[Loneliness] …feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged.
Olivia Laing, The Lonely City 2016
… a neighbour is primarily a thing, a traumatic intruder, someone whose different way of life disturbs us, throws the balance of our way of life off the rails, when it comes too close …
Slavoj Zizek, Violence 2009
Good evening, hate having to post this, but I'm
needing some pretty urgent food help due to some personal things going on. Any
help/suggestions would be so helpful right now. Thank you
I'm looking at putting up something on top of trellis
to stop my crazy bored neighbour annoying us and vandalizing trees.
Wondering what places you can go to locally where you can go, sit and simply feel safe when home life just gets too much.
A man was captured on our cam tonight crouched over
our front steps. We zoomed in on what he was doing and he was holding a tape
measure on the steps.
Woman who was on Eastlink bridge looking vulnerable
and had police attend. I'm here if you want a friend.
Moving to new st in couple of weeks …. Is it ok??? No
trouble hoons junkies or riff raff I hope
Anyone have a spareroom as im homeless and sleeping in
my car and can't get a house anywhere I dont care where it is as I have drive
all over for work
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To the man with the agressive Pit bull in the lake park. Your dog
is going to attack children and other dogs. It was already menacing the ducks.
What
security camera options are available for a property with no wi-fi?
Keep your kids close and keep an eye out for this
creep!!
Does anyone know why there are helicopters overhead every night lately?
Did
anyone feel that Earthquake?
I am just wondering, does anybody know this man the one in the white hat his name is Peter
Did anyone just see the massive meteor in the sky a few moments ago?
I am just wondering, does anybody know this man the one in the white hat his name is Peter
Did anyone just see the massive meteor in the sky a few moments ago?
Maybe you need to rephrase that.
Not sure what you are asking
What's your point
Why does everyone keep caring so much about this.
Does anyone know what the deal with new st is? Everytime I walk past there is a lot of dodgy looking people that seem to be looking shifty, rubbish dumped everywhere and aggressive yelling sometimes coming from some of the houses?
This morning around 9.30 there was a man throwing rocks at moving cars, didn't say anything, seemed very calm and completely detached. Very strange. The police were called
Seriously. The world must be so hard for you live in if this is such a big deal
Any ideas where i can find a justice of peace today? Urgent please
Suspicious man tried to lure our dog through our back
gate. Wearing high vis and driving a ford stationwagon.
︎
Since 2001 during periods of feeling alone, alientated from the people who live around me, I have walked the suburban landscape in search of an elusive sense of community. I began to collect quotes from social media community groups and junk mail texts. The process of capturing visual traces of anonymous inhabitants in my local area, and selecting snippets of conversations shared by people unknown to one another and yet living in close proximity, revealed undercurrents of collective estrangement in an unexceptional urban neighbourhood.
Dear Neighbour is an account of the ways that disconnection is encoded in suburban streetscapes and through the disembodied voices of social media users. The project explores signs and symbols of estrangement between neighbours at a time of social, technological and environmental change affecting how we live together, how we see each other, and what we call community. When the digital world is dominated by rising tensions, and the balance of our daily lives is continually disrupted by the unfamiliar, this project invites viewers to ponder the passing of neighbourliness, and face to face connection. By bringing both personal and shared tensions, contradictions and unease to the fore, I ask: Who is my neighbour?
The first iteration of Dear Neighbour was exhibited at Maroondah Federation Estate Gallery, Ringwood, Dec 2023 - Jan 2024. The installation included a backdrop of shadowy figures printed onto industrial screening mesh, with scattered junkmail and Facebook community noticeboard quotes. It also included a beautiful soundscape by my partner, Peter Miller, which you may hear on the artist walk through video HERE
Peter says about his soundscape:
My sound work oddly.shaky.land is created from multiple recordings I've collected of the ambient background noise in two specific locations: the Ringwood Eastlink underpass and the Eastland shopping complex, places that I find myself passing through on an almost daily basis.
Even though those of us who live in cities hear this kind of ubiquitous ambience all the time, we mostly don’t notice it due to our brain's remarkable ability to filter it from our awareness. To emphasise the unique qualities of these soundscapes, I’ve layered the recordings of each location multiple times to distil their essence, and then ‘played’ the resulting sound blends as if they were musical instruments. Framing them in a musical manner like this allows me to re-discover them in terms of their purest form, a kind of hollow swirling that evokes a spectral nostalgic sense of motion. To accentuate these inherent qualities, I've added sparse melodic instrumentation of a more conventional nature.
