cc >> I'm going to talk
about the work of the Temporary Travel Office.
A fictional, yet operational tourism agency, specializing
in what we might call tactical tourism.
I'll give a brief survey of the work of the travel office
that will hopefully provide some definition for what
that term might be. And if there's time,
I'd also like to show the work of some other people
who I think are working along these lines and in this arena.
*To start, I'd like to summarize some of the concepts
that inform our work. Some specific ideas that we
consider guiding principles. Gregory and the Florida
Research Ensemble used the ancient Greek persona of Solon
to identify an idea of the tourist traveler
as knowledge producer rather than as simple consumer.
Likewise, writer Diana Taylor and her work in Argentina
during the so-called Dirty War of the 1970s and '80s
called for the efforts of spect-actors
in place of spectators. Both emphasized the importance
of witnessing as a form being in the world.
Art theorists work on networked art, including
art and fluxes provided a critical lens through which
to interpret the meaning of socially mediated and
discursive forms of practice. Not unlike the more recently
celebrated conceptions of relational aesthetics,
or are more relevant to us Grant Kester's dialogic art,
intimate bureaucracies described the use of bureaucratic language
and forms for socially intimate networks.
While sociopoetics describes a creation of social situations
for poetic, as well as instrumental ends.
Conceptions of haunted places and stories in reserve,
speak to their oppressed cultural memories that lie under
the surface of our daily lives. Recombinant and participatory
theater discussed and practiced by critical art ensemble,
and sub-rosa, among others, combines theatrical methods
and techniques with other forms of disciplinary knowledge
and production, creating audiences
both within and outside of the performance space.
Liminal leisure names those activities in which individuals
are allowed, and allow themselves to act counter
to conventional social norms and expectations.
In other words leisure can be a socially transformative space
as well as a normalizing and conservative one.
And finally, situated social action and social knowing
represent recognition of acting and knowing as socially
inscribed and located. That knowledge is an inherently
social material that is negotiated among agencies,
and therefore subject to social factors that determine access
more or less equitably. *So I'll move now to a handful
of actualized and proposed tours that the travel office has
produced over the last couple of years, in which these
principles can hopefully be seen at work.
*I'll begin with a project that occurred in 2004,
in which the travel office was commissioned
along with 12 others by the Center for New Media
to visit the Lofoten Islands of Norway.
They're just north of Arctic circle.
We were asked to respond to the possibilities for media
interventions in a context far from more conventionally
considered urban centers. In other words, looking at
places that aren't highly dense urban cities,
in Europe primarily. It's known as a land of Vikings.
These are children's drawings of Vikings in their
Children's Museum. Whaling and fishing,
oil rich lands, Death Metal.
It's also known for its extreme landscape that's surrounded
by water, which in the summer makes it quite a tourist
paradise. But the winter is known to be
pretty severe and inhospitable, and, of course, dark
almost 24 hours a day. *At the time of our visit,
king crabs, seen as unnatural invaders from Russia had
recently become a contentious topic, as they began interfering
with the much-prized fishing industry there,
and wrecking havoc on the ocean floor.
*The travel office's proposal unsuccessfully marketed to the
Tourism Council of the Lofoten Islands of Norway
was a kit for tourists encouraging the experience
of Lofoten across its different, sometimes harsh seasons.
This is a diagram of our proposal.
The theme of the kit, taking a cue from the king crabs
was invasive species. The kit provided handy items
like an all-weather parka and a hat that could sport
changeable nautical emergency flags, such as
"I require assistance." The kit would have also
have encouraged quote "locals" and "tourists" about what
it means for people and other things to move
through spaces where they're seen as not belonging.
*The definition of invasive species would have been printed
on the parka, as you can see in the image in Norwegian,
as well as other languages that are commonly spoken
by tourists. And they would have been
accompanied by pictures of king crabs, oil rigs
and other unnatural residents. *Also in 2004, we were working
with anti-GMO, genetically modified organisms
activists and others in Chicago. And we saw an opportunity
for tourism in a space known as the Chicago technology park.
The technology park is a 56-acre parcel
within a larger 560-acre area called the Illinois
Medical District, which is a semi-sovereign entity
located within the Chicago's near west side.
So that's sort of the loop in the distance by the lake.
Sitting near the University of Illinois-Chicago and
a former site of many of the city's public housing projects,
the area is designed to serve as an incubator
for start-up Biotech companies, pulling from a combination of
city, state and federal funding, the Technology Park is one way
that Chicago is attempting to compete for a piece
of the new economy represented by biotechnologies.
