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
Memory and Forgetting: WNYC Radio Lab
According to the latest research, remembering is an unstable and profoundly unreliable process. It’s easy come, easy go as we learn how true memories can be obliterated and false ones added. And Oliver Sacks joins us to tell the story of an amnesiac whose love for his wife and music transcend his 7 second memory.
Show includes:
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless RatWhat is a memory? Science writer Jonah Lehrer tells us is it’s a physical thing in the brain… not some ephemeral flash. It’s a concrete thing made of matter. And NYU neuroscientist Joe LeDoux, who studies fear memories in rats, tells us how with a one shock, one tone, and one drug injection, you can bust up this piece of matter, and prevent a rat from every making a memory. LeDoux’s research goes sci-fi, when he and his colleague Karim Nader start trying to erase memories. And Nader applies this research to humans suffering from PTSD.
Adding MemoryWe start this section off with a question from writer Andrei Codrescu: "where do computers get their extra memory from?" And then we take it literally. Can you add memories? Dr. Elizabeth Loftus says yes. She’s a psychologist in the department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California at Irvine, and her research shows that you can implant memories—wholly false memories—pretty easily into the brains of humans. Her work challenges the reliability of eye-witness testimony, and is so controversial that she once had to call the bomb squad. Then, producer Neda Pourang brings us the story of finding a lost memory. Painter Joe Andoe incessantly paints huge canvasses of seemingly random images: horses, pastures, and - more recently - a girl with a particular about-to-say-something look on her face. He didn't realize until recently that he'd been painting a day from his past, a fragment of an afternoon 30 years earlier.
CliveThe story of a man who’s lost everything. Clive Wearing has what Oliver Sacks calls “the most severe case of amnesia ever documented.” Clive’s wife, Deborah Wearing, tells us the story along with Oliver Sacks. And they try to understand why, amidst so much forgetting, Clive remembers two things: Music and Love.
Thanks to Uden Associates Productions for excerpts from the 1986 film about Clive Wearing, "Equinox: Prisoner of Consciousness."
Labels: heritage, theory
A crisis in urban creativity? by Dr Franco Bianchini
From: Artfactories (
http://www.artfactories.net/article.php3?id_article=1109)
A Crisis in Urban Creativity?
Reflections on the Cultural Impacts of Globalisation, and on the Potential of Urban Cultural Policies
by Dr. Franco Bianchini
Paper presented at the international symposium The Age of the City: the Challenges for Creative Cites, Osaka, February 7th-10th 2004
ABSTRACT: The work in progress presented at this symposium considers some aspects of the cultural impacts of globalisation (1) on contemporary Western European cities, and some of their implications for urban creativity. It concentrates on trends which have the potential of undermining the conditions for urban creativity. These include the following: the dispersal of urban functions and the problem of the ‘hypertrophic’ city; the emergence of ‘non-places’ and of the ‘experience economy’; the reduction in leisure time for people in work; the consequences of ’information overload’ and of the ’audit explosion’, particularly for public sector organisations. The paper then considers the creative potential of a further trend: the increasingly multi-ethnic and multi-cultural composition of cities in the UK and other European countries. The concluding sections of the paper discuss aspects of the potential of urban cultural policies in counteracting an emerging crisis in urban creativity and innovation.
by Dr Franco Bianchini
International Cultural Planning and Policy Unit
De Montfort University
The Gateway
LEICESTER LE1 9BH
ENGLAND
Read the full essay here:
http://www.artfactories.net/IMG/pdf/crisis_urban_creatvity.pdfLabels: theory
Archaeology of the contemporary
I came across the following excerpt from James Clifford's
The Predicament of Culture, reproduced in
Interpreting Objects and Collections, Susan Pearce (ed), Routledge (1994):
Clifford is writing about the way we value objects in collections and notes how we find "intrinsic interest and beauty in objects from a past time" and how we assume that "collecting everyday objects from ancient (preferably vanished) civilisations will be more rewarding than collecting, for example decorated thermoses from modern China or customised T-shirts from Oceania...Temporailty is reified and salvaged as origin, beauty and knowledge". (261-62)
This pretty elegantly sums up, I think, a central issue for the practice of archaeology in contemporary contexts. Of course, an interesting question is whether shifting the focus onto the contemporary for the purposes of collection can constitute merely another order of reficiation--the reification lying more in the system of collection than the things collected.
Labels: archaeology, theory
Dublin divided? Deep ecologies and social complexity
I was recently thinking about popular conceptions of Dublin urban geography. The most dominant one is probably the North:South divide. Quoted from a site found from a quick Google search for 'Dublin inner city culture' (
www.streetsofdublin.com):
"Traditionally, a north versus south division has existed in Dublin with the dividing line provided by the River Liffey. The Northside is generally seen as working-class, while the Southside is seen as middle and upper middle class. Dublin postal districts reflect the North/South divide, with odd numbers being used for districts on the Northside, e.g: Phibsboro is in Dublin 7, and even numbers for ones on the Southside, e.g: Sandymount is in Dublin 4." (
Read the rest of the page here)
The article does go on to give a deeper history for divisions and also discusses East:West issues. What I was thinking was, however, that I feel our project should make some direct statements about the problems with such reductive and essentialised divisions. Bifurcating the urban fabric creates dangers territorial conceptions and in many way reifies boundary - almost regressing debate to early 20th century
siedlungsarchaologie (settlement archaeology) - advocating notions of
Gustaf Kossinna's
kulturkries (culture area).
I feel our project - through the optics of social research, archaeology and art - has the potential to offer constructive complexity to the conception of Dublin's geography. Most critically, it should add two more dimensions to the standard 2D boundary lines of N:S bifurcations. Adding both depth and temporality.
It's an ambitious goal, but one certainly attainable - developing a process that both captures and enlivens the flow of a 4D conception of social space in Dublin in which all civic participants can feel they have representation and a stake.
Let the comments and debate begin...
Labels: archaeology, sociology, theory
The archaeological sensibility - a radical example from Argos
The
Metamedia Lab at Stanford University under the stewardship of
Michael Shanks has supported the development of some rather provocative reflexive practice in archaeological experssion. One example is
Archaeography - the digi-project managed by
Christopher Witmore (now a fellow at Brown University).
Stated briefly, the archaeological sensibility is that capricious sensation (both embodied and intellectual) experienced by humans today which suggests that things encountered index or embody complex temporal possibilities. The archaeology of the contemporary past suggests that by seeing the past as a complex of things experienced today, the past is liberated from boundaries and distinctions built into its rendering.
Simply stated, things from different times, or of different peoples or just things which wouldn't normally be thought of as existing together are approached as co-temporal happenings. A mesolithic flint or a medieval wooden comb or a piece of rubbish left from last week's binmen are all of the same temporality because we experience them together, presently, now, as part of living of the contemporary. And by experiencing pasts in this liberated contemporary sense, many new possibilities could be made evident - such as in
Chris Witmore's photographic studies of squatter's dwellings in Argos, Greece.
Are Chris' photos any less 'archaeological' than an excavation of a bronze age settlement?
Labels: archaeology, theory
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
