User:Mania/Assesment
Project proposal
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
How do you plan to make it?
- What makes it a magazine is its continuity, even though it will be published intermittently there is always another issue
- Content will appear in smaller Issues each dedicated to direct attention to a specific theme.
- It takes a fragment as a starting point for sharing, layering, reconstructing, embracing multiple perspectives to envision different ways of seeing and engaging with our direct environments. Smething intrigues me about the idea of looking at a city piece by piece. I think we only ever see fragments, and no image of a city is ever complete. It’s this uncovering bit by bit, discovering something unexpected, that excites me about wandering around the city and seeing what reveals itself to me.
Moreover, fragments offer the possibility of connecting them with other fragments, rearranging them, bringing certain elements to the forefront, gives me a lot of room to reimagine certain things and also to invite others to do this together with me.
- Public moment
- An important part of my practice is experiment with print, for this project I want to explore web to print.
Between an object and the event
- 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.
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
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.
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)