Filing Cabinet

Event Horizons

2010-12-02T18:29:00.004+11:00

My catalogue essay on Pierre Huyghe's One Million Kingdoms for the Event Horizon exhibition at CCP, Melbourne 2010, can now be downloaded from:
www.ccp.org.au/docs/catalogues/EventHorizon.pdf

Slow Art

2009-12-03T16:43:00.005+11:00

Slow Art, Slow Time ...
my catalogue essay on the Slow Art Collective (Dylan Martorell / Chaco Kato / Tony Adams / Ash Keating ) is now available to pick up for FREE from BUS Projects November 2009 www.busprojects.com.au
You can also read the article online at http://sac-ts2.blogspot.com/

words elsewhere

2009-08-20T11:50:00.005+10:00

my article on art and war is out now in broadsheet
go here to download
http://www.cacsa.org.au/now/index_frames_bs.html

Branches

2009-07-21T11:34:00.002+10:00

Darwin's tree of life, the only illustration in Origin of the Species. Looks like music ...

Found Sound # 6 All Together Now

2009-07-09T19:24:00.003+10:00

All Together Now was the final sonic event in a series of six presented by Found Sound: The Experimental Instrument Project from January - June 2009. We invited Dale Gorfinkel & Ben Kolaitis with Albert Mishriki & Dylan Martorell to collaborate on two improvised performances - the artists then presented a selection of their original instruments to everyone who showed up for an all in sound-up featuring experimental vibrating percussive instruments, vibrottles, vibraphone keys, modified trumpet, harp made from tree branches and wood, hand-made circuitry and electronics, modified violin, springy boom-booms, cymbals, lead pencil drawing-circuits and plastic pipes. Yeaaaaaaaah!

Found Sound will be back in 2010. Anyone interested in participating in the next program of events is most welcome to drop us a line. Amelia and Albert say - clik bing swazzle clack trik shhhiz whirr prrrrrring ...

Video by Drew Roberts - thanks Drew!

www.foundsoundproject.blogspot.com

North Star Dark Star

2009-07-04T16:11:00.004+10:00

my review of North Star Dark Star curated by Greg Fullerton at the Narrows can be found in here in unmagazine 3.1

Wonderlands

2009-05-30T11:52:00.008+10:00

click HERE to download my interview with Timothy Webster on his video installation 'Cristo Redentor' (blindside gallery, march 2009)

Experiencing Experience: A Conversation between Timothy Webster and Amelia Douglas

'In WONDERLANDS Cristo Redentor, time is folded and constantly reconfigured as the front most layer of video is forever dissolving into the background. This piece is a composition of many experiences from over an hour and a half. The constant reconfiguring of the frames undermines our memory of it, yet instills a sense of what is there. Memory becomes an ad-hoc whole, composed of a myriad of fleeting moments and feelings, yet always tempered by our present experience. The motivation is to reconstruct the site in a way that seems to be disintegrating, so as to mimic our own inattention to the moment itself and therefore our desire to capture it forever, for later.'

Tim Webster 2009
http://timwebster.tv/media/catalogues/wonderlands_interview_e.pdf

Glacier

2009-03-25T21:43:00.000+11:00

Pierre Huyghe: A Forest of Lines

2009-03-25T21:18:00.005+11:00

---_/- my interview with Pierre Huyghe can be found here =---

'At the Sydney Opera House a unique experience occurs throughout the course of a day and a night. An event with no beginning and no end, no division between stage and public, no specified path to take – it is a theatre liberated from rules. From the stalls to the circles to the stage, a forest of trees has grown and spread throughout the entire Concert Hall. The light of dawn barely shines on this valley obscured by clouds. This is an in-between reality, an image of an environment, a fact that appears for a brief moment just before vanishing.

Someone walking between the trees tells a story. As the voice draws the audience into the forest, the lyrics of the song tell how to find a way out; out of the Concert Hall and into the reality of a place elsewhere.

The Concert Hall presents a geographical displacement. This image is a diversion, an extension towards another world and yet it is the same. The song is a map for a journey towards what constitutes the image. It is a line following a chain of events in the life of an environment.

The cloud of narratives obscures the necessity to find an ecology between the image and its environment.' (Pierre Huyghe, BoS)

interview at http://www.melbourneartjournal.unimelb.edu.au/E-MAJ/currentissue.htm

2008-08-30T18:59:00.003+10:00

2008-08-30T18:49:00.002+10:00

Standard Procedures at the Scene of the Accident

2008-08-30T18:47:00.000+10:00

The Bacon Lair

2008-08-10T13:49:00.002+10:00

In the horsehead forest lies the lare of the bacon. Furred green streak of fat wraps slow around the cave, vicious, hard diamonds of putrescent glittermeat flash light beams from the depths to the swirling stars. my sleeping bag smells like damp chickens and skivvies.

Space Simulator

2008-06-22T17:19:00.003+10:00

Thomas Demand
c-type photograph
2003

Tonal Etymology

2008-06-16T18:05:00.004+10:00

cinnabar green
cadmium orange
aureoline yellow
ghost white
rose madder
alizarin crimson
pink lake
terre verte
turquoise
permanent red violet

'puce' used to mean flea coloured, from Latin pulex via French

Psychotropicalism

2008-06-10T21:37:00.003+10:00

download the new Unmagazine here http://www.unmagazine.org/un2_1.html

Dylan Martorell

2008-06-10T21:32:00.008+10:00

Go here to download my text for Dylan's exhibition at Craft Victoria, June 2008: www.halbumzzz.blogspot.com

Ways of World Making

2008-06-10T21:27:00.002+10:00

In May 2002, artist and writer David Robbins began his description of the conditions of contemporary life by confronting the changed status of illusion. “The illusion-generator”, he wrote, “is now too weak to launch imagined narratives free of the gravitational pull of reality and into the self-completing orbit known as ‘fiction’. Prevented from reaching this condition of full-on, illusionistic make-believe, ‘story’, now grounded and weakened, is infiltrated by a host of earth-bound narratives – reality’s narratives. Fiction and non-fiction contaminate each other. The contamination destabilises each category until, eventually, between them a new equilibrium is attained. The equilibrium point is determined by elements of both, but ultimately gravity weights things in favour of reality.”

