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nO fiXeD aDdrESs
audio installation first presented at Mercer Union
(curated by Liz Magor) in Toronto, Canada in 1987.
The piece has also been shown at CIAC Cent Jours (curated by Claude Gosselin) in Montréal in 1989, with the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver in 1991 (Keith Wallace, curator), and at the Sidney Biennale, 1992-1993, (The Boundary Rider, artistic director, Tony Bond)
A parallel bookwork of the piece was published in 1987 by Mercer Union in Toronto.
An interview with René Viau concerning the project was originally published by the online magazine, Synesthesie.
Mercer Union
CIAC
Contemporary Art Gallery
Sidney Biennale
The audience is informed of the piece by broadcast television commercials or by a series of matchbooks that have been distributed throughout the city.
Both the TV voiceover and the text printed inside the matchbook read:
What do you think you can see in a photo like that and a couple of notes, a name, a date they all seem so much the same. You know, I could tell you something real. But I can't tell you here, and I can't tell you right now. You'll have to call me.
I'm at 221-4793
Once the call is made, the piece is transferred from the public to the private domain.
...I don't know how you found out about this but I guess I should tell you that really wasn't my picture.
I don't think I could be talking to you like this if I thought you might know who I really was...
The confessional quality of the recorded voice soothes the listener, encouraging him through passive aggressive techniques to call back on another number again and again and then again. She seems alternately to control the situation and then suddenly to be vulnerable and pathetic as she recounts the stories of a photograph.
...First I want to tell you that that picture really was me after all. No, but it's not recent so I wasn't really lying before.. OK so this is the truth -- That picture was me a long time ago. But it's not me anymore....
and later:
Oh yeah -- You know that picture of me -- well it's not me and it never was. It's my sister. Everyone says we look a lot alike but I think she's prettier so I just like to say it's me...
Other stories are told, building one on top of the other, and a relationship between caller and recorded voice seems to begin to be constructed. The listener's position drifts between voyeur and respondent;
...no one has to know you're calling me...
he never has the opportunity to say anything until the very end, but he is the one who keeps the game going by dialing the next number and the next number and the next number after that. He may sense analogies to social, psychological and theatrical structures, but for the moment he's at the center of the ruse,
OK maybe we should try to have a real conversation.
Would you like to have a real conversation?
and the analysis can wait until later.
The piece builds into a complex soundtrack, folding back into previous recordings
...a little too fast or a little too slow and everything all around seems a little too big or a little too small flying all around you with its everywhere kind of noise or else you're just left out there in the middle of a huge nothing at all...
until finally, overloaded, it breaks and ends with a seeming straightforward description of the work.
...so now you know it's just the machine --and so I guess it doesn't really matter what I say here because...