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

The Monument Project (Si Monumentum Requiris Circumspice), a new digital video installation by Chris Meigh-Andrews commissioned by Julian Harrap Architects on behalf of the City of London Corporation opens on the 21th of March at the Nunnery gallery, Bow.

The installation, which produces a continuous stream of ambient responsive panoramic images from the top of the Monument in the City of London, 24 hours a day, 7 days per week for 3 years, can be accessed at http://www.themonumentview.net/

The launch event will take place at The Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts Trust, 183 Bow Road, London E3 2SJ, from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM, Friday, March 20^th, 2009.

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.

http://www.armelhostiou.com/

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.