Robbins was here ruminating on the widespread move toward what he called “fictionalising the present” in recent years: the production of a new equilibrium between hard reality and soft fiction that makes it difficult to distinguish one from the other. This condition is, importantly, historically specific – emerging as it does out of an era in which the rich and acute tension of ficto-reality touches all aspects of life. We might say, for example, that contemporary life across many parts of the globe is fundamentally shaped by invented mythologies (products) and imaginary stories (image-worlds). Pinning down where story ends and life begins initiates a drama on an ontological scale. And for many contemporary artists working today, confronting this drama begins not with a question of delineation but of navigation: how to work with rather than work out the powerful tension between a limitless fantastical wilderness and the real business of being-in-the-world?

Popular Science

2008-06-10T21:25:00.000+10:00

Stalker

2008-06-10T21:20:00.001+10:00

in the jungle all light is paralysed

2008-05-08T20:29:00.002+10:00

Robert Smithson says:

"In the jungle, all light is paralysed. Particles of color infected the reflections on the twelve mirrors. Color as an agent of matter filled the reflected illuminations with shadowy tones,pressing the light into dusty material opacity. Flames of light were imprisoned in a jumbled spectrum of greens. The world color means at its origins to 'cover' or hide. Matter eats up light and covers it. Luminous lines emanate from the edges of the mirrors, yet the surfaces reflections manifest nothing but greens. Deadly greens that devour light.I'm trying to find areas, zones, regions, which do not have the burden of associations. There is no point trying to come up with the right answer because it is inevitably wrong."

J. Eric Thompson says:

"The Aztec thought the crest of the earth was the top of a huge saurian monster, a kind of crodocile. It is probable that the Mayan had a similar belief, but it is not impossible that at the same time they considered to the world to consist of seven compartments, perhaps stepped as four layers."

2008-03-04T16:59:00.001+11:00

black polar bears

2008-03-03T18:11:00.002+11:00

If you put your knees to the ground and hold the backs of my legs ... I am an octopus, an epiphyte swamped in cillia, a suckerfish, too obvious, there is no I just a field full of alien matter and some chemical olfaction that I can't control that moves like green waves behind my eyes, or a herd of black polar bears stampeding an inky cloud.

Venus

2008-02-12T19:53:00.000+11:00

2008-02-12T19:40:00.000+11:00

2007-11-21T19:39:00.001+11:00

Gordon Matta-Clark
Office Baroque

Popsicle

2007-11-02T16:39:00.000+11:00

burnt hair
yeah yeah
weren't there
yeah yeah
learnt chair
yeah yeah

wooooo oh oh

burnt hair (repeat)

confirmation

2007-10-21T20:52:00.000+10:00

the air is on fire. sky tasting like soil. one slow mouthful won't swallow the edges.

list #34

2007-10-16T23:16:00.000+10:00

a faked history. the light from the stars that is always old. a pine forest. the matchbox museum. a published miracle. the smell of snow. lead flakes. a hole in the sky.

2007-09-23T17:34:00.000+10:00

Attenborough - Lyre Bird

2007-09-18T12:11:00.001+10:00

2007-09-11T18:49:00.001+10:00

Jen Stark

2007-09-07T21:14:00.002+10:00

Notwithstanding

2007-08-12T18:39:00.003+10:00

From the roof I throw stones that crack the street, leaving crevices as dark and as blue as the ocean floor. Everything here smells like snow. Shadows are always cool against the cliffs of slate and glass. In the centre of the piazza, a tower. On the top floor, a man with a ram's head shakes his horns slowly back and forth. From his fingers slide bright strings of dough, dripping and sizzling on the stones far below. In place of fingernails matt small poultices of leaves. The veterans all sleep loudly beneath creamy folds of paper. I fold it, and then fold creases and imaginary creases until the picture is embedded into the plane and springs away like an origami box, falling open, trampled thickly by bare feet.

A bulbous city, lightly covered with earth. All the policemen carry paper lanterns and keep tigers in their pockets in case of an emergency, pull tail. I'm driving a 1984 Toyota Celica, white, with pop-up headlights and a broken indicator. The chassis stinks of bongwater. The map is stuck between the seats. I ripped it, prying out directions from beneath the sticky vinyl. Our contact was refusing to budge. Burnt chickens and leaking gas pipes. We could be in Thailand, but we're not. I wanted to go home and cook pasta. Bringing deep pans of salty water to a luxurious, rolling boil and frying up mushrooms with garlic, fresh chillis and handfuls of chopped parsley. I flicked on the radio, poured a glass of wine. The telephone rang. I cradled the receiver and waited.

Hello?
Who is this?
Who is this?
Hello? Who is this?

The phone hit the floor with a dull click and skidded across the linoleum. I picked it up carefully and with my right hand jimmied up the window sash and tossed it into space. I was wearing a powderblue suit that day, with black loafers, a pink necktie, blue shirt and cufflinks shaped like bullets. I was looking for clues.

Nathan Gray

2007-08-10T17:18:00.002+10:00

The Fold: Nathan Gray
Joint Hassles, 2a Mitchell Street Northcote 3071
27th July to August 17, 2007.

