Another way to see my city is do watch vlogs by tourists trying to understand my surroundings. Here is the first. A young North American couple talking about the food in Wellington while walking around it. So innocent about our world. I feel there is something here I could mine...
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This act is selfish, it’s not a community endeavour, and it’s counter to that and disruptive. This act is my memory/memories and the trails they leave through this space. Sometimes these memories include you and become entwined in your memories. But these are not totally together, as we both come to this point from our own paths and have our different separate modes of remembrance wrapped in this moment. Last night I went to see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play live. In the venue were about six thousand other people, the majority who were there because the music of NC&tBS had touched us all in some way over the last 40 years that Nick Cave has produced music. But these experiences coloured how we felt coming into this collective moment that is now a memory. Not many in the crowd were trying to sleep in 1994 at my friend’s house whilst he blasted “let love in”, and I have no idea how many people also got sick of hearing “Wild Rose” as their (now ex) wives overplayed it. I don’t know the constructs that frame this shared experience that totally becomes individualist even if we want to share it on FB to make it seem like a collective moment. I still have the song “No more shall we part” stuck in my head even though it wasn’t played in the 2 hour set. In time I may even remember it being played that night. There is no collective experience. And as such we approach the space we exist in in the same disruptive way with our memories.
Watching Netflix and HBO now I have some downtime. Finding bits and pieces that can influence my work in the next year. One is a quote from Westworld, where the characters live in an imagined concept of the past. Main character Dolores, who is a synthetic human, starts to move out of her normal storyline and sees "Choices hanging in the air like ghosts"
The other is from Black Mirror, S1, Ep3 "The Entire History of You" where the main character gets lost in his memories and has time distortion troubles by over-living the past. Broken time keeps jumping into focus. I am reminded about the story of Momo (1973) written by Michael Ende (Never Ending Story), or to give its full title: Momo, or the strange story of the time-thieves and the child who brought the stolen time back to the people. (translated from German). It is a book I read a few times when young. As I wander the streets I do so with purpose, not like the psychogeographers who let themselves be drawn by the spectacle. I do so on a set path, one where I might encounter the ghosts I am looking for. Phenomenal ghosts lead my way.
Everyday Hauntology: Ghosts about Wellington.
Is the future collapsing? We have now gone past the future point that Marty McFly went back to, October 21, 2015. That future has not happened. We are now in a nostalgia loss loop for futures that never were. In this seminar I apply Derrida’s hauntology via Mark Fisher’s lens to a building in central Wellington where a nostalgia point of an unrealised future “exists” for me. Ghosts of futures lost. My latest exhibition Other Ghosts is current on at Space Studio and Gallery in Whanganui. I'm happy with how the models and animations are working but as usual the sound is a bit of a tag-a-long afterthought. SO. My next show is probably going to be in May and will be focusing more on the lighting aspects of the work due to the controlled environment I am looking at (an old walk in safe). SO. Before that I want to take a different approach and make a building from the sound-side up. What does this building sound like? How can I craft it audibly before it comes to life physically? These ideas have come out of an excellent workshop I attended today with Simon Cumming on generative strategies for working with audio. As an animator to start with the audio sculpting first makes sense, but as a model builder is seems a strange way to approach. What joy can be found coming from this direction?
