Improbable Monuments
Improbable Monuments is the Web portion of Monument Recall. It is an exhibition of work that explores artists’ use of the Internet, our newest public space, as the place for cultural memory to reside. All the projects are unbound by materials, conventions, politics, economies and other restrictions that usually form and inform the face and voice of physical commemoratives. Here, there are no statues, no pedestals, and no monoliths.
Two ideas instigated this collection of proposals for, and sites of unlikely commemoratives: First, the usefulness of imagining the public monuments outside of the usual round of forces that shape and temper them. Second, the desire to explore the Web as a site for public monuments. The Web is profoundly redefining both art and everyday life, and public monuments should be no exception.
While fulfilling obligations of monuments, such as calling to mind events or ideas to be remembered and shared, or transmitting particular aspects of cultural values or histories beyond the life of a single generation, these Improbable Monuments are unconventional and sometimes irreverent. Most came from artists responding to an open call, but some were added as recommendations because of their resonance with, and relevance to ideas in the show.
All of the projects extend public commemoratives into cyberspace, and offer a foray into what promises to be a rich new site for public memory.
REPOSITORIES
Conventional monuments metaphorically function as repositories, creating sites that bridge time by providing historical and cultural continuity from generation to generation. The Internet literalizes this role, making it possible to locate, gather and store extraordinarily large bodies of information that can evolve and grow over time.
Two projects utilize the web’s extraordinary capacity to gather, hold and access information: the Wayback Machine and A Proposal for an Improbable Monument to the end of the Prison Industrial Complex.
The Wayback Machine and A Proposal for an Improbable Monument to the end of the Prison Industrial Complex exist on the web as large, growing bodies of information that is stored, organized and accessed. All bridge the limitations of time and foster trans-generational continuity. All are collective bodies of retrievable information, allowing the past to re-enfold and be reintroduced back into the present.
Wayback Machine
Since 1996, the Wayback Machine, has archived more than 30 billion web pages, preserving the rapidly changing face of the web for future generations. Founded by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat as the Internet Archive, it is now the largest database in the world, surpassing what currently exists within the Library of Congress. Working against the rapidly changing face of the Net, the Wayback Machine collects and maintains pages that have long been removed, ensuring that the history and evolution of the this new medium will be available to, and preserved for the future.
Proposal for an Improbable Monument to the end of the Prison Industrial Complex
Sharon Daniel, in collaboration with Justice Now offers A Proposal for an Improbable Monument to the end of the Prison Industrial Complex, a collection of contributions from incarcerated women living within the Central California Women's Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla, CA, the largest women’s prison in the United States.
Conventional commemoratives often flatten history, losing the details of events, lives and circumstances that have contributed to movements, shifts in time and ideological changes. A Proposal for an Improbable Monument to the end of the Prison Industrial Complex is a monument-cum-vault containing recorded conversations with women within the prison. The monument-vault contains their personal stories and histories along with their political insights, analysis and critiques, told in the womens’ own voices and from their own points of view. In addition, Daniel and Justice Now work collaboratively with the women to draw up plans based on their ideas for renovating CCWF -- as a monument to the end of the prison industrial complex, and as a monument to the many women who have died in the prison, as the result of substandard medical care. Daniel and Justice Now also solicit other artists or architects to participate in the project.
“Traditionally,” Daniel writes, “public architecture, memorials, and monuments articulate narratives of power in an attempt to produce histories and foster historical consciousness. Ideally, a monument has the potential to stand against forgetfulness or ignorance and act upon the world with a view to reshaping it.”
As a vault, A Proposal for an Improbable Monument to the end of the Prison Industrial Complex ensures future visibility and historical viability through collecting, protecting and affording accessibility to perspectives, histories and critical views of women within the prison complex. As monument, Daniel, Justice Now and the women within CCWF bring together imagination and critical discourse as the most essential and powerful forces by which to forge public memory.
MONUMENTS THAT WARN
Nike Ground, Autogrill Monument and The Grief Monument are improbable monuments that stand as a kind of warning, cautioning viewers of the likelihood of impending consequences. All, however, exist in the realm of conjecture as hypothetical structures, none of which has been fully realized. All respond to current cultural, social, political or economic trajectories or directions that logically lead to the symbolic or metaphoric vernacular of the proposed projects.
