AVANT GARDE BELOW ZERO

Artist Geoffrey de Beer is working on a continuous project, ‘Avant Garde below zero’. Next to numerous other artists I’ve also contributed an especially made edition to this project. Geoffreys freezers are placed in the Verbeke Foundation. My work consists out of an ordinairy small cardboard box in which three instructions can be found. Each instruction relates to a location, a date and a time and short preperations for getting to the specified location. Hidden under a small card, there’s a description of what could happen to you, when visiting these locations. It’s rather mysterious and the work is actually only text-based, though there’s a cd with soundtracks provided. I came up with this idea because it’s sometimes so utterly impossible to capture a certain important moment in a certain important place at a certain important time into an artwork or a text. The only thing I can do in terms of trying to communicate this effect, is to send the public to these locations in circumstances similar to the ones that I was in at those times.

I’m actually thinking about transforming these instructions into three animations, so they’ll be used anyway. There’s a time and place for everything.

// script.js document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function() { // Check if the body has the specific page class if (document.body.classList.contains('page-id-400605')) { const container = document.getElementById("container"); // Function to create and position images function createImage(src) { const img = document.createElement("img"); img.src = src; img.classList.add("image"); // Set random width and rotation const randomWidth = Math.random() * (150 - 50) + 50; // Random width between 50px and 150px const randomRotation = Math.random() * 30 - 15; // Random rotation between -15deg and 15deg img.style.width = `${randomWidth}px`; img.style.transform = `rotate(${randomRotation}deg)`; // Random position within the container img.style.top = Math.random() * (container.clientHeight - randomWidth) + 'px'; img.style.left = Math.random() * (container.clientWidth - randomWidth) + 'px'; img.draggable = true; // Event listeners for dragging img.addEventListener("dragstart", function(e) { e.dataTransfer.setData("text/plain", null); // For Firefox compatibility img.style.transition = 'none'; // Disable transition during drag }); img.addEventListener("dragend", function() { img.style.transition = 'transform 0.1s'; // Re-enable transition after drag }); img.addEventListener("drag", function(e) { const x = e.clientX - container.getBoundingClientRect().left - randomWidth / 2; // Adjust for image width const y = e.clientY - container.getBoundingClientRect().top - randomWidth / 2; // Adjust for image height img.style.transform = `translate(${x}px, ${y}px) rotate(${randomRotation}deg)`; // Keep rotation }); container.appendChild(img); } // Load images from a specified folder const imageFolder = 'https://yourwebsite.com/path/to/your/images/'; // Update with your image folder path let i = 1; // Initialize the counter while (true) { // Infinite loop to keep trying to load images const imageUrl = `${imageFolder}image${i}.jpg`; // Adjust this to match your image naming convention const img = new Image(); img.src = imageUrl; // Check if the image exists before creating it img.onload = function() { createImage(imageUrl); }; img.onerror = function() { console.log(`Image ${imageUrl} does not exist. Stopping further attempts.`); break; // Stop loading more images if one doesn't exist }; i++; // Increment the counter } } });