[A20 Recall / 2007] Walking seems to be a reoccurring theme within your work. In addition to the aforementioned Life: a user’s manual and Parasitic Video Network, many of your works use ‘the walk’ as a means to collect video signals or as a public performance. In A20 Recall you use the walk to trace the historically charged perimeter of the "wall of shame" that was erected during the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001. Could you talk about how this project explored movement, documentary and cartography? Also, more generally, what are your thoughts on walking and the city? When I started to develop Life: a user’s manual, I used walking as a method for exploring a city and finding wireless video transmissions. This enlisted a method of walking which had no particular direction or final destination. Upon arrival in new city, the first thing I would do is connect together my kit—a video camera, battery pack, video receiver and necessary cabling—and start to walk. The first thing that I noticed on the camera screen was a bit of noise. This suggested that something was present and deserved a closer look. As I moved closer to the source, the signal became stronger and I could start to see what was happening within the video. At this point I would sometimes try to find the camera. The videos led me through the city. I might start in one direction but then would find myself somewhere else, because I had found another video and wanted to know where it was. A walk that started on a busy street might end up in an unmarked alley. Unplanned movements and itineraries, detours and shortcuts became ways for me to experience a city. Later on I became interested in Michel de Certeau’s portrayal of walkers as producers of "urban text", created by their own movements yet without being able to read it; how networks of movement, which are like acts of writing, together make a story, created out of multiple fragments and trajectories of space. These are invisible actions that can be visualized from above, a cartographic view, described as traces and paths followed. However what is depicted is an absence, rendering something that is no longer there. In 2007, I was invited by La Chambre Blanche to do a residency in Quebec City. At that time I was reading a lot on the militarization of urban space. Stephen Graham’s analysis of security barriers and Stephen Flusty’s taxonomy of defensible space are some examples. The Summit of the Americas was one of the first instances that a wall was put up during a global summit, temporarily claiming a territory within a urban area and limiting access to city residents. The militarization of Quebec City and violent protest that followed was both a political awakening for many and set the precedent for other global meetings that followed. These meetings have become even more sophisticated in their security procedures and have become a perverse form of event management. I was curious about the repercussions that these global meetings have on the host cities. Instead of compiling a list of interviewees, I decided to retrace the wall and randomly approach people on the street and see what they remembered. As I had never worked in this way before, I was at first quite shy and nervous. However throughout the three weeks that I did this, the project took a life of its own; each day going out walking and using the fragments and trajectories of the people that I met to weave together a multiple narrative of what went on around the wall. If I had met different people during these walks, the narrative would be perhaps different. After a while, and this was so incredibly moving for me, different people would come into La Chambre Blanche and give me any photographs or newspaper clippings that they had been saving. One man said, "I never knew why I was taking these pictures, but now I want to give them to you".
[The City is Creative / 2009] In The City is Creative you built an archive of commissioned video performances is underutilized and inaccessible industrial and commercial space in Eindhoven. This piece problematizes the 'creative class' rhetoric by intersecting expression with marginal spaces—byproducts of economic production—and also challenges the limitations of social networking through installing an interface for exploring this media at various sites where it was recorded. Could you discuss the interest in derelict spaces here, do you think the emotional resonance of these spaces extends into social networks as well? I developed The City is Creative around the Strijp-S area in Eindhoven. Strijp-S is the former headquarters for the Philips company, who based most of its operations around Eindhoven for almost 100 years. It is now the future site for "The Creative City" an urban development plan for new work / live spaces being built out of the former factory spaces, which is intended to attract both industry and the creative class. Fordist factories that become wastelands are turned into post-fordist factories. The project was commissioned by Baltan Laboratories, a media lab in Eindhoven, and Flux-S, an annual festival designed to follow and comment on the development of the region, until its completion in 2018. Instead of going into a description of The City is Creative, I want to start by saying that there is currently a lot of debate around the role that art and cultural production plays in economic and political post-fordist, neo-liberal agendas. As filmmaker Hito Steyerl recently stated in a public discussion that took place in Berlin, "It's not about what art is, it is about art does". I start to think about my artistic role within local cultural events that are at the same time branded to promote a certain legitimacy, making them attractive for corporate sponsorship (and city development). This makes me an active agent and contributor within these processes, which are now becoming the dominant economic model for cultural production. One can look at what recently took place in The Netherlands. This year, the government announced that by 2013 most cultural organizations will no