Monday, November 4, 2019

ROARAWAR FEARTATA'S CROSSINGS FOR MELBOURNE CITY COUNCIL PUBLIC ART TEST SITES


CONTEXT

Afternoon. 

Friday January 18th 2019.

2.52pm.

I am meeting a mid-wife to help assist with the delivery of our second child’s birth and i receive a telephone message from ROARAWAR FEARTATA’s collaborative provocateur and co-conspirator and Dr Ben Cittadini “We are successful applicants for Test Sites … give us a call”. Our proposed project The Crossing had aspects previously undergo a creative development in association with the CAST research centre at RMIT University for the Performing Mobilities conference in 2015 with Benjamin Cittadini, Fiona Hilary, Shanti Sumartojo and Ceri Hann. Having wrote a response to it and now collaborated upon a further iteration of it together with Ben as ROARAWAR FEARTATA, i proffer our discourse here plays within the dialogical co-relationships between practice, theory and mythopoesis.  

The project was to take place Monday to Friday during business hours of 9am until 5pm over a total period of two weeks or ten days  at the intersection of Cardigan and Victoria Streets Carlton - it didn’t. Rather than this our two week’s broke up into three time periods of three consecutive days in order to fulfil our other responsibilities to life, family and other work commitments with the first week commencing from Thursday until Easter Saturday, and then the next consecutive week upon the Thursday and Friday, with another week to follow later in September. This was more than just a convenience to suit our routine schedules - the breaks were strategic to facilitate critical reflection and self-generative creative gestation upon the research tests. 

With Herman Hesse’s Siddharta as inspiration for the project whereby “two guides will assist each every crossing that takes place at this intersection” our proposition would rather than ferrying people across a river, or in this instance an intersection, approached as “an obstacle, a nuisance, a barrier to their forging ahead; a hindrance on their journey”; the intersection becomes a proposition presenting an opportunity to “listen to the flow that is everywhere at the same time”. Like Siddharta’s approach to the ferryman, the project we proposed coalesces within a constant state of becoming in order to listen to the journey within its present passage - i.e. the timeless present of an intersection and our own serenity and presence observing the intersection’s ever-changing rhythms and moods. 

Our project aspired to be subtly or implicitly pedogogical, and explicitly epistemological; listening to the onto-phenomenologies of Being and Becoming between our shared pasts whereupon passer-by pedestrians literally have been, or were, upon one side of the intersection to the other of an imminent pre-destined future of where it is they intend that they will be going to, as a liminal present - listening to the traffic’s flow, observing the shadows of time with all the utopian and dystopian possibilities and its ephemerality. Such an occupation of a liminal splace elicits neither a departure nor destination, but a deeper temporal space of multiple interchangable realities as a locus of the present, an assistant scribe for a soliliquoy upon the participant’s own realities, as they waver in the act of crossing a threshold, or limbo of sorts, and begging the question:-  

What might be missed between those moments from when one steps off the kerb from one side to the other? 

For us, The Crossing is less about going from here to there and more an experiential accessing of simultaneous elsewheres within and without of time, within and without of oneself, departing tethered within an intimate space together, arriving peeled apart, fragmented, crossing and being crossed and perpetually having questions without answers insisting themselves - where am i right now? 

Without canvassing the public for interaction and interrupting normative functioning of the intersection we posit a gift-giving of the self and our body’s fleshly humility, whilst inveigling the curious and bewildered passers-by alike, with strange uncanny encounters of celebration and comfort; mnemonic ghostings embodying a Sisyphean melancholic hope in order to burst indifferent bubbles including the spectacle of apathetic happenstance. A durational performative silence and a purposeful purposelessness or aimlessness and its ability to convey, rather than to embark or dismbark become accumulative aspects advancing with the rhythms of an everyday life lived where people create a vibrant and ephemeral public space, beyond nothing more, or other than, the co-ordinated movement across a busy thoroughfare.

White bucket or flower pot helmet with transparent visor, long-pleated skirts, jumpers and poncho’s symbolically manifest The Crossing’s futuristic pseudo-scientific-religious esoteric order and its unique eccentricities, existing amidst a flood of other eccentricities. Might we become merely another routine in the ensemble of routines constituting our everyday lives, or an opportunity to disrupt, or rupture routines and alter the teleology of the other passers-by’s days, or fixed points in the ever-changing flow of traffic, or a respite from the insistence of a tension wrought from intentions, insisting one must be getting or going somewhere, or a realisation, that they don’t really need to cross; that they are in fact actually really content with where they are knowing that the traffic is everywhere at the same time.

