 R.Kempadoo (2006) Amendments This is the introductory page to the working area of Amendments. Amendments is a prototype being developed (with an exhibition of the prototype by the end of January 2008) by Roshini Kempadoo in conjunction with Marc Matthews, Nalo Hopkinson, Gary Stewart, and Adam Hoyle. Synopsis: The users enter the gallery space. On the basis of two persons in the room, they experience:
Interactivity: - game playing possibilities:
The users see something in front of them (possibilities are based on game playing devices) with which to trigger a set of visuals and sound on the single screen.
Characterisations:
They will be able to trigger 3 - 4 imaginary characters – who are introduced to the user and whose stories are interrelated.
The stories and the characters, relate to a Trinidad landscape (past, present, future) and the characters are situated in an urban area of Trinidad, either San Juan or Port-of-Spain.
The stories revolve around a central character who has a story to tell. We understand through other characters telling us her story, that she might have done something, and been part of something…..
Visuals:
The characterisations appear to us through visual and sonic references in a series of moving still images, music, and speech. They have become digital griots… Presentation of Amendments: Monday 18th February 2008, 5:30pm at Matrix East (MERL). University of East London. Room EB.1.37. Docklands Campus. 4-6 University Way. London E16 2RD Also see SmartLab as supporters of the project. The prototype is funded by the AHRC.
http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/awards/award_detail.asp?id=326298
I use a quote that I is particularly inspirational and pertinent to Amendments perceived as a contribution to social and critical commentary. Taken from James Baldwin's book No Name in the Street, written in 1972, he reflects on the state of the 'Deep South.' It poetically explores the landscape and people living in it as inextricably linked to one another... In the Deep South – … there is the great, vast, brooding, welcoming and bloodstained land, beautiful enough to astonish and break the heart. The land seems nearly to weep beneath the burden of this civilization’s unnameable excresences. The people and the children wander blindly through their forest of billboards, antennae, Cola-Cola bottles, gas stations, drive-ins, motels, beer cans, music of a strident and invincible melancholy, stilted wooden porches, snapping fans, aggressively blue-jeaned buttocks, strutting crotches, pint bottles, condoms, in the weeds, rotting automobile corpses, brown as beetles, earrings flashing in the gloom of bus stops: over all there seems to hang a miasma of lust and longing and rage. Every Southern city seemed to me to have been but lately rescued from the swamps, which were patiently waiting to reclaim it. The people all seemed to remember their time under water and to be both dreading and anticipating their return to that freedom from responsibility. Every black man, whatever his style, had been scarred,….; and every white man,… had been maimed. And, everywhere, the women, the most fearfully mistreated… with narrowed eyes and pursed lips – ….. – watched and rocked and waited..
….For a moment I thought that I would never be able to persuade my feet to carry me away from that unspeakable, despairing, captive avidity..
(Baldwin, 1972, p.68/69)
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