Nike Ground (Project for the Fake Nike Monument)
According to the proposed plans, the Nike Corporation intended to rename Karlsplatz, one of Vienna's main squares, as Nikeplatz. Moreover, plans indicated that the Nike Corporation proposed to rename and construct many additional Nikeplatz monument sites in cities throughout the world.
0100101110101101.ORG, the artists behind Nike Ground, produced a series of small maquettes composed of prints, 3-d views of the monument on the square and other documentation of the construction plans. The collection of materials was exhibited within a “faux” information box located on Karlsplatz, in September 2003.
Disturbingly logical, and all too feasible, the proposal carried such veracity that it caused great public outcry in Vienna as it shocked, teased and navigated the ground between corporate power and public space.
Autogrill Monument
Proposed by Luther Thie in collaboration with Karmen Franinovic, the Autogrill Monument combines monument, information visualization and entertainment. Influenced by writings of J.G.Ballard's CRASH, Autogrill Monument proposes a visually dynamic sculpture that can be seen from the highway and within a popular highway rest stop restaurant in Italy, also called the Autogrill Monument.
The design connects real time accidents on the adjacent highway with a large glass transparent sculptural tower filled with clear liquid. When actual automobile crashes take place on the highway, the Autogrill Monument emits a swirling and sensuous blue cloud that is visible within the context of the restaurant’s tasteful decor, and, at the same time appears as a sign on the highway warning drivers of an accident on the road.
In Auto Grill Monument, the horrific becomes aestheticized. It parallels a similar evolution and cleansing process that often takes place within conventional commemorative arenas when cultural traumas are reborn as symbolic structures.
Grief Monument
Karen Bermann and Jeanine Centuori's Grief Monument metaphorically translates traumas of war experienced by children into a disturbing and visceral public site. Bermann and Centuori submitted Grief Monument in response to a call for proposals in 1991, during the Persian Gulf War, to use empty pedestals throughout New York as possible sites for public projects.
Bermann and Centuori responded by designing a hypothetical monument where loss and the ravages of war were translated physically. Their proposal was to plant a grove of new trees, all with various instruments attached to the trees’ limbs and branches. Over time, the growth of the trees would be directed and unnaturally shaped by the instruments which exert various forces: tension, compression, torsion, weight.
Bermann and Centuori dedicated the space to children of war. As war deforms the growth of children who are subject to those forces, so would these young trees be thwarted, stilted and stunted.
MONUMENTS AS AMPLIFIED SPACES
Monuments intensify locations. They can heighten a site, realign time and augment place by introducing new information that cause dramatic shifts in everyday life.
All four of these projects intensify our relationship to the present. Each augments the locations in which they are situated by converting what is normative into the extra-ordinary. All of these projects were carried out in physical space, with each of the websites functioning as archive, holding ideas, commentaries and documentation of each project.
Three cities were amplified – Amsterdam, Newcastle and San Francisco.
Amsterdam Real Time
Esther Polak and Jeroen Kee, together with the WAAG SOCIETY OF AMSTERDAM presented Amsterdam Real Time as part of an exhibition called "Amsterdam Maps 1866-2000.” Amsterdam Real Time is a live recording of the traces of movements of 80 participants throughout city of Amsterdam, a human mapping of the city, made with the use of GPS and GPS tracking technology.
In the way that monuments activate memory and foster ways to new ways by which to envision, occupy and experience place, Amsterdam Real Time literally articulates the city by means of illuminated mapped traces of people's movements throughout a day. The map it generates stands as an eloquent living body of a city whose blood is composed of the lives lived within it.
Monument
Margaret Crane/Jon Winet collaborated with the residents of Newcastle, England and reframed the town as a cultural monument. Newcastle, once economically viable and valued within the larger national industrial economy, suffered severe economic depression.
Crane/Winet recast the town as a virtual monument in the hopes that this provocative and proactive reframing of the town as a living signature of its historical role within the larger economic, social and industrial fabric of the country would be sufficient to rescue the town from its economic and social struggles. Crane/Winet write: “The city itself is a monument to the industrial age and to a departed era of coal and steel. Our observations of the city and its inhabitants reflect the improbably monument qualities of everyday life in this time of global transition.”
