To continue with the series of articles, we chose an essay from Maeve Mulrennan, written for the publication of the exhibition ‘Letters from the Field’ in August 2012. The article raises questions related to the discussions we are having in the residency the last weeks.
Fictional Scenarios: Whose Experience Is This?
by Maeve Mulrennan
The human ability to create a fictional scenario is necessary in order for progress. Creative innovation drives us forward and aids criticality. Fiction is not necessarily separate from truth: one cannot be without the other. Fiction is not a lie: it is a creative and critical expression of what could be or could have been.
Ciaran Walsh’s work, Two Scripts for a Museum takes a scientific paper on amnesia as its starting point. The paper outlines how people suffering from amnesia related to a specific part of the brain (the hippocampus) are unable to imagine fictional scenarios. When examining these scripts it becomes apparent that the gaps and pauses in the text are extremely important. The viewer, imagining the script being acted, recognises these pauses as a void. The ability to create a fictional scenario is what changes who we are now into what we could be. If alternative ways of living cannot be imagined by anyone, or only by a select few, what will happen to us? The case studies that Walsh is looking at suggest that it is a lack of memory that affects the ability to imagine future scenarios. Recognition of our past is necessary to imagine a future. This contrasts with studies on three and four-year olds where it was easier for them to imagine fictional scenarios than real beliefs:
Young children may find reasoning about fictional mental states that contrast with reality easier than reasoning about epistemic mental states that conflict with reality.1
A three year old does not have a bank of memory to draw from when forming a fictional scenario. The ability to imagine is ingrained into the human condition at an early age. However a three year old with no past is not the same as an adult who is aware that they have had a past but have lost it.
Is it possible then that people who feel that their history and / or culture have been taken away from them feel the same way as a person with amnesia? Can they imagine a future when they know that their past is now a void?
For people with amnesia due to a damaged hippocampus, a lack of the past is indicative of a lack of future and understanding of the human condition. Could one’s future depend on someone else’s past? It is said that memory is a life long film-reel that can be rewound to specific moments when prompted. When large segments are spliced out, what comes next can be confusing. Hannah Arendt discusses the repercussions of this:
We are in danger of forgetting, and such an oblivion – quite apart from the contents themselves that could be lost – would mean that, humanly speaking, we would deprive ourselves of one dimension, the dimension of depth in human existence. For memory and depth are the same, or rather, depth cannot be reached by man except through remembrance.2
Ruth Le Gear is strongly attracted to the scientific method behind natural phenomena, as well as the more intuitive process of understanding these phenomena including homeopathy. These methodologies are polar opposites but her practice operates on the premise that crucial connections are involved in perception and a unified experience is created from differences.
Le Gear’s new video piece presents the viewer with a lost civilisation. She utilises fictions surrounding Lemuria and Atlantis and recontextualises them in contemporary Berlin. It was a widely held nineteenth century belief that these two islands were real but lost places. After this belief was proved false, it entered the realm of fiction. These fictions gave reasons for their downfall: they became lost because a mistake was made, something went wrong. Lost cities recur in utopian literature, for instance with Thomas More, William Morris, Charlotte Perkins Gillman and many others, demonstrating a necessary human need to explore fictional scenarios in order to understand more about the self.
If mistakes are made, are we lost forever? Who decides what our mistakes are? Why do we decide to accept this?
Lindsay Lawson’s work removes scenes from the plot-based narrative model of the Hollywood film and creates an infinitesimal loop where light, absence and repetitive action create new meaning for these scenes. The work questions authority by appropriating copyrighted material. By appropriating somebody else’s fictional scenario, it may be possible to create new meaning and understanding. By viewing a scene repeatedly through several layers of disassociation from the authorised version or scenario there is room for the audience to explore and to create their own, linking the scenes to personal or cultural memory.
The position of the artist as author also raises questions: Lawson’s artwork is a one-off film print on 16mm – this is in direct contrast to the digital shared film that she works from. By appropriating both content and method, the artist is creating a fictional scenario relating to authorship. The internet acts as a constantly shifting and expanding cultural memory archive, a mass of authorised and unauthorised content. History is no longer a clear, selective narrative in a book written by an authorised ‘expert’. With search engines and a conglomeration of information, each with different authority, impact and potency, history is now an ever-evolving network of ideas to be shared and consumed.
Who is the author of our imagined future? In 1975 JG Ballard addressed this:
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.3
If an artist is inventing a reality that opposes capitalist fictions, can reality be copyrighted?
1 Jacqueline D. Woolley “Young Children’s Understanding of Fictional Versus Epistemic Mental Representations: Imagination and Belief” Child Development, Vol.66, No.4, (August 1995), 1011 -1021 Blackwell Publishing 31/7/12.
