-

Back into the land.

2012-02-14T21:14:00.000Z

i bought a book today called 'towards re-enchantment: place and its meanings' mainly for an essay by iain sinclair about clapton; springfield park, the river lea, walthamstow marshes. i read the essay and walked the route. out of the city. like home. two hours later i walked back on the opposite side of the river and stopped off in the hope and anchor, a local boozer for people off the boats. the time i spent in there and the people i met is for another time, but the essay i read in the latter half of the book, 'a counter-desecration phrasebook' by robert macfarlane, opened with a quote that hooked me.

'our task is that of taking up the written word, with all of its potency, and patiently, carefully writing language back into the land.' - David Abram.

home, i searched for more on him. bit of a hippy but what he is saying about the relationship between alphbetic society and ecology crisis is interesting.

walking home over the bridge there were two plastic folder pockets, make-shift notices, attached to the wire fencing with cable ties. 'don't be harsh, save the marsh.' it told me that the olympic committee are paving over the land to build a car park and some sort of training ground for the basket ball teams. they promise to put it back in 9 months.

Dr. David Abram - The Spell of Literacy

MartinInTheShakespeareSaid

2012-02-14T01:00:00.000Z

(Music = Mehdi Messouci + Words = Claire Potter)

Martin in The Shakespeare said
January's a bad month
so's February y'see
people get paid
before Christmas
so the next pay
day
is any time now
but
there's overdrafts
and bills,
V.A.T's gone up -

It'll pick up again
come March,
you watch,
just you watch.

Divine Intoxication

2012-02-14T00:26:00.000Z

The lesson of Wuthering Heights, Greek Tragedy, and ultimately, of all religions, is that there is an instinctive tendency towards divine intoxication which the rational world cannot bear. This tendency is the opposite of Good. Good is based on common interest which entails consideration for the future. Divine intoxication, to which the instincts of childhood are so closely related, is entirely in the present.

- Georges Bataille, 'Emily Bronte & Evil' taken from La Litterature et le Mal, 1957

Georgio Agamben - What is a paradigm?

2012-02-07T17:32:00.000Z

The function of the paradigm/example in discourse.

David Shields. Legend.

2012-01-12T00:56:00.000Z

David Shields. I'd recommend The thing about life is...
Also see him in action at a round-table discussion at the Philoctetes Center, New York. Autobiography/Biography:Narrating the Self.

Audio Tracks/Collabs

2012-01-10T22:20:00.000Z

Selected audio up on soundcloud Nothing past August 2011 though.

Four Poems

2011-08-26T17:36:00.000+01:00

Latest four poems published by 3:AM

Notes from 'Women in Love' by DH Lawrence

2011-04-15T10:41:00.000+01:00

OLDHAMSTRASSE 2010, The Plaza Principle, Leeds

2010-12-08T21:06:00.000Z

An installation of five audio recordings (CDs with headphones) on five pub tables with stools. The recordings of pub conversations were made surreptitiously over three months using my mobile phone. The content ranges from arguments about racist language and political correctness to reminisces of seventies drinking culture in Manchester, right down to where exactly the pet cemetery is on the M62.
The pub is a social and historical haven for uncensored opinion, discussion and story-telling.

Exhibited at The Plaza Principle, Leeds. Curated by Derek Horton and Chris Bloor.

I'm not from Bury - Sept 2010

2010-11-10T17:56:00.000Z

Reading vs. reading

2010-02-17T00:35:00.000Z

I recently read a short story at the opening of a performance based art's event at A Foundation in Liverpool. The event, Wrong Love, professed to be 'an uncommon alternative to your drab night of misty-eyed smooching' and my short story, 'You couldn't be in better company' was a telling of a near-fatal event at a strip club in Manchester. Admittedly the two did seem like they would slot together seedily and bring the best out of each other but upon reading it I realised that the writing and this event, ideologically, couldn't have been further apart.

I arrived conscious of my non-effort. I hadn't taken pains to put together a fetching ensemble nor had I meticulously rehearsed my story, or even rehearsed my story. I felt that by abstaining from the performative elements I was being loyal to the mode of writing; the understated realism of just getting on with it. This theoretical aspect was bolstered by a long-maturing cynicism for art events and performance art in particular. Reading a slow, stark story of a man being stabbed in the throat at a strip club wouldn't bind well with people arriving in a reception room, grabbing a drink and mingling. From the moment I said hello into the microphone and took that first glance at the audience I knew I didn't care about reading my words aloud. In a shard of a second I knew that the story was meant to be read, in print, or in the very least should be listened to through headphones.

I lost my place frequently, bumbled over misread sentences, and shook with begrudging and nervousness. At times I honestly felt like walking out the door. I just couldn't be bothered and didn't see how what I was doing at that moment mattered at all; I may as well not be reading. On occasion, obligation rooted me and encouraged me to genuinely feel the words as I spoke them, but notwithstanding. I raced to the last sentence and even included a little ironic smile and change of tone at the end, as if to signify that I was fully aware of how crass it is read one's own writing aloud. In conversation afterward, my self-effacing justification for my poor efforts was, 'Well, you get out of it what you put into it, don't you?'

I'm not a poor orator, nor am I often ill-prepared but I am stubborn, and more than familiar with the notion of going down with the ship, particularly if I feel the voyage is not worthwhile - perhaps that is more akin to sinking the ship but, tomato...tomato. If this episode has brought me nothing else it has resurrected the debate of authorship and vocal ownership for me. What are the resulting effects on a text when read either silently or aloud? When it is performed, as a monologue would be, does that shift the experience by changing the form of the audience? Is it important to put a face to the name, so to speak, or is it more vital for the text to act as a sort of clothes horse, acting as catalyst for arguably the most unique relationship to be had; that between reader and author?

