City of Care is a collaborative experimental situation in which the artists , armed with paint and stencils, are on the streets being directed by collaborators over the internet.
The aim of the experiments is to create graphical representations of dream cities – cities transformed through radical and insurgent reimaginations of their possibilities by groups of marginalised people. Used with children originally these experiments with adults are to see what other possibilities lie within this method.
The gramatology and vocabulary of the representations is very fluid incorporating images, texts and structural graphy from the whole range of ideography available to participants, eg from networking diagrams or comics.
As such the maps produced are as much hypergraph as metagraph and the centre of an overall situgraph as delineated by the street, phones, machines and internet infrastructure surrounding it. I would like to see further developments of this taking in a much wider area of the city – like the 90s phenomenon of “war chalking” where people would chalk signs on pavements and buildings to denote the availability of a wireless network – or Asim Butt’s eject graffiti which was used by the Peoples Resistence Group as part of the resistence against the military dictatorship in Pakistan, in 2007 (see https://teeth.com.pk/blog/2010/01/16/the-graffiti-activist-asim-butt-1978-2010/)
More sessions are planned for the near future so get in touch if you would like to take part!