unmakings

For the next few weeks, I'm working on projections for my installation in New Orleans, a collaboration with Kira Akerman, called Amending, its for the biennial art festival called Prospect 2.

Our proposal:
Amending is an outdoor animation projected onto the facade of an old building, the former home of Promenade Fabrics in the former Garment District. Amending clothes this facade to reveal its liveliness: an intricate landscape of textile structures and tangled string. Amending is a meditation on our disposable society, and the disconnection of the process of construction from product. Amending is a collaboration by artists Silvie Deutsch and Kira Akerman. It will play on loop for the first week of Prospect 2.

Now we are envisioning sculptural elements as well as projection. The installation will be at an art space called Zeigeist. We are still deciding whether or not to project on an outdoor wall or an indoor wall.

My next 3 weeks leading up to going to New Orleans to do the installation is fairly unstructured, and I'm coming up with a system so I can insure I get a lot of work done. I am going to make a loose video experiment everyday.

More video ideas to try later:
-overlapping 2 different knitting videos
-dipping a woven piece in wax, like a network of wicks, and watching it burn/melt
-unknitting found textiles
-burning/unburning holes in a woven structure
-dripping water onto something-- paper? or some sort of disintegrating substance
-melting / unmelting shaved ice. I was thinking last night about making an animation of something slowly disintegrating as it gets wet, and then reversing the footage. what are other things that melt/disintegrate when they get wet?

-Water--some shots of water, but maybe make it abstracted from itself so you arent so sure its water.

-i want to make a tunnel / ruth asawa inspired tube unravel video. that appears to go into the wall. but i dont really know how i will do this. i wish i knew how to do computer generated animation, but i think i'm relegated to the stop motion and my housemate has a little flip video that makes low definition videos also. there are ruth asawa's pieces at de young where i was the other day. i was struck by the shadows they cast, the fact that they are static but still vibrate with the intricate repetition that went into making them. i imagine the tunnel knitting video to look a bit like one of her pieces but if you were to turn it on its size and look right into it, like a telescope. i dont know how i would make this video but i really hope i can.

Now I'm just jotting down ideas from the various emails and notebooks they have ended up in, so they can be in one place:

-organic forms
-knitting / unraveling
-relating my videos to the cellular / biological / heart. i like when there is more to what you see than what you are seeing. like there are more interpretations people could have depending on their viewpoint /background / interests.
-beauty in flaws, unraveling, breaking, wabi sabi
-highlighting / showcasing the places where things break, are asymmetrical, imperfect.
-recording peoples conversations.
- recording the river
-lace would cast amazing shadows. i think we can dictate the mood by dark lighting, video is conducive to being quiet, as are sound pieces. maybe we dont have drinks and snacks there at all? i dont want it to be a mingling art show in the traditional sense either.

-gentrification of objects, trash-to-spectacle, history of space/objects of labor
-Cusp of change: feeling of contingency. the fragility of the threads being broken, Thread, pitter patter, build up, recede.
gentrification-- something attaining more value. This reminds me of those bails of clothes sent to Africa, the losing team t-shirts for the super bowl or whatever... a sweater from barney's in a thrift store (thats the opposite of gentrification), finding something that is trash and making it spectacle-- that is the gentrification of objects.
-Blown apart / simultaneously contained world.
-we begin gathering things from the streets, from people, friends. imagine them hung from transparent wires from the ceiling, all at different intervals, giving the appearance of a rauschenberg piece or dumpster or shit-shack that has exploded into lots of little pieces. objects, material, some organic, some commercial, some whole, some broken. there is an unraveling video / water video on the brick wall, the wall looks alive, maybe this wall is a tunnel of fibers penetrating the wall, going through it. there is also a projection on the floor, textile energy, that will hit both the floor, the people in the space, their clothes, the objects that we suspend in the air. the space is only lit by the projections. the objects-- some are fabric but also just chards of wood, trash, anything we find in the 2 weeks. in my head this stuff is swaying a bit in the air, the air is thick with this blown apart world. and, some of the objects can be very specific to the area, things people would recognize? maybe we use a fan to get it really moving? or maybe the projection itself with its movement and the people in the space will create the movement.

