Workshop and Discussion: Ideas are Motion

29 October 2010 / Conversation, Workshop

Ideas are motion, the Poster as Travel Experiment

Workshop and conversation for the poster project with Markús pór Andrésson

Participants of Institut für Raumexperimente

Ideas Are Motion: The Poster as an Experiment in Travel is prismatically structured to reflect the making of a class excursion, within the making of an individual art project, within the making of a collective project, within the feeling of a place, within an exhibition in that place.

Ideas Are Motion takes place in

(1) Zagreb, Croatia (2) Japan (3) Iceland.

The Institut für Raumexperimente traveled to Kanazawa, Kyoto and Tokyo in February and March 2010 and brings back Ideas Are Motion as part of the exhibition Berlin 2000-2011: Playing amongst the Ruins at the MOT, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo from 29.10.2011 – 9.1.2012.

Some posters are sketches of ideas, some finished statements, others dreams, or personal distortions. They are autonomous projects soon to be realized, parts realized in other places, and pitches for projects to come. In a real way, each poster is a still from a moving stream.

Every place is a mangle of spatial relationships involving motions and emotions of scale, speed, perception, attention span, directionality, and distance. Posters are vehicles of urban communication, which materialize these spatial relationships. Posters mobilize populations of perception. We behave differently because of the promiscuity of these kinds of signs in public space. We slow down, think about, read, reflect on, change plans. Urban signs are coordinated around the rhythms of our movement but they also help to coordinate that movement.

Posters are mirrors, which confirm an approach, a direction of arrival, a route of passing through. Posters reflect the population’s psychological relationship to things we personally feel we want or need, and the things we go out of way for. Posters offer a phenomenal vehicle to hitchhike an encounter with art, a formal opportunity to subvert the complete commodification of our public space, while materializing diverse art projects without predetermining an artistic content.

The poster project makes the concept act the art. The act demonstrates a process of how thinking feedbacks into a transformed thought and that thought feeds back into a transformed action of change in the world.