Flipbooks of my Favorite Places

The DCM's final community challenge was to identify a space in the city that has a distinct atmosphere or spirit, or Genius Locii, and then make a tribute to it in a small box provided by the museum. Every day I fall more in love with the new neighborhood we recently moved to, so I decided to make a little flipbook shrine to the Berkeley Park hood. The best part about living here is that I am within walking distance of three of my favorite places: a dog park, coffee shop, and hardware store. So I filmed a walk around the neighborhood with my sidekick, Meyer.

We started at home, the point at the top right, then we walked counterclockwise to the Berkeley dog park, over to Tenn St. coffee, down to Tennyson Hardware, and then back home. It ended up being an hour-long walk split into four separate legs, so each flipbook is a 10-20 minute video reduced to 60-80 pages.

Each participant was given a small cardboard box to contain the representation of their Genius Locii, and I wanted to keep the flipbooks tethered to the box yet still accessible to viewers. In my BFA show in 2006 I used magnets to attach flipbooks to the side of a pedestal:

but since this is for a traveling exhibit that will pop-up around Denver and San Francisco I wanted to attach them more permanently. After lots of brainstorming (pulleys? rubber bands? mini slinkies!) I finally thought of using retractable name-badge lanyards. So I bound the flipbooks with zip-ties and looped the lanyard into the binding.

Here they are hooked into the box. More about the exhibit and a video of my flipbooks coming soon...

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