writing...

the latter Diaspora

Diaspora 2.0 has begun. The Moors, animated by provoking and violent oscillations, started their slippery colonization of Eurasia, loosing huge pieces of themselves beside. Everything has a price. New interesting sceneries are coming. Who knows what this new hierarchy will bring!

Fluxusná Praha : the Visual Communication as a Driving Force in the Culture of Hybrid Flows. (The Bateson Ecology Applied to the Visual Context)

Fluxusna Praha by Simona Noera is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale - Non opere derivate 3.0 Unported License.

     This experimental research rises from the need to demonstrate how Bateson' s ecological model can be applied and expanded to visual communication. The purpose is to draw the relationships and mechanisms that create for us the world as an energetic vibrant and interconnected network in the contemporary culture, which is mainly based on visual communication, pursuing the goal of suggesting a theory for the metropolitan flows. This study is intended to be developed in two parts and has an anthropological - even if interdisciplinary - imprinting. The first part (narratively theoretical) will be focused on the main concepts of my research (creation of identity and avatars, social body, the city architectural body, relationships, non-lieux, visual communication, in-between, editing-mounting-bricolage, goods visual fetishism, visual anthropology, pattern) through authors the likes of Bateson, Canevacci, Simmel, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Bataille, Baudelaire, Adorno & Horkheimer, Augé and more. The second part of this Prague city behave exploration will be evinced through the dialogic methodology (cf Bakhtin), namely the narrative flow of voices that with the editing technique will create a polyphonic narration, proving my hypothesis. This narration will be strongly supported by the monographic documentary film, titled "Fluxusná Praha”(entirely produced by me). In this way, I will try to audiovisually understand and show these flows in their streaming. The audio component, too is specially recorded and soundly edited to match the polyphonic goal of this narration. The theme is therefore in opposition to the obsolete ethnocentric theories.

As I have already mentioned the main hypothesis is founded on how the Bateson' s ecological model can be applied and extended to the visual communication. And the methodology I've chosen to prove this is the dialogic one. In the experimental research it is particularly important for the scientist to ask about which method is better to be used. Personally, I've chosen this because I've already used it in my previous research for the bachelor's degree and I think this is the best one for visual culture experimental reports.

In Lévi-Strauss' opinion “the subject can be detected only between the here and the elsewhere "¹ , in the narrative ethnographic loop, which implicate the same observer to be part of his own observation. His field of knowledge - that is totally a social thing - must be externally recorded and must turn on the unit that includes a subjective understanding of the researched object. The use of such a process in knowing the others, shows the three-dimensionality of social acts, and the body, too is divided between both the object and the subject. In such cases, the ethnographic object is subordinate to the subjective ability to project outwards those fragments of the self that can never be reduced. In the nowadays cosmopolitan reality it is worth to use a strategy that first of all refers to a specific historical time, and it must value the new scapes². The aim is to research cultural and globalized processes with a more extended and transdisciplinary manner . The problem of autorepresentation is a symptom that wants to overstep the understanding of interpretation. To transform the text into a research field, so that its subjectivity gains a polyphonic nature, it's not enough to suppose just the dialogue. The dialogic methodology is a protection between the text and the interpretation, that allows the multiplication of subjectivities inside the text. In the indicated research these narrations (which have much in common with citations and the power that spreads from their collage, cf W. Benjamin) are collected in an audiovisual way. And this audiovisual document will be then analysed in the textual part of this study. It will be the character and the narration of my research. On Fluxusná Praha blog³ it is possible to find the record of the different phases that concern this project.

Presenting this work, I would like to make a quick view about the main concepts and ideas that brought me to this reflection, paying attention especially on the anthropological concepts that can be useful to develop this research, I will try to paint a short portrait of the object my study is focused on. 

  The metropolis is the place where the conflict, the ambivalence take place. The resulting feelings alternate themselves between the possibility to make it a resource or to remove it. The same word metropolis is “the verbal device that causes one of those lancinating intensification of the ordinary and logic quality that belongs to the extensive processes, for which the quantity changes to quality catalysing worlds instead of numbers”⁴. This quality makes the metropolis to be contemporaneously the object of languages and discourses and the subject of these languages, as it produces them by itself. The plurality of slang that connote the metropolis brings with itself a difficulty to define it, but also the impossibility to make it communicable. The proliferation of languages marks the passage: from the Fordist absence of interactions to the load of linguistic acts of the Post-Fordist epoch, and for sure this path has empowered the language.

