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Countercurrents: Department of Lost notes
Jacqui Shelton
Fri 4 Feb – Sat 6 Mar
Public Program Sat 6 Mar, 2pm | Register here
Closing Celebration Sat 6 Mar, 4pm
Brunswick Mechanics

Department of Lost Notes is a four-channel video that attempts to capture the impact of receiving large amounts of emotionally charged data (texts, poems, quotes, emails) from the perspective of a digital device. Department of Lost Notes operates from a speculative position that imagines a smart phone organising by the digital interactions that replace face-to-face during lockdowns and periods of isolation. Department of Lost Notes gathers multiple experiences of isolation through the intermediary of a phone, anonymising and collating diverse text submissions from the public that capture their digitised personal thoughts.

Presented as part of Countercurrents a new public art commissioning partnership between Next Wave and Moreland City Council. Countercurrents is intended to support both site-specific and community-based public art projects.

Want to contribute?

Next Wave and Jacqui Shelton invite you to participate in Department of Lost Notes: Working Group public program where participants will contribute text from their notes app towards a collective document of digital experience. The artist will guide groups through a process of editing and physical orientation, that will inscribe texts developed collaboratively as walks in the local vicinity of Brunswick Mechanics.

Department of Lost Notes Public Program
Sat 6 Mar, 2pm | Register here

This process will develop a series of multiple stories and texts that participants can share as a walk and recite to friends and family, as a record of collective experiences of distance and the varied differences within these text-based representations.

This work archives community submissions to construct a collective experience of isolation and distance. You are invited to contribute personal notes to be included in the work via this link.

Jacqui Shelton is an artist and writer born on Barada Barna land, central QLD, and based in Narrm, Melbourne. Her work uses text, performance, filmmaking and photography to explore the complications of performance and presence, and how voice, language, and image can collaborate or undermine one another. Jacqui is especially interested in how emotion and embodied experience can be made public and activated to reveal a complex politics of living-together, and the tensions this makes visible.