Day 5

The place was under the Granville Street Bridge; it was our rainy weather location and it was deemed necessary earlier in the day. The space was remarkably different than the others; primarily it was the quality of the light, or lack thereof, that was in stark contrast to previous locations. Also, it was not as pretty. However, the space did lend itself to a chalk mural that Nola brought to the project. She outlined everyone in dance pose and then we filled ourselves in. Robyn followed suit, with yarn in hand, and connected us all by the hand. I, on the other hand finally found myself inspired to “install”. I must admit, my work is minimal by nature and I have resistance to decorate for decoration sake. It was the coloured cup cake papers that enticed me. They were delicate paper three-dimensional bits, and I was immediately taken by them. So, as we had all noticed the tendency for passers by to pass on by, marking as large a space between them and us, I decided to snake the cupcake papers in along the sidewalk, forcing people to engage with us, even if it is only to avoid stepping on a paper.

Unusually, I have described the place before describing my project. Hmmm, I wonder what that means? Perhaps I am being taken over by the group…something to consider. So tonight’s project revolves around art theory, art school and the tendency to wear black. I have heard the stereotype that artist’s wear black. I don’t know too many artists who do this; however I do wear black. But I’d like to point out that I have been wearing black since sometime in the mid-80s, long before I ever identified with being an artist, if that is indeed what I do now. But anyhow, I wore black tonight, and I danced to an art theory lecture, one from my MA at Goldsmiths college, something regarding the way in which the city is framed and how that can be a political thing and how representation can help to build and breakdown political agendas. The class is called Reading the City and it was given by Michael Keith sometime last September. The piece is called Self-Portrait While Mobile Dancing to an Art Theory Lecture.

I will post the self-portraits just as soon as I get them.

Day 4

Tonight was magic. Our location was the Cambie Street Bridge, and I had been looking forward to this location from the beginning. It has a narrow pathway with the direction moving in only two directions. This configuration lends itself very well to public interaction of a different kind. This nights installation was pared down in contrast to the environment my colleagues provided. Their theme was party. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision for the group, but in the end, that is what one would suspect. There were streamers blowing off the bridge and decoration was everywhere. My project on the other hand was comprised of my camera set up on a tripod and a sign with the phrase “take a photo”. I didn’t necessarily mean that people should take a photo with the camera as I left it. I just thought people would be less likely to steal it if they also had to take a tripod. And then I started dancing. Jamie lent me his ipod after I complained that my minidisk player, which is not mac friendly, only came with two music discs, I usually use the device to record lectures and don’t have my own personal stereo. He also set up a “Rina needs to boogie” playlist with 3hours of dancing fun. That made a huge difference! I had such a good time, my dancing felt better, I was internal rather than focusing on the passers by, and I genuinely had a good time. In fact, the time just flew. Okay four sessions and a cynic like me is hooked.

These are the photos that other people took.

Day 3

Tonight seemed hard, but in the end, it was all in my mind. The location was the community park on the corner of Richards and Davie. Now this park is long and narrow with water features at both the north and south ends. There is also a long, narrow trough connecting the two features. It appeared that we should pick one end or the other in order to maintain visible from the street. Initially I thought the north end was superior; due to the current civic strike, the water was not flowing and that left these amazing step-like stages to play with. However, by the time I rallied the troupes to have them move to the other end, the skateboarders had moved in to the space and I was intimidated into picking the other end. So our end was square shaped with a circular pool with a central raised platform where the water is usually pumped. That meant that we were not contained, and in fact, we were considerably separated, a figuration that I found discomforting, not to mention that we were surrounded by occupied benches, providing our first ready-made audience. In the one corner there were three young guys, they dressed hip and their body language was aloof even though they were obviously watching intently. I could see one of them had an ipod and I was irritated that they refused to dance. Then the most fun thing happened: someone I know joined us. He danced with vigor, and I was so happy. After the session, I asked him how he had heard about us. Apparently he was told by a mutual acquaintance and he came by to check us out because “he was on his way to get green onions anyways” And then Robyn told me that the “cool kids” would be joining us tomorrow, that they were really interested but that only one of them had an ipod on them. And it was all-fine.

Tonight I danced without a strategy. I needed time to reflect on the act itself.

