Agency for the Assembly of Invented Communities. Exhibited at Ohio State University Urban Arts Space as part of “What Time is This Place” juried group exhibition. Columbus, Ohio. July – September 2008.
My projects focus on the co-evolution of a community, which is always conceived of as an emergent public space that exists within and through its relations. In The Agency for the Assembly of Invented Communities, I utilized the trope of utopia as a tool through which to approach the possibility of a new type of commons. The first stage of this project involved interviews with the former employees and consumers of the Lazarus Building’s commercial spaces. During the exhibition, this information was collected and fed into a specially designed java-script program that interprets the future and past tense as a set of fractal attractors/resistors and creates a set of vector drawings based upon these interactions. These drawings were printed onto overlapping sheets of vellum and placed on the wall, gradually obscuring a large recreation of Thomas Moore’s illustration of Utopia.
Utopias serve a dual function, they allow us to imagine the trajectory of the future as radically different than the present and they make us aware of how our own imagination is hostage to the background of structures we dwell within. Using this trope of utopia, The Agency for the Assembly of Invented Communities will take the form of a provisional laboratory that exists within the space of the gallery, provoking a series of questions: How does the past inflect the present and make the future possible? What processes can we evolve that would allow us to actualize our shared histories in such a way that they radically redistribute agency? How do we become attuned to the potential of our being in the world? What tools, practices and knowledges can we develop that will allow us to become sensitive to the potential of our futures?
