The images here attempt to make sense of some thing, specifically the project that led to their creation. This project, initially a series of conversations, eventually became an intervention into the Art History course schedule of a public University. Over several days we, with the help of a group of students, audited classes and developed performative responses in the form of lectures. These public encounters produced a series of effects, which we reflect upon now. As part of the project students were asked to produce notes, the shape of which was left to them. Our only concern was that these notes relate to three points of interest. 1. Architecture: how does the shape of the lecture hall influence the production of art historical knowledge, 2. Context: how is the knowledge produced in the lecture hall situated within the institution, 3. Performance: how is the lectured delivered. The students responded with sketches, lists, poems, and descriptions.

These pictures also reflect our appropriation of a lecture given in 1969 by Robert Smithson. In many ways Smithson's talk on the Hotel Palenque reduces all of Mexico to an ethnocentric fantasy. It is a dangerous place according to Smithson, but not exclusively in a physical way, which makes his reduction evermore troublesome. For Smithson, Mexico's danger is mysterious and undefinable, somehow part of the very soil and air. Be careful, he warns, of how Mexico corrupts the unsuspecting North American psyche. He makes sense of Mexico by taking photographic notations of the decaying remains of a hotel, by fetishizing decay. Our work is to also make sense of what is left, to invoke a process rooted in the aesthetic experience of remains, but we also want to be aware of how we elicit wider meanings from our own informatic reductions, and their subsequent expansions. Essentially, these representations simultaneously refer, document, and conjure the events they are derived from. They are notes, but they also much more.



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