The walk replaced the zoom-in function of a photo lens by going from the original point of view to the center of the captured image. At the target point (which happened to be a warning sign), the originally seen image was attached as a photo. In this way, the starting point and the point of destination met in the same image, just as an experience when setting up of lenses: being able to take several viewing positions in the same time without changing one’s own geographical position.
Art Walk is a genre which no product creates, but a unique individual experience. An adequate representation of such experience is only conditionally possible. Photography is a medium that traditionally represents an individual experience. Zoom-in Walk is a project that reflects the interaction of a walk with the camera documenting it. Therefore, this installation is not an after-the-fact documentation of a walk, but an authentic form that represents a progression from the first image to the last one.
Participants:Participants of the Art Walks workshop at the Macherei, Evangelische Johannesstift Diakonie / Berlin.|Duration:2 hours each|Language:German|Equipment:Smartphone Redmi 9, Derive App, mobile Internet|Time:10:00 am|
Subtitle:Radical Reorganization of Spaces According to Guy Debord's Theory of Derive|
Duration:4 Days, 2 hours each|Language:German|Equipment:Photocopier, printing paper A4, scissors, paper paste|
Four participants made the photocopies of the building emergency evacuation plan, cut it in small pieces and glued them together in a different order. The original and the new version were hung side by side.
Production:Die Macherei Johannesstift Diakonie, Proclusio GmbH Berlin / Germany|
Along the Fence
One of three participants guides the group along his usual route, which runs (due to his short memory disorder and his visual impairment with his right eye) counter-clockwise along the fence of Johannesstift. So he can always see with his seeing left eye the fence around area and arrive at the starting point of his walk, closing the circle.
Misleading
Duration:2 hours|Participants:Depending on, between 2 and 6 participants of Macherei at Johannesstift Diakonie Proclusio gGmbH. All are people with various forms of disability, from physical to cognitive.|Language:German|Equipment:Smartphone Xiaomi Redmi 9, WiFi, Komoot App|
Participants were guided for two hours by a person who is visually impaired and uses a wheelchair.
cut-up.city
Participants:2 students (architecture and art), both female, age-range 25 – 30.|Duration:2 days|Language:German, English, Russian|Equipment:laptop, camera, smartphone with mobile internet, box cutter, backpack, bicycle;|Requirements:Participants had to register with the festival project coordinators. They needed to be 18+ and willing to accept liability for their illegal actions during the workshop.|
INTRODUCTION
The workshop “Naked City” was developed as a side project during the CityLeaks Festival where I exhibited my adbusting project “Iconoclash”. The workshop was about the critical issue of commercial postering in Cologne’s Ehrenfeld neighbourhood along the lines of Guy Debord’s “Naked City”. During the workshop, we looked at the Cologne city map (similar to Debord’s Paris city map) as an advertising poster and, instead of re-doing Debord’s collage, we created a political poster from scavenged fragments of advertising posters.
The workshop consisted of a theoretical and a practical part. The theoretical part examined such conceptual linkages as: artist – passer-by, guiding – misleading, advertising – adbusting. I gave a short overview of art practices, artists and theorists, as well as of my own work, in which I elevate the status of the term “passer-by” from flâneur to artist. The practical part was a collective intervention, where we pieced together a political poster out of advertising poster fragments we collected ourselves, both physically as an illegal activity in the urban space as well as digitally on a specially-designed website.
The aim of the workshop was to link Debord’s dérive with Kalle Lasn’s adbusting and to come up with some examples of new artistic strategies.
WORKSHOP PROGRAM
Day one, August 24, 2019 / 11AM-2PM
Day one began with an art history introduction to the workshop title “Naked City”. Then I gave a short retrospective summary from Situationist International on to Décollage, then to Adbusters and finally Santiago Sierra. We covered: (artists) Weegee, Brion Gysin, Situationist International, Asger Jorn, Guy Debord, Raymond Hains, Jacques de la Villeglé, Santiago Sierra, (books) Karen O’Rourke “Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers”, Guy Debord “The Society of the Spectacle”, Guy Debord “Theory of Derive”, Naomi Klein “No Logo”, Kalle Lasn “Culture Jamming. The Manifesto of Anti-advertising”, (films) Jules Dassin “Naked City”.
To conclude the theoretical part, I presented four of my own projects (The Luminous Box, Open Power, Film Noir, Iconoclash), which were relevant to the themes covered in our workshop.