Our project The Crossing as ROARAWAR FEARTATA continues to perpetuate the questions persisting from since Ben’s Master of Public Arts and PhD project Wasted Space and the work of Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis. Techniques of surveying inspired by Hans Haacke and Lefebvre’s complex “ambition” to “found a science, a new field of knowledge, the analysis of rhythms with practical consequences” [1]become a methodology by which we might score a ‘past present’ and its series of presences for future projects, including, utopian aspirations, whereupon “works might return to intervene in the everyday … and accomplish a tiny part of the revolutionary transformation of this world, this society in decline without any declared political position”[2].

For Lefebvre, the theory of rhythms becomes founded upon experiences and knowledge of the body. This corporeality of the rhythmanalyst’s body or chrono-biology manifests our concrete lived reality beyond generalised abstractions. Interacting with thought - “strengthening itself only if it enters into practice”[3], Ben proposed how recording these rhythms of ours, whilst adhering to Lefebvre’s insistence the rhythmanalyst “listens ...  first to his body; he learns rhythms from it in order to consequently to appreciate external rhythms. His body serves as a metronome. A difficult task and situation to perceive distinct rhythms distinctly, without disrupting them, without dislocating time. This preparatory discipline for the perception of the outside world borders on pathology yet avoids it because it is methodical”[4] Our first meeting had Ben proffer this methodology of how we might, as per Lefebvre’s own words, “announce, observe and classify pathological states”[5] ... “calling upon all the senses and think with the body, not in the abstract, but in the lived temporality… without putting himself in the pathological situation, and without putting that which he observes there either”[6].

Presenting a crude schemata literally representing the body and its sensations, Ben had us consider a complex and somewhat irreverent whimsical symbolic key to graphically record information each of our singular crossings. Whilst I commenced familiarizing myself with Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis our unofficial creative consultant Nick Beer discussed the project with Ben and its prospects of simplification, until inspiring Ben with a simplified form to survey the complexity of our apperception into three ambiguous data sets - Atmosphere, Interaction and Daydreaming; and whereby each was subjected to a scale of several states of intensity from internal to external or an event. 

Such surveying facilitated a pseudo-scientific aesthetic whereby a dialectical and dialogical relation “grasps a rhythm” whereby one must “let oneself go; give oneself over; abandon oneself to its duration … [For] it is necessary to situate oneself simultaneously inside and outside[7] … [whilst] not be obliged to jump from the inside to the outside of observed bodies, they should come to listen to them as a whole and unify them by taking [their] own rhythms as a reference by integrating the outside with the inside and vice versa”[8]. Such ‘attentive listening’ transforms “everything into presences, including the present, grasped and perceived … a dramatic becoming”[9] as if a symphony of “what are called disdainfully noises, which are said without meaning and to murmurs full of meaning[10]” recognised representationally by their “curves, phases, periods and recurrences”[11].

And it is within our aesthetic representation of a pseudo-scientific rhythmanalytical project we literally conjure the magical power of metamorphosis, as a poetical fundament of a foundational rationality, whereby the present becomes presenced, within all its “innocence and cruelty … It can wear a smile, or be tinged with melancholy and even provoke tears”[12]. These represented themselves within the advent of our interactive eventualities and its durational performativity. To merely present oneself to a splace for a duration of time becomes that which is subject to alterity or otherness and othering of other things beyond mere spatio-temporalities. Myth becomes born. 

Other things to write include impact of consciously pursuing a heightened performativity (bells and butoh androgyny) and its affective effects, Easter Good Friday, illness as inspiration for other things such as data processing and choreography as well as future iterations of The Crossing as an implied ‘pseudo-activist’ rhythmanalytical project, whether the rhythmanalyst “does not have the right to provoke an accident” p.21 and “Will the future rhythmanalyst have to professionalise himself? Will he have to set up and direct a lab where one compares documents, frequencies and various curves?”p.22     

WEEK 1

        
Commencing our project The Crossings as artists-in-residence at RMIT Public Art and upon warming-up the unknowing manifests its presence presently anxiously self-questioning ourselves -”what are we doing?”, “how will we know what it is that we are doing?” 