Salt crystals on paper. Psychadelic dreams. Museological mutations. Nathan Gray's latest exhibition of sculptures and works on paper at Joint Hassles is like some light, fragile portal into a world sparkling with the residue of hallucinogens. Almost all the pieces feature hand-made fragments of paper, stained, marbled and saturated with organic swirls of colour. The collages are pinned behind glass like specimens in a muesum or flattened out origami, and matched with titles like "Pyschraficial Hood" and "The Hawknotist". Sprawling beneath the framed compositions are a series of free-standing sculptural growths. In making these works, Gray began by constructing simple, geometric frames from pieces of wood. The skeletal structures were bolted together using wingnuts and then used as supports for aggregations of paper, prints, cut-outs and string. The evolution of the forms seems slapdash, but they also have something of the lyrebird bower about them, as if Gray has nested out in the gallery and built little encampments out of shiny, precious lures.

The works in this show were originally generated as a response to Gray's recent experience at the Osaka Museum of Ethnology in Japan: "All the best parts of all the cultures of the world were mixed together, masks, costumes musical instruments, weapons and rituals. I tried to recreate some of the energy of this place by making my own masks and tools." Gray describes his collages and sculptures as abstract representations of relics, collected from a fictional neolithic village. "But instead of being ethnological", he explained, " I realized how much I was being influenced by album covers and band posters. I guess this is my culture." Music has played a large part in Gray's artistic productions for several years now: he has been collaborating as one-half of Snawklor for nearly a decade, and has also designed album-covers and t-shirts for various Melbourne band, including Architecture in Helskinki. The Grateful Dead album-covers from the 1970s are cited as a particular source of inspiration, and one that feeds Gray's broader interest in psychadelia and "the unseen". Traces of the Dead's fractal mandalas are particularly noticeable in Gray's Inspirational Vibrelation and Ud. Shaped like stylised guitars, these wall mounted sculptures sprout with quasi-symmetrical paper trails.

It then seems particularly appropriate that Gray has also been using his exhibition as a container for sound. The visual component is complemented by three musical performances in the gallery. Gray's own trio, The Fold Ensemble, is playing on Saturday 11th of August at 2pm, and features synths, loops, recorders, vocals, wah and (I am promised) extended guitar solos. Electronic duo Halfman/Halfmoffarah performed in July, and Snawklor held court amongst the collages last week. "As always", Gray writes, the exhibition "deals with my continued investigations into display and composition, the psychedelic and unseen, music, energy and colour." In his work at Joint Hassles, Gray has taken these ideas and constructed an unnatural history that remains poised as if on the brink of collapse.

More Nathan Gray work at www.undodesign.com

Sound waves

2007-08-01T16:00:00.000+10:00

Streamside Day

2007-07-30T21:52:00.000+10:00

I'm sitting on the floor in a polygonal enclosure waiting for the film to start. The walls outside are coated with iridescent emerald foil. As the lights go out, we sink into the half-light of dawn. In a long crane shot, cleared lands and tree carcasses streams past the camera. The sound of cicadas intensifies into a dense cascade of audio. Under the forest canopy, woodland animals venture into the frame: a rabbit, an owl, deer and a racoon. The deer drinks from a stream, oblivious to the camera. Cut from the woodland to the suburbs and a Bambi look-alike traipses down an urban driveway to enter a new, empty residence. Its hooves click on the kitchen linoleum. Outside on the street, a group of kids play house in cardboard boxes. We speed out of the city down the highway into the valley. The journey is inter-cut with brief, fragmented scenes: twin children crouch in a vast sea of grass, a swarm of bees engulfs the base of an enormous tree. “That’s our house right there”, says one girl, pointing to a miniature architectural model on a table in an empty room.

The parade begins slowly. A fire-fighter truck, cars and buses roll slowly into town, followed by a procession of revellers dressed in makeshift costumes and cardboard boxes. “Welcome to Streamside Day”, the poster reads. Children in animal masks wander the streets like zombies. The soundtrack is saccharine, like a twisted ice-cream van jingle. The cops watch from the sidelines, their faces lit by the flashing lights of emergency services. All dialogue is muffled. On a stage in front of an almost empty town square, the mayor begins her speech: “A great community spirit is starting”, she announces, speaking into the void, her audience distracted by the commencing feast. Guests navigate through tables laden with “traditional” settler’s fare, heaping their paper plates with food. As the sky darkens, a fake moon rises above the houses like a giant balloon. A man takes to the stage with an acoustic guitar. In front of a few, idle spectators, he performs the “Streamside theme song: "a flower blossom, raising through the falling leaves, the day’s just begun, light through the trees, this is the same light that falls in dreams. It’s a streamside Celebration." The tune is at once unbearably kitsch and strangely sincere, like a Julee Cruise song in a David Lynch movie. As the day comes to a close and the town is left empty, the camera scans streets strewn with discarded boxes and debris. Two moons – the full moon and the inflatable balloon moon – hang lightly in the sky. Someone flicks a switch. The moon flickers out and is pulled back down to earth. The walls begin to move again.

(Notes on Pierre Huyghe's installation Streamside Day Follies at Dia: Chelsea, New York, October 31, 2003 to January 11, 2004.)

No knowledge zones

2007-07-25T14:51:00.000+10:00

"'No-knowledge' is a condition whereby everything one assumes to be true, or that one thinks one knows, participates in an essence that is incomprehensible. Knowledge repels itself. True knowledge is a voluntary freedom divested of all fear."
Simon of Taibutheh

Ideas are pulled out of white noise. White noise is the unrepresentable totality of phenomenological and mental perception, as constructed by the human animal. Like sentience, white noise is an invisible screen, a collusion so vast it cannot be seen (looking at the sun burns holes in the retina). In order to navigate through this impossible terrain, people try and shape solid pockets of meaning and isolate them as reference points. This process can be described as subtractive selection. Similar to the way that Michelangeo carved his marble sculptures out of a single piece of stone, idea pockets develop by scooping away the totality in order to find the singular. These singularities are the landmarks that puncture the void.

