Present Attempt are making a piece of work as part of SLICE,  an international project commissioning twenty new artworks created in collaboration with UK and Pakistani artists. SLICE maps an imaginary line that cuts through buildings and across streets from Lahore to London. Focusing on the first mile at each end of the line, which runs from Lahore Central Station to Liverpool Street Station in London, Lahore and London based artists have been invited to make a work that responds to a location on the slice.

Back in May all the artists in London walked the section of the Slice which started in Hope Square just outside Liverpool Street Station and ended beyond the Brady Centre in the East End. Early on from a suggestion James made, we decided to response to Hope Square. Initially what struck James was the contrast between the busy place of passage and the immobility and stillness of the bronze statue of  the Kinder transport found in the square, a memorial to Jewish refugees of the second world war. Since the walk we have found that the site resonates with the context of the project in multiple ways. It made us think about to the state of emergency of contemporary cities, travels between London and Lahore, perception of everyday places or spaces and the possibility of looking at a place anew, with a naïve eye, as if you were seeing it for the first time.

We have now spent a couple of days working in Hope Square. After repeated visits we can ironically say that it is hopeless and a terrible place! There is something definitely tragic about the square. 6 giant ugly white pillars dominate it, with a McDonalds covering one of it’s facades and franchises setting up their pop up stalls and marquis to sell commercial products of various kinds right in the middle. The square, more a place of passage for commuters than a place where people hang out is littered with fast food waste. And then the statue of the Kindertransport in the middle of all this, erected in memory of the refugee children who came to Britain in search of a safe haven. The whole thing is rather paradoxical. This paradox, the gap between the name ‘Hope Square’ and the actual place which is devoid of anything really positive is guiding our thinking.

Yesterday we went back to Hope Square to further our investigations through in situ writing and filming. We have come back to our earlier intuition about building a picture of ‘Hope Square’, settling on writing to reveal and approach the paradox of Hope Square. A textual depiction of Hope Square is what has emerged out of the work yesterday, it remains to be seen how this text will manifest in its final visual form. Looking forward to sharing the final piece which will form part of an exhibition in Ideas Store Whitechapel, Rich Mix in Bethnal Green and the National College of Arts in Lahore. To be continued…

Some Months Ago

We started thinking about what a performance would be like if it physically moved between different audiences for the duration of a day, for that fundamental measure of time – 24 hours. The opportunity to present a work-in-progress as part of the Forest Fringe Festival in Edinburgh provided us with a suitable fulcrum point to make such a journey. And so, we allowed our performance to be contained in a round-trip there and back – approximately 800 miles of road network to negotiate in line with a number of audience meetings, scheduled in various locations over the 24 hour duration. This would be a circular trip or circuit – a journey that consciously promotes the idea of journey, as opposed to arrival. This journey begins and ends in the same place and just as time returns every 24 hours, so shall we, changed by what has happened. Time and experience understood as a cycle (or spiral?), which organises our everyday by returning on itself.

Weeks into The Project

We were drawn to the idea of interconnectivity, being here and simultaneously being there. How could we be in Edinburgh and London at the same time? We saw a documentary on BBC2 about Network Theory, a new branch of science that emerged in the late 1990s. One of the most well known theories is the ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ or ‘Small World Problem’, a notion which dates back to late sixties and proposes that despite our societies’ enormous size and complexity, that it can be navigated relatively easily by following the social links from one person to another – a network of six billion people in which any pair of people are on average six links from each other. And so, motivated by our concerns with liveness, with a certain demand in our work to attempt to ‘be here’, we found ourselves drawn to the idea of physically embodying and following a chain of social links spread out over this island. We began to conduct ‘field research’, we started to journey.