What could I create if I started with this field recording? Finally here is my favourite image from the Other Ghosts opening - 16 July 2016. This paper starts wandering around in the urban landscape of Wellington and ends up tightening in on one building, The Imperial Building, 41 Dixon St, Te Aro, Wellington. This is a building that I had an animation studio in, tried to run as a business, from 2002 to 2004. This is a place where I ended many of my hopes and dreams after graduating from art school, where I lost my first marriage. There are many phenomenological ghosts in that building. Before I reach my ghost hunt in this building I am first going to lay down some structure, a pathway and foundations for the research. My research investigates memory, personal memory, my memories and how they have managed to attach themselves to public spaces, especially around a central city block where I spent time on different occasions at different stages in my life. This is a site of interest for me to build on both in a physical and theoretical sense. In a literal and imaginary (daydreaming) sense. In my art practice I have drawn this area and made models of some of the buildings. I have been selective as the field of memory research is wide, being covered in scientific, philosophical, psychological, archeological as well as literacy paradigms to name a few. The focus of my research is tracing its way towards narrative, both literary and oral, to look at memory but to be able to investigate other paradigms too. I am bringing in a prose style to my writing and art. In this sense Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (1997) has influenced me to look at how the unknown can be given life through lyrical description. Describing cities from the person who has experienced them to one who has never experienced city living, Italo Calvino imagines what tales the traveller Marco Polo would bring back to the great Kublai Kan. Are these cities real or imagined, the tales true or embellished, have memories of one place run into another? How distinct are these cities? Have these cities been described to enthral the listener (reader) of Marco Polo's tales? This is where I am - attempting to describe the city of my memories to you. But my task is different as my audience may already know this place, or similar cities, and have their own memories and ghosts running around. Or they may see the city-scape as a universal, a place to live, die, get carried away, a place of trauma, pain, obsession or (dreaded) nostalgia. The buildings and park spaces, roads and walkways were built with purpose and the humans have moved it to invade that initial intention. My memories, my ghosts now haunt this place as much as anyone else's. So I have to enter with a subjective viewpoint and bring you along with what you know and tell you how ghosts make up this urban landscape. As I travel, walking down from Massey University to Courtenay Place I see the scrawls of word images, figures and forms running over the landscaped buildings. Some are sanctioned murals, others fouling graffiti. Disrupting. I am reminded of the work Muto (2008) by the artist Blu. Blu paints large scale, many storied animations on the walls of buildings, disused urban spaces and the ground. Figures evolve and fold then disappear. There is an interface between the projected narrative and the architectural urban landscape. Here animation brings life through the persistence of memory and the use of remembered coded symbols. New life is given to old buildings. As I pass through Pukeahu, the National War Memorial [Skate] Park, I see how people have already repurposed a solemn reflective space of remembrance to that of a skate park. Creating their own memories of the space, in opposition to the intentions of the park’s planners, (Phillips, 2015)(Seaman, 2015). Sullying the purpose with different memories. Making different marks on the landscape. This is a path I have travelled often, taking walks through the city during my lunch breaks, when I had to escape the office to think. During these lunchtime wanderings small memory ghosts would come to me as words and I would send these short memories to myself as text messages while walking. Memories real and imagined came to me. One of the lines that came to me was “I can't stop ghosting those same streets”. (In this my phone has become my digital mobile notebook.) From the message "I can't stop ghosting those same streets”, a new term has arisen for me - “ghosting". My initial investigation into this term came up with three meanings in popular culture. The first is to follow someone in their footsteps without them knowing. This cruel game is videoed and posted online. A person walking down the sidewalk is selected at random and the ghoster will follow them, mimicking their movements until the ghostee notices they are being ghosted. An example here: https://youtu.be/BrwVRSwMSqw The second meaning, to suddenly disappear from someones life, when dating without notice to call it off, cease contact and not tell the other party (to block). This also known as the “slow-fade”. Ghosting is a problem that has arisen in the last few years due to the app based swipe-left swipe-right internet dating culture. (Samakow, 2014). The third meaning I have discovered is to leave a social gathering without saying goodbye (known also as the the fade, Irish goodbye, the French exit, and any number of other vaguely xenophobic terms). (Stevenson, 2013). This is something I’ve been known to do. But for me ghosting has a new meaning. It deals with living with the memories of