Sometimes it's difficult to determine who or what makes the landmarks visible: do you sculpt your own pockets of meaning or are you stumbling across ones already created? Outside my window is a street lined with houses. If I look at the houses, I see them either as self contained units, or, if I'm trying to go somewhere, as impediments along a route. Walking to the shops, I follow the road. I don't even think about it. The road is already made, it flows around the houses, and in order to get where I want to go I stick to path. I don't jump the fences and stroll through other people's gardens. I am a model citizen. I observe the codes. I am afraid.

A world without landmarks is a world without knowledge. To live in a no-knowledge zone can be likened to total immersion in white noise. This prospect is a dream, utopian, and yet it is critical to maintain because the acquisition of knowledge – as it regulated today, at 3:11 on Wednesday, July 25, in Melbourne, Australia – currently appears geared solely toward the maintenance of the economy. What is referred to as knowledge is then not knowledge at all. It is illusory, a fiction, a necessary lie. Perhaps we should ditch it for the sake of something else; a construction site, a no-knowledge zone, the potential for collective control.

In neo-liberal societies, the individual is presented with the dubious honour of self-regulation. Self-management, self-control, self-policing are critical strategies for a market in which competiton and prosperity are predicated upon the individual's capacity for self-maintenance. The focus on the self, the privatisation of labour, is echoed by widespread privatisation of public services and the removal of collective infrastructure. Any problems that the individual may encounter cannot then be referred. Kafka knew this condition well. Call up the courts and the telephone gabbles nonsense. There is no external law. The other end of the line has been leased out to a stand in, tenured by a corporate mouthpiece.

The singularity demanded by the system in order for the individual to prosper is a blindfold. With this blindfold firmly in place (helpfully fastened by its wearers) the threat of external perspective is neutralised. The erasure of the outside nears completion when the borders between life and work begin to crumble. Neo-liberalism relies upon the immaterialisation of labour: work is no longer definable as the task that one performs or the object produced, but is rather properly situated in the mind of the worker. The model citizen is a living, breathing, curriculum vitae, whose success is measured solely by an ability to overcome impediments to prosperity. Flexi-time workers in an immaterial labour force arguably bear most of the brunt of this affect. They are, literally, their work. Any free time "earned" is on the flip side of labour, a dualism that always requires the gift of the self. That it is a gift and not a requirement is the ingenious keystone in the maintenance of false agency.

Such maintenance is strengthened by the belief that all landmarks encountered in the void of white noise are created by the spectator. They come into being seemingly only at the moment they are sighted. They have no history, no past, and no future. They stand alone, each individual believing that they are the author of the fiction of knowledge, but in effect, agency lies elsewhere. The most dangerous symptom of this process is the generation of a time code: the neverending present, the eternal now. Ideas, when recognised, have no context. Their value is graded by the econony, meaning the perpetuation of the state of the eternal present.

I am reminded here of a mouse in a labyrinth. The mouse, trained to go through the labyrinth, does not consider the possibility that there may be secret doorways. The mouse can not bear the thought of the unseen. It does not entertain the potential of secrets. The maze is then produced only by the mouse, who tracks through its long corridors unaware that it is responsible for the path. The labyrinth is real, but outside the labyrinth are the no-knowledge zones. What is needed is to be able to move through these zones, and with the help of others, recognise the landmarks in the void by the context of their production.

Conversation No. 5

2007-07-16T13:33:00.001+10:00

Do you want to ring up your husband?
No.
I'm ringing up your husband.
Oh.
Who is your husband, not your old husband, your new husband? Dougie's your new husband, right? Oh here he is, your husband. Quick talk to him!
Hello, who is this?
It's your new husband! Your new husband! Your new husband! Oh look give give me the phone. Hello Dougie are you there? How are ya? Look, the wife just wanted to talk to you cos she's so much in love. Look I'll see you later, I've got some rolls for you. Here, talk to your new husband (tries to give her the phone, she pushes it back, he tries to give her the phone. She takes it reluctantly) No, he wants you. Look, tell him you love him, Tell him, your new husband, you love him. Oh give me the phone. Dougie? What's that? Bring the wife over? Yes. I'll bring the wife over. What's that? You're already married Dougie, you're already married. Look, I'll bring the wife over she's going to have veal parmigiana and then she'll be right over here I'll put your wife back on (He hands her the phone).
Ask him how much he loves ya! Get him to tell you how much he loves ya!
He says he wants to know where the honeymoon is, when's the honeymoon?
Ask him where he's taking you for the honeymoon!
He says he's taking me to Geelong.
Do you want me to talk to him again?
No, he's your husband, you talk to to him. He wants you, not me. He wants you.
No, he says he wants you.
What?!
You're going to bed?
Give me the phone! You're going to bed with the wife Dougie is that right? You tell her so she'll understand here. And then we'll hang up.
Oh (she talks on the phone).
What?
Veal Parmigiana.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. What? He wants you.
No, he wants you.
Ask him how much he loves you.
Hello, can you hear me? Do you want to speak to him?
No he doesn't want to speak to me, he wants you.(She hangs up phone).

We're going to fatten you up for the jig a jig wth Dougie. Now, you promise to go and see and your husband tonight?
He wants to see you.
No, that's not the point, you can do things for him that I can't.

(They sip on Camparis)

He's alright Dougie, a nice bloke Dougie, I approve of your husband. I approve of your husband. Alright darling, we're going to feed you then take you to your husband for a night of mad passionate love. Mad passionate love. Alright? Enjoy your night of mad passionate love with Dougie.
Who's Dougie?
Your new husband, Dougie.
I don't want him.
Whatd'ya mean you don't want him, you're married to him, you made a promise at 67 Grover Road. I was best man at the wedding. Ask Dougie.

