Made for the Fields of View screening to celebrate A.L. Rees's posthumous book.
This is a composite view of Convoys Wharf in Deptford, constructed from a number of sequences captured at various focal lengths and angles of view on 29 July 2021 between 11.17 and 11.44am. The camera was positioned on the opposite side of the River Thames, 355 metres due northwest of Convoys Wharf, on the furthest extent of the Thames path, from Maritime Quay, 322 metres from Masthouse Terrace Pier. The weather was sunny, with occasional cloud and wind from the west at 25 kph, the temperature was 22 degrees Celsius.
From the album Abstract Vectoral Landscapes TQN-aut 7 video captured on East Alligator River (Erre), Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory, Australia.
scramble up from the track in the breath of the heat on the wind past the smoke of the fire scrubby grass and the river is dry butterflies, blackened tree plateau, savannah, falls, and floodplain pandanus spiralis stones underfoot, the walk to the ridge and there Myormu waiting for me sickness country and in rock escarpment in the deep past Miyamiya and the camera phone brow trickles waterfall sweat to the ground from the mountain below Google Earth, or a video drone as the ground is above captures fatal painting photograph the rainbow came through tail lights and explosions below and this sickness country all that you can see is what you’re told you can see [to see] peripheral night soon after twilight flashes of light when the sickness takes hold nausea, vomiting, appetite loss dehydration, confusion cells degraded by autophagy bone marrow syndrome cutaneous blisters ulcers sweat glands atrophy DNA clustered damage takes hold somewhere… [...over the rainbow]
Public Water is concerned with exploring the nature and status of water as urban public space in London, UK, and Melbourne, Australia, with a brief stop in Istanbul. To qualify, ‘public space’ is defined broadly as space to which the public is freely admitted and while ‘urban public space’ is usually considered in social, physical and architectural terms, most large cities also contain large bodies of water such as bays, rivers, canals, and so on. The idea of these as public space, is much more ambiguous. In recent years, with the escalation in official concern about the threat of terrorist attack, there is perceived to have been an increase in the enforcement of restrictions on the rights of the individual and their activities in public space. However what is assumed to be public space is often privately owned with its own independent rules above and beyond those in common law governing its use. Typically such places are also policed by security agents engaged by or on behalf of the owners. Among the activities under scrutiny has been the capture of still and moving images. While there is no legally enforceable restriction on photography in most genuinely public spaces in the UK outside of the provisions of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, in private places to which the public has access, such activities can be, and often are forbidden. One place where this is the case is the Canary Wharf estate in London’s former Docklands, where I was on one occasion requested to refrain from shooting video. London’s Docklands have been a model for global urban development and Melbourne in Australia has followed suit, regenerating and repurposing its own Docklands as spaces of business, retail and leisure, using local government, planning and corporate agendas in ways that parallel and echo those of London. The conceptual and aesthetic strategic conceit that I have arrived at for this project as a result of these and other observations, has been to capture moving images of place reflected in water. The simple speculative formulation is that if there are restrictions in capturing the image of the place, what is the status of the image of that place as reflected in water? Water as public space, water as medium: when reflections on water are photographed what and where is the image? Water becomes a medium reflecting and reproducing (albeit distorting) an image. By then rotating this image through 180°, I am attempting an optical illusion that further problematises the image as an image ‘of’ something in perhaps a gently subversive way. Most of this activity has been located broadly in urban and suburban landscapes, increasingly concentrated in and around the private/public space of the Docklands in both cities. Reflections on Public Water (pdf) publicwater.net
Lists remind us that no matter how fluidly a system may operate, its members nevertheless remain utterly isolated, mutual aliens. Ontographical cataloging hones a virtue: the abandonment of anthropocentric narrative coherence in favor of worldly detail.
...ontography is a practice of increasing the number and density [of things], one that sometimes opposes the minimalism of contemporary art. Instead of removing elements to achieve the elegance of simplicity, ontography adds (or simply leaves) elements to accomplish the realism of multitude. It is a practice of exploding the innards of things. - Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology
Boundary Cyclone Transaction is a video I made for the new season of DVBlog. The video takes Ian Bogost's characterisation of the ontographic list and uses it as a process by which to auto-construct a picture of a non-human, which is perhaps to say alien, world, using material found on or through the internet. As such it also presents a fragment of what might be considered as the consciousness of the internet as manifested in image, sound and text.
