ARCHIVING THE CITY

for the city yet to come

Posts tagged “dreams

foolish journeys documentation

Posted on April 23, 2011

Yesterday’s performance of Foolish Journeys went very well. First, participants came in and signed the book, and then they were given pamphlets (made from a single letter-sized sheet folded in half twice), which contained the Foolish Journeys orientation text. Then they were given a reading, using my deck of cards, laid out on a tablecloth made of cut up pieces of the official MTA New York City subway maps. The tablecloth was pieced together to create an impossible geography of New York,with some segments of the city repeated, mirrored and distorted, as in a dream. After the reading, participants were asked to choose the card they would most like to focus upon and encounter in their lives. Once this card was chosen, I scattered…

fairytale

Posted on April 18, 2011

In 2007, for his invited exhibition at the art fair, Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei did a strange thing. He put out a call on his blog (which was shut down in 2009 by Chinese authorities) asking for 1001 Chinese people to accompany him to the art fair in Kassel. When I was invited by Documenta, I didn’t want to do a conventional work like painting or sculpture, but rather do a work which directly relates to the real lives of ordinary people… Then the idea came to bring 1,001 Chinese people to view the exhibition as audience, and create a work of itself. The basic concept behind the work is to create a condition which encourages self experience and extends people’s participation…

not a walk in the park

Posted on December 14, 2010

In the movie District B13 (2004), set in future-present Paris 2010, marginalized young people no longer walk. Moving through a grey landscape comprised of the dream-turned-nightmare of urban modernism,  they no longer accept pedestrian movement as the natural response of bodies to urban space. Instead they leap frog, bounce of walls, fly through windows. The new bodies are made, by necessity, for time-and-space-defying travel.

dreams are archives of our cities

Posted on December 21, 2009

In dreams, affects take shape and form and color. affects are drawn into resonance, the seemingly disparate in waking life are crashed or woven together into intricate, shocking, garish, intimate realness. A key character in dreams, or narratives of dreams, is the setting itself. In my dreams, interior and exteriors blend, neighborhoods in different cities open up to each other, like the impossible geographies of Kafka’s stories. (film credit: “N.Y., N.Y.” Francis Thompson, dir. 1959) Yesterday the New York Times published an Iraq war veteran’s dreams and reflections. Here are some important excerpts: What if it’s not a dream at all? What if I really have the city of Mosul inside of me? Or at least that neighborhood on a sunny morning. Maybe when…

Table for Electronic Dreams

Posted on January 3, 2009

We carry mobile phones, and laptops, and similar devices everyday. We forget that these devices operate at electromagnetic frequencies beyond basic human perception. In other words, our phones have other lives and exist in other worlds of connectivity, different from our own. New media artist Andy Doro wants to remind us of this fact, by making that other world visible, at least momentarily. I have constructed a table which reveals the hidden electrical activity of electronic objects placed upon it. Through this interaction, people will develop a greater awareness of the invisible workings of their electronic devices and the limits of human perception… Perhaps our inability [to perceive electromagnetic] space is our repression of the dreams of electronic objects. There is a disconnect between…

  

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