(This is a transcript of an actual conversation that I recently overheard in the pub. The couple were in their mid 60s, each carrying a large red white and blue homeless-person bag. The phone was a very sleek, new Nokia.)

virtual agency

2007-06-28T23:19:00.000+10:00

The average budget spent on game development internationally is ten million dollars per game. 80 percent of them fail in the first 12 months. The best professional gamers can earn up to a quarter of a million US dollars per year on the competition circuit.

Since 2001, almost all new recruits to the American army have been gamers. The major means of enlistment in the United States is a computer game called America’s Army, available free online with a direct link to the Army recruitment page. It’s a first person shooter game, produced predominantly by young (16-24 year old) male animators. Each year the design team are taken on a three-day boot camp by the American Army to “test” the new weaponry for accurate incorporation into the virtual world. The pentagon funds the game and its operation. The virtual world is the primary training ground for war. EMPOWER YOURSELF. FREE THE OPPRESSED. FIGHT FOR FREEDOM. These are the game slogos of America’s Army.

The enemy targets in American Army are unfailingly Arabs. The illegal import of American games into middle-eastern countries has now motivated Palestinian game designers to develop their own counter-product called Under Seige. In this first-person shooter, the Palestininan protagonist is required to shoot and kill Israelis. The Israeli army is portrayed as a force of extreme brutality. The demographic of the players is the same demographic required for military recruitment.

In the ten fatal shootings in American high schools during recent years, all shooters were gamers. One fourteen year-old boy walked into a classroom, fired eight rounds, and killed eight people. He had only ever picked up a real gun once before, but he had the aim of a highly trained professional. Most of his victims were shot in the head. Weapons analysts have long indicated that there is something about the human face that usually deters direct facial shootings. In games like Doom or Manhunter or Postal, head shootings are rewarded with bonus points.

It used to be a myth that playing first-person shooter games stimulates aggressive “effects” and hostile emotions in the cerebral cortex, but now they’ve tracked the brain waves of the gamers and the theories are confirmed: it is possible to virtually simulate the brain activity of a real experience. To the brain, the virtual and the real “feel” the same. The problem being that games are powerfully affective educational tools that groom minds to behave and react in specific ways and are as such the perfect vehicle for propaganda. They are often devoid of consequences, encourage instant gratification, and promote extreme hostility. The sense of agency proferred by a game is an illusion – much like the illusion of choice in a “democratic” society. It’s a blindfold that covers inadequacy and masks deficits in actual inter-personal activity. The feeling of achievement is one of the most marketable and most lucrative elements of the contemporary game industry: games that don’t “reward” the viewer, don’t sell. If you can receive accolade and victory in the virtual world, perhaps you don’t need it in the real world? Or, if you can receive accolade and victory in the virtual world, perhaps this is transferable onto real life situations: American Army desensitises shooter responses to victims, encourages competition, and demands aggression in order to survive. No coincidence that these qualities are also the necessary components of survival within capitalist societies.

The minutia of detail and speed and rapid decision making required in games like Star Quest are highly desirable skills in working the stock market. In South Korea and America, retired gamers (the average gamer career lasts only six years, and gamers are often “too old” to play by their mid 20s), are officially recognised as prime contenders for stock market trading. The “best” retirees are headhunted by multi-billion dollar corporate finance industry.

from: Gamer Revolution 28/6/07 ABC 9:30, Red Apple Media

The Sunshine Singers - Nobody Jesus but you

2007-06-28T18:33:00.001+10:00

Palindromes

The Way Things Go

2007-06-14T14:00:00.001+10:00

worker

2007-05-29T13:03:00.000+10:00

Grin without a Cat

2007-05-27T12:29:00.000+10:00

"When a living being ceases to exist, does all that it has been cease to exist as well? How to integrate the memory, the experience, the presence of the dpearted, amongst those still here, the living? When it comes to cells, the usual idea used to be that when a cell died, nothing remained of it. It was here before; now it isn't, end of story. But the collective doesn't behave in the same fashion when a cell dies as when a cell hasn't died. there is a presence, a memory, of the dead. The collective acts differently because certain members died in its environment. The Cheshire cat is a metaphor for the fact that after the death of a cell something very surprising can persist, not at all what you might expect. Alice is very surprised not by her memory of a smile that has disappeared, but by what remains of a cat that has disappeared, a grin without a cat."

Jean Claude Ameisen

In the philosophy of history

2007-05-21T22:47:00.000+10:00

Historiography is the writing of the writing of history. Contemporary historiography is the writing of history in the present. How can history, supposedly a measure of things past, unfold in the present? First admit that history is always mediated by the present - historical writing is a translation. There are no originals. There is no code. But nonetheless things do happen. And they happen in specific circumstances and specific places - in bedrooms, in streets, across the ocean, in aeroplanes, in cinemas, on tv. Things happen all the time. In order to become historical their happening must be contingent and witnessed.

This is not a history of the situation but of the event. Situations can be engineered - they can occur on their own. They do not need witnesses. Situations may then also be contained. But an event is always in excess of itself. It involves elements that cannot be named or quantified or represented, perhaps because of their exposure to the multitude. Events need witnesses. the only event that needs no witness is a miracle. Events rely on interception and a slight delay in recognition. Their significance is difficult to discern.

So we have a history of situations, that is also a history of events, and an event unto itself.

1) Things Happen.
2) These are addressed, as in on an envelope, because they have witnesses.
3) They are re-presented and exposed.
4) Things Happen.

The loop is never perfect but at each cycle goes out of sync. The durations are imprecise because there are too many extenuating circumstances. Circumstances are always extenuating.

