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From the 8th of August, 2008 at 8:00 p.m. to the end of the closing ceremonies on the 24th of August, a small space located at Xiaojingchang Hutong in the centre of Beijing will be open to host and organise a series of minor practices[1] that will embark from the crossing points of the local community and the world spectacle of the 2008 Olympic Games. As a commercial storefront space that also hosts its proprietors for living, sleeping and eating, this space represents a metaphorical bringing together of the public and the private, a commercial trade with the common good or open exchange. During the period of the Olympic Games, a number of activities will take place to investigate, document and generate possibilities for our relationships as individuals to the 2008 Olympic plan, the timetable and its juxtapositions with local urban micro-society. This is an open call inviting your agency as participant, observer and player. [download full english project proposal as PDF here, 下载中文方案]

Please address inquiries, ideas and informal proposals for an activity you’d like to initiate by e-mail to: ho [at] iwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter [dot] org, by telephone at +86 137.1855.6089. While there is no official budget available for any of these events and activities, if certain equipment and/or resources are required, please contact and we will do our best to make suitable arrangements. There is no deadline, and your ideas are welcome for the duration of the Games. Training is not required. 有时间过来玩!(If you have time, come over and play!)

Among the Events planned/possible…
. evening public viewing of Olympic Games via storefront LED projection
. field recordings of the neighbourhood (audio/video)
. public wii games via storefront LED projection
. street-logs[2] and hutong-side live sports announcing
. presentations and/or talks on related work
. storefront sale of refreshments and other goods
. Beijing Critical Reading Group session
. language lessons for sports and netspeak
. street party for Olympic losers

Participants, Potential players…
. Beijing Critical Reading Group participants
. Pauline Doutreluingne – curator, DJ
. summer school students of Fensiting Primary School, two doors down
. Beatrice Ferrari – geography and spatial planning; Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale Lausanne
. big brother Gao – next door neighbour, security guard
. 何颖雅 Elaine Hoart and design
. 蔡凯 Cai Kaiart and design
. 崔凯旋 Cassidy Cuiprofessor
. Liang Yueart and performance
. Ren Bo – filmmaker
. Ouyang Xiao – art and critical theory
. Sean Smithcritical sports theory, Brock University, phD. candidate European Graduate School
. Grandpa Wang – neighbour from the building across the street, retired musician, active ladies man
. big sister Wang and big brother Yue – the landlords, subway ticket vendor
. big brother Zheng – next door neighbour, postal office worker

HomeShop will be open daily by appointment throughout the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. A running schedule of all events will be continuously updated on this blog. The HomeShop Games 2008 project is an initiative of 何颖雅 Elaine W. Ho and 欧阳潇 Xiao Ouyang, hopefully the first in a series of community-based investigations of art practices, Beijing, networked spaces and the home. Documentation, essays and other contributions from this series will be compiled for a publication to be produced after the Games. In the case of inclement weather, we can huddle together.

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[1] See http://www.sarai.net/practices/cybermohalla/minor-practices. A number of the ideas for the HomeShop games project are humbly attributed to the work Cybermohalla.

[2] “Streets are spaces of banal repetitions, encounter with world of things, gathering of people and occasional events. This is also how streets enter our conversations. To stand still in a street or to observe a street over a certain duration of time could make the street re-appear into conversations and thought with renewed vividness and perplexity. Street-logs were evolved by practitioners in 2004 to engage with the familiar and the banal, to find ways of re-thinking and re-imagining its disruptions, surprises and flows” (Cybermohalla).




6 Responses to “HomeShop series number one: g a m e s 2 0 0 8”

  1. sportsbabel

    you can never dip your toe into the same street twice…and you will rarely have such a semiotic detonation of the “global” on the “local” as will occur with the eights…looking forward to seeing anew next month–are we on?

  2. e

    how do you mean it in terms of ‘semiotic detonation’? i think we talked about it before, about how ouyang and i talked about the three major events of this year in China as being a critical turning point for the future of the socio-political identity of China, where a ‘eu’-tastrophe such as the earthquake have only assisted in the veiling of this larger question at hand, and that the Chinese people will be looking back at 2008 for quite some time yet.

    yesterday my mother called me to make sure i was okay, because she heard that there were bus explosions in Beijing, and I went online afterwards to read more about it, discovering that my mom was mistaken because the explosions occurred in Kunming, over 2000 miles from Beijing, but all the Western media reports frame EVERYTHING in light of the possible threats to the Olympics and relations to Beijing, so my mom was naturally confused… Of course, any sort of terrorist threats can be seen as a warning to Beijing, but the way these news reports worded it, it was like Kunming was a suburb of Beijing, when it’s like talking about the harm to the Olympic spirit in Toronto when an attack would happen in Vancouver! Ergh…

    But next month, dun dun dun (in dramatic movie voice)… we are on, yes!

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