Using New York City’s Times Square as the location for my psychogeographical walk, I wanted the location to dictate an integral component of the walk. The walk consists of me crossing the street eight times at an intersection in the heart of the Times Square spectacle. I arrived at eight times by turning the name “Times Square” into the mathematical equation of 2 x 22 = 8 or “two times two squared equals eight.” This mathematical and linguistic pun determined the parameters of my walk during which I captured the ephemeral tourists that constructed the ambiance of time and this hyper-real environment assembled to promote consumerism.

Garden Crawl
four-channel split screen, color, sound
2006, 14 min.

On Saturday, June 24, 2006, I performed a psychogeographical crawl titled Garden Crawl through the Green Thumb public garden in the East Village for Allied Production’s Le Petit Versailles (New York, NY).This performance was similar to my previous performances in which I use the city as a fluid canvas documenting (wearing video cameras attached to my person) the landscape and ephemeral characters that construct the ambiance of place and time. However this time somewhere between a crawl and slither, I captured the minute environments and nuances of the garden. For approximately fourteen minutes, wearing four video cameras, I moved around the garden recording the subtleties, flora, and foot traffic. Lowering myself to the garden’s perspective, altering my usual state of movement, I captured an unedited glimpse of the subtly ever-changing minutes of life in the garden. While green space is a rare commodity in New York City, this perspective gives the garden a greater sense of scale. By negating the face-to-face encounters with garden visitors and capturing only their foot patterns, the video footage emphasizes the ephemerality of existence. 

Labor
four-channel split screen, color, sound
2006, 14:39 min.

For five days Monday through Friday beginning at 4:30 pm, I rolled out a spool of denim fabric that span roughly a block and a half and then rolled the fabric back up. Playing off of the concept of the red carpet, I used denim to connote quotidian labor rather than bourgeois excess. Interested in the idea of work and play in my art making, I wanted to physically engage in an exercise that blurred the two concepts. The video footage illustrates only the labor of the rolling, while the results of my labor are left to the imagination. Purposely, only the undulating form is captured to show the constant flux, insinuating that progress is never made. Blurring the political and poetic, I labor this traditionally plebeian material into a poetic line in the streetscape.

Concrete Intervention
two-channel split screen, color, sound
2003, 9:30 min.

ROBERT LADISLAS DERR

www.portfolios.com/rlderr

It can be said that I put myself literally in the center of a barrage of questions about life and making art. My videos are derived through intersubjective exercises and psychogeographical walk performances. Performing for the video camera in site-specific or staged environments, my exercises provide polysemous interpretations as I draw on historical antecedents to manifest a collection of ideas through ontological acts.

During psychogeographical walk performances, I use the city as a fluid canvas documenting (wearing video cameras) the landscape and ephemeral characters that construct the ambiance of place and
time. My own predetermined parameters, gallery viewers, or descriptions in a book or poem map the performances. Capturing the views around my being, the video cameras record my journey,
while also creating both my absence and presence. At the center of these mediated devices, I am void to the second-generation viewer but present through the arrhythmia in the video.

I have performed and exhibited throughout the United States and abroad at such venues as the Irish Film Institute (Dublin, Ireland), Art Interactive (Boston, MA), and DiVA Festival (New York, NY). The
recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, I am currently an assistant professor of photography at The Ohio State University (Columbus, OH). I received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of
Design.