A philosophy of history is necessarily linked to a philosophy of time. Because perception is key, history has a delay. Instant history is anathema to historical knowledge. The news is not history. There is then a sense of presentation about this model. It has to reach back and grasp the past in the present, preserve its historicity, but also admit the colours of its pallette.

The subject of historiography is not precisely a subject. Agency is bestowed. Visibility is no guarantor of history. Historiography is a methodology that lets in elements of the past and the future as well as the glinting perspectives that catch on the sides of this paradigm in its transition from action to address. Time is a subjective construct that dilates and expands, with no respect for the calendar or the clock. Knowing temporality is subjective means acknowledging the subject's own context and admitting the presence of formats. Even in their subjective relativity, time and history are constituted by formats.

Where does word play or play in general stand in this model of historiography? Play would be dysfunctional without work. Reactionary? Yes. To play with something, like language especially, you need to know how language works. Same with images. So this model of historiography encompasses play as one modus operandi.

The problem of the subject remains, but after play is admitted into the fray this is softened by the possibilities of dispersal.
In its duplicity, double meaning, the subject-subject is the maker and the product, the consumer and the producer. Subject - party to or confined by. Border markings across unsigned lines.

Maybe the present is not synonymous with the now, it stretches forwards and backwards. The open present lets in aliens. Things happen, but do we know why? Space is maintained as a certain coefficient or constant - ie the elements are for the most part localised (context) and situated in or respond to specific conditions. This is despite the generation of non-locatable forces (event). Is the differentiation of situations and events a question of timing?

The subject is a character. The character is a coalition of acts. Not all subjects are characters, but because they share characteristics they can move through each other. Characters can be fictional and non fictional but they are constituted by actions. The subject is content-based. Is this too dualistic? Dualism is the enemy of this model because in the process of turning hstory into the philosophy of history, all potentialies and possibilities briefly rise up. So: the perception of time is non-verifiable, but occurences are nonetheless reliant upon specific, externally imposed formats of temporality for their dissemination.

History is a state of production and consumption. It has to take care of the process of its dissemination. Historiography is the means by which the productive/distributive aspects of history may be addressed. The address offers up a subject, which brings with it a frame, a series of locatable elements that are juxtaposed with the absolute non-locatibility of the event's shrapnel. In these conjunctions we begin to live.

Garden of Harmonious Interest

2007-05-21T22:25:00.000+10:00

The lake takes up the most space. There's a bridge on the other side and some reeds around the edges. The sky is faded.
Most of the colour has been bleached by the sun from someone's window. Except for the red on the temple roof mirrored in the water below. I can't see anyone here. Corners have been cut and smoothed out. I can't remember the names of the trees anymore.

sophie calle

2007-04-10T12:38:00.000+10:00

The shape of the future and memory, 1966

2007-04-10T11:56:00.000+10:00

"My thoughts on art, like Humpty Dumpty, have fallen off the wall of language and will never be put together again. The 'visual' memories of something terrible are buried under pressure in my tiers of glass sheet. Pictures of the future slip from my sight through the progression of mirrors. Memories have a way of trapping one's notion of the future and placing it in a brittle series of mental prisons. The 'time traveler' as he advances deep into the future discovers a decrease in movement, the mind enters a state of 'slow motion' and perceives the gravel and dust of memory on the empty fringes of consciousness. Like H.G. Wells, he sees the 'ice along the sea margin', a double perspective of past and future that follows a projection that vanishes into a non-existent present."

Robert Smithson, 1966, 332.

thursday night

2007-04-02T22:46:00.000+10:00

The house in the forest is like a concrete bunker. Huge, solid, yet peculiarly difficult to look at. It seems impenetrable. There are no doors and no windows. Protruding from the roof is a large, semi-transparent orange tube. It looks like it is made of plastic. A human body would only just fit inside. Perhaps that is its feeding mechanism. I enter the house by some subterranean means but I cannot remember what it encloses.

2007-03-12T22:46:00.000+11:00

torn wrinkle

2007-02-25T11:07:00.000+11:00

a table piled with chicken bones
and itchy flakes of sunlight

In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni

2007-01-24T19:06:00.000+11:00

We go around and around in the night and are consumed by fire.

This latin palindrome was attributed to the orator Sidonius Apollinaire, and reads identically forwards or backwards.

"The phrase that reverses itself, constructed letter by letter like a labyrinth, perfectly represents the form and content of perdition. We have not sought the formula by turning the world upside down in books, but by wandering around, together with four or five rather disreputable persons."

- Guy Debord,
(in Oeuvres Cinematographiques completes, Gallimard, Paris, 1994).

Berlin 1997

2007-01-24T18:51:00.000+11:00

In the Archive

2007-01-24T18:43:00.001+11:00

In the 1980s, the East German Stasi came to the realisation that their surveillance of citizens was so absurdly zealous that it had become impossible to manage, let alone utilise, the millions of files collected. By 1989, the Berlin headquarters of the Stasi contained nearly 7 million files collected by the East Germans on East German citizens crammed into 100 kilometres of storage space. Whilst some of the dossiers undoubtedly reviewed potentially incriminating material, the majority constituted a catalogue of banality. Even the most insignificant actions were reported and recorded. In 1987, an undercover agent denounced a housewife in his apartment block for allowing her daughter to wear blue jeans. Neighbours informed on their neighbours’ haircuts, telephone habits, or reported if their television aerials were oriented in a suspiciously western direction. Notes were filed on the fashion habits of known artists. There were eight kilometres of files of transcripts of phone conversations recorded in Berlin alone. Add to this the so-called "Bureau of Olfactory": a warehouse stacked with thousands of jars containing pieces of fabric stolen from houses (notably, dirty underwear and socks), that were used to train sniffer dogs to track suspects. It was joked at the time that the only information you needed to provide your taxi driver with was your name, for they would already know your address.

