[arg_discuss] Sophie Calle

[Hugh Davies]

Sorry about the empty attachment everyone. Here is the article in
question.It mentions a couple of very interesting works. There is
quite a lot of this
stuff around listed under hybrid media, live art, interactive art and
relatonal aesthetics, as well as in other nooks and cranies, but you have to
rustle around. There is no real umbrella for the feild yet.
If you are interested in Sophie Calle, I would recommend looking at the work
of Shizuka Yokomizo and maybe even The Surveillance Camera Players..
And keep me posted if you find anything extra tasty as im always on the
lookout.
Cheers
 Are You Awake? Are You In Love?

*[this is a recently finished article commissioned by Camerawork: A Journal
of Photographic Arts <http://www.sfcamerawork.org/journal.html>, based in
San Francisco. Thanks to Marisa Olson for the commission, and the artists
for their assistance]*

*Part 1: Three stories about trust.*

1: A story about Uncle Roy All Around
You<http://www.uncleroyallaroundyou.co.uk/>by Blast Theory

I'm standing in a red phone booth on the lower half of Regent St, London.
Outside, a drunk-looking man in a tweed suit looks desperate to make a phone
call, whilst I'm standing here, holding a PDA, waiting for the phone to
ring. After what seems like an age, the call comes, and a man's voice tells
me that I have to trust him, and that he has something he has to ask me to
do for him. After he finishes the call, I've got to head north, take the
first left turn, and get into the white limousine that's parked by the side
of the road. I wait in the limousine for about 5 minutes, then a man in a
brown suit gets in and sits next to me. Without saying a word, the limousine
drives off, and the man starts asking me questions, looking straight ahead
all the time. Have I ever had to trust a stranger? Would I be able to help
someone I've never met if they were in need? Could I be at the end of the
phone whenever they needed to call me? Could I commit to that for a year?

2: A story about Surrender Control by Tim
Etchells<http://www.forcedentertainment.com/>

My mobile makes the two-tone bleep that tells me I've got a text message.
Scrolling down, the message reads "Write the word SORRY on your hands. Leave
it there until it fades". What should I do with this instruction? Obey it?
Delete it? What would happen if I did write SORRY on my hands? I think
through the rest of my day - a meeting at work, a packed underground train,
meeting my wife in a restaurant... What would people think I was sorry for?
Is it a reminder to say sorry, or to be sorry? Would they ask me about it,
or would they store the memory, forever affecting their impression of me, of
who I am and what I might do? Am I the kind of person who writes messages on
their hands about emotional issues? Am I the kind of person who says sorry?

3: A story about Audit <http://www.bookworks.org.uk/books/2002/audit.htm> by
Lucy Kimbell <http://www.lucykimbell.com/>

It's a Wednesday. I'm at my desk, thinking of ways to not do things that I
know I should be doing. I flick through the pile of envelopes in my in-tray,
and come across an A4 manila envelope. Inside is a questionnaire from
someone I've met a few times over the last few years - it's an audit about
her and about our relationship. The questions are strange; like a work
appraisal, but veering off into more intimate territory - Would she make a
good parent? Do I think she should have children? If she died tomorrow, or
if we never communicated again, what are the three things I would miss about
her? I start filling out the questionnaire, taking it seriously at first, as
if it were a tax form, or a reference for a passport application. I feel
like I know her, but we're acquaintances rather than friends, and some of
the questions push me to be more intimate, to imagine parts of her life that
I don't know about. What will she do with this? Why is she asking me? If I
drew up a list of people to fill in a similar audit about me, would I
include her?

*Part 2: Trust, art, and technology*

Those stories describe three interactions. Or performances. Or moments in
the production, or consumption, of an artwork. Or perhaps they are
descriptions of how the production and consumption of an artwork can be
reduced to the same act, the same moment. They operate within, to use Nicholas
Bourriaud's <http://www.boiler.odessa.net/english/raz1/n1r1s02.htm>term, a
'relational aesthetic' - these artworks don't rely on an encounter with a
traditional art object, nor do they substitute that with some transcendent
concept of a dematerialised art object. In Bourriaud's definition, these
works exist within "the realm of human interactions and its social context,
rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space".
They are moments to be experienced, not viewed, reaching out and enmeshing
themselves in the messy network of conversations and relationships that make
up your life.

But these are not 'happenings', 'live art' or, worst of all, 'public art' -
these aren't experiences created to celebrate the liberation of art from the
constrictions of the White Cube, and the high capitalist symbolic value
bestowed upon art by those hermetically sealed walls. Enough politics
already! For some critics, art cannot exist amongst the quotidian without
taking to the barricades. It's damned if it keeps quiet within the safe
walls of the museum, and damned if it tries to live outside that space
without constantly reminding you of that fact. For isn't most 'public' art
exactly like the worst kind of evangelist - carrying a bundle a pamphlets
behind its back whilst it tries to disarm you with a handshake? There's no
real risk there - no commitment to existing more than a toddler's-step from
the safe arms of the curators and critics, plaques and pronouncements that
silently re-build white gallery walls around their 'interventions' into our
city streets. Much harder to just put something out there, to put yourself
in someone else's shoes, to risk misunderstandings and rejection.

