Having spent much of the past couple of years on the move, there are many close friends who I have not managed to spend enough time with. I began to wonder whether they could even remember what I looked like, or in fact what their mental image of me actually was.

I found a website (flashface.ctapt.de) where it is possible to assemble faces from the constituent features, somewhat like a police identikit portrait. I sent around emails with the link and asked my close friends if they could try and reconstruct my face using the software. I felt that this form of depicting my face was not based on a technical skill, such as drawing for example, and thus would be more accesible for a broader range of friends to try and accurately depict their mental image of me.

The results did vary quite considerably, but I do not think the software entirely eliminated the skill factor in representation. In general, people who were more familiar with imaging software, tended to make more ‘accurate’ portraits (or perhaps this is my distorted perspective). Nevertheless, some of the portraits which were less realistic did seem to capture some kind of likeness… The project is ongoing.

In August 2007 I participated in the performance in public space festival ‘Out of Site’, in Dublin. Michelle Browne, the curator of the festival, asked me to develop a work for the site of Mountjoy Prison, which is soon to be relocated from the city centre to the suburbs.

Working with this ’site’ what most intrigued me was how the experience of being in prison would affect your notion of time. Most people have experienced the elasticity of time (generally it passes slowly when you don’t want it to) but how would this be in prison, where the time spans are often long and the distractions few?

Initially I thought about trying represent the passing of time, to make time visible, by marking out the seconds, minutes and hours of the day with chalk on a wall. However, after some logistical issues, I moved on to the idea of making time audible, speaking the seconds, minutes and hours of the day through a megaphone. To try and illustrate the difference between perceived and actual time, I would say the time I thought it was, rather than looking at a watch.

For three days of the festival I told the time through a megaphone from 9 in the morning until 5 in the evening (with an hour lunch break). After the first few hours I had to stop saying the seconds. It was incredibly painful, but more importantly I could not stop to talk to passers-by who asked what I was doing.

In fact, as if often the case, it was the peripheral conversations that happened around the piece that were the most interesting. In terms of representing the difference between perceived and actual time, I would say the performance was fairly disastrous. But, as a provocation, a means to stimulate some kind of dialogue in public space, then it was marginally successful..

SLUM-TV is based in Mathare, a slum of 500,000 people in Nairobi. We produce and distribute local, grassroots audio-visual material. The form of the material ranges from documentary features produced by local citizen journalists, to drama and comedies produced by youth drama groups. The content however, is focussed on the local context, dealing with local issues through these varied strategies.

The material is then collated and screened on a monthly basis in public space in Mathare. Thus it functions like a ‘newsreel’ and affords the slum dwellers with a form of local news. Having been screened locally, the content is then uploaded onto the website, which functions both as an archive of this oral history and a means to access a secondary, international audience.

The slum features in the mainstream media almost specifically within the context of violence. SLUM-TV strives to provide slum dwellers with a form of self-representation so that they can begin to tell their own stories and offer a more nuanced, multi-faceted and accurate portrait of slum life.

At the core of this project is the aim to develop an audiovisual format that covers important cultural, social and political issues in Kenya and later within the African region. Whilst at the moment we are screening in public space, the distribution strategy for 2008 is to begin to use the existing ‘pirate cinema’ network that covers the whole region. SLUM-TV will then be distributed on VCD format throughout these existing channels.

Anticipating the future when slum dwellers will have cheaper and better access to the Internet, we will also make it possible for SLUM-TV locally to build a Website to serve as a kind of “YouTube”, linking different SLUM-TV Units worldwide, and producing a digital space for communication and exchange of experience.

SLUM-TV maintains connections with a network of New Media activists. Concurrent with our monthly production of ‘newsreels’, we host six-monthly workshops, offering specialist training in a variety of new media strategies, ranging from media hacking to open source editing.

For more information see www.slum-tv.info

For four days in late November 2006 I loitered around the photo booth by Rosenthalerplatz in Berlin and asked people who were having their photo taken if they would take an extra strip of photos wearing my glasses. Why did I do this? There were a variety of issues that I was interested in; taking someone’s portrait without having to physically confront them, presenting an individual with an unusual social contract in a public space, seeing to what extent a pair of glasses enhance or reduce a person’s features, exploring the hazy boundary between documentation and fiction…

Nevertheless, I think to a large extent these issues succeeded, rather than preceded, the initial impulse, which was simply to ask people to have their photos taken with my glasses on. Rather than starting with fairly abstract concepts and developing a form with which to investigate them, I started with quite a defined form, whose hidden dimensions I felt I would only understand by actually acting it out. More than anything, this was an experiment.

And as with most experiments the results proved slightly unpredictable, particularly the extent to which the people who agreed to have their photo taken carried out a kind of 20-second performance whilst they were in the photo booth. In some ways, instead of the piece being my performance that challenged participants’ ideas of what you do in public space, it was the participants who performed and me that was challenged by their behaviour..

