Direct Objective

Elmington Estate revisited

2011-12-13T15:03:00.002Z

Nearly six years ago, in December 2005, I posted this short sketchy video which animates views of council flats undergoing demolition. The photographs were taken in August 2005, the Elmington Estate being demolished is just on the edge of Burgess Park on Edmund Street, Camberwell, South London. I have just reposted it as part of an occasional series for which I plan to post 'archival' Direct Language videos as some of the links to the original videos at the Internet Archive seem to be broken.

Looking back at the video I was curious to see what had become of the site after the credit crunch. I was expecting to find the estate to be replaced by some kind of new development, hopefully retaining some social housing at the very least. I was slightly surprised then to find that, in spite of being demolished, as this view from Google Maps attests to

it has been transformed into a wasteland by Southwark Council, which has since handed it over to Notting Hill Housing for regeneration.

On the face of it Notting Hill Housing seems to be a perfectly responsible, local organisation with an interest in social housing, which is in some contrast with the global developers the council uses elsewhere for more lucrative high profile developments such as the Heygate Estate at Elephant and Castle. But after six years the site remains uninhabited, where the decanted residents are now who knows, or whether they to be part of the new community, and the regeneration plans as outlined by Southwark Council are ambiguous indeed.

Travelling Practice - Directors Lounge special screening

2011-10-26T10:03:00.002+01:00

Digital video works 2003—2010
curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

21:00, Thursday, 27 Oct. 2011
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

programme:

Metalogue (26:37, 2003),
Direct Language (10:00, 2005 2008),
The Ground, the Sky, and the Island (7:45, 2008),
Aboriginal Myths of South London (10:27, 2010),
Personal Electronics (26:00, 2010)

more details, with an essay by the curator

live at Seeing in the Dark

2011-10-21T00:04:00.005+01:00

live at Seeing in the Dark by Steven Ball

Soundtracks performed to Vowels & Consonants by Lynn Loo & Guy Sherwin and Autumn Fo g by Lynn Loo, recorded live at Seeing in the Dark, CIRCA, Newcastle Upon Tyne, 19 October 2011.

The Vowels & Consonants soundtrack replays and manipulates samples of Bob Cobbing reading with additional live utterances. Autumn Fog is based on a recording of my back yard (the leaves in the film were shot in Lynn's backyard), with spoken quotidian observation.

"...Vowels and Consonants consists of six projected loops in which individual letters appear intermittently crawling up and across the surface of the screen, occasionally intruding into the optical sound area, thus emitting gentle plops of sound which seem to emulate the sound of the letters. As in other optical sound works the relationship between image and sound is integral: while the use of letters suggests a literal ‘reading’ it also resembles ‘concrete’ text such as Bob Cobbing used with Koncrete Kanticle, used as much to prompt vocal sounds in performance as to be read as conventional poetic text. As such the work becomes, like concrete or performance poetry, a score for itself. In fact, Loo and Sherwin have regularly extended the work with the addition of live sound and musical accompaniment, often local to the place of performance and, in this context, the projectors become instruments, part of an ensemble. "
Steven Ball, 'Conditions of Music: Contemporary Audio-Visual Spatial Performance Practice', Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film (Tate Publications, 2011)

Seeing in the Dark - A Group Show

2011-10-12T00:45:00.000+01:00

curated by Sam Watson, Adam Phillips (CIRCA Projects), Steven Ball

more information

Glitch vs Scratch

2011-10-11T09:44:00.001+01:00

The MisALT Screening Series returns this Sunday, October 16th at a new location and with an exciting program of experimental film and video that explore and celebrate the distortion, destruction, and decomposition of their respective mediums.

MisALT Screening Series Presents: Glitch vs Scratch.
Sunday, October 16th, 2011. 8pm , $6.00
Artist Television Access
992 Valencia St. San Francisco, CA

This screening seeks to create a dialog between artists working in Scratch Cinema (film based practices that make interventions on the celluloid level) and Glitch based video and media practices (which manipulate images by exploiting vulnerabilities on the molecular and electron level of video tape and code), to bridge the gap between work that focuses on the material underpinnings of cinema and work that brings attention to the often invisible foundation that lies beneath the digital moving image.

The bubbling, flickering, abstractions of decaying, damaged, and melting celluloid meet the frantic and ghostly distortions of mangled signals and scripts.

Featuring:
Jodie Mack, “Unsubscribe #3: Glitch Envy”
Tsen-Chu Hsu (Taiwan), “Cotton Sugar”
Florian Cramper (Netherlands), “How to picturize two Kafka short
stories within one hour in a hotel room”
Charlotte Taylor, “Secrets”
Péter Lichter (Hungary), “Light Sleep”
Alberto Cabrera Bernal (Spain), “12 Erased Trailers”
Christine Lucy Latimer (Canada), “MOSAIC”
Anna Geyer, “Good Bye Pig”
Nick Briz, “Binary Quotes”
Adam R. Levine, “Koh”
Michael Betancourt w/ FsLux, “One”
Steven Ball(UK/Australia) “The War on Television”
Lili White, “Got ‘Cha”
Drone Dungeon “Phantom Wegman I-III”
Channel TWO “In a []”
Ted Davis “What make up a Surprising Image”
Lennon Batchelor “Focus on the Family”

Curated by Tessa Siddle

Station to Station

2011-06-12T12:44:00.002+01:00

A 21st century phantom ride on Docklands Light Railway. Some of the earliest films made in the late 19th century were shot with heavy cameras mounted on trains, one of the only ways by which smooth movement could be achieved. Called 'phantom rides' because they appeared to present the point of view of a disembodied floating entity, they were a novelty and popular with audiences. In the early 21st century we carry devices in our pockets capable of recording, editing and mass distributing such images without even getting off the train.
Made for the BabelFiche project

action at a distance

2011-06-12T12:23:00.001+01:00

blogging, about blogging 2

2011-03-22T16:25:00.000Z

I’ve just posted my latest contribution to the or-bits.com blog. This has taken somewhat longer than planned as real-world events intervened.

This post was originally part of the first draft for my first post but, as that was getting lengthy and mindful of the necessity of keeping texts written for reading on the web at a relatively short readable length, it became split in two parts. This latest is an attempt to bring the rather subjective ‘historical’ overview of my first post up to date, with a focus on specific activities in the world of glitch.

So the first structural issue that has arisen has been to do with the length of the posts, how much one can reasonably expect to include in a single post and how this will effect the serial nature of the writing. As I mentioned before, serial posting around themes is something quite new to me and the development of ideas from one post to the next would seem to be contingent and evolving. Where this will go will be determined as much by the process of actually writing the post, as by what I’ve provisionally mapped out for future posts as these are the germs of ideas, theories I'm not yet sure, even convinced about, so I can’t certain about their efficacy until I come to write them. Sometimes I'm holding things back, avoiding the temptation to give too much away in post in advance is proving difficult, other times planting clues that won't be recognised as such until.

Thinking through writing is what most writers do but there is a small irony about this as one of the ideas I’m planning to pursue is that of medium-specificity as attending to media objects. This would be objects in a ‘post-correlationist’ formulation, beyond a correlation between thinking and being that privileges the human; thinking media works, media, and so on as ontological objects (and megaobjects) in their own right, and in that sense a counter to a post-structuralist hermeneutic approach that would privilege textual analysis, the world as text. While I’m suggesting that I will develop the ideas through writing, the production of text. Text as an inscription technology among others may well also play a role in future or-bits.com blog posts, but I’ll write no more here for fear of writing those posts before I write them.

Urban(e) Environments

2011-03-21T18:14:00.005Z

ACMI Gallery in Metalogue

This Wednesday 23 March Melbourne Cinémathèque will show a programme of my recent video as part of an evening of three programmes called Urban(e) Visions. My programme is sandwiched between John Smith’s War Diaries and Of Time and the City by Terence Davies, elevated company indeed and it's interesting to me for my work to be in the context of, on one hand Smith’s situated reflections on the war on terror, and on the other Davies’s documentary revisiting of his Liverpudlian childhood. Interesting partly because this collection of my work is hardly as thematically, and perhaps formally, focussed as its neighbours'. However Cinémathèque has thoughtfully titled my programme FORMAL ENVIRONMENTALISM and describes it as work that “explores the geography and topography of physical landscapes and technological environments”. In an attempt to flesh this out a little, I have provided some programme notes with an introduction suggesting that the programme “…covers a range of territory, as digital materialist experimentation meets spatial exploration to become urban landscape study and hyperlocal excursion. Concretist formal processes explore and exhaust species of spaces and media, producing variously eccentric musically rhythmic structured works, and abstracted, essayistic studies."

Reflecting on these digital video works, I think that there is a sense in which many of them do strike a tricky balance between the specificity of place and formal process and techniques, but that specificity is often less to do with the qualities of the place - an essence that might once have been called the genius loci - but more the way that my construction of place is an abstraction. In short I’m not so sure how ‘successfully’ these works do actively ‘explore’, ‘interrogate’, ‘construct’ (unsatisfactorily metaphorical words in themselves) the specificity of place. Some, such as The Defenestrascope and Metalogue, are constructed from images captured in diverse places: in the former Lucca in Italy, Berlin, and London, while its ‘musical’ structure draws on English folk song and samples as diverse as Music Hall and Chinese traditional song, the neologism of its title suggests throwing views out of the window; while the latter ranges from London, Pisa, Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne... the neologism of its title signals it as a travelogue in which metadata has risen to the surface.

One reason I am interested in screening Metalogue in this programme is because a section of it was captured somewhere several storeys below where the screening will take place, in what is now the gallery at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), the images taken from a private tour of the space I was given while the building was still under construction.

The final work in the show Aboriginal Myths of South London, might carry a slightly provocative title in an Australian context. It is in part an attempt to speculate what might happen if I articulate what I understand of certain Australian Aboriginal attitudes to the relationship between the history of a place and its specificity, in relation to the history of the now deceased people who once inhabited that place. It has occurred to me that the indigenous Australian attitude to the dead affords a level of respect entirely lacking from a European belief system, which plays itself out in terms of ethical protocols and legality. The video is a first attempt to bring such a philosophy close to where I live, to New Kent Road in south London, as a way to pay closer attention to the specificity of that place and apply a pragmatic materialism in the face of what I think might mistakenly be considered to be the mystical notion of the genius loci.

Refenestration

2011-03-01T13:05:00.002Z

The Defenestrascope screening at:

InCounter sound______video_____performance

Friday 4th March

7pm- 3am @ the Bussey Building, opposite Peckham Rye Rail
Tickets: £7 on the door, £5 in advance from http://incounter.eventbrite.com
Doors open 6.30pm

with FREE MIDNIGHT SPAGHETTI

A programme of work exploring structure and process through sound, performance, and videos. With a special screening (World premiere) of James Benning’s new work YouTube Trilogy at 7pm

performances by: Anne Bean + Chris Gladwin + Richard Wilson, Stephen Cornford, Melanie Clifford, Howard Jacques, Kalendar + Clutter, Kaya King, J Milo Taylor, Rachel Moore, Ring Mod Orkestra + Marlon Random, Thomas Pigache + Yann Leguay (ARTKILLART)
with InCounter DJ Matt Brown
videos by: Holly Antrum, Steven Ball, Katy Connor, Riccardo Iacono, sue.k., Erica Scourti, Maria Theodoraki

live link with Resonance 104.4FM 8 - 9pm. Bring FM radio / mobile phone to take part.

blogging, about blogging

2011-02-22T00:23:00.001Z

I have been asked to be a guest blogger for or-bits.com, which is a terrific project curated by Marialaura Ghidini consisting of online group shows of works made specifically for presentation on the web, many specifically for the site, organized around broad and imaginatively interpreted themes.

The latest edition is Acceleration.

My contributions will be a series of posts speculating around a number of ideas that have been percolating recently, prompted by the reemergence of ideas around digital materialism, extrapolating about and beyond media specificity, its contemporary resonances and implications. These have developed out of the convergence of a number of recent factors, which I won’t detail here for fear of spoiling the posts, but has been prompted in this context by the presence of work by Rosa Menkman on or-bits.com. Menkman has over the past few years revived ideas around glitch. My first post, posted today, is Accelerating accidents.

The serial nature of my posts on or-bits.com will probably distinguish them from posts here on my ‘regular’ blog, which have tended to be one-off topics - pursuing and developing ideas and themes over a number of posts is something I’ve never really done. In fact my blogging activity here has become rather sparodic lately, probably because this sort of activity has been taken over by 'micro-blogging' habits, specifically in my case via status updates and posting links on Facebook (and less so Twitter), which directly reaches peers and friends - like a form of soft 'push publishing', rather than the 'pull publishing' of regular blogging - and as such possibly reaches a larger and more regular readership. It also changes the nature of what’s ‘published’ as it’s a much more casual, immediate, spontaneous and sometimes personal form, one-liners both flippant and serious on any number of different types of topics, conversations in comments boxes, links to things that I happen to be interested in and think that others may (or not) find interesting, which in themselves become catalysts for comment and conversation, and so on.

