[ISEA2015] Artists Statement: Brook Pearson & Nathan Fabian — Imaginary Cities: Graffito Series α

Artists Statement

We want to present a work-in-progess, in inception—a digital poetry and mapping project that engages the participant in a thesis: the world is both all that is the case, yet our ability to understand this is mediated through the imaginary. Imaginary Cities is a follow up to a workshop run with students in the Humanities programme at Simon Fraser University over several weeks in the Summer of 2010, where we applied the project thesis specifically to Venice. The larger project is an investigation of the thesis on a network with multiple nodes, including (but not limited to) Gaza City, Istanbul/ Constantinople, Rome, Jerusalem, Mosul, Vancouver, London, Los Angeles and Santa Fe. Utilizing text, image, video and an interactive web interface, the project aims, over time, to become a graffitied map of imaginary interactions with the world as all that is the case. For this initial stage, we will present an interface that allows the production of maps that utilize a combination of networks, old and new, physical and ideational, to produce the conditions for a new way of understanding our present.
In the example attached, the physical and ideational network of holy sites established by the Emperor Constantine and his mother Helena in Palestine during the fourth century CE is cross-connected with the physical and ideational space in which those nodes currently exist, and with a human nervous system. The contested / constructed space of the Near or Middle East is an accretion of a series of physical and imaginary maps, and this initial project in the Imaginary Cities series seeks to problematize the possibility of a particular imaginary dominating others.
Imaginary Cities lives in the tension that emerges in the social construction of, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, ‘delirium by recording the process of production’ (Anti-Oedipus, p. 10). Under the themes of ‘unconscious delirium’, ‘true consciousness/false movement’, ‘true perception / objective movement’, ‘true perception/the movement of the needle’, the project uses poetry, film, photography, audio, interactive and generative webinterfaces to produce the content of (initially) serial e-books released for free through public outlets in an effort to act as tiny glitches in the network of corporatized control of publication. Pamphlets in the era of ubiquitous information flow.
The concept of ‘network’ is investigated in this project in part by problematizing the equation of ‘digital’ with modern. ‘Network’, as used in this project, utilizes the Deleuzeo-Guattarian model of smooth and striated space to trace instances of its emergences across the past several thousand years. The disjunction between the network as instantiated in the physical and the network as that which flows through physically connected nodes is traced through multiple metaphors: skeletal structures, routes of pilgrimage and conquest, communication and transportation systems, DNA, books. The digital is only a new physicality of the world as imagination and what is the case.
This is a rhizomatic project that emerges from nodes in a lateral fashion and becomes its own series of interconnections, not all of which will be created or controlled by the originating artist-authors. The generative and interactive parts of the project aggregate and transform interactions with text, image, and location, actively engaging points in a timespace unlimited holographic projection of the network over thousands of years. A burned scrap of parchment from the Mosul library, a scholion to an interpolated line in the Iliad, the stolen slides from an NSA powerpoint, the stones in the foundation of the Church of the Nativity, the slow movement of an oil tanker through the Vancouver harbour, packets of information exposing General Petraeus’s affair through e-mail dead-drop—all of these are points in a deep web of the kind that the Silk Road doesn’t even begin to describe. Engagements with this project will roll out over years, and will, no doubt, result in surprising instantiations.