This is us getting ready

Day 2

In keeping with my plan, I head down to Science World, strategy in hand. Tonight I dance without a personal stereo device. I mean, if one of the points of mobile clubbing is to do something on your own simultaneously within a community, what happens when you try to enter that community without following the proper rules? Well, if I thought I was uncomfortable being looked upon by those who pass by, and my camera pointed directly on me for a whole half hour, this night was excruciating. Without an internal focus, ie. the music, my attention was propelled much further than the bubble-like boundary of space in which my body occupied. To further complicate the matter, I was without a stereo, the signifier that alerts people to why I am there and what I am doing. So, the gaze was not only from the passer-by, but also from other members of the group. Although I could be imagining this due to my heightened self-awareness, I am sure I did notice more eye contact that was not followed by a smile. Last night, eye contact was usually always followed with a smile, the smile of recognition that we were into this activity together. So there I was, trying to dance away with no music and not much connection with my comrades. It certainly felt as if I was on the edge of a dance circle, not able to get in.

Day 1 of Mobile Clubbing

I have been thinking about my strategies –my art-making strategies that I usually use—and I am trying to employ them in this strange context. I always worry when I get involved with other people, other artists, and particularly the “public”, whatever that is. I am a bit of a control-freak. After all, I have been successfully indoctrinated by a certain art college, and that has had a profound and lasting effect on my ability to have un-analytic fun. So I am taking this project far too seriously and have decided that the best approach is to come up with a different strategy every night that pertains to my discomfort, and that the nightly experience of enacting out the strategy will help guide, or direct my decisions for the next night’s strategy bringing me ever-closer to the distilled visual version of my discomfort.

On the first day I head over to the site, it is the Granville bus loop at 5th Avenue, right next to the great waterfall that I love. I arrive much too early and I feel like I might throw up. I want this feeling to translate digitally. In my anxious mode, I grab on for dear life to the strategy I have used many times, and I ask the kind volunteer to take photos of me every minute as I dance in front of the lens. This project will be called Thirty Minutes of Sheer Hell, or Thirty Minutes of Discomfort, depending on my sense of humour when I hang the photos.

Mobile Clubbing? Me?

I’ve hooked up with a duo that operates under the name Foolish Operations. They are the mobile clubbing scene in Vancouver. And what is my interest you ask? Well my interest is two-fold. First, I have always been disappointed in the lack of community and political engagement found in the citizens of Vancouver. I suppose it is easier to get a couple hundred people to show up to something, or even nothing at all, in London, a city with the population of about 10 million compared to our puny 2 million (both numbers include the greater area). But still, as long as I remember, it has been tricky to get Vancouverites to buy into anything that might be construed as fun, silly, or not cool. They will aloofly await another city to try something out and then proclaim that thing over. And although mobile dancing, or flash mobbing, as it, and similar spontaneous group actions, have been theorized through their politics, I have been giving it a second look through a narcissistic lens. My personal interest is not in its politic. Rather, I am interested in it phenomenology. How does it work on my body? How does it work on me when I act abnormally in public space, space where others, people not in the know, are going to see me acting silly and un-cool? So I decide to meet Robyn Campbell’s challenge and join her and her collaborator Julie Lebel for a half an hour a day of mobile dancing over the course of 2 weeks and see what I can see.

This is Public Art: Third Time Lucky

documentation 4, originally uploaded by rina.liddle.

documentation 3, originally uploaded by rina.liddle.

It`s Monday morning, I called the HHS Hire people. I have found that if you present a problem and then feign as if you have no idea of any possible solution, Londoners love to find you a solution, particularly if you are a girl and they are not. If you find your own solution and ask them for what you want, you will get the big egg. Responses include: “No, we don’t do that”, “No, that is against our rules” and a particular favorite, “No, I can’t help you, that is another department”. So long-winded it was, I recounted the weekend’s activities for the technician and happily, he soon was at my house, picking up the defunct generator bringing another, bigger version in hand.

Well armed, off we went, and, as a descendent of Italian heritage, the kind that resembles a subject that is uneducated and superstitious, I was thinking. “third time lucky”. Thankfully Eleanor, a classmate of mine, helped with the driving, and being a rather confident Londoner, she was not afraid to park illegally. We arrived at our destination, set everything up –the only anxiety this night was of the technical kind—only discover that I needed an adapter for my mac. Bloody hell. So Eleanor zipped though the streets to South East London and thankfully I found mine exactly where I thought I left it.

Back again and everything was almost beautiful, except the projector wasn’t reading my computer. Thankfully the AV rental people had posted their cell phone right on their equipment and I called for a little emergency consult. Within minutes we had things running, finally.

The response was a mixture of what I had expected. There was a range of engagement, from people glancing and walking past, a few apologies from those who realized part way that they were walking through the projection (or perhaps through the videoing of the projection), to people who stopped to enquire about the project.