As such this ‘return’ to blogging, at or-bits.com is an interesting prospect for me and, as evinced here, has also led to another ‘return’ to blogging, about blogging.

Arbitrary Object

2011-01-10T15:34:00.005Z

http://arbitraryobject.blogspot.com

A compilation of five abstracted improvised experimental objects,
indifferent distracted viewing objects.
Made from television images,
analogue vision mixer 'effects',
and primitive circuit bending and hacking
- inputs through outputs, feedback loops and so on -
from a single improvised session's visual source material.
Forms and techniques used are limited,
sound is sequenced and manipulated samples.

Recalling the Shots

2010-12-06T12:13:00.003Z

Actor - David Hall & Tony Sinden, 1972

On Wednesday 8 December I will be presenting Recalling the Shots at Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle upon Tyne. The programme is part of the Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere series of exhibitions by CIRCA Contemporary Art Projects, which has so far presented shows by Stuart Pearson Wright, Henry Coombes and until Thursday 9 December Lu Chunsheng.

Recalling the Shots cuts across the received history of artists' moving image, featuring work from the past 40 years including experimental cinema classics, rarely screened artists’ films, rediscovered seminal video works, through to new and recent contemporary works. The works in the programme move beyond appropriation and deconstruction techniques as they engage with cinema, television and digital media conventions and phenomena to consider, reconstruct and reinterpret them in new and unusual ways. Recalling the Shots includes work by Sarah Dobai, David Hall & Tony Sinden, Mark Lewis, Anne McGuire, Matthew Noel-Tod, Manuel Saiz, Erica Scourti, John Smith and Mark Wilcox. Reproduced below is the catalogue essay and programme details.

Recalling the Shots

A critical artists’ film and video practice inevitably exists in relation to mainstream media and there is a history of attempts to rouse or frustrate the viewer into an awareness of its supposedly pernicious forces of control, its deleterious effect upon the hapless spectator ignorant of its lack of agency and of the damage done. In 1951 Lettrist Maurice Lemaitre provoked viewers and engineered civil chaos for a Paris screenings of his “general butchering of the cinema” (Lemaitre quoted by Christian Lebrat in the lecture Lettrism: History, Theory and Cinema, 1990) Le Film est Deja Commence? (Has the Film Already Started?); in the mid-sixties Nam June Paik famously asserted “television has been attacking us all our lives, now we can attack it back” (Gene Youngblood, ‘Nam June Paik: Cathode Karma’, Expanded Cinema, 1970); while in the seventies Peter Gidal’s polemical anti-narrative position dictated that illusionist narrative in 'dominant cinema' "places transparency and representation/illusionism at the centre of oppressive structuring in society" (Peter Gidal, ‘The Anti-Narrative’, Screen, 1978), leading him to make films intended to alienate the viewer into being keenly aware of the fact of their watching a film.

This brief chronology of discontent brings us to a point where, post Modernism, artists started using more sophisticated approaches to the conventions of television and cinema. By the 1970s televisual pop had already begun to eat itself, with a self-reflexivity often manifested in the form of satire or comedy (look no further than Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC TV 1969-74) for evidence of this). Artists were also beginning to appropriate and adapt media forms and language with a more nuanced critique of the idea of cinema and television, tactically reclaiming autonomy by rewriting the "simulacra the system distributes to each individual" (Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984).

Each work in this collection, in differing ways, shuffles and remixes the institutional codes, conventions and phenomena of cinema, TV and the media. Each has been selected to engage with elements of those conventions, redefining their phenomenological roles.

The Actor: Deconstruction in artists’ film and video finds an early exemplar in David Hall and Tony Sinden’s 1972 film Actor. Inspired by Hall’s attendance at a BBC TV session for editors and directors, where examples of what not to do in shooting and cutting a scene were presented , the eponymous actor becomes locked in an aporia, a self-referential impasse. As he unsuccessfully attempts to resolve his ostensible role in relation to and in conversation with an assumed audience, a monologue worthy of Beckett traces the actor’s absurd existential crisis, the fatal ontology of an on-screen persona.

The Director: The actor above is entirely scripted and the tactics employed to demonstrate the artificiality of the situation determined by the artists; John Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) conversely, assumes directorial control after the fact: the authority of the voice-over preempting the everyday events of a North London street to achieve the illusion of absolute control over it. As we become aware of the reality of the situation the film is transformed into a work of humorous deconstruction of notions of authority and the construction of the illusion of reality employed by cinema. Smith was particularly inspired by Francois Truffaut’s film Day for Night (1973) during which a megalomaniacal film director issues instructions to actors and passers-by alike.

The Remake: Actor and The Girl Chewing Gum demonstrate classic deconstruction techniques as post-structuralism would have it in the sense that they are texts that have dismantled themselves. Now considered as a classic text of Video Art deconstruction in its own right, Calling the Shots by Mark Wilcox (1984) is also an appropriationist deconstruction of a previously extant text: Douglas Sirk’s classic Hollywood melodrama Imitation of Life (1959), itself a remake of a 1934 film. Wilcox’s fragmented ‘remake’ is complete with extracts from the original film, revealing the conditions of its own construction in the TV studio, the mutability of the actors, roles and script, as well as the then state of video art technology in the form of the repeat edit.

Post Postmodernism moving image across mainstream media arrives in many ways as already deconstructed and artists do not so much evince this as to create new formal relationships, resonances and formulations, through remaking and remodelling.

The Fading Star: In I Am Crazy And You're Not Wrong (1997), Anne McGuire plays the television singer past her prime with virtuoso just-reigned-in hysteria. Like a suspended slow motion train wreck that never quite happens, the video echoes a voyeuristic cultural fascination with tragic fame. But playing to whom? Is there, was there ever, an audience?

The Extra: As the title suggests Mark Lewis’s The Pitch (1998), indeed takes the form of a pitch to camera, but who is his viewer, and to whom is he pitching? The role of the extra, the apparent passer-by in the cinema that so intrigued John Smith, is revisited as Lewis calls for more attention to be paid to its role and existence in the feature film. The camera pulls back revealing Lewis, a one-time extra himself, surrounded by his subject, as he uses industrial cinema techniques to reflect upon the conditions of industrial filmmaking.

Sound and Music: sync and non-sync. Two pieces approach these phenomena from different directions and to quite different ends. In Manuel Saiz’s Specialized Technicians Required: Being Luis Porcar (2005) the relationship of the voice-over artist to the star actor is neatly inverted. How much of the persona of John Malkovich is the actor known by that name, and how much is actually the voice by which he is known to millions of his viewers? Atomic by Matthew Noel-Tod is a simulacrum of the music video by Blondie that begs the question of what happens to the vehicle for a song when the sound to image relationship is reversed through replacement. Apocalyptic imagery becomes dramatised, heightened and remobilised by association.

Landscape as location: Going back to ‘nature’. One might occasionally hear it said of a spectacularly cinematographed mise en scène, particularly of the Western genre, that the landscape is considered as being central, as though a character. In Sarah Dobai’s Nettlecombe (2007) the landscape is ‘performed’ as non-human elements such as the strength and direction of the wind, the movement of the trees and bushes are all choreographed. Set as it is in a landscape garden, an artificial wilderness, the film critiques the artificiality of landscape representation, nature as essential and undetermined is a cinematic illusion.

Landscape as information: In the Information Age moving image media proliferates in many forms across every available device and platform as material and information as content and generic taxonomy become indistinguishable. In Erica Scourti’s new work Woman Nature Alone (2010), rather than being a physical construction as in Nettlecombe, ‘nature’ is a generic keyword (and one that could stand in for ‘landscape’) for the setting or location of human activity. It would seem that shots and gestures are now collected in databases, metadata has replaced creative invention and interpretation, in the world of stock images and footage content is described by keywords and organised with tags. Scourti’s tactical cunning revivifies the database by reclaiming the anonymity of categorisation as a series of short self-portraits that writes the individual into the industrial.

Programme

Actor David Hall and Tony Sinden (UK, 1972, 11:00, original 16mm)

An (intentionally unmistakable) actor holds a conversation on a telephone, only his voice is heard throughout. His scripted monologue attempts to draw the audience across the time barrier between the time when the film was shot and when it is seen, gradually revealing that the conversation is a hypothetical (impossible) one with the audience themselves. Unconventional juxtapositions are applied in the editing to support this and ultimately to pose questions about the accepted notions of temporal and spatial continuity.

- Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film catalogue, Hayward Gallery, 1977

The Girl Chewing Gum John Smith (UK, 1976, 12:00, original 16mm)

In The Girl Chewing Gum an authoritative voice-over pre-empts the events occurring in the image, seeming to order not only the people, cars and moving objects within the screen but also the actual camera movements operated on the street in view. In relinquishing the more subtle use of voice-over in television documentary, the film draws attention to the control and directional function of that practice: imposing, judging, creating an imaginary scene from a visual trace.

- Michael Maziere, ‘John Smith's Films: Reading the Visible’, Undercut 10/11, 1983

The Pitch Mark Lewis (UK, 1998, 4:00, video)

Mark Lewis has made a series of films that isolate particular elements of mainstream and avant-garde cinema, which he identifies as cinema's real inventions. In the work shown here he delivers a pitch about his desire to make a big-budget film devoted exclusively to film extras, usually seen only as the human backdrop against which the central stars perform.

Woman Nature Alone Erica Scourti (UK, 2010, 10:00, video)

Woman Nature Alone shows a series of micro-performances enacted in response to captions and taglines of imagery taken of stock video and photography sites that corresponded to the keywords ‘woman’, ‘nature’ and ‘alone’. Each of the videos was uploaded to YouTube on daily basis, only 2 seconds snippets of which appear in the final film. This version fashions the range of activities into a loose narrative, covering various emotional states, times of day and weather conditions of a woman alone in nature.

Nettlecombe Sarah Dobai (UK, 2007, 7:00, original 16mm)

This fixed-frame work depicts a landscaped garden whose stillness is broken by the wind that plays across it. As the work itself reveals, the wind in Nettlecombe is achieved thorough an orchestrated performance of wind machines and ropes in which the trees and bushes in the garden are animated like puppets within a constructed set.

Specialized Technicians Required: Being Luis Porcar Manuel Saiz (Spain, 2005, 1:00, video)

Luis Porcar, a well known Spanish dubbing actor, speaks for one minute about his work when dubbing the voice of the American actor John Malkovich. The video is presented dubbed into English by John Malkovich himself, thus closing the conceptual loop of the work with his collaboration.

Atomic Matthew Noel-Tod (UK, 2003, 5:00, video)

Atomic is a shot-for-shot remake of the 1980 music promo video for the pop song by Blondie. Recreated with a Debbie Harry look-a-like, the video replicates the imagined post-apocalyptic setting of the original video with the kitsch, vamp costumes and lo-fi, homemade stage set. The soundtrack of the original song, is replaced with a contemporary score for FW Murnau's silent vampire film Nosferatu (1922).

I Am Crazy And You're Not Wrong Anne McGuire (USA, 1997, 11:00, video)

A wonderful witty work about nostalgia and desperation. Ann McGuire portrays a Kennedy-era singer performing in a space where theatre meets television. McGuire's Garlandesque gestures provide both a sense of tragedy and humour. I am Crazy and You're Not Wrong weaves narrative, performance, memory and history into a ironic and haunting work of unique proportions.

Calling the Shots Mark Wilcox (UK, 1984, 11:00, video)

Calling the Shots remakes a technicolor sequence from a 1950s Hollywood movie – not once but three times. It progressively exposes the artifice and mechanics of production; behind the painted set plus poised actors, lie cameras, lights and technicians. Reconstruction becomes deconstruction. Simultaneously questions of the representation of women are raised and the power politics of gender are explored.

- Mark Wilcox, Subverting Television, Film and Video Umbrella, 1984.

Land Gauge

2010-10-04T21:27:00.002+01:00

Recently I found this version of my video Land Gauge. Land Gauge has appeared in various forms and contexts. It first appeared in January 2007 as Direct Language 4.0 on my original Direct Language videoblog. That version used the sound as recorded with the image although the whole thing is slowed down. In 2008 I made a version for One Minute Volume 2 where it is accompanied by 60/60 a sound piece made when I was at art college in 1981, which was also on the Snatch 3 compilation. For this version I sped the original 60/60 up so that it would fit within the 60 second parameter of the project. Later that year it was in the Transcentric show, where it was projected on a small raised platform screen on the floor so that one looked down onto it, replicating the original point of view, as a silent 4 minute loop. This version was made while preparing the video for Transcentric and compiles several parts of the original sequence, into a kind of extended mix as a continuous 10 minute video, it too is silent.

some September screenings

2010-09-06T23:32:00.010+01:00

Inanimatismus

Inanimatismus screens at:
• Ukrainian Art Festival, Koktebel, Ukraine,
7 - 9 September;
• Future Proof, Marseille Project Gallery, France,
Saturday 18 September;
• Stew Gallery, Norwich, UK,
Wednesday 29 September.
These screenings are part of One Minute vol 4.

