Memory Replacement Election Day 

On November 8th 2016 we together made history and created a unique piece of artwork, a collaborative piece made by hundreds of New Yorkers from all walks of life, ages and many languages on Union Square in the heart of New York city.

On Election Day 2016 I wore a white canvas on Union Square and asked people from all walks of life to write me a message.
Two Weeks Later I took the same piece to London, turned it over, and asked people on Leicester Square to write me a message.

It was a Collective Iconoclastic Street Art and Graffiti Project, the skin of a strange animal cast on the side of Union Square. As imagesurgeon noted, The People have the power! ( if they did but realise it?) Iconoclasm is a way of intelligently re establishing that power.

Two weeks later I took the same piece of canvas to Leicester Square and asked Londoners of all walks of life to write me a message, on Brexit and life. Here is the result.

We had our memory replaced this Election Day. Memory Replacement was a success.

This is about giving people weapons – little arrows of brushes and sharpies, and oddly enough people use these weapons to express their feelings of belonging and joy of one another. I want to use these tiny weapons to bring the best in people, a moment of joy with an arrow of paint. Where people from all walks of life put there heads together in a brief moment, a second of color.

Where day traders and day schoolers doodle together on the sidewalk.

One of the aims of the work is honesty via immediacy, unexpected interaction, friendly confrontation on the street and eliciting the same in people I met. Because I was not protected or tasked by an institution and there was no institutional context to my work – myself, the work and the result were entirely at the mercy of complete and unbridled honesty. . I surely relied on everyone being at least a bit nonplussed and curious and to have no time to feel self-conscious or deliberate. . And thirdly ( something imagesurgeon correctly noted ) I was a living sounding board placed on one hand between a guy who was shining shoes and on the other a couple of masked guys who were selling bricks (yeah, the real kind). 

With the understanding that Union Square has always been a place of gathering and dissent. via imagesurgeon:



The People have the power! ( if they did but realise it?) Iconoclasm is a way of intelligently re establishing that power.

Photographs of my Memory Replacement – Election Day performance on Union Square. Photographs by Ian Mack – ianmackstudios.com

The beginning of my Memory Replacement – Election Day performance on Union Square

This is about the simple joy of saying hello to a stranger in the city I love. Not the love of a puppy for his master but the acknowledgment of other humans in this vast universe for some unknown reason clinging to a tiny rock. And I am on a sidewalk just being totally odd and I love it.

Literally my only photograph from Memory Replacement Today London