Gareth Foote - Imiant

Sunday @ 1pm
Outside Liverpool Street Station (Bishopsgate exit - top of the escalators)

I am aware that most people have no idea what the reasoning behind this little jaunt is. Although I don’t think anyone really needs this knowledge (as i’m just getting to grips with it) to take part I think it would be helpful to look at some of the things which have influenced this.

Lottie Child - Doing Nothing

Doing Nothing is a vital skill that can be developed. In western late capitalist metropolis life most people are working long hours with free time potentially being another form of stressful consumption. Are we stuck in cycles of hyper consumption and production on many levels including our own heads? How do you do nothing?

Last Monday i lay on the pavement near to Habitat on Tottenham Court Road from 5.30pm - 6.00 as the commuters became fewer and the evening light changed - you notice different things when you stop and do close to nothing. I ignored people but occasionally when they caught my eye they smiled and i wonder if doing nothing in public space throws all the speed and activity into contrast i wonder if it makes people reflect differently on all the doing we are doing and the ways we behave in london.

Lottie Child - Urban Climbing

More Urban Climbing.

These activities are influenced by the knowledge that the city is more than just it’s built forms. Urban space and the city are a not just made up of physical but also social and mental structures. We all create our own interpretation of our environment and this is influenced by the often privatised and homogenised built up environment. The idea behind Lottie’s Doing Nothing and here other activities, Street Training and Urban Climbing, is to enable people to have an effect on their surroundings equalling that which our surroundings have on us.

Alex Villar - Upward Mobility

Click image for more detail on Alex Villar - Upward Mobility

Both these projects are also quite simply attempts to break the norms of everyday life. An way of creating new meaning and significations in space which we take for granted as existing for utilitarian purposes only. Villar’s particular flavour of retaliation shuns the everyday horizontal movement in the city, challenging the means by which city planning forces our movement in a particular trajectory. Although it was by no means his aim, any attempt to achieve any practical goals using these methods are futile at best.

It is important to remember that there are no practical goals for Sunday. No research, empirical or theoretical. Despite this there will be guidance because challenging the conventions of usual activity in the city goes against its nature.

Feel free to bring anyone who has an interest or some spare time. Don’t wear your Sunday best, just in case and bring a camera if you can. I’d appreciate it if people could document proceedings.

-> Event page.

Many thanks,

G

After much deliberating and loss of hair , I have decided this project should not take the shape of one rigidly structured object, idea or piece. During this process of conceiving something which can be considered ‘a project’ I have become more aware of how unfamiliar this uninhibited creation process is to me personally. By uninhibited i mean, no client, no brief, no product (necessarily), no hypothesis, no questions and no answers. Other than being an opportunity for self development this is an opportunity to be truly free to express myself. I am not an artist by personal definition, and have never to my memory put myself in this position. My problem perhaps could be that I am subscribing to a traditional view of art creation as something only available to those who are trained in the high/classic/fine arts. Despite this realisation I am still applying a comforting notion to my project work which has more in common with science or engineering - the experiment.