The Ground, the Sky, and the Island screens at:
• Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival
Hawick, Scottish Borders,
Sunday 12 September;

Direct Language screens at:
• cogcollective at The BAck doOR
Melbourne, Australia

Saturday 25 September.

August Aggregate

2010-08-31T07:57:00.000+01:00

Direct Language (3 posts)

Public Water (2 posts)

Personal Electronics video part 4

2010-07-06T13:28:00.001+01:00

Video 6 min 37 sec
Flash video | QuickTime movie
Personal Electronics dossier | web references

Personal Electronics video part 3

2010-07-05T18:38:00.001+01:00

Video 2 min 21 sec
Flash video | QuickTime movie
Personal Electronics dossier | web references

Personal Electronics video part 2

2010-07-04T16:44:00.002+01:00

Video 5 min 15 sec
Flash video | QuickTime movie
Personal Electronics dossier | web references

Personal Electronics video part 1

2010-06-17T22:59:00.007+01:00

Video 17 min 14 sec
Flash video | QuickTime movie
Personal Electronics dossier | web references

on the return of Direct Language

2010-06-03T08:51:00.002+01:00

stuck somewhere

the word

the dissolve

refused to render

until the sequence

had been deleted

and even then

with difficulty...

...the return of Direct Language

Chromatic City

2010-04-07T04:39:00.003+01:00

Killing time in Melbourne yesterday I wander into Screen Worlds, The Story of Film, Television & Digital Culture at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) at Federation Square, of which is boasted: “This stunning new exhibition will change the way you think about the most pervasive and powerful cultural forms of our time.” Leaving aside questions about what exactly ‘Digital Culture’ is, or perhaps more precisely isn’t (some factions of Australian moving image culture still seem to find it necessary to make the distinction, I suppose at least they’ve stopped using the anachronistic term ‘new media’), the exhibition is a bit of a discombobulating affair, resembling a fairground as much as an exhibition it seems to have an educational remit designed to appeal primarily to restless geeky teenagers. I find it almost impossible to be motivated to engage with all the clever displays, the entertaining paths through the history of forms and themes of moving image are to me as alienating in their insistence as they might be engaging.

Turning a corner though, and to my surprise, I find a film by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, The City of Cinematic Dissolution (16mm, 1998). But not 16mm at all, a video transfer, sorry ‘digital transfer’. The surprising thing about this is that the Cantrills have famously long been advocates for film, for film as film, not just in a materialistic sense, but also in terms of it as a medium of cinematic reproduction and exhibition. They have always to my knowledge absolutely refused to even consider transferring their films to video preferring to screen good quality prints or in some cases the original reversal film. This has usually been on the grounds of quality and resolution and the quality of film and colour separation as a very specifically filmic technique long practiced by the Cantrills, is the formal and structural basis of Cinematic Dissolution which consists of images made from three black and white filmed sequences, each shot using a different colour filter. The digital transfer at ACMI is nothing special at all, indeed it renders the original crisp lines of the film, the layers of RGB colour that recombine into an out of register fractured portrait of this ‘dissolved’ city, soupy and indistinct. I feel mildly shocked that it had been allowed to be displayed in such a condition. Nevertheless, there it is. Of course in this ‘educational’ setting the display is there to demonstrate a particular aspect of film technology. It is more importantly to my mind one of the finest ‘city’ films made, as insightful a portrait of Melbourne as Ruttmann’s was of Berlin.

Having spent a few days wandering around Melbourne, looking at particular aspects of urban space for the Public Water project, I’ve been noticing contemporary Melbourne architecture, mostly buildings that have been erected since I lived here.

The buildings seem predominantly to be towers, monumental grey or beige blocks with grids of windows, often with a particularly jaunty angle or ostentatious detail. A little like the people one sees promenading around town: smart, somewhat conservatively dressed but with enough clever little details to signify them as being, oh just that little bit more interesting. Melbourne people seem to like to check each other and everybody else out. There’s no hiding their giving everyone in range the once over. Like the smart clothes of the local middle classes, the architecture is ‘look at me’ architecture. Often attached to the facade of one of these smart new building is a clever little neo Le Corbusier-lite detail in primary colours, a dash of red, a lick of yellow, a frame, a line, an angled perpendicular. The black and white and RGB of The City of Cinematic Dissolution holds a dispassionate mirror up to this city that so earnestly wants the world to look at it.

There’s no such thing as originality, just authenticity

2010-03-13T10:09:00.005Z

Think of almost any kind of cultural endeavor and then use the word “we” to describe its creation. The communal pronoun trips easily off the tongue when talking about the world of contemporary arts and entertainment, where things are often the product of teams, workshops, studios or institutions, where collaboration and idea-swapping are the norm. But now try applying it to creative writing, especially to fiction and poetry, and it can sound absurd: “We worked for years on the character development and the voice, and when we finally nailed the subtle epiphany, we cracked open a bottle of Champagne to celebrate.”

Maybe that’s one reason for the flurry of attention recently about a teenage German novelist, Helene Hegemann, whose book about Berlin’s club scene was named a finalist for a prestigious literary prize to be awarded next month in Leipzig. After a blogger and fellow novelist announced that Ms. Hegemann had blended sizeable chunks of his own writing into hers, Ms. Hegemann, instead of following the plagiarism-gotcha script of contrition and retraction so familiar in recent years, announced that appropriating the passages from that book and other sources was her plan all along.

A child of a media-saturated generation, Hegemann presents herself as a writer whose birthright is the remix, the use of anything at hand she feels suits her purposes, an idea of communal creativity that certainly wasn’t shared by those from whom she borrowed. In a line that might have been stolen from Sartre (it wasn’t) she added: “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.”

Although associated with generally well-respected artists, Kathy Acker’s most recognized novels, Blood and Guts in High School, Great Expectations and Don Quixote receive mixed critical attention. Most critics acknowledge Acker’s skilled manipulation of plagiarized texts from writers as varied as Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, and Marquis de Sade. Acker's final novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates, is a partial adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, with allusions to The Story of O and Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty.

Spam Lit (also known as Lit Spam and Literary Spam) is defined as snippets of nonsensical verse and prose embedded in spam e-mail messages. Some of the snippets are made up, others are passages from public domain works (such as Edgar Allan Poe and The Bible), and others are conglomerations of several creative public domain works, which are often be copied from the internet. Spam lit is included in spam emails selling or purporting to sell a products such as software, male enhancement pills, and computers.

Flarf poetry can be characterized as an avant garde poetry movement of the late 20th century and the early 21st century. Its first practitioners practiced an aesthetic dedicated to the exploration of “the inappropriate” in all of its guises. Their method was to mine the Internet with odd search terms then distill the results into often hilarious and sometimes disturbing poems, plays, and other texts.

Originality is the last remaining waste product (muda) of creative practices and remains to be eliminated within aesthetic production and/or distribution systems. Originality traditionally destabilises group functioning (e.g. the literary canon, the factory floor, a circle of close friends) and creates avant-garde (i.e. unsellable or unthinkable) works.

Notions of plagiarism and originality are rife in our culture at the moment, but attacks on plagiarism seem wrong-sided, warranted by the idea that originality is desirable and worth preserving when blending in and being like everything else is equally to be striven for.

Originality today has become the diminished function of lessening production costs ("content scraping") i.e. there is less and less incentive today to produce original works, especially in the arts, because everyone, particularly those outside the arts, are doing so. And this creates a considerable incentive, especially among artists, to plagiarise works by others, works that already exist and were produced by those formerly considered to be non-artists. Or to put it more simply, as the price of originality has gone way down (everyone an artist), the price of plagiarism has skyrocketed - even if, in the end, plagiarism has costs that are nominal, illusory, and often gratuitous when stacked against the no-less illusory concept of "originality". What after all is the true economic "cost" of plagiarising clearly unoriginal work whose value is increased, not decreased by further (uncited) circulation patterns or by syndication across networks?

Aboriginal Myths of South London

2010-02-12T00:48:00.006Z

Aboriginal Myths of South London (video, 10:30, 2010) adapts world views associated with indigenous people of Oceania to an interpretation of the space and social history of places in South London. As the first manifestation of the project, this video is presented as its prelude and explores New Kent Road, a major road close to the artist’s home. This application of attitudes to the status of the dead and human relationship to the ground, becomes a materialist alternative to the concept of the genius loci and the familiar. The approach is measured and austere, employing an arrangement of animated photographs and voice texts that becomes a poetic essay.

Screens: Saturday 13 February, Urban Research at Directors Lounge, Berlin; Sunday 21 February at Olsen, Leeds.

Public Water

2010-01-25T01:57:00.002Z

http://public-water.blogspot.com/

Direct Language on DVblog

2010-01-07T08:49:00.005Z

Direct Language videos featured on DVblog today.

16 January update: more videos on DVblog.

Thanks Michael!

Sounds Unspoken

2009-12-04T15:03:00.008Z

two mini-albums now available to download here
more about Speakers
more about Unspoken Word

http://soundcloud.com/steven-ball/sets

People Watching/Harun Farocki revisited

2009-11-16T00:16:00.010Z

People Watching
QuickTime Movie, 7.1Mb 4' 17", 2007

Saturday at Tate Modern, Harun Farocki (prompted by an observation of Sophia Phoca's about how much his work examines processes in the construction of meaning in images through giving as much as possible for the viewer to work with and how, it was implied, this differed markedly from the deliberate obfuscation/alienation techniques of a structural/materialist (her characterisation) approach to deconstruction of representation that has become the default background to British experimental film practice) stated that, while he couldn't be held accountable for what different individuals from different backgrounds might or might not be able to appreciate in any given media work, he considered that he makes work that anyone viewing, whether by intention or accident, would be able to follow and understand. I was reminded that at Documenta in 2007, I captured and posted video of visitors to Farocki's installation Deep Play, which bears witness to the work's wide appeal. Drawn to the broadcast television multiple live and computer generated views of the 2006 World Cup final, the viewers become entranced by the integrity of Farocki's forensic approach to the media spectacle. The video can be viewed again here or by clicking the image above, while views of the installation screens can be seen here.

A season of 22 of Farocki's films is at Tate Modern until 6 December and an exhibition of his installations at Raven Row runs from 19 November to 7 February. From the information available it's not clear whether Deep Play will be one of the works at Raven Row.

Personal Electronics remix

2009-11-10T13:21:00.000Z

Post Office London Street Directory 1909: New Kent Road redacted

2009-10-17T01:24:00.000+01:00

Speaker

2009-09-28T17:29:00.016+01:00

Speaker (M.Mayer) by Steven Ball, 2009, 3:20, stereo

(click image to enlarge)

Speaker by Michael Mayer, 2001, Kompakt Records

Sounds Spoken podcast and playlist

2009-09-26T14:47:00.006+01:00

Ed Pinsent's The Sound Projector Radio Show
25th September 2009
Resonance 104.4FM
Curated and co-presented by Steven Ball
Download mp3

And The Native Hipsters, ‘There Goes Concorde Again’
Heater Volume Records HVR 003 single (1980)
Dajuin Yao, ‘Satisfaction of Oscillation’ (1997)
From An Anthology of Chinese Experimental Music (1992-2008), Sub Rosa SR265 CD (2008)
Neil Mills, ‘Seven Number Poems’
From Experiments in Disintegrating Language/Konkrete Canticle, Arts Council of Great Britain LP (1971)
Caroline Bergvall, ‘Ride’
From Via: Poems 1994-2004, Rockdrill #8 CD (2005)
Caroline Bergvall, ‘Rapid Eye Movement, Part 2′
From Via: Poems 1994-2004, Rockdrill #8 CD (2005)
Simon Wickham-Smith, ‘Three Versions of Appreciative’
From Rapt, DISPOSABLE THUMB RECORDINGS DTR-011 CD (2003)
Jas H Duke, ‘Bloodshot Eyes’
From Poems of Life and Death, NMA Publications, Cassette (1989)
Chris Mann, ‘Maybe if You Hit it Hard 3′
From Maybe if You Hit it Hard, http://theuse.info mp3 (2009)
Chris Mann, ‘Maybe if You Hit it Hard 4′
From Maybe if You Hit it Hard, http://theuse.info mp3 (2009)
Unamunos Quorum, ‘She’s Going With the Boys’
From Strange Visitors, Unamunos Quorum CD (2006)
Arf Arf, ‘Someone Said ‘
From Clanguage, Arf Arf CD (1996)
Arf Arf, ‘Bronson’
From Clanguage, Arf Arf CD (1996)
Bob Cobbing, ‘Computer Poem’ (1968)
From The Spoken Word: Bob Cobbing Early Recordings 1965-1973, British Library NSACD 42 CD (2009)
Konkrete Canticle, ‘Hymn To The Sacred Mushroom’ (1971)
From The Spoken Word: Bob Cobbing Early Recordings 1965-1973, British Library NSACD 42 CD (2009)
Furious Pig, ‘I Don’t Like Your Face’
From I Don’t Like Your Face, Rough Trade RT064 EP (1981)
AGF, ‘Letters Make No Meaning (Weapons No War Germs No Disease)’
From Words Are Missing, AGF PRODUCKTION MDM55082 CD (2008)
Augusto De Campos & Caetano Veloso, ‘Dias Dias Dias’
From Caixa Preta, Edições Invenção single (1975)
Augusto De Campos & Caetano Veloso, ‘Pulsar’
From Caixa Preta, Edições Invenção single (1975)
Peter Roehr, ‘Auf Der Tapete’
From Tonmontagen I+II, suppose koln ISBN 3-932513-35-5 LC 10439 CD (2002)
Gregory Whitehead, ‘Market Share – Mumbo Momo-All About Squid’
From Writing Aloud, Errant Bodies Press/Ground Fault Recordings ISBN 0-9655570-3-0 book/CD (2001)

Sounds Spoken

2009-09-23T00:07:00.009+01:00

Presenting a collection of recordings of experimental spoken word in poetry, permutation and performance. Also contains language.