By the end of the day, we were busy preparing for the intervention on the next day. I presented a website that I had designed together with a colleague, which would be a digital tool for our intervention. The website (under the working title recut.city) displayed a Google map of the Ehrenfeld neighbourhood. A billboard-icon in the middle marked the geo-position where our poster collage would be. The location was a broad concrete wall at the intersection of Liebig and Subbelrather street, at a railway underpass. The wall was regularly used as a rental space for small-format advertising posters. Our poster would be placed illegally at this location on the next morning.
The participants spent the rest of their evening picking out advertising posters in the Ehrenfeld area which personally affronted them in terms of content. Their task was to tear a piece off the posters. They photo-documented the vandalised posters and recorded GPS coordinates for our Google map. All accumulated fragments were to become part of the political poster planned for the next day.
The basic idea behind Debord’s “Naked City” is an invitation to critically evaluate linear, authoritarian urbanism. Debord cut a regular Parisian city map into small pieces and created a non-linear city map by putting the snippets back together in random order. The new map created a completely different concept of movement through the city with alternative routes, connections and, most importantly, a new perspective on urban space in general. His non-linear map embodied the idea of dérive. Dérive means allowing oneself to drift aimlessly through the urban landscape rather than following a pre-planned route to a set destination. This involves avoiding the main roads, orienting oneself towards distinctive features and tourist attractions, yet moving where one has never been before, not being afraid of getting lost or wasting time. The title “Naked City” was borrowed from Weegee (Arthur Fellig), US-American photojournalist. In his photobook, he showed New York’s social hotspots in the 1930s and 40s. By “Naked City” he meant “exposed, revealed, unmasked city”.
Kalle Lasn, Canadian filmmaker and political activist, founder of Adbusters magazine, likes to quote Guy Debord in his manifesto “Culture Jamming“. His critical focus shifts between themes of urbanism and architecture and themes of “commercialization of urban space through advertising and loss of public spaces”. He points out that the entire contemporary urban landscape has been degraded to a huge advertising surface by total commercial billposting of human living space and calls for radical protest. By adbusting he means a strategy of misappropriation, where advertising content is transformed in such a way that it ultimately becomes its own opposite, anti-advertising. In this way, former advertisement becomes a political poster, which should lead to the reappropriation of public spaces.
The workshop was an effort to revive both Debord and Lasn’s discourses within the local context of Cologne’s Ehrenfeld neighbourhood. It was not difficult: the advertising on Ehrenfeld’s streets is in fact so aggressive that one can easily talk about blanket billposting of the entire city landscape.
Day two, August 25, 2019, 11AM-6PM
Participants brought the poster snippets they had torn down the previous evening to the workshop the next morning. We started the day by assigning each fragment a QR code. The QR codes link each of the snippets to a corresponding page on recut.city. These pages were created by the participants themselves by uploading their photos and writing accompanying descriptions for each particular fragment. In total we had 17 fragments, which meant 17 QR codes, 17 web pages, 17 photos and 17 write-ups. The write-ups were very unique! We had short emotional exclamations, poems and little essays, all in four different languages: German, Russian, English and Spanish. Each new entry on the map was marked with a box cutter icon.
As soon as the content was online, we could finally start working on our political poster. First, we assembled the collage on the floor to see how it looked, then we brought the pieces to the wall and pasted them there. Next, each fragment was outfitted with its own QR code. Finally, we uploaded a photo of the finished poster to the website. Although the poster seemed abstract, but it was actually very concrete: through the QR-codes, each fragment of the collage pointed to a corresponding personal statement from the participants and so the poster was highly purposeful.
While Debord took the Paris city map under the scissors, the workshop participants cut along and across the entire Ehrenfeld advertising landscape. They collaged the snippets of destroyed advertising posters just as freely as Debord randomly collaged the snippets of the Paris city map. While Debord thereby created a graphic dérive manifesto, the workshop participants produced an anti-advertising poster. While Debord’s “Naked City” map created a walking route, our “Naked City” poster created ad-tracking.
Similar to the Iconoclash project, we transformed a commercial poster into a political poster, rejecting the commercialisation of the visual domain.
The poster was removed by unknown people the next day, August 26, 2019. Although the poster could only be seen live for a day, its digital image “hangs” online for an eternity. The website also remains online as a digital tool for public commentary on urban advertising. This tool may continue to be used worldwide.