the past, real or imagined, in a tangible place. As in when I go through a real space I may be ghosting as I am interacting with the traces of memories that I have stored in those places through repetition, trauma or the unusual occurrence. I may be present in the now but be wrapped up in the past, so am just ghosting through. This meaning is in line with techniques used in archeology research. One proponent of this is Dr April Beisaw, who takes her students ghost hunting at Vassar College New York (Archeology Fantasies, 2016). They don’t find actual ghosts but may instead encounter phenomenological ghosts: “Who has not experienced that flood of images of people long gone, or people when they were younger, while revisiting an old “haunt,” as we say? Who has not had that slightly chilly, and yet very warm, feeling of almost being able to see your friends from when you were eight dashing down the sidewalk as you walk through the neighborhood where you grew up? Who has not had that sense, while creeping into some room where one really should not have been, that someone unseen was watching? Ghosts….constitute the specificity of historical sites….[they] haunt the places of our lives.” (Michael Mayerfeld Bell quoted in Beisaw, 2016) These ghosts travel with me also. I see phenomenal echoes of the past. The walls echo stories of the past, the surfaces have been worn down by time, tampered with by different owners with differing ideas of how the space exists. The physical architecture has memories built into it too, references to other forms of architecture, grand ideals or memorialising elements. Marks of the far flung Victorian colonial capital at the wrong side of the world. I use the term imaged when referring to memories as I can never be sure how accurate the memory is, whether it has been distorted by emotion, confusion of time, other people's narratives, urban myths or even something I’ve seen on TV. This fits with ideas from Neurologist and science communicator Steven Novella: “When someone looks at me and earnestly says, “I know what I saw”, I am fond of replying, “No you don’t”. You have a distorted and constructed memory of a distorted and constructed perception, both of which are subservient to whatever narrative your brain is operating under”. (Novella, 2014). As my mind travels along this path now how important is it to also consider what I don’t remember? What isn’t there? This is something the artist Mike Kelley asks of his audience with his work Educational Complex (1995), an architectural sale model reconstruction of the places where he learnt, his childhood home and educational institutions. Kelley deliberately tried to leave out parts of the architecture he didn’t remember. And what can be said about why somethings are not remembered? Is it because they were too dull to remember or do I not remember some things out of trauma or repression? Or shall I, as Kelley did, fetishise the forgotten and dull areas. These could be filled in with poetry or cartoons, daydreamings. “It is much better to fill in these empty spaces with fiction… [fill] in the blanks with pastiches of things that had affected me… cartoons, films and the kinds of stories one finds in the literature of repressed memory syndrome…” (Kelley, quoted in Miller, 2015 p23) My wandering brings me to the site of my old studio. The Imperial Building was built circa 1930. It is totally utilitarian in design and purpose built to house clothing manufacturing and had life as home for a jeweller too. It is mentioned in many adverts in the Evening Post from 1932 - 1940 with notices of situations vacant for “Coat, Vest, Trouser Machinists” (Evening Post, 23 Oct 1934) amongst others for drapery and costume machinists. Adverts for Carr and Haley Ltd Jewellers (established 1902) tell that they closed down in 1932 (Evening Post, 24 Nov 1932). Samuel Pizer and Company Wholesale Manufacturing Furriers made a great deal, hanging onto the prestige of the fact they were opposite the now long gone Royal Oak Hotel (Evening Post 9 May 1944). Otherwise there is no mention of the Imperial Building in a newspaper search via the National Archive. It appears to have done its job of housing various enterprises throughout its life unremarkably. It is now a building no-one cares for, evidenced by they fact it is not a heritage building and has now become the home of art studios, a tattooist and alternative health practitioners. The Imperial Building is on the Earthquake Prone Buildings list with a notice that requires strengthening work done on it before 15 June 2027 (Wellington City Council, 2016). This fact makes the possibility that it will be demolished in the next 10 years quite high. It is a stumpy four story concrete building. It has no architectural prowess, no modernist ideals wrapping it up. A little art deco flare on its facade is its only tilt at any style. It has a strong solid core of a narrow winding staircase surrounding an antique iron gated lift. What former lives have been in this building? If I was Shimon Attie, what would I project on its facade? In his work The Writing on the Wall, (1992 - 1993) Attie projected images of how buildings in Berlin used to look when they had been inhabited by Jewish people before they were ejected by the Nazi regime. A guerrilla action with the light of photos past. Confronting present owners with uncomfortable past. Here I see ghosts. Phenomenological ghosts. Memories playing out in front of my eyes, given life and flesh, heat and chill, hard yet ephemeral. As I climb the hard slate stairs that were so tight, so treacherous when wet