Category Archives: Urban

Bradley Davies “Echoing Movements” 2012

stills from surveillance video

Bradley Davies “Echoing Movements” 2012

[credit]

“Bradley Davies’s work is a kind of re-enactment of Vito Acconci’s seminal performance work ‘Following’ (1969). Acconci created a set of instructions which he had to follow to create a work. ‘Following’ saw the artist follow a random individual through the streets of New York until he could no longer do so, at which point he chose another individual at the location he found himself, throughout the day. However, Acconci’s photographs were created retrospectively: they were ‘staged’ rather than documentary images.

Davies’s work is, therefore, a reconstruction of a work which only ever really existed in the artist’s head, and which can only be known through images shaped and edited for our consumption subsequently. Davies’s work is also created for an age in which CCTV cameras are now endemic in urban space: walking in the city is impossible to undertake without being observed almost constantly. Britain, in particular, has more CCTV cameras per head of population than any other nation. Accordingly, any attempt to create ‘Following’ today would be quite different: the artist would be seen hundreds of times by security cameras – and his potentially threatening behavior recorded as evidence throughout the duration of the work. Davies’s work acknowledges this – our point of view being precisely that of a CCTV camera.”

Echoing Movements, 2012, film from Bradley Davies on Vimeo.

“Echoing Movements is a performance/exercise that looks at the gap between an artist, its subjects, and its viewers, from the studio to the public domain.” [credit]

Tim Knowles “From Windwalk – Seven Walks from Seven Dials” 2009

multimedia installation: helmet, sail, wall drawing and monitor

[credit]

“Tim Knowles creates photographs, films and abstract drawings by undertaking walks. Knowles’s working methods are deliberately improbable, idiosyncratic and inventive. He makes use of chance in innumerable ways, ensuring that the outcome of each walk is unknown in advance. As the critic Jessica Lack has written in The Guardian, 11 June 2009, his works are “generated by apparatus, mechanisms, systems and processes beyond the artist’s control”. They are “akin to scientific experimentation, where a situation is engineered in which the outcome is unpredictable. There is a poetry, English eccentricity and wit to the work”.

For ‘Walk On’ Tim Knowles presents an excerpt of a larger work, showing one of a series of seven walks made from Seven Dials, London. Each of these walks is guided solely by the wind as Knowles steadfastly follows a windvane mounted on a helmet worn on his head. He has no ability to affect the windvane and simply acts as a servant to the system he has devised. The wind takes him on a meandering route, at times blown directly down a street, at others caught in eddies repeatedly circling on street corners or joining the city’s other debris down some cul de sac. His meandering path collides with the rigid structure of the city; his route tracing out buildings, railings, ventilation shafts, parked vehicles and other boundaries. Knowles devises a new method of exploring the city and reveals how the wind moves through and is shaped by its structure.”

Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup “Search” 1993

surveillance stills

Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup “Search” 1993

[credit]

“‘Search’, by Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup, consists of silent video footage documenting a synchronised walk undertaken by the artists [in two separate locations] in the city centre of Newcastle-upon-Tyne [on Monday, May 17th] 1993 [at 1pm]. It was the first commissioned project undertaken by Locus+ and was part of the 2nd Tyne International exhibition of Contemporary Art. ‘Search’ was recorded on the then­ brand-new 16-camera surveillance system run by Northumbria Police, and the resultant footage was given to the artists who edited it into twenty 10-second sequences that were then transmitted unannounced during the commercial breaks on Tyne Tees Television between 21 June and 4 July 1993.”

“The artists wanted to demonstrate their concerns towards the recently installed massive surveillance systems through the city of Northumbria (Newcastle upon Tyne was the first city centre in the UK to install a Closed Circuit Television network). Pat and Wendy recorded it on the 16 camera surveillance systems and its vision was capable of recording 16 separate views of the city in any one second. ” [credit]

plan b “All GPS traces in Berlin in 2011-2012” 2012

a map

plan b

two people tracing

plan b

[credit]

“plan b is the name that Sophia New and Daniel Belasco Rogers take when working collaboratively as artists. They are amongst the leading figures to engage with GPS technologies since their widespread availability over the last decade or more. Their practice is based on both walking and on data collection including, most notably, their GPS traces. Rogers has tracked every single one of his journeys for a whole decade. New has done the same since 2007. On several occasions they have exhibited an entire year’s worth of traces in one space, effectively making every action they take become public knowledge.

