User:Mania/Assesment

What do you want to make?

Fragments is a magazine that is created for reading our cities. I seek ways to open to different experiences, searching for unpredictability and surprises in the city, exciting connections, and interactions with others. This magazine may seem a bit messy, but this messiness in unpredictability can bring unexpected connections. And this is what the act of making this magazine public and publishing it outdoors call for. It seeks to decode the language of the city and by actively existing in public space, it becomes a tool for that, knowing that this act is an unfinished process. The image of the city is ever changing, its never complete.

Fragments is a way to support performative interactions with space

Fragments is a tool to find diffrent ways to navigate our cities

Fragments is an invitation to looking with with curious eyes

Fragments is a search for unpredictability and surprises in the city

Fragments is a place for interactions with others in shared space

Fragments is published intermittently and meant to be read outside

fragments from my notebook

unfolding into a kite

How do you plan to make it?

The first issue dedicated for:

PEOPLE who always carry a notebook

TO SEE the choices in how we move 

IN open spaces

Systems to energize exploration in physical space

public moment

I became intrested in scores, graphical notations. Scores constitute a system of symbols where elements like time, space, rhythm, and their combinations are presented graphically, visualising a process over time and influencing it. Scores allow for the process to constantly evolve.

I’m curious about translating what film works with into a system for exploring physical space.

Film deals with: frames scripts continuity speed time rhythm...

I’m curious to use these elements as tools for decoding the language of the city.

1. Framing

How can movement be visualized and influenced in a graphical form? There is a difference between graphical representation and the action that results from it. But one informs the other.


A zoetrope moves individual frames, animating them into smooth motion. But when I look at it as a flat image, it becomes a graphic representation of that movement over time. It reminds me of musical notation. What if I were to record movement using symbols, similar to a musical staff? Instead of a composition, I could record a walk…

The zoetrope, by animating frames arranged in a circle, plays with continuity and repetition. Similarly, I could write notes on a staff that loops into a circle, suggesting that this segment should be played repeatedly, over and over. By playing with this looping, we could create a notation for a walking choreography where you continually turn only to the right, or only take narrow streets. Frames, continuity, repetition.

2. Playing with speed, time, sequence

walk with a chair

Between an object and the event

inspired by "The house of dust" by Alison Knowles

- magazine being something between an object and an event

- workshop format to create content together or to activate existing publication

- Another method could be a group walk. I’m planning to dive deeper into situationists approach in order to find methods for playful encounters and interventions to design format for the magazine to exist also outside.

- I’m planning to organise a workshop in De Boog to make a publication that doesnt just depict the surroundings how I see them but engages readers in experiencing and reinterprating them.

- Colloquium - as an oppurtnity to test paper based tools.

Tools we made during my colloquium

A TOOL

FOR people who get lost in their thoughts

            TO SEE the absurdity

                  IN open space

A TOOL

FOR people always in a hurry

            TO SEE the stories in gestures

                  IN the shadowed corners

A TOOL

FOR people who love surprises

            TO SEE the endless possibilities

                  IN an open park at night

A TOOL

FOR people always in a hurry

            TO SEE the city as a game

                  IN the spaces in between

A TOOL

FOR people who always carry a notebook

            TO SEE with the greatest precision

                  IN an open park at night

A TOOL

FOR people who speak with their hands

            TO SEE the stories

                  IN every turn they take

A TOOL

FOR people who miss their hometown

            TO SEE the absurdity

                  IN open space

Why do you want to make it?

I want to combine the topic of urban space with the format I love—publications, specifically a magazine. I'm curious to explore what a magazine could be if I think of it as something to be read outdoors or used as a tool, and what it could bring to urban spaces. After completing the Scripts to Read the City project, I find the question of what perspectives artistic research can bring to urban spaces very relevant. I love cities and I am interested in projects rooted in this context.

We cannot comprehend the entire city at once; it is impossible to absorb everything in a single glance. We need

separations

and

pauses

to interpret what we see.

Without these breaks, the city becomes an overwhelming stream of information, impossible to process.

Fragments Magazine aim to direct our attention, frame and bring certain aspects to the surface.

Relation to previous practice

Guide - part of Scripts to read the city

workshop - part of Scripts to read the city

Fragments Magazine will build upon the experience gained in previous semesters. Starting with the research into neighborhoods as learning environments, which I began in the second semester and drawing heavily from the last Special Issue. Fragments Magazine continues the exploration of the theme undertaken during the Scripts to Read the City project, where I tried to create a series of scripts that encourage spontaneous behavior and exploration of space. The result of the work was a device for reading the city and a guide containing scripts that encourage the discovery of opportunities we might encounter and the viewing of the city from someone else’s perspective. Additionally, as part of the project we conducted a series of workshops in which participants wrote their own scripts, and then we walked around the city according to a script written by someone else. For the magazine I utilize the exploration of the relationship between scripted and spontaneous behaviour, the tension between chance and control, and how the simple tool or a script can enhance unpredictability, stimulate imagination and encourage us to observe space with curiosity, as if we were looking from someone else's perspective. Treating this as a foundation, I want to experiment more with printed matter, forming scripts and playing with the physicality of paper, to understand how a magazine can shape the way we perceive our surroundings. This project studies how even the simplest tools, which impose certain limitations, can open us to unexpected opportunities and seeing our surroundings in a new way. It considers magazines as shared resources that help us observe, see differently, and encourage us to question reality. I want to explore the role that self-publishing and distribution might play in this context, by thinking about ways I’ll publish my project to create networks of exchange.

This summer, I attended a summer school focused on urban space as a place for various (un)learning practices, activating different modes of knowing, sensing, and being/becoming together. I met people from urban studies, researchers, and other artists interested in participatory urban interventions, and I think that these connections could also help me now, by providing constructive conversations.

performace in public space - stills from my short film

Who can help you and how?


I can definitely count on the people from De Boog—they’re also interested in print and always look for ways to do things together. I’m planning to run a workshop there, and their help will be very valuable. I think that if I go forward with an open call for the magazine, participants I met during the Viadrinicum summer school might be interested in taking part in it. I just thought of reaching out to some of them to conduct short interviews, which could accually be incredibly inspiring for finding the right approach to public space interventions in terms of ways to publish the magazine. Other than that I really need help from tutors to master web-to-print. And most importantly some emotional support from other students and friends.

References:

Johanathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison Objectivity, MIT, (2007)

Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

Guy Debord, Report on the Construction of Situations(1957)

The Situationist International (SI) - Situationist maps, like The Naked City (1957), fragment Paris into emotional zones, challenging the conventional ways cities are navigated and understood.

Soda Kazhiro, Why I Make Documentaries, on Observational Filmmaking

Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (2010)

Jane Jacobs , The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) - Jacobs emphasized the importance of "eyes on the street" and mixed-use urban areas, critiquing large-scale modernist urban planning in favor of organic, community-oriented design.

Dziga Vertov – Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

Agnes Varda – Daguerreotypes (1976)

Frederick Wiseman – In Jackson Heights (2015)