Put Something Here

Public/Private: Put Something Here

Site-specific art carries the potential to redefine the intention of public place.

Put Something Here, an exercise which is purposely oblique, teases out a variety

of responses, all related to issues brought forward by the insertion of “something,”

or intrusion into public space. Students are asked to “put something here” to

which they usually respond, “What is the something and where do we put it?”

In reply we present Krzysztof Wodizcko’s “Alien Staff,” a pole with a mini

video screen on the top and a loudspeaker in the middle that plays a video

projection of the person carrying the staff. Wodizcko designed the Alien Staff in

response to the dilemma of the outsider, the immigrant who is invisible (and also

silent) as he moves through public territory. The Alien Staff is meant to make the

bearer (the alien) visible by creating a double presence, one in “media” and one in

“life,” inviting a new perception of a stranger as imagined (on screen) or as

experienced (real life) (Wodizcko 1999, p.104). In examining projects of this

nature, we are attempting to bring forward how engaging new media technologies

offer new conceptions of place as a space of resistance, interference, and

enunciation in opposition to those augmentations of surveillance and control they

also enable (Myers, 2006).

One project, titled Palimpsest FM, consisted of a device that houses a

hidden speaker which plays back the sounds of the same spot from an earlier

time, anywhere from thirty seconds to a day before. The replayed recording serves

as an audio version of a palimpsest, a proof of what had been there before. Using

sound as her medium, the student created a nearly seamless overlapping of past

and present where the sounds of today cannot be discerned from the sounds of

the past. Like a palimpsest, it will be unclear where the past ends and the present

begins.

Bachelard speaks of centering oneself in stable surroundings, but if your

surroundings are constantly in flux (and also incidentally not just your

surroundings) like they are in New York, it is no wonder a sense of ontological

anxiety can result. New York City has often been described as a place where the

physical environment changes so quickly that rebuilding without being able to

erase what came before it becomes very obvious to anyone who has lived there

long enough to call New York their home. “You’ve become a New Yorker once

you have the urge to point out a place and say, “that used to be . . .” The “that

used to be . . .” that every New Yorker expresses is part of the inerasable past that

is being built over, it is an expression of memory of a piece of their home and

consequently a piece of their identities that is gone but not forgotten. It is

embodied in the senses. The urge to tell others what used to be is an attempt to

reassert one’s identity and the home they had carved out of the city. This project

serves as another means of describing the “that used to be.” But instead of

subjectively telling the narrative of one person’s New York, it objectively captures

what the place witnessed. The audio palimpsest played back in this project serves

as a kind of memorial of what used to be in the immediate past. It stands to

commemorate the same everyday New York that its citizens quietly mourn when it

is torn down and built over. It memorializes the trivial happenings that many may

overlook, but still plays an important role in a place’s narrative and consequently a

person’s identity. By placing Palimpsest FM in Washington Square Park under the

shadow of the statue of Garibaldi and the Washington Arch, a comparison can be

drawn between the monuments that commemorate the selective history of the

victors to one that records and replays all voices of the city equally. The

neighborhood narrative can then become more complete as it plays back

everything it hears.