أشغال جيونفسية

Speaking of waiting, I'm sure some of you are curious to know what happened* to my collaboration with Sleepless in Beirut. Though I tried to convince her otherwise, everyone's favorite shadowy romantic insists on finishing the whole project before she blogs any further about it. She has given me the green light, however, to share more with you here.

First, the basics: Sleepless had the idea of tagging areas in Paris with QR codes that reveal scenes from Beirut when accessed by someone with a smartphone. The idea was to find areas in Beirut that evoked something similar to the tagged areas in Paris so that the QR codes would display videos that slowly overlaid the two scenes -- the first showing the tagged location i.e. where the person is standing, and the second showing the twinned scene in Beirut --  as they slowly fade in and out again. The tagged locations would form a walking tour in physical Paris as well as a metaphorical tour in a fragmented version of Beirut.

So Sleepless asked me to be her legs in Beirut (cleverly wondering if I wanted to 'get more blisters,' an indirect indication of her following my posts -- which I wasn't aware of at the time) and hunt down the similar settings. At first the plan was to find shots that resembled photographs she had taken in Paris in order to align them near-symmetrically with each other. I was also to record audio in these locations so that people would get access to locations in Beirut that looked similar but sounded different.

As the conversation between us developed, the strict symmetry loosened and the videos that Sleepless was making on the fly became increasingly abstract and metaphorical. The connection between the two scenes was sometimes quite subtle and other times based on unexpected alignments of graphic elements. The audio that she chose for the different videos would also surprise me at times, in a good way. The mood evoked by the juxtapositions was strange and ethereal, making it difficult to read into the clips any sort of clear message.

And how could one expect clarity? The videos were interpretations of interpretations; a collaboration in the truest sense, where it wasn't clear whose ideas were being evoked at any given moment. I can remember my thoughts when taking the pictures or when stealing some audio here and there, but within the short clips the scenes have their own logic generated out of three cycles of intentionality: once with Sleepless' choice of locations, twice with my interpretations (and digressions), and thrice with her final reinterpretation.

I've tried to imagine a participant response to the clips, and even here I cannot pick up a 'feedback signal'. This is a very strange state for me as I rarely do anything that doesn't try to provoke a certain response. When I was in New York five years ago doing a summer course in film making, I was told by the teacher in front of the whole class that everything I do is political, even when it doesn't seem to be: "you like to poke sticks," she said. She meant it (and I took it) as a compliment. So for me to be part of a project where I had little direction, minimal control and didn't try to proclaim anything in particular is very disorientating to say the least. And pleasantly so.

So I cannot predict how anyone will react to these clips, nor have I asked Sleepless how the walk she organized in Paris went. She is now working** on finishing up the videos for the other part of the conversation: tagged locations in Beirut. I wonder if there would be any difference in people's reactions here and there.

Perhaps selfishly, I'm not all that concerned with the walk or the feedback. I think the method of production in itself -- the gentle whispering*** of two, far-flung urbanophiles who had never met and didn't know much about each other -- is an intriguing process to explore and replicate elsewhere and with others. I've never had a 'pen pal' before, so this kind of affective networking and discovery of alien spaces is quite new to me. Sleepless has also told me that her time in Paris pushed her into forms of group work she had never tried before. It's always blindingly obvious to look back on social dynamics that others may take for granted and see how enriching they are, but being aware of that eerie moment on the edge of intersubjectivity helps us appreciate the enormity of the little things (like choosing to "take a different road," etc.). Whispering Cities' method of collaboration is an interesting tool for discovering new ways to express one's relationship with his/her surroundings and place in the world, making homes and foreign places -- and one's own thoughts about them -- both alien and familiar.

Perhaps the logical step for me now is to reinterpret Sleepless' "final" interpretation somehow...

* Others may also be wondering what happened to the T-Marbouta project, but that's another waiting game for another day.

** The last I heard, Sleepless was working on a clip at the airport on her way back to Paris -- a wholly appropriate liminal space for this experiment in transnational networked production.

*** The project was initially going to be called Speaking Cities, but our words were too hushed for our exchange to be called speech...