After the revolutions at the end of 1989, the files that hadn’t been destroyed by the Stasi were made available for public review. Which raised several questions; when everyone is on file, how can anyone possibly be incriminated? When every action is recorded, what constitutes history? And how are we to sift the clues from the junk? Within the archive, the inconsequential and the incriminating sit side by side.

Topography of a Bird

2007-01-24T18:08:00.000+11:00

Stendhal Syndrome

2007-01-24T18:04:00.000+11:00

Stendhal syndrome or Stendhal's syndrome is a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly 'beautiful' or a large amount of art is in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when shopping.

It is named after the famous 19th century French author Stendhal (pseudonym of Henri-Marie Beyle), who described his experience with the phenomenon during his 1817 visit to Florence, Italy in his book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio.

Although there are many descriptions of people becoming dizzy and fainting while taking in Florentine art, especially at the Uffizi, dating from the early 19th century on, the syndrome was only named in 1979, when it was described by Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini, who observed and described more than 100 similar cases among tourists and visitors in Florence. The syndrome was first diagnosed in 1982.

(Thanks Wikipedia)

Journey to the Moon

2007-01-24T17:31:00.000+11:00

In 1865, the young French novelist Jules Verne published his third major work, Journey to the Centre of the Earth. The tale recounts the journey of Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel through Iceland, toward an extinct crater, across a sunless sea and into the inner most recesses of the earth. Verne’s continuous provision of metereological and geographical detail in the novel is for the most part an accurate record of the Icelandic environs. Although Verne never travelled to Iceland personally, he familiarised himself with the territory via written descriptions and artistic impressions in scientific journals and periodicals of the time. It is also highly possible that Verne collaborated with librarians and geologists in the making of his text. The contract from Verne’s French publisher stipulates the services and employment conditions for geologists and librarians, who were to provide Verne with the data needed to “validate” his fictional landscape. The crater into which the travellers descend is still known today as the Snaeffelsjokull volcano, located south west of Reykjavik in the Snaeffelsjokull Peninsula National Park. For Verne’s contemporaries, this area provided an unearthly spectacle of sublime desolation. Its exoticism was matched only by accounts of Antarctica, at this time just entering public discussion in France. Marked with jagged, rocky outcrops and rivers of molten lava, Snaeffels Jokull is the perfect backdrop for an expedition into the unknown.

A century after the English translation of Verne’s book, the site again proved catalytic for the production of science-fiction. A year before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their historic steps on the moon they trained at a NASA base in north-east Iceland, not far from the site of Verne’s fiction. It was here that the first shots of a be-suited Neil Armstrong bounding across a rocky, lunar-like landscape were captured. Verne’s fictional account of the conquest of the earth’s interior was refashioned as a projection of extra-terrestrial activity. When the footage from Apollo 11 was broadcast back to Earth on July 20, 1969, its choreography had already been mapped out on that same desert of Icelandic lava. The aesthetic of history was determined by fictional parameters.

Incomplete Architecture

2007-01-24T17:13:00.000+11:00

It is possible today to buy readymade houses from catalogue, newly built and newly furnished, with stainless steel appliances throughout and a lawnmower in the shed. This is the real estate equivalent of the gesamtkunstwerk; the “total package” of a domestic lifestyle. From the moment of purchase, clients set their clocks to the ticking of mortgage payments, monthly instalments and the rate of interest. Time is regulated by capital, segregate from the passage of historical or biological evolution.

Celebration was established by the Walt Disney Company in the mid 1990s, and is located only a short distance from Walt Disney World. As one resident of the community recently proclaimed; “Even though we must pay for the privilege, it's wonderful to live so close to Disney World. When you're not in the parks, you can still hear the distant echo of the fireworks each evening.” Celebration markets itself as a “real pre-1940s American town” but life in the exorbitantly priced estate is like inhabiting a billboard: a corporate microcosm, ringed like a moat by the security of Walt Disney’s family friendly signature. It even has its own soundtrack – muzak is piped continuously along the palm-tree lined main street – and property laws are in place to ensure that home-owners are prohibited from marring the Disney name (no “junk” littering the yard, no parking excessive amounts of cars on the street, no short term rentals). Everything is to be used, and nothing is to be created.

But there are models of inhabitation that have developed in opposition to the readymade, and those that can alter the culture of its use. In the Mediterranean, and particularly in Italy, the countryside is dotted with examples of “incomplete architecture”: skeletons of buildings, scaffolding still visible, which are nonetheless still inhabited as residences. The permanent state of construction is maintained in order to take advantage of a peculiar tax-loop hole in the regulatory framework. In these areas, property tax is due only after the building’s completion: if you don’t finish building, you don’t have to pay.

Chladni Plates

2007-01-24T17:04:00.000+11:00

The German physicist Ernst Chladni was the inventor of the klangfiguren, more commonly known as Chladni plates. By vibrating a sand covered brass plate with a violin bow, patterned nodal vibrations appeared on its surface: a direct transcription of tonal properties.

Excess or Overdose

2007-01-24T16:16:00.000+11:00

Int., Night. A Paris Salon, sometime in the 1870s.

The room is crowded and hot, and we are pressed close up against the daguerrotypes mounted eclectically across one wall of the Salon. What a marvel it is, a scene composed from sunlight and science, preserved in a landscape of salt and silver...

Whereas both the visually minded "art critics" and the newly established bourgeoisie of the late 1800s may have found photography "excessively detailed" , "too faithful" and "lacking in focus"; a medium of "inhuman precision" and "artless mechanics", those involved in the acoustic realm apparently thought otherwise. Rather than lamenting the razing of visual hierachies, the figure over ground protocols that traditionally governed painterly composition, the thoughts of modernist inventors strayed elsewhere. Suddenly, the background became of immense interest, and the capturing of "fugitive" previously hidden phenomena appeared immanently possible: especially, it seems, in the world of sound.