It's also a location in which we can see the material
and literally concrete manifestations of biotechnology.
*Sorry, this is getting away from me.
*So we saw a connection between the ideology of transgenics,
or the process of transferring DNA from one organism
to another. The history of eugenics and
the spatial restructuring that was occurring
in the Technology Park. *We called this connection
spatial eugenics, where public resources such as housing
and hospitals, serving low-income residents
are eliminated to make way for the smooth funneling
of resources to profitable, private interests.
These are images from a guided tour that we conducted in 2004
of the park. *We ended up with
a distributable audio tour and guide, some of
the peripheral materials are seen here.
The audio wove together three narratives, linking
the larger questions of biotechnology to those
of urban redevelopment and the specifics of the Chicago
Technology Park itself. This was distributed as
a free CD and booklet that you can see in the bottom right,
as well as a downloadable Web package and pod cast.
*Our interest in the relationships between broader
ideological and philosophical world views and the often
mundane realities of space, led us to our next series
of tours that are also still ongoing,
titled, "Parking Public." Parking Public developed out
of research into open space in Hollywood and Los Angeles,
which happens to have quite a bit of land devoted
to surface parking, but little relatively speaking to parks.
*Our interests quickly turned to a broader view of parking
within the United States. A view that ran counter
to the dominant understanding of parking as a mostly unplanned
and rather unfortunate byproduct of American
automobility. Parking lots seen in the context
of historical urban planning and real estate concerns,
appeared to function as sites of storage
for the immaterial ideals of capital, as much as for
the material storage of cars. *In Brooklyn, for example,
one can look at the geography of parking, differentiated
by municipal city lots, which are represented by
the blue arrows, and privately-owned and operated
lots, indicated by the red teardrop markers.
*Currently in New York City, as in many cities around the
country, both private and public parking lots are being cashed in
for the construction of condos and multi-use structures.
*In the small city of Champaign, Illinois, where the travel
office is currently based, the flipping of city-owned land
as a cheap and largely subsidized land bank for
developers many of whom are also city officials
is extremely present. These municipal lots,
mostly built by the cities between the '40s and '70s
on land acquired by purchase in eminent domain were attempts
to keep the downtown viable in the post-war flight
of capital to the suburbs. *Now, with concepts like
new urbanism and the paradigm of an information economy
driven by urban dwelling creative classes,
those lots are being redeveloped by successors to interests
that created the lots in the first place.
Like this former municipal parking lot,
now under construction as a site for luxury condos, offices,
and retail store fronts. *Using maps and other narrative
devices, we lead guided tours, attempting to bring
the more difficult-to-see geographies into the concrete
spaces of parking. In an attempt to construct
spatial narrative and polemic about the social production
of parking spaces. This is a tour that we gave
on historic Spring Street in downtown LA, which was
once known as the "Wall Street of the West."
*Here, we're looking at a former privately-owned
parking lot that's now the site of a future Madame Tussaud's
Wax Museum that will also have a retail complex.
As part of that tour, we produced a guide booklet
for people to take a self-guided tour.
These are some pages of that, showing the parking lot
on the left, and on the right, showing
a digital rendering of what the building will look like
when it's there. This site was a focal point
of an ongoing battle between historic preservationists
and speculative developers who were championing
the Madame Tussaud's building. However, both still imagined
Hollywood as a space to be consumed, and so both fight
against things like more social services in the area.
They have just have different aesthetic ideas of what
consumption should look like. *In 2006, we were not asked
to serve as tourism consultants for the Timucuan Ecological
and Historic Preserve. The Timucuan Preserve
is a 46,000-acre collection of parks, trails, wilderness areas,
historic landmarks and education centers,
managed and operated by a partnership between national
and state park services, the City of Jacksonville
and 300 private entities, with the National Park Service
operating less than a quarter of that space.
It was signed into law by President Reagan in '88
and is mostly situated in the sprawling city of Jacksonville,
which is the largest city geographically speaking
in the United States. This is the Preserve
headquarters, where we're not working.
*In our role as non-resident consultants we have created
a report outlining what we see as opportunity for the preserve
to expand both its historical and ecological boundaries
by contaminating itself, so to speak.
This report presents this opportunity in narrative form,
and includes two concrete proposals for action.
