| projects
is a list of our past work together.
Project:
Dencity
DENCITY is
a live performance of electro-acoustic music on a nightly bus tour through
New York's hidden landscapes. It is the contemporary urban equivalent
of an explorer's notebook- a kind of Huck Finn on land. The producers
of the DENCITY project are interested in exploring the relations between
our point of departure, Williamsburg and some of the surrounding neighborhoods
that have remained on the periphery of most experiences of NYC.
click
here for a complete description
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| Project:
65MPH
Continuing
the physiographic narrative e-Xplo initiated with DENCITY,
65 MPH re-orients the "tourist" with a new vocabulary for the city structured
through the highway's imperative for speed and distance.
This
tour was in many ways a response to questions that posed themselves
in the Dencity project. If Dencity was grounded in a sort of scoptophilic
or vouyeristic looking at places often unseen ("the Gritty Backstage'),
65MPH was about the absolutely mundane.
Moreover,
if Dencity was a mobile work, it was still tied closely to the specific
location it was engaged with. 65MPH was instead, a purely mobile work,
it could happen on any highway, in any city or town.
If
Dencity was directed toward destinations, 65MPH's sole desitination
was the metaphorical and literal place of going, the highway.
click
here for a complete description
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| Project:
Floaterby
dual channel
audio-video installation, running time 45min
A bus traversing
through space with no apparent destination, seemingly without purpose.
The trajectory of this piece is related to our interest in exploring
movement and inbetween spaces.
The audio in the
piece remains focused on the range of sound produced within and without
the bus. From this perspective the movie house or gallery space may
be revealed as useful for analysis of the city. The immense and obscure
nave yields too little compartmentalized volumes that recall strangely
the character of cells of means of transportation. Minimum of transit
space, maximum focus given to vision in flux. A series of cross-sections,
surfaces, passages for passers by.
The world "flown"
over, offers nothing further of interest. Flight in darkness and narcosis
of the passengers. Urbanism is in decline, architecture is in constant
movement while dwellings have become no more than a amorphesis of thresholds.
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Project:
Picnolepsy
picnolepsy
(noun. from the
Greek, picnos: frequent). For the picnoleptic, nothing has
happened, the missing time never existed.
Manhattan served as the backdrop
for an investigation using attenuated adaptations of various sounds
and texts.
Using "Picnolepsy" as a thematic link (a condition marked
by frequent lapses in consciousness, wherein the subject is unaware
of the missing time, and compensates by filling in the missing time
with supplemental information) the artists wanted to juxtapose the represented
city, the spatialized city of neighborhoods and zones, with the temporal
city, the city of/as event, the city recollected, the peripheral city
of memory (possibly a faulty memory), and the imag-ined city, the cinematic
city.
click
here for more details
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| Project:
rISO AROMA
Architecture
and the city are given a comic mode - a lighter way to be experienced.
For BIG, e-Xplo combined music, multi-language dialogues from specific
movies and closely microphoned details that are foregrounded within
a bus tour as aural stage. By contrast, there is little of the background,
obfuscating rumble of the city. As such, the live sound performances
offer an urban construction variously composed from 'real' and synthesised
sounds, chance operations and improvised performances.
click
here for more details
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| Project:
Open Channel at BIGTorino 2002
The idea of
e-Xplo operating as a platform for experimentation and collaboration
is nothing new, it is one of the ingredients that brought the three
of us together. But opening up this platform to other artists took us
a few years.
For BIG, we found artists working with sound in and around the city
of Torino, and asked them to play live sets in public spaces. We also
created opportunities for individuals to play together who had not previously
done so. This created for some amazing sets. Most of the photos in this
section are from one evening in front of the University.
click
here for more details
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| Project:
Domestic Disturbance; Fight or Flight; or Shelter
Domestic
Disturbance; Fight or Flight; or Shelter, references the questions that
called themselves out in this project: who stays, who stays where, how,
how does one stay, how does one decide to fight for or leave, what is
it to reside somewhere?
This
work was exhibited at the Inside/Out
Festival for New Art in Berlin. This festival presented e-Xplo with
a unique opportunity to situate work inside a bunker, which once housed
a popular techno club in the center of Berlin
The
"bunker" became the starting point for a work dealing with the intersections
between memory, politics, war, property, gentrification, media, exile-ration
and the subject.
A
16mm film was shot and projected inside the bunker. Alongside the film,
a separate score was constructed using both original and found sound.
Using
words, sounds, radio broadcasts, personal narrative and the images of
the film, e-Xplo attempted to
take the viewer/listener to another site. Not a site outside the bunker,
but next to it, added to it, informed and in relation to it.
A site where the bunker could slip from shelter to one's residence,
from a space of security to one's insecurity, from a hideout to one's
internment.
Continuing
with the "bunker" as an in-between space, we proposed the physical environmental
space constructively, as a personal one: that is, the desire to create
a vocabulary for oneself. .
click
here for more details
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| Project:
Hidden Track
Art In/Output Festival
and Dutch Electornic Art Festival (DEAF '03) invited e-Xplo to make
two separate projects.
