——
Research material from part of the PUBLIC project by Elaine W. Ho and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga. Organized as a daily series of experiments, interventions and discourses, PUBLIC aims to examine the potentiality of latency and open spaces made possible in the relations between individuals and publics. Other activities are posted here. Some are open invitations to all, others are unannounced insertions in different locations throughout Berlin. PROGRAM - intitiative for art and architecture collaborations; 22 January - 1 February 2009.
“can intimacy exist in public?”
Secret communities tested in aleatory fashion, Acconci’s limitations are practical, too. Beginning at the site of the Bundesnachrichtendienst and arriving at the Auswaertiges Amt:
The subject was chosen walking past the site of the German Secret Service building (to be finished in 2012). A plywood construction blockade, there is hardly any graffiti here. One stencil of a walking man whose head is a surveillance camera.
[14:06] The subject has been spotted on Chausseestrasse walking south at a medium pace and smoking a cigarette with his right hand.
Getting on the U-bahn, Schwarzkopfstrasse.
Stadtmitte, getting off.
Walking south on Friedrichstrasse, turning left on Krausenstrasse.
[14:16] Subject is noted to always look both ways before crossing the street.
Taking a left and turning into park.
[14:21] Subject missing.
[14:22] Subject 1 has most likely entered building number 40 at Leipzigerstrasse, and subject 2 is picked up at the point of departure, exiting from the building wearing high-heeled boots, blonde hair, carrying a black shopping bag in her right hand. She suddenly turns and walks the other direction. [14:26] Subject number 2 enters a jade coloured BMW 725i. We return to the point of departure of Subject 1. 40 Leipzigerstrasse. [14:28] Subject number 3 exits 40 Leipzigerstrasse. She walks east, wearing a multi-coloured scarf and black hat. Walking at leisurely pace, adjusting her hat.
[14:37] After playing Lotto, subject walks into the adjacent super market.
Blumenkohl, broccoli, kiwi.
[14:50] Subject 3 investigation is terminated in supermarket. Subject 4 recognised at 14:49 walking out of the market, carrying a large bottle of Pepsi.
[14:51] Walked inside Multipolster furniture store a few doors down. Appears to be working there.
[14:53] Subject 5 spotted walking west on Leipzigerstrasse. Subject 3 rediscovered walking west on Leipzigerstrasse. She is carrying groceries in a black nylon bag. Subject 3 investigation re-terminated.
Leipzigerstrasse 43. Subject 6 is spotted buying a small potted plant from the Blumen & Pflanzen shoppe. He wears a beige trenchcoat and red scarf, carrying a white and blue shopping bag and newly purchased flowers. [14:59] Subject meets a couple at the intersection of Leipzigerstrasse and Markgrafenstrasse. They all hold shopping bags and chat for a moment before trying to enter a restaurant door, finding it locked. The go to the next eingang and enter City Hotel.
[15:15] Subject 6 exits hotel accompanied by the same man and woman. He is no longer carrying the flowers and shopping bag. They walk north on Markgrafenstrasse. [15:23] Subject 6, accompanied by the couple, walks into the Auswaertiges Amt (Federal Foreign Office). He is seen removing his trenchcoat before security check. Subject 6 investigation terminated.
