 SEASON I Program 01 15.10.05 Program 02 22.10.05 Program 03 29.10.05 Program 04 05.11.05 Program 05 12.11.05 Program 06 19.11.05 Program 07 26.11.05 Program 08 03.12.05 Program 09 10.12.05 Program 10 17.12.05 Program 11 25.12.05 Program 12 07.01.06 Program 13 14.01.06 Program 14 21.01.06 Program 15 28.01.06 Program 16 04.02.06 Program 17 11.02.06 Program 18 18.02.06 Program 19 25.02.06 Program 20 04.03.06 Program 21 11.03.06 Program 22 18.03.06 Program 23 25.03.06 Program 24 01.04.06 Program 25 08.04.06 Program 26 15.04.06 Program 27 22.04.06 Program 28 29.04.06
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Program 1 October 14, 2006
The psycho-geographical walks and beyond: the works of Robert Ladislas Derr 2 x 22 = 8 (Times Square) 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 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.
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 Continuing my psychogeographical studies, I found a group of concrete culverts laying side-by-side in rows in the median of a four-lane road. This time, I crawl continuously circling through two of the side-by-side culverts. Watching the two videos in tandem, the viewer is reminded that no one lives independently of the environment. The two videos of the same act in two separate but identical culverts illustrate the monotony of daily life. While none of our daily events are exactly the same, the geographical environment renders them a shared collective. |
2 x 22 = 8 (Times Square)
Garden Crawl
Labor
Concrete Intervention