RETAIN

Terminal Convention, Cork Airport, Cork, Ireland.
Small cine-sculptures. Found old tech objects (Brooklyn, decommissioned), micro projectors, optics, plexiglass, vellum and old tripod legs.

Terminal Convention was an art, music and discursive event featuring some of the world’s leading and emerging artists, musicians and theorists.
The project took place 17-27 March 2011 in the former Cork International Airport, Ireland (now decommissioned) and Cork city centre music venues.
Exhibitions Curator for Terminal Convention 2011 was Peter Gorschlüter (Deputy Director of MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main).
Terminal Convention consisted of four interrelated strands: Exhibition, Symposium, Music Event and Art Fair.

Exhibition

Participating artists were: Rosa Barba, Juan Cruz, Ross Dalziel (Sound Network), Douglas Gordon, Diane Guyot, Michael Hannon, Martin Healy, Nevan Lahart, Shane Munro, Seamus Nolan, Peter Norrman, Jacqueline Passmore, Le Pavillon (Palais de Tokyo/Paris), Hannah Pierce, Frederic Pradeau, Becky Shaw, Imogen Stidworthy, Paul Sullivan, Padraig Timoney and Adrian Williams.

Gorschlüter described the exhibition proposition:

“Airports today are among the most controlled places in the world, and the most vulnerable too, not only in terms of security, but also, and more importantly, with regard to human relations, retail strategies and global economies. In 2006 the former Cork International Airport Terminal was decommissioned. A site that saw thousands of passengers passing through arrival and departure halls, duty free shops and customs controls every day until a few hours earlier, finally closed its doors for the last time.

Now, reopened for a few days after years of abandonment in which the site has preserved the traces of its past and has assumed a personal, almost humanlike identity, flickering technology and infrastructure, personal goods and permanently lost property, airport diaries and broken display cases are being reactivated to unfold new life through the interventions and works by over twenty international artists. Turning decay and absence into prospect and presence, the exhibition wakens the decommissioned terminal building to become, for a short moment in time, both an autonomous place and a place where autonomy is negotiated. Intangible to a great extent, the new commissions manifest themselves in the air, in sound, through light or in economic and interpersonal transactions.

My project description:

My first ideas for this project were ideas of the decommissioned airport as the Auditorium and Cinematic Space. Or, the Airport as An Image Maker. 
I asked myself: How does the airport retain images? How can I think about the airport as a Projector? An Identifier? A fleeting and transient Image Maker (of x-rays, visitors badges, travelers snapshots). The airport both connects and projects stories. It is both the beginning and the end of an event.  
The more I thought of a large scale response to my questions, the more I was drawn to something very small. This seemed to resonate with the transitoriness of airports. The transient gesture as a small gesture.
As I further examined my response to the site I was drawn to ideas around short durational time (jetlag and my 2 day visit from Brooklyn), the space as an 'archeological site'  and my findings while digging through left-behind electronic trash (digital artifacts). Drawing from 2,976 found small jpegs of airport visitors in the 90s (all less than 200k), ideas of identity and identification, and the site as a cinematic apparatus I am creating 3-5 cine-sculptures made from parts that will all travel with me from Brooklyn.
The work will further touch upon: ideas of leaving/returning, motion, Brooklyn immigration and decommissioned spaces. In addition each sculpture is an apparatus in itself (old reconfigured technology, micro projectors) and draw from ideas around the airport as a cinematic apparatus: the act o fimage making (eyescans, ID cards), non-recorded events (x-ray), global media culture (tv-screens), stories (visitors, workers), and training and how-to videos (repeated practicalities).
The ultimate project is a culmination of architectural archeology and experimental cinema.