After some days, she didn’t feel the need to continue in the same way again, I mean, what is participation anyway, if it’s the same as tearing the sheet, sticking around to feed the birds or clicking——wordlessly——”add friend”. How engaged does one need to be to find intimacy, and what is participation in a group in which nobody notices? Taking part, you took part, again again… but what of inaction in the kinesphere, an allowance of space in regards to an other, not taking the responsibility. What can simply be, we were the worst at imagining a telos, so it just goes here to there nor there, our passivity is incremental. but why keep thinking of community and collectivity with such utopian ideals, anyhow. he asks, “can you imagine any form of positively created collectivity”? I thought of all my ill feeling; now, like a nearing in language or love, linking forward or a re-action may not require positives or negatives…
Posted by 丫 | more »today. you and we. happy birthday miss asuka
a year passes - 誕生日お目出度う happy birthday, aka-chan 生日快乐 - the day whiles away… late afternoon, almost evening… more space these days for time, for thought for re-collecting, gathering, re-organizing, arranging, and you, ever-preparing for an unfinished moment, future, now in a box, the a-4 papers placed on top as they don’t fit, remembering in april to prepare for may, but when? after ten? after twenty? alas the archive! a year passes - 誕生日お目出度う happy birthday, aka-chan 生日快乐 - the day whiles away… a day with the memory of you and your birthday, perhaps not so different from the year before just that we didn’t record or we didn’t say. so today we learn new things, we capture video, eat a good crispy jian bing, we wear things long forgotten, we receive a phone call from japan, do grocery shopping, cycle to the village, we watch dance, we buy more food in the village, apples, bananas, pears, peanuts mixed with raisins, two filled pancakes and an egg pancake, and we search for a picture of a birthday cake we don’t find, only the not so good one where the candle wasn’t lit and more food is visible on the table, while searching we collect other images, we stop for a moment, we miss you - a year passes - 誕生日お目出度う happy birthday, aka-chan 生日快乐 - the day nears its end… miss asuka-chan, how was your day?
acommuniqué number one :: hiroaki
HK:丫:HK:丫:HK:丫:vitamin space studio behind the star city hotel, guangzhou sunday 15:00, before catching another flight. a conversation with 大明 turns out to be an exercise in grasping. As in holding on, we talked about it for so long, and in doing, he slapped at the computer and said “i hate this thing”, footage, a semantic exercise. It is not possible to ascertain whether one would have been more keen to remember naturally without it, as often suspected, but now all that is left are the remnants of feeling and machines. and oh yes the sparkle in his eyes.[PUBLIC BUS - a butterfly moving back and forth between the driver and the passengers seated in the front seats for the elderly or handicapped]one may have bored already with all that talk of archiving and documentation (“don’t say that! it’s something i’m interested in!”), but in the presence of the oversignaled conversation, or a small pale blue notebook with careful letters, “home for lost ideas”, it became interesting to juxtapose the falsely alluded stability of ARCHIVE with MOBILITY (the more cities we will meet in…)[MOBILE TELEPHONE picks up - "I'm driving, I'll call you later."]An illusion, yes—-the restaurateurs sweat, i pore over how to make more space on the hard drive—-for the reels will always start to decay, the paper yellows and becomes brittle or moist with mildew, the archived item, like memory, takes a half-life, conscious of what it once was, now less than. Temporal processes (cooking, growing, getting ready) bear a physicality. These, yes, are continuities. The act of documenting disPLACEs the documented object from its subject, in terms of the mediated action, reality from its image or copy, and its positioning within the consciousness of the documentary maker.[TAXI - after a long silence, he asks, "do people pick their nose in Beijing?"]If we are to keep the archive moving, imagine the scenario of various speeds traveling simultaneously side by side, the tour de france, the armoured truck. it was the memory that caught up with us, and that idea, it seems somehow fantastic, slips into the corner of your vision, up through to the tip of your tongue, already in momentum, such that, as the fear goes, if i were to stop, it would keep going, taking its own trajectory, its own lifehood. they were never yours or mine, and we are merely trying, you perhaps just a bit more gracefully, to keep up.[recreation of SUBWAY - ]“today on subway, she and i were talking about how we want to print our ribbons, with print on one end of ribbon or both. and i said that to put it on both would be more balanced.” “for sausage?” “yes. and she said, ‘different ideas of balance…’ we see the world in such different ways. she felt that if the print were all on one side, then the fullness would balance with the emptiness on the other side. and i said that’s not balance, that’s contrast. but that contrast creates balance for her, like positive and negative.” “yes, but contrast results to balance in the middle, no?” “and you know there is no original word for ‘logic’ in chinese. and i thought this amazing.” “you told me. oh, many japanese people here.” “the word is from english. but maybe it’s more true. because to think of logic is a kind of objectivism, maybe, which i should not forget is all too deceiving. i envy her a lot.” “oh. why.” “what do you mean about balancing in the middle?” “i guess what you were saying about outweighing each other.” “what was i saying about outweighing? what do you mean? trying to understand. …would like to understand something today.” “full and empty, positive and negative are not balanced, not symmetrical but the outcome in the center is 0. not sure if that makes sense…” “that’s a kind of balance, too, no?” “yes, so maybe hers is a kind of balance, too.” “i mean, i see what you mean in the sense that it’s also a kind of annihilation. and this is perfectly her, yes. it is a kind of balance, and that was a nice to see.” “a balance of difference and a balance of sameness.”no, grasping was not the point. and yet if not, if there were no continuity in these relations, no sense of fulfilling, then do processes become reduced to mere transaction? does the momentary require a sense of place any more or less than the sedentary? would it be important, to imagine for all these words passed between, a compiled identity of all the possible words of a certain past and an uncertain future? and if we were to do so, would i be really able to see the world as you do, and would i stop moving?