Camera:Andrey Ustinov|Web Development:Yuri Popov|Production:CityLeaks Festival|Special thanks to:Georg Barringhaus, Olga Funk|
(dis)appointment
Participants:8 - 12 students of the arts, design, architecture and culture studies. Age range 20 - 35. No particular skills were required, just the will to move and act within the city space. Everyone had a smartphone, iPad or laptop with mobile internet, a long-life battery, and robust footwear.|Duration:4 days|Language:English|Equipment:Smartphone (Android / Apple)|Software:debord app (Possible Rendezvous App)|Requirements:The workshop was free of charge, but spaces were limited. Candidates applied via email @ WRO Center and had to be 18+|
INTRODUCTION
The (dis)appointment workshop was about art practices involving the physical and psychological experience of walking, subjective perception of city spaces and digital mapping based on the outcomes of those experiences. The main topics we covered were: the city as a space for deception, disappointment, danger, failure, and being lost and frustrated; urban spaces as a projection plane for dystopian imaginings.
The workshop consisted of theoretical and practical components. The theoretical part involved a brief introduction to the history of walking performance and art mapping as well as examples from the history of contemporary art as it relates to my own work. The practical part of the workshop was a walking performance which we developed together on days two and three. I introduced a mobile application called “Possible Rendezvous” which I am currently further developing with my colleagues. We used this app for the performance on day three.
The goal of the workshop was to learn about situative and walking practices in contemporary art as well as to deepen reflection of the situations generated in the urban landscape and to get the participants actively involved in performance.
WORKSHOP PROGRAM
Day one, November 17, 2017 / 5PM–7PM
We covered the theoretical basics which included a very brief introduction to the history of walking performance, art mapping and situationism, touching on key terms like Lettrism, dérive and psychogeography, as well as artists and theorists like Asgern Jorn, Constant, Santiago Sierra, Kollektivnye Deystviya, Heath Bunting, Janet Cardiff, Richard Long, Tehching Hsieh, Francis Alys; (film-makers) Jules Dassin, Patrick Keiller, John Rogers; (authors) Guy Debord, Henri Lefebvre, Karen O’Rourke, Edward Dimendberg. We also got into the technical aspects of mapping (tools, equipment, devices, software etc.).
I presented three of my own related projects (The Luminous Box, Open Power, Film Noir); And lastly we covered some technical aspects of mapping: equipment, electronic devices, GPS recorders, smartphones, cameras, audio recorders, laser digital distance measuring equipment and classic devices like compasses; Software & Online Platforms: WordPress, Google Maps, Google Earth, Scribble Maps, Open Street Map, Photoshop and Illustrator.
Day two, November 18, 2017 / 10AM-12PM
The second day was devoted to preparations for the performance on the third day. The day began at WRO Center, where I introduced the demo version of my “Possible Rendezvous” app.
The demo version was the main tool for the collective performance which took place on day three. The demo version was not designed as a mobile app, but rather a web app. That meant it only worked over a web browser. It had few downsides, which I corrected in the final app version. One of the main disadvantages was that the users were constantly dependent on fast internet connection and needed external power. A web app doesn’t secure users’ privacy and personal data as reliably as a mobile app would. Still, the web app was fine for a demo-run. For the demo-run on day two, I limited the rendezvous area to up to 1km2 around the WRO Center (downtown Wroclaw). The participants only had one hour to get to their rendezvous locations. To help them recognise each other on-site, the participants wore paper masks shaped as a red location marker.
The demo-run went like this: Two matches met their appointments and two matches did not (they were (dis)appointed). Also, one person refused to participate in the demo. One of the successful rendezvous took place on the fire escape in the courtyard of an apartment building, and the second one – on a big square with public wifi which was important because of the need for internet connection. One rendezvous failed because of a software bug (one of participants got the wrong GPS coordinates), and the second fail was because the participants gave up (they were close to each other, but one of them turned back without waiting for their match).
After the demo-run we had a re-grouping at the WRO Center, where the participants could share their experiences and clarify any questions regarding the upcoming performance on the following day. By midnight, all participants received their invitations for their next rendezvous. The WRO Art Center promoted the “Possible Rendezvous” performance to their local contacts in order to engage as many participants as possible. Thanks to them, we had about 25 registered users on the “Possible Rendezvous” website.
Day three, November 19, 2017 / all day
This was performance day: Each participant arranged their appointments using the app. Our performance started at midnight. The rendezvous area had been extended to encompass the entire city of Wroclaw plus surrounding areas, a square around the city approx. 400 km2, and the time-frame was extended to 24 hours beginning and ending at midnight. Throughout the 24-hour period, participants attempted to reach their meeting places at the appointed times. The software sent 12 rendezvous invitations to 25 registered users. Because we had an odd number of participants, we had to make somebody a joker. The joker got an invitation to all of the appointments and got to choose which one(s) they kept, if any.