Sounds Spoken
Steven Ball and Ed Pinsent
The Sound Projector Radio Show
Friday 25 September, 5:30 - 7:00pm
Resonance 104.4 FM
Live from London on radio and webstream.

Sub Zero Degrees

2009-09-15T09:48:00.006+01:00

Musing about the sometimes held misunderstanding between 'structuralism' in British experimental film and the same name given to post-existentialist French philosophy, I was excited to see that Sam Renseiw had appropriated Say Zero, positing an intriguing suggestion of what French Structuralism applied to a moving image work can produce. Refining his text, I attend to the grain of the voice, on the distinction between jouissance and identification in illusion.

Herstory

2009-09-14T00:36:00.000+01:00

Goddess Loop

2009-09-13T00:02:00.001+01:00

In My House

2009-09-12T01:03:00.001+01:00

Je--s

2009-09-11T00:02:00.001+01:00

Free Speech

2009-09-09T23:40:00.008+01:00

The sound pieces that I am posting this week were made in response to a project initiated by no.w.here as part of The Free Cinema School. Based at The Centre for Possible Studies on Edgware Road, London for a good part of August and September, no.w.here has been making a film from moving image and sound material created for the project by anyone interested in participating. I became interested in Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, a short distance from Edgware Road, as a site for gathering material for spoken word sound works. I spent a fascinating afternoon recording some of the speakers and have been experimenting with ways of developing, re-performing and reworking both the sound and the spoken text. The sound pieces being posted here represent the first results of this work, I have donated them and their source recordings to no.w.here for working into the film however seems appropriate. I’m looking forward to seeing the results and how the sound is contextualized when the film is screened this coming Friday 11 September at the Park Nights screening in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion.

Name One Goddess

2009-09-09T22:33:00.001+01:00

I'm Gonna Sing...

2009-09-08T23:56:00.001+01:00

This Global Warning

2009-09-08T00:03:00.003+01:00

Unspoken Word

2009-08-13T22:33:00.013+01:00

I’m currently starting to develop a couple of small projects and to each of them, in one way or another, spoken word is central. That is to say, each will, in one way or another, be a setting of recordings of spoken words. Whether the setting consists of being placed in a context, involving simple editing or more complex manipulation, will depend in degree on the parameters of the project, much of which has yet to be decided let alone realised. Some of the outcomes will be posted here.

I have been thinking about ways in which the spoken word has been used in sound poetry and sound art as well as in pop, experimental and electronic music. I have also been trawling through some old work and remembering how I have experimented with the sound of speech in the past. I thought it might be interesting to compile four pieces I made around ten years ago into a little downloadable collection, a ‘mini-album’, if you like. They are all rather rudimentary and rough experiments with digital sound editing and collage, and it’s interesting, while perhaps not unsurprising how throughout they play within the time-honoured avant concrete conventions of the aesthetics of repetition and the logic of fragmentation. I’m not so sure that’s how the new work will proceed, but we shall see. Or rather, we shall hear.

Click the cover image above to download a zipped file (59.6Mb) of the 'mini-album' (320kpbs mp3 files) or play below.

Track info:
1. Say Zero (5:14, 2000)

This track came out of experiments with a CD containing demos of recordings of actors’ produced by a voice-over agency. The actors’ performances conformed to the conventions for advertisements, information films, radio announcements and so on. They were by turn upbeat, sing-songy, serious, conversational, exactly what you might expect. As this was Australia, they also had that informal casual Australian chumminess. I broke the voices down to phonemes, cut, pasted and created insistent, breathy, stammers of rhythm; some sounded disturbed, quietly obsessed or climactic. This is an extended version of the one minute piece made for Colin Fallows’s Audio Research Editions CD Zero. More about that here.

2. I Was Bugging (4:10, 1998)

Going around the internet at this time was an audio file that purported to be an answering machine message relating a first person account of an episode of casual sex with a stranger, in some detail. At that time such revelations were more rare than they have now become, at a time before people felt it necessary to regale the world with their most intimate thoughts on the web. What was most interesting about the recording though, was not so much the sordid details but the excited relish of the person divulging the event, apparently breathless with gossip about themselves! A slightly slowed down (to obfuscate the gender) and channel separated version of the recording starts the piece, followed by a squelchy spanking rhythmic track made entirely from samples of the recording.

3. The Shape That Has Held Me (5:21, 2000)

Australian visual poet and super 8 filmmaker pete spence sent me a copy of a poem, which surprised me for being a sort of gently surreal existential piece. Surprising because pete’s work is usually characterised by elegant cut-up image-text visual poetry. But this is no straight forward nihilism of being that spence has penned, there is great humour in word play in lines such as "I am a notion I search always to find, like a small lantern of fur sleeping at the foot of my bed, which I carefully avoid waking when I enter the immense collapse of my room". In retrospect my reading of it is rather earnest. Like Say Zero it is mostly rhythmic fractured fragments of the sound of my voice, which has a certain squelchy vivacity, occasionally it breaks into legibility.

4. At Five in the Afternoon - with Lee Smith (13:29, 1999)

This was a collaboration with Lee Smith and it is his very distinctive voice that introduces and sets the tone for this setting of a poem by Federico García Lorca. It was made for a film by Lee that took the poem’s title and we experimented with a number of editing techniques to produce a musical cadence from his reading, and used recording techniques such as shouting from the other side of the room. There are long sections of the sound of traffic, recorded outside the front door of my house (Victoria Street in Footscray could get busy), and the voices from Say Zero make another appearance. I had started to work with Lee on a few sound/music pieces. As well as making wonderful experimental super 8 and 16mm films, Lee was also a guitarist and had a passion for all kinds of music. We were at one point working on a bizarre version of Donovan’s song Season of the Witch, which is alas destined to remain unfinished as I left Australia in 2000 and Lee sadly died this time last year. This is for him.

** Update: now available on SoundCloud
http://soundcloud.com/steven-ball/sets/unspoken-word/

Watergate Street, London SE8, 13 July 2009

2009-07-14T09:55:00.001+01:00

Mare Street, London E8, 29 June 2009

2009-06-30T08:54:00.003+01:00

The Fly Art of Fine Tipping

2009-06-22T09:12:00.013+01:00

Brut Smog's exhibition survey of British flytipping ended yesterday. If you're wandering the streets of Hastings today you might find yourself a nice hardly worn pair of boots, or perhaps a clothes airer, or maybe some old, but still perfectly functioning TVs, or if you're really lucky a whole new installation, just as these two likely lads found this rather fine sofa installed at a bus stop not far from the gallery.

Cities Methodologies - Aroundabout: Second Person Present

2009-05-23T23:07:00.008+01:00

CitiesMethodologies is an interdisciplinary event on innovative methodologies across the arts and humanities, exploring the city and its multi-faceted realities, showcasing concrete examples that push the boundaries of urban research with exhibits, installations, films and workshops for exchanging ideas.

For CitiesMethodologies I will be presenting Aroundabout: Second Person Present. Aroundabout is an occasional placeblog of hyperlocal ambulations around public spaces along the south-eastern section of the inner-London ring road, using a combination of text, image and video to reflect upon specificities of each location. Aroundabout: Second Person Present will consist of installation and expanded performance presentations based on Aroundabout, by way of an elaboration of the blog, reiterating extant material while adding a performative layer to create an enhanced interpretive context for questions around how subjectivity in place is articulated through a convergence of multiple media.

Private view 18.00-20.00 Wednesday 27 May
Download the private view invitation

After Lethaby performance documentation

2009-05-22T07:41:00.004+01:00

After Lethaby video performance by Martin Blažíček and Steven Ball, Lethaby Gallery, Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London, 20 May 2009.

After Lethaby

2009-05-13T17:28:00.007+01:00

audio-visual performance
Steven Ball and Martin Blažíček
6pm, Wednesday 20 May
Lethaby Gallery
Central St Martins College of Art and Design
Southampton Row
London WC1B 4AP
Free

Beginning on Saturday, Martin and I will capture images and audio around and about Central St Martins’s Lethaby building, interrogating spatial, historical and other phenomena of the space and its use. This will be developed into a one-off live audio-visual performance conceived specifically for the building's gallery. The development of the work will be documented over the days preceding the performance at http://blazicek.net/lethaby.

The performance is part of the expanded cinema seminar series organized by Duncan White for British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection and follows the Expanded Cartography and the New Live Cinema symposium which runs from 10am – 5pm in G12 Conference Room. For more information see the Study Collection website.

Image from the Museum and Contemporary Collection at Central Saint Martins

Over Magnetic Island

2009-05-10T00:04:00.003+01:00

Over The Borough Island

2009-05-06T08:39:00.001+01:00

Burham Quarry Tunnel: report on the first investigation, 16 March 2009

2009-03-17T09:11:00.019Z

The goal today was to find the entrance to the tunnel photographed here by Jack Hill: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/26581
marked by a red circle on this map:

Walking from Aylesford via Eccles, the village just visible in the southwest of the map, I arrive at the junction and turn left towards Burham.

Immediately the road turns quite steeply down a hill and round a sharp bend. According to the map the path that leads to the tunnel entrance is somewhere around here, but there are no accessible paths from the road opposite Little Culand, Culand Farm and Petts Farm. There is a fence beyond which is a dense overgrown thicket and beyond that what appear to be paddocks. There is no footpath along either side of the road and cars appear quickly around the bend making it impossible to stop anywhere to take photographs. Around the corner on the right there is a bus stop and a byway leading off the road up a slight hill, shown as a green line with cross lines on the map.

A little way on the right is a bridle path, shown on the map as a broken green line, which I take. It runs along the edge of a field. After a while I reach a short but steep incline to the right of which is a wooded area. With farther exploration I find that the dense thicket here comes to an edge and then a drop of about 20 metres.

This, according to the map, is immediately above the tunnel entrance, however looking down I can see no sign of it. From the original photograph it would appear to be set back into the cutting, which might explain why it is not visible from above. Turning left to follow the bridle path it is possible to reach the disused quarry that the tunnel is supposed to lead to, and a strange and interesting landscape it is. I walk a treacherous path around its edge.

Future action: return visit on a quieter day with less traffic and investigate a possible connection with this place: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/877686

observational-note-taking-behaviour

2009-02-21T21:14:00.005Z

Around More London [1] people are behaving photographically in front of views of City Hall/Tower Bridge.

They are tourist-behaviour-photographers.

One man [2] is in the artistic-behaviour-photographer mode, photographing objects close-up, including a bronze sculptural-relief-model-map of the area, complete with rough hewn bronze models of City Hall and Tower Bridge, River Thames, More London... upon which someone has placed a small pair of children’s spectacles with pink frames.

I, of course, am in observational-note-taking-behaviour mode, scratching in my notebook, music on headphones [3].

Weather’s fine.

[1] Taking a walk on the way home with my bag of shopping [1a].

[2] The man is dressed in black leather jacket, black jeans, he is olive skinned with dark hair and unshaven, he looks intense, a determined expression.

[3] ‘Repercussions’ by Distance

[1a] One organic white tin loaf from Flour Power City bakery; 500g of Balmaadi Estate coffee, ground for cafetiere from Monmouth Coffee; a chunk of Keen’s Cheddar cheese from Neal’s Yard Dairy; two bottles Marqués de Cáceres 2007 Rioja Rosé (£2 off when you buy two bottles from Majestic Wines).

The Ground, the Sky, and the Island

2009-02-10T14:04:00.004Z

This video reworks photographs, super 8 film, sound and anecdotal text from a series of bush and outback locations across Australia during the 1990s. It takes the form of extracts from an imagined first person journal, layered over extruded experiments with composition and movement constructing a synthetic shifting landscape. Moving through discrete but related sections, the abstracted view shifts vertically through 90 degrees between the closeness of the local, the ground, and the claustrophobia of the distant colonizing horizon. As it travels east from the South Australian desert, through bush, tablelands and rocky range, the video becomes a subjective essayistic meditation, in absentia, on being in the landscape, the problem of attempting to reproduce these landscapes and the uncertainty of their representation. At its inconclusion we arrive on K'gari (Fraser Island off the coast of Queensland) where we reach the edge of the known world, a space being made in an open future.

