Ryan Ferko: Where glass can reflect a sphere

In most controlled touristic locations, whether outdoor sites or museums, the tripod is the consistent object that separates the two poles of tourist and professional. This also seems to indicate a presumed difference in the way a tourist would look at and see things in a place they are visiting, compared to a person with a tripod. After paying an admission fee to historical sites, one can take an unlimited amount of photos — as long as they identify themselves as a tourist. This identity implies a level of passivity — a lock-step with the official narrative of the location, which the images created by the tourist will perpetuate and disseminate.

Meanwhile, it seems assumed that the professional has other motives. The tripod can take them out of the image, removing the hand-held motion of a video or the off-kilter horizon line in a photo. Possibly, this is to make money from their images or to peer a bit deeper than the tour guide’s information, and therefore there is some control or regulation over those intentions.

Despite ongoing uncertainty surrounding tourism during a pandemic, we have recently seen the promotion of a “return to travel”. From this particular shifting moment, Ryan Ferko will continue in Αthens a long-term project interested in the dissemination and creation of touristic images to better understand what they enable and what they conceal.

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I made a rule early upon arriving in Athens: to not make any new images. Or, at the very least, I wanted to set myself up in a tension, to resist the images that might be offered to me and force something else. I set a routine; every day I would walk a different route to the Onassis AiR space. Upon arriving, I would sit and write unbroken, unmediated thoughts as they arrived, accumulating pages and pages. I wrote about Athens. About Europe. About the violence of the Schengen Zone. About the Mediterranean. I fixated on Neos Kosmos, the new world, and the death of Queen Elizabeth II. On so-called Canada, on settler colonialism, on the idea of something ancient, and the idea of a starting point of civilization. I wrote about desire, about loneliness. About tourism, and artists as tourists. About Leonard Cohen buying a house on the island of Hydra with an arts grant, and about artist residencies and tech start-ups.

I would take this daily writing into the dance studio, along with a selection of other texts. In the middle of the studio, I would place an Owl 360 Meeting Camera — a device purchased by Onassis AiR to use for web conferences. The camera uses a microphone array and motion-activated 360-degree camera to automatically track sound and motion of anyone sitting around it, clumsily panning to and zooming in on the surrounding environment. Placed in the wall-to-wall mirrored dance studio, I would read back, unbroken, my daily writing, as the Owl 360 confusedly tracked my motion, sometimes cutting to a person passing by the street window and then jumping back to my body, then my reflection in the mirror, back to a car, and so on: action and banality.

I kept writing and filming myself reading. I would then edit these videos, somewhat intuitively, following parts that seemed interesting, maybe when the camera became focused on a tree outside in the wind or when I left the room. Other times there was music or ambience. I continued this process in a cycle: editing the video, which then produced an edited version of the writing, read out as a voiceover.

I then began to break my rules. I started looking at locations in the city to develop the work. I liked being tethered to the Owl Camera, which had to be plugged into the wall to work. I began running long extension cables to get to different locations. I went up on the roof where I was staying in Gyzi and continued to read, filming sunsets, the city, always without controlling the camera myself. A solo broadcast; a performance for the Owl.

Towards the end of my time in Athens, I placed a TV in the center of the dance studio and looped an edited video from the Owl Camera. On the mirrors surrounding the studio, I taped up photocopies of my phone, displaying the transcription of the texts I was reading out in the video. Through a hermetic editing process, I turned an intensive phase of reflection, writing, and research into a mirroring back — the text could be read as a subtitle to the video that could be watched in tandem in the mirrors’ reflection. I was very satisfied with this accumulation and process. I had an unfinished video work and an unfinished text, which I continued to expand in this site-specific process of writing-filming-performing for an automated camera.

At the end of my residency, someone I met at the Open Day told me the work was beautiful, but also cold, lonely. I mostly agreed. Image making is something I often do in collaboration, often very embodied and physical. Writing is something that I have always done in parallel but separately. I wanted, here, to experiment with bringing the uncontrolled, physical elements of image making into the process of my writing and its editing. By resisting images and instead meditating in words in this feedback loop, I found new moments where the writing became the thing out of my control, which was then documented back into another kind of form.

Right before leaving Athens, my phone stopped working, having gotten wet from the off-days I spent in the sea and on the rocks at Limanakia. At the repair shop they told me the phone’s hard drive was damaged and nothing could be recovered. And so, I left Athens being held to my rule, where every single image I did end up making on my phone was completely lost, along with all the files, writing, maps, and notes I accumulated. And so, I am left only with the photocopies of texts from my phone and videos of my reading of those texts: a warped tourism, a collapsing journal, postcards from Neos Kosmos, glass reflecting a sphere.