Ben the ‘utilitarian transcendentalist’ has compiled a folder with pens for each of our own rhythmanalytical self-surveys that somewhat awkwardly dangle around from our necks, as if absurdly over-sized jewellery. Ben has also recorded soundscapes compiling tracks with their own atmospheric ambience - some lilt as if lullabys and others have a subtle dramatic foreboding to be played upon a discreetly placed portable speaker ‘secured’ either in some bushes, next to a rubbish bin, tree or pole. 

In order to record the time of each crossing, Ben consults his watch and calls it out from across the road over the intersection through the throng of traffic. I enjoy the pleasure derived from this banal utilitarian action that tediously marks the present presence of our bodies within time passing past - a rite bearing witness to the construct of time and inevitably the rhythmic flows of pedestrians and traffic too alike, until, Ben in his customary way suggests we just note the time of crossing within two minutes intervals. But however, without  accurate recording we have prematurely entered the future; for rather than the traffic lights changing every two minute interval, they do not, and instead incrementally exceed beyond two minutes - we believe we have forged ahead of present time -  a future of our very own. 

From the safety of the traffic passing-by, vehicles acknowledge us from their windows with smiles and stares; some toot their horns as emergency sirens wail ever-present; pedestrians are cautious and awkward; from one moment to the next i am free and then self-consciously aware of such freedom and its vicissitudes; pedestrians perpetually ask questions we answer as “We are rhythmanalysts recording a rhythmanalysis of the intersection for an art project”. Perpetually lost; we lose ourselves self-consciously until I return back again to the euphoric joy of abandoning myself to crossing with each other. 

What are we doing? 
Get into it brother - fuck oath! 
The Boys!

Contact is made with passers-by awkwardly holding hands and hand slapping high fives. A passer-by voluntarily recommends “the Mexican salad”. Psychology becomes manifest whether they are resplendid in what in white or pink, and, with or without their tongue out. Special Utility Vehicles or four wheel drivers are belligerently self-entitled and subjected to enduring contentious glances and withering looks. Melancholic quietude manifests itself within a happy sunny happy blue-eyed joy until mid-cross my surveys and pen detach themselves and fall, whereupon a passer-by pedestrian asks if they might provide helpful assistance. The social engagement of our presence is irresistible - involuntary, self-consciously pedestrian passers-by ask questions and reveal their own curiosities and secrets to our Sisyphean rhythms. 

Within the afternoon peak hour lights pedestrian passers-by digitally immortalize our present and its presences as past micro-histories and futures never to be had or have returned again. The polite and the agitated offended become eye-brow raisingly dangerous distractions, until feeling nothing, we cross the intersection again and return to melancholic quietude. Smokers cuddle. A building site’s clanging metal cylinder and emergency sirens symphonically play, expressing our existence’s as one fraught with naught but Being-/-Becoming self-consciously aware of our own elusive otheredness and its ‘singular indeterminancy’[13]

How long have you been crossing the road?
I have been documenting a socialist meeting.

There is whimsy - a whimsical smile as children play with their parents keys. And there is lack. There is passive aggressivity.  

Are you having fun? - I’m not.

Spoken as if a true young liberal. 

You have something in your teeth - spinach?

We know these pedestrians passing by simply as mere passers-by. Nothing more will ever do again to that which returns back. They passed past as if mnemonic ghostings of a hauntological present - an evental of Fiona Hilary’s “situated practice”[14] as research enquiry  “emplaced thinking through action” - crossing guard as a “mobile methodology”[15]. And within the logic of the pedestrian as “civilising process”[16] we approach a limboesque ‘Messianic walking’[17] towards our own utopian no place, whose entropy has time stand still; we are going nowhere - well nearly, almost going nowhere. 

ALMOST.

