Please feel free to:
1. Push and pull the structure along the line of travel (North-South), by yourself or with others.
2. Use the attached phone holder to make a film.
3. Lean on, sit on, and touch the work.
works shown:
(i) This Revolving Door Moves In A Straight Line / Soft Camera C: What's the difference between Rocking and Rolling?
2025-ongoing
(ii) untitled chain
2022-2025
(iii) Political Cartoon (Banned in B.C.)
2025
(iv) Non-Electric Spotlight/Dandy Distance
2025
(v) Natural Disco Ball, Gingham Disco Ball
2025
(vi) Revolving door study, Maastricht
2024
transcript from final presentation:
...
I will begin by reading this excerpt from Jodi Dean’s
Comrade, and essay on Political Belonging (2019):
“…the term comrade predates its use by communists and socialists. In romance languages, comrade first appears in the sixteenth century to designate one who shares a room with another. Juan A. Herrero Brasas cites a Spanish historical-linguistic dictionary’s definition of the term: “Camarada is someone who is so close to another man that he eats and sleeps in the same house with him.” In French, the term was originally feminine,
camarade, and referred to a barracks or room shared by soldiers. Etymologically, comrade derives from camera, the Latin word for room, chamber, and vault. The technical connotation of vault indexes a generic function, the structure that produces a particular space and holds it open. A chamber or room is a repeatable structure that takes its form by producing an inside separate from an outside and providing a supported cover for those underneath it. Sharing a room, sharing a space, generates a closeness, an intensity of feeling and expectation of solidarity that differentiates those on one side from those on the other. Comradeship is a political relation of supported cover.“
...
Now I will read the text I provided when presenting this work in it’s first configuration, during my last group critique:
Soft Camera C: What's the difference between Rocking and Rolling?
This is a work in progress: please look around and interact as you wish, it is the starting point for a new project, and a response to my thesis research. As such can be seen as a new tool that needs to be tested, broken, etc. This structure is the bones of what will be situated in Tent, and has been designed to be flexible, movable, and multi-scale.
The title refers to previous works Soft Camera A & B (not shown), which propose non-digital structures and user interfaces that can contain detailed information about a scene or action. These were made using discarded office supplies. The second part of the title is a nonsense question that activates terms of orientation and movement, while a planting a contradiction in the basic ingredients of rock and roll music.
This work aims to choreograph a shared and self-conscious walking environment, where this basic type of movement can be measured and examined outside of a psycho-geographical context, seeing walking not as the creation of routes and pathways but as the animated state of clothing, physique, attitude; and the interlude between states of work and leisure.
Pushing the work is a prerequisite for having 'seen' it. Please take turns rotating the structure together, being mindful of the safety of others. Feel free to add your own music.
...
How would like to be part of an active audience? How would you like to make a movie with me?
While I read to you, could you please help me pull this machine back and forth in a slow and steady waltz. Treat it like a camera track, and try to follow me, keeping me in the frame. Once I’ve reinvented the wheel, I can try to reinvent the moving image.
This revolving door has been freed from it’s axis of rotation, and we can use it to see and record the world around us.
I make drawings that allow me to collage images and forms, in a way that is more responsive for me than a classic photomontage. This structure, in a similar way is collage not of form but of function, framework, orientation.
Now that we’ve gotten used to pushing and pulling, we can tune into the war drums that are rolling closer and closer on the horizon, try to discern the rhythms and the attitudes. Jan knows something about rhythm and attitude; He can be my Rhythm section, and the rest of you can be the Chorus Girls. A very vital role.
Rocking is a linear motion that remains fixed in one spot. Rolling is a circular motion that moves forward. Rock ’n’ Roll is contentious signifier ascribed to the music of the postwar West, heralding an apparent era of geopolitical peace and psychological war, that now, like the leather jackets that fill up our favourite second hand shops, could be more readily associated with our ageing parents. And as an axis of US soft power.
Rock, and Roll;
Taken as a set of instructions, what kinds of choreography could we make of this?
...