A Collaboration with Justin Wong, Bryan Chung and Alan Fong / Micro-wave Internation Media Art Festival 2005
Opening Event
I See Where You Are `In Central' is a checkpoint game challenging the habitual ways we navigate the city. The game involves groups of two seeking to move from one point to another without knowledge of the exact location of other players. Each team consists of a street player and an on-line partner. In order to get to the assigned ‘secret point' hidden somewhere in Central, each street player carrying a PDA set with location-tracking system has to follow the route of his/her teammate, who is sitting in the front of a computer navigating a faked map of Central with the keyboard. While GPS technology is giving us precise information about where we are, it is the adaptive use of maps – that is, human-made visuals representing real space -- that becomes the key tool for reaching a point. The playful use of the map becomes an exercise to break away from the routine – to overcome the heavily managed urban space. The game also seeks to materialize the notion of “creating situations” in the urban space, by which several performers will be placed at a number of points to improvise actions that would generate communication with the passers-by and obstruct the players.
From the perspective of cultural re-creation, the making of situations to address the constraints of our highly managed urban space has gained widespread rapport among cultural theorists and activists who do not just want to intervene via writing, but also via the re-making of everyday life. Put in simple terms, cultural engagement is action-making; theories are practices; creativity is not the privilege of art practitioners, but should be extended to embrace everyday creativity as an attitude as well as actions and performance. Theory as creative intervention in the “ I See Where You Are `In Central' ” event specifically emphasizes our bodily presence and our physical movement within the concrete space of Central. Players (and viewers) are invited to unwind their sense of familiarity for the district, and to discover the material impact of buildings, lanes and passages woven into a space with narrative implications that defy any easy, simple walk based on pure quantitative understanding such as measurement and duration.
The “ I See Where You Are `In Central' ” event will be played on the streets of Central, transmitted live for viewing, and followed up by an open discussion session by the street-players, on-line partners , performers and the general public. Video footage of the actual street hunt will also be edited and displayed in the exhibition space after the game.
The “ I See Where You Are `In Central' ” is the opening event in the Microwave Festival 05.
See also documentation on the personal website of Bryan Chung.