This paper has two authors, Philip Courtenay of e-space lab and Petra Johnson the instigator of the kioskxiaomaibu project of 2010 and Through the Looking Glass of 2011. These two experimental projects emerged out of the recent phenomenon of video live-streaming that both authors have used as an accessible way to connect people and places and in a context that transforms everyday situations into performance spaces. These projects form the core of the paper’s case study and are the starting point of a current project called This is NOT a Kiosk that will be taking place in Shanghai, London, Koeln, Liverpool, Weimar and Huangshan City in 2015 and 2016, and curated by Philip Courtenay of e-space lab. The results of this process and programme will take the form of proposals for a trans-national project flowing out from Istanbul in 2017.
The work of e-space lab has instigated situations of exchange occupying and acting in the zonal interface produced by optics and the screen environment of the world wide web. This practice has resulted in a number of observations and conclusions that were taken forward in the kioskxiaomaibu and Through the Looking Glass projects of 2010-11, and intends to provide a working and speculative theory in order to identify some of the qualities present in this experimental public art practice.
The paper begins with some of the research and findings of the e-space lab project, that has contributed to kioskxiaomaibu and Through the Looking Glass as an observant participant, and in curating the current project ‘This is NOT a Kiosk’ the aim is to provide an experimental context to further explore the potential of this experimental public art practice that begins with a stock-take of the 2010-11 archive. The curatorial method supports the curatorial purpose; to use the kioskxiaomaibu and Through the Looking Glass archive and the re-collecting process to see how we are able to articulate and communicate to a wider audience the methods employed in this type of experimental public art practice.
This practice has emerged out of video-streaming in a context that transforms everyday situations into performance spaces. Rather than these spaces becoming places where representations of everyday life are created, these occasions were events that were shaped by the webcam and the screen to produce presentations functioning as artistic probes revealing aspects of everyday life. The transformation of these spaces in all the locations was to a large extent produced through the agency of the technology involved. The presence of a camera that streams the all-at-once-ness of a part of the worldpool becomes a point of orientation and necessitates a facing in the zone of an interface, whilst the illuminated screen becomes a cool pool of information, glowing in such a way that surrounding environment becomes just that; surrounding environment. A place happens!
Usually the discourses concerning “the establishment of the space of virtual reality”, and that “are engaging, a contrario, in the eclipsing of the real” (Virilio, 2005 p3,), and that are made possible by what Virilio calls electro-optics, agree with him that they have contributed to a speeding up of “the various means for the representation of the world”. However, at the level of our experiments and practice this technoculture is actually running at the slower speeds of everyday life, the speed of cognitive activities, nervous systems, the speed of making something, organizing a conference, writing a paper even, where the richness of texture is experienced best when everything slows down to an extended time in multiple spaces. Perhaps this observation is counter-intuitive to the time space compression Virilio is so anxious to critique, but it is where this paper chooses to begin.
Where this experimental public art practice originates is in the intention to produce the kind of awareness that reveals the texture of everyday life, and makes visible the invisible realities of social fabric as well as finding, or making, a place for looking again at material culture. This has a long backstory in the arts, and can be summed up in a word, a word first coined by Viktor Shlovsky in his famous article of 1917 Art as Technique; ostranenie (остранение) that translates as defamiliarization, or estrangement. The word originates in a printing error that contributes to its strangeness, given that this term comes from the Russian word for strange, and then ends up as a term transformed in Brecht’s borrowing of it, then re-translated into German as die Verfremdung, which in its turn became the Russian otchuzhdenie meaning alienation. The point of referencing the term though has to do with Shlovsky’s key idea in his article that the function of art is to “to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” This explains why the arts often use techniques that “make objects unfamiliar”, and “to make forms difficult to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.” (Rivkin, 1998)
There are experiences of defamiliarization that operate outside the techniques of art and that happen in the context of everyday modern life, and the kinds of places where this happens connects to aspects of this type of project. Our experience tends to indicate that the relations in connecting people and places tend to remain flat, in the way Bruno Latour sets out in Reassembling the Social, whenever participants make connections (Latour, 2005 pp 179 -180). There has always been a sense of curiosity about the other place present on the screen that is perhaps connected to the equal relationship that is present in this shifting connectivity between cafe and museum, street corner and studio, pub and apartment, small gallery space and lobby. This wonder leads to mapping, file sharing, moving a laptop into adjacent spaces inside and outside to show what's round the corner. The familiar becomes fresh through its presence on the screen.
