anton d. lazarus

For THE SHOW I had to put everything I’d done together into something digestible. Sure, sorry, it wasn’t a “show,” it was an “expo”. The idea of the expo was to present my work and engage with visitors about it. I suppose I could have handed out a printed copy of everything that has been written on this blog so far, but that’d be a bit silly. I wanted the people that came to engage with what I’d done in a managed way; sure, I’d be there, explaining what I’d done and why and when and how and anything else they cared to ask or I cared to tell, but I wanted there to be a purpose to what I had done. I wanted to try and change people’s minds through the work I’d done, or at least to make them think, or at least for them to have a laugh and have fun doing something. What I wanted for the show was for my love machine to be built and to work, so that guests could come in and have a go, to see whether they were “compatible” in terms of the work that I’d done. I needed to build a machine that could be placed into the room and “shown off,” that people who had no idea about anything I had done could see as a tangible outcome. No doubt it would lack the depth of reading my entire blog or even having done everything I’d done, but that didn’t bother me, it was an abstraction of the things I’d thought and seen and felt. I saw the expo as a door held very slightly ajar for a moment to allow people to peak in, not for long and not able to see the whole thing, but to get an idea of 1. what was inside, 2. why there was a door and 3. why I wanted to hold the door open.

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So in a way hitching had been a massive failure, my last post is based on a scrawled entry in my journal after having attempted to hitch from London back to Bristol, specifically to the woods that I had been to with Heath and his friends and even more specifically to get back to the place where I had fallen down trying to jump from tree to tree (sorry, too good to not link to again). I wanted to make that instance of failure into a moment of inspiration, a cause, a point behind everything I was doing. Perhaps I thought that I could somehow make up for my failing by forcing it into a success but I like to think that it was more wood on the fire of chance. Anyway, it didn’t work, no one in west London would pick me up. I had planned to ask everyone who gave me a lift what they thought about love and then to record what they said and somehow use that in my system. Again, yeah, it was a vague plan but I liked it that way, if anything I saw that as simply opening it to potential rather than a very specific plan that would force me to do something that I set out to do.

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I was completely alone. Holding up the sign seemed the most difficult thing to do - an act simple in itself but symbolically and emotionally overloaded. By holding up the sign I was making an exhibition of myself, I was offering myself, begging for attention and favour. As a rule I do not get intimidated by standing up in front of a crowd or being the centre of attention, but that’s different, I am on my own terms in a familiar and acceptable social situation, this was different. Here I stand, protected only by a thin piece of cardboard that is itself the weapon inflicting my outsider status. I am alone and asking to be judged. I stand and cars slowly drive by, drivers looking me up and down judging my level of threat from the safety of their own vehicle, thinking “who on earth goes HITCH-HIKING these days?”. My behaviour puts me at odds with 21st century etiquette, out of place in my own city, amongst “my own people”. But it makes me realise the idiocy of that assumption - that these are my own people; how are they my own people? They live in the same city, that is all.

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Deciding to visit HEATH BUNTIN.G was an odd moment. I had some ideas about love and about doing something potentially adventurous but nothing very material and it was beginning to scare me. Visiting Heath just seemed like something that could be done that may or may not lead to something else happening. Yes yes, I know that was a ridiculously vague pretense for crossing the country to meet up with someone that I had only met once before for an hour or so, but as I said, it seemed like a good idea and I’m all about these things that seem like a good idea, especially if they just seem that way “at the time”.

The visit to Bristol was all rather odd. I didn’t really know what to expect so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. I met Heath sitting in the sun by the observatory looking out of the beautiful Clifton suspension bridge. The bridge was designed by the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, although he didn’t live to see its completion. Brunel is someone I’ve always admired, his career of firsts is astonishing and some of his achievement’s fit in rather snugly with things I have come across this year at Goldsmiths, for example Brunel built the steamship that laid the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic. The connections don’t end there, the Clifton bridge’s cables were actually bought second hand from the former Hungerford bridge in London, the new bridge now built on the same foundation piers as Brunel’s now carries trains from central London to New Cross - and Goldsmiths, AND another of Brunel’s firsts - the first tunnel under a navigatable river now forms part of the currently closed East London Line, which took trains from either side of Goldsmiths towards the east end. Is the relevant? I don’t know, but it’s interesting to follow the links that Brunel’s story can provide, it’s a different way of thinking about the way that everything we do is linked and it is this kind of thinking that I want my work to be packed full of.

A couple of others joined us and we headed off for a walk, over the bridge and through the woods on the opposite side of the gorge. As we scrambled down the hillside through the thick brambles and around steep drops where the side of the hill seemed to be urging you to fall, I did begin to wonder what on earth I was doing here. I was going to ask Heath some questions about his Status Project which I felt might be relevant to the kind of stuff I was interested in. But now it seemed like that was the last thing in the world to talk about, we were off in the woods, apparently miles from the city, and even perhaps, closer to nature. We walked for hours and climbed trees (and tried to jump from tree to tree, which I failed at and caught myself in the act on film - see video), chased deer and built and messed about on a rope swing, and Heath and his friend played with some catapults they had made. At times I thought about taking Heath to one side and asking some questions but as the day went on the atmosphere became less and less suited to it, we were just four kids playing in the woods; who cares about the rest of the world?

