Ghost Room

Using air-conditioning units connected to a weather-app via a computer, the room/gallery will be kept at the local (and live) temperature of Williamsburg in New York.

When I came up with this idea I immediately thought it should be Williamsburg, for no more conscious reason than it’s somewhere I would often like to be, but aren’t.

I’ve since come to think of how Williamsburg has been described as cool, as hot, and for many people is now something of a cultural ghost town, due to gentrification.

It would be possible to come up for a conceptual justification for setting the temperature to pretty much any town or city in the world.

A key recommendation is that wherever the work is installed, a town/city is chosen somewhere in the world that has a significantly different temperature/season/weather-pattern, to ensure the work is physically effective on entering the room.

A Repeatable Action-Work

Every artist needs a simple action-work that they can do anywhere, anytime (for example, on arrival somewhere), which transforms a fairly modest moment into a moment of creativity, capturing something of that moment and lending it significance (even if it doesn’t really have any).

Something like:

Balling/screwing-up a blank piece of A4 paper, then photographing it in-situ.

Keeping the disposable cup from the first cup of coffee you drink in a new destination.

Sending a postcard to your dead Grandmother’s last address.

In some ways, it doesn’t really matter what the action is, it’s just a physical representation of a moment. The success of a work like this exists in the repetition. One balled-up and photographed piece of A4 is photograph of a piece of trash, whereas 100 photographs of balled-up pieces of A4 in different locations becomes a marker of time.