We began our residency by asking what was being preserved.
What is the preserve preserving? And to give you an idea
of what we think it is, the following video,
we think represents the current official narrative
of the preserve in 15 seconds. ( no audio )
*So the preserve provides educational services through
the processes of reenactment, conservation and preservation
using artifacts, models, didactic signage
and historic documents, or replicas of such things.
*The primary historical focus of the preserve
is the military battles between European colonial forces,
primarily between the French and the Spanish,
during the 16th century. and eventually the English
and the United States. *Fort Caroline is a speculative
model of the French fort built in 1953.
Based on drawing and journal accounts, whose authenticity
is now in dispute, and is not to scale
nor at a verifiable location. The real fort is the regarded
as the first established settlement by European colonists
in the future United States. Park Service officials
call the display the Fort Caroline Exhibit,
since it is neither a preserved artifact
nor an accurate model. *The Rebeau Monument,
a concrete pillar, commissioned by the Daughters
of the American Revolution in the 1920s, has been moved
twice since its creation, once due to the site of the
large and still operational Mayport Naval Station.
It's supposed to be a replica of an obelisk
left by the French colonist John Rebeau, claiming the land
for France. But much like the Fort,
this monument was fabricated using etchings by a
Dutch publisher as a reference, and which you can see
in the top right. That publisher is now believed
to have fabricated a good number of images supposedly produced
by Jacques Lemoine, a French artist and colonist.
An actual pillar has never been found.
*The namesakes of the preserves, the Timucua, are positioned
as inevitable losers in a clash of civilizations,
that can be explained in terms of religion and technology
as this recreated Timucuan hut illustrates.
*And while the preserve includes within its bounds a preserved
18th century plantation home, Kingsley Plantation,
its narratives end with the European naturalization
of North America into a white-controlled space,
a United States into which others may assimilate.
And where more modern narratives are allowed to enter
our social imaginary, it is only through the development
of a white sense of environmental stewardship
and preservation. *Where preservation equals
the creation of a spectacular and ocular vision of nature
that relegates discussions of land use by Timucuans
and cast-offs of oyster shells and U.S. preservation policies.
*We found that preserve is protecting conquests
by using nature as a barrier between its constructed
histories and ecologies, and those histories
and ecologies that reveal the ongoing reality of the conquest.
While the violent histories of conquest deeply mark
the myths of those living around the preserve,
like this subdivision, Spanish Point, such history is
only moving in any directional manner colonial history allowed
to seep out, while its post-colonial present is
prevented from entering inside. *So we propose an expanded view
of the Battle for La Florida. One that didn't stop
in the 19th century, or assume that white conquests stopped
with the death of Timucua or the end of the Civil War.
We start this expanded tour at the mythic beginnings
of contemporary Jacksonville, the St. John's River,
or the River of May, as it was supposedly named by the French,
and a formally shallow crossing point used
by the Timucua, and later by the Spanish
and English as part of a trading route.
*This marker notes the location of the river crossing
that would become the beginning of Kings Road and a keystone
in Jacksonville's developments. *This central location
in Jacksonville, known as Hemming's Square, which is
literally just around the corner from the previous marker.
It's the symbolic spatial center of the city government,
and is dense with historical recognition and representation,
like this marker for a 1960 civil right's demonstration.
*This nearby intersection, the site of an NAACP-sponsored
sit-in at a local department store, that was
discussed at a previous marker, would become the site
of another demonstration by NAACP youth in 1964,
on a day referred to as Axe Handle Saturday,
because of the violence with which whites reacted,
beating demonstrators with axe handles, appropriated
from nearby hardware stores. *Also in Hemming's Square,
the Kings Road historic marker, which was also erected by
the Daughters of the American Revolution in the '20s,
points to the early importance of the road and the symbolic
myths of Jacksonville. *Following this historic route
north through the city where it splits and becomes
New Kings Road, one finds a small section designated
as Johnnie Mae Chappelle Memorial Parkway.
This used to be known as Picketville, the town,
it's now incorporated as part of Jacksonville.
Chappelle was murdered while walking near this stretch of
road in 1964 by four young white men wanting to find
some way to participate in the fight against black freedom
that was happening in downtown. The parkway was legally
dedicated by the state legislature in 2005.
But the case in which only one of the killers was convicted
and sentenced to three years, has never been re-opened despite
the work of Chappelle's family and appeals from civic leaders.
