itourist?

I’ve now done two presentations on itourist? in the last two days. both to groups of students at middlesex university – undergraduates on ‘the cultural life of things’ and some MA fine art students today. i suppose i’m using these sessions to rehearse for the presentations at MoDA and John Hansard. i thought i’d record them but i couldn’t get the mini-disc machine to work. it’s getting to the point where i tend to avoid talking about the images at all. to be honest i’m fed up looking at them – to the point where any meaning they might have had for me has been more or less evacuated. instead, i spent the best part of yesterday’s session talking about the photographing people in poland and germany, and today discussing the process of putting a project like this together. nuts and bolts. i was sat on the 26 bus the other day – travelling up the hackney road, listening to music on my ipod – when i glanced out the window. i saw twiggy. needless to say, she didn’t see me. it was an M&S ad. i didn’t dwell on it – but something (perhaps many things) registered. which is possibly the way it is with billboards. an entirely different mode of engagement compared to the gallery for instance, where one is under an obligation to dwell, and pass comment (consciously pass comment), if not to another then at least to oneself. an encounter with a 10×20ft billboard tends to be a very different kind of event. the way of seeing tends to be cursory, blase. cool, yet often rather absorbing. and the more i dwell on my own billboard images – which i do in front of a screen, in my office or at syd’s studio – the more profoundly alienated i become, from the billboards, from what i imagine will be the actuality of their everyday existence. and the more alienated i become – which is to say the more ‘interested’ i am in them, the more preoccupied i become with design details, all of which will register – the more fruitless – it seems to me – are any attempts i might make at explaining or accounting for whatever it is these images might actually come to mean or represent. it seems, in part, to be a question of time.