How many things go unnoticed in our day to day lives? How many things get taken for granted? The Art of Asbestos' mutli-series project over the last few years in Dublin has been urging the human traffic of footpaths around the city to think about just such things.
The 63 interventions in the 7 series of 'Lost' take as subjects the things in our daily lives that we don't really think about that often, but ironically, when they go missing they can become a central story in the telling of a day's or life's adventures. In the spirit of Heidegger's object-oriented philosophy in 'Das Ding', the 'Lost' series highlights our ontological relationships to things that we rarely acknowledge until they become absent or broken.
Beyond its charming and insightful qualities, the 'Lost' project also illustrates the effectiveness of viral design in guerilla art interventions in the generation of lateral relationships and social reflection. Mobilising the passing moments waiting for buses or walking a long a footpath, the 'Lost' project offers an amusing and gentle provocation to think more broadly and laterally about how we engage in our world.
'The Art of Living with Strangers' curated / edited by Lolita Jablonskiene is based around the experience of the immigrant within their adopted environment and is indebted to the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's assertions that inhabitants of the contemporary city are -- "permanent strangers," and that cohabitation, according to Bauman, is "an art which, like all arts, requires study and exercise". Moreover, Lolita Jablonskiene describes her edition of Printed Project "as a workshop - constructed in the spirit of Alexander Rodchenko's Workers' Club -- offering socio-political enlightenment, a platform for debate, and a space for the renewal of our energy at the end of a long working day".
Graffiti Archaeology is a project devoted to the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. The core of the project is a timelapse collage, made of photos of graffiti taken at the same location by many different photographers over a span of several years. The photos were taken in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and other cities, over a timespan from the late 1990's to the present.
Using the grafarc explorer, you can visit some classic graffiti spots, see what they looked like in the past, and explore how they have changed over the years.
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You can also explore the Grafarc Flickr photo pool and discussion board - currently boasting 47,171 images.
For example - notice the palimpsestic changing of this wall over time.
Friends in Cardiff have for few months embarked on a place-making project. The Arcades Project: A 3D Documentary explores the famed arcades of Cardiff. The city is known for having the highest concentration of Victorian and Edwardian arcades in the UK, hence its rebranding as the city of arcades (not just rugby folks).
The lead artist Jennie Savage assisted by Andrew Cochrane have developed a series of art events and responses to Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project on the the Parisian arcades. The events both interrogate the spaces from theoretical and aesthetic perspectives, but they also seek to engage with the communities of businesses, patrons and passersby who frequent the arcades, activating and enhancing the social percolations of urban architecture in inner city Cardiff.
The project features artist talks, peripatetic media (a la Janet Cardiff) and a 3D mapping project. Savage's process focuses on response and interaction with others hoping to draw out the constellations of linkages and meanings shared by all those frequenting the arcades.
Wander over to the project home site and peek into their happenings.
Fearghus O'Conchuir's choreography and performance art interrogates the capricious, flowing relationships between bodies and buildings through contemporary dance. In January 2008, Stéphane Hisler and Bernadette Iglich brought his choreographed work 'Fox' into Foley Street Park in the Monto.
Fearghus is an artist in residence with Dublin City Council and works between Dublin and London. His recent work 'Niche' at the Project Arts Centre explored the ways we all try to find our place in the world.
I feel that Fearghus' work and his process of reflective/reflexive research (externalised on his blog) is a good example of artistic practice that synergises with the aims of the collaborative elements of our project. Have a read of his blog and let me know what you think...
According to the latest research, remembering is an unstable and profoundly unreliable process. It’s easy come, easy go as we learn how true memories can be obliterated and false ones added. And Oliver Sacks joins us to tell the story of an amnesiac whose love for his wife and music transcend his 7 second memory.
What is a memory? Science writer Jonah Lehrer tells us is it’s a physical thing in the brain… not some ephemeral flash. It’s a concrete thing made of matter. And NYU neuroscientist Joe LeDoux, who studies fear memories in rats, tells us how with a one shock, one tone, and one drug injection, you can bust up this piece of matter, and prevent a rat from every making a memory. LeDoux’s research goes sci-fi, when he and his colleague Karim Nader start trying to erase memories. And Nader applies this research to humans suffering from PTSD.
We start this section off with a question from writer Andrei Codrescu: "where do computers get their extra memory from?" And then we take it literally. Can you add memories? Dr. Elizabeth Loftus says yes. She’s a psychologist in the department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California at Irvine, and her research shows that you can implant memories—wholly false memories—pretty easily into the brains of humans. Her work challenges the reliability of eye-witness testimony, and is so controversial that she once had to call the bomb squad. Then, producer Neda Pourang brings us the story of finding a lost memory. Painter Joe Andoe incessantly paints huge canvasses of seemingly random images: horses, pastures, and - more recently - a girl with a particular about-to-say-something look on her face. He didn't realize until recently that he'd been painting a day from his past, a fragment of an afternoon 30 years earlier.
The story of a man who’s lost everything. Clive Wearing has what Oliver Sacks calls “the most severe case of amnesia ever documented.” Clive’s wife, Deborah Wearing, tells us the story along with Oliver Sacks. And they try to understand why, amidst so much forgetting, Clive remembers two things: Music and Love.
Thanks to Uden Associates Productions for excerpts from the 1986 film about Clive Wearing, "Equinox: Prisoner of Consciousness."
Placing Voices - Voicing Places is a collaborative investigation and mediation of the contemporary heritages and material cultures of inner-city Dublin. Clanbrassil St and the Monto will be explored throughout Autumn and Winter 2008 through archaeology, art, digital storytelling, photography and sociology. The project hopes to inspire news understandings of the co-temporal qualities of the things both known, forgotten and sometimes remembered about the places we civically share.