what if there could be projection lapping at the contained detritus like water? like an ebb and flow of magic, the light comes and goes as if it were a whirring lapping shore? a world being blown apart, this is the artist's work i saw the other day that i was excited by: her name is cornelia parker, the piece i saw was called 'anti mass'. parker's work got me thinking about burnt relics of the past, and the history of a specific space. burnt fabric? still interested in playing with burning and wetting fabric.
i also saw this guy bruce conner's work.
i like his aesthetic -- that dirty, stretched, decaying, organic ...

we don't want the installation to look like wall-e's home; im not going for making our own shit shack hoarders episode, but why cant this be a set, like a fabricated environment that people interact with? i also like the idea of participation -- people engaging in the act of the unraveling they see around them. how we make them engage without disturbing the peaceful, quiet, contemplative space?

Just discovered this guy Josh Blackwell.
interesting use of found trash / textile techniques / carelessness with carefulness
- bed sheet windows on the wall being burned/ unburned. or what about real windows? I think using imagery of domesticity is appropriate for this project...
-there is the sound of water, the river, maybe overlayed with found recordings we could make of people in the city as we collect things. violin strings? Environment / sense engage / experience: idea-to-visual image. water sounds. These sounds could be mixed with something else. I keep thinking about violins, possibly just the stringy-ness of them. We could do some found sound recording of the Mississippi river, maybe even people talking on the street. something about recording sound making it possible to freeze/preserve a moment in time and space is really relevant to whats going on here.
-I like the idea of 2 projections, one on the ground/peoples' bodies/clothing, and one on the brick wall. the 2 videos can be in dialogue with each other. we should just fantasize about this environment and then figure out the technical details of how to make it happen, and then we can scale back if necessary. reflection in mirror, found chards, reflection in water? projecting onto people/ clothes. intimacy with textiles, memory of space, history of labor.

- How can we integrate the whole community? It is definitely out of a white box, and maybe if this event were more everyone friendly, less obtuse and art-speaky; non-academic, definitely. how can we make this experience more interactive? i immediately thought of felix gonzalez torres, that guy who put a big pile of candy in a corner and asks you to take from it, or, this flaming lips show i went to once where they had little kids dressed up in animal costumes handing out fudgsicles to the crowd. something about being able to take something small and sweet and free makes things more accessible. and hey, maybe taste could be a sense we activate as well? or we advertise something about the show in our flyer that makes all kinds of people eager to come? a clothing swap? some sort of raffle? sending out kid/everyone friendly invites. bring an object to place in an alter... would people do it? maybe if they got something in exchange... i am imagining a corner of the room as a cascade of forgotten objects like stuffed animals and stuff, kind of piled like felix gonzalez torres candy pile, and there is projection on it of the knitting... kids rolling around in it....

- commercial patterns, im still obsessed.. i do think of them as a map, a map of the body, a map of the labor/directions that go into clothing... you can see why i spent a year just focusing on them. one issue with them is the are so fragile, they need to be backed with something (i used sheer fabric and glue to stiffen them in my thesis.)
-- definitely need to project onto brick wall, so special, but also project onto another surface as well?
-- how high is the ceiling? strings / ropes hanging?
- lights / flickering / candles... projection need darkness, projection creates its own strange light
WATER-have you ever noticed how rarely water looks like water? (abstracted water shots, that maybe dont look like water at first.)

-white water (like in a river, rushing, that could be interesting looking)
-how water sometimes obscures whats in it, like maybe we submerge little objects or things under a little water and that makes it hard to figure out what they are. i like the reveal/conceal thing both in the textile unraveling/raveling and in water submerge/emerge
-both textiles and water have delicate texture, ephemeral structure
-rivers and seams -- converging, attaching, dividing, ripping,
-never seeing the same water twice (in the case of a river, you dont move your eyes yet the water is constantly changing in one spot)

{photos/videos: my own video experiment; ruth asawa's wire sculptures at the de young, cornelia parker's anti mass (2005); bruce connor's snore (1960); one of josh blackwell's plastic baskets; felix gonzales torres' portrait of ross (1991); roni horn's still water (the river thames, for example) - image c (1999)}