On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

Jeremy Wood, The World's biggest 'IF'

Last week-end saw one the busiest day at the Kinetica Artfair in London, featuring over 150 exhibiting artists working at the cross-roads of sound / light art, computer art and interactive sculpture, and an extensive programme of related talks. One of them was given by Jeremy Wood, whose work I saw for the first time last year in the V&A Mapping the imagination exhibition. Wood had been working with GPS technology for over 8 years, and started from a disconcertingly simple idea: he noticed the aesthetic qualities of the paths formed on a map by geo-tagged photographs taken during a flight from Berlin to London. From there he has pushed the practice of flying, driving, cycling, walking (and even dog-walking) with a GPS attached, expecting some meaningful shape or pattern to emerge.
It’s interesting to note that while some of this ‘always-on’ recording process may be totally random (and pretty similar to Dan Belasco Rogers‘ work), Wood has also taken a keen interest in plotting routes to achieve a specific – and often funny – purpose (e.g. writing the world’s biggest ‘IF’, or drawing a ship sailing on the shoreline by cycling around the streets of Brighton – amusingly dropping its anchor where it had the most space to draw it in all details: in a park).

Jeremy Wood, Brighton Boat

I would describe Wood’s practice as negotiating around the possibilities offered by space to enable a drawing to take place, diverting and using wearable GPS technology as a mark-making tool. Initially a method for the military to record spatial activity, the technology has also become in the hands of Wood an ‘alibi’ to find out what’s going on where – a reminder of Situationist strategies for the Dérive (He has applied psychogeographic principles to a few drawings). In a different strand of works, he also explored the assumed precision level of GPS and has interrogated how accurate and reliable the technology actually is.
His work has obvious parallels with art movements of the last century: GPS drawings by animals echo the surrealists’ use of snails to paint. The special relationship to the territory established through walking as a creative act is also found in the work of many land artists, including Richard Long and the Stalker collective.
I was curious to figure out how much importance real-time feedback takes in this kind of work – I guess a lot of the fun is about experiencing it for yourself. Good, because Wood actually happens to run regular GPS drawing workshops with schools, local authorities and art galleries.

http://gpsdrawing.com/

Finisterre is a collaborative film project, part-documentary / part-music promo, between film-makers Paul Kelly, Kieran Evans and the electro-pop band Saint-Etienne, produced by CC-Lab and supported by Onedotzero.

I watched this film for the first time shortly after it came out in 2003, and remained fascinated by it ever since; after watching it again recently I was inhabited by the same irresistible feelings of nostalgia and tenderness. Beyond the innovative format of the film, which seeks to explore the possibilities of a 60-minute music-promo at the scale of an entire album, the combination of Saint-Etienne’s melancholic or energetic tunes and Kelly/Evans thoughtful shots successfully captures the alternating moods that London has to offer to the unsuspecting visitor.

The film starts and finishes with a train journey in and out of the city, dusk to dawn, unknown to familiar, and transports the spectator on a journey of discoveries and insights into the ‘London Nobody Knows’, through a succession of interviews of local artists and residents connected to the story of Saint Etienne, blended with powerful musical passages accompanied by imagery ranging from architectural patterns to urban scenes and walking crowds, always meticulously shot as stills documenting the city area by area, punctuated by an overwhelming voice-over narrative that features the observations and reminiscences of Lawrence. Finisterre sheds some light on London as a source of influence, inspiration and curiosity for many, offering a trip through the city that is largely reminiscent of a line of psycho-geographic films such as ‘London’, ‘Robinson In Space’ (Patrick Keiller), and ‘Orbital’ (Chris Petit).

The result is a touching tribute to London, marvelously conveying the essence of the place while forming a visual record and musical impression of the city today.

On the subject of “the ability of sound to instil even the most mundane images with beauty or new meaning” and matching mood with space, I remember visiting a show appropriately entitled “Shhh… Sounds in Spaces” at the Victoria and Albert museum back in the summer 2004.