Hoping to emulate some of the "qualities" of detailed, impervious photographic inscription, sonic scores were produced whereby every element was miked up, amplified, and recorded on site, before being mixed together to create what was intended to be a recording of "absolute acoustic fidelity". But whereas the photograph proferred a uniquely detailed composite of all elements in front of the lens, in acoustic terms there was no such equivalent, and no such legibility. To the phonographers' great disappointment, when they played their recordings back they found nothing but noise.

Visible Language

2007-01-24T15:48:00.000+11:00

Many years before he invented the telephone, in the late 1800s in Scotland, Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) was enlisted as an assistant to his father, a speech teacher. Bell the elder was responsible for developing what he called "a system of visible language", composed of symbols depicting the actions of the vocal organs in action. He referred to the system as a "universal alphabet", and insisted that his letters, "instead of being arbitrary characters", were "symbolic representations of the organs of speech and of the way in which they were put together in uttering sound." Alexander would frequently participate in his father's "visible language" demonstrations, and the two travelled to Montreal, Canada to "teach" the language to small crowds of scientists and teachers. Young Bell's role was to "play" the sounds, to act as speaker for his father's records. When the child left the room, an audience member suggested a sound. Bell pere would then "write" it in his system of visible language (which resembled vibrating wave patterns), and Alexander, returning to the room, would decipher it. As he recalled, "it was just as easy to spell the sound of a cough, or a sneeze or a click to a horse, as a sound that formed an element of human speech." The nonlinguistic noises always attracted the greatest applause.

Alexander Graham Bell's mother and his wife Mabel were both deaf.

skinflakes

2007-01-24T15:40:00.000+11:00

fish fish
oh fishy fishy
how salty fishy salt salt
how fishy salty fish fish
oh salty salty
oh crumby flaky scale

theres's scrambled custard and cold beans for breakfast if you want some

Is this the first time a rainbow was featured in an art exhibition?

2006-10-28T17:38:00.000+10:00

July 1967.

Gustav Metzger is setting up his exhibition in the Filtration Laboratory at Swansea University. The lab was purpose built to investigate the flow of air and water, fitted with precision equipment to regulate pressure and direction. But Metzger's an artist, not a scientist, and saw only lines and possibilities, tools and tangents amongst the sterilised surfaces.

Six exhibits were installed on site. For the first, Metzger used plastic tubes and airpipes to engineer a dance of water and air - a vertical jet of air hitting and merging with a horizontal jet of water. "The space was very long, and as you came in, you were faced by a long row of windows with venetian blinds. The binds were down, it was winter, and I noticed that at noon the light would come in at a certain angle and when it went through the water jet you got this extraordinary rainbow effect on the walls...quite fascinating."

A light space filled with rainbows. Walk through to find a clear plastic cube - inside, the sun reflects off thousands of mica pieces spinning through jets of air. Past the cube, three pieces of polystyrene hover uncannily just above the floor - suspended by four streams of compressed air that pinned down the corners of the objects. At the farthest end of the room, a "small cubicle where liquid crystal was projected with a controlling system. The heating of the liquid crystal went on systemacially and for the first time I had a liquid crystal project which was ceaseless, hour afer hour." Metzger recalled; "it's beautiful to have this element of stability which at the same time you could see was totally explosive..I feel I achieved something in that this was literally off the ground."

Is this the first time a rainbow has been included in an art exhibition?

Melik Ohanian Seven Minutes Before

2006-10-28T17:25:00.002+10:00

Begins with a voiceover in French. A tragic accident, a freak storm. A herd of goats lost in the forest, the shepherd missing? Seven screens split through seven cameras, moving through an underground landscape, sous sol. Sometimes it seems like the cameras travel in the same direction, sometimes not. Surround sound, panorama. No edits - one take per screen. Three figures, a violinist, a poet and a child huddle outside in the half-light of dawn. The writing of memory is always a trace over. How did we get from there to here? No faces, no closeups.

A slam poet amongst stone ruins, lit by fire, yellow and orange. You always feel like you're missing something - the enormity of the projection space preventing absorption of narrative. On every screen a different motion. A man walking down a road at down, silhouetted, the camera tracking before him. A string of white sheets hangs over threads, stretching across a wet green field. A small explosion of fireworks. Clean water flowing over a rocky stream bed. Spiral jetty washes through the water - blue grey in the early light, tumble from above, shake each other. A bird tied to a bicycle. Memoria. A miniature house sawn in half.

The violinist climbs onto the back of a pick up truck, drives past the jetty, past the poet, past little sculpture houses immersed in water. The land through a kaleidoscope. Everywhere an incredibly sensuous enjoyment of light. The camera dips impossibly over the side of a fast travelling car down rocky, narrow mountain roads. From above, the house is lit up with a web of tiny golden lights. A string of energy, a maze of luminosity covers the grass. A trail, like hansel and gretel. A blue painted line. The alignment of seven view points to converge in one point in space. An explosion.

Melik Ohanian's Seven Minutes before is one of the most extraordinary film installations I have seen in a long time. Never sure whose eyes we are seeing through, whose eyes we are seeing. All details dispersed in the breadth of landscape. Never permit claustrophobia. An accident brings us to the scene, a freak storm, and an accident ends it - motorcycle crash. From the path it's impossible to see the road, just a split second of the truck, smashing and then it's everywhere on all screens simuntaneously, one camera races up the embankment over the shale and gravel and then the road itself is hazy, continuously rolling away beneath us, and we go toward the meeting point in reverse.

It takes time to make sense of space.