FormLab - a nomadic model for discourse and a museum in a museum

Since its inception in 2007 Form Laboratory explores the experience of an artwork through a mirroring of event. It is the tactile, the audible, the visual as an engagement of senses that explores recursively sites which it appropriates through found objects/ aritfacts, performance, and moving images.

Current projects explore local community of sites through the languages of its communities, politics and structures – creating a museum-within-a-museum  - a cross section of economic hierarchies through found objects, video and performance and the recreation of locally produced hybrid-artifacts from performance.           

This project presents a radical shift in the creative conception of the ontogenesis of art as Form Laboratory creates a museum-within-a-museum reflecting local sites which it appropriates in shared practices, images, sounds, found objects that reflect the diverse socio-economic and cultural structures of a site.

Form Laboratory will use the main exhibition space inside the museum to create a central mutable installation structure with objects (inter-connected locally constructed platforms, single and multi-channel video monitors, display shelves, kinetic objects and communications between satellite “installation-nodes” ) in the museum’s central space.

Form Laboratory redefines traditional conceptions of the museum by making it an ongoing process-based event where visitors can observe the artist “in-situ” creating artifacts culled from local raw/found materials creating multi-faceted representations of the site’s socio-economic structures, history/politics.

Museum visitors can observe the Form Laboratory like an archeological excavation site in progress revealing process. The objects (each containing intrinsic narratives and historicity) are collected, categorized, mutated, combined and processed into artifacts and incorporated into the installation as part of the four-week performance.

Working independently or with community participants, the artist is observed in the collection of objects which reflect disparate parts of the host city.

The project’s agenda includes an integrated education program, lectures and workshops for community members connecting the museum to local people in a site.

The aim of this project is to become a continued nomadic structure in other countries in Asia, EU and South America.

Main Influence of the work

The work is in essence a model for multi-faceted mirroring of a culture through installation and performance. The performance is culturally oriented through the interaction with community and creation of artwork from materials indigenous with the community and in tandem with local members of the community.

From 1994-present Joynes has created installations and documentary projects on lost communities in London, Enoshima, Japan, East Germany and Singapore that explore site, object and historicity. 

Form Laboratory is already fully in conceptual development stage and has already developed experiments in local communities: Manhattan’s garment district, 2009); local narratives from shut down factory (Treignac Projet, France, 2010); tracing local community through objects along a forgotten tributary in Hatsudai (Tokyo, 2010) and with contemporary dancers in Singapore (2009).

Intellectual and Social Impact of Form Laboratory

As a museum-within-a-museum this project radicalizes the museum as a site for multiple levels of discourse. Also by creating work in tandem with members of the community (usually 1-2 others) the platform for creation is disrupted so that the creative output (or re-narrativized artifacts) is transformed by a shared creation where personal narratives are hybridized.

From an aesthetic perspective, this is the creation of a shared tertiary discourse and production between creators and is a new language for museums.

From an intellectual perspective this will integrate narratives from diverse local cultures as well as provide a structure for workshops, lectures and community involvement. From a civic/ social point of view it gives voice to the narratives of the communities themselves.

Target audiences

Form Laboratory’s target audiences include art center and museum-visitors but most importantly local audiences (residents, school groups, workers, local merchants - the people that represent the scial fabric of a site).

Form Laboratory, Garment District, 2008: In Manhattan’s textile and garment district in New York drew local Euopean American, Chinese, Korean, Latin American, African American and African residents as well as artists and art historians to witness the mirroring of the site in which they work and live.

Form Laboratory/ Trace, Berlin 2008: Local residents in Berlin’s wall-divided Hansaviertel came to observe 1957 Interbau spaces shared by buildings by Alvar Aalto, Egon Eiermann, Walter Gropius and Oscar Niermeyer re-connected" through performance and light-drawings.

Form Laboratory, Singapore, 2009: In Ethnically diverse Queenstown, Singapore personal stories from local inhabitants: Indians, Chinese, Malay and other ethicities as they withness the transformation and loss of their neighborhoods and subsequent sense of deterritorialization (and decentering of the subject). This also drew members of the arts, and performance communities.

Form Laboratory II, Limousin, 2010: (above filming of performance of Form Laboratory at Treignac Project site of a former factory in central France) Local residents and visiting artists were invited as participants and spectators of the events and the creation of on-site labs to create artifacts in tandem from raw and fouind materials from the 300 year old site and factory.

Form Laboratory/ The Man Who Fell to Earth, Tokyo, 2010: Explores the a fictitious spaceman's sortie from his spaceship (performance above) and exloration and creation of the Alien Encyclopaedia of Terrestial Forms ©.

Form Laboratory Sao Paulo, 2012: In Brazil audiences include local communities of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s most socially diverse city with ethnicities that span Japanese, African-Brazilian, Chinese, European immigrants, local first-nation populations –with seven religions and twelve spoken languages Sao Paulo encapsulates diversity and hybridization. With this project Form Laboratory is engaging socio-economic intersections of communities expressing a merging of the various aspects of each as a structural element.

Venues for Form Laboratory

Current venues in planning include a museum in Sao Paulo (2012) as well as in Nagano, Japan (2012) and Shanghai, (2013) and the sites are all actively engaged with the intersection of local communities, history and narrative and contemporary art.