The rather unusual aspect of this show was that the museum displays hadn’t been altered in any way; Instead, the museum-goer was given headphones connected to a player containing a set of pre-recorded tracks that was triggered as you crossed specific doorways. The portable technology used (IR sensors and a lightweight headset) was transparently integrated, giving way to the stunning experience of entering a room just to be surprised and self-conscious of our own presence and motion into the space, revealing the hidden aural dimensions of architecture. This ‘invisible exhibition’ was actually turning the experience of visiting a gallery upside-down while engaging visitors with the space in an unparalleled way: the wandering visitor was the focus-point of the art, rather than being simply an external observer of it, by creating their very own audio-cinematic display in (and from) their head as they moved along the rooms and corridors of the museum.

Ten sound artists and musicians were commissioned to create aural pieces re-defining specific rooms and spaces of the museum from their own perspective. The results encompassed a wide variety of approaches to making sound, through a game of contrasts and comparisons between sound and space: compositional, concrete, conceptual, in response either to the architecture, to the objects, to activity, or associations of meaning: from Roots Manuva’s outspoken social commentary in the Norfolk Room to Cornelius’ work which was particularly moving – It was almost as if you felt the music was a direct echo of the light twinkling on the glass and ceramics objects you were looking at.

In this book, De Botton turns the purpose of a travel guide on its head and instead of providing advice on where to travel, asks why we go places — and how we might become more fulfilled by doing so.

In the first chapter, On Travelling Places, he delivers a brilliant analysis of some unexpectedly poetic travelling places: airport terminals, train stations, motels, or the service station – “forsaken, on the ridge of the motorway, far from all habitation”, and refers to artists who, like Baudelaire and Hopper, were “alive to the power of such liminal travelling places”.

As recalled by his Invitation au voyage, Baudelaire felt incomfortable at home. He ever dreamt of leaving France for somewhere far away, with no-reminders of daily life, and eventually ventured to India, only to feel lethargic and reminicscent of his homeplace, evidencing a lifelong ambivalence towards travel.

“It always seems to me that I’ll be well where I’m not and this question of moving is one that I’m forever entertaining with my soul.”

Charles Baudelaire

Indeed, it seems that Baudelaire “felt more at home in the transient places of travel than in his own dwelling”, after which T.S Eliot proposed that Baudelaire “invented a new kind of romantic nostalgia, ‘the poésie des départs, the poésie des salles d’attentes‘”.

De Botton draws interesting parallels between the 19th century sea-going ships that Baudelaire often admired – a “vast, immense, complicated, but agile creature, an animal full of spirit, suffering and heaving all the sighs and ambitions of humanity” – , and the modern aircraft, “it too a vast and complicated creature which defies its size and the chaos of the lower atmosphere.”
He quotes airports as the quintessential place of travel, plane passengers as aliens “for whom this ordinary english afternoon will have a supernatural tinge”, and the plane itself as “a symbol of worldliness, carrying within itself a trace of all the lands it has crossed; its external mobility offering an imaginative counter-weight to feelings of stagnation and confinement.”

Few seconds in life are more releasing than those spent in an airplane taking off, resulting in an undisguisable pleasure – “an examplary symbol of transformation”, he explains. The vibrating cabin of the aircaft ever raising to the skies, the thrusting engines in one the the most impressive display of power, can inspire us analogous shifts in our own lives, “to imagine that we too might one day surge above much that now looms over us” – “all along, hideen from our sight, our lives were this small.”

If flying “lends order and logic to the landscape”, train travel fosters an unequalled dreaminess, in which we seem to stand outside our normal selves and have access to thoughts and memories that may not arise in more settled circumstances:

“Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts requiring large views, news thoughts new places. Instrospective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape.”

Views from the train window evolve just a the right speed; the landscape changing fast enough for us not to get exasperated, but slowly enough to offer us some brief, inspiring insights into the privacy of backyards and hidden alleyways.

This exhibition, running in April-June 2007, investigated the whole process of ‘mapping’, and showed how contemporary artists have abstracted it and expanded it into art. The show featured ‘maps’ – ranging from representations of a geographical territory to schematizations of thought processes embracing many other disciplines – into loose categories illustrating the themes or processes behind the production of such diagrams.

