Robert Ladislas Derr will perform Chance: Fairfax, a psychogeographical walk performance through the streets of Fairfax on March 28, 2008, starting in front of City Hall, 10455 Armstrong Street at 11:00 am. On April 4, his performance will start in front of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA), 230 The Fenway, Boston.

During The Fifth Annual Visual Cultures Symposium at George Mason University’s Johnson Center Cinema on March 27, the viewers will determine the direction of his walk performance (wearing four video cameras harnessed to his person) through the streets based upon the roll of a dice; the dice indicates that he move forward, backward, right, left, spin, or stand in place. He will accept thirty dice rolls then proceed on his walk accordingly. When spin or stand in place are the command, he will complete each for one minute. The directional commands will take him to the next intersection, as he continues the walk for approximately forty-five minutes (the average amount of time that it takes to complete all thirty commands).

Just as in past performances, he will wear the mirrored suit to allow his presence on the street to be real and illusionary. Regarding his suit during the performance for the SoFA Gallery, Peter Haralovich in an interview with IDS News stated, “I think it is a pretty good look. It reminds me of (French artist) Marcel Duchamp.” Using the city as a fluid canvas, Derr will move through the streets in silence capturing the ephemeral characters that construct the ambiance of place and time. The videos record his physicality as he steps off of a curb, moves around geographical structures, traversing through the streets. The resulting video footage connects the second generation viewers back to Derr through this arrhythmic motion created from his physical presence with the cameras, as well as the viewers stand at the center of the video projections as he was at the center of the four video cameras. In an article for trAce Online Journal, Susan Sakash observed of the videos from the Void psychogeographical walk performances, “Derr’s footage is testament to this interplay of repetition and surprise…the sights and basic patterns of the traffic may be similar but it is the particulars that demand attention.” The videos mesmerize the viewers and physically engage them with his stride. Derr has noticed the viewers mimicking his walk and spinning in sync with the videos.

Not only is Derr’s psychogeographical experience captured, but also the experience of the pedestrians on the street. The pedestrians become the actors in the videos, playing out their role in the daily life flow that is structured by the geographical environment in which they live. In his psychogeographical walk performances, he is interested in the chance encounter between pedestrians and himself. Through his self-induced spectacle walk performances, Derr raises awareness of the individual in society.
Each individual resident plays an important role in creating the fabric of place. Again Sakash’s keen observation of the video from his Void performances, “a graphic oral display by a woman leaning out a pub - it is the “other” who replaces the artist as the director and actor of the unfolding drama. This celebration of minor characters, and the coincidence of habit and chance, emerge as central concerns for the artist.” However in Chance not only is interface with pedestrians emphasized, but also interaction with the viewers is crucial for his progression. Subverting the traditional social structure of a performance that prefers the viewers to be quiet observers, Derr relies on the viewers to determine the cartography for his walk.

Moving through the streets in Fairfax by rational and irrational means, walking in silence through the crowd, letting his cameras record, he will capture an unedited glimpse of an unfolding drama. Just as Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed his decisive moments, Derr’s video cameras will record many decisive moments in the framework of linear time, capturing the banality of existence between these moments. The videos will present a visual record of the homogeneity of daily life, while none of daily experiences are completely uniform, the geographical environment renders them as a collective. Performing Chance in a variety of cities develops this ongoing project that creates a comparative body of video and photographic work that captures the essence of place at a certain moment in time through the unconventional cartographic mapping. In this infinite game of chance that Derr takes to cities throughout the world, the viewer in the gallery and the pedestrian on the street is affected by this peculiar means of video production that documents the particular time that he was there.

Each performance of Chance provides a contemporary document of each place using détournement to undermine conventional methods of walking through a city. Expanding on Guy Debord’s concept of détournement, Chance creates cartographies of each city by means of chance rather than by some rational directive method. The video installation demonstrates this détourne approach of map-making, which illustrates the city as a place for potential discovery rather than structured conformity. Considering Debord’s unconventional and influential map of Paris titled, The Naked City, 1957, Chance functions within a similar discourse by using today’s technology to remap the city with non-linear methods.

Derr will lecture about his Chance series on a panel beginning at 11:15 am in the Johnson Center Cinema at George Mason University’s Fairfax campus, and the dice rolls will take place at 12:30 pm outside of the cinema. The Johnson Center Cinema is located at 4400 University Drive; directions.