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Task 38 - Shifting the Mode from Proximate to Centre

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Marie
Tasks
Date

Marie writes:

This week we are moving out of the house where we have lived since the beginning of this project and you have asked me to centre my task for you around this event. I was interested to revisit tasks we have done throughout the project and these out-of-the-ordinary circumstances of packing down a house seemed an opportunity to do so. The week I set you your Task 24 – Holiday Scrap Book was also a week of unusual activities, as we travelled to Norway for a skiing holiday. Your task this week will loosely be based on these ideas.

At the same time I want to add an element. I was fascinated with your Response 28 – 28 times 28 and how you employed the simple parameter of the number ‘28’to create your reflections almost in the style of a haiku poem. The response is satisfying yet informative. I want you to employ similar parameters on this task as you did then.

You speak in Response 14 about ‘one of the interesting aspects of our project are the blurred boundaries between it and other, proximate, modes. The project is at once an academic undertaking and a set of self-help exercises […]. It’s like a family scrapbook as well as practice as research.’ In Response 36 you quote Hector Rodriguez asking ‘whether generative or constraint-based artworks must always comprise tightly closed formal systems, or whether (and how) formal constraints can also open up the work to the life that is lived while making it’.

With this in mind, here is your task.

Your task

Create a scrap book of our house. As you move through rooms to tidy and pack, record aspects of the house by photographing places, areas, furniture, corners etc that hold a memory that would be forgotten without documentation.

 In your engagement with these domestic chores think about of how this speaks back to the recurring theme of status and equality that we have explored in the previous tasks and responses. Is there a way in which the images can reflect (in)equality?

This task also explicitly exhibits the aspect of our project that might be found cringe-making: the aspect of couple’s therapy being performed in public. Thinking about ‘proximate modes’, as mentioned above: how can constraints open up to the life lived while making it and how can life lived reveal new constraints for artwork?

See Alan's response here.