Studio IMP - 1

-
We've started a number of new initiatives here at IMP,
the first of which is a new label called Studio IMP.
It will be a place for a behind the scenes look at the studio, works in progress and discussion.

A number of people have asked us,
how did THE IMPOSSIBLE PLACE evolve?
So I've decided to post the inital ideas I wrote down in early 2007.

IMP THEORY

PART 1

After visiting Taiwan I was interested in how mythical stories and deities pervaded the culture whilst the approach to everyday life was very pragmatic and focused. I was interested in how history had quickly become mythologised and how rational and foreign modernity had been adopted to model a nation. What alienation had occurred or was occurring in the rift between the public face and the private world? How did an imaginative personal life co-habit?

My thoughts quickly expanded beyond the geography Taipei to of the extremes of Otuku and Harajuku cultures in near by Japan.

Quotes from - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otaku - June 2007

Otaku is a Japanese term used derogatively to refer to people with obsessive hobbies, most commonly manga or anime.

In modern Japanese slang, the term otaku refers to an overtly obsessive fan of any one particular theme, topic, or hobby. Common uses are anime otaku (one who sometimes enjoys many days of excessive anime watching with no rest) and manga otaku (a fan of Japanese graphic novels), pasokon otaku (personal computer geeks), gēmu otaku (playing video games), and wota (before referred as "idol otaku") that are extreme fans of idols, heavily promoted singing girls. There are also tetsudō otaku or denshamania (metrophiles) or gunji otaku (military geeks).
Harajuku girl is a term for girls who gather in the Harajuku district of Tokyo in Japan. "Harajuku Girls" are fashion aficionados and/ or the home sewing hobbyists They are dressed in any of several distinct styles of clothing that originated in the culture of Japan's major cities. The "Harajuku style," named after Harajuku station, combines a wide range of diverse influences.

Many different fashion styles may be found among the girls who spend time in Harajuku, including Gothic Lolita, Gothic Maid, Wamono, Decora, Second-Hand Fashion, and cyber fashion. The Japanese street fashion magazine, FRUiTS, features many of the varied clothing styles that are popular in the Harajuku district.

These cultures of fantasy and display have become global trends and when combined with myriad forms of self publishing and exposure on the internet we see a new creative culture emerging. New myths and models are constantly being regenerated from fragments and remnants of previous cultural elements and merged with new technologies and new practices.

Elaborate fictions are created to function and serve as realities. Media displaces or becomes a reality in otaku culture. Screens, paper, plastic and synthetic materials serve as the commodities of consciousness. The physical and material world is avoided and replaced by obsessions with designs, images and words.

Media characters function as surrogates to house thoughts and imagined actions without social consequence. Natural flaws are eradicated and smoothed over, boredom is alleviated, time is compressed, and the drama is intensified. Play acting becomes a legitimate response and culture becomes a commodity.

All this is traditionally framed as a negative. But I came to realize that culture is the only real commodity. Everything else is driven by it, framed by it. Culture creates desire and now desire rather than necessity creates commodity.

PART 2

Whilst in Taipei I was fortunate to meet the Museum of Contemporary Art -Director Hsiang-Ling Lai and International Curator Sean Hu. Their ideas and discussion were also revealing…

Quotes from – http://www.mocataipei.org.tw/_english/1_about/0_overview_taipei.asp - June 2007

The Cross-fertilization of Contemporary Culture-Due to the ongoing tide of digitization and technological progression in our era, contemporary culture has entered a period of unprecedented international dialogue and integration.

The future of regional cultures will depend on how the “globalization” trend is converted into a stimulus for dialogue among those cultures and then used to deepen self-awareness of the original cultural matrices and to reposition them.

Art trends since the 1980s have opened the boundaries between high and low art, between art and other disciplines, and between art and social life. Art’s diverse media and the content of diverse cultures have mixed together disparate fields of inquiry such as art, science, philosophy, the aesthetics of living, and cultural study.

The globalization phenomenon has already manifested itself in economics, culture, technology, and communication. Elements from the foreign cultures of different regions are being exchanged with increasing frequency.

This rich intercultural dialogue and exchange will help to expand people’s horizons and stimulate new, progressive thinking on culture. Even more, it may become a never-ending source for the creative energy that drives contemporary cities.

I misread this as…Even more, it may become that a never-ending source of creative energy is what drives contemporary cities.

Interaction between boundary-transgressing contemporary art and different social groups in order to bring art outside of the museum and into the life of society, thereby changing the face of the city, has always been one of MOCA’s goals, so it has been gradually building on this foundation.In the future, MOCA will pursue a more multidirectional plan for development, under which art becomes an interface for remolding the urban landscape and experimenting with various novel realms in urban landscape, in order to achieve the forward-looking concept of making the city’s subjective,distinctive qualities a foundation for global dialogue.

At this point it crystallized in my mind; that it is creative energy driving us, it is open narratives in constant construction that guide us, make us and entertain us. Creativity is no longer contained or isolated in ‘Art’, and that it has already been dissolved and disseminated. In this state creativity is the culture and the currency of our world.

When I applied this thinking to my own ‘world’ I realized that the barriers and boundaries restraining creative behavior and practice exist only because they are nurtured by redundant myths and bureaucracies.

If they were to be done away with what would happen then? Well I would still make what I deem to be art but why isolate art with other art? Instead mix art with architecture, fashion, illustration, design, music, writing, etc. Stories and images and sounds which could extend far beyond the instance of their creation to be used relocated and transformed.

The product of such collaborations may be housed temporarily in the cleanness of art spaces or in the fluidity of an online environment yet there true place would be in the minds and the lives of others.

This new model for merging of art, culture, design, narrative and dialogue, questions existing modes of creativity coming from the private artist’s studio and being placed in the exclusive institution.

It allows audience access to other areas of creativity, commerce and community.

The singularity of the artist as a brand can be dissolved into collective participation and cross promotion from which individuals can then share and network into other communities.

It can be seen as the world as designed, created and crafted into new existences and behaviors and relationships.

Fashions, beliefs and desires are the primary drives our contemporary societies and they are constantly mutable, they affect our models of manufacture and behavior they are imposed on the natural world, reinvented in the technological world only to be consumed again in the world of our imagination.

PART 3

Finally my last and most basic revelation is that people are really and truly opening up to new media.

The devotion of enormous emotional energies to intimate relationships documented in diaries, letters, computers and video are now being posted and evolving publicly. The private intense areas of engagement in people’s lives are becoming disclosed in digital ‘fictions”.

In video logs, web sites, blogs and file shares - fears and joys and perversions once harbored in the floating worlds of the imagination are now finding virtual forms.

The ramifications of these public disclosures are extending into their audiences, their worlds and relationships. These online media presences don’t remain contained in digital space but they are replicated and extended into new dialogues and contexts.

These new media constructions are in themselves becoming multi faceted realities which are interfaced with and adopted or assimilated into what is known as life.
-

So they are the concepts that started IMP.
Lets see how far down the rabbit hole they will take us.
Chris.W.
-