According to Max Weber - who published the book The City – the metropolis is not only made of the economic and material dimension, but also of experience and therefore of the subjectivities that live inside it. The metropolis needs to be crossed/go passed/walked through, it need to open new sceneries counting with the relationships that grow inside it.⁵ In order to communicate, there is no need anymore of physical spaces, the net is an example of the Over experience, as the locus where the interaction and the consumption take place, joining the immateriality with the immediacy. Therefore the metropolitan solidity goes in relation with the fluidity of the communication networks.

In his essay The Metropolis and Mental Life (1957), Georg Simmel analyses the deepest problems of the modern life, that also concern the individual pretension to preserve the independence and the particularity of being determined in the face of the unbeatable powers of the society, of the historical heritage, of the exterior culture and of the technique.⁶ In the modernity the subject resistance is levelled and dissolved inside a technosocial mechanism. To understand the metropolis and the modernity we need to question about the products of the modern life in their inwardness and about cultural body. We have to look for the movements with which personality adapts to the powers that exist out of itself. The intensification of the nervous life is the psychological base that characterises the metropolitan individualities, it is produced by “the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli”⁷. The human consciousness is stimulated by the difference among the impression of the moment and that one that precedes the impressions that last, not much differenced or alternated by habitual regularity. The main result is the comparison / contrast among the psychic metropolitan life and the countryside, based on sentimentality and emotional relationships, set in the less conscious levels of the psyche and which are developed by the repetition of uninterrupted habits.⁸

Even if Simmel' s essay is dated 1957 and clearly refers to modernity, which is a little bit an over era, assuming that we disputably live in the post-modern age, better classified at this point of the human development as the Information Society, it is still appropriate to consider the words of a – in my opinion – genius, who was able to paint with extremely wisdom a perfect portraits of the feelings and emotions that float around the life in the city. The visual experience that takes places everyday through our eyes and gazes has a deep influence in the creation of the identity.

Anthropology has always been an anthropology of the here&now. The ethnologist is the one who is in some place (his here of the moment) and describes what he observes and listen to in the same moment. Every ethnology supposes the existence of a direct witness of a present actuality, while everything that separates from the direct observation pushes away from anthropology. The theoretical anthropologist who appeals for other witnesses and for other fields than his, resorts to ethnologists testimonies instead to direct sources that need to be interpreted. ⁹ The West/European here acquire its meaning referring to the far elsewhere ( that once was the colonial one and today is the underdeveloped one) that the English and French anthropologists have privileged. It is wrong to affirm that ethnologists tend to fall back on Europe because there are no more far anthropological reality. In Africa, America and Asia there are still many possibilities of concrete studies, though there many good reasons to work on Europe, whose exam can lead us to bring into question the opposition Europe/elsewhere, from where we started.¹⁰

The anthropological research minds, in the present, about the question of the Other (all the others: the other of the others, it means the ethic or cultural other defined in the relationship with a cluster of others considered identical, the social other who establishes a system of familiar, political, economical differences, from which it is possible to define the various fields of research. The anthropologist is interested in the person not only because he is a social construction, but also because every representation of the person is necessarily a representation of the social connection that is complementary to him. The social begins with the person, therefore he becomes the object of the anthropological observation.¹¹

Whatever is the level to which the anthropological research is applied, it has as object the interpretation of the interpretation (meta-interpretation) that the others give to the other's category on various spacial and social levels.

  The common pattern of these three terms, gives a profound and significantly meaning to the new anthropological research. And it is exactly thanks to the visual focused on the contemporary culture, that is possible to feel, discover, create the multiple changes that happen in the different societies. If communication is a system based on different channels, where everybody participate in every moment, this participation finds an easiest way to grow and move exactly through the different languages that the visual offers to us, like advertisings, cinema, televisions, shortly the various technological media that has involved and still do not only the West cultures, but also the natives ones ( cultures that reject: the museumification, because they statically stay in the reserves of their borders; the homologation, because they are dynamically absorbed into the homologative flows of the mediascapes). This double bind (cf Bateson) shows the conflict among tradition and mutation, among global and local.

