New York based Vito Acconci is one of the most renowned and influential artists practicing today.

I first encountered his film and video work as a practicing artist, when i would often skulk off to the library at Central Saint Martins College of Art in London, in search of inspiration. Locking myself into one of the video booths there, I would while away hours watching artists' videos, taking notes and thinking of ways to be as original and ingenious myself.

At a particularly low ebb one day, all bound up in existential angst, I stumbled across Theme Songs - a tape by Vito Acconci from 1973. Up close and personal, Acconci challenged me, scared me, sang to me, spoke to me...at least that's how it felt, and it that moment I knew this was the art that I had hungered for, this was that art that would change my life...And it did. Fifteen years later, now as Director of Exhibitions, I am continuously considering this relationship between the artist and the audience, the power of art (particularly media art), to shift and change our directions, our perceptions, challenge our conventions, our uses of language, space, and the territories we occupy.

On a research trip to New York last year I visited the Barbara Gladstone Gallery to see Vito Acconci's show Diary of a Body. And there I was again, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up on end, remembering, through this selection of archive materials, how and why he managed to affect me - and a million others - so profoundly. His pioneering film and video work, and texts that precedes them, still resonate today, still challenge what it is to be alive, to occupy our bodies and the space around us, to relate - to love, to hate and to desire, to explore light and the dark side. The early works in film and video, with their intensely original, seemingly personal and resonant style explorations of the self, in relation to others (an enduring pre-occupation for Acconci) and the film/video camera, continue to be referenced by new generations of artists, television and filmmakers.

Self/Sound/City reflects the development of Acconci's artistic practice, from the late 1960s and 1970s - where he produced a prolific body of conceptual film, video, text and performance work - through his shift in the 1980s towards creating public artworks, furniture and mobile architecture, to the current day - which sees him working with a collective of artists and architects at Acconci Studio.

The show also highlights how the power and play of text and language informs his work in all media - from video to architecture.
Gallery 1 presents original documents, films and videos from the Acconci 1969 - 1973 archives, for the first time in the UK.

On the stairway leading up to Gallery 2 a selection of works from the 1980s - interactive installations and public art works, adaptable furniture and architecture - demonstrate Acconci's growing interest in, and relationship with, the audience and the public.

Focusing on the move into architecture and public realm projects, Gallery 2 showcases three films that take a journey through Acconci studio's practice to date, screened in a specially built environment designed by Acconci Studio. The films also reveal the part that new technology now plays in Acconci's work - from drawing to the realisation of the architectural models and public art projects.

The wall outside Gallery 2 represents current Acconci Studio projects and projected around the building are works from throughout his career that share similar themes and concerns featuring throughout the entire exhibition.

The Media Lounge presents a selection of Acconci's key audio works and the Acconci Remix Studios invite you, the audience, to create your own work form the Acconci archives and combine them with a diverse range of other audio samples, selected by Acconci Studio.

[LESS]
New York based Vito Acconci is one of the most renowned and influential artists practicing today.

I first encountered his film and video work as a practicing artist, when i would often skulk off to the library at Central Saint Martins College of Art in London, in search of inspiration. Locking myself into one of the video booths there, I would while away hours watching artists' videos, taking notes and thinking of ways to be as original and ingenious myself.

At a particularly low ebb one day, all bound up in existential angst, I stumbled across Theme Songs - a tape by Vito Acconci from 1973. Up close and personal, Acconci challenged me, scared me, sang to me, spoke to me...at least that's how it felt, and it that moment I knew this was the art that I had hungered for, this was that art that would change my life...And it did. Fifteen years later, now as Director of Exhibitions, I am continuously considering this relationship between the artist and the audience, the power of art (particularly media art), to shift and change our directions, our perceptions, challenge our conventions, our uses of language, space, and the territories we occupy.

On a research trip to New York last year I visited the Barbara Gladstone Gallery to see Vito Acconci's show Diary of a Body. And there I was again, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up on end, remembering, through this selection of archive materials, how and why he managed to affect me - and a million others - so profoundly. His pioneering film and video work, and texts that precedes them, still resonate today, still challenge what it is to be alive, to occupy our bodies and the space around us, to relate - to love, to hate and to desire, to explore light and the dark side. The early works in film and video, with their intensely original, seemingly personal and resonant style explorations of the self, in relation to others (an enduring pre-occupation for Acconci) and the film/video camera, continue to be referenced by new generations of artists, television and filmmakers.

