Ben Wilson paints little acrylic paintings on discarded chewing gum that has been stamped into the pavement. His pictures are emblems of contemporary social life – some are declarations of love, some commemorate the absent or dead, some celebrate a gang or the bonds of friendship, others record memories or tokens of identity.
The term ‘semionaut’ is an interesting phrase; not as jargon, but for the way it can illuminate what is already going on in the sphere of visual communication. How in the age of a ‘knowing’ audience – from art to advertising, film to graphic design – can we communicate meaning? The curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud charges his artists with the task of becoming semionauts in the current informational realm (the subtitle to his second book is ‘Culture as Screenplay: how art re-programs the world’). Semionauts make connections within our universe of proliferating signs.
Sometimes the connections we make between different objects or events, in space and across time, seem wholly coincidental and circumstantial. As we move through the world, leaving trails of thoughts behind us, we accumulate a store of memories and loose associations that have emerged through contact with speech and things. Some connections just fall away and are lost forever, submerged under a host of privileged moments and pressing engagements. However other connections are merely dis-placed, sidelined by the same moments and engagements but preserved as a latent memory. The latter is merely put to one side in anticipation of future action, subsumed under the social schedule of work-and-play.
This is the story one such memory, first generated and then laid to rest at the conference Repositioning Graphic Design in October 2005. It was finally remembered – or recuperated - at the exhibition Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World in June 2006.