Erik and I colloborated on this initial (beta) release of the Elsewhere Visitor Center.
PLANNING MEETING NOTES:
Visitor Services (BETA):
• Installation process/product space
• Games: consist of objects and (dynamic card box)
⁃ Local - games that happen at desk (associative writing, ex corpse stories, etch-sketch
⁃ Elsewhere - games that take you around space: binoculars, take these five/return five more, frames
• Communication
⁃ Mailing list sign-up
⁃ Calendar of events
⁃ Cards, brochures, fliers - web info in card format (info on mailing list form)
⁃ Audio Tour, maps, info about installations
⁃ **Archive: "About elsewhere" materials**
⁃ Sign-in/Reflection/questions book
• Tools and Resources
⁃ What is installation?
⁃ Images
⁃ Strategies
⁃ Books
• Camera (pictures for sale - $2/poloroid if you create an installation, OR rent digital?)
• Buttons for sale?
• Aesthetics - glass, clean, lights, grand, organization system, "unit" feeling, communication strategies
PRIORITIES LIST
1. PHOTOGRAPH HUTCH
2. Pile of current elsewhere visitor stuff (?)
3. Mailing List (1hr)
4. Installation (3hrs)
5. Organize set-up of visitor center (2hr)
6. Two games of our own (2hr)
----
Post-Unveiling Feedback with George and Steph
BEST
- Parts that send you into the space (limited as a result of GE opening)
- Game that involved switching out objects
QUESTION
- Map of center? Work or not work?
Response - Needs to be fleshed out more, deeper, more developed, self-sustaining
- Where does archival material live?
- Photos - post S/G arrival
- How do visitors encounter it? Is it accessible as is?
- Is it something for their second return? Is it for returning visitors?
- Are they encouraged to visit it?
- Are there elements in the space that send someone back to it?
- What is it used for, how are people directed to it?
- Is there a mirror?
- What are the public spaces of elsewhere? Map with context clues.
- How are permissions provided (wrt above)
MUSEUM DISPLAY - is a historical display
STORE COUNTER - Where materials and information is distributed, human to human
Buttons, promotional information, fliers, etc
VISITOR CENTER - pedagogical, clear
A way to communicate Elsewhere via process and organization
- Education is clear
- Refer to specific pieces in space
- About Elsewhere, deeper level (articles)
- Work about the work
- Work by current artists
- (i say - further opps to engage, such as promotional materials, calendar, web address, under guise of "learn more")
IDEAS
- Game of unit as a whole (overarching theme) across whole unit
- (((aside - in kitchen, etc are we on display?)))
- Find and retrieve - not necessary getting, but recording. Games that are actually interesting for people.
- Using objects to speak "Open me" "Look here!" etc
- What I saw log - visitors can point each other to something that they saw in space -
using words, maps and images...
- mini-collections org'd by themed
- shopping
The barges down in the river flop.
Flop, plop.
Above, beneath.
From the slimy branches the grey drips drop,
As they scraggle black on the thin grey sky,
Where the black cloud rack-hackles drizzle and fly
To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop
On the black scrag piles, where the loose cords plop,
As the raw wind whines in the thin tree-top.
Plop, plop.
And scudding by
The boatmen call out hoy! and hey!
All is running water and sky,
And my head shrieks -- "Stop,"
And my heart shrieks -- "Die."
* * * * *
My thought is running out of my head;
My love is running out of my heart,
My soul runs after, and leaves me as dead,
For my life runs after to catch them -- and fled
They all are every one! -- and I stand, and start,
At the water that oozes up, plop and plop,
On the barges that flop
And dizzy me dead.
I might reel and drop.
Plop.
Dead.
And the shrill wind whines in the thin tree-top
Flop, plop.
* * * * *
A curse on him.
Ugh! yet I knew -- I knew --
If a woman is false can a friend be true?
It was only a lie from beginning to end --
My Devil -- My "Friend"
I had trusted the whole of my living to!
Ugh; and I knew!
Ugh!
So what do I care,
And my head is empty as air --
I can do,
I can dare,
(Plop, plop
The barges flop
Drip drop.)
