laurajoansmith

[laurajoansmith]

'I Met' (1968-1979/2004) and 'I Read' (1966-1995) by On Kawara

"On Kawara based the entirety of his collection of books, paintings, and drawings on the arbitrariness and subjectivity of the way we measure time. Many of his projects were ongoing, making Kawara himself, as the recorder of time, one of the primary materials in his conceptual works."

Podcast about 'I Met': https://www.guggenheim.org/audio/track/on-kawara-i-met-1968-79

[laurajoansmith]

BOOK>Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media by Ernst van Alphen (2014)

On collecting:

"Artists usually collect and archive the trivial, that is, objects that are not acknowledged by the public or the culture at large as important, or valuable in whatever respect."

On lists:

"They only have significance in relation to each other; each object is different from the other objects in the collection as well as representative of the collection as such."

"Finite lists are countable, whereas infinite lists are not."

" ... This indicates that listing is a time-bound process: it list past items, but not present or future items."

"What is made present by means of listing is not simply the referential world of objects implied in the list, but the conceptual categories used by the archivist and imposed on the referential world."

"The solution for this instability of spaces is mediating them by means of listing them."

"Lists are as much the result of the categories imposed on them by the person who makes the list."

"... the list serves to generate memories - it fuels the narration."

Leanne Shapton:

"I like the idea of objects being haunted and holding more history than they appear to do."

On On Kawara:

"In all these projects the artist On Kawara models himself on the image of the archivist. He is the archivist of passing time, of personal times and well as historical time."

"The real experience evoked by [his] archival projects is not the historical experience, but the experience of the process of administration."

On memory:

"Since the 1990s the spread of memory practices in art and literature has been enormous."

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'Inside the Archive' (2000-06) by Uriel Orlow

"Inside the Archive takes us through the interior of a small archive and library, foregrounding its material conditions, and focusing on different spaces which are devoted to archival tasks and lingering on minute and banal details. Inside the Archive reflects on the archive as something which is never fixed in meaning or material, but is nevertheless here, usually invisible yet at the same time monumental, constantly about to appear and disappear; latent. The visual exploration of the archive at the intersection of concept and matter has a profound urgency. With the dematerialisation of archives through the process of digitisation, there is a need to re-assess the material qualities of archive and document."

[laurajoansmith]

'Teignmouth Electron' (1999) by Tacita Dean

"Teignmouth Electron deals with the tragic and extraordinary story of the amateur yachtsman, Donald Crowhurst; a story which has preoccupied Tacita Dean for several years. Crowhurst filed false reports of his progress and position in the 1968 single-handed non-stop around the world yacht race. He became obsessed with time and two weeks before he was due home to a hero’s welcome, his yacht, Teignmouth Electron was found adrift and empty.

Today his boat lies beached and abandoned at its final resting place, Cayman Brac, an island in the Caribbean. Tacita Dean has visited the island in an attempt to piece together the story of Crowhurst; she also studied books, articles, films and recorded testimonies from people who knew him. The result is a loosely woven narrative of striking texts and images that trace the Donald Crowhurst story and Tacita Dean’s quest to understand more."

[laurajoansmith]

The Individual and the Organisation: Artist Placement Group 1966-79 Exhibition at Raven Row gallery, London 27 September to 16 December 2012

"Between 1966 and the turn of the eighties, APG negotiated approximately fifteen placements for artists lasting from a few weeks to several years; first within industries (often large corporations such as British Steel and ICI) and later within UK government departments such as the Department of the Environment and the Scottish Office. APG arranged that artists would work to an ‘open brief’, whereby their placements were not required to produce tangible results, but that the engagement itself could potentially benefit both host organisations as well as the artists in the long-term. "

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'American Land Museum' by THE CENTER FOR LAND USE INTERPRETATION

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'From the Freud Museum' (1991-96) by Susan Hiller

"From the Freud Museum is an installation commissioned by Book Works and the Freud Museum in London. The first version of the installation was produced for the Freud Museum and exhibited there in 1994. Hiller continued to work on the piece and a later version was completed in 1996 and purchased by Tate in 1998. It is generally exhibited as a single vitrine in which fifty archive boxes are displayed on two shelves, with their lids open, revealing a broad range of small artefacts. Each box is numbered and given a title corresponding to its contents. Many of the items included in Hiller’s installation are ephemeral, everyday articles, such as 45rpm records, two china creamers in the shape of cows, the English puppet Punch’s wooden slapstick. "

[laurajoansmith]

BOOK>All This Stuff: Archiving the Artist by Judy Vakim (ed) (2013)

"Process Progress Project Archive" (name of Bruce McLean project)

On CLUI's 'American Land Museum':

"... the physical form is just one potential mechanism for viewing the artefacts of the museum, which is a collection of places scattered across the landscape."

Barbara Steveni on the Artist Placement Group (APG) archive and the I AM AN ARCHIVE project:

"I gradually found myself talking the archive. I started to see it, the material I was looking at, as stories and I found myself telling these stories and realised I was a kind of database of memories and knowledge ..."

"`In a wheelbarrow were degradable leaf bags and I had '60s and '70s diaries. I would take out a little bit and read it. I also had old files from the APG archive that Tate was throwing out. I asked Adrian Glew to give me all the old files as they repackaged the archive material in acid-free preservation packaging. I used these dirty old files as part of the work, to make other works ..."