Like ‘stepping machines’[18], we pedestrians take for granted Baudelaire’s insight that when crossing amidst the chaos of (post)modern urbanity, t/here is ‘death galloping at me from every side’[19]. These – our crossings – consume and unconsciously transcend, sublate or negate death’s shadow. For might not crossing intersections court defiance? That is, the defying of death as if a limboesque gateway to a temporal immortality within the utopian non-place of an intersection’s pedestrian crossing - we have become memento mori as a ‘’selfie’ - the post-modern eternal equivalent of Walter Benjamin’s ‘ruffle on a dress’[20]

INSERT GOOD FRIDAY PHOTO 

Ben constructs a new elegant solutions - albeit a somewhat crude apparatus  - for the surveys from paper-clips and others stationary. 

12th April - 

Meet Victor from Rhode Island. 
A City of Melbourne employee asks questions “How/why/What?- who for?” - and so they need answers. 
I hold hands with a representative from the RMIT Student Union.
There is a stumble. Nearly a tripping over - almost; our bonding together over commonplace schaedenfreude. 
They are from Footscray and love it. 
Sideways glances and caution abounds.
There is blue finger nail polish.
Politely refused comparisons to DEVO generations; we are DEVO - not! We are NOT DEVO.
The uncanny’s unintended consequences of the uncanny.
Late-crossers await feminization.
Cigarette’s smoke haze blaze.
Deluded daydreams of messianic walking’s deluded daydreams.
Am i Jesus as if Jesus performed Ian Drury and the Blockhead’s Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick
I meet an RMIT Management lecturer whom discusses the art of mismanaging conversations. 
Here there is a fanatical New South Wales Rugby League Blues supporter misrecognizing knowledge and ignorance; an alterity exteriorizing intimacy and alienation - the extimite’s extimacy. 

We are doing less yet there is more work from pedestrian passers-by to not explicitly engage with us - the less we do the more impact we have. 

 An apparition of First Nations Indigenous Aboriginal People’s leader William Barak appears as if an architectural Platonic Jesus. 
The road is pathed bathed in rose-pink.

Are we spaghetti monsters?

WTF

What?

The fuck

We have contact within salutes and hand-slapping high five acknowledgments, until I am the filling of between a couple of pairs of drug-addled strangers a hand-holding sandwich.
The latin alphabet meets asiatic pedestrian passer-by. 
Sun joy.
Trolleys. 
Cyclists.
Breath. Breathing. Leaf blown. 

Hands held. Hold up. Joy. Held. Up.

What the fuck is Ben doing with their baby’s pram?
Might we have become a family creche?

The present presenced more contact.
Dangerous. 
Awkward uncomfortable pleasures.
Comedy festival questions. Extremely serious scientific answers fucking playfully. 

The art of indifference, apathy and savoury chips!
We have bells.
We know pedestrians-passers by questions including Yarra Trams.

Did ya lose a bet mate?

Emergency sirens as she walked by. SIRENS! -  as they walked by!
EMERGENCY. 
SIRENS.
DESIRES.

An engineering student. Atmospheric elements. Mechanical engines and the right to provoke an accident. Disapproving shakes of Ben and Lefebvre’s heads. 
There is an excess and lack. An excessive lack? In each? 

Of these social media pilgrims one must not speak. 

Wittgenstien.

Ludwig.

Wittgenstein. 

4WD. SUV. Withering looks. Contentious glances. Sweating. Fatigue. Mouth. Dry.

Mouth. Thirsty.

Mouth.

Fatigue.

Hunger. 

A President thus? Tattooed slick punks. I have a scratch. I cannot itch. 
Engineering socially, aesthetically, politically, situationally, scientifically - rhythmanalytically. 

A Carlton resident believes we have been and are still here “everyday”. STILL! 
Parched, even bells forget time. 

Proactive intimidations. Provocations. Exhausted the joy of late crossers. Time poor. Challenged. 
Happy. Happy joy. Joy. Joy! JOY.JOY!

The passing vehicles still acknowledge still their mobile love for us within their tooting horns’s toots. 
An exasperated uncomprehendingly and stunningly bewildered asiatic acknowledgement that “youse have been here for hours!” 

More questions. 
What are the parameters? 
Less answers. 
Savoury chips! 

A question from a window passing-by: -
Are you for real?
Answered with:-
As real as you sir!

Keep passing the open windows.
Transcendental celebrations. Ekstasis. Ecstasy. Euphoria. Euphoric. Euphoria. Ecstatic ecstasy ekstasis.