how i spent my time at the Venice Biennale, or, looking for mere life.
The crux of this situation is one of returning to an academic reportage—after the holiday, after the event, after stepping out of the heretofore all-encompassing realm that is the Home and learning to tell or recount (and what not) to our classmates, our teachers, our friends. Spending the entire summer hanging out by the pool and eating sandwiches with the crusts cut off may have been real life. But how much of a real life do we access, relive, or reveal when writing about our experiences, passing them on to others, or trying to capture them via other media simultaneous to the experience (i.e., photographs, audio recording, drawing, etc.)? If we make art from/of our lives are the results still a reflection of the world we live in, and how much do we really reveal about ourselves through the process? More? Less? Is life as recorded in a journal, a newspaper, an uploaded video or a painting symmetrical to “mere life”? Or parallel?
The question of life in art is not at least in part a question of reality and document, of truth and artifact. Insofar that life is being, it is the living element of a work of art, its energeia, which we recognise, or recognises us, is capable of moving us beyond our own mere lives towards truth and Heidegger’s sense of the world worlded, “more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home.” To find, then, the evocation of life in the artwork does not set up a dichotomy as implied by the analogy of reality to document, truth to artifact. We can look perhaps more towards Adorno’s dialectics, not by way of simple polarities but a dialecticalism whereby one is contained in the other—art and life mutually inherent.
Even so, the “mere life” evoked in a work of art is by no means equal to reality. The distance between the two can be described as a greater truth or a place of the spirit, but perhaps, much less glamourously—not so far off from the gap between seeing someone’s endless vacation slideshow versus having been part of the real experience. One approaches a higher plane of being, the other is, very often, just a bore.
At the Biennale di Venezia, a near Disneyland of contemporary art and national identity, we are afforded the small world after all of contemporary art multiculturalism. The short examples following interest me here as different national perceptions positioning life relative to art. The stereotypes that emerge are perhaps an ironically self-conscious colouring of the ways the simulacra overtakes us even in self-presentation, but at the current stage of hyper visual culture, it is possible in this context to raise new questions regarding art as presentation (show, artifact, material, object) versus documentation (alternate reality, report, medium, subject).Japan, History and Tradition.The most physically direct form of document was created by artist Masao Okabe for the Japan pavilion. His work consisted of a series of 1,400 frottages made with pencil on paper, rubbed directly on the surface of stones that made up the World War II bombed platforms of the former Ujina train station in Hiroshima. Okabe’s work is a document of history, a literal tracing of stone as the ultimate testament to the fragilities wrought by war, where even rock is impermanent, its solidity transferred into the grainy shades produces by a sketch, no more certain than the dead flowers and leaves pressed under glass throughout the installation. His is a document of “mere life” in its most physical approach, but its results question the viability of history via transference across artifact, time and medium.France, Love.Sophie Calle’s work can also be said to be evocative of “mere life” in the sense that it is largely autobiographical, and the source of her piece for the French pavilion is no exception, although this time Calle succeeds in moving her story outside of her own life and recapturing it through others— 107 other women, precisely. By asking each of the participants to translate, interpret or explain a break-up letter received from her lover, Calle is able to create a prism of images of the lives and perspectives of these women, revoiced in the form of dance numbers, linguistic corrections and psychological diagnoses among others. Insodoing, the acuteness of a supposedly ‘real’ emotional situation becomes estranged, dramatised and made multiplicitous. “Mere life” is simply a matter of perspective.China, Future. Cao Fei’s use of the internet portal Second Life to create her video installation for the Chinese pavilion brings ‘reality’ directly into the art world, as it investigates a phenomenon that is transpiring in the immediate present, being translated across media from a virtuality through the internet to a mass phenomenon, not necessarily in terms of users but certainly by press coverage. The irony and fascination that Second Life poses for both Cao and the media is that the form of reality proposed by it is one that projects itself as a future for everyone, and the ambivalent possibilities proffered by this future are ones that reacts back upon the present of our “mere” everyday realities. Her documentary made entirely from footage of the voyages of her Second Life avatar, China Tracy, turn the strangely connected but utterly desolate world before us into a montage of cinematic moments, like nostalgic flashbacks of something not yet experienced.
