Mobela_C_in_the_making
Mobela C
This new work will soon be shown 2009 in Beijing at the Art Channel Gallery. In this project, the user could extract a series of descriptive stories about the different parts of the city of Abadyl in English and Mandarin. The voices an explored by moving two RFID readers over a map with mark-out points with the titles of the subject of exploration.
I worked with students from WAB and Beijing and some local representatives from the local community were the Art Channel is located. The table was made in one of the furniture shops nearby my home, which also made the Mobela_b that host the city of abadyl database.
In this work, I paired some of the writers that inspired me over the years into shaping the framework of the city. The idea was to take the authors in small groups for a walk in Abadyl and listen to what they had to say and the one´s who finally made it was: Alexander/Venturi, de Certeau/Calvino, Wallenstein/de Botton, Taylor/Mankiewicz, Damasio/Cambell, Baudrillard/Koolhaas, Auster/Manovich, Davis/Hoffmeyer, and Sorkin/Söderberg. Here are some quotes from the seven constructors of Abadyl:
1.Pinpoint (a text that delft with the mapping of space and time in real and fictional spaces)
– You see, writings and especially literature has us experience space and place in myriad ways that have little to do with real space.
– So there is not much correlation between writing about activities in space and then trying to recreate them in a factual way. It is like when you try to be on two different locations at the same time, it is the logistics of hell.
– Sometimes mapping these worlds can be a waste of time and miss the point of creating maps. Literature of all kinds has so many things to tell us about space and place, but the things it has to communicate are not necessarily of the sort that lends itself to cartographic representation.
– In a book people can talk for ten minutes going down a stairway, which in real life takes about 25 seconds.
4. The planners (a text about constructing spaces of surprise)
– Most of all I have been frequently occupied with architecture and buildings as objects. In other words, my notion of theory has not been there to explain or analyze these objects but to face architecture – the theory and the built environment in a frontal collision, like trains on the same track, in opposing directions.
– Facing the building, the theory should explode, it has to explode, it has to blast, blow up. The same strategy I assume in relation to other theories, intellectual suppositions, ideas. I regard them also as objects, try to lash out to them – more or less as like when you try to hit and extract certain particles in an atom smasher.
7. The walkers (a text about the Flaneur)
-To provoke the perspectives imagined by the urbanists, city planners, painters, and cartographers. Establish a blind practice that is foreign to the geometrical or geographical space of both visual and theoretical construction.
-The art and act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language. Where bodies follow the thick and thin of an urban text.
-Walking is like writing and never be able to read it. And by walking the streets of a city one shapes and share the narration that creates humanity.