09/27/2010

Well today was trippy as it was drippy. It rained most of the day. Jennida and I spent a lot of the morning discussing the psychic funk we were both sharing. Over the course of one day the perspective on the city that we were both experiencing had changed drastically. The weather didn’t help at all. Going from Hot and sunny to cold and rainy while you contemplate a history of death and causal effect that still looms over a whole city. And amidst this we still have to propose our project on Tuesday for Elsewhere. We are toying with our original sound performance idea but turning it into something more youth oriented. After reading about and watching “Greensboro’s Child” one thing became very clear, how do we balance our need to create art with a certain social and community understanding? That life flows around us and the things that contributed to our current manifestations as human beings flow from the positive and negative effects of history. Not the history of dead things but the history of living peoples, actions and incidents. It remains clear that when a child is put onto a dangerous path there will be positive and negative hurdles- too many negative hurdles generate more negative hurdles until you cannot hurdle anymore.
But first Jennida just needed to get out of the building, and then it turned into a venture of traveling to the site of the ’79 tragedy. Fates converge and it just so happens that some students form UNCG made an audio walking tour for the “88 seconds that refuse to end.”
http://library.uncg.edu/dp/walkingtours/
These tours can be downloaded or streamed for your walking pleasure.
Ok, so geek out moment#1:
So close to my locative arts musing! Only you can access it from anywhere in the world. Zit is site specific but can still be served to the consumer in the comfort of your own home. Also the tour is 40min. long and kept lagging, due to rain, or interference, bandwidth, I don’t know.
Geek out moment #2
It is really eerie to have watched the original source material so much that I do know what the original buildings and facades look like as the narrator describes what was there but isn’t there now.
Pervout moment #1
How awkward is it to have to admit to someone that you are taking an audio walking tour of a killing of five people and it is in your back yard lady, oh I guess you really wanted to be reminded of this today.
Geek out moment #3
Apparently I am doing research since I am thinking about all these things simultaneously in a city where I have come to do work on art that might have something to do with the ideas of the importance of place, memory, passage of time and the threads that run throughout. How adult of me.

Needless to say that this walking tour is excellent in its breadth of information and perspectives. It is as current as 2006 as far as current events and knowledge and “presentness” will allow. It provides a capstone of sorts in which to frame a tragedy and where we are today both as the city is concerned as well as the community in which the murders occurred.
We now have a plan.
This is our initial proposal:
CONCEPT:
Investigate and respond to an area/location and its people.

The proposal is for a 2-part project dealing with investigation/examination of this location and its surrounding culture. We propose an interaction with the elsewhere collections which possess their own history and memory which is located within a city with a collection of its own memory and history.

We plan to digitally explore, document and catalogue details within the elsewhere collections through motion and focus; then stage a community engagement night with dinner and fun, to create the soundtracks for these video fragments.

DATE PREVIOUSLY DISCUSSED (via email): 10/8

COMMUNITY ELEMENTS:
We propose to bring in approximately 10 to 20 “at risk youth” around the age of 13 (12-15 or there about) to engage in a hands on sound and music workshop. This workshop’s main intent is to foster the idea of music and art being something creative and expressive and a metaphor for a way to shape and fashion your dreams and your experience.
The young people will have the opportunity to interact with artist and community role models during dinner and a guided exploration of the creative possibilities of sound and music.

In addition to inviting other Elsewherians to participate, we would also like to invite a few other sound artists/musicians to help interact with the youth and document the event.

RESULT:
We intend to combine the two parts of this project in a final collaborative art project where the collected audio gathered from the created soundtrack/music as well as small snippets of interviews from the children to be paired with the visual elements assembled by us. It is our belief the audio content of any visual is ultimately what gives the final piece its character and voice. We will be essentially asking these young people to give voice to this project and help guide the final interpretation and shape how others will read the piece. It is our intent to help foster a discussion of possibility.

The inclusion of sound is generally believed to guide the understanding of any visual element. We would love to include the voice of a young demographic to guide the reading of the collected visuals.

This collection of short videos will be made available online (via Youtube) and perhaps available for screening here and through participating organizations. A copy will also remain at Elsewhere for it’s own collection.

POSSIBLE NEEDS:
---Technical help (use of some equipment for event)
-Perhaps sound recording equipment
-The house speaker system
-Use of projectors
-Help documenting the event

---Possible involvement from other Elsewherians.

---To provide dinner for the event

---Possible housing (that night) for other sound artists/musicians from out of the area.