“THE JOY IS NOT MENTIONED”
Cats pyjamas playing bingo with you
E.Budvytyte, G.Budvytyte, I.Miseviciute
Special radio broadcasts, series of dance events in the city and the exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, 2007
During the second weekend of September the streets of Vilnius were hijacked by spontaneous dance floors. Music ranging from 20s Lithuanian classics to old-school electro hip-hop and Bollywood disco, with recorded dance instructions and fictional information about the city mixed in, was broadcasted through a special radio programme. Anyone could join the events by tuning in their car radio, dancing in the street with us, or simply listening to the programme. Drifting dance floors, with music played on car radios and a classic 80s boom box, would over the night attract from 5 to more than 50 participants.
With almost no prior advertising or organised structure the dance events were driven by a logic of spontaneity and chance, creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or endpoint. The open-ended and non-structured character of the events generated the possibility for encounters between different individuals and social groups that would meet in the dance events and through radio frequencies.
The invasion of fantasy into the physical space of the city continued with the opening of the radio studio at the Contemporary Art Centre exhibition hall. The first radio program was recorded live during the opening of the show, and transmitted in almost real time through the radio channel “Start FM” (94,2FM). Recording equipment and a computer programme installed in the exhibition hall allowed visitors make their own recordings and have them broadcast the next day. Thus visitors were invited not only to listen, but also to add to and actively shape the content of the radio program. These contributions included poetry recitals, mobile phone melodies, short anecdotes, a priest giving a lecture on patriotism, children laughing, interviews between friends.
Portable radio receivers were made available for visitors to borrow as guides or companions in the city. By using almost outdated media for communication and music broadcasts such as portable radio receivers and boom-boxes the project proposes that one can copy-paste, revive and remix fragments of history and create an alternative timeline in the present. The 80’s boom box, whose use at the time helped to define the identity of marginalized black groups, became in the context of 21st century Vilnius a tool for inclusion and the blurring of social lines. By remixing past artefacts into the present one can provoke new roles, new meanings and new performers.
An experimental catalogue was presented which, instead of commenting on the exhibition in a straightforward manner, contained a collection of images and textual inserts suggesting how to read or otherwise use or misuse the book.
The three parts of the project (dance events, open-source radio, and catalogue) rely on the notions of spontaneity, accidental social encounters, and the free-floating imagination of the spectator. This project searches for alternative spaces for collective social experience that are not strictly organised but rather loosely guided, and are an end in itself rather than governed by a means-end logic. City streets can become the space for celebration for its own sake; radio can be a space for the creative expression of the spectator; the catalogue, instead of being a passive medium, can turn into a note book, how-to guide, or companion, and extended in variety of directions by the reader’s fantasy.