13th April 

Walk with me.
Proactive hand-holdings.
Blackened Canberra friends with a six month old baby child discussing rhythmanalysis as if zombies walking messianically, daydreamingly, deludedly, voluntarily, irresistibly; with me.

Art is beautiful man.

Cliched Americans.

There is a couple of them! 

Child.

Infectious.

Hand-held digitally communicative technological zombie slaves.
Infectious.
Happy happiness smiles beaming smiles grinning smiles.

IN.FECT.IOUS.

CAUTIONS.

Greetings. Nodding greetings. 

That way boys. 
What am i suppose to be imagining?
What are we?
Scientists?

Dangerous ghosts haunt crossings.
More than a few times. 
Drug-addled matte black party music rages against the dying of the night’s light.
Alone.
We cross alone. 

Once again late crossers cross only to persistently, insistently, return back again. 



WEEK II

With the completion of the first week of our Test Sites project The Crossings and as RMIT artists-in-residence we had four days to critically reflect. And upon the eve of returning back again to commence the second consecutive week, Craig attended a colleague and close personal friend sculptor Caleb Shea’s art exhibition opening at Lon Gallery.  

Excited anticipating the next day’s instalment of our developing Test Sites experiment Craig indulged a late-night toasted tuna sandwich with an excess of chilli mayonnaise and a whole entire punnet of macadamia nuts upon an empty stomach. Within hours, from the early morning until the afternoon the next day Craig’s digestive system struggled. Excruciating pain assaulted his body. Disappointingly only Ben returned back again, with Craig guiltily and regrettably, lamenting the unfortunate missed opportunity of performing The Crossing upon the Easter Thursday - in anticipation of the imminent festival rites about to disrupt the working week’s everyday routine. 

The affective effects of a chronobiological arrhythmia manifested itself upon the hour for in-excess of 15 hours, whilst Craig traversed a trajectory of fear-filled hope and regretful desire towards his future Test Site’s contributions. As Ben patiently awaited the development of Craig’s ever-devolving prognosis, he re-engineered the self-surveying techniques within the contexts of utilitarianism, and the efficient recording of our rhythmanalytical data in real-time - albeit analogically. Whilst Ben’s editing omitted the descriptive noted comment section, the inexpedience of transposing our rhythmanalytical data became elegantly resolved graphically. Rather than a self-survey inspired by punch cards, the rhythmanalytical data was to become immediately recorded directly as a graphic representation instead.   

With Craig recovered and returning back again the next day Ben suggested we choreograph a dance routine to be performed within the intersection for a duration of time the automated pedestrian crossing legislated. We playfully experimented with motifs established from the week prior within the confines of RMIT Public Art’s interior spaces, until Ben asked the following question of Craig “Have you seen The Favorite?” to which he responded “No, i have not”. 

Ben suggested that The Favorite’s absurd dance choreography become an aspiration to be pursued. Inspired by the ensuing rehearsals, it was proposed that an in-situ performance and documentation might be quite successful. Due to the Easter Good Friday Public Holiday, the site’s intersection permitted access to play within the space of the dance without occupation of other inhibiting bodies. 

The choreography of The Crossings dance included:- walking hunched over for both to meet together and bow courting manouevres where each greeted the other with semi-circular backward steps; the palms of each other’s hand slap playing patty cake, an exaggerated self-grooming of the head and its hair; a climactic lift book-ended with a return to hunched over backward steps bowing with arms down and palms out upon display. The performing was not without its anomalous events such as a clashing of perspex visors and helmeted heads falling off and crashing down to the ground and rolling across the road and dangerous impatient self-entitled 4 Wheel Drive Special Utility Vehicles, whom beyond the desire to run us down, needed to toot their horns. An eccentric artist asked questions requesting answers about aesthetics and the affective effects of sacred religious Easter festival rituals and the ethics of rites. 

Satisfied with the day’s productivity we returned back again to the site a week later without necessarily any plans. With the RMIT academic semester completed the site was yet again quiet and with our interest piqued by the recent choreographic dance experiments the week prior, we playfully experimented upon the bustling corner of Victoria and Swanston Streets returning back again to past inspirational Butoh aspirations. 

