REVITALIZING THE EVERYDAY
Emil Gombos / Dorottya Bucsi / Akos Plesznivy / Anna Aleksandra Salmi
How often do you find yourself following the same old path , lost in thought , in a state quite opposite to that of being “ present ”? You are following the same old routine , you bike down Üllői utca , take the metro to Deák Ferenc , get on the tram until you find yourself at Oktogon . Maybe on the way you check your email , read a book , stare into space , notice a little girl in a bright pink jacket , but how acute and vivid are your senses ? Are you living and experiencing , or are you simply floating through these 30 empty minutes in a grander timeline called “ your life ”?
Our aim is to look at our personal daily routes that have become mundane , numbing , or stale due to repetition , and to reevaluate them in an attempt to rediscover their specificity and freshness . A space can become uncertain simply by exisiting within it for an extended period of time , as you begin to accept the details as facts that will never change , and no longer find the need to pay them any attention . In looking at these forgotten specificities and experiences , we hope to propose an artistic and interactive video game that would allow a player to revisit the urban space with a new intentionality and mindfulness .
“ According to Brian O ’ Doherty , who introduced the term in a discussion of Robert Rauschenberg ’ s silk-screen paintings : The vernacular glance is what carries us through the city every day - a mode of almost unconscious or at least divided attention . Since we are usually moving , it tags the unexpected and quickly makes it the familiar , filing surplus information into safe categories . Casually self-interested , it accepts the miraculous as routine . Its self-interest becomes so habitual that it is almost disinterested . This is the opposite of the pastoral nineteenth-century “ walk , ” where habitual curiosity provoked wonder , but found nothing but ugliness in the city . The vernacular glance doesn ’ t recognize categories of the beautiful and ugly . It just deals with what ’ s there . Easily surfeited , cynical about big occasions , the vernacular glance develops a taste for anything , often notices or creates the momentarily humorous , but doesn ’ t follow it up . Nor does it pause to remark on unusual juxtapositions , because the unusual is what it is geared to recognize , without thinking about it … The vernacular glance sees the world as a supermarket . A rather animal faculty , it is pithy , shrewd and abrupt , like slang . Its directions are multiple … Its disorder needs no order because it doesn ’ t require thinking about or “ solution ” … It is superficial in the best sense .” Anne Ring Petersen , “ Chapter 16 Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger at Times Square ,” ₁
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So how can we escape this vernacular glance ? How can we rediscover that “ habitual curiosity ” in the urban daily commute ? In exploring and researching our own personal daily routes , we hope to propose ways in which we can actively reengage with these spaces . These spaces have become uncertain due to our understanding of them as mundane , average , and everyday , and in revisiting them in the name of artistic research we hope to not only make these spaces certain again , but also to reinvigorate them and give them new life , to create an experience that is much more than average .
₁Anne Ring Petersen , “ Chapter 16 Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger at Times Square ,” in The Urban Lifeworld ed . Peter Madsen and Richard Plunz ( London : Routledge , 2002 )