Therefore this leads to the fact that the diffusion of visual communication caused the establishment of a globalist culture (which is not seen anymore as unitary, but characterised by fragmented overlapped flows creating syncretisms) that makes the national field of research obsolete. Hence, the anthropological approach to visual communication is configured on two levels. The first one is about the direct use from the researcher of audiovisual techniques to document and interpret the reality. The second one is about the application of the cultural analysis on the communication products to extrapolate lifestyles, to elaborate symbolic models useful to the anthropology.¹²

To demonstrate the possibility of innovation for a communication anthropology applied to the visual (intending with this the visual goods) with an adding value of communication sort. The contemporary goods are the visual goods and they differ from the traditional goods, as the new fetishes are embodied in them, qualifiable through the communicative power that they spread.

The nature of the new goods is hence presented as visual communication, they are not just objects anymore, but they are rather fully subjects, with a body bloated of symbols and signs. The concept of methodological fetishism wants to encourage the dissolving of the visual fetish-goods, exasperating their appeal, the sex appeal of the inorganic (cf W. Benjamin) – disentangle of the communicative power. It redefines as methodological fetishism that approach to the communicative forms of the inanimated objects that dissolves their commodificated quality through the semiotic slide of the codes embodied in it. The polyphonic methodology suits perfectly to them, with the multiplication of the point of views and of the representative styles on the same object. The meta-observation fits completely for the decoding of the visual communication. Observe and being observed, showing up, placing in the point of view that is totally inside the visual flows ( technoscapes, mediascapes, finanscape, ideoscapes and ethnoscapes) and at the same time totally out of it. ¹³

Assuming the fact that we need to be positioned in the point of view that is totally inside the visual flows, so that the perceiving subject and the perceived object cast themselves into a unique pattern, it is now time to propose the Gregory Bateson concept of “an ecology of mind”, which refers to our skill to contemporaneously decode many different messages. The mind doesn't belong just to the human being, but to the whole ecosystem. This represents the most radical attempt to overpass the old dualisms between spirit and matter and to fuse the nature with the culture. According to Bateson “every unit that presents functioning characteristics of attempts and errors, will be legitimately called a mental system”¹⁴ The Bateson truth is a great one and so it has to be criticised. The challenge is to transform his ecology into an anti-ecology of mind and media. And this anti-ecology has to be empirically verified onto the contemporary communicative flows. It has to be experimented with innovative forms (technologies) of representation.

Bateson presents also other concepts connected to the ecological system. The Connective Pattern as an experimental pattern of the representation, through the interconnection of the different disciplines they connect each other by abstractive processes. Abstractions that are possible through the collage or the polyphony, multiplying the different points of view. And the double bind, a concept which is applicable to different communicative processes and so it can be applied to the goods and the media, therefore to the visual communication anthropology. The origin of this concept has to be found in Bateson' s studies about schizophrenia. He supports the idea that most of the mental disturbs are due to the incapability of a person to recognize and interpret the meta communicative messages ( that have for object the communicative relationship) that should tell the person what kind of genre the message is. To this adds the incapability to issue meta-communicative messages ( the classic example is the familiar relationship). It is possible to grab the double bind model from the familiar dynamic to apply it to the visual communication. Indeed, the meta-communication emanated among the new languages is more and more complexly made of codes that dances on a pattern that connects them and the audience finds problems in decoding in a non conflictual manner the various codes spread by these languages. This new reception that is released also for people that don't know how to decode the communicative power and the interaction of these different codes, can produce a double bind. At the end, the acculturation to this new reception produces an anti-ecology of the mind. ¹⁵

The new critic to the communication is situated in the ability to cross over, break up, multiply the narrative spins. The ethnographic Bateson experiments new ways of representing for the research on field and new forms of objective language, a multiplication of new languages that make more comprehensible a precise reality. The essay form has overcome. With Bateson for the first time the emotions of the observed and of the observer become the specific object of the ethnographic research. The iconic, verbal and written language empower each other under the unpredictable law of polyphony. In Bateson opinion, the methodology doesn't express itself so much on the field as on what the researcher is going to do with the collected data, basically he refers to their editing. The anthropological writing can just be a mosaic-editing that meta-communicate, because the new anthropology is syncretic and polyphonic in the object of the method.

