the text and images below are posted from beijing, berlin, buenos aires, hong kong, los angeles, new york, sado island, shanghai, tokyo and zürich. there are a few of us, and this is the space in between.
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minutes. finally. we meet. others. minutes.

beds. dormitory feel. luggage. blanket. dishes. showers? toilets? they’re in a group but also individuals at the same time. artwork and also receivers of info at the same time. receiving more than giving out. selection. simple. profession. location. possible interest in the project. possibility of having an effect on their life. parents? eighteen to sixty. preference of the embassy. people who can determine their will. biggest worry. how to select people. where to get them. met with embassy first. documentary film. sixteen teams all over the country. already six-hundred hours of footage. people also need to answer ninety-nine questions from fake. about germany. the west. fantasy. religion. work through e-mail. make participants start to participate. the first step. already a part of it. even if the visa process may fail. june thirteen. announcement of the artists of documenta twelve. the project is impossible to keep a secret. logistically. not boat-people. boeing-people. usb-stick. memory stick. memory of today. infrastructure hardware. network infrastructure. upload. download. twenty computers. printers. a working office space that people can freely use. create an information landscape. info-booth. usb-stick will contain the memory of one individual. corporate gift. two sticks. one at start. upload. download. use. then at departure take in stick and give a new blank one. keep this memory, this accumulated knowledge. the used one you keep as a trace of this experience. memory of participant and memory of event. a thousand and one different eyes. one may be completely into all the artworks. another may not give a damn. i’ll be a cook. a barber. the teacher. informational storage. where to eat? where to sleep? what to buy? what to visit? most will not speak english or german. need information. mapping. computer technicians? doctor? impose on top of kassel another layer of information. modeled after a map of china. your own city in any city. when it’s gone it’s gone. traces in mind not in physical space. why products. so much stuff. unnecessary. what will be related to the stick? information centre. we want to be active. them to be active. interface architecture. set up a condition. we don’t know what’s going to happen. we provide a possibility. most fascinating thing. usb one GB. one thousand and one GB. a photograph of each? that’s the studio photo! ask people to do it themselves. assuming that most people have a camera. otherwise provide twenty or so cameras. each group roughly two-hundred. on the planes forty here. sixty there. some from beijing. some from shanghai. and insurance. one-thousand yuan per person. plane tickets non-refundable. over twenty people to coordinate the work. will have volunteers in kassel. can probably have computers and technicians. map-office sets up scenario. something personal. emphasize individual. the more unpredictable, unforeseeable elements we put in the better. when i started i didn’t know it was going to be like this. chinese people get very emotional. one girl wrote me that one day she was standing on a traffic overpass and started thinking about the fact that she will partake in this project and that she was so happy it made her cry. she said she never knew she could cry out of happiness.minutes.gifimage edited from: http://blog.sina.com.cn/aiweiwei

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not-yet-expired activity

bestbefore_BW.jpg[readings for Best Before; this is what we’re up to; arnhem, boston and beijing in new york, August-October 2006]

“The separation between a thing and its environment cannot be absolutely definite and clear-cut; there is a passage by insensible gradations from the one to the other; the close solidarity which binds all the objects of the material universe, the perpetuality of their reciprocal actions and reactions, is sufficient to prove that they have not the precise limits which we attribute to them. Our perception outlines, so to speak, the form of their nucleus; it terminates them at the point where our possible action upon them ceases, where, consequently, they cease to interest our needs. Such is the primary and the most apparent operation of the perceiving mind: it marks out divisions in the continuity of the extended, simply following the suggestions of our requirements and the needs of practical life.” —from Matter and Memory, Bergson

“We ought to think of the historical world according to this model. Why ask if history is made by men or by things, since it is obvious that human initiatives do not annul the weight of things, and the ‘force of things’ always acts through men? It is just this failure of analysis, when it tries to bring everything down to one level, which reveals history’s true milieu. There is no ‘last analysis,’ because there is a flesh of history in which (as in our own body) everything counts and has a bearing — the infrastructure, our idea of it, and above all the perpetual exchanges between the two in which the weight of things becomes a sign as well, thoughts become forces, and the balance of the two becomes events. It is asked, ‘Where is history made? Who makes it? What is this movement which traces out and leaves behind the figures of the wake?’ It is of the same order as the movement of Thought and Speech, and, in short, of the perceptible world’s explosion within us. Everywhere there are meanings, dimensions, and forms in excess of what each ’consciousness‘ could have produced, and yet it is men who speak and think and see. We are in the field of history as we are in the field of language or existence.”These transformations of private into public, of events into meditations, of thought into spoken words and spoken words into thought, this echo coming from everywhere makes it such that in speaking to others we also speak to ourselves, and speak of what exists. This swarming of words behind words, thoughts behind thoughts–this universal substitution is also a kind of stability.” —from Signs, Merleau-Ponty

“Take, for example, a small drawer, which the carpenter has made for the convenience of some housefold. With the passage of time, the actual form of this drawer is surpassed by time itself and, after the decades and centuries have elapsed, it is as though time had become solidified and had assumed that form. A given small space, which was at first occupied by the object, is now occupied by solidified time. It has, in fact, become the incarnation of a certain form of spirit. —from Kinkakuji, Mishima

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paper insert

no2_pian.jpgiwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter number two is now being distributed. (the first, we later realised, was wear) unbeknownst continuity. you can receive: photographs on card | music | about the music | about sixteen people | phrases and, or, a word. sixteen people in our lives to share with one hundred. to find out more or for your copy of this limited edition series, let o know.

