Explorations will be shown as part of ConfluxCity–a user-generated city-wide event on Sunday Sept. 20th, 2009 from 10am-6pm–in conjunction with the larger Conflux Festival, an art and technology festival for the creative exploration of urban public space from Sept. 17-20. Please join us at our location at 81 Front Street in DUMBO as Explorations: the Arcades slowly begins to unravel some of the many tessellations of urban experience.  As a projection, the user encounters the scene as a small cityscape, gradually emerging out of mortar and concrete.  As it unravels itself, this java-based processing applet will start to break apart, and similar to the way that we bear our scars and our marks as a visual history of our life, the city bursts forth with the history of its inhabitants and the elements of its structure.  And as the user is enveloped by these aggregate materials, objects, and people, he or she becomes a part of a new history and place, continuing a new cycle of things to come.

Walter Benjamin, in his exposition on the arcades—fluid-like places which strike us “like realities in a dream,”—tells us of a dream world that is the harbinger of our freedoms, holding the promise of utopia.  It is through interpretation and reconstruction, that we can begin to understand its meaning and implement its lessons in the modern world by remaining sensitive to its past.  A building’s ruins, Benjamin believed, was not so far removed form a solid structure; it was possible to discern more about a great building from its plans or ruins than from the completed structure itself.  The value of the ruin, was the fact that it had passed through a history, bearing the marks of process.

in association with Conflux Festival and with the generous donation of exhibition space from Two Trees Management Inc.

Collaborators: Jelani John
Additional assistance: Jason Rosado