c:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\the state of choice

The triptych of videos looks on how people are treating their surrounding
and each others, their responsibilities and their habits.

Through observation of marginal phenomena in public space in the very
center of Belgrade, I interpret the structure of simple decisions we are
making all the time and the concept of free choice that is actually
conditioned with the offer.

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When they started charging the ride in public transport in Belgrade again, the price of a ticket was so low that it was almost the only thing you could by for the money. When checking a ticket in a bus, you would get a combination of three holes on the matrix of nine numbers. There were 84 combinations possible, still it never happened that you reach such a diversity of experience in the regular bus lines one uses in his day-migrations.

For the reason of an experiment I was collecting these randomly perforated combinations and arranging them in order that I could keep control of. I was also checking the combination of the machine by putting a paper of the same width as the ticket inside. These checking papers I would make out of flyers that were delivered to me on the street. While carrying my collection of tickets with me, it never happened that I didn’t have the right combination to show to the ticket collectors.

I did not feel like paying for every ride I was taking because the transport was running anyway, with or without me inside. I felt liberated with this disrespect of their rules.

The assembly of used tickets was to me like music, an abstract song about the chance. The rhythmical progression of spots on the body of the ticket plays with its rigid visual identity that is not loosing integrity with perforation....

One morning, I left the house and went to the bus station. I was not yet awaken and aware of the risk of taking this ride. When it was already too late, I was in the bus with three person checking passengers tickets, with no ticket or money in my pocket. They caught me unprepared. My collection of combinations was long gone for they changed the colour of the ticket a few times. Then they wrote me a fine.

The Choice of Our Time

The consumer’s trust in product brand that the companies have gained provides the consumer a feeling of belonging to a group, which can be regarded as identity. Freedom and particularity figure as values that we are referred to by our inner senses and the support of surrounding; being the ones we are that we are supposed to long for. An individual who is carefully reading these messages accomplishes a feeling of security through the belonging to a group that is close to him. In these circumstances “being yourself” means actually “being ours”.

We are living in the time of flyers! Personal freedom is handed to us like a flyer on the street, this package of selected possibilities with a range of diverse offer of broken moral standards and combinations of human relations that have never been seen before. The catalogue of images is on to your free choice. You have to define yourself! You cannot stay outside the chest of drawers.

Our needs are being the object of constant supervision and examination, in marketing, at our dentist, in our supermarket... They are completely transparent; their structure is measurable and predictable.

Packages of your needs are offered before you can reach to feel them or think about them. They are offered in public spaces, in all the situations where a big diversity of visitors is expected – on the street and in media. Same packages are later being “practiced” or “trained” in groups, on specific places where these groups meet and gather. This state of the choice is equal to the question whether you are going to take the flyer or not (this time).

I have been recording kids dealing out flyers on the street and focused on the way they are taken or refused. It turned out that this decision depends more on the charisma of the distributor and his aggression in order to impose himself in their field of perception, than any kind of thinking or intentional gesture.

The pavement on the street is a witness of the city life, stamped with traces of dynamics and movement of people who live there. The presence of people is recognized by the change they make in the surrounding. We can have the same approach to the trashcans that tell us about the consumers, their choices, tendencies and habits. What is the most interesting here is the amount of what has stayed outside the can or is inside it.

People walking down the street throw away leftovers conscientiously or unconscientiously. They take a choice and make a decision. We are not talking about the level of culture or hygiene in the city but a spirit and dynamics of life in it.

Everything that stays outside trashcans and containers on the street can be put together into a note about traces of human presence. Pavement memorizes stains, chewing gums, pieces of food and cigarettes, in spite to the efforts of the city sanitation department.

If the content of a trashcan speaks about everyday life, standard and people’s habits, the street tells the same. Sterilized or not from traces of the daz passed, the pavement shows the psychology of an urban environment. This is not about sabotage of the perfect cleanliness of public spaces but about recognition of divergence of the urban spirit.