Place Grammar

First Make A Distinction

The Zone

Will Pappenheimer and I will be exhibiting a version of Virta_Flaneurazine at the Golden Thread Gallery in association with ISEA 2009 in Belfast. I will be traveling early to get the exhibition underway and will take the opportunity to produce Imaging Belfast. Here are some images I constructed with google map which indicate the areas where I intend to work.

Shankill Road

Peace Wall

Falls Road

Free International University

In March, 1980, I traveled  to Dusseldorf to meet Joseph Beuys, whose work I became aware of the previous year.  In December 1979 I visited New York to view the Beuys retrospective at the Guggenheim, and met Ronald Feldman at his gallery.  The smoked kipper remains in a box with a glass lid (kipper devoured by Beuys) tempted me (only $200).  To help arrange a meeting, Feldman offered to pass along a letter to Beuys, who never answered the several letters posted to him.  Feldman reported that Beuys said I would be welcome to visit, but he could not say when he would be at home.  So I went when I was free (Spring break), arrived at Beuys’s doorstep, knocked, and Beuys opened the door.

Joseph Beuys

During the two-hour converesation, Beuys presented me with a copy of “Report to the European Economic Community on the feasibility of founding a ‘Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research’ in Dublin” (1975).  He signed the book on the front cover (a white binding) in pencil.  This gift is the origin/inspiration for  the EmerAgency, of which Imaging Belfast is, for me, the latest experiment, devoted to the design and testing of a new consultancy.

Before the Snack

The manifesto portion of the document is an appeal for a new model of education that integrates elements of all disciplines and arts to produce a hybrid capable of focusing the full resources of civilization on the complexity of a social problem.  A further proviso was that the specialized learning is not separated from quotidian experience and the public at large, with art as the interface modality.  This approach to infusing learning and problem solving into lifeworld situations expresses Beuys’ motto, stating that every person is an artist, and his insight into art as “social sculpture.“

Intuition...instead of a cookbook

The seat of this branch  of the FIU was proposed to be Dublin.  Reasons for establishing a center in Ireland included the particular conditions of Irish history.  Some of these conditions, such as the relative underdevelopment of Ireland economically, have changed considerably since the early 1970s.  Here is the entry on the issue of Northern Ireland.

2.10. In the context of the Free University this would be seen as a challenge and not a disincentive since it represents the most acute example in Europe of a total breakdown of communication and understanding, as well as the apparent inability of the cultural  and intellectual worlds to offer any convincing alternative to the bankruptcy of ideas that  lead to violence.  There are parallel situations in different degrees in other parts of Europe — the conflicts between the Basque countries and Spain, between Corsica/Brittany and France, or the Jura and the  Swiss confederation — and the Free University with  its range of approaches, nationalities and disciplines would be in a strong position to undertake comparative study of such situations.

Developments subsequent to this assessment make the two Irelands a model of solutions as well as of problems.  The vision of Beuys, Boll, and the other founders of the FIU, remains a worthy relay for further invention.  The first instruction may be:  take the multiple as a genre for further development.

Imaging Belfast Blog

What I suggest is, on the one hand, we should start fresh. Leave  Beijing, the Miami River etc. behind and work from scratch. I could create an Imaging Belfast blog with authorship privileges for both of  us. If you chose to, you could draw from the material on the blog for the Turbulence contribution.

On the other hand, not to be contradictory but, we should get back to  basics. Imaging Belfast should be an electrate experiment in the development and documentation of choragraphy. The two of us should  constitute a theoria as we did with Bill and Barbara Jo in Miami.

The differences I would suggest is that rather than sending a querent,  like Babara Jo, the end users of the virtual space/archive would play  the role of the querent. The completed virtual space/archive would act  as the oracle to be consulted.

I will go to Belfast not as the querent but to collect the topos. Of  course the topos would be embodied by the denizens and the mystorical  formative memories they recollect on camera.

The blog can be the hub for the distribution of a video podcast we  create by recording iChat video exchanges. I have made good progress  integrating blog and other feed data into virtual world so that this  activity could be seemlessly integrated into the virtual space.

What I suggest is, on the one hand, we should start fresh. Leave Beijing, the Miami River etc. behind and work from scratch. I could create an Imaging Belfast blog with authorship privileges for both of us. If you chose to, you could draw from the material on the blog for your contribution to Networked at Turbulence.org.

On the other hand, not to be contradictory but, we should get back to basics. Imaging Belfast should be an electrate experiment in the development and documentation of choragraphy. The two of us should constitute a theoria as we did with Bill Tilson and Barbara Jo Revelle in Miami.

The differences I would suggest is that rather than sending a querent, like Babara Jo in the Miami River work, the end users of the virtual space/archive would play the role of the querent. The completed virtual space/archive would act as an oracle to be consulted.

I will go to Belfast, not as the querent, but to collect the topos. Of  course, the topos would be embodied by the denizens and the mystorical formative memories they recollect on camera.

The blog can be the hub for the distribution of a video podcast we  create by recording iChat video exchanges. I have made good progress integrating blog and other feed data into virtual world so that this activity could be seemlessly integrated into the virtual space.