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"This Too Shall Pass"
Memories and noises from the Waterfront // 53°24’N 2°59’W - Liverpool.
The City as an Affective Interface. Brian Mackern.
Cities in Dialogue, oct 2014, FACT, Liverpool
https://latamcyber.wordpress.com/

In this exhibition, Brian Mackern addresses the representation of places and different aspects of the localization of ‘being’. The meaning of ‘being’ is in his view twofold: to be oneself while also being (or not) in a place or environment. What aspects are involved in that ‘being’? Memories and/or remembrance? How do we reconstruct these memories? How do these memories evolve into their own reproduction every time we bring them into the light of consciousness? How does noise (as external information that intermingles with memory and remembrance) add up to create these representations? Which input/output media work inside us to build these memories? What activates long forgotten memories of childhood? As the famous movie put it: is déjà vu a glitch in the matrix? These are some of the things that most attract Brian when recreating places and detours in his daily life.

Ports are waypoints on a trip, ingesting and refashioning cultures, rebuilding urban traces and histories. Ports construct societies and are ways of reinserting new and old meanings into our ways of seeing and being in the world; they provide opportunities for an outsider stuck inside another culture to question his being in this world. They are, in other words, interfaces.

For this residence art work, Brian intends to rework the footage obtained through his dérives (as a series of unplanned journeys along a urbanscape) in Liverpool. That gathering of information and recording of sound and visual material is then remixed by different parameters (volume levels, transparencies, zooms, fragmentations, crossfadings, speeds of timelines, etc) controlled by Liverpools’ “socio economic historic curve” of last century. This curve was loosely obtained through joining historic markups based on readings and conversations with people from the city.

The curve interpretation about the socio economical ups and downs of the city defines its own "signature". Everyone in his life has it. And also cities, viewed as an organism composed by a complex system of human interminglings. "This Too Shall Pass", is a phrase that balances the good and the bad, makes us think about our past, about our ancestors, about our grievings and about our joys. About our responsabilities for the present and future.

An affective approach to considering our place of being. Our being in place.

Cities in Dialogue, oct 2014, FACT, Liverpool
https://latamcyber.wordpress.com/

+info:
This Too Shall Pass 1
This Too Shall Pass 2

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