Such actions present ethical problems for us, as much as for the artists. The viewer becomes privy to the artist’s habits and, hence, inner life. If information about apparently innocuous activity such as walking through one’s own city can be timed, monitored and recorded by an artist, such information can easily be known by technology providers and sold to others. Those who might want to observe, redirect, restrict or control our behaviour have new ways of doing so. Most recently, plan b have engraved a whole year’s worth of GPS data onto a transparent acrylic sheet. The journeys that they routinely or repeatedly undertake are ‘dug’ out of the material in an almost archaeological manner. Their habits and ways of inhabiting the city are simultaneously made both monumental and as ghost-like traces.”

Catherine Yass “High Wire” 2008

person on a high wire

Catherine Yass, High Wire (2008)

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“‘The dream of reaching the sky is also a modernist dream of cities in the air, inspired by a utopian belief in progress.’ Catherine Yass

Presented in the Berwick Gymnasium is the multi-channel video installation High Wire (2008) by acclaimed British artist Catherine Yass. The work follows the French high-wire artist Didier Pasquette, who was invited by Yass to walk a wire strung between two towers on the Red Road Estate in Glasgow. Stepping out between what were once the highest social housing blocks in all of Europe, Pasquette offers us the ultimate vertiginous perspective.”

[credit] – Duration: 6min, 48sec

High Wire is a room-sized video installation consisting of four projections and two lightboxes. Filmed at Red Road, a high-rise housing complex in Glasgow, it shows the noted French tightrope walker Didier Pasquette attempting to cross from one tower to another over a thin metal wire at a height of 90 metres. The large projections occupy the four walls of the space in which the work is exhibited, offering different views of the event. One shows a long view of the two tower blocks against the distant landscape, highlighting the dominance of the high-rise in its urban context. The second projects footage filmed from the top of one tower, the camera shifting shakily between the roof itself and the line of wire. The third and fourth projections offer further views of the rooftop, one from a distance and one close up. As the films begin Pasquette enters the frame, stepping off a small platform down to the level of the wire. A camera is strapped onto his helmet, revealing the source of the eagle-eye view of the scene, and captures a sweeping, panoramic view to the left, then to the right. It then catches glimpses of Pasquette unclasping his hands and feet, and calmly and purposefully lifting the long pole prepared for him to aid his balance. As he sets off into the void, Pasquette looks down, and his head-camera view provides a reeling, vertiginous sensation. He moves with precision and grace, carefully touching the wire with his toes before resting each foot on it. One third of the way along the wire, Pasquette stops and appears to be in trouble, with the rope shaking beneath him. Retaining his focus, he steps backwards, fast and composed, and in a few seconds he reaches the roof again, his crossing frustrated.

High Wire was made by the British artist Catherine Yass in 2008. It continues a preoccupation, seen in Yass’s earlier work, with architecture and urban systems, in particular the ways in which they can convey wider social and political concerns (see, for instance, her 1994 series Corridors, Tate T07065–T07072, and Descent 2002, Tate T13569). The choice of Red Road was originally a practical one, but it came to symbolise the aspirations of an apparently misconceived architectural utopia. Built in 1964–9 as part of Glasgow City Council’s slum clearance project, Red Road was the tallest residential building complex in Europe at the time. Inspired by the utopian ideas of the architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965), this dream of a brighter future was embraced by the local community. Yet a rise in crime and gang violence, bad maintenance, and perhaps a lack of a sense of ownership and engagement due to the scale of the complex, made residents feel vulnerable and insecure. Red Road became emblematic of the ill-fated housing ambitions seen across Britain in this period. In 2005, three years before Yass made High Wire, Glasgow Housing Association announced a £60 million regeneration plan for Red Road, slating the towers for demolition, to be replaced by around 600 low-rise private and council homes.

