Tickers

(2002)

A participatory project for Send & Receive, Winnipeg, 2002.

A city’s identity contains an inherent tension between order and chaos. From the history of its physical expansion to its development of community standards and its conflictual relation to critical cultures (graffiti, street protests, performance art, etc.), the city is an organism which defies planning and prediction. The individual contains similar internal struggles. Both navigate nervously between the controllable and the uncontrollable.

Tickers is part of an ongoing project consisting of portraits of cities through the bodies of its inhabitants. With Crackers (Ottawa, 1997) participants were recorded cracking their joints. With Poker (Montréal, 2001) the sonic properties of taciturn faces were explored. With Tickers (Winnipeg, 2002) the rhythmic possibilities of facial tics were explored.

These projects perform impossible attempts to constitute somatic communities; they result in sound and video portraits which oscillate between awkward intimacy and playful complicity.

Participants need no prior experience, only a willingness to experiment.

Participants: Steve Bates, Brian Ferguson, Terri Fuglem, Mike Germain, Patrick Harrop, Erica Lincoln, Jake Moore, Nicole Shimonek.