My idea for this project was to explore the state of being stationary within a city that is in constant flux. From 06.09.06 until 11.09.06 for 6 hours a day I sat on a bench in Kuznicza Street in Wroclaw. I wanted to see whether, for that small section of the city, there were patterns/routines that I could identify, and try to learn them, as one would learn a song.

However I soon realized that by merely being in the space for extended periods of time I began to attract people’s curiosity. Although I had set out to watch and learn the space I began to feel that it was in fact me that was being observed. As the days passed I felt this mutual curiosity mount. But was it actually mutual?

To explore this further, when I had finished the action, I asked Zosia Jarosz and Marius Jodko to interview people in that particular space about ‘the guy on the bench’. The video presents this material; a spectrum of memories, encompassing the wildly inaccurate, the highly perceptive and those that simply do not look.

Having studied History before studying Visual Art I find the issue of a ‘legitimate’ history a compelling one. Spending 2006 studying in Weimar I was struck by the way in which one history was presented as more ‘right’ than another. Whilst Goethe and Schiller are seen as historical figures which are truly representative of German culture, the Third Reich is seen as some kind of aberration, a period which has no organic connection to the corpus of German history.

This led me to the idea of prosthesis as a metaphor. In many ways it seems that the Nazi period is treated as an extension on top of the German ‘body’, that there is no organic connection between this and the rest of German history. Exploring possible forms to express this uneasy relationship between different pasts I became interested in the power of the Hitler moustache as symbol for this period.

In an attempt to explore these concepts of organic connection and legitimacy I developed a video piece involving a slug that is initially positioned as a moustache. During the course of the video the slug moves from its position, explores the contours of my face and finally escapes to my hair. Although at first the moustache reference may be clear, through the passage of time and the transit of the slug, the references become more ambiguous.

Together with Dusica Drazic

A young woman stands by the side of the motorway. It has been raining, the woman is wet and the road is noisy. Off camera a voice addresses her: ‘Take three’. She leans forward seeming not really to hear but music starts playing and the woman starts to dance. The song is “Young Americans” by David Bowie. During the chorus a male voice joins in singing “Young Serbians” instead of “Young Americans”. The video lasts slightly longer than the song.

In the summer of 2006 I was studying in Weimar. The road that I walked to college along every day had been totally dug up, so it was a bit like walking through a building site with machinery, bricks and fluorescent plastic every where.

As well as studying I was also teaching English to earn some cash. This basically involved playing scrabble once a week with four fluent English speaking kids. On one walk to home I realised that there was a certain formal similarity between the new bricks being laid and the scrabble pieces.

I decided to make a scrabble set for the builders. Each night I stole a few bricks from the stack of bricks, took them to the studio, sprayed letters on them and returned them, making sure that the letter side was covered so nothing seemed amiss.

After about a month I had sprayed all the scrabble letters. On the last night I turned the bricks round so the letters were visible. The idea was that the builders would be able to lay words in the pavement, but these words would be invisible to everyone else as they were on the side of the brick.

However, in the space of time between uncovering the bricks and the builders laying them, passers by also started using the bricks as a kind of scrabble set, leaving messages for one another. Some bricks even started appearing at different spots around town, some even in people’s apartments! I am still not sure how many ended up in the pavement…

The initial idea for this came from an old photo I saw of Grand Central Station in New York. The photo is black and white and shows the huge atrium in the interior of the station. Shafts of light stream through large windows on the side of the building illuminating the dwarfed figures standing there. The light seems so tactile, almost as if it actually was a three dimensional form.

Walking in the forest I had a similar experience of these shafts of light pouring through gaps in the foliage in the afternoon sun. I tried to recreate this phenomenon, to give the illusion of light, but using sisal string.

These structures were build having developed a few prototypes first. They are made from one piece of string, which goes from the base to the top, and back again. They are temporary and at some stage will decay and fade away. Hopefully the memory will last longer…

This performance entailed me numbering the bricks of an exterior prison wall in Leuven for seven hours a day, over a period of 10 days. The bricks were numbered in chalk. I counted 15,776 bricks.

The theoretical basis for the piece was the ambivalent nature of categorisation, which can be both useful, absurd, or in some cases, utterly abhorrent. Whilst the action of numbering the bricks in chalk could be seen as ridiculous, within the context of an exhibition dealing with Buchenwald and the atrocities of the Nazi regime it assumed a more sombre and reflective quality.

The performance attempted, in both an absurd and perhaps ultimately futile manner, some form of representing the victims of WWII and the Holocaust. By performing the action day after day, and leaving a slowly developing, yet highly ephemeral trace on the wall, I hoped to give some indication, through both time and space, of the unimaginable scale of the atrocities.