Exploring NYC through 26 words
An area rug on cobblestones, reserved for women, framed one of the explorations of beauty offered to the Dumbo Art Festival audience by the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective. Revelatory for the women who accepted the invitation to wear the hijab, and revelatory for the male on-looker.
A good building helps us see beyond its walls. These windows at the Metropolitan Museum create a spectacular RETE that welcomes the snow outside.
Hanging out with Ai Wei Wei at the Brooklyn Museum. It takes a certain artistic brilliance to know how to JERRYBUILD a hanger, transforming it from a sartorial tool to a work of sculptural insight.
In an OPEN CITY , would we wage a Kurt Schwitters style attack on all things militaristic? I found this Dada celebration in the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn in the summer and now it is long gone, making way for sky high apartment buildings. Perhaps they will create their own OPEN CITY of peace. (OPEN City – In war, a city that has abandoned all defensive efforts.)
I’ve been listening to this multi-song bird every night over the summer here in Brooklyn. I have never seen it, but it perches in the top of a spruce tree in the front yeard by the street each evening. I recorded its lovely, dynamic song and now would like to find out if it is indeed a MOCKINGBIRD.
From my roof, the day my second nephew was born.
Clinton Hill, Brooklyn
Spring 2014
EVERY FOLD MATTERS
a performance that explores the personal, often hidden experience of doing laundry among the washers, dryers and folding tables of a working laundromat
by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs with Rosemary Fine and Veraalba Santa
Saturday, May 17, 2014
Atlantis Laundromat. 472 Atlantic Avenue , Brooklyn
EVERY FOLD MATTERS is half-hour work-in-process reading and movement piece. Our performance explores the personal and social experience of doing laundry. Two performers played by Veraalba Santa and Rosemary Fine weave together improvisation, written text, and movement within the inspiring environs of the soon-to-be-demolished Atlantis Laudromat.
Presented as part of the Brooklyn Lit Crawl http://litcrawl.org/nyc/brooklyn-may-17-2014/
Produced by Emily Rubin and Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose and supported by the Brooklyn Arts Council
More info at: http://www.dirtylaundryreadings.com/html/volume31.html
This event is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).
By choosing the word bibliomancy, I have forced myself to think long and hard about the investment we as humans have in the written word. Twenty years ago, I made a filmed entitled “Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning”, so I guess I’ve been fascinated with the power of the thing for a long time. With bibliomancy, the thing is the book and the book, in most cases, is holy. But, for those of us secular folks, committed to the magic and the mystery of telecommunications, the holy book has become the telephone book. It offers us access to the identities and locations of millions of other people – people we might marry, people we might meet on a bus, people who are rich, people who are brilliant, people who are almost destitute, people who are no longer people but whose names still remain in the book. Faith in the book implies a belief in its ability to lead us to divine awareness, maybe even to see into the future. The shooting of a film for this word takes us to a basement where we I photograph the flipping of a Manhattan telephone book while my daughters fan a feint breath across the pages. Later through Flash animation, a hundred names will tumble from the page. (Lynne Sachs)
When I was invited to contribute to this project, I was given perhaps a dozen words to choose from. This word was the most inspiring. Since most of my work is very literal, I really appreciated an opportunity to make something abstract and impressionistic. A short film whose starting point is “the study of blindness” was an inspiring springboard.
Walking along 23rd street and noticing the services and schools for the blind, I felt that I had found my . At the intersection of 6th avenue, an audio signal box beeps an alert tied into the streetlights; I knew I wanted to include this metronome.
The first idea that came to mind was to make a “video flipbook” composed of stills. When I started gathering the stills, I felt they were too clear, too legible. I wanted to recreate a sightless/partially sighted experience by making the stills unfocussed and blurred. As I began stringing the stills together I experimented with interrupting the image flow with dark sections– leading me to what became the motivator for the rest of my image gathering and editing: the overwhelming, unfocussable assault of visual stimulation that a 5-avenue stretch of Manhattan can become, and how moments of darkness can offer some respite. What if you could only see in bits and pieces? What if your eyes and mind weren’t fast enough to make logical connections between the racing images flying past?
I ultimately used nearly 700 stills. I walked across 23rd street several times, shaking my camera, looking like a tourist going home with the world’s worst collection of travel memories. I was looking for softness, color and dynamism. Some images I froze to allow a moment of closer study, only to be whisked away and replaced with a dozen more images.
I recorded the audio the same way, walking slowly and pausing near any interesting voices or words. I eventually used 4 different pieces of audio overlapped and mixed up and down to try to give an impression of conversations speeding by. The film is bookended with the sound of the signal from the 6th avenue crosswalk box.
When I watch it I like that the images move just fast enough that I always feel a step behind, trying to process the image that just passed while also registering the new one coming at me; the way the darkness allows me a moment to breathe and absorb just the sounds for a moment. (Ethan Mass)
It was a humid summer evening in late August. I was strolling around Manhattan in no rush to get to my subway stop, when a vanilla ice-cream craving overtook me. To my delight, I turned a corner and found one of the many infamous Mr. Softee trucks sitting idly. I smiled at the man, and scoured the various sprinkle and dip combinations available to me, when my legs suddenly became immersed in a dense heat. I lost concentration, and looked down to find two wafts of toxic grey vapor, one from the sewer a foot away, and one from Mr. Softee’s tailpipe, morphing into a big noxious cloud at my feet. I decided against the cone, and instead took out my camera to dance with the emanations all around New York that night. (Beth Botshon)