The visual communication is not presented as linear, but as an artifice composed of continuous mixes, exchanges and interfaces of visions, associations and abstractions.

As happens in the hourglass everything endlessly turns upside down and the time of fall for the grains is always the same, but its order is chaotic. The proper methodology for visual communication is the editing. It is urgently strong the need to pass, even sharply, from a narrative pattern to another. This alternated editing (among theoretical and visual texts) of the story is inserted inside a double beginning to whom will follow a double ending to let the discourse circular. This paradigmatic language ( unlike the sintagmatic one, in which the signifier chain follows the words order) in which a multiplicity of different languages talk each other simultaneously, multiply the codes present in every frame: internal comment, external comment, noise, body techniques, colour, writings, camera movements.¹⁶ Every synchronous fracture has in itself different codes. In my thesis polyphony and multimediality will try to open the communication to a dialogic model that will consider its final meaning by the simultaneous sum of every variation provided in the text, so that it could be “played” as a hypertext.

The diaspora move on different spaces, not opposite to nomads diffuses a completely new float of points of view.

The difference between the 19^th century metropolis and the contemporary ones is that the latter are constantly crossed and intersected by diasporal subjects who are impossible to be stopped, neither with repression, nor with laws. These diasporal subjectivities graft worried and worrying communicational syncretisms. The diasporal subject is not connected anymore with his ethnic matrix. He is a disconnected subject, who chooses to go through the metropolitan and communicational flows, questioning about every solid configuration of what has been realized , ethnicised, sexualised from the West.

The hybrid mix of culture has swept away the industrial centrality of the old city and of the Benjamin metropolis. The communicational metropolis has extended along huge areas of perturbation, with plural meanings and multi-sequential that insert in the new technologies and new syncretism through mutated panoramas.

Sooner or later, diasporas will end up in the metropolis. Without diasporas there are no metropolis.

The nomadic is irreducible to the city, the diasporal multiply in the metropolis. From this perspective, there are affinities among the concept of syncretism and the diaspora one. Both the concepts are liquid and don't stand against to the solid ones, but they automatise from them. It means that they mix, remix, recreate.

The diasporal subject, crossing and passing through the technologies, styles, different cultural models produces syncretisms. Moreover, both of them are hardly classifiable, they are concepts that live in a continuous transformation after being marked for such a long time as stable and sedentary.¹⁷

The contemporary shape of the metropolis – always less characterised by the production and always more by the triad culture-consumption-communication – is not reducible to the State as it has developed along the modernity. Metropolitan spaces are hybrid spaces and the syncretism is totally something else than the nomad and nomadism. Syncretics enjoy and cross the metropolis instead of being purists and purifyings of modern Babylonias. So we can say that the syncretics are not nomads but diasporal.

The diasporal is a subject who acts a spontaneous ethnographic research performing the mutation of the contemporary metropolis, remixing the traditional dualisms as material/immaterial, nature/culture, and so on. It' s not a case if the metropolitan areas are characterised by diasporic migrations, because are exactly the migrations that put the diasporic subject into the adventure inside these new spaces/times. It is inside these conflicts that emerge new irreducible post dualist practices crossed by a plurality of diasporic displaced selves.¹⁸

As I've already mentioned, diaspora moves on different spaces and it does it inside the multiply histories of subjectivities ignored by the official History. Obviously diasporas are often forced migrations, diasporas migrate their subject in many different contexts, and one of them is the metropolis. The diaspora flows have as scenography the mutant lines of the new metropolis. And the diasporic subjects are critically important for the production in the new metropolis. Liquid concepts don't try to gain the power, instead they flow among continuous crossings and intersected patterns that contribute to innovate a remix, to endlessly lead their own mutant multi-existence, constantly breaking down every central and authority power.¹⁹

Cross cultural communication doesn't mean to manage the emergent conflicts among people who belong to different cultures and who live in the same area. It means instead, to set free the infinite combinations in which the crossings, the walking through and the crosses – externally or internally to the subject - modify the interzone feeling of the communicational transit.²⁰