*On the other end of Kings road, about 100-kilometers to the
south is St. Augustine, the oldest continually occupied
European city in contemporary North America.
From here, the Spanish would drive out the French
shortly after their arrival and maintain control of Florida
during two extensive eras. The Castillo de San Marcos,
a Spanish fort built in 1672, that you can see
in the background, is the only 17th century fort
in North America. *And in the 19th century,
it was used by the U.S. military as a prison camp during
the Seminole and Plains Indian wars.
Now it's a prime tourist destination, operated by the
National Park Service. Just north of the fort is
the Nombre de Dios Mission, speculated to be the birth place
of Juan Alonso Cabale, the last reported Timucuan
who died in mid-18th century in Cuba after the Spanish ceded
the territory of Florida to the English.
This fact is not part of the tourist narrative
celebrated at the mission. *St. Augustine was also the site
of intense civil rights struggles in the early '60s.
An area dentist and organizer named Robert Hailing even tried
unsuccessfully in 1963 to petition the White House
not to recognize the 400th Anniversary
of St. Augustine, linking the colonial past
and then present struggles for black freedom.
Hailing would be key in organizing demonstrations
of 1964 that would play a major role in the passing
of the Civil Rights Act soon after.
*Organized swim-ins in the ocean, as well as in hotel pools
culminated in an infamous incident in which hotel owner,
James Brock, poured acid on protesters at the Monson
Motor Lodge in 1964. The lodge is now the Hilton,
St. Augustine Historic Bayfront Hotel
*So our first concrete proposal following our research
is the creation of a new trail, tentatively titled
the Guanabacoa Trail The trail would be an 800km
elevated boardwalk that extends from south eastern edge
of the preserve to Guanabacoa, Cuba,
which is now mostly known as a suburb of Havana.
The boardwalk would utilize an existing observation tower,
not far from Fort Caroline. *On the Florida side,
signage would inform visitors of the last known
Timucuan, Juan Alonso Cabale's death in Guanacaboa, Cuba.
The boardwalk would end with no means to descend in
Guanabacoa, where the one mile section
of Johnnie Mae Chappelle Memorial Parkway
would be re-created. Signage on the platform
would tell the story of Chappelle's death
and its relationship to the civil rights struggle
in Jacksonville. *These are some sculptural
renderings of the proposal that were on display in Jacksonville
the end of 2005, beginning of 2006.
*For a second proposal, we think there are opportunities for
combining the spatial histories of north Florida's civil rights
black liberation struggles with contemporary struggles
over land use and environmental justice.
Taking into consideration how land has not just been the
setting for military conquest, but has been used
as an implement and tool for a continuing kind of
conquest of Florida. *The concerns of ecological
preservation visible in the Timucuan Preserve intersect
with the histories of civil rights as we've documented.
*Between the Cow Ford site, the origin of Kings Road
and the Johnnie Mae Chappell Memorial Parkway on the
top left, is an area dense with evidence of this land use war
and ongoing clash of civilizations.
*Eight toxic ash sites can be found in an area here
under 43 square miles, adding up to more than 261 acres
of ash contaminated land. Incinerators were used
to burn solid waste here, where the ash deposited
on site and at dumps from 1890 until the '60s.
*Rather than valuable cultural and historical artifacts
from another time and culture, excavations at these sites
reveal artifacts of chemical and social toxicity.
*The proposal is for the creation of what we call
an Ash Site Annex that would add 43 square miles to the preserve
and would be governed using the principles
of environmental reparations and community preservation
districts. Put forward by environmental
justice scholars and advocates where the residents
and community stakeholders would be given further power
to determine the use and regulation of the land.
This would utilize a unique aspect of the Timucuan Preserve,
that it is not governed by a single city or state entity
but by social principles of preservation.
*Didactic materials, school programs, interactive
and roadside exhibits and tours would be created
with members of the community. *Who would govern how funds
and resources would be allocated and what the relationship
would be between it and the rest of the preserve.
As an initial implementation, we're working on a creation
of a cell phone based audio tour of the Annex that could easily
be updated and serve as a sounding board
and feedback mechanism for residents and tourists.
*So the last tour that I'll present is also ongoing,
as was the project in Florida, and looked at the spaces
of contemporary Olympic games and the international
organization that runs them. This series of tours
is being undertaken with Sarah Ross, and Illinois-based
artist and activist. Currently, our focus is on
North America with sites such as the 1976 games in Montreal,
where the potential for the games to actually be
profitable to a city was first put to the test.