High Wire found an immediate resonance within this context, which for some exemplified the failure of the modernist utopian project, and in the installation this is paired with the frustrated attempts by Pasquette to realise his own dream. As Yass stated in 2008:

High Wire is a dream of walking in the air, out into nothing. But it has an urban background and the high-rise buildings provide the frame and support. The dream of reaching the sky is also a modernist dream of cities in the air, inspired by a utopian belief in progress. Every time I see Didier turning back I remember hearing him shout, from where I was standing on another rooftop, ‘C’est pas possible!’ But something was possible, he returned safely. And something emerged from the actuality of the walk, which was a moment when reality became more of a dream than the dream itself.
(Quoted in Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Visual Art 2008, p.94.)

Yass’s four-screen video installation is accompanied by two photographic works of the same sky walk, printed as black and white negatives and presented on lightboxes. While the videos elicit an empathetic, almost physical response from the viewers, the grey, backlit landscape of the lightboxes presents a world that is unfamiliar and distant.

Further reading
Catherine Yass: High Wire, exhibition catalogue, Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Visual Art, London and Glasgow 2008.

Sofia Karamani
October 2011

Carey Young “Body Techniques (after A Line in Ireland, Richard Long, 1974)” 2007

woman walking on materials in the desert

Carey Young

“Carey Young‘s series ‘Body Techniques‘ recreates several works from the canon of performance art from the late 1960s and early 1970s, including pieces by Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, and Valie Export. Many of these earlier-generation artists undertook their projects by walking into a public space to create a kind of experiment (or, in Nauman’s case, conducting an experiment by walking around the space of his studio).

Long’s ‘Line in Ireland’ offers the viewer a point of entry into a quintessentially romantic wilderness, free of people. The art of the late 1960s often negated the idea of the art object as a luxury commodity by focusing on performance or the artist’s own body, on process rather than product, or on using natural or basic materials. Carey’s image inverts such binary terms, with some ironies.

Her work, like Long’s, shows a place that seems uninhabited. Yet Young’s work also inverts the attitudes associating walking with unfettered liberty, heroic (male) creativity and boundless natural landscapes. She suggests that such concepts are escapist fictions: her uniform of a business suit implies that the world we live in is one where art, money, and big business are more entangled than ever. Creativity and capital are unavoidably intertwined, rather than separable: we cannot ‘walk out’ of either. In her work, no space – conceptual or physical – escapes the process of commodification. ‘Body Techniques’ is accordingly set in Dubai: a place seemingly emblematic of twenty-first century capitalism where almost nobody travels by foot. The gargantuan tower blocks in the background, created with petro-dollars, ensure that walking, and the pleasures and chance encounters of perambulation, have been abolished.” [credit]

“Body Techniques (2007) is a series of eight photographs that considers the interrelationships between art and globalized commerce. The title of the series refers to a phrase originally coined by Marcel Mauss and developed by Pierre Bourdieu as habitus, which describes how an operational context or behavior can be affected by institutions or ideologies.

Set in the vast building sites of Dubai and Sharjah’s futuristic corporate landscape, we see Carey Young alone and dressed in a suit, her actions reworking some of the classic performance-based works associated with Conceptual art, including pieces by Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Dennis Oppenheim and Valie Export.  In thus recasting earlier works centered around the physicality of the body in time and space, it is ambiguous whether the artist is molding herself to the landscape or exploring ways of resisting it.