The huge space of the metropolis transform itself in a living space in which is possible to move over the limits, over the borders, down to the most deep secrets. The passages described by Benjamin, become the places where this mutation happens, where the ambivalence of modernity appears. Something sensitively changes inside the metropolitan space. Concerning this accelerated change Lévi-Strauss says that “ therefore it is not the metaphorical manner that we get the right to compare (…) a city to a symphony or to a poem; this is the matter of the objects with the same nature. Perhaps it is even more precious, the city places itself in the confluence of the nature and of the artifice. (...) It is contemporaneously nature object and culture subject, person and group, lived and dreamed, human thing par excellence”.²¹

Lévi-Strauss put on evidence the extraordinary variety of the urban landscapes, the contrasts that result from the accumulation of temporal stratifications and from their tangling in the space, everything under the sign of the computed mitation.

The many connections at issue, are not just thematic and geographic, but entail also an additional dimension that is not temporary. In fact, these allow to transmute the linear temporalness of the mythical tales in to the circular temporalness of the groups of transformation, it means again the manner to stop the time.

The modern anthropologist, complaining about the dissolving of the human diversity, collects and increases the value of its surviving. These precious archives of the human diversity, the collections and the anthropological taxonomies are, anyway, constantly threatened by temporal contingencies. Wondering around through the modern scape, the anthropologist finds every time something different, a casual mixing of possible human combinations.²²

The point at issue is to accept and search for the connection that Derrida names “jettée”²³, a word that in French means the jetty, the landing stage that extends to the water to welcome the boats, that in Derrida' s intentions means that expository movement and subsequent retraction of progress to the unknown and of necessary retraction in a place of sense. The double movement that typify the constitution of every theoretical instance.

1H.K.Bhabha, I luoghi della cultura, 2001 page.209

2The scapes intended here are the five global flows presented by Appadurai. Thinking with scapes lets extend the discourse to panoramas and shows its liquid and irregular shape. These points of views are deeply perspective, and their cases are historical, linguistic and political encounters for different actors. Appadurai describes the following panoramas: ethnoscapes ; mediascapes; technoscapes; finanscapes; ideoscapes. (ref. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization, 2003 pages 48-65)

3http://fluxusnapraha.blogspot.com/

4A.Abruzzese, Forme Estetiche e Società di Massa, 2002 page 2

5M.Weber, La città, 1922 pages 10-11

6G.Simmel, La Metropoli e La Vita dello Spirito, 2004 page 35

7Ibidem, page 36

8Ibidem, page 38

9M.Augé, Non Luoghi, 1993 page 14

10Ibidem page 15

11Ibidem page 22-25

12M.Canevacci, Antropologia della Comunicazione Visuale, 2002 pages 11-16

13Ibidem page 24

14G.Bateson, Verso un'Ecologia della Mente, 1976 page 477

15M.Canevacci, Antropologia della Comunicazione Visuale, 2002 pages 46-49

16Source: personal annotation at class of Anthropology with Prof. M.Canevacci, 2004

17M.Canevacci, Sincretismi, 2004 page 65

18Ibidem. Page 68

19Ibidem. Page 77

20Ibidem. Page 80

21C.Lévi-Strauss, Cahier de l'Herne, 1982 (it.trad.2004) page 122

22J.Clifford, A Chronotope for Collectionism, in Fuori di sè, 2008 page 165

23J.Derrida, Come non essere postmoderni, 2002 page 44

Bibliography:

A.Abruzzese, Forme Estetiche e Societŕ di Massa, 2002

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization, 2003

M.Augé, Non Luoghi, 1993

G.Bateson, Verso un'Ecologia della Mente, 1976

H.K.Bhabha, I luoghi della cultura, 2001

W.Benjamin, Parigi Capitale del XIX Secolo,1986

M.Canevacci, Antropologia della Comunicazione Visuale, 2002

M.Canevacci, Sincretismi, 2004

J.Clifford, A Chronotope for Collectionism, in Fuori di sè, VVAA 2008

J.Derrida, Come non essere postmoderni, 2002

C.Lévi-Strauss, Cahier de l'Herne, 1982 (it.trad.2004)

G.Simmel, La Metropoli e La Vita dello Spirito, 2004

M.Weber, La città, 1922

personal annotations at class of Anthropology with Prof. M.Canevacci, 2004

doco sketches at fruit party in 2.patro

Praha 18.09.2010

Planting Ideas Symposium & Fluxusná Praha

If any problem won't occur, the interactive video editing installation will be held in Kolin chez the Divo Institute next weekend.
I'll give better infos during these days.
See you soon for the cut!

http://plantingideas2010.blogspot.com/

Bodies

with prague sampled sounds

what's Fluxusná Praha?

