Assessment Two: Concept Statement
This site may offer (top)
Add, edit, change, write, over-write here: https://goo.gl/ZkdbMi
Editable google document shared publicly
Permanence/Impermanence (bottom)
100 black balloons, electronic fans
These spaces are elusive. I think what I’m dealing with here is a kind of dialogue between two very different sites. In Permanence/Impermanence, there’s a sense of continuity, fluidity (moments of appearing and disappearing, existing in one moment and suddenly not in the other) that mirror the editable nature of its virtual self, this site may offer.
this site may offer began as a blank document. With no axis of orientation nor initial prompt or subject of inquiry, it demands its online users to construct a space for themselves. It requires them to adapt to spaces, to words, whether intrusive, with or without consent. One may delete the other. The other may re-create, resurrect, over-write. A claim not so unfounded is that this site may offer, over time, might almost transform into that of a collaborative sculpture, moulded by the hands of its anonymous co-creators. It becomes a mixture of poetry, weird prose, confused images, dirty jokes, and political critique. It is a space, or perhaps, according to James Bridle, not even a space, where its tenants only exist momentarily as “temporary arrestations in continuous metastable flows.” (C.Battersby) It is perhaps a sensorium active in the process of collection and retention..Not a space but a meta-space, holding not existence but records of existence. (Sam Wickham, The New Abjection)
Permanence/Impermanence, on the other side of the screen, exists to us in real time, real space. (But of course, what is so ‘real’ about it?) Two electronic fans on opposite corners of the room direct the spatial flow of a hundred black balloons. It is not imbued with personality, junk-mail, or the fragmented conversations of its counterpart. Rather, it almost exists in a vacuum, a kind of negative space, or a lacuna. All bodies lack a place. It shifts from one moment of appearing to the next. Formally, there is something very surreal and disquieting about being in this room, in this space.
I was of course initially interested in playing with architectural stability (forms of geography in instructing the body), an idea I had begun to toy with in the poster, Guerrilla Games. It was precisely the potentiality of finding cracks within these structural forms that I wanted to uncover. If site is a function of absence, states architect Peter Eisenman, (a blank google document, an empty room), and observing that absence is either a trace of previous presence or a trace of possible presence..then it is a site containing memory, a site containing immanence. this site may offer…Permanence/Impermanence are sites then that remain indefinite, intrinsically.
Tying nicely with the seminal text that engendered the work as a whole, Michel De Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life finally says: “To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.”
Kaye, Nick. Site-specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation. London: Routledge, 2000
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford, OX, UK: Blackwell, 1991
Certeau, Michel De., and Steven Rendall. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California, 1984
Perec, Georges, and John Sturrock. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London, England: Penguin, 1997
Kapoor, Anish, Mitch Cohen, and Germany Berlin. Symphony for a Beloved Sun: Anish Kapoor. English ed. Köln: Verlag Der Buchh. Walther König, 2013
Light, Andrew. Philosophy and Geography II: The Production of Public Space. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998
Cooke, Lynne, and N.Y. York. Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art. New York, N.Y.: Dia Center for the Arts, 1996
Steyerl, Hito. Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead? http://www.e-flux.com/journal/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/
Wickham, Sam. The New Abjection 2015
andulkaphoto
discoholicmusic
izzy806
janainaart