The Ground, the Sky, and the Island was made for Figuring Landscapes

Figuring Landscapes

2009-02-04T09:56:00.003Z

Artists’ film and video on themes of landscape from Australia and the UK

This weekend at Tate Modern:
http://www.figuringlandscapes.co.uk
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/film/figuringlandscapes.htm

explicate this process

2009-02-02T21:09:00.002Z

Beginning eight days ago
some men began
to erect scaffolding around the adjacent block.
Built in 1975 of light ochre bricks, it now has an exoskeletal form,
but not quite a shell.

Beginning in 1971
six designers and many other men
spent six years erecting a building in Paris.
15,000 tonnes of steel exoskeletal form,
something like a shell.

In 1942
a French poet spends some time pursuing the challenge
that objects offer to language.
A revelation drives his repeated attempts to to explicate this process,
something of an exoskeleton of revision and frustrated refinement
of phenomena of the everyday sublime.

Things that I am not in writing this concerned with:
the revelatory,
the sublime,
the spectacular,
the phenomenal,
the extraordinary,
the allegorical, or
the ineffable.

But then it snowed.

15,000 tonnes

2009-01-26T21:09:00.001Z

Some men have
(over the past three days)
erected scaffolding around the block of flats adjacent to where I live.
This block,
built
(in 1975)
from light ochre bricks,
seems now
(in 2009)
to have exoskeletal form,
not quite a shell.

It took six designers
six years
(from 1971 to 1977)
to build
(in Paris)
another building with apparently skeletal shell,
(external support or protection?)
of 15,000 tonnes of steel.

exoskeleton

2009-01-25T12:51:00.002Z

The scaffolding went up on the block next door.
Well, when I say,
or rather write,
“...went up...”,
what I mean is that several men
(I omitted to count them)
spent some hours
(how many?)
erecting the scaffolding.

When I write “...the block next door...”
it would be more accurate to write “...the adjacent block of flats”.

I may be alone in finding this scaffolding rather interesting, almost attractive.
It is as though the building,
a rather unremarkable 1970s
(I would guess)
block of flats,
built from a light ochre coloured brick,
has grown an external skeleton, an exoskeleton.

A zoomorphic metaphor perhaps,
but what animal looks like this?

Around the Nature Colour Cycle

2009-01-19T16:44:00.022Z

Abstraction, landscape, colour, and information.

This is an extended version of an essay originally written for the catalogue for the exhibition To Look and To Look by Raul Gomez Valverde.

Spring: abstraction
The spring of the twentieth century: high times for modernism, colour and abstraction. This abstraction wants us to think of the sublime while standing in awe in front of a painting, in the presence of ‘pure’ abstraction, as though in common with other non-pictorial forms like, let’s say, music, abstraction has the means to elicit a direct response, bypassing language. Is there not though a semiotics of colour and shape just as there is of music? Can abstraction really resist the organising imperative of language inscribed as it is within a cultural context and the history of the abstract in that context, in culture?

As new and radical pure colour and abstraction might have seemed in the future-heading motor-driven early twentieth century, one of its exemplars in Rothko’s practice was informed as much by age-old mythopoeia, symbols, rituals and like Greek tragedy, driven more to redemption, intending to fill a supposed modern spiritual emptiness.

Away from such neo-religious impulses we find a more secular form of abstraction: first in Malevich, then Mondrian and the De Stijl group where essentials of pure form, line, shape and colour in design were ends in themselves, not just beyond the pictorial but through to the other side of abstracted representation. Malevich’s Suprematism was a grammar based on fundamental geometric semiotics, in particular the square and the circle, suggesting that such abstraction could lead to “a fourth dimension or a Fourth Way beyond the three to which our ordinary senses have access” (Mel Gooding, Abstract Art, Tate Gallery Publishing, 2001). For Mondrian the non-pictorial was the only way to move beyond the tragic into the world of the synthetic and the un-natural; eschewing the metaphysics of Malevich’s bold colours his work became self-sufficient, painted surfaces appearing to stretch far beyond their borders as though skilfully cut from a landscape. In fact the painting was the landscape. This was considered by De Stijl to be a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order, pure abstraction and the reduction to the essentials of form and colour became metaphysical.

But if we look at a Mondrian painting today do we see universal spiritual harmony? Is our emptiness banished in the presence of a Rothko? Or are these more likely to be seen as signs along the road of twentieth century art history, no less impressive for it but offering little redemption for the contemporary soul? What is the use of abstraction?

Summer: landscape
Landscape, of course, is not the natural world but an idealised, pictorial version of nature. The word comes from the Dutch word landschap, from land (directly equivalent to the English word land) and the suffix -schap, corresponding to the English suffix -ship. The word was brought into English when Dutch artists were on the verge of becoming masters of the landscape genre.

In the early nineteenth century Marylebone Park in London was renamed The Regent's Park and John Nash landscaped a huge circular area for the Prince Regent with a lake and a canal. From the terraces of the new royal residence the vista appeared to be that of a country park. The Regent’s Park is an idealised, pictorial version of nature, a representation, a construction following the practice established in the eighteenth century (most famously through the work of the likes of 'Capability' Brown) of remodelling the great estate parks of the English gentry to resemble a tidied up version of nature. The Regent’s Park is an artwork sharing the aims of landscape painting, its romantic appeal to the sublime and human reconciliation with nature.

For structural filmmakers like Chris Welsby and William Raban in the 1970s, questions about how landscape images were produced and the relationship of the viewer and maker to those images became more important than any lingering romantic reconciliation with nature. The form of the films would be determined by the systems of nature, forces in the natural environment. In Welsby’s work the wind, the course of a stream, the position of the sun, played as much a direct role in factors such as the direction or movement of the camera, duration of shot and the overall structure or shape of a film, as any of the direct actions of the filmmaker. In the photochemical moving image practice, landscape representation shrugged off its historical metaphysical imperative and became existential, as much a model of time as space. In Raban’s film Colours of This Time the change in the colour of the natural light of a park from sunrise to sunset is captured continuously, exaggerated by using time-lapse, with an open shutter compressing the day into 3 minutes.

Autumn: colour
Photography does not represent or reproduce an image of the natural world but constructs an idealised pictorial version of it, the simulacrum of photo-realism has come to be considered to contain the most verisimilitude as an image of the world. Photographic realism itself is based on a set of assumptions around Euclidean perspective, idealisations of what the world should look like developed from painting. Cinema, being predominantly lens-based and photochemical, inherited this as an early example of remediation, not the least in landscape images. Now we find that the most prized goal of digital moving imaging is definition and resolution, its zenith being to equal and then to surpass film and cinema in appearing more real than real climbing to dizzy heights of super-realism. Whether photo-realistic or synthetic, the aim is for it to be highly pictorially representational and of course in High Definition. How did this happen when computational imaging has such vast potential for sophisticated and complex interpretation of visual input? The essence of digital imaging is not the indexical trace but information processing and so pictorial imaging is but one of many possible options (For a more thorough discussion of the relationship between cinema, digital imaging, graphism and pictorialism see The Virtual Life of Film, D. N. Rodowick, Harvard University Press, 2007, pp.102 – 105.).

Some artists however have worked with abstraction within digital moving image to highly original effect, like the Austrian duo reMI or Dutch artist Bas van Koolwijk, but while the joyous, delinquently noisy and jarring effect of their work is of a different nature to, let’s say, Rothko, they also work pretty much purely on the level of affect as an immediate response to dynamic abstraction. But digital media, with information processing at its very core, also has the potential to work at conceptual and cognitive levels.

Philip Sanderson’s video Fleshtones, while ostensibly concerned with an integral relationship between colour and musical tonality produced an interesting side issue. The piece used pixellated pornography among its source material to provide its eponymous colour palette. The presence of porn survived in the key words Sanderson used on YouTube, resulting in a vastly greater number of hits than one might usually expect for an experimental video work. This as abstraction is as far away from the visual affect/effect of pornography as one can imagine, however much the tonal values and variations might remain, to the search engines it’s still pornography, perhaps much as it might be to visual recognition software; this may be non-figurative abstraction but there representation remains at the level of metadata.

Susan Collins’s Fenlandia and Glenlandia projects abstract through process into non-idealised pictorial representations of landscape A webcam transmitted images from a fixed view of a rural location via the internet, harvesting pixels by the second, each generated image accumulated from top to bottom, left to right in coloured horizontal bands throughout the day. The resulting slowly changing images are like pixellated digital pointillism, representations of several hours of a view in one continuously changing image. Already we can see how the paradigms might have changed from conventional pictorialism when we can talk of multi-temporality and an image that changes continuously but isn’t a moving image in the cinematic spectacular sense.

Collins’s and Sanderson’s art projects might be seen to bring concern with colour and abstraction into the world of information, leaving the affect behind and moving towards an art of data and information, asking questions about the relationship between the abstract and the pictorial.

Winter: information
Generally speaking graphical information is represented in colour and abstract form. Information design ‘guru’ Edward Tufte, refers to information design as ‘cognitive art’(Envisioning Information, Edward R. Tufte, Graphics Press LLC, 1990, p.9.). His emphasis is on the clarity of reading “colour’s great dominion” and he writes of the diminishing returns involved in using too much colour, too much information. In his world colour is semantic and not naturalistic unless it’s used to distinguish information: to label (colour as noun), to measure (as quantity), to represent or imitate reality (as representation), and to enliven or decode (as beauty)(ibid. p.81.). Tufte’s idea of information design is based on utilitarian principles and the imperatives of communication, as such it is teleological and deterministic, unable to conceive of a graphical form that can be concerned with anything but the transmission of information. It is a formulation that limits the imagination of design and ultimately how design might imagine itself.

Spring: full cycle and change
So how might abstraction be liberated from the competing imperatives of the informational on the one hand and the abstract affective on the other? How might the cognitive, the conceptual and the social qualities of information design drive an art practice that escapes a modernist preoccupation with the abstract idealisation of being? How can an open and generative form of address that employs moving image media, colour and abstraction, not for random effect and the immediacy of affect be forged as a continuous measure of the world without recourse to the purely pictorial? Can the abstraction of integral informational forms resist reduction to reflexive closed loop feedback while being simultaneously temporal and spatial? These are questions that arise from considerations around the Nature Colour Cycle, considerations that might entertain other questions about what visual art is for, if it is not to make us think about the way we see things, the way things are represented visually, the space between those two points and what this relationship means.

Can we conceive of information design that is abstract but doesn’t serve commerce or the information industry? Perhaps beyond modernism on one hand and the commercial infosphere on another, we can conceive of an abstraction of information that is relational, that speaks directly to the experience of space and the (re)-writing of place as a generative and iterative process, while investigating new possibilities in both perceptual and cognitive representation of what we might have once called landscape, through a hybrid of what we might once have called Fine Art and Information Design.

With Nature Colour Cycle Raul Gomez Valverde has gone some way towards realising the possibilities of such a project. This chromatic animation is based on weather conditions and seasonal changes of The Regent's Park, the circular proportions are those of the original scene photographed in the park at solstices, equinoxes and moon phases throughout a year, transformed into a concentric colour wheel colour changes that graduate chronologically through the seasons. Projected on the floor in the gallery space in his exhibition To Look and to Look, Nature Colour Cycle forms a perfect circle: dark in the middle shading to lighter on the periphery, it might be said to resemble an eye and we might think of ourselves as being slowly drawn into a mildly hypnogagic state as we look, and to look is to be pulled into the pool of this singular staring pupil with its singular viewpoint. As a visualisation of an environment in which process over time reveals spatial patterns however, it repurposes abstraction beyond abstraction as a means to its own ends. In exhibition Nature Colour Cycle is clearly part of a larger system, surrounded as it is by a variety of descriptions and illustrations of the process and offered as one of a number of possible ways of presenting environment and landscape. By hybridising conventionally distinct disciplines this variety of visual information becomes an experimental art practice that is driven by form and process, but being specific in the context, object and subject of its investigation, it is not allowed to become subsumed by process, reduced only to abstraction or dominated by formalism, rather it suggests the potential for an open-ended process of exploration and interpretation.

To Look and To Look
Del Sol St Art Gallery
Santander, Spain
10 January - 14 February 2009

Suspension (Jetlag Emulation Remix)

2009-01-08T22:46:00.002Z

[HD Version]

Suspension Excess

2009-01-06T22:25:00.003Z

[HD version]

percussive

2009-01-05T17:15:00.005Z

A walk in Queen’s Wood near Highgate on Sunday afternoon.

We hear drumming.
A Woodpecker, a Greater Spotted Woodpecker.
Drumming.

It flies from tree to tree.
It seems to choose different thicknesses of trunk or branch to tune the sound.

“The drumming sound often heard is the Woodpecker trying to attract a mate by vibrating its bill against a branch.”
http://www.naturegrid.org.uk/biodiversity/birds/woodpeck.htm#great

Could the Woodpecker's percussive communication be a rare, or perhaps the only, example of non-human communication using a musical instrument?

Immersion, suspension, stasis...

2008-12-30T14:13:00.012Z

So what is this?