Both
projects utilized the bus as not only a means of "tourism"
but also a form of transportation. In other words, passengers were being
taken from one point to another. One of the tours took place on the
highway connecting the cities of Eindhoven and Rotterdam. The other
tour explored the harbor areas surrounding Rotterdam.
click
here for more details
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| Project:
Found Wanting
Dates
: November 27, 28, 29, 30, 2003
Location: East End (London)
Curator Lucia Farinati
invited e-Xplo to create a public art project located within the physical
and discursive spaces of East London. Over the course of several months
of correspondence as well as inteviews and discussions conducted by
Farinati and e-Xplo, a timetable was set up for a residency for November
of 2003. Within the course of a one month development period, e-Xplo
mapped and created the soundtrack for a tour which would highlight and
question the incredible density of narratives describing and engaging
with the "East End" and "East London".
Questions which emerged in relation to this project were an interesting
grouping of old as well as new. Below, just a few:
Who has the right to speak about or on behalf of a city?
What is the relation and place of the "tourist" or tourism
in the experience of / narratives about the city?
If there are any positive aspects in the experiences of the tourist,
how would one go about recouperating them, foregrounding them?
What alternative tropes exist for drifting or moving through the city
that offer an experience that is different from the tourist?
How could one distinguish cruising from touring?
Where exactly is East London?
How would one go about creating a tour of East London that would not
only engage but problematize the overlapping strategies of speaking
about or narrating the city?
click
here for more details
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Project:
My Lodging and Some Others
The
savage political failures of our time, of any time (humanitarian failures
after all, are also political ones), must have something to do with
a rekindled interest in imagining other trajectories, possibilities,
or spaces of hope. Nevertheless, the very process of arriving at Utopia,
of imagining, runs into problems that city and urban planners face,
which is that the imagined city, even when realized is always different
from the one inhabited and lived in.
click here for more details
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Project:
Roundabout -
Love at Leisure : Help me Stranger
Brief Description:
The tour was divided into two parts.
Inhabitants of the two towns of North Adams (from MASS MoCA) and Williamstown
(Clark Museum) explore in interviews the overlapping themes of property,
local politics and desire in part1: Love at Leisure. (going from North
Adams to Williamstown)
Part 2 (comming from Williamstown to North Adams): Help Me Stranger
is more of a fictional film, based on a screenplay.
e-Xplo created a set of monologues and narrations inspired by the interviews
in part 1 and draws in a lyrical and sometimes violent way a detailed
and provocative civic portrait.
e-Xplo casted local individuals to read the text passages. Martha Rosler
lends her voice to the role of the narrator The soundtrack for the tour
was produced by local musicians and e-Xplo’s field-recordings
The performance was controlled by an onboard computer which uses a GPS
to determine the bus’s location. “Korin 2.0”, the
software developed by Evert Van Der Poll together with e-Xplo and the
support of the Technical University in Eindoven, determines which sounds
ought to be played, at which point, at what levels and for what length
of time.
Although the two tours together amount to 50 minutes, there are over
16 hours of recordings available for use by “Korin 2.0”.
Original info:
From July 4th through August 31, e-Xplo's bus will shuttle passengers
between the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute located in Williamstown
and MASS MoCA, located in North Adams. Delving into the themes of property,
real estate, development, redevelopment, and the American dream, e-Xplo
will work in the area for a 7 week period including the months of May
and June.
Visitors
at the exhibition will be invited to enter into a mobile Scotty camper
located outside MASS MoCA to access a temporary archive of maps, notes,
and reading materials which were collected for the project.
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Project:
Something About Revolution Repetition
Dates
: October 16-23 2004
Location: Budapest, Hungary
Each year
the city hosts a Fall festival with what appears to be a range of art,
music, film, and theater. We have been invited along with David Shea
+ Tommi Grönlund / Petteri Nisunen as three artists working between
sound/music and film. The aforementioned artists performed or worked
within an old movie theater- the Átrium.
e-Xplo's bus departed from the same location. We worked with the idea
of remaking three films in Budapest. Guy Debord's "Critique of
Separation" László Moholy-Nagy's sketch for a city
film entitled "Dynamics of a Metropolis" and the third relying
on texts from Angelo Quattrocchi's contribution to the book "The
Beginning of the End." This idea has been provoked by the fact
that Budapest has mostly served as backdrop location for other films
without any links to the city itself.
The relation of the sounds and texts, however, was not unambiguous to
the view connected with it. (Which is equally true for most of our pieces
but perhaps has been pushed to an extreme in this one.) The sounds-
collected on site, music as suggested by Guy Debord himself, the spoken
texts-in Hungarian, French and English and our own compostitions transformed
the images of the social reality into "video- clips modulating,
metamorphosing, displacing, decomposing the view…..
