You can contact by mail as above or telephone +(44) 78 55 11 25 42 (Nicola Donovan’s mobile).
The ‘Museum of Shoplifting’ is a rapidly growing network of artists collaborating in intervention, performance, net, interactive and relational art.Forthcoming works include a webcam narrative without characters and a live web streamed mother/daughter duo, power relation performance.Recent work includes ‘History Revision’, an exhibition/event constructed by Brendan Byrne (me) and Nicola Donovan, including work by Terry Atkinson, Christopher Saunders, Clarissa Beothy, Chila Kumari Burman, Mark Fairnington and Rhona Lee amongst many others.’History Revision’ highlighted a recent history of artists’ opposition to the art market and the art commodity.The work proposed is a ‘Museum of Shoplifting’ collaboration using a Hollywood film lighting technique which gives the effect of a reflected fire. It is often used for love scenes.I have scaled up the technique and used it to modify the light on large public buildings which are already lit at night. I am now building an autonomous mechanism which bolts on to the existing lights. The mechanism filters and flickers the light to make the building appear to be lit by a City on fire.Participating artists will be supplied with mechanisms and instructions on how to make more. The ‘Museum of Shoplifting’ will co-ordinate the work to produce a simultaneous international conflagration.Collaborators have the choice of producing an intervention (without the co-operation of the institution chosen) or installation (which allows the possibility of producing an interaction with the passerby. This version uses sensors to turn on the light and mechanism when it detects movement, making the viewer appear to be the source of the fire).A large number of enthusiastic collaborators came forward after a talk I gave at the AVIT International VJ Festival in Brighton, UK and from participants at the recent ‘If Museum’ event in Poznan, Poland.We found the ideas of the BDP combine very well with this ‘Museum of Shoplifting’ work; we hope you think so too.If you’d like to take a look at my own work then I can post up the (half made) website. Alternatively, 2 of us will be in Paris for a few hours on Saturday 6 December if you would like to meet (I realise that this is unrealistically short notice). The work is an attack on social institutions which light their buildings at night. These include government buildings, shopping centres, financial institutions, civic centres and churches. I have already tried a prototype using the security lights guarding some ministry of defense ships and it worked and I wasn’t, on this occasion, arrested.These are buildings which take up both geographical and ideological space, freezing thought, killing discourse and paralysing action. The work itself is to put these real buildings in real cities in the context of a City on fire. The mechanism is easy and very inexpensive to make and takes about 10 seconds to bolt on to a light. It can also be taken down quite easily by, for example, the police, but the absurd self assuredness of the institutions involved means that there will be some time before they even notice their existence and then ‘initiate procedures’ to have them removed.I’m sorry I can’t write this in French, I tried but I think you will have more chance of understanding the English.We will be in Paris early afternoon on Saturday. We are leaving here in about 10 minutes. You can contact us using Nicola’s mobile number 00 (44) 78 55 11 25 42 and I’ll check my mail in an internet cafe when we arrive.We are already putting this work together but it would be even more effective, I think, as part of the BDP.Have to go now.Good luck and best wishes,Brendan Byrne