Travel not books! So Michel Foucault advises his students in his Lecture series of 1976 at the College de France, published in English translation as Society Must be Defended (Foucault, 2004), because travel involves the encounter with the unfamiliar and slow time just happens, and we become aware, we awake from the familiar and discover where we are coming from at the same time as discovering where we are. So European travel writers, as long ago as Théophile Gautier, who reacted against the cult of speed, are therefore found in a context of resistance. "The flaneurs languid gait on the boulevards was an attempt to decelerate the modern world, by reducing quick walking to a slow crawl." (Kiberd 2009 p 75)
So, slow communication generates texture, phatic gestures, looking after each other as guest/hosts, valuing this alternative pace. Consciousness is embodied, and the dance of thought itself cannot be separated from the whirligig of perceptions of the place you are in, or move through, or scan, or touch and smell. The geographer David Harvey when he used the term space-time compression in The Condition of Postmodernity (1990) recognizes the processes that revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time, so how are we adjusting to, or resisting this most recent episode now? The flaneur's pace is slow, in order to observe and be observed. The pace of e-dialogue between artist and artist, or artist and audience, or artist and participant observer, or actor and observant participant, is necessarily slow in this pixellated space, this space of translation, and of endless coding, de-coding and en-coding, as rhythmic in its way as the in and out of breathing.
Using the growing everyday capacity of video-streaming to shape new types of engagement with local realities in this virtual space, that is an actual experience, has to do with the inter-cultural and local to local interfaces these projects have created. The dialogue that happens in this field of optics and screen is the content of this medium, which is anything but pure, say in comparison to the electric light, which is a pure information, “a medium without a message, as it were, unless it used to spell out some verbal ad or name”, according to McLuhan (McLuhan 1974 p.15). The texture of the particular consciousness that happens in this e-dialogue is soaked in low-definition information. Screens are formed from pixels, chunks, lumps of colour, texture, that are more sculptural than filmic, multi-sensory, where the sound space becomes the warp and the weft that holds it all through the breaks, holds attention amongst the fuzzy images, and as we strain to listen, de-code etc, we become profoundly engaged.
An example of the e-dialogues that we have used as a case study took place on 18 March 2010 at the Art & Design Academy Liverpool John Moores University and the am space gallery Shanghai (Courtenay, 2010). It was called Your Morning My Evening/Your Evening My Morning in Shanghai and presented in Liverpool as a Liverpool – Shanghai cultural exchange boot fair. This was a public happening using skype, a meeting of strangers, with participants instinctively behaving in ways that correspond to protocols of conduct that preclude a sense of vulnerability, of exposure. In occupying this shared space we depend on the kindness of strangers. The mutually experienced x-ray revelations generated require a large measure of hospitality, and, as that measure is given, it creates a space of engagement, listening, and above all a climate of tolerance and civility.
When exchanges are interrupted by flow of information and data fluctuations, grief comes with anxiety, so effective behaviours are ones that roll with the rhythms of the flow, accommodate breaks as breathing spaces, chats between participants that can update input. The international dimension provides a crucial spur to waking up and discovering an anti-environment because translation is a gift that has its own time/space effects, a fertile ground for generating new ideas. Umberto Eco's book Mouse or Rat? (2003) is subtitled translation as negotiation. Building up a sense of contexts, local to local, involves sharing, file sharing, collaborative editing, valuing this alternative pace.
Gifting is performance, a dramatized exchange, usually signifying the arrival at a nodal point in the duration of an activity where the spectre of social obligation begins to take shape, and actions are necessary to equalize the field of relations between host/guests and guest/hosts. Part of this “gifting” behaviour includes the co-opting of objects, presented, displayed and offered, without strings attached, part of the “tracking” of a new pathway in the network, through the passing along of goods as well as images and evocations.
The 1st May 2010 saw the opening of the six months long kioskxiaomaibu project instigated by Petra Johnson and co-produced with e-space lab member Xu Zhifeng which connected a number of Kiosk type social and economic urban situations. The project included a Kiosk in the Ehrenfeld district of Cologne and a redundant Kiosk in Weimar and these German based situations were connected to a street based Kiosk in Shanghai. The first event was also broadcast on a livestream webpage and observed by members of the public at the Bluecoat, Liverpool, and an invited audience that included members of the Yellow House arts organization. This durational project had been specifically designed to run simultaneously with and against the backdrop of the EXPO 2010 in Shanghai.
