Impending Unrest

Impending Unrest was produced by Radar artist in residence Jorn Ebner during his stay at the Harris Library, Preston in October/November 2010. Radar was a partnership programme of artists' residencies in public libraries brought to you by folly and the Lancashire County Libraries and Information Service.

The Impending Unrest website contains images, text, audio and video collected whilst in residence. The materials represent a snapshot of the preoccupations of the artist, the library service and society as a whole at a specific point in time, capturing a sense of unrest and anticipation of change.

The structure of the website is a reaction to the physical library research experience. We expect a library to be up-to-date, but that is often at odds with the historical weight, content and fragility of the material in the library.  As such, Jorn's work questions how we navigate information structures, through a website that is both unexpectedly simplistic and confusingly disordered.

folly's Marketing Assistant Mei Yee Leong caught up with Jorn to gain more insight into his project; the inspirations, the ideas, and the outcomes.

Here's what she found out;

Jorn Ebner was our latest Radar resident artist; placed at the Harris Library, Preston. The intention of his piece was to focus on the virtual part of the relationship that exists within the library space.
The nature of the piece means that the general public can participate with, from the comfort of their own homes. And in doing so, creating a largely contrasting piece to that of a past piece (see Jennie Savage's page).

Additionally, Jorn's project included an opportunity for Preston FM and a local group of Volunteers to assist with recording some of his sound pieces.

What is "Impending Unrest"?
It is a website that is made up of a collection of videos, sound recordings and pdf notes that reflect my  individual approach to existence, to a city.  It is also a stand-alone Flash projector file that can only be accessed in the Harris Library, which utilises some of the photographic and sonic material on the website. I reacted to things I found, things that related to my life, things I found interesting: these included aspects of labour history in Preston, aspect of film history in England, and my date of birth. 

What was the process that you followed to carry out this project?
The idea was at first to photograph interesting things that I found in the library and then find a corresponding item in the world outside the library. But sometimes it worked the other way around, something I found outside determined what I'd look for in the library.

As a change from this rather content-based approach I started to build my own bookscapes as cityscapes and landscapes within the library and photographed them. Some of the correspondences were intended to be sound files, especially with Katie Price. But then they took on the function of a ‘not’ themselves.

The sounds became soundtracks to the same contemporary reality that the photographs depict but catch different places; they did not come from the same places that the photograph was taken.

In the process of working with the ‘bookscapes’, I wanted to assemble animations from the photographs. In the animations the colours have been manipulated, so the images appear slightly differently. In each note a correspondence to another note can be found. Yet there is no direct link between each one - be that an image notebook or a sound note. The animations on the other hand bring some of these aspects together but not all of them. As with life, there is no direct linkage and reason between each part but everything seems to connected in some, maybe meaningful, way.

As a  result, the piece remains open. It misuses the idea of a website, by all remaining on a single page from which you download the individual notes (in whatever order you like).
Like a library, the work invites you to navigate it, using the informational architecture of both a web browser and your computer's own filing system.   
    
What is the background and premise to Impending Unrest? Where did it all stem from?
At the time, I had this growing impression that something was going to erupt in terms of the current political climate. I have been reading Guy Debord again recently, and maybe that critique of 1960s capitalism rings true now as it did back then.

I understand that there were a fair few afterthoughts that you wanted to discuss within the pieces too?
Yes, I wanted the work to say something about internet technology and the work of art. That on the internet the work don't have to be implementing all the latest fashions of interactivity and contribution-possibility; it doesn't have to be following rules of readability on the web. My piece can hopefully be as strange or enigmatic as any thing else, without using a lot of flashing lights and clips and images, but on the other hand can have all of those things ready - only hidden.

Here, I was interested in finding a way of misusing the idea of website. In the past I have been working with pop-up windows and usually, I never cared whether people could not see the work because their pop-up-blocker was enabled.
This time I wanted everything to be on one page but not in an obvious way. People have to do something. In my opinion there is too little playfulness on the web.
This website is simple yet not easy to navigate. At least that was my motivation.

The Impending Unrest piece is available online, here; www.impending-unrest.co.uk

 
About Jorn

Jorn Ebner was born in Bremerhaven, Germany, and grew up outside of Hamburg. He studied at Central Saint Martins College in London and is now based in Berlin. He is an artist whose work encompasses a variety of media includes online work, social performance, and drawing. He has been involved in international exhibitions and festivals.

Find out more about Jorn on his personal website: www.jornebner.info