This is s a sketch, an experiment, trying out an idea that I’m unsure about. It’s an experiment in making something that suggests or creates an affective state, an attempt to replicate the experience of something in such a way that the experience might be reproduced in the experience of the video, which might be considered to be attempting to reproduce a subjective state, or simply to replicate a situation as far as possible within the possibilities of a medium. Ideally it is intended to be experienced immersively, more of that later, but to this end the closest you can get to achieving some kind of immersion is if you watch it full screen with the sound on headphones or better still the HD version at http://www.vimeo.com/2510462 (full screen with headphones).

Temporal slippage and the sensation of creeping jetlag, timelag. There’s a point when, after being on an flight for 12 hours, sleep seems impossible, weariness fills every limb, the dull hum of the engine, the occasional rough shuddering turbulence, the blinds drawn, seat reclined as far as possible, squeezed fetal, cabin lights dimmed, long slow feeling as though we could stay here forever, suspended animation, speed and perception, precipitates a kind of swirl of melancholy. It’s this creeping jetlag melancholia, a wistful, pensiveness born of suspension of time or its normal diurnal working patterns that I was trying to evoke: the suspension of a subjective experience of normality, a vague liminal hallucinatory state, a few kilometres over the Indian Ocean. This is the state that I am groping towards trying to recreate in this sketch.

The music that I’ve been connecting to this is the anti-drama of 90’s German techno: the more dubby ambient, deep, end of Basic Channel/Chain Reaction and Rhythm & Sound, or Plastikman’s Consumed, immersive spatial sounds, the sort of music that occupies narrow frequencies, is continuous and based on drones but with almost sub-sonic spatialised reverberant bass and rhythms, the sort of narrow frequencies of the pressurised container with the standing wave of the engine sound.

The interest here is in creating context, an environment, an affective situation rather than a perceptual spectacle or metaphors for vision and consciousness. Video here is not a ‘medium’, not here functioning as a carrier of information, or meaning, not in itself a stimuli for response, or to demand attention, and it is not a spectacle. It suggests rather that the viewer becomes immersed in the context that it creates.

Digital video is not so adept at being the presentation or a record of time past, it cannot easily be broken into discrete images that represent an indexical record of a moment. Digital moving image media is far more adept at thinking spatially. Compression dictates that any discrete moment, if it could be frozen in video, would represent not that one fraction of a second, but a merging of various particles of recordings of both preceding and following that moment, keyframing, bitrates all conspire against the representation of a temporal flow. So now temporal representation is a continuous streaming slippage of a number of points in time, all at once. If this is the case we recreate the illusion of the passage of time through perception and cognition, a slippage of multi-temporalities, or let’s say a lack of temporal specificity, suggests a spatial experience, multiple representations of time suggests the creation of continuity and place, in suspension, a few kilometres over the Indian Ocean.

The problem is that the video is inadequate in producing this context in and by itself without recourse to instructions to the viewer to watch it in HD, wearing headphones, or whatever. The possible best context for creating this context would be to create a space in which this video would be playing continuously, perhaps surround sound filling as much as possible the interior space, an immersive space itself standing in for an immersive space, a box, in installation. This line of enquiry is, perhaps, to be continued.

In the meantime, it has occurred to me that I have already made a film with these kind of immersive qualities, 17 years ago on super 8, it was intended to be exhibited in a cinema space, screening with continuous sound, Harmonic Maheno:

(watch it in full screen, with headphones... etc)

it's cold

2008-12-28T20:28:00.004Z

It's cold.

I move my leg here.
It's cold.

Then just a few centimetres,
over here.

Still cold.

Cold across my back.
Cold air on my back.
I turn so that my back is angled towards the radiator.
Still cold, but not as cold.

However this angle is awkward for the keyboard and it's difficult to type.

[map]

movement

2008-12-22T22:03:00.004Z

A column...
... no, a rectangular block of tiles set into the wall, floor to roof.
Its width is four horizontal rectangular shaped tiles, with a ratio of around 2:1 width to height.

Dark turquoise green glazed tiles with light coloured, possibly white, grouting.

In the centre a patch of yellow and black striped hazard tape, four strips placed horizontally so that the black and yellow bands running at an angle of roughly 45° across the width of tape, create an irregular staggered pattern.

It looks to me something like an op-art painting, but resisting the illusion of movement.

The Bakerloo line train moves out of the station. Any further description would be based on memory and not direct observation.

mute objects

2008-12-14T00:06:00.010Z

Most of them are boarded up now.
One or two, here and there, still occupied.

When entire floors are empty
welders appear fixing fanned metal rods.

insurance

2008-12-12T10:18:00.000Z

Camberwell pavements,
health insurance?
No thanks...

unattended

2008-12-11T22:47:00.003Z

Music on earphones.
Whose earphones?
His earphones?
No, mine.

Unattended bags
cause delays
please keep yours with
you at all times

The exclamation mark is to the right of the block of text
and runs its full height, vertically.
The point at its base is a graphical image of a case.

We stop and start through the emptied estates.

three

2008-12-09T00:55:00.002Z

Three words collided
three words together
three words repeated
but not three times.

She's holding two mobile phones.
Why am I always suspicious of people
with two mobile phones?

From Waterloo Bridge the river looks sluggish in the indifferent chill.

had enough

2008-11-30T02:40:00.002Z

The Welshman on the night bus said he'd had enough of this country and couldn't wait to get back to China.

there and back

2008-11-29T17:33:00.008Z

There

Can't see much farther than the back of the seat in front, the rain on the steamed up window. Macro shift the grey sky, the spots of twin red lights, the yellow rail.

Back

Sky darkening, windows more reflective, restless leg across the passage two seats up on the right. A couple are trying to read my notebook over my shoulder.

post

2008-11-29T00:24:00.002Z

These keys... what do you want me to write?

A clear and unambiguous statement perhaps?

It's not before time, certainly.

Horizons and Centres

2008-11-11T13:19:00.005Z

If my blog writing has been a little skimpy the last few months it's because I've been incredibly busy with other things. Two of those things reach some kind of fruition in the next few weeks: two separate curatorial collaborations, both involve Australian artists.

Transcentric, an exhibition at Central St Martins's Lethaby Gallery, a collaboration with RMIT in Melbourne on the theme of the urban centre, opens next week on Monday 17 November.

Figuring Landscapes, a touring screening programme of Australian and UK moving image works on the theme of landscape, has its first public exhibition at ArtSway in the New Forest on Monday 24 November.

Click on the links for details - I'm too busy to write more!

Hisstorical Release

2008-11-03T22:04:00.005Z

MESSTHETICS GREATEST HISS CD (#110) An introduction to the D.I.Y. cassette scene 1979-84.

This is D.I.Y. at its most liberated. The U.K.'s initial outburst of "cassette culture" produced sounds of incredible freshness, directness, and even occasional sophistication, which poured out of hundreds of bedrooms filled with found- and improvised percussion, Woolworths guitars, home-made electronics (and soldering fumes!) came at least a thousand tapes, mostly circulated through the mail for free or at cost (and usually in editions of 100 or fewer. The 'Greatest Hiss' series samples the cassette-scene's more, er, melodic material (sorry, there's no 'ambient' or 'industrial' - and everything's under 4 minutes!).

Just released, features 25 acts, including Storm Bugs, plus bonus mp3s.

More info at Hyped to Death

Plagiarism Live!

2008-10-26T00:22:00.009+01:00

Dirk de Bruyn is in town from Australia next week and Small But Perfectly Formed Olivier has kindly, efficiently, and at short notice, managed to rustle up a gig for his performance Plagiarism, a multi-screen film and sound poetry presentation addressing issues of traumatic effect/affect.

Also performing on the night, improvising together for the first time will be
Phil Durrant (synthesizers and computer), Mathias Forge (trombone) and Samantha Rebello (flute), while kicking it all off Lynn Loo & Guy Sherwin will present two 16mm multi-projection performances Cycles #3 & Sound Cuts #2. Dirk will also be accompanied by guest appearances from local performers.

Here's some more info about the artists and work:
Dirk de Bruyn was a founding member and past president of MIMA (Experimenta), he’s been involved with Fringe Network and been a member of the Melbourne Super 8 Film Group. His materialist film practice is a representation of traumatised space, depicting a person consumed by a body of pain in which slowly something is remembered. In this performance he enlists the strategies of experimental film and punk, invoking notions of Artaud's "cruel" performance.

Mathias Forge and Samantha Rebello use a wide variety of extended techniques to explore the textural capacities of their instruments. Focusing on the fragile physicality of the sounds and on their environment they keep a strong sense of musicality in their improvisations. Phil Durrant approaches the computer like an acoustic instrument, with all the flexibility and precision that this implies He has been awarded various Arts Council grants to research and develop his use of electronics. He has played with Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Grooverider, John Zorn, MIMEO...

Guy Sherwin and Lynn Loo: Cycles #3, is a hand-made film for two 16mm projectors. The image of a circle pulsates at varying rates accompanied by rhythmic sounds. This is a recent colour version that uses two basic colours that have the effect of inducing additional colours in the eye of the beholder. Guy explains Sound Cuts: “Black film stock is repeatedly cut and rejoined. The cuts are made with the angled blade of a splicer normally used for joining sound film. At each cut we see an angled flash of light followed by a thud of sound. The film combines rhythmic intervals from one cut per second to twenty-four cuts per second, spread across 6 projectors”.

7:00pm, Sunday 2nd November, £6 admission
HOLY REDEEMER CHURCH HALL
Exmouth Market, London, EC1R 4OE
Tube: Farrington, Angel / Bus: 19, 38, 341
More information on http://smabpf.blogspot.com

Night Garden or Meltdown?

2008-10-07T01:00:00.005+01:00

let's leave the grown ups to their crisis as we enter the garden in the night...

The Grown Ups

2008-10-06T14:27:00.002+01:00

They're all out there today you know. With their grey clothes, grey faces frozen into frowns, with their cigarettes, their cardboard coffee cups with the plastic lids, and their complicated mobile 'phones. Cash or credit? They look worried.

Green on the Horizon

2008-10-05T13:06:00.018+01:00

Green on the Horizon, 18 min, 1988, Philip Sanderson & Steven Ball

It was well over twenty years ago that Philip and I spent weeks scouring the folk archives and local libraries, from the marshlands of the Medway delta to the lanes of the outskirts of Maidstone and that mysterious suburban liminal hinterland between, collecting loosely connected local folklore, phenomena occurring around pagan sites, universal urban myths, hatching plans to realise this as some kind of major cinematic opus. But how to achieve this vision?

There was some interest from influential figures in the experimental film world, which led exactly nowhere. Without the means to produce the project in its entirety, we were however able to make some forays into the project, first with the extremely DIY Apostrophe S in 1986 and then in 1988 for Green on the Horizon we received funding from South East Arts. It was shot on several days over a couple of months on Cliffe Marshes, using the London Filmmakers’ Co-op’s just about functioning Nizo super 8 camera, balancing precariously on bicycles while shooting, pacing around fields and along the Thames Estuary foreshore as Angie Staples made attempts to interpret the directors’ intentions through self-choreographed parading up and down, round and round. The finished video was influenced as much by Tarkovsky and The Avengers as it was by avant-garde formalism.

Green on the Horizon was well-received in some quarters. Stephen Bode wrote “Short cuts make long delays. Green on the Horizon makes a wonderful diversion.” (City Limits, 28 April, 1988) and made it number four in the City Limits ‘Indie Vid Top Ten’ for 1988 (placing it above works by the likes of Mona Hatoum, Cerith Wyn Evans and George Barber). It was included in Electric Eyes, an early Film and Video Umbrella touring programme which resulted in screenings at the Tate, ICA, Video Brazil, and Wien Medienwerkstadtt, among many others.

But elsewhere the video received a more muted response. Mike Jones was frustrated: “A film that contains elements of dance/choreographed movements, but is not really a dance film; a film set in a landscape, but its insistence for much of the time on framing the figure closely in relation to background means that it’s not really a ‘landscape film’” and he goes on to suggest that it “…stumbles and then trips itself up…” (Independent Media, July 1988).

So, after twenty years how does Green on the Horizon fare?

It looks to me now to be something of an ante-narrative, a catalogue of gestures and phrases on a linear path that suggests a parallel narrative that it is placed beyond; the narrative elements presented only partially in the work itself, which still curiously appears quite self-contained, well-formed but paradoxically incomplete. It is an enigmatic piece and perhaps best viewed alongside its complementary works: the aforementioned Apostrophe S and Hangway Turning. The latter was made by Philip in 1990, after I had left the UK, and effectively collects most of the remaining elements that we had developed for the project into a work with a more satisfying narrative structure. This is achieved chiefly through the introduction of a second character, a kind of reluctant psychic archeologist who provides a narrative continuity, played with deadpan aplomb by Nigel Jacklin. An extract from Hangway Turning can be viewed here, courtesy of the archive at psouper.co.uk.

