todd shalom

image: Jacob Gaboury, Compression Glitch, "Inches"

Below is a brief interview with Jacob Gaboury about our collaborative walk, Findr, that debuts Friday, June 24th.

Todd Shalom: So, i first found out about your work through ctrl+w33d. for those who don't know about it, can u explain?

Jacob Gaboury: CTRL+W33D is a queer internet art collective organized around a site on Tumblr. It is meant to be a kind of image aggregator, pulling images from all over the web and re-contextualizing them on the site. Some of the images are art, some of it spam, some of it pornographic. For me it is sort of a collection of queer image culture online.

Todd: did you have the trove of images first and then decide to do something with them, or did it all come together at the same time? in other words, how'd this find you?

Jacob: I think each member of w33d came about it in their own way. Nobody really had a stockpile of images, and a lot of what gets posted is just the kinds of images we come upon when trolling the Web. Those images lead to themes, or queer worlds (masking, zentai, gay travel, body morph videos, mix tapes, etc.) Most of my contributions come from queer image boards modeled after sites like 4chan, specifically sites for bears and furries.

Todd: i was once a furry in the serramonte mall for a photo company during easter. it's another conversation. so, this work also ties in with your phd studies. how is queer image culture known in academia?

Jacob: There's a relatively long-standing tradition of queer scholarship in the fields like comparative literature, performance studies, and cinema studies, which can be visual in a certain sense. But there is comparatively little work done on questions of queer technology or technological image-making.

Todd: is grindr considered queer technology? or technology used by gays/queers?

Jacob: I think Grindr is definitely a form of queer technology, in that it takes productive technologies such as geolocation, mapping, and social networking and queers them in service of alternate forms of what Samuel Delany has called "contact".

Todd: i feel like grindr and other apps/sites (i.e. manhunt) still face the same judgment within the american gay community as say, bathhouses/video booths. they're both some of the last taboos. what do u think?

Jacob: In many ways they've replaced those taboos, literally. I've also heard the accusation that they've led to the closing of a lot of the old gay nightclubs and bars, since people don't need to go out to hook up. There is also probably an argument for the way in which they've contributed to unsafe sex practices and the rise of barebacking culture since the early 2000s. What interests me more is the way in which these technologies transform public space, or transform spatial imaginaries through technologies. And this isn't limited to geolocation apps like Grindr. The Men Seeking Men section of Craigslist is also a popular site for these forms of contact - one that is much more socio-economically accessible than an application that can only be used on a $300 smartphone.

While M4M and Grindr may be used for similar purposes in urban areas like New York City, in rural areas it can create opportunities for contact that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

Todd: right. and so, for me, using grindr for the walk that we've created in nyc is an attempt to re-frame how we use the technology, with the intention that it might bring gays together with the perspective of building a shared space while also making us more conscious of how we (literally) create new paths in the city.

Jacob: Exactly. It's not that we're rehabilitating a potentially problematic technology, it's that we are using the technology to find new ways to interact and create a shared, networked physical space. We're hoping to create new forms of contact between anonymous strangers, and in so doing create new ways of navigating the city.

Tour de chance
Oct 6th 2010, 10:09 by E.B. | NEW YORK
lead photo: Kate Glicksberg
Read the article on The Economist's site

VISITING a city can feel like an adventure. Tourists often enjoy a heightened awareness of sights and smells, sounds and people. But for residents, much of this becomes routine—dulled by time, muted by circumstance. We are often blind to what we see everyday.

This, at least, is the guiding principle of Elastic City, a new company that offers a series of conceptual walks in Manhattan, Brooklyn and occasionally London. Founded by Todd Shalom, a Brooklyn-based poet and “sound artist”, these walks encourage participants to consider the city in a different way—by listening to the noises it makes, exploring the materials it’s made from and discovering its unexpected pockets of beauty. The aim is to feel like a traveller. Or, Mr Shalom explains, to “take poetry off the page”.

What this means in practice has varied from walk to walk over the course of Elastic City’s inaugural season, which began in May and concludes on October 17th. For a walk called “Brighton Zaum”, Mr Shalom led a group on an acoustic tour of a remote, Russian neighbourhood. City residents are often besieged by noise, he explained, yet the sounds we make or perceive are often subject to choice. He asked participants to walk silently and listen intently, to notice the sounds of the city as its own poetry. The quiet was an unexpected reprieve, coaxing into high relief the sigh of buses, the ripple-rattle of plastic bags and the occasional squeal of a train. The smell of smoked fish wafted importantly (listening closely intensified other senses). The walk ended with writing a poem in the sand of Brighton Beach as the sun set. The doggerel itself was silly, but the earned intimacy of the group felt startlingly sincere.

Mr Shalom has recruited experts and artists in other fields to create their own walks. For an excursion called “Homesickness”, for example, an Israel-born urban designer and “environmental psychologist” led a small group through Chinatown and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The idea was to consider notions of displacement in an area associated with generations of immigrants. The tour began in Columbus Park on a Sunday, when amateur Chinese opera singers perform in the open air. One participant from Malaysia shared that this is where he comes to treat his own pangs of homesickness. “These songs are all about suffering. Like my aunts boasting about their suffering over tea,” he observed. Others on the tour never knew the park existed.

Mr Shalom describes these walks as “performative”, yet suggests they are a genre unto themselves. He has a point. These experiences are rare for being educational, interactive and personal. The artists often encourage moments of introspection and even vulnerability among participants, who may be asked to walk with eyes closed, make the sound of an inanimate object or trace the wall of a building with one’s hands. That such behaviour sounds regressive may be part of its appeal. With the right motivation, it can be satisfying to flout conventional codes of behaviour out in the open.

Together with Juan Betancurth, a Colombian-born artist, Mr Shalom is putting the final touches on “Lucky Walk”, the last tour of the season, which will debut on October 9th as part of New York’s Art in Odd Places festival. The walk, which considers the power of rituals and superstitions, includes moments of walking backwards, making wishes and buying lottery tickets. Participants meet at the Manhattan intersection of 13th Street and 7th Avenue, naturally.

The concept of luck—and specifically good luck—seems apt for Mr Shalom, whose Elastic City has enjoyed enough success for him to be making plans for the next season.