The quality of artists interventions in the kiosk spaces transformed these spaces via skype and live-streamed broadcasting into a virtual space of exchanges. Rather than these spaces becoming places where representations of everyday life were being created, these occasions were events that were shaped by the webcam and the screen and produced presentations. The use of the term ‘presentation’ is significant in this description of a process that is spontaneous, presentational and therefore non-representational, experiential rather than discursive. Midway during its running time from the beginning of May to the end of October 2010 with weekly links between kiosks in Germany and Shanghai, kioskxiaomaibu also spent 20 days on the stage of the German Pavilion at the EXPO which afforded a space of contrast as well as reflection.
In returning to the main premise of this paper we flag again the notion that the transformation of space in all the locations was to a large extent produced through the agency of the technology involved. Thinking about spaces and the publicness we are seeking to instigate, one of the significant aspects of the public dimension of the activities we are consciously fostering are the kinds of place we have ended up choosing, or the opportunities and logistics that determine where they have taken place. These include the Out of the Bluecoat retail premises functioning as temporary venues, side rooms of museums, a conference room, gallery spaces with or without exhibition, lobby spaces, street café, street kiosk, and expo pavilion. Using the available technology is part of the determinate context, but there is also a sense in which these places are locations that have a quality of being on the street, in-between the street and some other connected space, at least in our thinking and conversation, that is more formally identified as a place of cultural meaning, for instance a performance space, a cinema, a gallery, a theatre or concert hall. Where WIFI operates it creates a pool of communication potentials, in some ways reminiscent of the 18th century coffeehouses in London and Paris, places where the spontaneous exchange between strangers from diverse social origins is allowed. In the coffeehouse business was the culture, in these projects, it appears, culture is our business.
Wandering about with a laptop connected to the internet, video-streaming, listening, talking, showing and pointing using a webcam, is hard on the arm muscles, but a fantastic way of mapping, much more than a version of a virtual fly through, laying down a memory based and spatially specific cognitive map. Connecting spaces in this attitude of mobility and inclusion really does render our everyday assumptions about inside and outside wondrously akin to the conundrums of Lewis Carroll. Thanks to the work of Martin Gardner's The Annotated Snark that explores the genius of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, we have the juxtaposition of two fascinating mapping concepts in his annotation 21 that contrasts the map in Fit the Second which is a “perfect and absolute blank!” with a map with everything on it in Lewis Carroll's Bruno and Sylvie Concluded; where in Chapter 11;
The German Professor explains how his country's cartographers experimented with larger and larger maps until they finally made one with a scale of a mile to the mile. 'It has never been spread out, yet,' he says. 'The farmers objected; they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So now we use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well. (Gardner 1979 p. 57)I suggest that this challenge to inside-outside is equivalent to this mapping discrepancy. The fact of the screen as the global, the space local, is a reverse of the usual geographic assumption of going out into the world. The image made of pigment, ink and emulsion, is de-coded to produce the light of art, photography, whilst film is light projected onto a screen and we learn to focus on a plane that hovers invisibly in front of that screen to achieve the maximum illusion of a window onto a cinematic set of spaces and times.
The telly, the computer screen, are both illuminated from within, this is a spatial relation akin to the architecture of glass in the medieval cathedral, not an architecture of light, a system of illumination where the human subject performs the role of a screen capable of absorbing this quite different sort of light, a sort of sculptural light, if that is possible! Texture! Or "the bairdboard bombardment screen" in the "charge of the light barricade" (1975 p. 349) as Joyce has it in the Wake! Enlightenment!
The computer is an extension of the nervous system and the screen is as much brain information as the light your brain makes in your head when looking at the world, including all this newfangled tackle. In short the screen becomes this other sort of place, another place, an anti-environment. So, the theoretical context of this practice explores the way actors are able to activate spaces and that some aspects of actor network theory have been very useful in analyzing what has been the core of this experimental art practice. This may help to explain how a new type of public art practice can emerge through the use of communication tools. These tools have the power to create contexts for dialogue that are in themselves new spaces. These performance spaces then allow the generally invisible texture of the social experience of things and places to become visible. The connection of spaces using these technologies create a situation where perceptions are shaped by the simultaneous presence of environment and anti-environment, in a way that Marshall McLuhan in the 1960's theorized an understanding of the artistic function in society.