More One Minutes (Volume 2)

2008-09-13T14:50:00.007+01:00

More screenings during the remainder of this year for the One Minute (Volume 2) touring programme curated by Kerry Baldry

14 September - 31 October: The Big Screen, Queen Victoria Square, Hull

18 – 21 September: Housewarming, The Marseille Project Gallery, Marseille, France

18 October: Hull Film, The Red Gallery, Hull

21 October: NoD, Prague, Czech Republic

19 November - 20 December: Artprojx Space, London

Artists included in One Minute (Volume 2): Kerry Baldry, Steven Ball, Gordon Dawson, Catherine Elwes, Andy Fear, Steve Hawley, Nicolas Herbert, Riccardo Iacono, Hilary Jack, Esther Johnson, Nick Jordan, Tina Keane, Deklan Kilfeather, Lynn Loo, Kate Meynell, Louisa Minkin, Claire Morales, Gary Peploe, Martin Pickles, Stuart Pound, Laure Prouvost, Eva Rudlinger, Philip Sanderson, Erica Scourti, Margie Schnibbe, Guy Sherwin, Marty St.James, Unconscious Films, Phillip Warnell and Mark Wigan.

At Five in the Afternoon

2008-08-20T01:24:00.002+01:00

At five in the afternoon.
It was just five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A basket of lime made ready
at five in the afternoon.
The rest was death and only death
at five in the afternoon.

The wind blew the cotton wool away
at five in the afternoon.
And oxide scattered nickel and glass
at five in the afternoon.
Now the dove and the leopard fight
at five in the afternoon.
And a thigh with a desolate horn
at five in the afternoon.
The bass-pipe sound began
at five in the afternoon.
The bells of arsenic, the smoke
at five in the afternoon.
Silent crowds on corners
at five in the afternoon.
And only the bull with risen heart!
at five in the afternoon.
When the snow-sweat appeared
at five in the afternoon.
when the arena was splashed with iodine
at five in the afternoon.
death laid its eggs in the wound
at five in the afternoon.
At five in the afternoon.
At just five in the afternoon.

A coffin on wheels for his bed
at five in the afternoon.
Bones and flutes sound in his ear
at five in the afternoon.
Now the bull bellows on his brow
at five in the afternoon.
The room glows with agony
at five in the afternoon.
Now out of distance gangrene comes
at five in the afternoon.
Trumpets of lilies for the green groin
at five in the afternoon.
Wounds burning like suns
at five in the afternoon.
and the people smashing windows
at five in the afternoon.
At five in the afternoon.
Ay, what a fearful five in the afternoon!
It was five on every clock!
It was five of a dark afternoon!

Federico García Lorca

for Lee Smith RIP

Microscape

2008-08-15T11:18:00.010+01:00

The Big Carpet Snake came through this country long ago in the Dreamtime. At that time the sea was not here (and) the land went all the way to the mainland... On his way down from the north, his body made the channel between Hinchinbrook Island and the mainland. The big snake came down the Herbert River, went out to sea and broke up leaving parts of his backbone which are the Palm Islands and his head which is Magnetic Island. The tail of his body is at Halifax Bay.
- Wulgurukaba people, Yunbenun (Magnetic Island), Queensland, Australia

Personal Electronics Dossier

2008-08-01T06:51:00.012+01:00

On Saturday I will be performing Personal Electronics as part of the series of moving image performances Intermission: Who is Miss Roder being presented by the Melbourne International Film Festival in Australia. The performance is concerned with ideas around the notion of paranoia and was partly inspired by reports that instances of what one might call ‘everyday paranoia’ are on the increase. My subject expanded when I discovered phenomena such as gang stalking (people stalked or harassed in public by gangs of strangers, on the street, in cars, etc.), electronic harassment using lasers and voice to skull technology (people attacked in their own homes by remote lasers or hearing voices inside their own heads transmitted using technology that by-passes the ears), where individuals claim to be long-term victims of attacks by perpetrators unknown. There are many websites dedicated to reports about these attacks, speculation as to who the perpetrators (known as ‘perps’) may be and their motivation, as well as calls to government to introduce legislation against the practice (which might be optimistic as other sites suggest that governments themselves might be instigating much of this activity to intimidate and discredit personae non gratae).

There are also many videos on YouTube and Google Video made by the victims of these attacks. My performance will consist largely of extracts from online videos uploaded by victims with live voice performance of text extracted from videos and reports, including anonymous contributions to the performance gathered up to the day of the performance via a form on my website. The live voice will be performed by reciting recordings of extracts of these texts, played back in random shuffle mode on an iPod through earphones, in effect I will be repeating the voices in my own head. This will be presented without commentary.

The unasked questions might be whether this is an absurd extreme of the kind of everyday anxiety and paranoia that most people are familiar with, or whether the victims’ experiences are evidence that much paranoia points to justified concerns about organised activities being perpetrated potentially against all individuals.

Here is a link to some of the information available online as a research dossier of material for Personal Electronics: http://delicious.com/spherical_object/personalelectronics

Attitude

2008-07-21T22:26:00.003+01:00

click on image for QuickTime movie (9.7Mb)

Work in Australia

2008-07-09T08:11:00.007+01:00

With the recession biting at our heels in the UK it seems that many are considering fleeing to distant shores with the promise of a better life. According to this article certainly ‘white collar’ Australians in the UK seem to be cutting their losses and making the trip home believing “…that Australia, with its strong economy and buoyant jobs market, is the best place to ride out the credit crunch.” And then the other day on the tube I glanced over the shoulder of someone reading one of those nasty free papers; what caught my eye was an advert suggesting that the reader might “work in Oz” and gave this MySpace page. Was this a new attempt to lure Poms downunder to a life of endless barbeques on endless beaches, living in the shadow of Uluru or Sydney Opera House or any number of other clichéd icons of the ‘Australian lifestyle’? Well yes and no. Rather than an update on the White Australia Policy it is in fact simply encouraging young adults to take a working holiday in the country, itself of course frequently a backdoor to residency. In trying to debunk some of the old clichés the MySpace page constructs another image of Australia as the gap year rite of passage of choice.

Anyway this was not intended to be a deconstruction of contemporary representations of Australian culture, you’ll have to wait a little longer for that one, but to mention that I will be presenting some work in Australia later this month in Sydney and Melbourne in early August:

Loose Space and Circular Time
- a non-chronological retrospective of a selection of film and video works made between 1991 and 2008.
7.30pm, Friday 25 July, Teaching and Learning Cinema, SYDNEY (a bar), 302 Cleveland Street, Surry Hills, Sydney

Personal Electronics
- a video/spoken word performance
10pm, Saturday 2 August, Intermission, Melbourne International Film Festival, Fortyfive Downstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne

Two days later we travel out of Melbourne to catch the cogcollective screening
Intimate Journeys
curated by Lynn Loo
7pm, Monday 4 August at A Perfect Drop, 5 Howe Street, Daylesford, Victoria.

Hard art makes intelligence soft

2008-07-01T00:51:00.015+01:00

Cryptic Burgess Dub 12:26, 2006

download QuickTime version (76 Mb)

Dubstep meets experimental video meets cryptology. Electronic video manipulation follow dub music processes producing visual distortion, echo and reverb. Like much contemporary dubstep music this evokes the grimy South London summer, as pavements melt, the humidity rises, a steamy fug settles and the city slows into an uneasy and frazzled hallucinatory dub daze. The image track provides a background rhythm to an experiment testing a proposition that the cryptic in experimental art might not simply be subjective obfuscated poetical aestheticism, or self-reflexive formalism, but a vehicle for the transmission of statements which, from a current paranoiac 'homeland security' purview, could be considered as sensitive, even dangerous.

Two years ago I screened Cryptic Burgess Dub in the Shifting Latitudes programme, the first cogcollective programme in London; the video had been completed specially for that programme. Last weekend, nearly two years later, the programme became the first cogcollective screening in Australia. So to date Cryptic Burgess Dub has had exactly two public screenings. Why have I not attempted to get it screened in any other context? I might have responded to the various calls for submission from festivals and gallery programmes, perhaps even sent it to Lux for consideration for distribution (while Lux has exhibited zero interest in my recent work, I persist in submitting work, perhaps out of masochistic perversity I like to imagine that the consistent rejections are intended to discourage me and that my submissions are met with exasperation by the acquisition panel, it’s a sad little game to play I know…), but with this video I didn’t. The video is the result of a difficult experiment, it embodies its own problematic.

Summer 2006 resounded to dubstep, I suggested of the form that “…the languorous rhythms and caverns of reverb of dub infiltrates the jerky twostep, dropping deep sonic bass notes in its path…” making for a “…music at once raw and expansive…” and “…on this sunny weekend, with long term reports that this could be the longest warmest UK summer since 1976…” dubstep sounded “…like becoming the inner city soundtrack of the season as pavements around the Borough melt, the humidity rises, a steamy fug settles and the city slows into an uneasy and frazzled hallucinatory dub daze.” - from Big up Bare at Spherical Objective. While dubstep had been around for a few years, it had been overshadowed by the grittier spitting Grime, but with the haunted sounds of the debut Burial album having just leaked, this music resonated with the undercurrent of fear in the capital with its post 7/7 institutionally fanned paranoia; in short it sounded like the Zeitgeist. This spirit was hard wired into Cryptic Burgess Dub. The images are mostly shot in Burgess Park, south London, between Old Kent Road and Walworth Road, linking Bermondsey with Camberwell with Peckham, a shabby sprawling park that has seen better days and which, rather than offer the casual walker some space to stretch their legs and fill their lungs with fresh air, offers ample opportune concealed space for potential muggers to hide and plan their ambush, at least this is how it feels in situ: an agoraphobic’s worst nightmare. The video sequences were subjected to ‘visual dub’ techniques. I used an analogue video mixer wiring delayed output to input loops producing controlled accumulating feedback as the visual equivalent of the tape delay echo and reverb that gives dub its distinctive deep repetitive resonance. The video feedback on the edge of dissolving into abstraction, produces electronic colours that seem to suck the ‘natural’ colour out of the scene replacing it with a toxic hallucinogenic aura. Treated loops of dubstep from Rinse FM cemented the musical relationship with map references to highlight the specificity of the locations.

I was however also concerned with what the use of experimental moving image practice could be. The distorted visual effects of video signal bending are all very well in an abstracted modernist way, but ultimately do little more than become, well, attractive visual effects, conforming to the condition of music. I thought that it would be interesting if abstraction could provide a function, as a conceptual container perhaps. I was concerned with the danger of facing the dead end of obfuscation for its own ends, an aesthetic device that merely succeeds in arriving at a vague ineffability. The cryptic should not be an end in itself, but a means to an end, the end of the smuggling of a text, hiding the real meaning or intention of the work, readable only by those provided with the tools to decrypt. If experimental moving image work has exhausted the efficacy of the novelty of formal experimentation, then perhaps the cryptic in the abstraction could, literally, contain an encrypted ‘message’. In the post-homeland security political climate of the first decade of the 21st century, where policy is based on paranoia and everyone is a suspect, where fears of encroachments on civil liberties drive liberal protest, if ‘they’ are actually snooping on ‘our’ every move and reading all our emails, then perhaps an experimental video practice could be the Trojan horse for the transmittal of subversive messages. Cryptic Burgess Dub was a test for this.

Throughout the duration of the video a succession of numbers scrolls across the bottom of the frame. This is an encrypted text, produced with a one-time pad, an encryption procedure which, if used properly, provides an unbreakable encryption algorithm. The Wikipedia One Time Pad entry provides a good description of how the process works. It necessitates the reader having access to a decryption key, normally provided once only and destroyed immediately after use. At the end of Cryptic Burgess Dub is the information that a decryption key can be found at http://www.steven-ball.net/onetimepad01.html however for this to be any use the viewer would have had to have noted the numbers running throughout the video - the encrypted message - and then match each number in sequence with the key. Remember that there have only been two public screenings, two years and continents apart.

This particular encrypted text is not particularly subversive: it speaks to the possibilities of this method of transmitting text and the potential for it to be subversive. It is essentially self-referential. The irony is that revealing from the outset, rather than at the end, that this video carries a ‘secret message’ would undermine its efficacy as an encrypted text. The paradox is that when the transmission of encrypted texts is itself shrouded in obfuscation the fact of encryption becomes ineffectual.

So the video is embedded above and, if anyone has the inclination, it should with patience and determination be possible to decrypt the text. The comments box awaits your result!

This key is simple. This is a test.

One Minute (Volume 2)

2008-06-23T05:50:00.009+01:00

On Thursday I have a couple of videos in the new One Minute collection screening in Manchester. This is the second programme in the series of artists' videos curated by Kerry Baldry. This programme promises to be even more diverse than the inaugral One Minute programme first screened last year at cogcollective which went on to Manchester, Yekaterinburg (Russia), Hull, Prague, Berlin, Hornsey and will screen in Australia in August (the latter courtesy of cogcollective's Australian branch).

