Immigrant Story 2

Alex’s father was dieing. So Alex, who had a large format Hasselblad, decided to travel to Lvov, Ukraine, where his father had been brought up; to shoot the house, the street, the neighborhood of his father’s childhood.

Prior to the 2nd World War, his father had  lived on a sunny tree-lined street on the outskirts of Lvov on Nowy_ St. When Alex arrived at the beautiful shabby city in the 1980’s, Glasnost had just recently occurred. Cheerfully Alex went about his task and asked about Nowy_ St. He found a street with that name but it didn’t conform to his father’s description, so he inquired at a couple of houses and was told that the street had been recently renamed, so it was not  the street he was looking for. After a few days of inquiries he finally found the street formally known as Nowy_ St. This street matched up with his father’s description, so he spent a happy day photographing the street, the houses, the trees and the area.

He arrived back in London, developed the camera’s beautiful prints and finally went to his parent’s house to show his father the pictures. Completely wrong! The streets and houses were totally different from how his father had remembered them, no, they did not bring back any memories of his childhood.

Later, after his father had died, Alex found out that the street he had photographed had changed names twice since 1939, that the street his father lived on was actually in a totally different neighboorhood in a different part of town.

Immigrant Story 1

My father was born on a farm near Dubno in the Ukraine, which before the 2nd World War was part of Poland. In 1939, when he was a teen, the entire family, together with thousands of other Poles, were taken by the Russian army to Siberia. Late in life he decided to visit the land where he had been born and raised.

My grandfather’s farm was considered hi-tech.  For example, the farm had a large orchard, and he installed an underground specially-cooled cellar. This enabled them to keep fruit throughout the year and sell ‘fresh’ apples in the spring and early summer for a much higher price.

Arriving from the local airport by taxi, my father travelled along the local road acutely remembering  from childhood the topography and details in the landscape. Finally he arrived at the hill and fields that used to be his childhood home. Everything had been erased! All the trees had gone, the fields had been merged and now there was nothing but a slowly rising giant field. Astonished, he walked onto the earth.

From a distance, a figure walked towards him. Gradually he could make out an older man, not much younger than himself. Speaking fluent Russian, my father introduced himself, asking the man about his former home, if had made some great mistake. “No no”, the man replied, he himself had lived in the same house with the large orchard and cold cellar, and for decades they had an easy life of it, picking fruit and selling it into the next year.

The farm was sold to another local farmer, and when Glasnost occurred and Ukraine became independant, the new owner was so worried that the former residents might take back the farm that they had demolished everything, the farmhouse, the trees, the cellars. Any and all details of the former place had been erased forever.

theirtube

I am going to set up a blog of our progress, which is in our contract with Longwood. What name shall we give the project? The first title was Sqin (as in square inch).

Yesterday we were talking about Youtube, and Wesley was saying how ‘democratic’ it was. Actually, from what I understand, all movies uploaded to Youtube belong to Youtube, a corporation. My thought was, maybe we should be stealing from Youtube, using the software you began to write for that?

Maybe the search terms should be: identity, theft, immigration and loss,

I think that ‘identity’ is an interesting topic for the web. Who are we, as we extend ourselves out there?

Titles: TheirTube?

subjective maps

I love the idea of subjective maps that somehow overlay each other. How?

Once Martin and I talked about Eigen Faces. That programming is
probably hard? (would work for sounds too?). Eigen Maps, where you
compare multitude of maps and overlay them based on common
characteristics - that the program discovers? Or do you need to tell
it highlights, like eyes and mouth?

Even if the results are ‘hilarious’ I still think thats interesting…

Any reference will do. If you have a ‘high’ one, you generally need to
balance it with a low one..

I love the idea of a computer program interpreting subjective constructs.

1″x 1″ squares

So I’m reading (trying to anyway) Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. He opens with a reference to the Borges story “in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly.” (Sidenote: I guess its probably pretty hard to succeed at a project that references the likes of Borges — or Baudrillard for that matter — just given that he is already so extensively loved and referenced … actually, I feel like maybe part of the success of Noplace is due to the fact that Constant’s ideas are so fascinating but not so well known? … unmined I guess if you want to think of it that way … do you think its harder to successfully reference work that already has been extensively referenced? But anyway …) And I keep thinking so much about that project (called Photosynth, I think) where they are using computer vision techniques to stitch together many different pictures of the same thing. (The TED talk example was flickr images of Notre Dame — incidentally, this already reminds me of Noplace, given that we are stitching together flickr images in a different way ….)

These two concepts (Baudrillard’s discussion of the Borges map as “simulacra”, and Photosynth) seem rather interrelated to me … and perhaps also related to your ideas about the Bronx project, where people take images of 1″x1″ squares (or something like that right?) ….. maybe there is some project idea in here about something that is similar to Photosynth but instead of using flickr images, asks people to draw their own representations of things? I dunno … A great part about also Noplace was the collision of all these conflicting objective realities … Photosynth really bothers me … maybe it would be nicer if we stitched together subjective/perceptions of images instead of the real thing or something. ok, now I think my ramble has really dissolved … but just thought I’d present all this to you. I’ll keep you updated as I make progress through the book.