If these works have one thing in common, it is this - they understand how
communication technologies have created a series of fissures in everyday
life, a series of moments when some small act - a phone call, text message
or a letter - creates the possibility of stepping into someone else's world.
Bourriaud is right when he says this kind of work isn't about the modernist
fantasy of progress and opportunity - "Art was intended to prepare and
announce a future world: today it is modelling possible universes" . But he
then coins the term 'hands-on utopias', as if artists had slipped the
shackles of the avant-garde project only to engage in the equivalent of
community service. The fissures these works inhabit are sometimes more like
wounds than open doors. They are intrinsically wound up in the dual morality
of communication technology - the yet-to-be-answered phone call could just
as easily be a bomb threat as a declaration of love.

Of course, we've been here before. Photography, the cultural virus that
infected the last century, was heralded as a technology for emancipation and
understanding. Given the grand project of uniting the world under an
egalitarian flashlight, it instead illuminated our darkest shadows, creating
unheimlich Memento Mori. Sophie
Calle<http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0268/8_38/61907735/p1/article.jhtml?term=>,
in her book Suite
Venitienne<http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0941920097>,
embraces this duality, and uses the camera as a tool for an uneasy
exploration of desire. Taking a chance encounter with a stranger as a sign,
she follows him to Venice, keeping a diary of photos taken with a lens that
took photos at 90 degrees from the camera driection. The diary documents, in
breathless prose, her stalking of the mysterious 'Henry B.' through the
streets of Venice. There is no clear justification for the act – it's a
folly, but the desire with which she throws herself into the project always
threatens to become something else entirely – *"I must not forget that I
don't have any amorous feelings towards Henri B."*

The intimacy of the mobile phone creates a similarly fragmented network of
communication and desire. In Tim Etchells' Surrender
Control<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1600165.stm>,
a series of flyers were distributed in London with the enigmatic message 'Do
you want to Surrender Control?' with the instruction to send a text message
saying 'SURRENDER'. A week or so afterwards, a series of instructions were
sent back, each from an anonymous source, and increasing in risk over the
following days from banal thought experiments ('Look around. See who's
looking') to actions that have tangible effects on real life ('Dial a number
one different from that of a friend. If someone answers, try to keep them
talking').

But who is really surrendering control here? Subscribers, experiencing the
frisson of an instruction from an unknown Other, can still decide whether to
actually obey the actions or not. But the artist risks much more. Nothing
heralded this work as 'art' – in fact, in online discussions that commented
on the project, it was frequently mistaken for a corporate viral marketing
campaign . The work exists or not in the mind of the receiver (audience
seems too passive a noun, whilst participant assumes an activity that might
not actually have taken place). The text message, less than 160 characters
long, was easily deleted, and there was no avenue for feedback – like Calle,
Etchells wanted an unconsummated relationship. Describing the Other, or
giving a motive behind the communication, would have greatly diminished its
power – better to let people project from their own intimacies, and imagine
their own masters:

*"At first I felt as though something was lacking. Motivation, I think. Why
would I want to follow these instructions? I wanted more of a story,
reasons, causality, a role to fill, perhaps? Who was supposed to be sending
these messages? I can easily imagine a messaging sequence like this with a
clear narrative frame.
[…]
And yet there is some narrative here. It's like a very loosely woven net
that I slip through easily, but if I'm careful to stay inside it I can pull
at threads and find the connections, feel someone else pulling threads
pulling me towards them, imagine from the rhythm of the pulling and the
messages who that other person might be.*

*Do everything in the wrong order, was my latest instruction. Shall I?
Hmm..."*

*[fromjill/txt <http://huminf.uib.no/%7Ejill/archives/november2001.html#409>
]*

Lucy Kimbell's Audit treads a similarly risky path. By sending out the
questionnaire, she risked rejection, or, even worse, earnest responses that
could be as disturbing as they were enlightening. In the book published to
document the project, she uses a number of critical approaches to frame the
responses, from economic theories to sociological. But the work keeps
sliding out from under the microscope, with some respondents resisting the
format, and Kimbell's own sidebar comments that never quite give her the
last word. So what is it as a document? It's obviously flawed as a serious
piece of research, due to the complicity of researcher and subject, It's not
a portrait of the artist – despite the whole book being ostensibly about
her, you could read the whole thing and still pass her by in the street.
Instead, it's a fragile kind of map – a temporary document of a series of
relationships, created not according to a strict topography, but by the warp
and weft of real life. Those that didn't respond don't appear on the map,
and the ones that did form a chorus of unreliable narrators. Audit, for the
purposes of research, treats relatives and relative strangers with the same
even hand, and demonstrates the fragile networks of trust that exist between
them.