I can dare! I can dare!
And let myself all run away with my head
And stop.
Drop.
Dead.
Plop, flop.
Plop.
Via my friend Katie, who has a lovely blog at xk8tx.livejournal.com . Used without permission but we are all part of one big rhizome, and with attribution I can't imagine her caring that I've drawn this line.
solution. first, realize that all things are rhythmic and therefore,
cyclical. next, realize that there is no such thing as tangents, or
lines tangent, in periodic waveforms (until you start doing calculus,
but thats a whole other topic for discussion) only the periodic
function itself. now, view it like this. the waveform is composed of an
infinite number of varying frequencies composed together in such a way
that it forms one massive periodic function. this massive function is
life, and all the components are the things that make it up. realize
that you never went on tangent katie, you just encountered some
variable or constant along the way that gave a change of frequency or a
phase shift.
Is it possible to make play exist coherently on a tv? Because at this moment it is looking like the camera is a work zone, though I know that good ol' JJ, our resident surveillance artist would disagree. I call her resident because our community is ephemeral at all times, and I feel in many ways that everybody's who's passed through here is still part of the larger disembodied community of Elsewhere, hundreds of artists turned ghosts rummaging through the toy bin at all hours of the night. But with JJ specifically, I'm on some level convinced that she's still looking at us constantly; surely among all this stuff it wouldn't have been too difficult to plant a small camera somewhere that to this day remains unnoticed, transmitting to her current location in Missouri.
I owe her a letter.
Look:
There I am, photographing her video setup a day or two after I met her. I was told to take a photograph of her for a promotional postcard two days after she arrived; these images are all from that photoshoot. There I am. She did a good job of disrupting the usual photoshoot dynamics in a way that still proves instructive.
Single lens reflex cameras, like the Canon that put me deeper in to debt than my truck, allow the seeing of the other through a series of mirrors and prisms at an angle that doesn't demand any degree of self-reflexivity, unlike most mirror-based devices. It is a machine designed to see the other and put them on display; as my friend Eliza, a former Elsewhere intern wrote me last night (seeing as she is psychic),
"the similarity between photography and taxidermy
is suspended in a terrifying ambiguity of kinetic possibility
is a sphinx in a laboratory coat
reeks of authority
programs the celebration of death (of deadness?)
...consider mount rushmore
...consider the stern museum face of cultural hegemony
...consider the procession of endlessly renewing resignifications by which the objects are inescapably haunted."
My project at the moment is to figure out how to translate a play in to a work. City is several years of activity in a space by many members of this community- it's made of the buildup of signification of architecture, a button currency system, internal politics and underhanded dealings and revolutions, trials, mafia, legitimate enterprise, beauraucracy, businesses, beach, press, emergency services, mass transit and more. It's a process of play, of dynamic signification of the endless signs present in this space, and can only happen in this space. Perhaps more to the point, it's a dynamic resignification that happens too fast for a camera to follow; a big part of it is a fluidity of role of both person and object that is inhibited by the taxonomic eye of the camera.
It is shimmering, polymorphous perverse, a huge pain in the ass, the most beautiful part.
So we have to make a film about this thing that makes it make sense to an audience that has never seen the thing and is unable to participate. We've tried taking pictures of this zone of play but the act of taking pictures transformed the thing in to work, because to look without the other's looking being memorialized on an equal level makes the camera's frame in to an instant, portable proscenium stage, with audience and performer in fixed roles. One of the major political points of this whole project has been to break down lines between self and other, interior and exterior, scientist and experiment. So are we really going to be taking out the voice of myself as the cameraman, imposing a third person narrator who knows everything about what is going on, a voice of God issuing forth from the projection machine?
Science has known this for years. I remember vaguely from my physics class in high school that there are particles at the atomic or subatomic level for which you could not know both the velocity and the location, because the surveillance method for determining velocity changed the particles location, and the surveillance method for determining location changed velocity.