It failed spectacularly, as did the architecture,
depending on who you talk to. *The 1968 games held
in Mexico City became historic for several reasons,
most notably because of the symbolic gesture of
solidarity with black power movements by John Carlos
and Tommie Smith, two Olympic runners who won
the Gold and Bronze medals, for which they were expelled
from Olympic village. And some of you may have seen
the image of them standing with their hands up
and gloves on. It's also known for
the Tlatelolco Massacre, in which over 300 students
and others protesting economic and political inequities
were gunned by down the police in the Plaza of
the Three Cultures. That's a medium-sized memorial
to that massacre, that's that big sort of stone slab.
*Our first tour, as part of touring Olympia, will be
of Exposition Park in Los Angeles, which is the site
of the 1932 and 1984 games. Both games are historic
for how they managed to create an unprecedented amount
of privatization in their operation of the games,
something previously considered antithetical
to the Olympic spirit. *They actually had to rewrite
some rules and regulations for how Olympics could be run
because of how LA insisted on managing the games.
*In 1932, private interests formed civic booster
organizations to appropriate land upon which
to build the first Olympic Village.
In 1984, these interests converged again to produce
the first real success story of the Olympics
as a profitable tool for urban development.
For some reason, they have a big grass field on the right
that they don't want people to play soccer on,
which is kind of ironic since it's an Olympic stadium.
*So we produced an audio tour that we're actually giving
in mid-March that takes place in a fictionalized near-future
where international protest has led to the destruction
of the Olympic movement. Exposition Park is utilized
as a backdrop, a memorial to the Olympics due to its role
as the site of the last Olympic games in 2020.
*So I'll end presentation of this tour with a short
audio clip from that tour.
>> Even prior to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympiad,
cities have grappled with the burden of expensive and
difficult-to-use mega-stadiums and surplus accommodations.
When bidding, cities did not or could not rely
on private funding, they employed other methods
of creative economics. For instance, $75 million
of the U.S. government went to build the 1964
Lake Placid Olympic Village to the specifications
of a federal prison. After the games were over,
the structure was handed over to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
*But more common was the practice of turning public
resources into private ones. The Olympics were an urban
planning tool far more swift and effective
than the old tactics of economic restructuring
or wholesale buyouts of a community.
And despite the major failures and financial losses,
bidding for the Olympics became more and more fierce.
*Montreal faced a 30-year debt, the Sydney and Athens Olympiad
cost respectively two and four times what those cities'
publics were told. The potential to command
international attention and income from television rights,
and the ability to fast-track building plans with
little to no community input, made hosting the Olympics
a centerpiece to any consumption-based landscape.
*But the seduction of Olympia held over the globe
began to wane in the face of the disasters it left
for many in its wake.
>> That bit about the Olympic accommodations being built to
the specifications of a prison in New York is true, which
is a very odd and strange story. *So, I cut out a few things
to leave time for this, because I think it's important
to look at the work of other people
who are doing work along some of the similar lines,
but some importantly different. So I wanted to look at
what I consider fellow travelers among this kind of work.
This first project is called Invisible Five, which is
produced in 2005 by Amy Balkin and Kim Stringfellow, a sound
artist named Tim Halbur, in an environmental organization
called Green Action. It's an audio tour produced
specifically for driving along I-5 between San Diego
and San Francisco. And it tells and looks
specifically at narratives related to environmental justice
and ecological degradation that's kind of invisible
right off the highway. So they sort of used
their audio tour to point to these invisible,
to drivers anyway, situations.
*You can also download this from their Web site,
as well as purchase it as a CD. *A group called Free Soil that's
an international collective of artists and designers,
as some of you may know, if you're designers,
as Future Farmers. It's a lot of the same people
involved. It produced what's called
a Toxic Tour of Silicon Valley for a new media festival
called Isaiah, in San Jose, in 2006.
The tour included stops at some of the many Superfund sites
in the area related to the production of computers,
as well as to locations where groups are working
on remediation solutions to that toxicity, and also
met with figures from the History of Computing
Counterculture, and the sort of relationship
between psychedelia and computing
and its origins. This is their biofuel bus
that they used for the tour. *The Center for Land Use
Interpretation is an organization with locations
in Los Angeles, Windover Utah,
Troy, New York and the Mojave Desert
in California. They create exhibitions,
publications and guided tours of socially-shaped landscapes,
such as the Owen's Valley which is just north of LA,
and where over half of that city's drinking water
is piped from. So here, they're taking a group
of tourists to look at one of these pipes
that moves that water. *A British group,
art and research group, called Platform,
produced a project called And While London Burns.
