This collaboration explored several issues. Initially a map with no text, we wanted to keep everything quite visual. As humans we can understand more than we think, our brains can skip letters in a message, short-cut through a maze of graphics, read logos without reading them as words. Language can be visual as well as written. Symbols, instructions, emojis are all shortcuts and can cross boundaries to inform.
Xu Bing’s work ‘Book from the Ground’ is a set of symbols telling a 24hour story. It reflects back to the original primitive art where it is purely visual and no written language existed.
Xu Bing has been undertaking his Book from the Ground project since 2003. The artist first compiled symbols drawn from the public sphere and wrote a book using only these signs. The book is written in a way that any reader, regardless of his or her cultural or educational background, can understand. As long as one lives within the contemporary society, he or she will be able to interpret the book. Due to the universality of its visual language, it could be published anywhere without translation. For the Book from the Ground installation, Xu Bing recreated his studio’s working environment and brought some materials to the exhibition space, implying that this is a never-ending project in progress. Xu Bing’s studio also made a character database software that corresponds to the language of the book. Users can enter words either in English or in Chinese, and the program will translate them into Xu Bing’s lexicon of signs. It thus serves as an intermediary form of communication and exchange between the two languages. As personal computer and the internet become increasingly integrated into daily life, the lexicon of digital icons grows accordingly, and the symbolic language of Book from the Ground has been further updated, augmented, and complicated. In response to his own Book from the Sky, a work dated 30 years earlier whose language is illegible to anyone, Book from the Ground is legible to all. It is an expression of Xu Bing’s long-standing vision of a universal language. (http://www.xubing.com/en/work/details/188?classID=12&type=class)
I like the idea that words aren’t always needed to communicate, hence my interest and work with Braille and other obscure codes, like semaphore, morse, sign language, sonar, etc. It gives me the opportunity to be mischievous and creative in what I want to say and how I want to say it. Giving someone a clue but knowing how far to go in order to lead them without either going to far and giving it away or not giving enough and them just not understanding. I like the 'ooh, I get it' factor when a clue is worked out.
One of the reasons we went down this path was to support one of the artist’s who has memory issues and finds visual clues as triggers. We discussed the idea as they sometimes remember landmarks and negotiate their way around a new place by visual signs. We gave ourselves an area to work with to select a place to create an intervention in a space and to lead the others to it using their image map. There were four of us in the group and we were each to put in place and intervention first and then create the map for the next person to follow, so we would all eventually interact with each other piece. We set up a document each with the visual map on and then name it after our initials, the next person would interact and add their initials until the Word doc file had all four sets of initials on it. Nothing else. So mine eventually read CDJMJDKC.
Below is a set of my images that would lead you to the place I had selected. I took a slightly and deliberately deviating route, others were more direct.
You can plan as much as you want but you can’t allow for everything. My first piece was taken down before the second person could interact, one of the pieces was never found (but is still there) and instructions and clues can and were misinterpreted. These failures only added to the project and our communication during the process was limited to updates but without revealing too much if any detail.
Setting the trail was fun and good to play and then looking to follow the other maps was frustrating to different levels. One in particular I nearly gave up on twice and had to start reading past clues to find the location. I ended up wondering through a church at one point thinking surely they wouldn't put something in here but then again...
For my initial installation (which was removed shortly afterwards..) I had painted a set of wooden disks that were remnants from creating my large Braille, these all had holes in the middle so I strung them up with fishing wire and hung them from a tree like fruit, I was hoping they would stay there and the tree would come into leave and keep growing with them potentially becoming part of the tree over time. Clearly not.
My first piece to find did lead me quite astray until I finally spotted them, I initially left them there and then planned a way to interact with them, returning with some paint and small brushes. Everything felt quite covert, with eyes watching your every move. All the places were quite public with a lot of people about. However, nobody got questioned or stopped so we don't know if they were observed or not. You just felt like prying eyes were on you when creating and interacting.
This was the last clue to find these ones and below is what I did to them.
Amazingly these are in quite a prominent place and by painting them it made them even more obvious, yet they still remained. Whether this is because of the location where they were near a residential area and could have been seen as property of the householder...
Somebody found them interesting anyway.
The next one was the tricky one... I lost the trail twice, managed to pick it up and get to close to the location only to not be able to find the actual items. There were clues to pick up on, it was under cover, it was in stone, but what was missing was scale. I should have thought as this artist often plays with scale when creating her work. When I eventually found it the location was fairly obvious but also hidden in plain sight, which questions how much we see or how much we are looking. most of the time we are just going, we don't take time to look at detail, read between the cracks, look up or down.
When I found them it was such a revelation and they looked so perfectly placed that it seemed a shame to disturb them. Their setting was perfect and they fitted the environment.
These had already had a first interaction so this was the third and potentially last interaction as they remained unfound by the last artist. I didn't want to disrupt them too much and especially as the first interaction had been very sympathetic to the setting, installation and arrangement. I wanted to link them together and used some simple wire to join the two arrangements together. As you will see with my installation image the second intervention gives an idea of scale with the flowers.
The third intervention was when things went slightly astray. The one I was looking for had been taken down, there were remnants of something else that I thought was the original piece, although I had certain doubts but with no other information I put in place my intervention. As it turned out I had interacted with something that was nothing to do with our group, it took the work in a different direction and created something fresh. So a failure, if you can call it that, potentially takes the work in a new direction and although it breaks the original cycle it creates a new one.
As you can see I have reverted back to my original shapes as I wanted to re-instate the pieces that were originally used and taken down. I felt they hadn't been given enough time in place and by using the wire I was making the connection with the same tree a stronger one, a closer one and one as if they are gripping on.
We are all producing a publication to accompany our journey. We have agreed a format and size but the actual design, layout and interpretation is up to the individuals.