Ethnography should have known this for years, but since social science is a less quantitatively certain discipline with a necessarily larger amount of hand-waving, it's been a slower process of noting the social realities dictated by technologies of reproduction. My longest paper in college was twenty seven pages on Robert Gardner's documentary Dead Birds. I quote from this paper:
I read this stunned at how applicable this stuff is to what I'm thinking of these days.His style is described as poetic, mythological, sublime, heresy, manipulative, immoral, and as art disguised as anthropology. Though frequently criticized for a strange disregard for the representational concerns of his subjects, Gardner’s voice is a unique one in Ethnographic [sic] film, one that is concerned above all with finding common metaphysical ground between subject and viewer.
...
When Gardner revisited the Baliem River Valley in 1989 to produce a sequel to Dead Birds, he was sad about their adaptations to the tourist industry that was, in fact, largely driven by reaction to Gardner's film, tourists eager to see the primitives in person. Gardner chastises his former subjects in an unpublished version of his article The More Things Change: "Part of me felt they had shown themselves to be all too willing collaborators in the business of change. How could they tolerate so much compromise with what had been such a compelling life?"
...
Gardner projected Dead Birds for his subjects in 1989 after the film had been in circulation for years, realizing only too late that the language barrier would prevent them from understanding the film. Furthermore, Gardner understands little said by the Dani except for their requests for Western goods, like a radio and pants.
...
Later, the death of Wejakey is avenged by the killing of an intruding enemy, and the enemy’s corpse is shown immediately after a shot of a bird. During the final scene of celebration of the killing of an enemy pig thief, we see a lone bird flying in the sky. Immediately after showing the corpse, we see Pua is eating a dead bird by firelight and putting bird feathers in his hair, while sounds of celebration are heard distantly in the background.
...
This idea of manifesting invisible psycho-cultural and ritual forces on celluloid is an important one for a film about spiritual warfare, and it is worth looking at Gardner’s ways of providing visual evidence for ghosts, the invisible, unfilmable, archetypal entities who exert a force on the lives of the Dani. Says Gardner’s narration, “The ghosts, which more than anything else rule the lives of these people, work mostly in the dark.” This work consists mostly of spoiling food and accosting passerby, throttling them to death.
...
Watchtowers are protected with magic charms, such as a toy bow, to prevent vengeful spirits from interfering with the work of the watchmen. Um’ue does magic to keep the ghosts away by making a bundle of fragrant grasses and raspberry attached to branches, which boys carry through the village’s paths to sweep the ghosts away. Villagers build a fenced enclosure during the preparations for the feast as built as a temporary resting place for wandering ghosts, and a path is drawn in the dirt to the fence’s doorway so the ghosts can find the entrance. When preparing Wejakey for cremation, he is bathed with pig fat, that the ghost of Wejakey “might not feel neglected.” Much of the evocation of ghosts is verbal- Gardner informs us that the men leave battle while it’s till light out to avoid ghosts, he explains that the Dani avoid going out at night to avoid unneeded encounters with the ghosts, and so on. However, film is primarily a visual medium, and since we cannot see the thing itself, we are presented with its effect on the physical existence of the Dani.
I have decided to not wait tables for money based on this quote:
"The secret is to do a thing badly. If you serve someone spinach that
is cooked the way it should be, no one notices or remembers that they
have eaten the spinach. Wheras if you burn it, it shocks their
taste-buds and they become immediately aware that it is burned spinach
and they gain new insights into the characteristics of spinach,
cooking, etc."
-jean dubuffet
Surely there's a way to pay the bills while giving others new insights.
In other news I have decided that elsewhere is the closest thing I have to a home. Hopefully all Elsewheres distributed throughout the world that I end up encountering will become equally homey, given a newfound faith in light to radiate from the darkest corners of the dustiest attics of the whole world round.