Chosen blind and randomly, the rendezvous invitations were completely inappropriate time-place combinations. None of the participants was able to complete their journey, and so there were no rendezvous. Nevertheless, everyone was charged with experiences which they were eager to share.
Day four, November 20, 2017 / 5PM–7PM
This was the final meeting with all the participants, devoted to reporting on the rendezvous and giving feedback about the workshop in general.
99% of the rendezvous failed because of participants’ inability to reach their destinations, 1% failed because of a software bug. Two rendezvous were actually kept by one participant each, but the second participants either didn’t dare to set off for the rendezvous at all or returned midway without reaching their meeting places. There was one rendezvous where both participants reached their meeting place, but because of a software bug they were there at different times. The joker ignored the invitations. Those who accepted their invitations and managed to be at their rendezvous places on time couldn’t contain their stories. Of course, it was frustrating to have had to overcome such obstacles, but they were really excited about everything they experienced.
One female participant, a 22-year-old art student, received an invitation to a rendezvous shortly before 6AM in a distant suburban area at the edge of an industrial dump. She took her boyfriend with her for her safety. They had to take two busses, but for the most part, they had to walk through suburban areas in the morning twilight without roads or pathways. The whole journey took nearly 1,5 hours but they still got to the place on time. The couple waited there for over an hour. Unfortunately, her rendezvous partner decided to stay home. The couple took lots of smartphone photos to document their entire journey. This participant had a very long and humours story to tell, filled with details that came across like pictures themselves. Her missing rendezvous partner (a 24-year-old design student) was present at the re-grouping and enjoyed listening to her story. She apologised for not having been there. She explained that she decided not to come mainly because of the inconvenient location and time, but also because she worried about her safety.
The other participant who kept her rendezvous was also a female participant, a 25-year-old architecture student. Her rendezvous was at 10:30PM. The location was also in a distant suburban area, near a railway. She came alone and waited about an hour for her match. She waited in darkness holding a marker mask in front of her face along the railway that was occasionally illuminated by trains passing by. She took a few smartphone photos to document her experience. Her rendezvous partner didn’t come either. This participant was also present at the re-grouping on day four, and he listened to her report with regret because he didn’t make it to the rendezvous. The 26-year-old architecture student had started to go to the rendezvous location but turned back midway because he doubted that his rendezvous partner would make it that far.
I also participated on day three. I was invited to rendezvous at 7:45AM in a distant suburban area, a former soviet military base that seemed to be informally used for car racing. Public transit wasn’t available that early, so I had to walk the entire way. I was almost there, but shortly before finding the exact location, my phone died, so I lost my GPS coordinates and couldn’t get to the exact meeting place. I masked my face and wandered around, hoping to be recognised by my rendezvous partner. I met a group of men trying to pull an expensive car out of a ditch. I shouted “Possible Rendezvous”! They ignored me. I asked them in English if they had seen somebody with a similar mask around. They didn’t speak English and asked me something I didn’t understand, a mix of Polish and English, and pointed somewhere in the forest. I figured they were showing me where they had spotted my masked rendezvous partner. When one of them invited me into his racing car, I hopped aboard, hoping to be driven to the rendezvous place. It was a fatal misunderstanding. This guy just wanted to show off his great racing car in all its glory. We raced for half an hour on steep forest trails, falling into ravines and soaring over hills, twirling around the trees. The crazy driver was shouting in Polish and laughing while I was vainly trying to explain myself. Finally, he let me out of the car and disappeared. I was alone in a completely different unknown place and without my smartphone, I had officially lost my orientation. What I didn’t know then was that a glitch in the system had generated my rendezvous partner a meeting time for 5PM. My rendezvous partner, a 30-year-old curator, got to the location on time, but of course, I was long gone. She needed less time to get to the meeting place because public transit was running by that time. The right spot turned out to be just before the racetrack, so she didn’t have the pleasure of an adventure ride like I had had. She simply walked through boring deserted suburban areas, waited for me for a while, wondered if she got the right place and eventually went home disappointed. I took many photos with my NIKON while I was walking to the place. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to document my forest race because I was too shocked and had to hold on for dear life!
I didn’t have the chance to meet all of the 25 registered users. Four participants who didn’t take part in the performance still showed up for the wrap-up on the final day. For the most part, they were inspired by the “Possible Rendezvous” idea. After everyone had given their accounts, they offered me some constructive feedback regarding further development of the app. The WRO Center workers enjoyed hearing about all of our adventures and concluded by saying “thank you for showing us our own city!”
Camera:Ina Valentinova, Katarzyna Rębisz|Web Development:Yuri Popov|Special thanks to:Magdalena Kreis & WRO Art Center|
