WORKING
IMAGES & VIDEO COMING
Agency of Recollection: Assorted Practices
Is the role of the artist imagination or documentation?
Do these two intertwine?
Is it better to remember everything or is it sometimes good to forget?
Have you lost anything?
Anything missing from your life?
Join the Agency of Recollection and use a range of contemporary art practices, including moving image, performance, conceptual art, and collage to re-collect and re-imagine.
Faculty: Aaron Arreguin, Pui Ki Law, Carlos Trejo
Agency of Recollection Investigation:
Animating the Unconscious
The Agents of Recollection launched their Surrealist investigation with a “Seeing Into” exercise in which they looked for images in smoky marks on a piece of paper—a technique known as fumage.
Following this opening endeavor at accessing the unconscious mind, each agent was given a packet of papers on which inkblots had been dripped through the stacked pages. The youth artists responded to and extended the stains on each page, spending anywhere from several seconds to several minutes on each image. The related stains shifting from page to page supported the agents in creating unique individual images or in making related series of developing images.
The agents’ images were then photographed and animated sequences were created using the program Flash. Take a few minutes, relax, and watch the unreeling of the collective unconscious of the Agency of Recollection.
Agency of Recollection Investigation:
Monument to Your Lost Childhood
Monuments are everywhere in the city, they are commemorating notable people and even event in their communities. Often, the significance of monuments are not engaging to individuals because they are in visual boring. This project, Monument to Your Lost Childhood gives a chance for students to design their own visually compelling monument based on a significant childhood memory.
Monument related artists were introduced to the students, such as Claes Oldenburg’s enormous ice cream cone into a cityscape, Jeff Koon’s Puppy, and Takashi Murakami’s Flower Matango. Students identified various ways artists have explored art works addressed in different location/landmark in their work.
The agent artists recalling important memories from their childhood, they sketched several different past time favorite on the spiral prompting worksheet, such as favorite cartoon, school lunch, snack, haircut, board game, and sleep wear. Students used the form of public sculpture to symbolized the importance of these experience or objects in their past. Students selected two favorite sketches, and chose a sketch to make a finalized drawing. They were provided with a section of public spaces to place their monument.
Agency of Recollection Investigation:
Cell(f) Portrait
What is the role of the self-portrait in the 21st century? Is the activity of gazing at and creating an image of oneself a revealing self-reflective activity for students who have seen thousands and thousands of images of themselves by the time they are in high school? As it is becoming more and more common to have a cell phone camera with us at all times, might it not be more revealing of self to consider what the self notices and saves.
The Agents of Recollection acted as anthropologists of the future investigating how teenagers in the 2010s documented their lives using their phones. The youth artists formed investigatory pairs. After a quick review by the partner allowed him/her to not show some photos (for any reason), the acting anthropologist cataloged the photo archive of the subject under investigation.
Who or what did they document? Family, friends, randomly chosen strangers? Did people pose or were they photographed unawares? Current friends and romances only or literally carrying a crush on an ex each day? What other aspects of life were collected? Animals, meals, places, objects? Were pictures used as diaries or as visual note taking, mnemonics to remember intimate moments or practical details?
The youth artists (and the teachers) were often surprised by the photos they found. I never thought of taking a photo of __________. I like the idea of taking photos of __________. I would never take a photo of __________ because _____________.
The investigators considered how seeing the photos someone takes may be more revealing as a self-portrait than seeing a photo of person. Seeing photos of _________makes me realize that he/she is __________.
With new self-awareness, gained through the study of an other, each Agent of Recollection chose one of his or her own images that was significant in some way. Working from a printed photo, the youth artists created drawings that left out unimportant details (Who was that strange guy in the background anyway?) and added text concerning important facts to supplement the concrete images. As the Agents worked they became increasingly aware of the inherent strangeness of photography.
The drawings and their source photographs are presented separately in this show. We ask you to decide which is the most accurate recollection of life.
Agency of Recollection Investigation:
What the Smell?!
The sense of smell has been identified as the sense with the strongest capacity to evoke memory. Medical investigators have even used people’s inability to connect smells and memories in identifying early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
The agent artists took a break from creating visual artwork to personally investigate the relationship between recollection and the sense of smell. Using a methodology similar to that of the Alzheimer’s smell tests, students were presented with smells contained in squeeze bottles, wrapped in cloth to prevent identification of source of the smell. Students took time with each scent, allowing the smells to conjure up memories. They then recorded their association with the smell. Only later did they attempt to identify the source of their olfactory experience.
The Agents of Recollection invite you to conduct your own experiments. We have provided you with the same set of smells the agents utilized so that you can experience first hand the strong links between smell and recollection.
Agency of Recollection Investigation:
Addressing the Postcard: Space and Place
In Addressing the Postcard: Space and Place, each Recollectionist recreated a place he/she used to inhabit that had significant personal meaning. We initiated the process of remembering through a guided auditory meditation, encouraging the exploration of forgotten corners of the mind. We did not use photographic references or vanishing points to construct these portraits of places—only intense (and possibly unreliable) personal recollection.
