Wonderlands

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

Pierre Huyghe: A Forest of Lines

---_/- 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)https://emajartjournal.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/douglas.pdf

Standard Procedures at the Scene of the Accident

The Bacon Lair

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

Thomas Demand
c-type photograph
2003

Tonal Etymology

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

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

Dylan Martorell

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

Ways of World Making

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

Stalker

in the jungle all light is paralysed

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."

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