PHANTASMAGORIA at Dérivelab 22.07.2010

Phantasmagoria

Sound Installation and visual memories.

“Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.“

Karl Marx

Cities as Labyrinths, cities as playgrounds.

We live in the city that we create. The everyday becomes protean while every street, passage and corner communicates something new about ourselves and reflects what we are in a constant negotiation between external inputs and internal feelings.

Inputs are not just visual: the contemporary urban environment celebrates an astonishing poly-sensoriality made of sounds, smells and feelings. Our reaction to it can be positive, generating something new, engaging with it and its elements or negative rejecting the reality to escape into imaginary places far away from our present. Both forms of experience, in constant dialogue with our reactions create a relationship so fast that is difficult to distinguish from the phantasmagoric.

The sound and visual piece Phantasmagoria attempts to recreate this exchange between genuine urban stimuli and imagined memories in a constant exchange determined by visitors choices and actions.  Through this process it allows an individual and unique engagement with the space and the work.

I Do like red, blue and White

MY FRIENDS ARE MINE | PS

From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence | Foucault, of Other Spaces 1967

I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.

Dérivelab | Curatorial Project

DériveLab

Centre for Creative Collaboration, Acton Street, London.

22nd-25th July 2010

Opening 22nd July 6pm

DériveLab is a laboratory cast adrift upon the cultural waters of a 'broken' society for the experiments of a cast of artists, performers, musicians, theorists and designers. From the 22nd - 25th July 2010 DériveLab's latest feature-length psychotic episode features at the recently opened Centre for Creative Collaboration, near Kings Cross, London. An opening preview, post-view and peepshow takes place on and in the evening of the 22nd. Prior to this participants will explore or ignore, work and play within the venue for 10 days before their potentially prized or somewhat despised responses are reprised and prised open to a public.


DériveLab challenges participants to work off the rails and on the wrong side of the tracks, across disciplinary boundaries, with a schizophrenic mix of collaboration and resistance, whilst occupying an anti-hierarchical territory that mixes established, international practitioners with students, primarily from Goldsmiths, drawn from across undergrad, postgrad and research realms. DériveLab is a widely encompassing, wildly spinning compass at the corner of a constantly changing map of international contributors from cities including London, Tel Aviv, Frankfurt, Parma, Trieste, Paris and Tokyo.


We believe Dérive is a conduit to circumvent and short-circuit those repellent elements shortselling us down the river of ur-banality. We believe Dérive as an activity is reflexive: it both responds to situations but situations likewise respond to it. DériveLab concocts reflexive phenomenologies, DériveLab psychoanalyses the unconscious of urban space.

Forward Thinking | PARALLEL SCHOOL OF ART

PARALLEL SCHOOL OF ART is a virtual and international school where people who want to self-educate themselves can share what they are doing and thinking, as well as their interests and projects.
Parallel school wants to generate and spread work emulation, and to develop self-initiated projects such as publications, meetings, lectures, workshops etc.

Parallel school would like to bring people knowledge, experiences and energies from all over the world together.

Allen Ginsberg | COSMOPOLITAN GREETINGS

Cosmopolitan Greetings

Stand up against governments, against God. Stay irresponsible. Say only what we know & imagine. Absolutes are Coercion. Change is absolute. Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Observe what’s vivid. Notice what you notice. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. If we don’t show anyone, we’re free to write anything. Remember the future. Freedom costs little in the U.S. Asvise only myself. Don’t drink yourself to death. Two molecules clanking us against each other require an observer to become scientific data. The measuring instrument determines the appearance of the phenomenal world (after Einstein). The universe is subjective.. Walt Whitman celebrated Person. We are observer, measuring instrument, eye, subject, Person. Universe is Person. Inside skull is vast as outside skull. What’s in between thoughts? Mind is outer space. What do we say to ourselves in bed at night, making no sound? “First thought, best thought.” Mind is shapely, Art is shapely. Maximum information, minimum number of syllables. Syntax condensed, sound is solid. Intense fragments of spoken idiom, best. Move with rhythm, roll with vowels. Consonants around vowels make sense. Savour vowels, appreciate consonants. Subject is known by what she sees. Others can measure their vision by what we see. Candour ends paranoia.