black polar bears

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

Gordon Matta-Clark
Office Baroque

Popsicle

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

wooooo oh oh

burnt hair (repeat)

confirmation

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

list #34

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.

Attenborough - Lyre Bird

Jen Stark

Top Five Video Works Ever

A while back I gave a talk at ACMI on the top five video works ever. I began by thinking not so much about what works to consider, but WHEN and WHERE I would like to see specific works – like making a wish list for someone who has a time machine. Video is not timeless, nor placeless, something that’s easy to forget when DVDs can be sent all across the globe for curators to install in museums that in many ways look the same, and use the same equipment, the same brands, the same paint on the walls. Many of my favourite pieces of art are those that speak to the conditions of their production, that include a consideration of context that either makes it difficult to move them through space and time, or is internalised, so that the context is swallowed but not digested.

I would, for example, have loved to have seen Chris Burden on American national television in the late 1970s: both his piece called Hijack TV, where he “hijacked” a television broadcast in a live interview, much to the horror of the interviewer and the network, and another one called "Through the night softly" 1975. Through the night softly was 30 seconds of footage of Burden crawling across broken shards of glass, filmed in black and white. It looks completely gorgeous - he drags himself on his chest through this sparkly, glittering universe of fragments. Burden screened the work as a commercial. He actually purchased a months worth of advertising slots – when the network head was lazing about on the couch at home one night and saw Burden's footage he freaked out and immediately moved to revoke Burden's contract, but a contract is a contract and they were obliged to screen his “commercials” on prime time television. Burden later did another commercial that he called poem for L.A, which went to air in 1975, apparently the network was inundated with phone calls from perplexed viewers. Trying to insert footage like Burden’s glass crawl into prime time television scheduling today would be totally impossible – and this says a lot about the conditions by which images are screened and delivered, consumed. Consumption and control were both big deals for Burden – he said once in an interview that he used to take photos of people he didn’t like with a little spy camera and then chop up the negatives, sprinkle them on his breakfast cereal and eat them. He said it was a means of empowerment and control. Burden’s television commercials, by contrast, sacrificed control for chance encounters – they would have been encountered randomly, unannounced and unexplained, in the middle of dodgy shampoo ads and corporate broadcasts. In a way these were images that only survived by falling through the cracks.

I would also have loved to have seen Douglas Gordon’s Five Year Drive By installed outside in the American desert in Southern Utah. I saw an image of this work in reproduction years ago – a slide that showed a projection screen erected in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by low scrub and red earth, with endless horizon behind. The piece is a five year-long version of The Searchers, John Ford's epic western starring John Wayne. The duration of the film was stretched to match the duration of the narrative (five years from start to finish). Gordon calculated that 113 minutes of cinema time was equal to (2,629,440) two million, six hundred and twenty nine thousand, four hundred and forty minutes – so one second of cinema time had to last for 6.46 hours in real time, a durational leap that can only be made using video, not film. The landscape that surrounds the projection screen is the landscape in which the Searchers was shot – the Monument Valley in Southern Utah. Gordon said: “I like the idea of a physical monument to the idea of the search, the potential view has to be involved in a physical journey in order to see the work, this is a real parallel with the story.”Gordon’s Five Year Drive By played day and night - during the day it wasn’t visible, just the white screen in the desert. I like to think of this work as a kind of clock. You could visit it every now and then over the course of its duration, as a kind of life marker, a means of checking the passing of time against a narrative, so that the fictional story actually bends outwards to imprint upon real events over the course of five years of your life. There’s a sense of melancholia I get about this work, absolutely motivated by its absence, the sun takes over the image, the search is never completed, the whole is too big to experience, the fragment tells you where you are in time, like a chronological map.

Notwithstanding

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

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

Streamside Day

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

"'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

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

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