"The walks generated a mass of documentation. Not only was it filmed and recorded but I'd ask participants to record as well."

"It was about being in two places, the past and the present. It was really odd walking through London, being in my own body, with my total age span ..."

Carolyn Steedman on archives:

"The Archive is not potentially made up of everything, as is human memory; and it is not the fathomless and timeless place in which nothing goes away that is unconscious. The Archive is made from selected and consciously chosen documentation from the past and also from mad fragments that no one intended to preserve and just ended up there ..."

[laurajoansmith]

Free map resources

OpenStreetMap: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/51.5063/-0.1215

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‘Faceless’ (2007) by Manu Luksch

“FACELESS uses CCTV images obtained under the terms of the UK Data Protection Act as ‘legal readymades’, as instructed by the artist’s MANIFESTO for CCTV Filmmakers . Legislation requires that the privacy of other persons be protected when data is released – for CCTV recordings, this is typically done by obscuring their faces – hence, the faceless world.”

[laurajoansmith]

‘Tracking Transcience’ (2006) by Hasan Alahi

“An erroneous tip called into law enforcement authorities after 9/11 subjected Hasan Elahi to an intensive investigation by the FBI and after undergoing months of interrogations, he was finally cleared of suspicions. After this harrowing experience, Elahi conceived Tracking Transience and opened just about every aspect of his life to the public. Predating the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program by half a decade, the project questions the consequences of living under constant surveillance and continuously generates databases of imagery that tracks the artist and his points of transit in real-time. Although initially created for his FBI agent, the public can also monitor the artist’s communication records, banking transactions, and transportation logs along with various intelligence and government agencies who have been confirmed visiting his website.“

[laurajoansmith]

‘Pocket Full of Memories’ (2001) by George Legrady

“The Foundation is funding the development of a new installation piece by artist George Legrady. Pockets Full of Memories is a two room interactive installation with an emphasis on the integration of advanced computer programming methodologies such as self-organising map and camera tracking algorithms by which to explore audience contribution and access of data in a museum situation.“

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‘16 dm² - an essay‘ (1975) by Herman de Vries

“the book shows the complete series of collages of 473 dried plants, collected in the meadow near Eschenau; the book is divided in 16 parts; on the front of the pages the 473 plants and grasses are reproduced in Xerox-copy on paper (29.7 × 21 cm); a number followed by two letters indicates the location of the specimens in each of the 16 squares; the book contains a folded map (opened 59.8 × 47.5 cm) showing a square of 40 × 40 cm divided in 16 squares horizontally numbered A, B, C, D and vertically W, X, Y, Z and inside each square the location of all plants are marked and numbered 1 etc.; the handwritten titlepage is followed by a handwritten colophon and by 2 pages with photographs (8.8 × 13 cm) of 16 dm² in the meadow with and without the plants’

[laurajoansmith]

‘Trace’ (1999) by Teri Rueb

“Trace is a memorial environmental sound installation that is site-specific to the network of hiking trails near the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Yoho National Park, British Columbia. The installation transforms the trails into a landscape of sound recordings that commemorate personal loss. Walking through the installation is like wandering through a memorial sculpture garden where, instead of visible monuments, visitors weave their way through memorial poems, songs and stories that play in response to their movement through the landscape. The project explores loss and transformation in an historical moment when concepts of memory, presence and absence are undergoing significant shifts in cultural meaning. This drift in meaning is directly related to developments in the field of information technology. For this reason, I have chosen to use the computer as a culturally inscribed tool and medium that offers clues to our contemporary understanding of time, memory and mortality.”

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‘Traverse Me’ (2010) by Jeremy Wood

The University of Warwick campus drawn on foot with 238 miles of GPS tracks over 17 days

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‘City System’ (2003) by Lee Walton 

“THE CITY SYSTEM is a game-based tool for meandering aimlessly around a city. Each journey is unique to the user and determined by occurrences, observations, chance and rule.”

Download of THE CITY SYSTEM

[laurajoansmith]

BOOK>Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers by Karen O’Rourke (2013)

On Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair (2004):

“She immediately began to walk with her “virtual body”. “I found a way to be in two places at once ... to simulate space and time travel in a simple way.”

“Isolated excerpts cannot replace perceiving the binaural sound in the setting for which it was conceived. These works are immersive and engage vision, smell, and the proprioception as mush as listening.”

““The virtual recorded soundscape has to mimic the real physical one in order to create a new world as seamless combination of the two. My voice gives directions but also relates thoughts and narrative elements, which instills in the listener a desire to continue and finish the walk.”

“The recording is divided into six tracks, each one beginning at a place marked on the map ...”

“That’s one reason why I like walking through the city now - to come across those spontaneous moments of magic again.”

On walking protocols:

“A protocol is a rule, guideline, or document that specifies how an activity should be performed.”

“In contemporary art, a protocol is a set of rules that an artist establishes to realise an artwork. It is a statement of intention and informs the viewer’s understanding of the results. Defining objectives and methods in a preliminary document facilitates collaboration.”

Sol LeWitt offered a radical formulation: “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

On Degoutin and Wagon’s Attractions for the Suburbs of Paris (1974):

“... evoking the paranormal state of tourism. The dim lights, relaxing atmosphere, and muffled sounds of the first attraction Hypnorama, lull train passengers into an optimal hypnotic state so they can both present in and absent from the lands through which they travel.”