Intersecting travelogues:  Wandering through practices and archaeologies of space, place and image.

Paul Landon

This exposition presents the moving image elements of the doctoral thesis Intersecting travelogues: Wandering through practices and archaeologies of space, place and image. The text of the thesis is built around an artistic practice that explores architectural and urban space, an exploration that is translated into time based images installed within and responding to interior architectural exhibition spaces. The space of the city and its architectures are scrutinised through their seemingly insignificant details: abandoned or underused buildings, older model cars, deserted streets, details that resonate as markers of changing and forgetting. The work reconsiders recent concepts of media history and archaeology and relates them to specific questions raised by contemporary artistic practice: to the architectures and spaces of audio-visual presentation, to an archaeology of the city, to the mobile spectator of minimal art and installation practices as it engages with the redeployment of urban space through projection technologies, text and image. It promotes the activities of a corporeal, wandering subject that engages with the spaces of media as sites of forgetting and recall. The text is structured as a collection of wanderings that are organised into six chapters each presenting experiences of different places visited and the ensuing reflections that these visits spawned. To wander, in the ways in which it is presented in this work, engages with a fragmentary process of seeking out and coming across sites and subjects of enquiry. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, urban wandering entails the use of haptic perception and awareness of the city’s intrinsic details in order to lose oneself in it. Wandering informs and structures the text in terms of instances of arriving in unknown and distant locations as well as of getting lost in a familiar city.

Automat

2010, Colour anamorphic widescreen video, NTSC, stereo, 9:00 minutes.

A static shot of people entering and leaving a building lobby that houses automatic banking machines. The opening and closing of the doors provides the rhythmical structure, the score, for the video. The sounds captured during the recording of the images are played back, synchronised with the video. Inserted over the ambient soundtrack is the sound of chimes. The chimes correspond with the opening and closing of both sets of automatic doors.

Exhibited at Galleria FAFA, Helsinki, Finland, July 2010.

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