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 small folded pieces of the subway map on the table. Participants were then asked to choose a folded piece and open it. The area depicted in this map could become a site of pilgrimage or further research for the participant–the basis of a personal creative exploration, allowing participants to experience their familiar city as somewhat more strange and unpredictable. Most participants immediately experienced an uncanny or synchronous recognition of the parts of the city depicted on the map.

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 of art.

–Ai Weiwei  (source)

Ai Weiwei ended up with a whole bunch of regular working people, from cities, from small towns and villages, whom he picked from web applications, off the street, through community groups and through friends and acquaintances. His main criteria was that the candidates be unlikely to have the opportunity to take this kind of trip under normal conditions. The people were put up for a week in a refurbished former factory building in Kassel. Ai worked with filmmakers like Li Pengfei to document the trip. The resulting film is, according to Ai, “a truly realistic documentary about the current spiritual conditions of various Chinese people.”

What impresses me most about this work is the humor at the heart of the challenge to national and global politics which make travel and movement for leisure and pleasure a privilege only those with certain passports and economic means can enjoy. There is heartbreaking beauty in the immensity of taking (and finding, flying, housing, feeding, filming) 1001 people on vacation. The work cost about $4.1 million to produce. The size of that figure is dwarfed by the absurdity of our global systems, which make movement a matter of life or death for many, rendering it almost impossible for most people on earth to say, attend a world art fair in Germany. Is “Fairytale” art?

Fairytale is a work which relates to social, political and cultural aspects… I don’t even care whether it is an art work. –AW

FREE AI WEIWEI!

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.

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 I go to sleep I’m actually entering a world in which Iraqi mothers search through the landscape of my memory in the vain hope of finding their dead sons. My body a sort of graveyard, a repository of the lost and the dead.

Where does the dream world end and the waking world begin? There are moments, in the dead of night or far from home, when I seem to float between the two.

For Brian Turner, the veteran-dreamer-poet quoted above, both the city of Mosul and the countryside of California’s San Joaquin valley, where he grew up, are somehow viscerally melded by the combined experiences of war, violence and dreaming.

It seems almost childishly simple when I try to reconstruct it. The mother’s dead child of war is my own innocence, perhaps, as its loss is being interrogated by the world, which needs the medicine of home to…? To what? Regain its form? For me to be given back my body? To be made whole again?

The thing is, if this is true, if home is the medicine my mind is telling me to search out, then why do I continually leave? Why do I travel to the far corners of the earth? If I were to stand among those eucalyptus trees back home, if I were to reach down and clear away the red bark covering everything, what would I find?

And finally a poem :

“Here, Bullet”

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

(From Here, Bullet. Copyright ©2005 by Brian Turner.)

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 the voice we hear over a cellphone and the raw medium which the cellphone uses to transmit sound–the two are not analogous. Table for Electronic Dreams allows these hidden dreams to become visibly apparent.

He calls what he does making electronic dreams visible, I call it a seance for the ghosts of mobile phones. (Can “seancing” be an archival practice?)