At the recommendation of george & steph I am slowly cautiously poking my head barely in to the huge and seemingly endless rabbit hole of Deluze. Though he would argue that the bunny hole could be reduced in an ideal world to one flat plane; that the hole is not endless and is in fact made up of finely differentiated and finite multitude. But then I think of Borges' tales of perceptually endless yet somehow unimaginably finite libraries while living in a place where I've been four months in the same place noticing something new each day. All I can hope is to find a few good through lines through this ocean of looking that we all find ourselves in. Perhaps i am learning to find the entirety of the world's glory in multitude, strata, and vectors rather than more etheric, otherworldly, insubstantial humours; o, if only the whole world could be lain flat, then nobody would have to go to church. Maybe church is what we run to when realizing that the world lain flat would be too big to see in one lifetime.
All I can hope for is to see my corner clearly.
So here, have this photograph. This one here. It is a record of an ephermal weaving project done by one of Elsewhere's finest collaborators, Suzie. As a member of elsewhere's extended live-in community, this spider has woven a fiber arts sculpture near this bit of our electrical system, in collaboration with our carpentry and electric departments. Though it is a bit of a shame that Suzie used gossamer, given the richness of our internal archives, I was taken enough by this work to feature it on the internet to an audience of potentially everybody on earth.
So this web is a true living art; it catches all the food neccessary for this spider to survive, and provides a certain light & breezy intricacy to an otherwise drab corner. It injects her personality in to the space while taking care of a practical need; and her life, her dance is mapped out over the floorboard just above the hat factory under construction. She stays there all the time, waiting for visitors, hoping that they all become participants in the internal logic of her work. Like all things at Elsewhere, we are simply trying to make our places, leave our marks, and make it as beautiful as possible while being sensitive to the place we have found ourselves in.
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Dear Stephanie Pereira,
First the facts: You have animated a number of books taken from the library of Elsewhere and decided to project this animation against an exterior window of the building. You are taking aspects in the interior and placing them exterior to introduce an aspect of Elsewhere to the public. We have discussed Elsewhere and its accessibility during our time here.
We came to work at Elsewhere to learn more about collaborating with each other. Your video is inspired by this last month of collaboration, presented in five untitled acts. You take our personal and offer it publicly as well.
Next, what I learned about you and your work: Your video work is decorative and funny like many things you make. You are most comfortable as a maker when you can envision a look and then actualize it. You want to do things together.
Next, what I learned about my work and myself: I like to get the feel of a process and let that displace me. I want some quiet time to figure out where I am and to have ownership of that place.
Finally, what I learned about our work and collaborative relationship: Our work meshes in layers rather than in mixtures, like the flags at the end of your video, or this letter on this window; we are lasagna not sauce. We like to talk to each other about thoughts but not about action. We see time very differently, like most things.
Love,
Erik Fabian
Greensboro, NC @ Elsewhere
August 31, 2007
This video is pretty bare bones, when I made it I had just arrived at Elsewhere, and had little to say...still in the sponge-stage of the whole thing. I think it is nice because it gives at least the beginnings of a shape to the vast vessel that is Elsewhere.
(Apologies for the bouncy bouncy nature of the thing - my camera already makes very compressed videos, and youtube has just scrambled the whole thing further...maybe one day I will set things straight, but until then, people susceptible to seizures should probably not watch this video.)
The following statements are all from my point of view, and are in no way endorsed by his highness, Erik Fabian.
For the evening of our artist conversation, Erik and I wanted to push the hermetic boundaries of Elsewhere out, to make it as much as it could be, a place of the people. To this end, we replicated certain elements of Elsewhere's interior and installed them on Elsewhere's facade. We selected objects to replicate that would also be reminiscent of a grand opening, that special time in a space's life where everyone is welcome and encouraged to take part in its reception into the world.
While our guests (and Elsewherian natives) waited in the receiving line, they were given the task of telling each other stories. The story was to be about some sort of childhood misconception that they had. (Such as: I thought that if you ate strawberries your lips would be red forever) They were told to listen to each other's stories carefully, because once they had related their stories to one another, they were to venture out into Elsewhere and as a team, find one object that in someway could represent the stories shared. In this portion of the evening, there were many opportunities for stories told and retold. Connections abounded. In this way, our evening provided an opportunity for community building.
Another goal of ours was touched upon here since we intended for Elsewhere to become a place of production for its guests, a place where anyone can make something and feel ownership.
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