Vol. 1 No 1 | Summer 2020

Motion

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As the Executive Director of this project, my title and role often confuse me. I feel a certain kinship with Dene Oxendene, the young documentary filmmaker in Tommy Orange’s There There. In his own project, Oxendene is passionate about letting the content drive the vision, which is a strategy that I try to employ as much as possible in this project. This is sometimes difficult in practice. It can be hard to allow, and it can be hard to hear what the project is saying when it’s telling me where it wants to go.

A few months ago it became very clear what the project wanted. Bait/Switch demanded some order. Some pruning. Some reframing. If it seems outrageous to suggest that this project is like a living being with a consciousness, I invite you to go through some of the works and read the interviews. Pay particular attention to the space in between. The ideas that jump from one person to another, across time and space, is where the unknowable part of Bait/Switch lies.

When I was trying to think of a theme for this edition, I looked for commonality between these works, and what the artists had to say about their various creative processes. All of this work is very active. There are themes of travel, walking from place to place, and capturing energy. There is a wonderful sense of motion in this edition. From swinging axes and destroying paper, dancing onstage to making calls on public telephones. From taking in the daily sights and sounds of the city, to creating performances on the grass. From surfing the waves of the internet, to walking through lush vegetation. From trying to protect a fellow human being to grappling with past violence.

One phenomenon I am fascinated by in these quarantine times is the lack of wanderlust I have personally been experiencing. Somehow, although I have been outside my neighborhood just a handful of times over the past four months, I haven’t been feeling antsy. I think part of that can be attributed to meditation- it is amazing how far one can go inside their own mind when trying to focus on the breath. But part of it is also due to this project. Because of Bait/Switch, I get to talk to artists from all over the world. Hear about their experiences. Walk in their shoes. Talk about all sorts of weird things. I treasure these conversations, and hope you enjoy them too.

In this issue, we have a choreographed dance piece made in response to an architectural rendering. Considering the classic quote “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” this has been on my Bait/Switch bucket list for a while. We also have another first: a webpage URL as the finished product/ prompt for the next artist. This is exciting, because although Bait/Switch has always been internet-based, this is the first piece of Internet Art to become part of the corpus.

I’m also excited to present a visualization of how these particular works fit together, and what came before them. I have been told by many people that navigating through Bait/Switch is like running down a very strange tunnel. A full mapping of the entire corpus is necessary in the long run- everyone should be able to take in the full glory of this magnificent beast! That project is underway, as well as an interactive geographical map to see how the switches travel in the physical world.

The future has a lot of exciting things in store. Please stay safe out there.

With love,

Lu Valena, Executive Director

Map of Works in This Issue

Bait/Switch is an interdisciplinary exquisite corpse project. Every work is a creative response to a piece made by another artist. The project is divided into three branches- cyan, magenta and yellow. This map/diagram shows how the works in this issue fit together, and what came before.