The video consists of collections of image sequences, written words, spoken words and sounds. The order in which each of those elements presents themselves to the viewer has been determined randomly, therefore any juxtaposition of the elements is entirely arbitrary. The words used are nouns, i.e. they are things, objects, they were selected using a random word generator. The sounds consist mostly of recording of environmental phenomena, such as weather or recordings of cosmic energies, generally speaking non-human sounds. The image sequences are all found online and consist of landscapes, insects, animals, images of microscopic organisms and viruses, astronomical image, in other words also largely non-human. Both sounds and images were found through using keyword searches. It was important in the making of the work for the elements to be as removed from what I might customarily intentionally select, for them to be as far away from the familiarity of the (my) everyday, as possible.
Imagine this as a premise: the world as it appears is only as it appears to you and perhaps the world actually appears in arbitrary order Alienation is a state arising from objects in the world as they present themselves inevitably arbitrarily and without a coherent narrative. In this video the use of random processes aims to make coherence impossible, or as difficult as possible, while still, due to the linear and temporal nature of its reception, will still self-organise into a kind of self-coherent ecosystem. The longer term aim is for this video to be realised in performance, to perform itself, using software to randomly order the playback sequence of the discrete elements and media objects (images, words, sounds) for every iteration.
A wave front is advancing, sweeping across the plain… No Nothingness, the first new Storm Bugs record for ten years, featuring the song No Nothingness c/w extended instrumental mix Triangulation, is available now exclusively for download at Bandcamp
The day we visit the beach at Porth
Ceiriad on the Llyn Peninsula in North Wales, where in 1973 BS Johnson shot the film Fat Man on a Beach,
it is misty and raining a fine drizzle. We clamber down a slightly
treacherous path to the beach, and as sea spray adds to the dampness within minutes we are soaked. A small
group of intrepid surfers are the only people to find the conditions
agreeable.
Having visited a place it's easy to traverse its landscape on Google Earth.
The twentieth anniversary of the lecture and
publication 'Specters of Marx' by Jacques Derrida, was marked in April this year
by the Hauntology: 20 Years On
symposium organised at the University of Bradford. Philip Sanderson and I give
a presentation at the symposium about our current work in progress Film of the Same Name.
This project revisits the films we made in the late eighties, in particular
Green on the Horizon and Hangway Turning.
The films were made before Derrida delivered his famous lecture, but they are
prescient to recent interest around forms of hauntology which, beyond Derrida's
extended essaying of the status of Marxist thought in the immediate aftermath
of the dismantling of the Soviet Union, has rippled through art and music
and is now popularly better know as embracing other questions and resonances of
the past in the present.
Our films are in part concerned with hauntings in a
quite literal sense, one of the characters is based on local legends of ghost
sightings, but it also draws on such paranormal phenomena as psychometry,
ley-lines, and various other notions of energy embedded in the land. The
films employ forms which have become tropes associated with
hauntological concerns: voices over narrate mysterious poetic phrases
and faux documentary reports, shot on super 8 film they already evoke a
grainy ghostly nostalgia. By contemplating what it may be to revisit, remake,
reenact these projects, we are immersed in the same kind of forms of
hauntology that the word has become associated with, almost to the point of
cliche. In the face of this it’s hard not let a certain sense of irony creep in
and for the presentation we go into a deadpan performance mode while layers of
past and present manifestations of the project slip variously in and out of
relationship with each other; we read adaptions of the original text, play back
video of recent visits to the films' original locations, reenact the
revisitations right there in the auditorium, throw in extracts from the original
films, alongside recent workshop re-stagings of the original sequences, deliver
mini papers on related themes, all strung together with recorded extracts
from a semi-fictional journal about the project.
As a way of approaching presenting the material amassed
for the project and giving it a form which might lend it to public
presentation, this seems to work quite well, in spite of suspicions that
the audience are simply puzzled, there seems to be enough to do more than
simply tantalise and the presentation is followed by a quite wide-ranging discussion.
If nothing else it gives us a way in to thinking about how to begin assembling
the beginnings of a finished film, a process that is now underway.
Questions around hauntology resurface a month later,
albeit with closer regard to Derrida's original thoughts, when I write an essay about Chantal Akerman's film D'Est for a Melbourne Cinémathèque screening.