With the weather overcast with monochromatic clouds and face talcum-powdered with hair tied back in a top bun, the performance played between an absurd gargoyle and an ambiguous, ambivalent androgynous figure subject to the intersection’s vicissitudes, including its occasional belligerent self-entitled occupants of wilful litterers, 4 Wheel Drive Special Utility Vehicles, and passers-by affected to the point of crying tears and protests admonishing Ben for his lack of providing any helpful assistance to the disturbing figure - other than digital documentation for posterity. Further heightening the performance’s affective effects was news another woman’s dead body was lying within an inner-city laneway. Courting a tragic melancholic mourning and within its somewhat poignant pathetic lament, the performance negated the “missed opportunity” of the Easter Thursday lost to Craig’s ‘chronobiological arrhythmic disturbance’ yielded digestively. With the privileged luxury of knowing we were not to return back again in earnest to the Test Sites project until over four months later within September, further self-reflective critique manifested itself upon writing this journal article submission whilst informing the project’s trajectories. Irrespective of documentation, it is within the answers the questions asked by the rhythmanalytical data collected and its interpretations that we might proceed. 

ILLNESS CHRONOBIOLOGICAL ARRHYTHMIA AS INSPIRATION - Richard Foreman “I’d like to think in happier, healthier times maybe I wouldn’t even be an artist” “You could make the case that this perverse historical period we’re in produces serious art only if it’s perverse. And i’d like to think that i am forced into what i know is a perverse strategy by the times” 

RHYTHMANALYTICAL ART AS PSEUDO-ACTIVISM

Whether the rhythmanalyst has a right to provoke an accident - the accident of art. As dangerous

Will the rhythmanalyst have to professionalise themself and set up and direct a lab to compare documents, frequencies and various curves 

HERMENEUTICS SACRED TEXT ROSETTA STONE 

Irrespective of documentation, it is within the answers the questions asked by the rhythmanalytical data collected and its interpretations that we might proceed. With our data’s graphic representations we have a hermeneutic methodology whereby the biases of observation and interpretation are inherently biased and yet still indeterminate within the language of ambiguous categories such as “atmosphere”, “interaction”, “daydreaming” and “Event”. 

Whilst we might “lack sufficient context to permit a meaningful response” or quantitatively embed assessments within a “context that significantly alters the meaning or salience of events” it is within the burden of our interpretations we project our own onto-phenomenological subjectivity within graphic representations approaching an in-situ or site-specific reality of the intersection. 

Rhythmanalysis’ “situated practice” acknowledges the hermeneutic epistemology science courts and our own onto-phenomenological subjectivity as a “horizon of meaning” and “action … based in a context of situational influences, shared cultural practices and social ideologies”. This “forestructure of understanding” inevitably returns to that which is already known by our past historical experiences, lifestyles and culture. 

Subjected to our own criticality our onto-phenomenological subjectivities dialogically encounter objective reality, opening itself to re-interpretations of the possibilities of historical pasts, presents and futurities. Rhythmanalytical data as a test of ideas in hermeneutic onto-epistemology are “context-dependent, mutually defining (co-constituted) phenomena” and it is as a “situated construction of social networks” the graphic representation aesthetically exceeds its own (pre)-determined meanings.

Might a site’s graphic representation of its perceived stimulus become a score for aesthetic purposes including accidents?

Henri Lefebvre’s ‘rhythmanalytical ‘ project and its utopianism politicizes spatial site-specificity as a “possibility for transcendence of the present” surpassing beyond the current social historicity, whilst approaching a pharmocotic antidote to culture’s socio-political arrhythmic pathology. For as per Onto-Hysteric Theatre’s Richard Foreman confesses:-

“You could make the case that the perverse historical period we are in produces serious art only if it’s perverse. And I’d like to think U am forced into what I know is a perverse strategy by the time. I’d like to think in happier,, healthier times maybe I wouldn’t even be an artist”

Lefebvre’s belief that “an accident makes confused rhythms sensible” approaches a Janus-faced chiasma for the rhythmanalyst actually “does not have the right to provoke an accident” – but yet however what if such accidents those small, tiny catastrophes that only the creative practices of art and-/-or revolution and the artist is to become an analyst of rhythms? Are we not some sort of wish-fulfillment of Lefebvre’s utopian project and everyday life’s aestheticisation? And but yet however, if so, what becomes of the surplus, the something remaindred, the unanalyzable but most valuable residue that resists expression other than through poetic means?

