Planning to flân

Less than a fortnight to go now…

So, quick update. And we’ve literally drawn up a plan.

On the left of this sketch is a big old wooden plan chest, which will be propped on spare index cards or books, and sitting on top of it will be the main printer, hidden under we’re not sure what yet. Out of this printer, rolls of paper (each 40m long) will scroll across our portion of the Collectives Encounter exhibition gallery space (approx 10m) and gradually archive themselves into the open drawer of the wooden filing cabinet stage right, on top of which will be the lovely index card filing cabinet in the image below.

The index card filing cabinet should be something for people visiting the exhibition to play with. The details of all the photography collectives taking part in Mapping the Flâneur will be in there, with selected quotes from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project etc, and there’ll also be blank cards for feedback about the exhibition – or even (who knows) Benjamin/Baudelaire style observations from contemporary flâneurs? A second printer, spitting out pictures and quotes on index cards, should also be part of the installation, but it’s not in the sketch because we’re still working out where and how to place it.

We’ve settled on three very broad themes drawn from our reading of Benjamin’s Arcades Project, and these are consuming, transporting and urbanising. In the gallery, the images submitted for the three themes will be printed in separate rows on the roll paper, following a timeline – basically, the images will be printed in the order they arrive in by email, regardless of theme. Lots of general invitations have been sent out, responses are rolling in – if you’re reading this and belong to a collective that hasn’t received an invite yet, it might just be because we’ve somehow missed you off our list, so if you’re interested in being involved please email  us  at mapping.flaneur[at]gmail.com and let us know.

And when we say ‘us’ here, we mean both ASA Collective and Wideyed of course. Amongst other things, ASA have been setting up the online part of this project, and we’re all currently testing that as well.

To get back to printing though, we’ve also been testing that. Although we ought to know it already, it’s still interesting to see just how different the images we’ve uploaded and viewed online all look once they’re printed. There are pictures we might not look twice at on a screen, that as prints are transformed into something more worthy of our attention. Colin Pantall’s blog post ‘Seeing this work on a computer is not seeing it at all‘ comes to mind.

Anyway, as things are going we might not have time to blog again till Derby (although we’ll try). If not, see you there!