Mike Barrett is known for walking the streets of Brighton and Hove with a pocket full of chalk. He marks different urban and natural locations with his signature sign and almost opens up a new dimension to these places. What is happening behind this gesture and why is it so relevant now? Let's ask Mike.
What was the initial impulse behind the “Here was a Time” series? Was it a rational decision to collect as much information about your environment as possible, or was it organic of you to roam around Brighton?
I put myself into lockdown as soon as I could see the trends in the COVID numbers, sparse as they were initially. The government lockdown came a week later. Taking chalk out on my walks...Did I even know what I was going to do? There was the urge to be outside and leave a visible mark of human presence even if futile. From the first mark, I think organic is a fair description of my process. How I marked and how I recorded it grew and changed over the weeks and months.
Your approach to work reminds us of the psychogeography that was practised a lot by the generation of Guy Debord. Do you feel connected to the concept of the flâneur – an urban wanderer? What does walking do for you?
I’ve certainly kept returning to Guy Debord’s psychographic map of Paris and have watched Nick Papadimitriou's video ‘the London perambulator’ multiple times. I also have Walter Benjamin’s ‘arcades project’ on my reading list.
Walking is easily available for me, I just step out of my house and put one foot in front of another. It allows me to be in the world at a pace when I can notice the small stuff. I’m under a big sky and I feel unconstrained. I’m very anti-car and would otherwise settle for bus and train if I wasn’t concerned about being in a crowded enclosed space in these times.
We’ve noticed that you often tag your work with such words as #vibrantmatter #otherworlds and even #parralleluniverse. What scientific ideas inspire you the most?
I’m a total nut for theoretical physics and when it comes to quantum theory I find Everett’s multiple worlds interpretations the most straightforward, requiring the fewest assumptions. The Copenhagen interpretation feels a bit too magical for me. That isn’t to say I dismiss the magical experience, just the magical explanation.
The vibrant matter idea comes from Prof Jane Bennet and speaks to the visceral response I get from small features in the world, that might otherwise go unnoticed. I’m working my way around that idea in my PhD.
On Instagram, you call yourself an artist and data scientist working within what’s possible, exploring our encoded lives. Do you think we are all programmed in one way or the other? If so, can we overcome, transcend our programming?
As a boy growing up (as I was to discover) gay and neurodiverse, I experienced other people’s behaviours as odd. I could see they had some logic but they felt alien and I now describe them as having a robotic or zombie quality. Perhaps that led to my fascination with code and choosing a computing degree and how I found myself in a long career exploring and interpreting the trace data we all leave and that gets captured in computer systems. I should have known that elements of binary would come into my art practice.
Can we transcend our programming? Maybe, our suspicions that we are subjects of programming, means that some part of our consciousness already resides in a placeless place free of influence, and, perhaps, it is working on the escape route.
Could you name five books or films that are important to you?
I’m a creature of current passions. These have made a mark on me recently.
Films
Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Ivan’s Childhood’
Jiří Menzel’s ‘My sweet little village’
Books
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophical investigations
Carl Jung’s ‘Modern man in search of a soul’
Elizabeth Smart’s ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’
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