The locations for Young’s photographs are a series of empty, uninhabited ‘new build’ developments reminiscent of Las Vegas, rising from the desert’s tabula rasa aimed at bombastic luxury and spectacle and intended for thousands of incoming Western corporate executives. The architectural style is consummate ‘global village’ – a business theme park composed of swathes of multinational HQs and Italianate McVillas. These non-places could eventually compose an entire world-view: a hyperreal, corporate vision of utopia. Half-constructed backdrops are used as a ‘stage’ for the action, with the artist appearing as one tiny individual, overwhelmed, dislocated from, or even belittled by the corporate surroundings, while dressed up to play a role within it.” [credit]

[murmur] (2002-2013)

person with a cellphone on the street

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Introduction

[murmur] is a documentary oral history project that records stories and memories told about specific geographic locations. In each of these locations there is a [murmur] sign with a phone number on it that anyone can call to listen to a story while experiencing being right where the story takes place.

The stories are as personal as the relationship people have with the spaces they inhabit. Secret histories are unearthed, private truths unveiled, and tales as diverse as the city itself are discovered and shared.

Whose voices are not part of the official story of your neighbourhood?

[murmur] is a Toronto-based collective, collaborating on an archival audio project of first person stories related to particular urban locations, as told by people with a personal connection to the story material. A distinctive green ear-shaped street sign is mounted at each storied spot, displaying a phone number passersby can call on their mobile phones to access that location’s stories, or to leave their own. Stories are also made available along with other information (maps, photos, etc.) on the [murmur] website, and story map postcards are distributed throughout the city.

[murmur]’s Mission

At its core, [murmur]’s mission is to allow more voices to be woven into the “official” narrative of a place or city, democratizing the ability to shape people’s perspectives of place, and making cities, neighbourhoods and ordinary places come alive in new ways for listeners. [murmur]’s stories, though personal or even purely anecdotal, inevitably reveal elements of the wider social, civic and political history of a given spot, its surrounding location, and the communities and individuals connected to it.

By engaging with [murmur], people develop a new intimacy with their surroundings and “history” acquires a multitude of new voices, while the physical experience of hearing a story in its actual setting – of hearing the walls talk – brings uncommon knowledge to common space, bringing people closer to the real histories that make up their world, and to one another.

Transforming Places

[murmur] also allows participant storytellers to become community artists themselves – participants in the act of transforming place, and creating and linking communities, through story and public art. The physical marking of the story access spots, by pole-mounted metal signs at street level, also lets these stories become part of the physical urban landscape, giving tellers the opportunity to leave a lasting mark on the communities that inspired their stories, and mapping their experiences onto space together with others who have shared, or continue to share, that space. Community members and visitors can dip in and out of the collections as they go about their daily lives, and once they have, the hope is the storied spots will continue to resonate with new levels of meaning and historical association, far beyond the occasion of first listening.

[murmur] Abroad

The [murmur] project was developed at the Canadian Film Centre New Media Lab in 2002 and first launched in the summer of 2003 in Toronto’s Kensington Market. Since that time, installations have been launched in several neighbourhoods across Toronto as well as in Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, San Jose, Sao Paulo, Edinburgh, Dublin and Galway, Ireland. [murmur] in the Grange neighbourhood of Toronto, a collaboration with the AGO’s ArtsAccess programme, launched in 2009.

More [murmur]

All members of a community are encouraged to contribute to this project, so that the “voice” of [murmur] reflects the diverse voices of the neighbourhood. These are the stories that make up the city’s identity, but they’ve been kept by the people who live here. [murmur] brings that important archive out onto the streets, for all to hear and experience, and is always looking for new stories to add to it’s existing locations.

To find all the story locations, visit the [murmur] web site. After calling the number at any given location and listening to the story, you will have the chance to tell your own tale, giving voice to your own experiences and sharing your version of history with the rest of us.

Lee Walton and Jon Rubin, “Playing Apart” (2011)

“On Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011, over one square mile area of downtown Denver, artists Jon Rubin and Lee Walton worked with the Bear Creek High School Marching Band to present “Playing Apart,” a one-of-a-kind musical event that dismantled an entire 90-piece marching band into single performers who collectively use the whole city as a playing field. Each band member started on a different corner and walked a specific route, collectively covering one-square mile of downtown Denver. Mimicking the experience of city life, band members intersected randomly in an unpredictable mash-up of instruments and sounds. Viewers throughout the city— sitting in cafes, walking the sidewalks and working in the offices, saw one band member after another passing by, like solitary pieces of a larger puzzle. The performance was both subtle and obvious, small and large. Disrupting and re-imagining the normal flow of the city, this project invited viewers to contemplate social and auditory patterns within the chaos of the city.

