OPACITY INC: POST NOWIST PERFORMANCE ART

18.4.06

Tristram Shandy est mort, vive Tristram Shandy!

I’m walking through a busy Coney St. York City center on 4th October 2005 and I walk past a man pushing a baby in a pram.
The baby is crying and it is loud.
The man is listening to his iPod, oblivious to the child.
I look him directly in the eye but I am a ghost, opacity = 0%.

In the city we are either ghosts or robots, we belong to fiction, we pass and are passed by the passer by.
Where is the comm(on)unity in the street? I remember that in Paris in 1968 there were slogans written on the walls, one said ‘Poetry is in the streets’ where is the poetry in passivity, surely an active engagement in our environment is needed in (dis)order to be able to make conscious decisions and not be dragged into a fixed psychological field of geographical control.
In York control is the shadow of the edifice (York Minster), or Spectacle Street's glitter, glam, sham, pound signs...the media should be slogans on walls not slogans in windows.

This is what Opacity(ism) is, the freeing up of imaginative creativity, an escape from the psychogeography or the abilty to change it, or the initiative to do so.
It is eye contact with strangers.
It is playing
It is a clear understanding of complex theories
It is the art of 21st Century rebels: a man who says no becomes two men who say tristram shandy is dead, long live tristram shandy becomes people who say 'ch ch ch ch ch changes' becomes king mob media becomes oitopianism.

I have drifted a little on the digital page.

n x

Britain isn't working, ne traville jamais.

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OPACITY INC

OPACITY INC are a post-nowist performance art collective, internationally celebrated artists they are currently on an extended hiatus (until Margret Thatcher dies). Founded in 2006 by Mr Ward and My Walker in York (UK), their work makes geography, autobiography and community through large scale promenade performances and small scale film and book-works.

For Information on Opacity Inc. co-founder Nathan Walker visit: http://www.nathan-walker.co.uk

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