I’m really happy to catch up with Garnet’s work and to hear about Michelle’s new projects, specifically “Buscando al Sr. Goodbar”. I am interested in how the project brings into the youtube/map equation a very new and vital thread of connection through and between the network and the world.
I have never liked any of the words suggested by language– “cyber”, “virtual”, etc., and I always think that it is a mistake to think of the real and the virtual as a simple binary. These things are intertwined and complex, and there isn’t really any reason we should separate out that which happens “on the screen” from that which happens “off the screen”.
I think it is a real challenge to work with elements between screen/not screen and have them retain or recapture vitality, loveliness and importance, because in culture we are used to transferring between these modes, and we tend to discard the haeccaeity of the thing if it is onscreen. I see this thread in some of Garnet’s work, for example with his use of the real cockroach in “Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot”. This is one of the things I think is successful about Michelle’s new projects – there is a cascading array of representation and represented activity and it is examining what that movement is, and where that transformation is happening or not happening.
I also like how there is a play with scale. Scale of course is so important to considerations of the map and how it functions. We don’t always consider the haptic qualities of the map or of the things that are mapped. Google Earth is so tiny and fluid and swift and gigantic, Borges’ interactive map.
That is why I like the introduction of people, especially groups of people, especially groups of people in a bus (!) when tracking down and connecting with youtube videos. The man playing the piano on youtube is so very small and luminous, but when we meet him in real life he is large and in the centre of a crowd, and the whole things scales up back up again.
It relates to the Baudrilliard quote advanced by Garnet: “The absolute rule of thought is to give back the world as it was given to us – unintelligible. And, if possible, to render it a little more unintelligible.” I like how sometimes the world can be rendered “a little more unintelligible” through the provision of detail and specificity, through the actual activities of people and qualities of places and things.
I’ll try to answer Genda’s question in her post Giving Back : creating new spatial possibility. For me, there is always a potential for de-stabilization and subsequent strangeness through the introduction of technological systems. In an almost parasitic manner, my method of working is to explore the leakages that inevitably occur, when technologies are used in other ways than originally intended or when the division between the public and the private become very ambiguous and blurred. What happens when technological products and platforms become subverted by simply changing the context for how they are used? What are the social and cultural conditions that accompany these technologies and how can new social situations be created?
For example, I discovered that if people include the geo-coordinates of their videos when publishing them on YouTube then these videos automatically appear as a layer of information on GoogleEarth. This re-introduces an element of place within the videos themselves. Using this feature I started to ‘virtually’ visit cities and start to get to know some of the people living there through the videos that they produced. I also knew where they lived. Through a YouTube channel you can also send a message to a person. Therefore the placement of the video on a map, and the infrastructure of YouTube sets up the potential that at some point somebody might want to contact that person back and maybe pay him/her a visit.
For ‘Buscando al Sr. Goodbar’, I created a bus tour throughout Murcia, Spain where a search was made for the authors and locations of various YouTube videos produced in the city. During the performance the bus moved through the city and we visited some sites where videos had been produced as well as some people living there. The movements through the city were mirrored on GoogleEarth which could be seen on a large monitor installed at the front of the bus. Videos were played as we reached a place on the map where an action had taken place, such as a video of somebody doing Tai Chi which was played as we drove by a park. In preparing for the tour, I contacted several people in advance and asked if we could pay them a visit, where they would re-enact some performances on their videos. Therefore at certain points we got off the bus and entered into people’s spaces. For example, there was a young guy playing piano. First we watched his video on the bus, then met him at the entrance of the building and were led into the room where the piano was situated. Once we were all seated, he played the piano for us. Therefore a video was first made in a private space, then broadcasted on YouTube for an anonymous public who then reentered the private space. In this way, the videos’ author started to experience certain consequences of the media that had been produced and made public.
Buscando al Sr. Goodbar
I think one of the reasons I started being interested in the mapping of real space was that it could be looked at as relating to the operation or function of a network, but it was a low-tech network, and it didn’t involve the screen.
I was looking at relationships between places – the structures and activities of a city – as another kind of information network, or exploring ways these extended, evolved or evidenced other networks. The interest was about information, function, and connection that pulled away from the screen and started to operate in new ways by relating to and attaching to the real world.
One of the directions this has taken me is using the activity and movement of people or structures in the world to animate and recombine text. In the Path project, I produced a 12 volume bookwork from text that was recombined or put into order by the incidental physical movement of an individual going about their life in cafes in Montreal.
I’m interested in how activity of any kind (physical movement, network activity, social or symbolic activity) can be something you can kind of attach to and use as a generator. Doing this is funny from the perspective of mapping. That which is produced becomes a kind of a map, because there is a relation between “real” information (that which acts as a generator, i.e. the movement of an individual) and representational or poetic information (that which is mixed as evidence of the activity, i.e. the text they recombine when they move). This to me is the essence of a map: shifting overlays between real and representational information. For me, there is always a reversal, and I’m interested in beauty and surprise.