Self/Sound/City reflects the development of Acconci's artistic practice, from the late 1960s and 1970s - where he produced a prolific body of conceptual film, video, text and performance work - through his shift in the 1980s towards creating public artworks, furniture and mobile architecture, to the current day - which sees him working with a collective of artists and architects at Acconci Studio.

The show also highlights how the power and play of text and language informs his work in all media - from video to architecture.
Gallery 1 presents original documents, films and videos from the Acconci 1969 - 1973 archives, for the first time in the UK.

On the stairway leading up to Gallery 2 a selection of works from the 1980s - interactive installations and public art works, adaptable furniture and architecture - demonstrate Acconci's growing interest in, and relationship with, the audience and the public.

Focusing on the move into architecture and public realm projects, Gallery 2 showcases three films that take a journey through Acconci studio's practice to date, screened in a specially built environment designed by Acconci Studio. The films also reveal the part that new technology now plays in Acconci's work - from drawing to the realisation of the architectural models and public art projects.

The wall outside Gallery 2 represents current Acconci Studio projects and projected around the building are works from throughout his career that share similar themes and concerns featuring throughout the entire exhibition.

The Media Lounge presents a selection of Acconci's key audio works and the Acconci Remix Studios invite you, the audience, to create your own work form the Acconci archives and combine them with a diverse range of other audio samples, selected by Acconci Studio.

SELF/SOUND/CITY
Notes by Vito Acconci 2005

PRELUDE TO THE SHOW: Poetry (1965-1969)
Page as thing (Use idioms, that draw attention to themselves as language; use puns, that circle back on themselves and remain confined to the page) - Words as props for movement (How to travel from left margin to right, from one page to the next).
But why was I limiting that movement to an 8x11 piece of a paper? There's a world out there...

THE SHOW: SELF (1969-1973)

I had to try out (try on) my body, test my body, find my body, use my body, day by day (DIARY OF A MAP - MAP OF A BODY OUT IN SPACE)...

The agent (artist) functions as receiver of an external world (that agent ties self into an already existent system, outside the self); the piece exists as a private activity that, later, becomes public through documentation, reportage and rumour.

Presentation of self, The agent concentrates on self; the movement is circular (the agent starts an action, the action ends back at the agent) - the agent turns person into object that can be targeted in on (through photographs and film) by viewers.

Exchange-point. The exhibition area is a place where agent, in person meets viewer (the agent might function as a still point, that viewers move toward, or the agent might be part of the space that viewers happen to be in); the agent can introduce self in the present, by means of the past of future (autobiography, fantasy).

But, in order for you to have room of your own, in order for you to be free to move around the space, I have to move out of your way, I have to get out...

THE SHOW: SOUND (1972-1979)
Projection space. The exhibition-area is like a novel, a radio show, a movie to walk through: the piece consists of slide-projections (that transform the walls of the space into deep space, other places) and audiotape (the agent's voice is used as an instrument for alternate voices, other persons).

But sound is architecture. Both sound and architecture make a surrounding, an ambiance. Both sound and architecture make a context in which you can do something else...

Since a gallery/museum is a place where people come anyway, it can call people to a meeting, it can call the meeting to order: the gallery/museum is used as a plaza, as a town square.

But i'm fooling myself: the gallery/museum is never going to be a public place; if I really need, want, a public place, then I'd better find a way to get there...

INTERLUDE IN THE SHOW: Architectural Games, Prototypes (1980-1987)

The viewer activates (operates) an instrument (what the viewer has at hand) that in turn activates (builds) an architecture (what the viewer is in) that in turn activates (carries) a sign (what the viewer shows off): the viewer becomes the victim of a cultural which, however, stays in existence only so long as the viewer works to keep the instrument going.

The prototype piece is a house: a piece should be the kind of place in which a viewer might feel, literally, at home. Take the convention and subvert it; take this literally: the prototype piece is a house turned inside-out or upside-down.

But this is only the play architecture, rehearsals for architecture. Real architecture operates on local conditions...

