Here is a recap of Jacqueline Passmore's February 2 lecture Live Blogging/A Smackhead Stole My Rainbow Pants:
After leaving our first Critical Context session on 26th January, I boarded the 16:48 Virgin Rail train from Lime Street to London Euston. At some point before our 19:00 arrival, my bag was stolen off the luggage rack directly above me. The bag contained personal items including my clothes and toiletries for the week in London, but as well, the holy grail of my personal possessions: my battered but beloved 2004 G4 laptop.
The grand irony of the situation is that I was travelling back to London in order to spend a week at Apple Europe HQ to receive an advanced level of certification in the video editing software I use daily in much of my work. So there I was bright and early the next morning, underslept after a long night of frantic phone calls to the British Transport Police, my boyfriend, and my bank manager, disheveled in yesterday's travel sweater dress and fringed moccasins-- laptopless in Apple HQ, surrounded by a sea of bright, gleaming new MacBook Pros. The class I was in consisted of 12 other professional editors- all very nice guys- but all male, and most substantially older than me. I was introduced to the class, "This is Jacqueline. She is the first girl we've ever had on this course." It was meant well, but you know... no pressure....
In keeping with our promise to blog along with the course, my lecture 'Live Blogging/A Smackhead Stole My Rainbow Pants' was meant to candidly introduce students to the ways in which I use blogging to reflect on real life influences on my artistic practice and thought processes. In this case, I detailed the imprint that the theft left on my week: my inability to adequately perform without my technical tools, the feelings of professional amnesia/memory loss that I experienced after the theft, and the feelings of exposure and privacy violation I felt at having my work, thoughts, and personal belongings stolen and potentially accessed by strangers.
What arose from my week of technical disenfranchisement was a flood of thoughts, writing, and sketches for work about the physicality of identity and memory, modes of communication, degrees of vulnerability, and my personal and professional reliance on technology. I also drew parallels to existing works which I felt connection to through the course of the week, such as Sophie Calles's The Address Book (1983) and Jem Cohen's stunning Lost Book Found (1996). Other points of interest include the work of Vito Acconci and Kristin Lucas's Refresh.
As such, I rounded out the session by presenting the class an approximate list of the actual and digital contents of my bag/computer from memory (e.g., Yves Saint Laurent foundation with brush in no. 5, the aforementioned embarrassing rainbow knickers, two VGA to BNC adaptors, photos of my work at the Glucksman opening, an open sticky on my laptop containing my shopping list: kale, almond butter, apricots...)- excised my anger by announcing to the class that I was going to rob them (I didn't)- and finally, by passing round a copy of my fingerprints, offering the entire class the opportunity to view/access my identity. Highly cathartic- and an effective live exercise of the blogging process.
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