Neither Here Nor There: Props and Noticings

Randall Anderson

Origin: Static Issue 08
Content: Text/Images/Movie

In 2005, while attending the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, I developed an interest in a context where information serves as an intersecting point between bodies, facilitating the expression of both potential and failure. I started watching how people use the ubiquitous bulletin board (or pin board), identifying how they delineate visual space. This low-tech, vernacular, form of data gathering manifests as a dynamic collage, found in both private and public spaces. Although intent is often context specific, in all cases movement, change, and a constant state of flux informs what is essentially background coding signifying authentic living experience: information in formation. These accumulations drift from the specific to the general, beginning with a subject matter that reduces movement to its parts and particulars then sinking into the background.

As everything around us drifts toward obsolescence, unlearning and creating adaptable forms of order determine our ability to effectively use information. Collages, collections, and surfaces upon which things are gathered represent strategies for coping with the fragments that perpetually come at us. By design these systems are organically determined, accommodating shifts in the desires of the users, evolving and devolving as the information accumulates. Shape, colour, and position eventually create mediated un-designs, or formalized un-compositions. A tending-to-logic that unfolds as individuals strategically find the best place for their information, one notice vying for attention over another.

Initially my project involved making interventions on public bulletin boards, tampering with the rules that guide the system. In some of these actions I reorganized the notices, often turning them back to front, subverting the content, raising the questions, “What are these?” and “Why has somebody done this?” Jamming the system afforded a refocusing, and reassessment of the situation. In one intervention in Venice, Italy, I posted a blank notice and the next day discovered that some people had removed some of the tabs (see figure 5) demonstrating a desire to communicate and an innate understanding of how this system works.

Taken from popular media, the images that make up the “Props” database all feature a portrait of one person set against a background containing a bulletin board. The images are staged sets, constructs, fabrications of someone’s idea of a reality. The actor, the set, and the media create a tripartite set of formal relationships: three vessels, three blanks waiting for meaning. “Noticings” is an ongoing collection of collages. These works are made by harvesting bulletin board notices, then turning them over and layering them into formal compositions. The notices are used as they are found with no additional tags torn off, and organized following their original horizontal or vertical layout. The transient, throwaway notice realizes a hitherto unforeseen formal significance where the flow of information is frustrated, dammed up, resulting in a reservoir of potential.

Bandwidth, and the accelerated movement of bodies, both physical and virtual, occludes our need for momentary stillness, a time to re-assess where we are, and where we will move next. The “general”, being neither one nor the other, is a place where Props and Noticings act as rest stops, the moment before we all move again.

Props: View movie (QuickTime)

Noticings: View slideshow

Complete catalogue of noticings images:
http://randallanderson.net/pages/noticings.html

Complete catalogue of props images:
http://randallanderson.net/pages/props.html

Contributor:

Randall Anderson studied at Concordia University (BFA, MFA) in Montreal, The Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, and in the MFA program at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. He has exhibited, performed, and screened work internationally, including at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin Ireland, The Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide and Perth Institute for Contemporary Art in Australia, the Hinoemata Performance Festival in Japan, Artspace in Auckland New Zealand, the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, Transmission in Glasgow Scotland, The Western Front in Vancouver, and Mercer Union in Toronto, Canada. Involved as a board member in numerous artist initiatives over the years, he was a founding member of The Sense Lab in Montreal along with Erin Manning and Brian Massumi and in 2005 curated an exhibition of new work by Carolee Schneemann. He writes regularly for Flash Art, ArtReview, Canadian Art and Border Crossings. He maintains his website at: randallanderson.net.