Fluxusná Praha never left

It could look like it is a dead project. I spent the last months travelling a little bit, many times I didn't have internet connection so I just gave up for a while ( that lasted approx one year ) with the online diary.
This experimental documentary is still in production. As it pretends to be an anthropological research I think it needs a longer time, and I was counting since the beginning with that.



This is a piece of the building where I was living for some time in
Toulouse, France. It is long almost one kilometer and in there live
2.000 people. Lots of movement inside.


I spent some months in Toulouse, France and I was wondering if I had to put some pieces of this city too in the doco, but at the end I just decided it was a good experience to continue thinking about this metropolitan flows and focus especially on Prague city.

Most of the material is now ready for editing, but I'm still researching on the theoretical side of this project, so the final editing is planned to be ready at the end of the summer/beginning of autumn.

During this time I matured the idea of creating a double version of the videostream. I really would like the people to edit the audiovisual clips by their movement. To make it possible I decided to build a little interactive installation which will be capturing the movement of the people who will be spending their time at this event.

Some webcams will be set with differents audio and video clips I collected till now, and as the people will pass by the webcam they will in fact change the displayed images/clips and sounds.
So just with their movement they will be able to manipulate as they want the stream. The audiovisual manager software will be recording the live that will be later presented as the collective work of me with the people that will decide to join that evening.

So I'm working on the raw material and I'll keep you updated with this event that will take place somewhere here in Prague in the next two weeks.
See you soon!

with no ticket

ohne titel

So, last wednesday the 1st of July me and Natryx went to Naměsti Míru to meet up with my friend Polina S. Tikk, she's from Russia and she's involved in graphic design and other interactive media stuff. We met also Tomáš Patlich, a friend and a student of interactive media. He's Czech and he has also an audio recording studio here in Prague (sype studios) . Because, as usual, Prague's weather is crazy, we decided to record the two interviews in their apartment. The talks with them were made separately, Polina was talking in English because I don't know Russian ( and that's a pity, I would love to record it in her own language ) and Tomáš in Czech. It was really great, I really loved their points of view, especially Polina's definition of time and movement and the great anecdotes of Tomáš.
The day after, the 2nd of July, we went to interview Mike Gisondi, he's from New York and he lives here in Prague from many years. He invited us to his cool courtyard, right in the centre of the city and which hosts a couple of restaurants and shops. It was a funny speech, we were drinking good fresh Plzen and Gambač, talking about the funniest aspects of the city. Unfortunately this morning Natryx told me the audio we recorded isn't so good because of the noise we had around. I'm really sad about this, I'm waiting to hear it, hoping it will work in some ways. But sometimes happens, this is the risk of making a documentary, where everything is live and unrepeatable. Keep the fingers crossed!

Here are some pictures I took on my way back home.

the wall of fame

Today afternoon, my friend Wrabec went to my place in Letná to record the interview. It was the shortest interview I've ever made: 7 minutes. But I must admit that in a such tight time he told me things I was expecting to hear and that till now I didn't. He looks very deeply at the visual part of the city, and I really liked our talk.