The film was made in 1993, the same year Derrida published Spectres of Marx,
and in it Akerman visits the (then recently former) Soviet Union 'before it was
too late' [sic]. The coincidence of the anniversary of the film and the book,
and their partly shared subject of the post Soviet Union, as well as the
aforementioned reawakening of interest in the concept of hauntology, leads me
to post-Marxist speculations about the resonances and relationships between the
recent and current haunted reappearance of these formulations.
Future ghosts begin to appear through videos made for
the vapor collecting Vimeo group project initiated
by Michael Szpakowski, following a conversation we had had about the
'vaporware' music phenomenon. Vaporwave as a primarily musical practice,
fascinates me with its engagement with the forms of late capitalism, often
taking quite cheesy ‘80s and ‘90s, occasionally recognizable smooth funk
and MoR, slowing, glitching, pitch-shifting it into hazy melancholia, immersed
in the world of the shopping mall and commerce as both repellant and attractive,
a kind of post-accelerationist form
that speaks to a contemporary on- and off-line capitalist experience, while
forging a more heightened affective aesthetic, it ranges not just across sonic
forms but also appropriates video material. I may write more about
this in the future but for more information and links to examples Adam Harper writes a couple of quite enlightening pieces for Dummy magazine last year and then a year later, while Aural Incognito also writes about vaporwave,
particularly interesting is his framing of it as contemporary industrial music.
The shopping mall escalator of vaporwave chimes with my
interest in the private/public spaces of late capitalism, both the real and
their virtual representations if such a distinction can still be made, and
vapor collecting is an opportunity to try a few quick experiments with the
reproduction of such spaces. The works reuse and manipulate material
mostly sourced on the web, as well as self-captured video (if such a
distinction can still be made). They are immersions in capitalist spaces, the
hazy logic of late capitalism melts into pixels, in part suggestive of an
internet consciousness as imagined through the blandest of neo-liberal
banality. They embrace the aesthetic and the ambiguous contradictions of a
relationship to such places, the repulsion from and the attraction to their
seduction. The imperative here is to distort and amplify affect through
audio-visual effects, slow motion, pitch-shifting, repetition, and in so doing suggest
hallucinations of spaces of the near future, imagining a time, perhaps
post-consumerism, when the spaces of capitalism are theme parks, pure
spectacle, within which a dream-like melancholic drift is the only activity
available.
These works already have a life beyond the internet as
a selection of the vapor collecting group videos screened at the
Synthetic Zero event
at BronxArtSpace in New York.
Capital Wharf Station and Systemic Risk Plaza from the vapor collecting series are also soon
to be screened as part of the Tuned Cities screening programmeat Baltic 39, Newcastle on 21 - 22
September.
Western pixelated blur trail (accelerated
obfuscation mix), one of the videos posted to the vapor collecting
group is an ambient remix of an already ambient video From the West made
for the latest edition of Kerry Baldry's One Minute project.
After being immersed in virtual representations of shopping malls, for
this video I pay a visit to the most recent, and in some ways most notorious, example
locally of such a place (being part of the Olympics-led regeneration
and reportedly a crime hotspot
- perhaps an appropriate reputation for a beacon of consumerism).
Not being a regular habitué of such places, this first
trip to Westfield shopping mall in Stratford offers some revelations.
I notice two things in particular: one is that it seems to have been designed
as not just retail space, but also for leisure; there are a number of places
where one can stop, relax, sit down, much like as in an airport lounge (which
themselves increasingly resemble shopping malls). The other observation is
that while the place is buzzing with people the shops are mostly
empty and appear to be doing little or no business. Have people not come here
to shop?
Where earlier ghosts of political/social
totalitarianism reemerge in Chantel Akerman's films 'from the east' (D'Est),
what future ghosts of political/social capitalist totalitarian consumerism
emerge from the west?
I think back to Derrida's writing in 'Specters of Marx'
and I try to imagine a paradox of western consumerism after the fall of capitalism:
now the shopping mall is a kind of theme park, a purely social space for people
to hang out in, it retains its aesthetics, architectural structure, etiquette,
and customs but the crucial ingredient, mass consumption, is
missing, reenacted only in the performance of the social habits
of the act of shopping. It has become a ghost of itself.
Compiles abstracted improvised experimental objects, indifferent distracted viewing objects creating a viewer. Made from television images, analogue vision mixer effects, 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.
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”
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
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.
