One way I’m working with conceptualizing place focuses on YouTube as a literal online location where toxic discourses proliferate in relation to conspiracy theories. I’m also thinking about these ideas by focusing on the making of place through toxic discourses.
I would be interested in the place as a concept.
I am interested in toxicity, place, and collaborative anthropology.
One thing I’m really interested in thinking about is how other kinds of groups use this design model, and to what ends. For example, I think it is really interesting that one of the groups I am currently looking at actually uses a gallery model for their activism. They create a pop-up street gallery in an LA alley using photographs of chemtrail “evidence” in order to engage in conversations with the public on conspiracy theories. I think this is really interesting in terms of thinking about both place and design.
I’m wondering if for the final presentation of the gallery there might be a way to balance images and words to where visitors have enough information to understand the context of the image, but the text is brief enough to be able to read through several pieces. So, perhaps an online version could provide the extended text, or people could scan a QR code in the gallery for extended text, but the gallery would be something people could tackle in one visit and not be too overwhelming.
I draw inspiration from experimental urbanism kinds of work where people have critically engaged with planning as a practice and developed other ways of knowing, and collaborating with community. Examples:- The set of installations on When is Space?
I think it's an interesting experiment, and the biggest take-away seems to be in making us reflect on how changing the frame of analysis can change the knowledge produced about something, and in parsing through the ways in which we know what we know. My impression is that this is going to work great to think across seemingly different projects and topics. I would like more reflection on what forms of collaboration is possible and not in a project of this kind, as well as the many meanings of collaboration.
I thought it would be a good platform to share and collaborate ideas and materials while exploring with different ways of conceptualizing my project.
I have taken filmmaking classes and have produced several short documentary films. I have also been part of a group art project during an MA degree in Art and Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London. The project catalogued and visualized into a (physical and online) map the things, people, found objects, animal, and ghosts in the rapidly gentrifying district of Deptford, London, which was also where Goldsmiths was based.
I am interested in the relationship between the project of “placing” outer space (in terms of imaging, imagining, research through the placing of telescopes etc) and the politics of space on Earth, especially that of colonialism and settler colonialism. More than as a specific site, I am interested in “place” as a process of contention in the imagination of outer space.