Among their many other projects, which is an operatic audio tour
that takes tourists through a fictional narrative
that links concerns about climate change
to the corporate spaces of London's financial district.
So you would be listening to a fictional narrative
set in some not-quite-defined near future.
A scenario in which the story is happening in the spaces
that you're walking through, and different things happen
to the characters that are happening in the same spaces
that you're occupying. *Artist and geographer
Trevor Paglen conducts some of his field research into the work
of secret military programs with small groups, taking them
out into these spaces while he's doing some of his research.
Taking note that while these programs may be secret,
they have to exist somewhere, there's an actual landscape
on which their situated. He ends up with pictures
like this, that are of these sort of secret,
off-the-radar map, territories, and bases.
>> I was reading about that project that he takes those
photographs from five miles away sometimes?
>> Yeah, he has several sort of telescopes that
he's worked into photographic lenses, basically,
to produce them. He's also taken some video
by hooking a video camera up to the same
sort of telescopes. *An Italian collective
of architects, designers geographers and people
doing many other kinds of work and research,
known as Multiplicity, uses the form of a road trip
in their project called The Road Map, to document
the disparity and mobility that comes along with
the possession of either a Palestinian passport
or an Israeli passport.
So this is a map, for example, of their road trip that shows
with the Israeli passport they were able to traverse
the same distance in just over an hour,
where on the right, it took them a little over--
or just under six hours, because of checkpoints
and various other things. *So that's what I have.
I wanted to thank everybody for coming and listening to me.
Also, I can take any questions or anything you might have
either about the projects that I showed by others
and about my own projects as the Temporary Travel Office.
Thanks. ( applause )
Any questions? >> I have a question.
>> Sure. >> Do you think of this work
as activist work? Do you view yourself
as an activist? >> The short answer would be no,
in terms of this work, no. In other capacities,
I work with people who are activists, and
there are other activities that I take part in that I
might consider more politically directed, I guess.
But this work in particular, I don't consider
an activist practice. Yeah?
>> How do you get people to take your tours,
or how do you take a tour if you want to take a tour?
>> That's a good question. Generally, the tours are
organized through some sort of other larger, overarching event.
So it might be a conference. It might be some kind of
festival of some kind, either art related
or media related, and so they're put into a program
as part of those events. Sometimes, there are smaller
tours. And I might just be traveling,
and know a core group of people that would be interested
and could gather other people together,
and they happen informally. But generally, where there are
people that I just don't know personally, or aren't friends
of friends, they're part of some other larger series of events,
so they're advertised as part of those events.
Yeah? >> Are they officially,
actually part of those events, or do you just kind of
insert them, you know, guerilla style?
>> Right. Well, they've been part of,
the events that generally they're a part of
having something happen guerilla style would be
something that usually would be encouraged anyway, but they've
generally been sort of an official part of the program,
except for when they do happen informally sometimes.
If there happens to be some kind of event that I think
they'll be critical mass of people interested,
then sometimes they'll be organized more ad hoc.
Yeah? >> I'm curious about what you
said about not seeing yourself as an activist.
Do you see this work as something that points to things
more, and activism goes a step beyond that pointing,
or what's the kind-- what's the line for you?
>> Yeah, that's somewhat of a difficult thing to answer.
But I think to try to put it succinctly, the sort of strict
definition of activist's activities that have a boundary
that, where you can say this is an activist activity,
is somewhat problematic for me, personally.
In that, a lot of what we do in our daily lives are
politically charged activities, just by the nature of what
they are. So in that sense, I look at this
more as a specific investigation into topics
that I'm interested in, that are also things
that might direct where I would become more active
in a politically directed sense. But they're also,
I think aesthetic investigations that have to allow for things
that aren't politically directed in a specific way,
so even though they have a subject matter, and a theme, and
content that's easy for people to locate and pinpoint
as "political" or charged in a specific sense,
they have at least for me, a certain openness.
And that I don't necessarily have a pre-defined outcome
that I'm trying to, let's say, get a certain kind
of legislation through. But at the same time, they are
going to be directed by my political motivations.