THE SHOW: CITY (1988-2005)

Public space in an electronic age is space on the run. Public space is not space in the city but the city itself. Not nodes but circulation routes; not buildings and plazas, but roads and bridges. Public space is leaving home, and giving up all the comforts of the cluster-places that substitute for the home. Space on the run is life on the loose. There's no time to talk; there's no need for talk, since you have all the information you need on the radio you carry with you. There's no need for a person-to-person relationship, since you already have multiple relationships with voices on your radio, with images of persons in store windows and on billboards; there's no time to stop and have a relationship, which would be a denial of all those other bodies you're side-by-side with on the street, one different body after another, one body replacing another. There's no time and no need and no way to have 'deep sex': in a plague year, in a time of AIDS, bodies mix while dressed in condoms and armoured with vaginal shields - the body takes its own housing with it wherever it goes, it doesn't come out of its shell. The electronic age and the age of AIDS becomes intermixed in an age of virus, whether that virus is information or disease. Each person becomes too infected, either with information or with disease, to be with another. You come to visit, not to stay.

[LESS]
SELF/SOUND/CITY
Notes by Vito Acconci 2005

PRELUDE TO THE SHOW: Poetry (1965-1969)
Page as thing (Use idioms, that draw attention to themselves as language; use puns, that circle back on themselves and remain confined to the page) - Words as props for movement (How to travel from left margin to right, from one page to the next).
But why was I limiting that movement to an 8x11 piece of a paper? There's a world out there...

THE SHOW: SELF (1969-1973)

I had to try out (try on) my body, test my body, find my body, use my body, day by day (DIARY OF A MAP - MAP OF A BODY OUT IN SPACE)...

The agent (artist) functions as receiver of an external world (that agent ties self into an already existent system, outside the self); the piece exists as a private activity that, later, becomes public through documentation, reportage and rumour.

Presentation of self, The agent concentrates on self; the movement is circular (the agent starts an action, the action ends back at the agent) - the agent turns person into object that can be targeted in on (through photographs and film) by viewers.

Exchange-point. The exhibition area is a place where agent, in person meets viewer (the agent might function as a still point, that viewers move toward, or the agent might be part of the space that viewers happen to be in); the agent can introduce self in the present, by means of the past of future (autobiography, fantasy).

But, in order for you to have room of your own, in order for you to be free to move around the space, I have to move out of your way, I have to get out...

THE SHOW: SOUND (1972-1979)
Projection space. The exhibition-area is like a novel, a radio show, a movie to walk through: the piece consists of slide-projections (that transform the walls of the space into deep space, other places) and audiotape (the agent's voice is used as an instrument for alternate voices, other persons).

But sound is architecture. Both sound and architecture make a surrounding, an ambiance. Both sound and architecture make a context in which you can do something else...

Since a gallery/museum is a place where people come anyway, it can call people to a meeting, it can call the meeting to order: the gallery/museum is used as a plaza, as a town square.

But i'm fooling myself: the gallery/museum is never going to be a public place; if I really need, want, a public place, then I'd better find a way to get there...

INTERLUDE IN THE SHOW: Architectural Games, Prototypes (1980-1987)

The viewer activates (operates) an instrument (what the viewer has at hand) that in turn activates (builds) an architecture (what the viewer is in) that in turn activates (carries) a sign (what the viewer shows off): the viewer becomes the victim of a cultural which, however, stays in existence only so long as the viewer works to keep the instrument going.

The prototype piece is a house: a piece should be the kind of place in which a viewer might feel, literally, at home. Take the convention and subvert it; take this literally: the prototype piece is a house turned inside-out or upside-down.

But this is only the play architecture, rehearsals for architecture. Real architecture operates on local conditions...

THE SHOW: CITY (1988-2005)

Public space in an electronic age is space on the run. Public space is not space in the city but the city itself. Not nodes but circulation routes; not buildings and plazas, but roads and bridges. Public space is leaving home, and giving up all the comforts of the cluster-places that substitute for the home. Space on the run is life on the loose. There's no time to talk; there's no need for talk, since you have all the information you need on the radio you carry with you. There's no need for a person-to-person relationship, since you already have multiple relationships with voices on your radio, with images of persons in store windows and on billboards; there's no time to stop and have a relationship, which would be a denial of all those other bodies you're side-by-side with on the street, one different body after another, one body replacing another. There's no time and no need and no way to have 'deep sex': in a plague year, in a time of AIDS, bodies mix while dressed in condoms and armoured with vaginal shields - the body takes its own housing with it wherever it goes, it doesn't come out of its shell. The electronic age and the age of AIDS becomes intermixed in an age of virus, whether that virus is information or disease. Each person becomes too infected, either with information or with disease, to be with another. You come to visit, not to stay.