*Part 3: Epilogue*

At the end of our car ride around London, the brown-suited stranger asked me
for a postcard I'd picked up from a disused office earlier on. Driven by a
series of hints and instructions sent to me over the PDA, I'd discovered
this office in an otherwise normal block on Regent Street. After rummaging
around amongst desks, computers and guidebooks to London, I found a postcard
printed with the text 'When would you ever trust a stranger?'. I wrote,
'When you have no other choice', and slipped it into a shirt pocket. Back in
the car, we'd parked by the side of the street, near a post box. The
stranger asked me to write my phone number on the card, then added an
address and stuck on a stamp. "This is the address of a stranger" he said.
"There is a post box outside. If you post this card, the stranger will have
your number. You will be committing to be there for them, at the end of a
phone call, for 12 months. They can call you anytime, for any reason. Will
you post the card?"

As the stranger drove off, I stood in the street, the postcard bending in my
hand from the wind. I thought about posting the card, about how a simple act
would transform a few square inches of ink and paper into a year-long
commitment to trust, and being trusted. How many small acts of trust do I
commit to every day without thinking about it? How many promises, phone
calls, emails, letters? What kind of network is formed by these pushes and
pulls – how many knots, how many loose ends?

And finally, how come its taken a stranger to make me think about this?
 Posted by matlock at July 9, 2003 11:54 AM |
TrackBack<http://baked.haddock.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=612>

On 6/22/06, Christy Dena <cdena at cross-mediaentertainment.com> wrote:
>
>
> >(Perhaps confessing an unwise amount of ignorance for a future graduate
> student :)
>
> Not at all! We walk in to a postgrad not realising how much we don't know,
> and walk out knowing how much we don't know. :)
>
> Best - Christy
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org [mailto:arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org]
> On
> Behalf Of Jess Kilby
> Sent: Thursday, 22 June 2006 8:11 AM
> To: Discussion list of the IGDA ARG SIG
> Subject: Re: [arg_discuss] Sophie Calle
>
> Thanks to Edgar for the introduction to Sophie Calle (you're right --
> *very*
> Neurocam), and to Hugh and Christy for the introduction to relational
> aesthetics. I'm starting an MA in Interactive Media at Bournemouth
> University this fall, and this is exactly what I want to explore. I had no
> idea these ideas had their own formalized school of thought, however.
> (Perhaps confessing an unwise amount of ignorance for a future graduate
> student :)
>
> Cheers!
>
> -jess
>
> On 6/21/06, Christy Dena <cdena at cross-mediaentertainment.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Yes, I'm looking at Nicolas Bourriaud's 'relational aesthetics' and its
> > relation to ARGs! There is a definate mix there. Here are some pieces
> > online:
> >
> > Some quotes here:
> >
> http://www.dynamitefamily.com/charlie/os_readings/relationalaesthetics.pdf
> >
> > A glossary here:
> > http://www.gairspace.org.uk/htm/bourr.htm
> >
> > An interview here:
> > Bourriaud, Nicolas. 'Public Relations: Bennett Simpson Talks With
> Nicolas
> > Bourriaud', Artforum (April 2001). Reproduced online at
> > http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_8_39/ai_75830815
> >
> > The Skinny?:
> > "Relational Aesthetics = Aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks
> > on
> > the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or
> > prompt."
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Christy
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org [mailto:arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org]
> > On
> > Behalf Of Adam Martin
> > Sent: Wednesday, 21 June 2006 10:41 PM
> > To: Discussion list of the IGDA ARG SIG
> > Subject: Re: [arg_discuss] Sophie Calle
> >
> > Hugh Davies wrote:
> >
> > > Hi
> > > just to butt in - I also believe that the work of Sophie Calle and
> other
> > > artists concerned with relational aesthetics have a great deal to
> offer
> > > ARG's. If your not across it already - you might find some interesting
> > info
> > > in the attached article. Its not by me but the author and source are
> > > listed.
> >
> > (sorry, the listmanager seems to prevent attachements despite attempting
> > to override it)
> >
> > For archival reasons, it would be much better anyway if you could just
> > copy/paste in the full text.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Adam
> >
> > --
> > Adam Martin
> > CTO, Mind Candy Ltd
> >
> > tel: 0207 501 1904 - fax: 0207 501 1919
> > www.perplexcity.com - www.mindcandydesign.com
> > _______________________________________________
> > ARG_Discuss mailing list
> > ARG_Discuss at igda.org
> > http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/arg_discuss
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > ARG_Discuss mailing list
> > ARG_Discuss at igda.org
> > http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/arg_discuss
> >
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