Pre-workshop gallery activation: the ‘Hexa-Decimal’ project installed in the City Library Gallery.

Conducted by Public Assembly with young participants as part of Melbourne City Library and SIGNAL Youth Week program, April 2011. The Provocative Assemblage project was a sequence of workshops making small artworks from redundant books from the City Library collection.

The act of destroying a book in the past has been a provocative way of revealing the deeper structure of our collective knowledge / memory systems. This project explored the way library collections are curated. As their content ebb and flow over time, the books that are discarded can provide an interesting way to read the library as a whole as well as reflecting the demands and interests of the communities that they serve.

Prior to the Provocative Assemblage workshop, the ‘Hexa-Decimal’ project sought to establish a dialogue between the main library and the gallery. Ten volumes of a discarded Encyclopaedia Britannica were installed as a continuous horizontal line on the gallery wall. The installation refered to the ever changing horizon of knowledge, constantly re written perpetually incomplete.

The hexagonal forms punched from the Encyclopaedia Britannica were made into wearables and given to the City Library staff.

Each volume was perforated via a series of hexagons, revealing the contents within. The resultant hexagon sheets were applied to the gallery walls and made into wearables during the workshop program with invited participants. The hexagon can be viewed as a cube end on alluding to the 10×10x10 structure of the Dewey Decimal System (ten main classes, each of which are divided into ten secondary classes or subcategories, each of which contain ten subdivisions) but in a more poetic sense it is an expression of the ever expanding hive like quality of information storage.

The workshop began with a provocative act of slicing a discarded book with a large guillotine and reinserting them back onto the library shelves. This was intended to enact a metaphor to make visible the effect book weeding has on the library collection. Inspired by Joseph Beuys who sought to heal complex systems through artist interventions based on the concept of homeopatht, the intention of  this intervention was to ‘quickly peel off the band-aid’ so to speak and set in motion discussions around the universal transition to digital media.

Over two weeks, the City Library Gallery was transformed into a workshop space – inviting participants to transform discarded books into artworks.

‘Provocative Assemblage’ transformed the gallery into a workshop – creating a place for play and experimentation with redundant books from the City Library collection.  The resultant artworks were action based – creatively directed toward the central question of how information is ordered in the Dewey Decimal System and the relation of this to the deep structure of society.

As part of a final exhibition, these works were reinserted back into the library as a way to question knowledge systemisation. The gallery acted as a catalogue for the works placed within the City Library collection shelves, where visitors were invited to seek them out via their Dewey Decimal call number or by chance and thereby engaging with the library in a new way.

Great to see your project in action today. What a hive of activity and production. Very peculiar instruments and devices – the evidence of mad inventors at work. I loved the energy there in the space being overtaken by a guild of makers. I feel inspired by the connection of response of each work and their sensitivity towards the each book – “book becomes art object” – that in itself provides a wonderful synergy and reflection. And the seek and find aspect to the project that considers the integration of each work created, by reinserting them back into a relevant space within the library collection. This conjures a relevant context for the memory of their absence and also the rebirthing of the books. Laine Hogerty, Artist.

Thanks to Fiona Hillary from Signal. Leonee Derr; Jeanette Becklar and Ashley Higgs from Melbourne City Library.

Week One: Relationscapes shopfront / studio. Melbourne Central.

Relation-scapes: Spaces of Encounter, Emotion and Exchange. A teaching collaboration with Caroline Vains.

Building on the Interventionist Guide to Melbourne project, this interior design studio examined the relational and emotional context of Melbourne Central Shopping Centre with the intention of designing, constructing and testing a series of tactical interventions on site and at 1:1 scale.

As part of the broader Department of Counter Culture project, the Relation-scapes studio occupied a vacant shop within Melbourne Central for the duration of the semester. This space was transformed into a workshop, observatory, incubator, laboratory, platform and studio headquarters – extending our design experiments out into the mall when required.

Students began by investigating how we encounter other people, places and things in this highly instrumental and surveilled retail environment and then designed, performed and constructed interventions with a view to enabling face-to-face encounters and exchanges of a different sort – exchanges that were relational, emotional and empathic. With the exception of the final project, all designs were built, occupied and tested at full scale in the shopping centre itself with remarkable outcomes.

MEDIUM PICNIC: using the shopping bag as a medium. Picnic blanket; Oxygen bag: Jessica Wood & Emily Parker; Immersive projection: Danah Gochman

PROJECT ONE

• Students in groups of three or four observed, documented, revealed and represented the relational and emotional context and politics of Melbourne Central. This was presented as part of a one-night exhibition: Medium Picnic at  Open Space Gallery, Melbourne

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Connector garment: Lingas Tran, Ainslie Herbert and Phoebe Baker-Gabb. Escalator [re]Action: Danah Gochman, Krystal Rawnson and Sarah Rowley

PROJECT ONE | filters: relational politics

• The second part of this project entailed the same group to design, construct, perform and document a small scale intervention based on their initial site analysis.

Quick Sew: Lingas Tran, Ainslie Herbert and Phoebe Baker-Gabb. Swap Shop: Stephanie Chan.

PROJECT TWO | tactics: emotional tactics

• Students were asked to design, construct and perform or occupy a medium scale tactical intervention in the mall that enabled a face-to-face emotional encounter or exchange.  Mothers Day was factored in as a seasonal retail promotion occurring in the mall during the project.

PROJECT THREE | tactics: emotional tactics

• As the final studio project, individual students were asked to present a hypothetical proposal for a relational environment to be sited somewhere specific in Melbourne Central.

Counter Point  | 2010 State of Design. Ticket Reallocation Society: Jessica Wood. Quick Sew: Lingas Tran, Ainslie Herbert and Phoebe Baker-Gabb

RELATION-SCAPES: COUNTER POINT EXHIBITION | 2010 STATE OF DESIGN

As part of the 2010 State of Design Festival, Counter Point was the public culmination of workshops and studios undertaken within Melbourne Central by the Department of Counter Culture. Located within Lonsdale Street pedestrian walkway, Relation-scapes presented a curated selection of student outcomes that exemplified face-to-face exchange that were relational and empathic rather than commodified.

Student Participants: Phoebe Baker-Gabb, Yi Ding, Danah Gochman, Ainslie Herbert, Yi Lin Miao, Emily Parker, Krystal Rawnson, Sarah Rowley, Ping Tiang, Lingas Tran, Jessica Wood, Dom Bunnag, Stephanie Chan, Kerr He, Michelle Lim, Jenny Nguyen, Rahul Pereira

Thanks to: Steven Borin, Carolyn Hughes, Georgina Tulloch, Tess OConnell and Emily Pedersen from GPT | Melbourne Central for making this project possible and for their ongoing support.

For more detailed information go to the Department of Counter Culture website:

http://www.counterculture.net.au/

* Relation-scapes is taken from Erin Manning’s new publication

Images from the Ephemeral Studio workshops with facilitator Neil Thomas and students in action…