If the accidental small, tiny catastrophic event of art is “perception in the present of the unknown possible” and activism is an action outside of the routine of the everyday our rhythmanalytical project approaches courting a chronobiological revolution. Within Hegel’s dictum ‘the familiar is not necessarily the known” the artist and their art’s uncanny alterity, otherness or in Lacanese the extimite or extimacy - the intimate exteriority[21]; becomes the transgressive touchstone to the collective’s own instinctual transgressions.

If for Lefebvre the ‘remaindered’ approaches the underground side of everyday life – what becomes of utopia within a terroristic society and what becomes subversive about love?




  





[1]  Lefebvre, H. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life London: New York, Continuum p.3
[2] Lefebvre, H. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life London: New York, Continuum, p.26.
[3] Lefebvre, H. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life London: New York, Continuum, p.69.

[4] Lefebvre, H. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life London: New York, Continuum, p.19-20.
[5] Lefebvre, H. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life London: New York, Continuum, p.68.
[6] Lefebvre, H. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life London: New York, Continuum, p.21.
[7] Lefebvre, H. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life London: New York, Continuum, p.27.
[8] Lefebvre, H. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life London: New York, Continuum, p.20.
[9] Lefebvre, H. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life London: New York, Continuum, p.23.
[10] Lefebvre, H. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life London: New York, Continuum, p.19.
[11] Lefebvre, H. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life London: New York, Continuum, p.22.
[12] Lefebvre, H. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life London: New York, Continuum, p.22.


[13]  Ford, T.H. (2018) ‘Atmospheric Aesthetics:  Kant’s Antinomy of Atmosphere’ Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air, Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY, Cambridge University Press  p.135.
[14] Hillary, F. (2018) A Situated Practice. The Journal of Public Space, 3(2), p.149-166.
[15] Oliver, J Performing Mobilities (2015). http://www.performingmobilities.net/symposium/passages_mobile/crossings/?output=pdf
[16] Ingold, T. (2004)  ‘Culture  On The Ground The World Perceived Through Feet’, Journal of Material Culture, vol 9,p. 315–40, cited in Urry, J. (2007) Mobilities, 1st Edn, Cambridge: Polity Press, p.66.
[17] Pensky, M. (2004)  ‘Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images’ in Ferris, D (ed)., The Cambridge Guide to Walter Benjamin 1st edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p.191–4.
[18] Ingold,T. (2004) ‘Culture  On The Ground The World Perceived Through Feet’, Journal of Material Culture, vol 9, p. 315–40, cited in Urry, J. (2007)  Mobilities, 1st Edn, Cambridge, Polity Press, p.66.
[19] Baudelaire, C (2009) ‘Lost Halo’ Paris Spleen: Little Poems in Prose  Middletown Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, p.88, cited in Berman, M (1983)  ‘The Mire of the Macadam’ All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London, Verso, p.156 & 159.
[20]  Wolin, R. (1994) Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley,
p.130. 2nd edn.


[21] French Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s to theorize how our most intimate feelings can be extremely strange and Other and radically externalized subject to an authentic or sincere intense objectification.




CROSSINGS - PERFORMING MOBILITIES SYMPOSIUM


Benjamin Cittadini, Ceri Hann, Fiona Hillary & Shanti Sumartojo's Crossings is a performance work and a multi-disciplinary, practice as research enquiry revealing the negotiation of movements in the urban context. Formed from an emplaced practice of artists/researchers who are ‘thinking through action’ to reveal propositions/positions on contemporary (pedestrian) crossings.

The mobile methodology takes the form of the ‘crossing guard’ to reveal the embodied negotiations of flows in the urban context. By becoming emplaced ‘listeners’, the artists activate urban locations of pedestrian engagement in the ‘present’ term of crossing. To assist a public in a crossing is not just to help people negotiate obstacles between the past and the future, but to be with them in the present, to listen to the flow and observe the passage of the shadows of time, to live in a space that is neither departure nor destination, but a deeper space that is only crossing, never crossed. A crossing is not an overcoming of an obstruction, it is an opportunity to listen to the flow of movement that is everywhere, at all times: to coalesce in a constant state of becoming, to listen to the journey in its present passage.

