Ghosts deserve art too!

Whilst planning the Car Boot Museum's American debut for this autumn I've become obsessed with the idea of who the audience can be - with a project as flexible and evolving as this who are we creating it for? The plan at the moment is for a tour starting in Nashville and somehow going through New Orleans incorporating house shows, but a huge chunk of it will also be made up of impromptu stops along the way at any place that looks interesting, whether people are present or not. In places where there is no traditional art audience, is it art for its own sake, art for me and Elle, or art for something else entirely...?

I then (obviously... ha!) began to think about memories and ghosts. Both these things always influence my work, but is there a way to make them part of the creative process - my work is often collaborative with strangers - a way I could bring the ghosts and memories into it too to work with us? As we collect and create work to add to the museum as we go could we become almost ghost curators of lost memories? Search out the hidden for the hidden - creatively bring to life things we can never see or prove?

I'm obsessed with the outer realms of physics and its theories of reality. I don't pretend to fully understand them, but I don't think that negates the creative possibilities they open up. One theory states that as information can't be lost, even into a black hole, reality could essentially function as a hologram does, made up of information projected from the edges of space. I know I am hugely simplifying this theory, but if we accept the premise that information can't be lost, and visually think about the idea of a hologram, then in theory all information could be constantly floating around us and for me this includes memories - they are things that have happened - become information in the moment the action occurs that creates them. I like the idea that this could therefore work for people too - we are our experiences to an extent and therefore a collection of information that can't be lost. Could this be a new definition for what a ghost is? I know that this theory was never meant as a justification for the possibility of the existence of ghosts, but the nice thing about interpreting things creatively is that for my purposes it can be. If these ghosts of disembodied memories cannot be lost the logical conclusion is that they are everywhere. Therefore wherever the Car Boot Museum stops, even if there are no people around, there are memory ghosts. I like the idea that they could therefore become our audience, collaborators and co-curators of the places we visit; that we can create work with them, film invisible interactions, bring to visible "life" their memories as we go on our way.

In this way we could also become archaeologists of memories. Archaeologists look for physical artifacts to explain the past through physical activity in digging etc. I ran a creative workshop last year where to discover the past of a school grounds we dug up the back of the playing field. We found many objects that could illustrate the known history of the school - i.e. we found lots of bricks and we knew it was built on an old brick works - but what fascinated me was how we then took these objects and created stories and poems around them and the world that was brought to life by the children became not the known history but their own imaginary interpretation leading to a realm of memories. I have always wanted to discover an unknown ancient creature (preferably a dinosaur due to my general fixation!) and archaeologists constantly get the opportunity to do this, whether it's a new dinosaur like the recent one-fingered veloceraptor relative discovered in China, or the full mammoth skeleton found in November in New Mexico. But could memory function in the same way - can I creatively excavate a place to bring its memories to life, therefore having a chance to discover my own lost world?

My other pet outer physics theory of reality is the sci-fi fave of parallel worlds. It sounds ridiculous, but there are physicists who believe that theoretically every action performed splits reality so that there are an infinite number of different realities functioning at any one time. It's just we can't see them. But part of what fascinates me about this is again the idea that therefore these different realities, and the memories of them that presumably again can't be lost, are existing invisibly all around us. We can never "know" them in the traditional sense of what we expect from reality, i.e. physical experience (unless we are in that other reality, but we wouldn't be conscious of that...), but that doesn't mean that creatively there isn't the opportunity to bring them to life by exploring the hidden memories and stories within a place. Again I am thinking the Car Boot Museum could try and seek them out. I also think this ties with our original thinking about the Mnemosyne Atlas and the physical gaps in the displaying of images that the mind fills in with its own interpretations, I think obviously partly fueled by memory...

So, I am waffling now... but though the parts of the project where we stop in the middle of nowhere might seem empty of collaborators and viewers, I'm pretty sure this is not the case. After all... ghosts deserve art too!