– How our work might create opportunities for invisible performances or performance that operate within or under the cover of existing everyday performances

– The blurred line between actual or propositional performances, the real and the imagined

Interrogating Contexts

– Examining the impact of cultural context, location and individual positionality, and how the specificities of place and context influences our actions/performances

Language

– The use of instructions/invitations/propositions (in different textual and verbal formats)

– The nature of the interdisciplinary exchange between artists and writers

– How text functions in different ways within our work

– Exploring the relationship between propositions, instructions or invitations, and how these are responded to in different ways by an audience/participant

Stop/Pause

– The conceptual and physical differences between stillness as stopping and stillness as pausing – and the tensions here between stillness as a mode of refusal, resignation and of potentiality

As part of this specific phase of research we are interested in moments of slowness, stillness, obstruction and blockage. Slowness is often presented as antithetical to the velocity, mobility, speed, and freedom proposed by new technologies and the various accelerated modes in which we are encouraged to engage with the world. Slowness has in some senses been deemed as an outmoded or anachronistic form of temporality, as fastness and efficiency have become the privileged terms. Slowness is seen as a glitch in the system, an unwanted delay or moment of ‘poor connection’ during which things cannot progress as expected. Alternatively, slowness has been reclaimed as part of a resistant ‘counter-culture’ as a way of challenging the enforced and increased pace that things (including individuals) are required to ‘perform’, where accelerated and increasingly virtual modes of existence are seen as contributing to a sense of dislocation, disembodiment and loss of located-ness. Here, slowness is connected to the politics of the ‘slow movement’, where individuals have begun to ‘opt out’ of the system and ‘return’, perhaps nostalgically, to a slower pace of life.

We are, however, interested in exploring how slowness, stillness, obstruction and blockage operate within ‘the system’, and are perhaps as much a part of the city space and various technological infrastructures as speed, velocity and accelerated temporalities. We are interested in recuperating a value for these ideas, drawing attention to the potential within existing moments of slowness, stillness, obstruction and blockage in both the city and other systems; and creating opportunities for others to create their own spaces, gaps and pauses. Drawing on our different positions of ‘investigation led research’ we would like to present ideas and examples relating to this phase of research where slowness, stillness, obstruction and blockage have been used critically as a means through which to create points of anchor and location, or in order to affect a psychological shift in the way that space is encountered and understood

We want to explore the use of i-pod technology in order to create collective synchronised actions relating to slowness, stillness, obstruction and blockage. We are interested in how a synchronised group action in the public realm not only creates a moment of rupture or public spectacle that becomes witnessed by other publics, but how it might be possible to interrogate specific and at times conflicting ideas within the action itself – which become experienced by the individual participant.

Working in collaboration with Katie Doubleday from the Open City project, a 'performative' paper has been accepted as part of the Dislocate festival in Japan, September 2008. Click here for more information about the Dislocate festival. This part of my research in collaboration with the project Open City has also just received a 'Grants for the Arts Award' from the Arts Council which will enable us to travel to Japan and use the time as a key phase of research and development of ideas relating to 'Interrogating New Contexts and Methods for Public Participation in Site Specific projects'. Bringing together shared elements of my research with those of Open City, this research phase will enable us to examine three main aspects of our different practices:
* Specific areas of focus such as disorientation, threshold, flow
* The use of Instructions/invitations/propositions (in different textual and verbal format)
* Interrogating Context: examining the impact of cultural context, location and individual positionality in relation to these various ideas.

Context: Dislocate, International Festival for Art, Technology and Locality
September 2008 Yokohama, Japan
Dislocate questions our notions of place and location in the face of perpetual motion through multifaceted environments. The velocity of this passage is accelerated through new technologies, but as a result how does this impact upon our encounter with place and our attempt to communicate this to elsewhere? Through an exhibition, symposium and workshop series Dislocate will examine this encounter and communication, taking a journey through surrounding spaces andexploring our transient connections.Propelled through so many spaces with such momentum, mobility brings freedoms but also responsibilities. While in this state of passage how do we decide which spaces to engage with and what is our dialogue with them? Considering the locations we constantly carry with us, the interaction between the internal/external, virtual/physical, real/imaginary, our locatedness is multiple, fragmentary and in constant flux. Nomadic in structure the festival will focus upon our kinetic force through these various intersecting sites. Employing transitions by foot, bike and public transportation Dislocate will form an expedition into the diverse routes of the city and its hidden spaces, while questioning our relation to the ground beneath our feet. In this state of transit does our mode of transport isolate us from that which we travel through? Is there a destination? And how do we know when we have arrived?