Conversation Pieces from the Museum of Unrest
Featuring: Naiza Khan, Lilophilia, Naho Matsuda, David Palacios, John Phillips
This City Is…
‘This City is’ describes Bristol through a continuous list of statements scraped from twitter. The statements range from personal opinions to public announcements, to commercial texts and sports scores. Continuously updating and randomly arranged, this collectivised stream of consciousness is the impossible attempt to capture the many layers, people, events and emotions of a city that exist online in digital ‘public’ spaces.
In a time where our engagement in public places has changed dramatically over the past two years, it has become difficult to sense how a city ‘feels’ and to connect to the shared sentiment of a place. This work is trying to engage and reconnect with the multiple versions of a city through the re-edit of found text.
A projection version of ‘This City is’ has been shown as part of Shift Control Festival in Bristol in October 2020, and as part of O,Miami festival in Miami, Florida in August 2021. Projected back into the actual city ‘This City is’ re-contextualizes and confronts online content produced by end-users with the physical public space.
Naho is a German-Japanese artist based in London. Her work brings together the ordinary and the absurd to explore notions of labour, internet culture, emerging technology and the commons. Naho examines and constructs alternative narratives of social and cultural structures, and is interested in the blurring boundaries of language and the technologies we use to communicate with. Her work includes; print, publications, writing, installation and performance.