Why am I writing this again?Oh yes, Biennale experience. Mere life.Is it a coincidence that this question of mere life is actually one of the primary themes of this year’s Documenta exhibition? Perhaps we should look outside of the context of a self-inflated art exhibition towards another, slightly-less-self-inflated-but-on-the-Grand-Tour-nonetheless art exhibition to get back to this question of mere life.Or, perhaps mere life is merely in the looking.I’ll let you know after we get to Kassel.
street-farmer
Big question mark had been floating above my head. There are the situation which I can’t define the meaning, unreadable. I’ve been learning about the world since thirty years, I thought I know most of things I see on the street, at lease in my country… I’ve been passing by that place on the way to go working and to home. At that place, at the side of street, there are a planter with 4 wheels at the bottom, the plant in the planter looks like vegetable and has a tag with the date. The planter is changed every day to other one (vegetable inside become smaller or bigger) and has different date on the tag. One day I notice, at the other side of the street, there are about 10 planters on a line and covered with frames with net.The date on each tag shows there are 5 day different, like 04/15, 04/20, 04/25… there are some empty planter with the coming date. In front of those planter the soil in square trays are prepared. I’ve been wondering what kind of study he is doing?? Are there more planters somewhere? Where is the planter of last year? I went to him very straight when I saw him on the way to home yesterday. He was working with soil in the tray. I really had to ask him what he is doing. Otherwise, i had to be suffered by my big question mark hanging on my head. So, his story was like this; he is raising the vegetable to eat. It takes about five days to eat the vegetable in a planter, so he doesn’t need to waste and ran out, either. He does this work, otherwise he doesn’t have anything to do. He watched on TV that he could raise the vegetable in the planter, and he had been doing this already since four years. He goes zoo every Saturday to get the elephant’s shit for vegetables. (The zoo is distributing the bag of muck to the people every Saturday, at 2 o’clock.) The frame with net can protect bugs. He is just disinfect the soil by sunlight. He fix the wheels because he can move the planter to other side of street easily to get more sunlight for vegetable. He raises Mizuna (potherb mustard) and Komatsuna (Japanese Mustard Spinach) alternately. It takes a months to be ready to eat in summer time and two months in winter time. He gave some Mizuna to me. I told him I’ve been watching his vegetable and eager to know the person who was doing this and reason. I cooked salad of Mizuna and ate. The most fresh Mizuna I ever ate…
中日文化体育交流年 | china-japan year of culture and sport exchange | 日中文化・スポーツ交流年
长城 | a great wall | 長城
退屈でしにそう, a collected series on boring in nine parts, 无聊死了
c, beijing>>
haxi, beijing>>
anyway, osaka>>i’ve tried thinking obout “boring”… it’s hard.this is CONBINI, but without any sign. they were middle of renovation or breaking down. it was on may way to work and wasn’t noticeable when it was still open… it was just one of CONBINI where i didn’t have so much to do with… it had very specific sign like other photos. but one day it lost its face and suddenly started appealing to me with its boringness. how boring building it is… it’s weird that to be very boring can be very visible.
