Christina
Ray
The Lower East Side Shuffle:
a collaborative detective story
This project features a deck of cards, each depicting a different location on
the Lower East Side. Participants are invited to act as
detectives
in finding and investigating these places over the course of the Conflux weekend.
When all locations have been found and documented with notes and evidence, detective
stories will be generated by shuffling and drawing the cards to compose scenes.
With enough collective, creative detective work, the number of potential stories
will be staggering indeed. An interactive map in the ABC No Rio gallery will
chart the project's progress as participants add information, evidence, text
and photos.
Instructions:
50 decks are being produced for Psy-Geo-Conflux.
Contact
Glowlab to reserve a Shuffle deck, and pick it up at the
reception
on May 8th at ABC No Rio. This deck of cards is free, and is yours
to keep.
Find as many card locations as possible throughout the weekend, and contribute
story elements
by
describing
any
suspicious
persons,
criminal
activities,
historical
information or intriguing
clues
found in each
place.
Your
descriptions
may be real or fictional. Take notes on the cards and
collect
any related evidence. Be
thorough
in your search and
creative
in your actions. Be sure to raise an eyebrow and scratch your chin now and then,
as these are proven methods of successful detective work. Wear a trench coat.
Question everyone and everything. Divulge secrets. Make assumptions. Hypothesize.
To assist you in your work, a
half-hour meeting will be held at the 6 of Hearts on Saturday, May 10th at 1pm
sharp. An agent will be present to offer hints and clues.
Return to
ABC No Rio
to mark found locations on the map in the gallery, add story material and deposit
any evidence collected. You may also submit information and
photos
by
email. Your contribution
will be accepted only if you have correctly identified a location.
Anyone locating at least half the deck and contributing story material for each
card found will receive a special, secret prize... so shuffle the cards, shuffle
your feet and shuffle a story.
After the Conflux:
With the material collected, detective stories will be generated through card
games and shuffling of the deck. By randomly drawing cards and putting the scenes
together,
exquisite
corpse-style stories will emerge. Many of these may be complete nonsense,
but that is to be considered a desirable outcome for they will be even more
mysterious. A number of the results will be published on the Glowlab website,
along with photo documentation and a list of all contributors. See
www.glowlab.com/shuffle
for further information.
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bio:
Christina Ray is the girl behind Glowlab [an online multimedia arts lab] and
co-organizer of Psy-Geo-Conflux. Her interest in collaborative work has led
to projects including group psychogeographic walks in New York and Germany,
public-space inter/actions and online participatory works. Ray's photography
and mixed media work is based on urban walks and mapping experiments, and is
represented by
DCKT
Contemporary in New York. She lives in Brooklyn, where she can often be
found walking with a camera on cloudy afternoons.
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related websites:
Glowlab
previous version of
Shuffle
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contact 