The medium is the Massage, the title of McLuhan’s 1967 collaboration with designer Quentin Fiore comes from the typographer’s error, so message becomes massage. Massage – mass age – and then on the cover we can read text, placed under the foot of the photographic model wearing a dress/sculpture spelling out L, O, V, E, and says what we will find within is An Inventory of Effects. Perhaps we have come a long way since then but the idea of art as the exploring of the now through the use of created “other” spaces, within the ones we inhabit, and can therefore NOT see until the art happens, still seems relevant in our messy present.
In Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker's Through the Vanishing Point section called Sensory Modes, just before the main section Toward a Spatial Dialogue there is this blunt and no-nonsense, thought provoking statement:
Electronic Man (well it was first published in 1968!) approaches the condition in which it is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art. This presents no solution to the previous problem of decorating the environment. Quite the contrary. The new possibility demands total understanding of the artistic function in society. It will no longer be possible merely to add art to the environment. (McLuhan, 1969 p.7)
Going back to the Medium is the Massage (McLuhan 1967) there is a page with quotes from John Cage’s Silence, without a page number in this essentially graphic communication project, where numbers as an aspect of sequential thinking and navigation is substituted by a visual scheme that makes possible the memorizing of each page as a thought map. This is the same John Cage who said there was not a day that passed without him thinking about some aspect of McLuhan’s insight. This is one of John Cage’s insights McLuhan includes: “Theater takes place all the time, wherever one is, and art simply facilitates persuading one that this is the case.” (McLuhan 1967)
The initial motivation that began the genesis of kioskxiaomaibu was informed by the personal experience of how media reporting on China during 2003-2009 effectively pre-empted dialogue and thus prevented theatre in the Cagean sense. Though I refer to UK media or German media, I am generally considering the phenomenon of a superimposed narrative. (See also Gebauer, S.’The Portrayal of China in German Media’). Further research led to the phenomenon of visual objectification on TV, which constructs ‘the illusion that one can fully grasp the truth of a place’ (Pelletier. 1994: 190). By the first decade of the 21st century, technology offered an antidote, the screen could now speak back and this was the space ‚ kioskxiaomaibu facilitated and explored. This space shifts the viewing perspective from one of ‚distinction....to one of distance’ (Jullien. 2011: 27) and opens up a space described as divergence by Sinologist and philosopher Francois Jullien. Divergence, Jullien, argues, is not the difference of identity but rather a liminal space that is bereft of words and multiperspectival. An encounter with the mix of ignorance and situated knowledge (rather than a not knowing) that inadvertently takes hold of our perceptions (colonises perception) allows the ordinary to cause moments of wonder, of awe and serenity: moments defined as affects by human geographer John Wylie and anthropologist Kathleen Stewart.
In contrast to TV, Skype allowed participants to relate and exchange rather than be consumers of a filtered version of what is Germany or China. The weekly links facilitated by ‘kioskxiaomaibu’ were not structured in any way other than by a time frame and below are three observations in particular that were taken taken further in subsequent projects. The first observation on the first link provided evidence that very simple questions can cause sudden dynamic surges:
Fig. 1-2: ‘In Germany, do you have sausages?’: Shanghai–Cologne (2010-05-01).
A further discovery when looking through the archive were frequent instances of synchronicity of movement as shown in figure 3
Fig. 3: Example of synchronicity of movement: Shanghai–Cologne (2010).
and finally, records of instances of serendipitous moments as shown here, where two carpenters come to a kiosk at the same time and at opposite ends of the world.
Fig. 4: Two carpenters meet by chance, Shanghai–Cologne (2010).In the subsequent project ‘Through the Looking Glass’ (2011), a one-week event held simultaneously in Cologne, Shanghai and Istanbul, the concept of chorography guided the composition of the event. In chorography all meanings are used and the personal, popular and expert are mixed.
Through the Looking Glass provided an indoor and an outdoor stage. Indoors, an installation marked out the ground floor of a ‘lilong’, a low-rise walled housing pattern typical of Shanghai. It consists of 100 to 300 houses with numerous lanes (Qian Guan, 1996). This provided a stage in the form of a tableaux vivant for visitors to enter. These settings recreated a TV scenario, but what was shown were artist made videos about daily life in the respective cities.
Fig. 5: Installation, DQE, Cologne (2011).