In Hermann Hesse’s Siddharta, the ferryman takes people across the river, people for whom the river is an obstacle, a nuisance, a barrier to forging ahead. Meeting the ferryman, Siddharta notes his serenity and the seemingly timeless character of the river’s present. He asks the ferryman to teach him how to be present like the river. The ferryman answers that he is not a teacher, the river is. He listens. Crossing the river and observing its ever-changing rhythms and moods have taught him this. Siddharta lives with the ferryman, tending the boat and learning to listen.

Thursday.

Twilight.

St Kilda Road, alive with the freedom and madness of rush hour. Pedestrians, anticipating being home or prematurely celebrating the weekend, actively forget the travails of their recent past – the daily grind of their own presences and presentness.

Each passer-by hurries, harrying hither and thither, as four blue-coated, cream pant-cladded figures armed with white umbrellas and resplendent skivvies eerily cross back and forth through the intersection. Like lost resolute ships in the night, are these damned ghosts from a condemned future (fore)shadowing our present presences and/or our pasts?

A child’s gait slows, entranced, asking curious and wondrous questions of their guardians about Crossings’ silent phantasmatic spectres rendering the familiar strange. Crossings’ performative logic of the pedestrian – the ‘civilising process’(1) of merely walking from here to there – courts a limbo-esque utopian place/no-place and a timelessness somehow beyond the here-and-now, neither future nor past.

Within Crossings’ liminal threshold, (mis)recognition of knowledge and ignorance, an alterity exteriorising intimacy and alienation, the accumulative estrangement of repetition and its affective effects impact upon the enduring immediacy of life’s everyday reality. With all the time in the world to repeat each of their crossings – time stands still, going nowhere – Crossings becomes a dialectical image of messianic walking (2) and entropy.

From Crossings’ simple quotidian observation of a prosaic or commonplace ritual secreted or hidden in plain sight, the energy flow of the street’s vibrations ripples transfigured and/or transformed. These uncanny presences delightfully bemuse, perplex and bewilder, as a revelation of the emplacement we are subject to when negotiating the social fabric of urbanity, and those ebbs and flows imposed from within and without – including their transgressions.

Like stepping machines3,we pedestrians take for granted Baudelaire’s insight that when crossing amidst the chaos of (post)modern urbanity, t/here is ‘death galloping at me from every side’(4). These – our crossings – consume and unconsciously transcend, sublate or negate death’s shadow. For might not crossing intersections court defiance? That is, the defying of death; a gateway to a temporal immortality?

The everyday or quotidian performance of Crossings, as a mobilisation of our common ‘death-defying’ corporeality, hazards the street as a parade ground, whose procession expresses concrete lived experience, and an awakening from urbanity’s abstracted dream reality, unto nightmarish ‘profane illuminations’ that we are indeed hauntological – dead ghosts (5). For within Crossings’ formal utilitarian uniformity, these figures comfort and intimidate as though memento mori.  Irrespective of urban guardian angels or grim reapers, Crossings’ seductive solace manifested itself within a besuited man, whose temerity inspired mirroring one of the figures’ prone bodies upon a traffic island.  Another passer-by enquired, concerned, until a ‘selfie’ – the post-modern eternal equivalent to Benjamin’s ‘ruffle on a dress’(6) – allayed fears.  It was this entrancing enactment of emplacement and the strange uncanny familiarity of a bin-cast umbrella that Crossings’, as a research enquiry, proposes that those deaf and dead amongst us might listen still – at least figuratively speaking.

Respondent > Craig Peade

1 T. Ingold, ‘Culture  On The Ground The World Perceived Through Feet’, Journal of Material Culture, vol 9, 2004, pp. 315–40, cited in J. Urry, Mobilities, 1st Edn, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2007, p.66.
2  M. Pensky  ‘Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images’ in D. Ferris ed., The Cambridge Guide to Walter Benjamin 1st edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp.191–4.
3 Urry, op. cit, p.68.
4 C. Baudelaire ‘Lost Halo’ Paris Spleen: Little Poems in Prose Wesleyan University Press, Middletown Connecticut, 2009, p.88, cited in M.Berman ‘The Mire of the Macadam’ All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Verso, London, 1983, p.156 & 159.
5  R. Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, 2nd edn, University of California, Berkeley, 1994, p.132.
6  Ibid, p.130.