After considering the many different ways space has been depicted in different times and places—including Western perspectival and Egyptian iconographic systems, the young artists eschewed a single, fixed “correct perspective” in favor of the complex and shifting points of view of memory.
The agents used cut and torn construction paper to create their spaces as collages—no pre-pencil drawing allowed. The interchangeability and movable unfixed paper elements allowed them to arrange and rearrange the elements of their room until each collage captured important aspects of the memory even if the resulting space was internally inconsistent. Accents of color highlighted important details of the spaces.
The collages were photographed and printed out as postcards—making the remembered images more intriguing by their intimate scale. Students researched and brought in the addresses of the remembered places and then sent the postcards with written recollections on the back to the “Current Resident,” asking that any responses be directed to (whatever your group’s email is).
Agency of Recollection Investigation: Psychogeographic mapping—Blind Drawings
The Agents of Recollection turned their investigations to considering the evidence of our everyday lives. We leave crumbs on the carpet, footprints on floors on rainy days and impressions on our cushioned seats. These are traces of our existence in a particular moment in time, in space.
The Situationist International invented the term called psychogeography to describe personal, emotional/psychological engagement with one’s surroundings. This differs from experiencing only the “arranged” or designated purpose of a place. The Situationists believed in the psychological, aesthetic and political value of allowing oneself to drift through space, letting one’s own sensations serve as a guide.
Utilizing another of their groundbreaking techniques of aesthetic investigation, the Agents blindfolded themselves to deactivate one of the most dominant senses—sight. Trusting to a Spiral guide and their fellow agents, the brave investigators experienced the urban streets in unexpected ways through sound, touch, smell and even taste. Findings were recorded in the “blind drawings” and in the “blind photography” you see displayed here.
After viewing the Spiral Exhibition, please feel free to put on a blindfold and continue to experience it through senses other than sight. Experienced agents to assist you in your investigation available upon request.
Pin a few blindfolds to the wall near the statement?? This could be interesting.
P.S. If you are not going to use any of the images, delete reference above.
Agency of Recollection Investigation:
Happenings and Fluxus Scores
The Agents investigated these questions, “Is this a performance or an event? Is this a hoax or an artwork?” Using texts and scores from the Fluxus movement of the 1960s-1970s, our Agents recreated historic events/performances and investigated whether these were valuable means of contemporary meaning making.
Fluxus is an attitude.
It is not a movement or a style.
Fluxus is intermedia.
Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found and everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.
Fluxus works are simple.
The art is small, the texts are short, and the performances are brief.
Fluxus is fun.
Humour has always been an important element in Fluxus.
Having enacted and video documented classic Fluxus scores, the Agents exercised creative control by re-writing tired, outdated elements and principles exercises as Fluxus scores. Through gestures, vocalizations, solo performances and collaborations, the Agents recollected the modernist past and imagined a post-postmodern era in the field of art education.
Agency of Recollection Investigation:
Happenings and Fluxus Scores
The Agents investigated these questions, “Is this a performance or an event? Is this a hoax or an artwork?” Using texts and scores from the Fluxus movement of the 1960s-1970s, our Agents recreated historic events/performances and investigated whether these were valuable means of contemporary meaning making.
Fluxus is an attitude.
It is not a movement or a style.
Fluxus is intermedia.
Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found and everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.
Fluxus works are simple.
The art is small, the texts are short, and the performances are brief.
Fluxus is fun.
Humour has always been an important element in Fluxus.
Having enacted and video documented classic Fluxus scores, the Agents exercised creative control by re-writing tired, outdated elements and principles exercises as Fluxus scores. Through gestures, vocalizations, solo performances and collaborations, the Agents recollected the modernist past and imagined a post-postmodern era in the field of art education.
Agency of Recollection
Memory Mash
Memory Mash was the Agents of Recollection introduction to the medium of audio recording and their recognition that in the 21st century there are no hard lines between visual art and other media.
The youth artists began by recalling an event that included a potential 2011 Spiral Workshop Community Reception attendee--possibly YOU who are presently reading this. The students wrote their story and then recorded it using a hand held field recorder. They then traded their handwritten personal stories with a partner and changed details of each other’s stories. The artists altered the stories in several manners, including elaborating on minor or major details, deleting or interjecting new material and intersplicing, or mashing, details from each other’s stories. Even if not mashing their memories, the invention of the new memory is still collective because the “new memory” was formed in a collaborative exchange.
Making these collaborative memories raised the question of just how personal many memories actually are. Do we actually remember this experience in its details or is it a fabrication that includes details that we have heard from other people? Are memories altered by desire or habits of thinking? Have you ever suddenly realized that you were recounting a story about something that you did not personally witness? Would you recollect if you did?
We invite you to listen to the Agents recollect their personal stories about you. Do any of them sound familiar? Any strangely familiar?