PARALLEL LINES
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Synopsis
Parallel Lines is a documentary and a demand for the public space we need, told through lives, histories and developments parallel to the High Line, a park on New York City's West Side.
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Introduction
The High Line opened to the public in June 2009, and has become a frequently celebrated example of public space for community, culture, innovative design, and urban renewal. As the High Line becomes a model public space, we critically investigate its aesthetic, economic, legal, political, architectural and urban development processes and the history of its surrounding neighbourhoods, to ask:
How does public space get imagined, funded, inhabited, used and produced? Who defines public space, and for what ends? How are populations distributed for access to space, quality of life, housing and survival? How do zoning and property development produce relations of privacy and publicness? What are the visual, architectural and environmental methods that render space public? How do we identify with each other as "the public", and what feelings and emotions contour these experiences? How can we imagine and create the public space we desire?
This investigation is posed from our specific standpoint within an international contemporary art community. Consequently, our treatment of these questions will proceed through a filmic analysis of visual regimes of representation and their histories, as they intervene in the direction of the built environment. We will also explore up the performativity of our own research, interviewing, social relations and videography, in order to examine our participation in a discursive aesthetic field, and our positions as image-makers, artists, educators, and allies to ideals of public space and the public life that we desire.
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Phase 1: Preliminary Research (Summer 2010)
We are researching, interviewing and working with communities and figures working toward the ongoing materialization of the High Line and its surrounding spaces. They include designers, planners, funders, activists, residents, visitors, practitioners and scholars of political economy, geography, architecture, law, urban studies, aesthetics, and history as it unfolds through critical race, feminist and queer perspectives.
Phase 2: Revisions (Fall/Winter 2010)
Over the summer and fall of 2010, in addition to our time line on the High Line's development, we will produce two more timelines, one on queer history and another on urban development. We are also planning more video interviews, a workshop with queer youth, performative film shoots with various individuals and organizations, and conceptual exercises with other artists on photographic history and archives.
Phase 3: Documents / Documentary (2011)
Our research will culminate in a feature-length documentary, based on the material we are presently gathering. It will have multiple edits and viewing configurations, depending on its artistic, activist, commercial or educational venues, and our footage will be available to the organizations we are collaborating with. Our research video and textual archives will subsequently be edited into educational timelines and pdf files, which will be available for download on this website, in addition to other teaching tools.
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Project Directors
Parallel Lines is a project led by six artists and writers. We have made and written about video, film and art for many years, and have shown our work in venues such as NGBK Berlin, Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, RKL Gallery, Cooper Union, Las Cienagas Projects, Room Gallery, Art in General, LAX Art, MIX Festival, Workspace 2601, Hammer Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, Millennium Museum, Sculpture Center Long Island, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, ABC No Rio, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Maryland Art Place, among others.
Michael Cataldi
David Kelley
Hans Kuzmich
Jens Maier-Rothe
Jeannine Tang