WILL PAPPENHEIMER & GREGORY ULMER

This project proposes to trace the form a wishbone or Y shape on designated streets in lower Manhattan. Lines/markers will be made from sequentially placed small pom poms following ledges, cracks, etc. The resulting formation, if only for a few moments, will suggest both the why and wish dilemmas of the September 11th destruction of the World Trade Centers. The image references a series of letters between literary theorist Gregory Ulmer and Australian writer Linda Marie Walker concerning the ideas/implications of the common household practice of saving and dividing a wishbone. This action/installation, somewhat invisible from street level, but large enough to be seen from the sky, gestures towards Ulmer and Walker’s prolific meditations on the premises of aporia, wishing, divination and choragraphy as methods of inquiry, as means to proceed. It will scratch/outline the possibilities of a wish-monument. The date, during April, and streets of the installation will be chosen through yet to be determined processes.

The project will emerge from collaboration between Will Pappenheimer and Gregory Ulmer. Accompanying the installation will be a website which unfolds some of the implied questions and ideas.



HOW TO LOCATE

Through processes of inquiry, attunement and chance operations, the time, location and size of the Y formation has been/will be enumerated. The date of the action/installation will be April 20th, 2002. The location is intentionally peripheral; at intersection of West Broadway and Hudson Streets in Tribeca with the total length extending 8 to 9 city blocks. The color of the pom poms will be predominantly orange to suggest a state of E-mergency. Through the month of April, an accompanying Website will collect wishes/questions surrounding both 9/11 event as well as the audience’s own personal wishes/questions. Consistent with the wishbone tradition, where the wish must be kept secret, visitors to the website will be invited to input wish /questions online which will be encrypted by replacing letters with password-type dots. The questions will then be stored and displayed on another web page online. To determine the number of pom poms, the approximate number of casualties from the 9/11 tragedy will be added to compressed wishes/questions input into the website. The total number of pom poms collected from this process by the 20th will then determine the size of the Y and the ending place of the 'Wishing Walk.'

VISIT ON THE WEB



ABOUT THE ARTISTS

WILL PAPPENHEIMER is an artist/educator living in at least two places, Florida and NYC. As an educator he is Area Coordinator of Electronic Intermedia (EIM) at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He directs the multimedia and digital video program there and has shaped the EIM curriculum during the past 3 years. He received his MFA from Museum School/Tufts University in Boston and his BA at Harvard in 1978. As an artist he has exhibited nationally since 1985 in a variety of media. He received a NEA Artists Fellowship in 1990. His work has been included in over 30 solo, group and traveling exhibitions including The ICA in Boston, Stedman Art Gallery, Rutgers University, NJ, Exit Art in NY and “Immedia” at the University of Michigan. Recently he has contributed work to collaborative projects such as the “Tallahassee IME Simulcast” for Kristin Lucas’s website, Simulsite.com, Christine Hill’s “Pilot,” Barbara Jo Revelle’s, “Looking for Zapatistas” project at NYU, the Florida Research Ensemble and Terry Adkins’ traveling exhibition, “Deeper Still.” The ongoing interests of his work include ephemera, distance, instruction, shifts in usage and interpretation and dematerialized/corporeal relations. His recent work involves an ongoing series of observations, interactions and representations of particularly chosen sets of Webcams around the world. Current projects utilizes video installation, computerprocessing, performance, serial object installations, light box display images and a website archive, http://www.willpap-projects.com/ .

GREGORY ULMER, Professor of English and Media Studies at the University of Florida, is the author of Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (Johns Hopkins, 1994); Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video (Routledge, 1989); Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Johns Hopkins,1985). In addition to two other monographs and a textbook for writing about literature, Ulmer has authored some fifty articles and chapters exploring the shift in the apparatus of language from literacy to electracy. His media work includes two video tapes in distribution (with Paper Tiger Television, and with Drift, the latter part of an anthology produced by Critical Art Ensemble). He has given invited addresses at international media arts conferences in Helsinki, Sydney, and Hamburg, as well as at many sites in the United States. Ulmer's internet experiments are organized around the problematic of electronic monumentality--a long-term project concerned with the mutation of the public sphere in electracy and the consequences for American national identity. His teaching, research, experiments, and collaborations relating to the Florida Research Ensemble may be browsed at http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~gulmer/


LINKS

SOFT WISHING Y MEMORIAL

ULMER/WALKER CORRESPONDANCE

GREGORY ULMER

WILLPAP-PROJECTS