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So I think that MATCH.COM are confusing loving things about someone with loving someone? Well, I’m wrong, they’re really enabling the latter through the former. What do I mean? Well, how can we get to know someone well enough to love them without first loving things about them? We live through technics and thus systems of things we can love about people are not just important but necessary. We need technics to be human and we need technics to love. However, what such systems of compatibility do do is encourage us to forget the difference between the two, we think that all that matters are the things that the system contains, we are only able to love things that play a part of the system, so as a Virgo I should be looking only for a Taurus or Capricorn, within a personal ad only a GSOH or “attractive” or “slim” or similar is possible, with match.com their fields of compatibility are so varied and detailed that they give the impression that they are covering all that matters, importantly, Match.com claim to have the holy grail of the modern world: a scientific method.

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So human interaction and love. That’s the topics of choice, how do we relate, how do we find love, how does love work, what is love? That should be enough to be getting on with. Well, there are plenty of technical ways we do this (all of the ways we do this are technical - only some are more obvious than others): DNA matching, Star signs and THE LOVES GAME are three methods worth having a read about.

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Oh gosh is that the time already? What? Eh? I don’t understand. No, I mean it’s FINAL PROJECT time. It has been for a while really, and something must be done about it - specifically a final project must be done about it. An ultimate project, a project to end all projects. I want my final project to be all about everything this whole process has been about. I want it to explore interactive media, questioning everything it encounters and seeking out strange new life and civilisations. Ok, maybe not that last bit, but I do want to boldly go somewhere. I want the adventure of aimlessness, the intrigue of the Lazarus project and the fun of everything I try and do all squeezed in till the project itself bursts open and no one, especially myself, knows what it means any more. Like visiting a foreign and unknown place I want to get lost in my project and find things I had not just had no intention of discovering but no idea of existing. I want what I do to make no sense, I want it to be a story I can tell that can be appreciated but not understood. I also want my final project to be less about me and more about the people I meet.

Ok, there’s a lot going on here. Probably a bit too much, so let’s have an idea and then see where it goes.

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The RESPONSE to Ernest’s reincarnation can vaguely be split into two types, the response of other people and the response of me. I could split this post into two parts but that would be horrifically efficient.

People ask me: “What are you doing at the moment Anton?” and I like to say: “I’ve been working on making a facebook profile for my grandad.” They often smile, or if they’re really trying to impress/easily amused/on drugs, laugh. Then I say: “He’s dead”. “What?” “He died a few years ago.” “Oh.” I have probably spent as much time talking about this project as I have “working” on it -although for me talking about it has been as much, no, in fact, a more important part of the project than, for example, writing about it! - A few people I have spoken to have gone on to add Ernest as a friend, although only my brother (of his own accord) has written on Ernest’s wall:

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Something that I touched upon in my last post, but which I find interesting enough to warrant its own post all to itself is how Ernest developing ALZHEIMER’S disease fits into the project. I’ve said that I think that it is necessary for us to be able to self-describe, to be able to use language or art or actions in order to produce something of ourselves. Making a facebook profile, regardless of what you put on it, is an act of self-description. As Ernest’s dementia became more and more severe his ability to produce/create something to define himself diminished. Towards the end of his life when he might have forgotten his own name, how to say certain things in English or any other detail about his own life and situations that most people would assume a priori, the idea of creating a facebook profile would have been impossible. As would filling out a form to apply for a passport. While, as I have found the potential for the knid of knowledge that we find in lanuage and our use of technology (as Stielger claims consitutes “the invention of the human”) may be very useful in being a metaphor for, or hinting at some deeper, richer story, this understanding is limited in that it has no room for humans who are unable to “invent” themselves.

The ability to describe ourselves in information - to know our name, age, occupation, knowledge - is so intrinsic to what it is to be human that those humans who loose this capacity, such as through developing dementia, are unable to play the same part in society as those who are able to play the game. The phenomenologists may have destroyed Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” by being able to doubt the process of thinking, but, and ironic as it was one of Ernest’s favourite quotes, in order to live we have to be able to think in the same way as others, becoming demented or being born with a mind that thinks differently, makes the process of trivilising oneself impossible and impeeds one’s ability to live within a society, in order to differentiate within society we must first, at least to some extent, be the same - what Rorty would call overlapping metaphors in our shared contingent language.

It’s strange how THE DIARIES became my favourite part of the project. I hadn’t expected or asked for them, Roland just handed them to me and asked if they might be useful. I spent hours flicking through the pages finding out little things that Ernest had done on specific days throughout the years 1979, 1984, 1986, 1995 and 2000.

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