At Five in the Afternoon

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

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

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

click on image for QuickTime movie (9.7Mb)

Work in Australia

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.