I remember they once caused me to fall and scrape my palms. I pass the lift whose iron gate doors I’m sure inspired many animations I made with creatures that had sharp teeth. I come to the first floor landing foyer where Becs Arahanga pretended to play with stars for a day for a music video I made (Steelsmith, 2004). To the door of the massage therapy practice that now takes the place of my animation studio that I shared with my then wife who ran a printmaking studio. This place is now barred to me, unaccessible. Yet my memory carries me inside. I see the 3 large printing presses, the end windows letting in natural light, the make shift sound booth built into the corner. I smell honey and resin and ink. I hear Radio Active playing on the dinky stereo. I want to stop and stay and get something done. I’m drunk, I’m crying, I’ve been awake too long and I’m singing and dancing. There is so much to be filled in between a floor and ceiling. These internal spaces could be filled in and made solid like Rachel Whiteread's Ghost, (1990). The space cast to carry "the residue of years and years of use” (Gibbons, 2007). The air is solidified, the space is totally filled up. This is the space we exist in. The air is thick and we move slowly as it solidifies us into place. These are just my ghosts. What other ghosts reside in this place? Romanticism kicks in. Did someone toil their whole life away here making fine clothes they could barely afford? Were there affairs between people, fights? Did someone bleed on this floor? What is the constant hum of all the piled on voices overlaid with machines that drill and sew and press. Did anyone else have a flood that closed the businesses downstairs like we did in February 2004? This building is my mnemonic (Yates, 1992), as I walk around I see the past stacked in corners, smeared on the walls, tripping me up, muddling joy with pain and the mundane with absurd. These memories no longer have a real function of order or reason. I am here but transitory. What other ghosts are here with me? What is the Hauntology of this place? What futures that could of been but will now never happen (Fisher, 2014). All now becomes speculative and can collapse in on itself. Such is the nature of these ghosts, they keep circling around like creation myths for stories that never happened. The narrative of all the days I spent in this place blur into one solid yet shifting mass. Was there a routine I followed going to this place trying to be there by 9am in the morning in time to then leave and go get coffee in Eva Dixon’s Place (another relic of a once-was Wellington). In spatial terms the Imperial Building is temporal space. It was been built for a purpose early in the 20th Century and now is soon to be gone. It is a building few will miss. It is hard to think of a building as being ephemeral but this one is. Once the interactions of the people who have known it, spent time inside it, have filled it with memories it is only another passing vessel. Soon it will be gone. The memories attached to its physical form will be set free. Michael Landy has shown us how we can destroy the objects of our memories in the work Breakdown (2001). Over a two week period Landy shredded all of his worldly possessions, save for the clothes he was wearing. This included precious objects such as photos of his dead father and practical items such as his Saab motor car. He made an inventory of all that was shredded so that in the end all was left was the documentation of the objects that had memories attached (Gibbons, 2007, 142). In the end this banal list is meaningless. Conclusion - a launching point to narrative From this investigation I now ask what forms of narrative can my memories take as they fold around repeat and shift, build up upon one another? I interpret my memories in narrative forms and create space for them to exist by invoking these constructed spaces from the Wellington urban-scape. Cyclic repetitive narratives that take the form of short repeating animations now exist within these re-constructions. To add to this practice I will be doing further research into the history of old french and old english medieval narrative cycles. They have notions of heroism and the repetition of actions from generation to generation. I am interested in the heroic quest that never ends, the movement to potential success but not having success as it will destroy meaning. Is a hero without a quest really a hero, or even a potential hero? Sisyphus keeps pushing that stone up the hill. In my practice I am also interested in the cacophony of mediation we wrap ourselves in. I am interested in my inability to sit still in a metaphysical sense, if not moving my mind will wander, and as I have become older I have more past for my daydreams to inhabit and try to fix (fixing the past - giving structures/narratives to the uncontrolled swirl of memories and emotions) - the self repair toolkit of narrative structures kicks in. This narrative memory form hopes to sit between a diegetic narration that is a verbal story telling act built around language and a mimetic narration, a shown story, memories are given images and symbols. (Ryan, 2004) I am also interested in looking at narrative therapy in psychology. To look at narrative subjectivity in remembrance, especially around areas that may be traumatic. I will approach lecturers in the School of Psychology to further this line of investigation. Experiential design is also of interest, being used to design worlds and spaces in gaming and VR. I want to look at how we can construct new spaces and the memory