The woman whose response I had found most interesting was a resident of the neighbourhood. Just to set the tone, this area is in the financial district of London; and therefore, it is frequented primarily by office workers and tourists who come to see St. Pauls Cathedral and the surrounding statues. This woman was shocked to see the CCTV images. While understanding on an intellectual level that every angle of the square was imaged by the cctv cameras, she was quite unaware of what those images looked like. The project gave her a different understanding, one that she could relate to in a tangible way. This response was what I was after; to create a different way to apprehend the condition of London life, from that of knowing that you are being watched, into the experience of knowing that you are being watched. It is subtle in words, yet phenomenally different.

I am now off to the south of France to spend eight days writing my dissertation, what can a girl say about that?

This is Public Art, A Failed Event

When you think you have accounted for everything, you are still not prepared for all potentiality. Or, put simply, the last laugh might be on you. I know this to be true, particularly after this weekend.

The “customer service” woman at the HSS Hire shop assured me three things before I placed my reservation on her hand-held generator for this weekend’s event. First, it was silent. Of course, I didn’t expect silent exactly, but quiet was what I was hoping for. Secondly, after explaining that I was a 5” 3 weakling, she assured me that indeed I would be able to carry this thing across London by tube. It was a handheld generator after all. And lastly, she assured me that there was 500 watts of power, plenty for my 150w data projector. (A fact I knew because she made me call the data projector “customer service” people, who much less confident and not at all interested in checking, told me that it would definitely be under 500w).

And my prep day went like this:

Carsten, my German friend who is on holiday with me at the moment and I walked down to Brockley Road. I sent him off in a direction for good coffee, Time Out travelers guide and A-Z in hand. I met Michael and we headed to the Home Depot store, can’t remember the English name for it, to source wood and various gadgety-things for our show in September. With a short stop at Comet, to buy a dvd player, we made our way to the gallery space where Tom was working on the roof and Alison was already waiting for us. Alison, Michael and I proceeded to test the infamous brick clips ™ (thank you Lee Valley) and measure the ins and outs of the space. The procedure ran like a well-tuned machine, efficient and satisfying.

Then I went home to run my last checks on the equipment for the event. The generator worked, but silent, it was not. Our first clue was the “must wear ear protection” sticker slapped on the side. Remarkably, we got the data projector doing its thing quite quickly and I phoned for technical support regarding the power surge protector. Then we packed up and were transported by a very large moving van from Poland –an extremely funny way of transporting our hand-held generator.

The thought of the loud generator in that space, with all the cameras and a parked police van not more than 12 feet from where I wanted to project and a building security guard sitting in a lobby, was torture. And then I remembered that the point of the game was to get things running and get them shut down. So I got everything set up saving the generator for last. Pulling the generator starter and hooking up was the climax. Get the power surge protector in, got that running. Hook the data projector in, got that working. Plug the data projector in, got standby power there. Turn data projector on, and the power ceased. The climax fizzled as I tried a few more times to get the power to get there. The generator sounded pathetic as it struggled to rev up enough power for my 150w device, never getting there. I phoned the rental place only to be told that the 24hour centre in Hackney was only 24hours during the week, a different story than the one I was told only hours before. We packed up and went home.

Ironically, I didn’t feel complete failure as I had expected; I had after all run a loud generator in public space for at least a half an hour without any attention, and in a paranoid anti-terrorist kind of place, that was something.

This Is Public Art

this is public art, originally uploaded by rina.liddle.

liddlethought
Today is the day. It seems I have been preparing for this day for over 6 months. I am projecting my dissertation final project into public space, guerilla style. This Is Public Art consists of london cctv footage that is intermittently interrupted with the text: this is public art. I will be projecting the footage back into the space where the footage originated, near Saint Paul’s tube station, in full view of the camera that gave birth to my piece and possibly the same surveiller who helped me set up the camera to my aesthetic taste.

My anxiety is running high. With a lack of technical support from my sociology-based visual program, I have yet to confirm if, in fact, a hand held generator will in fact power the data projector for a half an hour without a power surge. Apparently, the tool rental technician advised me not to power such equipment with their generator, even with a power surge protector, which they will rent to me for an extra tener. The data projector, I acquired, is not insured, of course.

But perhaps I won’t even get that far, projecting into public space, I mean. The police are quite fast here, I have noticed, with all the terrorism hoopla, which is the point. When I was in the bank control room taking portraits of the lovely chief inspector (nice ass, I have never really been drawn to men in uniform…) I couldn’t help but notice that one of the operators had noticed some kind of disturbance and dispatched someone, I am assuming by foot, to go check it out. And when I was setting up for another portrait just outside the Liverpool Street Station, the foot patrol were on me really quick-like. I would like to know if terrorists are really so clumsy as to use medium format cameras and tripods.

I guess my question, as I set out to start me day is: If I am successful with this project, as in if I get to project a half hour of footage into the space unattended to, what does that say about my project and my dissertation argument? Only failing will prove my point.