‘Landfill‘ by Paul Matosic is a monumental piece where spare computer parts are arranged onto a printed map matching the coastline of Britain, with an ironic title to comment on Western consumer society. The work exists in different versions, adapted to match various sizes and ‘territories’, while its construction (sometimes collaborative) can even be the purpose of a performance.

In ‘Berlin Map‘, Armelle Caron re-ordered blocks of the city by size and shape, thus creating a simili-alphabet where the blocks, loosing their functional constraints as separators of streets and avenues, display a stangely coordinated stylistic unity akin to a set of glyphs. This shuffling of parts of the city is somewhat reminiscent of Debord’s Illustration de l’hypothèse des plaques tournantes en Psychogéographique (The Naked City) published in Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.

Below: Satomi Matoba Utopia

« Un homme fait le projet de dessiner le Monde. Les années passent : il peuple une surface d’images de provinces, de royaumes, de montagnes, de golfes, de navires, d’îles, de poissons, de maisons, d’instruments, d’astres, de chevaux, de gens. Peu avant sa mort, il s’aperçoit que ce patient labyrinthe de formes n’est rien d’autres que son portrait. »

Jorge Luis Borges

Le propos de cette exposition thématique, qui a investi les sous-sols du Musée des Beaux Arts de Lille à l’occasion du festival Bombaysers de l’automne 2006, est de proposer un panorama des relations entre le corps humain et le paysage, apprécié à travers la vision d’artistes de la Renaissance à aujourd’hui, et qui soulève la question métaphysique de la place de l’homme dans l’univers.

La muséographie regroupe les oeuvres selon cinq sections: cabinets de curiosités et Paysage anatomique sont présentés dans un volet historique, Homme-Végétal, Homme-Minéral, et Paysage érotique sont présentés dans le volet contemporain.

« Car de même que l’homme est un composé de terre, eau, air et feu, il en est de même du corps de la terre. Si l’homme a les os, support et armature de la chair, le monde a les rochers comme supports de la terre ; si l’homme porte le lac du sang où le poumon se gonfle et dégonfle dans la respiration, le corps de la terre a son océan qui, lui, croît et décroît toutes les six heures en une respiration cosmique ; si les veines partent de ce lac de sang, en se ramifiant dans le corps humain, de même l’océan remplit le corps de la terre d’une infinité de veines d’eau »

Léonard de Vinci

Les “têtes composées” du contemporain Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1530-1593), méticuleux assemblages picturaux de fleurs, fruits ou objets, rappellent que de même que l’Homme n’est pas si distinct de son environnement et que la Nature fait partie de l’Homme, tandis qu’au XVIIIe siècle les premières planches anatomiques mettent en exergue le rapprochement entre les monde végétal, minéral et corps humain.

« Qui pourrait nombrer les merveilles qui appellent et se disputent l’attention du spectateur? Les routes du sang marquées par un fluide coloré, la lymphe remplacée par le mercure, des ramifications que l’on serait tenté de prendre pour les productions les plus déliées du règne végétal, le système nerveux, espèce d’arbre étonnant dont les racines occupent les parties supérieures et les branches la partie inférieure. »

J.J. Sue (chaire d’anatomie à l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture)

C’est l’époque où, témoin de la pensée humaniste, l’artiste conçoit l’humain comme paradigme du monde. L’anatomie, l’espace intérieur du corps et ses réseaux sont étudiés; Les textures nerveuses, musculaires, sanguines, le tracé des organismes sont comparés analogiquement à la géologie, au tissu végétal et minéral, à la botanique et à l’entomologie. La nature est recomposée sur l’unité de la figure.

La curieuse tradition des paysages anthropomorphes apparaît quant à elle à la fin du XVIe siècle, et part d’une volonté de comprendre ou de domestiquer la nature, également présente dans l’Art des jardins.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi – Sans titre (Sexe d’une femme paysage)

Computer-Jam Lille – L’homme paysage

This one-off 10-day exhibition opened in December 2006 in Bargehouse (London’s South Bank) and was curated by the Light Surgeons.
The four-storey building – a dilapidated, raw warehouse – the ligthing and atmosphere of the space lent themselves marvelously to the purpose of the show, “a journey to examine how we move through, interact with, and share the built environment”.