immersion phenomenon, which gives users of VR the feeling of not just suspending ones disbelief when entering an VR space, but to actually really being there, written into ones memory as “real”. I want to bring experiential design knowledge to my models and animations. Bibliography Attie, Shimon. The Writing on the Wall, Berlin, 1992-93: Projections in Berlin's Jewish Quarter Art Journal, Vol. 62, No. 3. (Autumn, 2003), pp. 74-83. Archaeology Fantasies Podcast June 13, 2016, Ghost Hunting available from: http://www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/archyfantasies/ Baddeley, A. D., Eysenck, M. W., & Anderson, M. C. (2009). Memory. Hove [England: Psychology Press. Beisaw, April. (2016). Historical Archaeology as Ghost Hunting. conference paper Society for Historical Archaeology Jan 7, 2016 Washington DC BLU. (2008). Muto. Animation. Retrieved June 20, 2016, from https://vimeo.com/993998 Calvino, I., & Weaver, W. (1997). Invisible cities. London: Vintage. Chaloupka, A., Umberger, L., Basting, A. D., & John Michael Kohler Arts Center. (2011). Hiding places: Memory in the arts. Sheboygan, Wis: John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Evening Post. (24 Nov 1932). Page 18 Advertisements Column 1. Volume CXIV, Issue 126, 24 November 1932, Page 18. Retrieved June 20, 2016, from http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=EP19321124.2.150.1&srpos=27&e=-------50--1----0%22Imperial+Building%22+Wellington+Dixon+Street-- Evening Post. (23 October 1934). Page 1 Advertisements Column 8. Volume CXVIII, Issue 98, 23 October 1934, Page 1. Retrieved June 20, 2016, from http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=EP19341023.2.7.8&srpos=6&e=-------50--1----0%22Imperial+Building%22+Wellington+Dixon+Street-- Evening Post. (9 May 1944). Page 2 Advertisements Column 5. Volume CXXXVII, Issue 108, Page 2. Retrieved June 20, 2016, from http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=EP19440509.2.11.5&srpos=25&e=-------50--1----0%22Imperial+Building%22+Wellington+Dixon+Street-- Franck, K. A., & Stevens, Q. (2007). Loose space: Possibility and diversity in urban life. London: Routledge. Fisher, M. (2014). Ghosts of my life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures. Winchester, UK : Zero Books Gibbons, J. (2007). Contemporary art and memory: Images of recollection and remembrance. London: I.B. Tauris. Miller, J., & Kelley, M. (2015). Mike Kelley: Educational complex. Novella, S. (2014, July 24). NeuroLogica Blog » Sleep and False Memory. Retrieved June 20, 2016, from http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/sleep-and-false-memory/#more-6849 Phillips, Kendall K.The Profanity of Memory: Temporality and the Rhetoric of “Too Soon” keynote address to the Triggering Memory Symposium 2 September 2015, Massey University, Wellington. Saltzman, L. (2006). Making memory matter: Strategies of remembrance in contemporary art. Samakow, J. (n.d.). 'Ghosting:' The 21st-Century Dating Problem Everyone Talks About, But No One Knows How To Deal With. Retrieved June 20, 2016, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/30/ghosting-dating-_n_6028958.html Seaman, A. (2015, May 12). Skateboards damage Pukeahu park. Retrieved June 21, 2016, from http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/local-papers/the-wellingtonian/68466004/skateboard-problem-at-pukeahu-war-memorial-park Seijdel, J. (2004). (No) memory: Storing and recalling in contemporary art and culture. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. Steelsmith, M. A. (2004). Take it from me. Music Video. Retrieved June 23, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkFCEO95nEQ Stevenson, S. (2013). Don’t Say Goodbye When You Leave a Party. Just Ghost. Retrieved June 20, 2016, from http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2013/07/ghosting_the_irish_goodbye_the_french_leave_stop_saying_goodbye_at_parties.html Verwoert, J. (2006). Bas Jan Ader: In search of the miraculous. London: Afterall Books. Wellington City Council. (2016). List of Earthquake Prone Buildings as at 10/05/2016 Retrieved June 20, 2016, from http://wellington.govt.nz/~/media/services/rates-and-property/earthquake-prone-buildings/files/2016-may-eqp-building-list.pdf Yates, F. A. (1992). The art of memory. London: Pimlico. This is additional additions for my journal. The journal follows on from here throughout the whole blog...
Photos and little bits and pieces I've collected this semester. Writings, buildings, inspirations. Not ordered. I am now building around electronic devices that I have ripped apart. These are devices that serve up digital media yet stripped bare they envoke a feeling of the analog- the analogous reproduction. This is a golden feeling, and a great feeling for someone who grew up with the idea of getting dirty to fix things. Now these digital machines are being rehoused in cardboard and balsa wood with dollops of PVA. I'm finding my infantile home model railway side. Pegs and all. Sticky fingers and everything.
Previewed my new work yesterday to a crit group and got ok feedback. Ronnie Van Hout was evoked straight away - so I can now tick that off.
The best thing about the work was using sound and video to lead the audience around the work. The sound wasn't coming from the same place as the video and was turned down low making the audience get closer. The video could only be seen by either bending or kneeing down. I have made a work that is intimate, controlling but not abusive (for a change). There is wonder and playfulness here. |
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