"…The
route-narrative of the sightseeing excursion
often connects similar things found in the city, or as
in our case, exactly to the contrary, casts light upon
the fault lines and contrasts. Moszkva tér (Moscow
Square), the Chain Bridge, the National Theatre,
Illatos út, Népliget (People’s Park): these are
not
simply illuminated or darkened clichés, postcard- and
anti-postcard-landscapes, but each are mythical sites
of Budapest, discussed again and again. These myths
operate, however, in a way that is diametrically
opposed: they each describe a different city; they
tell the disparate stories of wealth, history,
politics, as well as poverty and violence. This
multiple mesh full of contrasts is shocking, even if
over the course of the route, the illusion of the
"spurious coherence" of a continuous film drives us
into its trap…"
(to read more about the tour please click here)
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Project:
Sleeping Dogs Lie -- Part 1 -- Nyctalopia
Dates
: May 21-August 14, 2005
Location: Columbus, Ohio (Wexner Center)
Part 1
e-Xplo was asked by curator Caludine Ise of the Wexner Center for the
Arts to initiate a work that would utilize the urban landscape of Columbus.
In December 2004, e-Xplo visits the city to do the initial research
on a film which will explore the subject of the night. Shooting film
at night is not our strength, so we meet with a few possible DP's and
begin our search for interesting locations. With the assistance the
Art and Tech department at the Wexner (thanks Jennifer!) e-Xplo will
produce this film for the Vanishing Point exhibition.
We have been slowly chipping away at the subject of 'the night' since
we started working together, so we imagine that this work and the Sleeping
Dogs Series which this is a part of will give us the opportunity to
put a lot of our thoughts and questions on the subject together.
Introductory
Text:
How is it that night came to be night? That it bore the responsibility
of retaining all that we cannot comprehend, all that we cannot see,
all that we would rather sleep through? In the Sleeping Dogs series,
e-Xplo attempts to directly confront one of the key threads tying together
much of their work, which is the theme of the night. More than just
a subset of reflections on a city, the night represents another time-space,
overlooked or underappreciated, with its own rules, grammar, language,
aporias, and questions. The night as a refuge for much that remains
hidden, ungovernable, unseeable, inassimilable, unusable in societies.
The night as a truth serum, in the faltering visibility of darkness,
it reveals what is both unique and completely repetitive about a place.
And yet, it is night that affords us a city in its solitude, in its
infinite theatricality, in its staginess, in its successive, yet measured
perspectives; it is night the retains the inherent mystery of the city
and arouses one to SEE in it!!!!! As is the case with all of their RECORDED
work, e-Xplo will work on site, collecting sounds, conducting interviews,
consulting formal and informal archives (ranging from libraries to flea
markets) and of course
looking for appropriate locations to tell a story about the night narrated
by the city.
About
the exhibition:
Vanishing Point
In a haunting new twist on traditional architectural depictions,
the works in Vanishing Point portray ordinary spaces in often unsettling
ways. Hotels, shopping malls, airport terminals, gambling casinos, themed
restaurants, and other visually intoxicating yet banal environments
are transformed—into alien vistas, intruiging abstractions, and
photorealistic voids charged with the palpable absence of human activity.
The exhibition includes paintings, photographs, videos, and installations
by such emerging and established artists as Dike Blair, Jonah Freeman,
Carla Klein, Sabine Hornig, Luisa Lambri, Amelie Von Wulffen, and Amy
Wheeler.
Vanishing Point is organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts.
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Project:
Sleeping Dogs Lie -- Part 2 -- Nights in Brasilia
Dates
:June 30-July 3, 2005
Location: Newcastle (commissioned for navigate and produced by
amino, BALTIC, Forma and Michelle Hirschhorn)
We cannot escape the politics of the sites we choose, and even in mapping
a tour, even in struggling for the visual element, we cannot avoid the
specifics of the places we work in. Having said that, how may our concerns
be heightened by the visual, historical, architectural, acoustic and
political circumstances of Newcastle? The night challenges us to enter
a process of constructing and reconstructing topographical views on
the subject.
Sleep and Insomnia. Alcohol. Drugs. Crime. Love making. Rock’n
Roll. Memories. Distances seem to change. In the night, one's thoughts
go from city to city, from one place to another, dreaming of another
life in each other's place.
http://www.navigatelive.org/
The Gateshead/Newcastle tour stretched all the way to North Shields
and back. We journeyed through patches of Brasilia, Benwel & Scottswood,
The Moors, Byker, and Wallsend, attempting to touch on the history of
the night and its connection to the political and economic history as
well as present day struggles. For the script, four different elements
tying the history of the city to a history of the night were conceived.
They included: Flight or Escape by Night, Ghosts & Spectres, Drunken
Nights, and Ingenious Nights.
The
first part of the tour worked entirely with materials we had acquired
or recorded in Newcastle, largely comprised of field recordings. The
second half of the tour worked with a script that was the product of
our research into the city's history and our interviews with people.
It was read live by Richard Crow, accompanied by sound/noise which attempted
to retrace the material heard in the first half, but now mangled, weakened
or dematerialized through repeated recordings of the material on a single
spool of tape on a reel to reel.
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