2 Hannah Arendt p94 Between Past and Future: Six exercises in political thought, Viking Press NY 1961.
3 JG Ballard Introduction to Crash (French Edition) 1974.
Two Scripts For a Museum
Ongoing artistic research into medical testing by the Institute of Neurology
(University College London) and the School of Psychology (Cardiff University)
of the apparent inability of patients suffering from hippocampal amnesia
to imagine new experiences and construct fictional scenarios. The scripts
represent real interviews.
Ciar.n Walsh
He Cried in a Whisper at Some Image, at Some Vision (II)
2012
inkjet print on photographic paper
37 x 50 cm
Patient 5
Interviewer:
Imagine that you are standing in the main hall of a museum containing many exhibits
Patient 05:
[Pause]
There’s not a lot as it happens.
Interviewer:
So what does it look like in your imagined scene?
Patient 05:
Well, there’s big doors. The openings would be high, so the doors would be very big with brass
handles, the ceiling would be made of glass, so there’s plenty of light coming through. Huge
room, exit on either side of the room, there’s a pathway and map through the centre
and on either side there’d be the exhibits.
[Pause]
I don’t know what they are
[Pause]
there’d be people
[Pause]
To be honest there’s not a lot coming
Interviewer:
Do you hear anything or smell anything?
Patient 05:
No, it’s not very real. It’s just not happening. My imagination isn’t…
well, I’m not imagining it, let’s put it that way. Normally you can picture it can’t you?
I’m not picturing anything at the moment.
Interviewer:
So are you seeing anything at all?
Patient 05:
No
Ciar.n Walsh
For the second day of studio visits this week we went firstly to Kinderhook & Caracas, the joint space of artists Christopher Kline and Sol Calero named after each of their respective home towns. They were celebrating the first anniversary of their space and the last day of Ethan Hayes-Chute’s show. Christopher and Sol then spoke about their joint collaborations (including their current show, Regalos Ancestrales at Tenerife Espacio de las Artes) as well as their individual practices.
We then headed to L’Atelier – Kunst(spiel)raum to check out Renata Har’s current show and we also had an impromptu talk from the lovely Stefania Angelini, director of L’Atelier Kunst(spiel)raum.
Renata Har’s interactive confetti ball catapult.
The Autumn residents had their first day of studio visits, starting with Sam Smith who presented his latest work, Film Without a Past, currently at Altes Finanzamt. It’s in its last days with a Q&A with the artist at the finissage on Wednesday October 3.
Then off to LEAP where we met with the lovely John McKiernan, one of the three co-founders and directors of the project space who explained their unique program to the residents.
We also visited LEAP resident artist Shingo Yoshida who had just returned from the remote Friendship Island off Chile with a new work. He is soon heading to Greenland for his next project.
From Sunday July 8 till Tuesday July 10 Node residents and team visited Documenta (13), the thirteenth edition of Documenta invloving more than 300 participants. The exhibition in Kassel is presented at eight main venues, with many other projects located at sites throughout the center of the city.
Documenta (13) is dedicated to artistic research and forms of imagination that explore commitment, matter, things, embodiment, and active living in connection with, yet not subordinated to, theory (Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Artistic Director of Documenta 13)
Yes!
From Sunday July 8 till Tuesday July 10 Node residents and team visited Documenta (13), the thirteenth edition of Documenta invloving more than 300 participants. The exhibition in Kassel is presented at eight main venues, with many other projects located at sites throughout the center of the city.
Documenta (13) is dedicated to artistic research and forms of imagination that explore commitment, matter, things, embodiment, and active living in connection with, yet not subordinated to, theory (Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Artistic Director of Documenta 13)
Culturia, art space dedicated to researching artistic processes and artist-in-residence program, invited Node for a one-day visit in which Culturia current artists-in-residence Alessandro Sau, Chantal Riekel and Nicolas Pye held presentations about their work.
An important part of the first month of the residency at Node is dedicated to studio- and art space visits. Today the team of resident curators visited the studios of Jan Vormann, Annika Rixen at Kinderhook & Caracas –a project space run by Sol Calero and Christopher Kline– and Jeremy Shaw.
‘Non-art visits’ is the name Node gives to curatorial exercises by which our residents visit (non-contemporary art) spaces and carefully study and review them to analyze possible contemporary applications. On this occasion, the resident curators were split into two groups: the Museum für Naturkunde (Museum of Natural History) and the Technikmuseum (Museum of Technology).
Museum für Naturkunde
Technikmuseum
With only a bit more than a week ahead before the opening, we visited the Fichtebunker with the artists that will take part in Node Spring 2012 residency final exhibition opening April 25th. More soon… 
In the final space visits of this Spring residence, we were welcomed at Berlinische Galerie, one of the newest museums in Berlin, where we got a private tour by Clemens Klöckner, assistant curator.
Berlinische Galerie is dedicated to contemporary art through temporary exhibitions and an art collection dating from 1870 to the present day – with both a local and international focus.
