TITLE NARRATIVE

How do we engage power in our day-to-day lives? Where do we encounter it? What forms might it take? Daily, from parents to teachers, lovers to friends, police to elected governmental officials we, as individuals, encounter issues relating to power and its uses from our homes to our streets and state buildings. In what ways do these relationships alter and regulate our lives, and how might we, within their presence, or even just out of sight, begin to create spaces and actions aimed towards considering new ways in which we might live with one another, more equitably and mindful of one another’s needs as well as our own?

Beginning in the spring of 2012 Red76 initiated THIS IS AN (A) FRONT, first with a series of projects feeding into an “American-style Pizzeria” established in Pristina, Kosovo, called Henry. This action, funded by the US State Department, served as a means towards discussing the relative power we hold over one another, as well as more obtusely the power held in relation to the ways and means in which the action itself was initiated to begin with and its associations vis a vis The State. How do we self-regulate when “our very existence” is determined through the auspices of governmental power?

For the second edition of THIS IS AN (A) FRONT the group presents Thumbs Up! a “used mp3” store located in Vancouver, Canada’s Chinatown. On this occasion the front reveals itself almost as a series of skins, each with its own considerations and means of interaction: first, the entrance of UNIT/PITT will be walled off, converted into a makeshift but functional lobby/convenience store; behind this façade lies Thumbs Up!, a shop that sells music distributed on thumb drives; and third, Thumbs Up! has its very own internet radio station, Power 2012. The station plays tracks from the stores stock, each broadcast – through music, interviews, conversations, and readings – relating to our daily relationship to power, macro to micro, from individual to State and back again.

COMMENTARY

DOCUMENTS

Over the course of its run, POWER2012 ran an internet radio station, as well as a short range FM station that broadcast around Vancouver’s Chintatown. Anyone was welcome to host a show. Adopted the late late 60s AM radio style of “free-form” broadcasting, the content and direction of all shows was entirely based on the desires of the DJ, with one caveat being that, in some form, the content needed to address how we recognize, engage, and quite possibly transform power, when we see it.

What is Thumbs Up : Power2012 from Sam Gould on Vimeo.

COLOPHON

Editor: Sam Gould
Co-Editors: Gabriel Mindel Saloman, Nicholas Perrin, K Higgins, and Various Contributors

Institutional Collaborators: UNIT / PITT Gallery, Institutions by Artists Symposium