Then me and Natryx moved to Jiřího z Poděbrad to meet Damien near the TV-Tower and he showed us the wall where he and other street artists paint/put their stuff. It was very interesting and he also told us some stories of that place. We made the interview on the sidewalk and it was quite interesting the noisy effect of the people walking through us while we were recording.
Příští stanice : Wednesday the 1st of July, an intensive day of filming and interviewing.

sound of the metro

rolling

It's quite a long time I don't write on this blog, but it's because after some shooting we made last week I've been for some days to Italy and I hadn't the time, so I apologize for the delay:)
Well, last week and exactly on the 18th of June we went to my Faculty in Jinonice (Humanities Studies) and we had the honour to record the interview with the Professor Miroslav Marcelli, Head of the chair of Electronic Culture+Semiotic at the Karlová Univerzita ( where I study), professor at the chair of Philosophy and sub-dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Ecumenical University in Bratislava, Slovakia. The meeting with him was very pleasant as usual, I think he's just a great philosopher and in fact he gave us many many good point of views. After we were reached by the street artist Damien Mitchell and his friend Mike Gisondi, who we will both interview next week, and we took the yellow metro B line from Jinonice to Naměsti Republiky and I recorded some footage of the metro travellers and of some signs with my videocamera. Hopefully Damien will also collaborate in this project making some art that I would like to animate, or what else, we will see.
The next monday, the 22nd of June we went again to my faculty in Jinonice to record the inteview with Cyril Říha, a researcher at the Center for Theoretical Study and lecturer at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design and at the Faculty of Human studies of Charles University in Prague. His main interests are architecture and urbanism and I must say that his interview was pretty interesting. One thing was funny, when he said that if it takes you more than one hour to travel from a point to another, you cannot say that you're in a city. It's funny because on my mind came the example of Rome, the capital of Italy and my hometown where I lived for 26 years, where you cannot plan to make more than one thing per day, exactly because it takes you so much to get from one point to another. And it happens because Rome is completely disorganized, with and awful public transportation and with too much traffic (people prefers to take their cars and to stay in the queue rather than take public transportation).
Anyway I think I'll take many ideas from this interview.
Next shooting is scheduled for next sunday, when we'll interview my friend, advertiser and kind of street artist Wrabec (Michal Moravčik )-he comes from Bratislava in Slovakia and he lived many years in Prague and in Dresden,Germany-and my other friend and architect Jan Jarošek. I'm really curious what their answers will be!
Next week will be a very busy week of shooting and I'm happy for that. We are planning to interview the French artist Pascal Silondi, resident here in Prague, and my friend and graphic designer Polina S. Tikk. We will also go to shoot the tunnels in Prague, we'll go to a tram deposit and try to interview a driver...and many more stuff that I will report on this page.
So we're running and it sounds really good.
See you soon on this blog!!;)

fluxusná praha : an introduction

Fluxusná Praha is a project that came to my mind first a couple of months ago while I was travelling through the yellow B metro line of Prague city.

Since I'm living here in Prague ( it's now two years ), I always felt this sort of attraction for the behaviour of the movement in this city. I imagine these kind of travel experiences as flows that spread both from people ( with their relationships ) and from the structure of transportation itself, what I'm researching now here is the narration of the forms and the colours that these flows draw, creating a connective pattern which in my opinion is the city and its life.
Last week I started filming.
On thursday morning (11th of June)I've been filming with the help of my friend and multimedia technic Emilio Bellu, the interiors of the metro stations Nádraží Holešovice, Vltavska and Můstek. Then I made a quick jump walking through Strossmayerovo Náměstí, which is a big tram cross in Prague 7. From there I took the tram 26 till Náměstí Republiky, situated in the center of Prague but it started to rain and it quickly turned into a storm, so I decided to shot the Lucerna Passage, another way to move through the city is obviously by foot and the passages explain well this concept.
The next day, friday, I went to make an interview to the artist, videomaker and graphic designer Rory Wilmer in the neighbourhood of Vyšehrad, he also showed us some particular places there, like the old Train Station and the massive iron train bridge.
For the audiovisual capture we are working in two. I take care of the video filming and I'm managing the art direction of the project. With me works a wonderful "sound grrl" Anastasia Chrysanthakopoulou, she comes from Athens in Greece and she takes care of the sound capture and she's helping me sample the sound from the city that will be modified into the sounds for the featured soundtrack.
Probably the composition will be made for some tracks by Anastasia and others by Honza from Cirkus Alien.
Last sunday, the 7th of June we've been recording sounds from Letenské náměstí, various older trams, from inside the metro (yellow and red line ), the tram stop in Národní třída, the street Národní and we ended up in Újezd where we last recorded the sound of the funicular.

This is a kind of diary for this short documentary.
I hope I'll have always the time to update our actions ;)