Jon Rubin is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores the social dynamics of public places and the idiosyncrasies of individual and group behavior. His projects include starting a radio station that only plays the sound of an extinct bird, training a hypnotized human robot army, operating a restaurant that produces a live talk show with its customers, and running an ongoing take-out joint that only sells food from countries the United States is in conflict with. Rubin’s project Thinking About Flying is currently at the MCA Denver, and consists of a group of young homing pigeons that are trained by museum’s visitors continually taking home the birds and releasing them to fly back to the loft on the museum’s roof.

Lee Walton is an artist who playfully questions the world we live in. His work takes many forms and often involves collaboration with numerous participants from artists and non-artists alike. Walton once played an entire round of golf by taking only one shot a day, competed in a season-long free throw competition with Shaquille O’Neal and started a competitive residency program inside an international supermarket.

Rubin and Walton have each created commissioned projects for museums and cities both nationally and internationally. Their work can be viewed at jonrubin.net and leewalton.com

The Bear Creek HS Instrumental Music program boasts one of the strongest music programs in the Jefferson County School District and in the state of Colorado. The Bear Creek HS Band as an all-inclusive program which is home to the Bear Creek HS Marching Band, a 2010 state finalist and a nine-time state semi-finalist. Bear Creek has one of the strongest percussion programs in the state. They are a four time World Class Percussion State Champions (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011) and the two-time WGI World Concert Class Percussion National Finalist. The Winter Guard program has been a national finalist and is the 2010 RMCGA state Color Guard 3rd place champion and a 2011 state finalist. The Bear Creek Band has performed throughout the state, most recently with the Denver Brass and the Metropolitan Jazz Orchestra.” (credit)

Carrie Schneider, “Hear Our Houston” (2012-2015)

“Hear Our Houston is a hub of public generated audio walking tours around our city.

All sorts of folks from all around town take a walk, record their thoughts, observations, stories, memories, and knowledge along the way. They then upload the tour to HearOurHouston.com where anyone can download it for free and retrace the tour maker’s steps, layering meaning into geography, and trying on another person’s perspective.

Some tours rely on an expert eye view. Other tours share intimate glimpse of the neighborhoods they call home. Some tours are an unexpected pairing of a fresh pair of eyes on a well trodden path. Some tours are really about getting to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, paths that we may be curious about but don’t always have the chance to understand.

All of these tours give us a window into another part of our world.
All of these tours celebrate the journey.

They are not a list of easily consumable hotspots. From point a to point b, you walk, you discover meaning in details you never noticed, in in-between spaces you wouldn’t have sought to arrive at, and see even the familiar in a new light.

Houston is a city of great but hidden richness only truly discovered by experience and word of mouth. In a place where walking is a radical act, Hear Our Houston  is preserving our hidden gems, voicing meaning within geography, and celebrating our common sense of space.” (credit)

Screen Shot of Hear our Houston website

Screen Shot of Hear our Houston website

Stanley Brouwn, “This Way Brouwn” (1960-64)

A compilation of maps drawn by passersby of directions to a particular location. The artist stamped them all with “This Way Brouwn”.

“CURATOR, CHRISTOPHE CHERIX: What’s fascinating here is an artist making a work through his interaction with people. He’s basically delegating the making of his work, not to someone that he chose, but to anyone. And the artist basically gives you here only a starting point and stops right when the work begins.

What he did was to ask someone, “How can I get from here to another point of the city?” And he would hand them a sheet of paper, with a pen or a pencil. And, the passerby was asked to make the drawing. And what Stanley Brouwn did was to ask similar directions to different people. So on one side, you see someone who is telling him with very geometrical line how to cross the city, and someone has a much more smooth, fluid way of crossing the city.” (credit)