The Way Around

As we began undertaking this ‘field research’ out on the road, across various types of networks, we journeyed in a circle to and from Axminster, Warwick, Hastings…etc. We never arrived at these places despite having been there. We spent very little time in each place; our priority instead was always to keep moving, to try keep up with time. As we met people along the way we allowed them to dictate our path by way of their social network. And so, there has been this tie to a route, a way through the road network to find people and a recognition of the architectures that (dis)allow us to move around. The motorway and road network are our playing space – a vast expansive network spread out over this whole island. We are interested in exploring our human-sized smallness in relation to the apparent vastness of the country and its road networks. You feel this if you have ever had to get out on the hard shoulder – one of those times when you come close, a danger point, realising that cars are in fact machines and we are in fact alive.

The Way of People

In tandem with our experience of the physical journeys has been our experience of ‘journey planning tools’. If we wanted to meet people along the way, we needed to be able to give people a meeting time. Our chosen tool was Google Maps, a web-mapping program that can provide exact journey times based on the precise distance between any two geographical points. However all journey times have to be calculated based on an average speed, and Google maps uses 52mph as its average. An exact journey time which relies upon an average speed? As we travelled in our vehicle along the way we found ourselves inhabiting a gap, a degree of uncertainty between the theory of the journey and the practice of it. We accepted that the success or failure of our journeys could not be understood as a result of (not) adhering to a theoretical timed schedule. In fact we began to accept that, when exploring the grey area between theory and practice, the best result we could hope for was to cope. To cope with unforeseen delays and with the movement of others around us, to cope with the task of communicating what we were happening upon with a remote audience.

Thinking how we might communicate this ‘performance journey’ to our audiences we were drawn to the Internet and making live broadcasts on a site called Ustream.com. The World Wide Web and its ability to make instant, virtual connections with people over any distance is in opposition to the travelling messenger, who physically journeys from one place to the next; on the web distance is compressed and time is quickened. So, this opposition has been emerging between real and virtual space in this project, provoking some fundamental questions for us about how we connect to each other – about how we are with each other?

3rd August 2009

Inspired by Stanley Mailgram’s ‘six degrees of separation’ experiment of 1967, we sent out 50 letters to friends colleagues and family asking them if they wanted to involved in the project by making a chain of links that we would follow. Similarly to the 1967 experiment, the fall out rate has been high, only two chains have begun to emerge and it is one of these that we will be following during the performance. We aim to make six links – to be able to move through a six degree separation between the person we start with and the person we end with. However, it is also possible that the trail will run into a dead end – that we will not be able to continue to make links and meet people. We wonder where we can meet people late at night and if we will be left alone in the dark, we wonder about this?

For the future

The 24 hour journey starts on Thursday 20th August 2009 at 13:00 and finishes on Friday 21st August 2009 at 13:00 where it started, in London. You can find details of the performance on this page, and we welcome you to watch, follow and make contact with us as the time unfolds. This is a work in progress, and we hope to hear your thoughts and comments, as they would help us towards making journeys across networks in the future.

Thanks,

Present Attempt

This is a very short extract from a very long video which will be playing at the Riverside Studios and Forest Fringe Festival at the same time as we journey.

Day…dusk…night…day.

This video goes around the clock. Its curves, white lines and sound are our clock, a pulse which shows our time passing. We hope to provide a small window into the periods of the journey you cannot see, the (non) places where we are travelling, bridging a gap between us, between you/here and we/there.

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

We have met with our audience at The Riverside Studios who very kindly saw us off and we also met our first link Rosie Rowlands.

We also had some technical issues concerning WI-FI connectivity which meant we couldn’t broadcast live but we will be uploading the recorded broadcast to our Blogspot soon so hold tight.

Currently we are on the road heading towards our next link in Lincoln…!

Thanks,
Present Attempt

This is where you can watch our broadcasts. We will begin at 1300 today.

More information on the broadcast schedule on the right hand side of the screen.
Leave your browser with this window open, if you want – our live broadcasts will play automatically.

You can also watch recorded videos of previous broadcasts which appear at the bottom of this Ustream Media Player.

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