Present absences: Lost - The Art of Asbestos
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.
Labels: art, material culture, theory, visual art
The Cardiff Arcades Project
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.
Labels: archaeology, architecture, art, material culture, performance, visual art
Taking things seriously
I've been reading a rather compelling book before bed. In
Taking Things Serious: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance, Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes have compiled a series of narratives from designers around the world - revealing their personal attachments to some everyday things that, for them, have more-than-everyday-meanings. The book resonates with an insight I gained from reading John Maeda's
The Laws of Simplicity. In
Law 7, he reflects on the importance of emotion in design - saying that people have emotive connections to things:
"Aichaku (ahy-chaw-koo) is the Japanese term for the sense of attachment one can feel for an artifact. […It] describes a deeper kind of emotinal attachment that person can feel for an object. It is a kind of symbiotic love for an object that deserves affection not for what it does, but for what it is.” (Maeda 2008, 69)
Although we could deconstruct these sentiments as being essentialist or reductive, what they do point to is the importance of acknowledging emotive affect within the study of 'things' (read in here - 'material culture').
Perhaps this acceptance or exploration of emotive affect (and subsequent engagement/management of it) is what has been lost through the abstraction and sanitisation (emotional) of things through archaeological science to become 'data'.
Labels: material culture, theory
Material Musings
I have a question re Ian's recent email outlining his prooposed approach to material culture in the context of Placing Voices. The question circles around the stated intention to abjure the traditional academic approach of documenting and creating 'typologies or evidenced based argumentation for the existence of specific identities'. Instead, immersion in the affective practices of the flaneur and recorder of stories is proposed. My question is: are the outcomes of these experiential encounters to be reshaped/processed into academic interpretations or do they exist as self-explanatory stories or evidence in their own right? Are these experiences to be converted in any sense into analysis? I'm not clear on this.This question is partly provoked by Daniel Miller's latest book The Comfort of Things which I'm reading at the moment. Miller's book takes the form of a series of elegantly crafted short stories of encounters with people in their homes in a London Street. The people, their homes, their contents and their lifeworlds are evoked in pieces that could easily pass for short-stories in the conventional literary sense. But Miller is professor of Anthropology at London University, and I'm having difficulty identifying the particular disciplinary practice involved here. Does the new epistemology involve an increasingly blurred line between the creative and the analytical?
Labels: archaeology, material culture, theory
Material Culture Mission Statement: Subjects not objects
I am interested in encountering and documenting the material culture (things) of the contemporary Monto as subjects of inspiration/inquiry rather than as scientific objects of interrogation/data.
The modern construction of a ‘material culture’ as something distinct from the embodied experience of the contemporary – as something separate or ‘other’ – I feel is an impediment to the articulation of the complex, constellated stories of places such as the Monto and Clanbrassil Street.
Rather than attempting to document and create typologies or evidenced based argumentation for the existence of specific identities, my work will focus on things as inspiration for storytelling.
The appearance of things and the story of their encounter and their subsequent ability to act as mnemonic devices, triggering old and new stories (both ‘true’ and ‘false’ and a mixture between) will the subject of study.
It is intended that this ‘show and tell’ approach will allow for a rich synergy with the digital storytelling aspects of the project as well as the sociological interviews.
The strategy for the study will include:
-Walks of the area (as a flaneur) with frenetic and iterative encounter with things of the streetscapes
-Show and tell sessions where members of the community will have the opportunity to bring forward things which they feel are significant
-To be conducted in collaboration with Alice and Darcy’s work
-Case-studies of specific residences/addresses
-These will be determined through the identification of study areas by Tadhg and Paddy’s research and Cormac and Alice’s ability to arrange access to premises
-These will incorporate both conversations with the residents in some instances as well as personal explorations of the items of the house
-Ideally it will be possible to discover how things are utilized in different ways to create stories (Stories with things)
-Some will be representative (e.g. mantlepieces) – supporting identifications with places/peoples/memories
-Some will be hidden (e.g. piles of things or bottoms of boxes) – unintended memories, forgotten traces, obscured identifiations
-Some will be incidental/accidental residue (e.g. rubbish)
All things will be photographed digitally, with the intention of uploading them either into a weblog or into a storytelling engine or photo-spatial engine (e.g. Photosynth).
The deliverable will be a Story with Things – showing how both ‘old’ and ‘new’ things interact creating complex environments for memory activation, identification maintenance and ideological representation. In this way, it should provide a process-based time-slice of the lived negotiation of contemporary space.
Labels: archaeology, material culture, theory