longer receive public funding and are encouraged to move towards creative industry economic models. This changes both the reason and conditions under which art is produced, which then has to follow the rules of play within a globally competitive market (but then perhaps this is what we've been doing already). To continue with your question about wastelands: Berlin-based sociologist Andrej Holm talks about the different stages of gentrification. First the pioneers enter and occupy the wastelands, then the others follow, bringing in flood of investment into the area whereby the original pioneers are driven out. The pioneers, mostly artists and other subcultural types, are both the instigators of the gentrification process as well as the ones that least benefit from it. So where does this lead us? We go to wastelands because that's what we like to do (sorry if this is sounding naive, but there is something intriguing and challenging about building up something in a space that is still unformed). But is it possible to be critically reflective as a participant in branded cultural events and/or in the gentrification process? Or is this not only welcome but already re-incorporated to the point to where critical debate becomes ineffective? I don’t think the desire to engage, tweak or populate underutilized space is naive at all – creatives are drawn to untapped potential, right? This discussion about ‘the wasteland’ and gentrification highlights how the programming and occupation of various urban zones or neighbourhoods is temporal and in a state of constant flux – just like public discourse, political infrastructure, the market, etc. So given this description of the city as a complex apparatus that is full of moving parts, what facets of urban experience are you thinking about right now and exploring (or contemplating exploring) in your work? I’m developing a new work that is part of a larger field of exploration spanning over the next two years. This research is being carried out within the Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Programme at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts. I study maps created by videos that people make and place on social media platforms such as YouTube, to which they also add a geographical location. By exploiting the locative data that comes with each video, I can generate collections of video material within a given city and observe what a city looks based on these collections. This is a service that both Google Maps and Google Earth offers, however I discovered that Google filters out many videos, leaving only the popular ones or those that have many comments and views. This is the official message from Google, however I think they filter out other things as well. For example, videos of the recent protests in Madrid or of homo-erotic body builders in Berlin get a lot of views, yet don't appear on Google's maps. Therefore it appears that there is some filtering and censorship taking place. I decided to build my own data-mining platform so that I could collect more unfiltered information and worked with Brendan Howell, a Berlin-based artist and programmer, to develop this platform. This is completely legal, uses a publicly available YouTube api and is written in Python. The software searches for and collects all geo-tagged videos within an urban area, anywhere from one to twenty kilometres, and displays these hits in a format similar to a photographer’s contact sheet. From these initial collections I start to first observe and then make my own filtered and curated collections, my own artistic intervention. This summer I focused on Berlin and am in the middle of this process. After a month of gathering and examining video material, I realized that some people living the city have quite substantial video archives which are geo-tagged. For example, a pensioner, a man in his 70s, has 244 geo-tagged videos on his YouTube channel. When I map out his archive, I can see the territory he has marked out in the city. This is a territory based on where he lives, where he takes his grandchildren for walks, where he goes to visit his relatives in the north part of the city and where he had a wake for his son when he died. This is information that he both created and made publicly available. I am focusing on the personal archives of 10 different people in Berlin, observing where they are in the city and what takes place within these videos. I use this map as a kind of reality that becomes the starting point of the project. From these archives I map out itineraries in the Berlin, which I then try to follow. I try to retrace the places where they’ve been, where they work, where they live, by physically moving through the city and visiting the sites where these videos are marked on the map. I maintain a journal of my experiences, which I write from each location. Many times the map reality and the reality that I encounter when I am physically in the city simply does not match up. The video is obviously taking place somewhere else, but for some reason it has been marked at the place where I am standing. At the same time this creates a relation, whether intended or not, which I then reflect on. Other times, the two realities disturbingly coincide, such as discovering that the apartment door where I stand is in fact the place where a person actually lives. One could make an immediate reference to Sophie Calle’s early works where she followed strangers and investigate their private lives. Or even Vito Acconci’s Follow piece in which he followed strangers at random until the point they went into their private spaces, such as an apartment building. I’m doing the opposite. These strangers give me their personal information and I follow up on where they tell me to go. This puts me in the position of being a stalker, however I would say that by now that is what we have all become. Digital information is changing the way we see and view the world, but information also changes us. As an artist, I try to explore and reflect on this. |
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