Stillhere
Susan Schwartzenberg, in collaboration with Elise Brewster and Robin Grossinger from the San Francisco Estuary Institute, developed a series of signage strategically placed within the environment. Billboards and posters showed historical and ecological maps, photographs and other information that effectively repositioned the viewer in relation to the site’s ecological and historical past.
Stillhere: Bayboards: Forgotten Landscapes, was installed in January, 2004, in three locations in San Francisco and the outlining Bay Area – 5th Street, SF, Oakland and Albany Hill. Each site contained either billboards or bus shelter posters that juxtaposed the specific locations with descriptions and images that reflected ecological changes that had taken place there over the past 100 years.
Monuments can act as evocations. They call to events or circumstances that embody larger cultural values and beliefs. StillHere carries out this role of more conventional monuments by remarking, and remaking locations within the Bay area so that “the entangled relationships between past and present landscapes” become visible.
A project of “art/science/awareness,” StillHere reinscribes the present with the past, extending both one's view and experience of site. Moreover it relies on this new, expanded vision, knowledge and awareness to instigate a kind of stewardship, allowing those who have seen the past in the present, to reimagine the landscape of the future
The Average Point of Interest – San Francisco
Monuments mark sites of significance making locations of larger historic or cultural meaning visible. Walton’s Average Point of Interest does the same. Here, however, the significance is insignificance. Using a formula he devises, Walton converts the 287 points of interest in San Francisco to a series of numbers that are then calculated to arrive at a specific coordinate -“the average point of interest.”
The Average Point of Interest monument, which will be marked by a plaque by Walton, is on Flint Street, off 15 Avenue, near Corona Heights.
NETWORK MONUMENTS
Monuments often become the sites of spectacles, places where large-scale cultural events are celebrated, acknowledged and shared. Culture relies on spectacles to create continuity and overarching connections. Highly resonant public sites are necessary places in which to locate these public engagements with what constitutes primary current values or reflect cultural ideological, political, historical and social past
Babel
In 1876, Mevil Dewey developed a system by which to classify knowledge in an infinitely hierarchal system of numbers. Now, in the Dewey Decimal Classification, subjects are organized into 10 large areas, each of which are then subdivided into smaller, and smaller topic areas.
Simon Biggs uses the 19th century Dewey’s classification system as a map and navigational device by which to organize the seemingly infinite space of information in the 21st century Web. In Babel Biggs takes the topic areas identified by Dewey and matches web subjects to the Dewey entries, such that Dewey numerical numbers link to corresponding site-based subject matter.
When viewers log onto Babel, they see a 3-diminsional data space. By moving the cursor around the screen, the viewer generates a rapidly changing sequence of Dewey Decimal numbers that, if clicked, becomes the link to a website corresponding to that numerical entry.
What each viewer sees is in effect, a shared view. Many simultaneous viewers can create a visual cacophony of data described by Steven Dietz as “a beautiful visual riot of overlapping numbers.”
Babel, like a successful monument, creates a shared space of knowledge and experience in which all valued ideologies and subjects, histories and legacies from the past are accessible. If monuments create spaces where cultural spectacles are shared, Babel offers the spectacle site of information, which comprises the newest shared cultural phenomena.
Digital Golem
Eric Van Hove's Digital Golem proposes a worldwide "email-based, multi-language chat" as monument. Van Hove envisions this site as an international shared online exchange, a "single digital human identity (the Golem)" that arises, lives and dies " as conversation does. "
The Digital Golem exists in proposal form only as a sequence of installations and events that become the living threads that activate everyday human connection on a large and simultaneous scale. The Digital Golem is a composite body/monument event.
Monument du vide
Monument du vide (Monument to emptiness) pivots between substance and immateriality. Using networks to link Pan-American communities, Monument du vide is a network of artists, artist communities, performances and events that compose the networked substantial and ephemeral body. This web of connected community is temporary, and exists for a limited period of time.
Marie-Christiane Mathieu describes her proposal as one that "constructs itself in time” reflecting various durations of individual performances within various communities. At the same time as performances take place within disparate sites, there are unifying themes and symbolic images that link community to community, and inspire on-line collaborations. Monument du vide has been presented in 2003 in Montreal and in 2003 in Mexico City.
Unlike conventional material monuments that are built to transcend time, Monument du vide embraces the transitory and momentary to create a large scale shared networked body that eventually disconnects.
Curated by Paula Levine
Research Assistants:
Sherrie Dandan
Anne Kroeger