f, berlin>>
so sorry i couldn’t send my boring things to you by 17.i tried to find something, but couldn’t.now for me, anything is not boring, but everything gives me some possibilities, or new feelings to me, i feel. i know that whether it becomes true or not depends on myself, the way i live. but now, i’m trying to get power for changing from small things. maybe, small things are “boring”, ne? yes, positive meanings of boring.[录像文件需要flashplayer和耐性来看,不好意思文件挺大的，还没学好怎么好好压小的。声音是haxi, a, 丫 和 strawberryshortcake做的。 kindly be patient with video files, flashplayer and patience to view, they are rather big, apologies, we have not mastered video compression techniques yet. audio tracks on all video files courtesy of haxi, a, 丫 and strawberryshortcake.]
Posted by o | more »
not-yet-expired activity
[readings for Best Before; this is what we're up to; arnhem, boston and beijing in new york, August-October 2006]
“The separation between a thing and its environment cannot be absolutely definite and clear-cut; there is a passage by insensible gradations from the one to the other; the close solidarity which binds all the objects of the material universe, the perpetuality of their reciprocal actions and reactions, is sufficient to prove that they have not the precise limits which we attribute to them. Our perception outlines, so to speak, the form of their nucleus; it terminates them at the point where our possible action upon them ceases, where, consequently, they cease to interest our needs. Such is the primary and the most apparent operation of the perceiving mind: it marks out divisions in the continuity of the extended, simply following the suggestions of our requirements and the needs of practical life.” —from Matter and Memory, Bergson”We ought to think of the historical world according to this model. Why ask if history is made by men or by things, since it is obvious that human initiatives do not annul the weight of things, and the ‘force of things’ always acts through men? It is just this failure of analysis, when it tries to bring everything down to one level, which reveals history’s true milieu. There is no ‘last analysis,’ because there is a flesh of history in which (as in our own body) everything counts and has a bearing — the infrastructure, our idea of it, and above all the perpetual exchanges between the two in which the weight of things becomes a sign as well, thoughts become forces, and the balance of the two becomes events. It is asked, ‘Where is history made? Who makes it? What is this movement which traces out and leaves behind the figures of the wake?’ It is of the same order as the movement of Thought and Speech, and, in short, of the perceptible world’s explosion within us. Everywhere there are meanings, dimensions, and forms in excess of what each ’consciousness‘ could have produced, and yet it is men who speak and think and see. We are in the field of history as we are in the field of language or existence.”These transformations of private into public, of events into meditations, of thought into spoken words and spoken words into thought, this echo coming from everywhere makes it such that in speaking to others we also speak to ourselves, and speak of what exists. This swarming of words behind words, thoughts behind thoughts–this universal substitution is also a kind of stability.” —from Signs, Merleau-Ponty”Take, for example, a small drawer, which the carpenter has made for the convenience of some housefold. With the passage of time, the actual form of this drawer is surpassed by time itself and, after the decades and centuries have elapsed, it is as though time had become solidified and had assumed that form. A given small space, which was at first occupied by the object, is now occupied by solidified time. It has, in fact, become the incarnation of a certain form of spirit. —from Kinkakuji, Mishima
Posted by o | reply »online habit: bookmarks
two kinds of people in terms of using the function of “bookmark this page.” type one: claiming he remembers all daily-read domains (e.g. yahoo.com, gmail.com, flickr.com, friendster.com) so these pages aren’t in bookmarks. rather, “bookmark this page” is used literally. when he is doing some research, and when he comes across some interesting research, he bookmarks it for later review. the links in his bookmarks aren’t checked daily, and may never be checked again. type two: claiming being organized helps better surf the web. she only bookmarks pages that she assumes she will check back tomorrow. she uses “manage bookmarks” every week, deleting, renaming. yahoo.com comes the first in her “mail” folder under the “bookmarks” folder; gmail.com is the second. flickr.com is the first in “tech nerd.” she feels online surfing has been restricted, because other than the bookmarked pages, she doesn’t know anything else.
* * *
– outlook
– tech nerd
– forums
– reading
– languages
—— english
———— writing
—— tibetan
—— chinese
—— nihongo
—— others
– music
– movies
– projectsnow
– temp
wear