Outdoors, there were daily live Skype calls between shops, studios, offices and workspaces in Cologne, Istanbul and Shanghai.
Additionally video-recordings of crafts like hairdressing, massage and cooking were displayed in shop windows in a street in Cologne.
Fig. 7-8: Hairdressing (2011)
‘Similar to the landscape painter, who composes visual information on a flat plane, a chorographer composes information and narrative in different media to present his/her interpretation of a specific place. By contrasting neighbourhoods live, the artistic objective of the Looking Glass project was to show unique and simple aspects of each neighbourhood. The driving question was: how can place, community and locality be conveyed beyond the limits of language and geography? How can taste, touch, smell, habit: the texture of daily life be communicated across culture?’ (Johnson/Blodau-Konick. 2011: 1)
Chorography addresses an affective body, it contextualizes life lived: life that affects and is affected by small events that can cause a ripple in an individual’s life and their immediate environment.
By linking workshops and studios, the focus of the Skype calls had moved beyond an exchange in form of conversations to an exchange of gestures through the demonstrations of making things. This indoor/outdoor event was furthermore informed by research into the relationship between labyrinth and theatre in Greek culture and led to the present practice ‘walk with me’.
As mentioned at the beginning of this paper, this experimental public art practice originates in the intention to produce the kind of awareness that reveals the texture of everyday life, and makes visible the invisible realities of social fabric as well as finding, or making, a place for looking again at material culture. ‘walk with me’ set out to work with an application designed by the Fraunhofer Institute. However, at this point in 2012, the technology available was too prescriptive, thereby instrumentalising both artist and participant. ‘walk with me’ is first of all informed by contact improvisation and takes the participants into a poetic exchange with our environment. As in contact improvisation we are stepping out of the ‘here and now’ into elsewheres with a partner through sharing rhythms. Furthermore ‘walk with me’ addresses gesture and line: the lines on maps we turn into experiences when walking and the lines made by writing in response to simple questions that filter our experiences.
Now in 2014/5, only two years later, technology has advanced and like Skype back in 2010, ‘wechat’ has now become a common form of communication (in China) and offers features like a slight time deferral as well as a choice of text, sound, video and camera. In one of the projects planned within the context of This is NOT a Kiosk participants are invited to work within a tightly choreographed structure, which consists of routes in different cities with equidistant points at which a range of prompts filter the walkers’ perception of the everyday. By using 'we chat' and projections (info screens in public spaces) participants can not only interact with each other whilst walking along a route simultaneously in different cities but also share and interact with an incidental audience that can observe as well as react to the process of the walk thereby juxtaposing the immersive experience of two prescribed routes in different cities (one of which will be known to the incidental audience) with an observers experience of the street filtered as it is by the intimate lenses of the walkers. The walkers are free to choose between video, photo, text and audio as and when they see fit. The incidental audience witnesses a witnessed world of little presences both in a familiar environment (their own city) and an unfamiliar environment. By attending to difference the scripts that shape our divergent relation with the world become visible. At the core of this practice is an enquiry into how new strategies for citizen’s engagement can emerge through the use of communication tools: tools that have the power to create contexts for dialogue that are in themselves new spaces.
This experimental public art practice continues in This is NOT a Kiosk. The inclusion of NOT refers to the intention to revisit the work as a starting point for new work in a cooperative process where artists from the UK, China and Germany engage with these processes and include the use of a gallery setting to instigate conversations and dialogue that looks ahead to a future work that may or may not have anything to do with a kiosk. This revisiting will begin as a “stock take” and the publishing of a digital inventory of what has survived in the form of documentation and objects present in the timeline of the sequence of events that took place in 2010-11. Whilst these gallery based installations and exchanges are not intended to be a sequence of retrospectives, they will clearly include a retrospective process essential to fulfilling the project ambition. As already stated in this paper the curatorial method supports the curatorial purpose; to use the kioskxiaomaibu and Through the Looking Glass archive and the re-collecting process to see how we are able to articulate and communicate to a wider audience the methods employed in this type of experimental public art practice. Even though this project includes a move back into the gallery setting the intention is to transform these gallery settings into something that functions in the way public space works in the Kiosk situation. Through the process of sharing and opening up this work with the cooperative activity of specific creative communities it will be these gallery settings that will allowsthis process of looking again to happen and instigate new beginnings. So, let’s see what happens.
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