Spanning the interconnected themes of travelling, inhabiting cities, private/public space, the event featured audio/video installations by the Light Surgeons, talks by Scanner, Iain Sinclair on his last book ‘London, City of disappearances’, and film screenings from Onedotzero’s own ‘Digital Terrains’ programme. A couple of film/video pieces by Lenka Clayton & James Price particularly grabbed my attention: ‘conversation’, where two TV monitors playback interviews of passers-by making a judgement upon each other on the basis of appearance, thus giving a peculiar insight – not least funny – of people’s untold perceptions of each other; In the series of films ‘People in Order’, the film-makers intentionally set filming ‘rules’ contained in the title: In ‘Age’ they shot 100 people in their home, telling their age, shown in order. This was followed by ‘Relationship’, ‘Wealth’… offering as many original and alternative ways to go about documenting people and their environment.

The show also explored the dimension of travel, with some very interesting works by the Light Surgeons – one travelogue video showing upstairs, and the installation ‘transit’ on the ground floor, featuring a full-scale airport terminal hall with its luggage carrousel and passengers’ voices listing the contents of their luggage.
As Chris Thomas Allen (from the Light Surgeons) puts it: “The moment you arrive you have departed. As you leave you have begun a new experience. The fluid movements of our arrivals and departures map threads of intertwined experiences in transitory space. Within the pockets of personal space we carry memories, aspirations and secrets. These resonant whispers mark our personal cartographies in the public realm.”

www.articulatedlondon.org

Rob White’s “IBIS la bicyclette interactive” (2001) (IBIS the interactive bicycle) is an interactive installation inspired by a piece of text written by the author’s grandfather in 1909, in which he related his journey from England to Spain, through France and the Pyrenees. IBIS enables the spectator to explore that text interactively, thanks to an antique bike fitted with sensors, which gives the possibility to navigate through the time and space of the book at the desired speed.

“The social practice of travel is driven by romantic desire for a transformative symbolic experience in an other place from which one could return renewed. Tourism converted secular pilgrimage into a commodity marketed in two-dimensional images.” ¹

Michael Naimark’s work involves projects of “real-space imaging”, surrogate travel and “moviemaps” based on series of photographic images of an existing landscape taken methodically on a dolly-mounted camera: an interface and a screen allowing one to “browse” backward and forward on a grid of predetermined paths and see, for instance, Aspen by car (Architecture Machine Group, MIT 1978-1980), San Francisco by air (SF Exploratorium 1987) and Karlsruhe by tram (ZKM 1990-1991). In See Banff ! (1994), he used a stereoscopic camera and the latest computer-driven video disk technologies to present the work through the peep-hole of an old kinetoscope. Interestingly, by texture-mapping bi-dimensional pictures onto a 3D immersive mode of representation, he melts photographic space and cyberspace.

¹ Margaret Morse, Nature Morte: Landscape and Narrative in Virtual Environments, p.202-203 in Immersed in Technology, Art and Virtual Environments, edited by Mary Ann Moser. Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, 1996.

French artist Pierre Joseph constructed ‘memory maps’ of Japan and the Paris métro without prior consultation of actual maps of the area. They are not maps to be followed literally, but, in common with the mid-thirteenth century mappamundi and contemporary Matthew Paris’ Itinerary Map showing the route to the Holy Land by depicting stage points along the journey, they are an aid to “self-distancing from the world in preparation for the contemplative ascent” ¹. These itineraries engage the viewer’s subjective interpretation, and reverse modern habits of map-reading: “instead of moving from the map to an objective world, we move from the map to a deeper textuality.” ² Indeed, reading a map can be an extraordinary vehicle for the imagination and multiple interpretations.

¹ Marcia Kupfer, quoted by Tim Scott, Next on the Left, or: ‘What Good is a Map if you Know the Way?’ in Media Mutandis . London : NODE.London, 2006, p.102.
² Michael Gaudio, quoted by Tim Scott, ibid.