Assignment No. 1: Curating an Experience (Haroon Adalat)

The following post was my original draft for our initial curation assignment. Since then, I've updated the order, while adding an outline for how to approach the "experience," on a special Tumblr I made for this assignment; you can access it here. It only applies to the first portion of the assignment (on architecture), and does not concern the second "experience," which remains as it was below.

EXPERIENCE ONE: ARCHITECTURE AS CHARACTER
*I understand we are to embed our video media, but I prefer to hyperlink them, if that's okay.

VIDEO
- Excerpt from Last Year at Marienbad (1961, Alain Resnais and Alain-Robbe Grillet)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KylTOoqtF4

- Excerpt from Playtime (1967, Jacques Tati)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH2vsYWwmRU

IMAGE
- The Anguish of Departure (1914, Giorgio de Chirico)
- in the same vein, a still from Antonioni's L'avventura (1960)



TEXT
An excerpt from Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past:
"Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would endeavour to construe from the pattern of its tiredness the position of its various limbs, in order to deduce therefrom the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, to the piece together and give a name to the house in which it lay."

AUDIO
- The first movement of John Adam's Harmonielehre
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUiv0jJl9zU SITE

SITE
- Live coverage of the Golden Gate Bridge
http://webcam.goldengate.org/webcam.jpg

CURATOR'S STATEMENT Throughout my life, I've rarely been invested in architecture as a form in itself. Nevertheless, it's become increasingly apparent how significant even the simplest of concrete slabs add lyricism to other arts (would we have Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise without Art Deco?), and more practically, as the spaces we most often occupy for shelter, comfort, work, etc. It shouldn't be surprising how evocative and engaging architectural forms and spaces can be, and I have attempted to bring various examples of other arts attempting to recreate the phenomenon of architecture. (1) The video clips are pulled from two films that could not be more disparate from one another – Playtime being a "minimalist" comedy and Marienbad a baroque mystery – but both scenes convey an overwhelming quality of architecture: our buildings, rooms, walls, and windows are boundaries, either from each other (as in Playtime) or meaning and context (the entirety of Marienbad concentrates on how such sumptuous realms consume identities). (2) De Chirico's The Anguish of Depature is emblematic of his vast, lonely landscapes, dotted with stark buildings and monuments, which like entries in Antonioni's filmography, strike a melancholy rarely matched. (3) While I find Proust's words a concise summation of this experience's aesthetic, (4) John Adam's musical contribution may seem the most awkward piece. The story goes that Mr. Adams was in San Francisco suffering from a creative block; when crossing the Bay Bridge, he imagined seeing a sailing oil tanker shoot into the sky like a rocket. Does such inspiration, linked to such a monument, come through the bars of his music? (5) Lastly, our modern-day 24/7 culture watches over its landmarks with a vigilant eye at the Golden Gate Bridge live webcam site.


EXPERIENCE TWO: AN (AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL) EXPERIENCE OF EUREKA, CALIFORNIA

AUDIO
Nick Drake's "River Man" from Five Leaves Left
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9HRo-9mqrQ

IMAGES


top: early illustrated map of the City of Eureka; bottom: misty fields in Eureka

TEXT
On the weather in Eureka:
The area experiences coastal influence fog year round. Annual precipitation averages 39.50 inches (987.5 mm). Measurable precipitation falls on an average of 121 days each year. The wettest year was 1983 with 67.21 inches (1680.25 mm) and the driest year was 1976 with 21.71 inches (542.75 mm). The greatest monthly precipitation was 23.21 inches (580.25 mm) in December 2002. The greatest 24-hour precipitation was 6.79 inches (169.75 mm) on December 27, 2002. Snowfall on the coast is very rare, averaging only 0.3 inch (22.5 mm); however, on February 4, 1989, 2.0 inches (5 cm) fell in Eureka and additional snow that month brought the monthly total to 3.5 inches (9 cm).

SITE
Google Maps directions between San Francisco and Eureka
http://bit.ly/d2QdNF

CURATOR'S STATEMENT
This "experience" certainly falls prey to the pitfalls of any poor autobiography: one is extending a memory no one may particularly want or is capable of recreating. In this case, it's my past two visits of Humboldt County as a guest of one of my friends. As a site, Eureka, the city, is a large area to digest - one with a dynamic geography and unique population. Hence, I've narrowed it down to some key "textures," the same which make it autobiographical: Nick Drake's music, the feel of "old, downtown" Eureka, the mists of fields, an explanation of those mists, and the (rather long) route from San Francisco to Eureka. Why this site? Curating with specific locations led to some interesting, albeit commonplace, places for my friends and myself (i.e. the Castro Theatre, the neighborhoods we always visit in the city, my hometown). Instead, as a relatively "mundane" destination, Eureka sparked a number of key moments of the last few years, like the discovery of one of my favorite musicians and the realization that I like small-town America over my urban home. Such reminiscences were difficult to shape through images, sound or text - not enough personal or public media - so clearly, the cracks in my approach may capsize this "experience."