但愿我能为您描绘得更好-第二册”现已开始发放（没有想做成系列，但当第二册完成以后，wear自然成为本系列的第一册）。这是意外的继续。您将会得到：做成小卡片的照片、一些音乐、关于这些音乐、关于十六个人、一些词组和（或）一个字。但愿能和一百人分享我们生活中十六个人的故事。如果您想了解更多或得到此限量发行系列，请给o来信。

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wear

wear_cover.jpg

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京都を知るということ: a project document, getting to know your city, we walk in circles every day

このプロジェクトは、「passing通用すること」−周囲の人に気づかれないように特定の場所に入り込もうとすること、失敗すると解っていな がらも京都 の日常生活に忍び込もうとすること‐の問いかけとして開始されました。しかし、「言語」、そして「出自」に対する問いかけは、よりいっそうアイデンティ ティ意識を高めることになり、そして「passing」は「passing back and forthやりとりをすること」といった意味でより私の関心をひくようになりました。言語や意味の交換は、私にとって人やもの、場所の間の距離をたどる ための手段となったのです。どこへ行こうとも−アーバン・プランナー、旅行者、あるいは地元住民、どのような者としてであれ−、私たちは自 身を取り巻く環境と関係を取り結ぼうとする 生来の、そして本能的なマッピング・プロセスを持っています。しかし、地図が私たちにもたらす最大の錯覚とは、土地は整然とした図面や格子で表現され、川 は図式化された形として表現されているにも関わらず、そこに信頼性や具体的な客観性があると思わせてしまうことです。実際、都市の表象としての地図は、空 間に固定された地点の軌跡であるが故に「物語」の多様性を示しているともいえるのです。したがって、京都を学ぶことは、実際の変数を知るというより、同時 に起こる「活動の結果」について知ることになるのです。同じ意味において、アイデンティティは行為に基礎を置いています。ミシェル・ド・セ ルトーは「何かをしようとする意志(un vouloir-faire)」によって人間を評価します。そしてその意志は私たちが、普段繊細なメタ・コミュニケーションの中でバランスをとっている現 実と願望、ありのままのものと加工されたもの、伝えられたものと受け取られたものの間にあるギャップにあると私は考えます。そこでは、かつて確実性を持っ てとらえられていた時間と場所はもはや確実性を失うのです。‐そして、私たちは日々円を描いているのです。This project began as a question of ‘passing’, of trying to insert oneself into the situation invisibly, of slipping into the daily life of Kyoto in a premeditated failure of assimilation. But very quickly, language and the question of nativity led to a much more relational sense of identification, and ‘passing’ became much more interesting in the sense of ‘passing back and forth’. Language and the exchange of meaning became the tools with which to trace the distances between person, object and place.Wherever we go, whether as tourist, native resident or urban planner, there is an inherent and instinctive mapping process with which we engage our surroundings. But the greatest illusion of the map, however, is its misleading sense of authority, of concrete objectivity in the face of a neatly laid out plan, a grid or a logically designed river. In fact, the map, as an image of the city, is a multiplicity of narratives inasmuch as it is a trajectory of points fixed in space. To learn about Kyoto becomes less about a real mapped variable than a simultaneous ‘result of activities’.In the same sense, identity becomes based upon production. de Certeau measures being by “un vouloir-faire”, or will to do, and it is within these gaps between reality and aspiration, natural and fabricated or transmitted and received that we find the rhythms of a delicate meta-communication. The former rooted-ness of time and place are no longer valid. We walk in circles everyday.

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it’s darker, more contrast-y and some things get crossed out, but “it’s something we’re supposed to be blowing new life into”.

mixtape_xd.jpgWe’ve moved. But the offer may still be valid. Send your e-mail requests to o[at] or post to: People’s Republic of China 100010 Beijing, Dongcheng District, Douban Hutong, Bldg 3, Entrance 6, No 901. 中国100010北京东城区豆瓣胡同3楼6é—¨901室. If you write in chinese it will come faster. Previous recipients include: bernadette & lorena, jasmina, anouchka & john and ron-li & vali. mr. white and jj, we haven’t forgotten you (or the 10 euros). we apologise for the delay, the scenery keeps changing.

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brinco

lucio and judi jump together.brinco1.jpg. .brinco2.jpg

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daily fable

asuka_detail.jpganyway …fall 2005. ten items of clothing including accessories are reflecting my personal association about daily clothing on the street. those fantasies are basically made out of the gesture of hands and relation between body and bag. by twisting daily subject and replacing it on its original place, i wish the exchanges between wearer and other people would occur.

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