One Minute (Volume 2) will be screened at 7 pm on Thursday 26th June at The Gallery Space, 1st Floor, Cow Lane Studios, Casket Works, Cow Lane, Salford, M5 4NB. Artists included: Kerry Baldry, Steven Ball, Gordon Dawson, Catherine Elwes, Andy Fear, Steve Hawley, Nicolas Herbert, Riccardo Iacono, Hilary Jack, Esther Johnson, Nick Jordan, Tina Keane, Deklan Kilfeather, Lynn Loo, Kate Meynell, Louisa Minkin, Claire Morales, Gary Peploe, Martin Pickles, Stuart Pound, Laure Prouvost, Eva Rudlinger, Philip Sanderson, Erica Scourti, Margie Schnibbe, Guy Sherwin, Marty St.James, Unconscious Films, Phillip Warnell and Mark Wigan.

Direct City Visions

2008-06-11T21:27:00.009+01:00

On Sunday 15 June at 2pm I will be discussing my work alongside other artists and Tracey Warr at the Visions in the Nunnery show. Warr has curated City Choreographies a programme that concentrates on the relationship between the city and its pedestrian inhabitants, screening at the Nunnery on Saturday from 12 - 2pm and 3 - 6pm, at 2pm she will be in conversation with Alan Smith, one of the artists whose work is featured in the programme.

I'm looking forward to this very much as clearly the themes of Warr's programme connect strongly with the selection of Direct Language videos screening at Visions in the Nunnery (Direct Language 1, 8, 2.5, 2.7, 2.9, 3.2, 3.0, 4.0 and 4.5 - which can all be viewed on the videoblog), with their variously rhythmically edited sequences of skateboarders, ad hoc synchronised dancing in a Soho square, visual Dopplerised U-bahn trains, cable car landscapes, jittery urban spaces and so on, they are very much dancing about architecture, enunciations of the city space by the pedestrian inhabitants and the author, of course, is one of their number.

Direct Visions

2008-05-31T16:18:00.016+01:00

A ten minute compilation of a selection of the Direct Language videos will be exhibited at Visions in the Nunnery between 6 - 15 June. The private view is 6:30 - 9:00pm on Friday 6 June, the Nunnery is at 183 Bow Road, London E3 2SJ.

With the exception of Outside and Unknown at the Pixelodeon and Screen Dump at cogcollective - both programmes dedicated to works from videoblogs - this is the first time videos made for Direct Language have screened publicly in a context outside of the web.

Sam Renseiw has written of Direct Language:

Usually using unostentatious settings as stepping-stone footage for the videos – from urban settings, interiors, and forests - the subsequently manipulated and precisely choreographed patterns mirror the concern for formal and cognitive visual rigor. Often palindromic and/or surgically sliced into rhythmic, repetitive footage with careful concern for soundtrack implications, the short pieces reveal, at times, surprising short-circuiting attentive observations from the seemingly banal out-sets. A study in the manipulation of the inconspicuous.

Direct Language has long since ended as an abstracted video serial journal project, it can be viewed in its entirety archived at Direct Language and I am also making a selection of the videos available as an unlimited edition DVD series, unostentatiously packaged in a plain cover with a handwritten label. This can be purchased for a nominal amount to cover materials, handling and postage. Email me for details with "Direct Language DVD" in the subject field.

Slow Space

2008-05-20T18:42:00.008+01:00

SLOW SPACE
Klaus W. Eisenlohr
16mm film/67:00/2004

Slow Space will screen in the no.w.here Light Reading series on 28th May 2008 at 7pm. Following the film I will be in conversation with its author.

About the film:
Slow Space takes the viewer on a visual trip through the city of Chicago without showing streets or plazas like we have seen in travel guides. Instead, the journey goes through places roofed and lit by glass architecture, a private living room, Gran Hyatt Regency and some other places. Scenes set in open urban space and interviews filmed in private homes complement this passage through public and private places. Slow Space investigates the relationship between the body and the urban architectural environment over the time period of three years. Searching the anomalies of the normal, the filmmaker traces a 'Desire for Modernity' in the city's architecture being shaped by pre- and postmodern forces. In addition, the film discusses the topic of public space in American cities through interviews with the Chicago artists and filmmakers Deborah Stratman, Chris Harris, Gretchen Till, Ken Fandell, Thomas Comerford and Eduardo Pradilla.

Klaus W. Eisenlohr is a Berlin-based artist who works in a number of media including film and photography. He is also a curator and has for a number of years curated an ongoing series of Urban Research programmes which have screened at Directors Lounge in Berlin and elsewhere, including cogcollective.

Light Reading
7pm, 28th May 2008
no.w.here
3rd Floor
316 – 318 Bethnal Green Road
London E2

£5 door £4 prebooked
courses@nowhere-lab.org
telephone: 020 7729 4494

One Minute in Crouch End

2008-05-15T22:08:00.004+01:00

The One Minute programme curated by Kerry Baldry screens all weekend at Hornsey Town Hall as part of Crouch End Open Studios

Hornsey Town Hall
Crouch End Broadway
London E8
11:00 - 18:00
Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 May

Rolled Up/Rolled Out

2008-04-22T20:26:00.004+01:00

Rolled Up/Rolled Out
20:00, Monday 28 April, 2008
Resonance 104.4FM

Produced and presented by Steven Ball, this programme will present Breath: Polymers and Pneumatics, a breathing performance by Australian artist Irene Barberis specially recorded in Australia for Resonance FM alongside work by London-based artists featured in the Melbourne exhibition Rolled Up/Rolled Out including Riccardo Iacono, Tina Keane, William Raban, Anne Tallentire and John Wynne.

Rolled Up/Rolled Out is part of a collaborative project between the University of the Arts London and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology exploring the urban centre within and between the two cities. The Centres Project brings together two centres of Fine Art research, each central to their respective cities; within the complex flow of forces of an urban hub, each institution simultaneously responds and contributes to their cities’ stimuli.

Curated by Irene Barberis (RMIT) and currently on exhibition in Melbourne, Rolled Up/Rolled Out is concerned with how the production of art in global cities is responding and contributing to the intensification and expansion of cultural flows in globalization, providing a snapshot of the diverse practices that emerge through the common experience of contemporary urban space.

**Update: the show is here for anyone who missed it.

Trailer

2008-03-24T21:45:00.005Z

Melbourne International Film Festival trailer, 1:25, 1993

The 'nineties work so far in this series were rarely, if at all, screened. But this final post is something of an exception. In 1993 I was asked to make a super 8 film trailer for the Melbourne International Film Festival which was screened several times a day for about two weeks, and then never again.

Protein

2008-03-21T00:35:00.006Z

Protein, 9:35, 1994

Moving forward one year for some systematic sampled randomness, images of waveforms, binary code and trains, repetitive audio samples of TV documentaries, modems and dial tones, a dubby data melange, all very current in 1994, on sound stripe super 8.

Circle of Confusion

2008-03-19T21:14:00.005Z

Circle of Confusion, 6:11, 1993

Another rarely screened film in the impromptu early 'nineties festival which also features m-dot.report and over at Brut Smog some of Professor Ham's wonderful Standard 8 work here and here. Urban reflections shot in grainy high contrast black and white Super 8 accompanied by a looping sample soundtrack. I found a few other old super 8 films from around the same time (of dubious quality - artistic and technical). If any one's really interested, that's what the comments are for.

m-dot.report

2008-03-15T19:56:00.013Z

m-dot.report, 6:02, 1991

A recently rediscovered video that has never been publicly screened, until now.

Eating Italy with Riccardo

2008-03-05T15:22:00.009Z

check his new videoblog

Hope, Trace, Zero

2008-03-04T21:38:00.009Z

I recently re-discovered and have been re-listening to these three CDs over the past couple of days. Hope (1998), Trace (1999) and Zero (2000) were limited edition collections of one-minute, or two-minute in the case of the double CD Trace, soundworks. Contributors were invited to create an original recording of specified duration for each thematic CD. They were published by Audio Research Editions, which was founded by Colin Fallows in 1998 as a limited edition imprint for artists' soundworks.

The Audio Research Editions website tells us that:

“Audio Research Editions CDs contain soundworks by a broad range of international sound artists, experimental composers, noise makers and other audio creators. Using the limited edition print as a formal model, the imprint has to date published over two hundred works by artists from over twenty countries. Audio Research Editions treats the compact disc as an art space with each edition containing a themed audio exhibition that can be experienced in either linear or random modes.”

The CDs included contributions by ARPARP, Joe Banks, Warren Burt, Martin e Greil, The Groceries, Reed Ghazala, id battery, in between noise, The Land Of Nod, Longstone, The Mindwinder, Yoko Ono, Henry Priestman, Project Dark, Lee Ranaldo, Keith Rowe, scanner, Semiconductor, Will Sergeant, Janek Schaefer and Skyray among many others, including me.

The artists range from the well-known, the obscure and the unknown; the shortness, diversity and number of the tracks (68 on Hope, 70 on the two disc Trace, 46 on Zero) and their alphabetical-by-artist-name order, lends an arbitrary egalitarianism to the project which is further enhanced by taking the advice of the suggestion in the sleeve notes that they are ideally listened to in random mode: this is a project made for the shuffle play age. The CDs can be heard in their entirety as Real Media files (unfortunately only in unshuffleable linear order) at the Audio Research Editions website.

Here are my contributions to the three CDs:

Hope Under the Weather (1 minute, 1998, 1.5Mb, mp3) from the Hope CD, is a compacted remix of the soundtrack to my super 8 film Microphone (1994, 24 min). The film centred around the elliptical theme of a shadowy individual who lived in a small back room facing onto Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne recording the weather and making arcane calculations based on the International Dateline. This shadowy individual was of course me and I appear briefly in the film with a shaved head wearing a green dress and ruby lipstick.

Brittle Creek Stalker Track (2 minutes, 1999, 2.9Mb, mp3) from the Trace CD, original sleeve notes: “Original tapes recorded on the foot along Brittle Creek Track, digitally parsed as image files and traced back to sound through a variety of programmes. Retracing the steps and strangely resonant with the haunting presence that haunts the track.” The title is an allusion to Brittlesea which was an early name for Brightlingsea in Essex. The originating field recordings were made on a track alongside Brightlingsea Creek.

Say Zero (1 minute, 2000, 1.5Mb, mp3) from the Zero CD, original sleeve notes: “Digital dub stammers, loping fractures and repeated returns to a zero point – an end in itself. A micro mix of incomplete projected settings of ante-logocentric voice fragments. Constructed at the Footscray Dip House.” The voices were sourced from a promotional CD for a voice over agency, the voices were manipulated effectively by removing the diphthongs from the recorded spoken words.

Night-light 2, 1999 - 2008

2008-02-24T22:23:00.011Z

No-way Street in Second Life

2008-02-10T13:43:00.000Z

Until tomorrow afternoon No-way Street will be screening at an outdoors screening at Directors Lounge, New Berlin in Second Life. Above is an image of 'me' watching the video there. Read more about the screenings at the Directors Lounge blog.

Neinebahn Strasse

2008-02-08T23:02:00.001Z

at Directors Lounge Berlin in Urban Research Friday 8 February and One Minute Saturday 16 February.

Direct Objective

Elmington Estate revisited

Travelling Practice - Directors Lounge special screening

Digital video works 2003—2010curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

live at Seeing in the Dark

Seeing in the Dark - A Group Show

Glitch vs Scratch

Station to Station

action at a distance

blogging, about blogging 2

Urban(e) Environments

Refenestration

blogging, about blogging

Arbitrary Object

Recalling the Shots

Land Gauge

some September screenings

August Aggregate

Personal Electronics video part 4

Personal Electronics video part 3

Personal Electronics video part 2

Personal Electronics video part 1

on the return of Direct Language

Chromatic City

There’s no such thing as originality, just authenticity

Aboriginal Myths of South London

Public Water

Direct Language on DVblog

Sounds Unspoken

People Watching/Harun Farocki revisited

Personal Electronics remix

Post Office London Street Directory 1909: New Kent Road redacted

Speaker

Sounds Spoken podcast and playlist

Ed Pinsent's The Sound Projector Radio Show25th September 2009Resonance 104.4FMCurated and co-presented by Steven BallDownload mp3

Sounds Spoken

Sub Zero Degrees

Herstory

Goddess Loop

In My House

Je--s

Free Speech

Name One Goddess

I'm Gonna Sing...

This Global Warning

Unspoken Word

Watergate Street, London SE8, 13 July 2009

Mare Street, London E8, 29 June 2009

The Fly Art of Fine Tipping

Cities Methodologies - Aroundabout: Second Person Present

After Lethaby performance documentation

After Lethaby

Over Magnetic Island

Over The Borough Island

Burham Quarry Tunnel: report on the first investigation, 16 March 2009

observational-note-taking-behaviour

The Ground, the Sky, and the Island

Figuring Landscapes

explicate this process

15,000 tonnes

exoskeleton

Around the Nature Colour Cycle

Suspension (Jetlag Emulation Remix)

Suspension Excess

percussive

Immersion, suspension, stasis...

it's cold

movement

mute objects

insurance

unattended

three

had enough

there and back

post

Horizons and Centres

Hisstorical Release

Plagiarism Live!

Night Garden or Meltdown?

The Grown Ups

Digital video works 2003—2010
curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Ed Pinsent's The Sound Projector Radio Show
25th September 2009
Resonance 104.4FM
Curated and co-presented by Steven Ball
Download mp3