Aging and Creativity

2010-02-16T22:38:00.000Z

There is a current Philoctetes roundtable discussion on the theme of aging and creativity that I highly recommend. Particularly interesting comments and experience of dementia, also touching on neuroscience.

Reading at this event

2010-02-11T13:39:00.001Z

edition of seven

2010-02-04T23:01:00.000Z

2010-01-25T17:29:00.000Z

2009-11-20T15:57:00.000Z

Notes from JUSTINE by Lawrence Durrell

2009-11-18T13:53:00.000Z

It is such a solace to think back to that first meeting. Never have I been closer to them both - closer, I mean to their marriage; they seemed to me then to be the magnificent two-headed animal a marriage could be.

Here our bodies were chafed by the harsh desiccated winds of Africa, and for love we were forced to substitute a wiser but crueller mental tenderness which emphasised loneliness rather than expurgated it.

How well I recognised her now as a child of the city, which decrees that its women shall be the voluptuaries not of pleasure but of pain, doomed to hunt for what they least dare to find.

"After all," I remember her saying, "this has nothing to do with sex," which tempted me to laugh though I recognised in the phrase her desperate attempt to dissociate the flesh from the message it carried. I suppose this sort of thing always happens to bankrupts when they fall in love.

She took kisses like so many coats of paint.

Perhaps one day she will meet a man before whom all these tiresome chimeras will fade into innocence again.

At least the invert escapes this fearful struggle to give oneself to another. Lying with one's own kind, enjoying an experience, one can still keep free the part of one's mind which dwells in Plato, or gardening, or the differential calculus. Sex has left the body and entered the imagination now; that is why Arnauti suffered so much with Justine, because she prayed upon all that be might have kept separate - his artist-hood if you like.

Je n'ai pas une jeune fille qui saurait me goûter. Ah! Oui, une garde-malade! Une garde-malade pour l'amour de l'art, ne donnant ses baisers qu'a des mourants, des gens in extremis...

It was as if now that the flesh was dying the whole funds of his inner life, so long dammed up behind the falsities of a life wrongly lived, burst through the dykes and flooded the foreground of his consciousness. (nb. death of count baldassare, proust)

We use each other like axes to cut down the ones we really love.

What I need to do it to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place - for that is history - but in the order in which they first became significant to me.

Guilt always hurries toward its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.

I reminded myself that she was not a pleasure-seeker, but a hunter of pain in search of herself.

...compiling the days of his early childhood in single condensed emotions born from visual memory.

His character was as thin as a single skin of gold-leaf.

"Minds dismembered by their sexual part," Balthazar has said once, "never find peace until old and failing powers persuade them that silence and quietness are not hostile."

At the same time, of course, he fully recognised that suffering, indeed all illness was itself an acute form of self-importance.

THE CITY
You tell yourself: I'll be gone
To some other land, some other sea,
To a city lovelier far than this
Could ever have been or hoped to be -
Where every step now tightens the noose:
A heart in a body buried and out of use:
How long, how long must I be here
Confined among these dreary purlieus
Of the common mind? Whenever now I look
Black ruins of my life rise into view.
So many years I have been here
Spending and squandering, and nothing gained.
There's no new land, my friend, no
New sea; for the city will follow you,
In the same streets you'll wander endlessly,
The same mental suburbs slip from youth to age,
In the same house you'll go white at last -
The city is a cage.
No other places, always this
Your earthly landfall, and no ship exists
To take you from yourself. Ah! don't you see
Just as you've ruined your life in this
One plot of ground you've ruined its worth
Everywhere now - over the whole earth.

When there is something to hide, one becomes an actor. It forces all the people round one to act as well.

I walked slowly among these extra-ordinary human blooms, reflecting that the city like a human being collects its predispositions, appetites and fears. It grows to maturity, utters it prophets, and declines in hebetude, old age or loneliness which is worse than either.

...but strangely enough I thought of it not as a personal history with an individual accent so much as part of the historical fabric of the place. I described it to myself as part and parcel of the city's behaviour, completely in keeping with everything that had gone before, and everything that will follow it.

...warm hair and mouth, and the treacherous nervous movements of a body which folded itself against one as if hurt, as if tender from unhealed wounds.

This is what is meant by possession - to be passionately at war for the qualities in one another: to contend for the treasures of each other's personalities. But how can such a war be anything but destructive and hopeless.

"Comment vous deféndez-vous contre la solitude?"
"Monsieur, je suis devenue la solitude même."

She was a walking abstract of the writers and thinkers whom she had loved or admired - but what clever woman is more.

"We who have travelled much and loved much: we who have - I will not say suffered for we have always recognised through suffering our own self-sufficiency - only we appreciate the complexities of tenderness, and understand how narrowly love and friendship are related."

Loving is so much truer when sympathy and not desire makes the match; for it leaves no wounds.

...that people only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it. To be struck by a face sometimes that one wants to devour it feature by feature. Even making love to the body beneath it gives no surcease, no rest. What is to be done with people like us?

Far off events, transformed by memory, acquire a burnished brilliance because they are seen in isolation, divorced from the details of before and after, the fibres and wrappings of time. The actors, too, suffer a transformation; they sink slowly deeper and deeper into the ocean of memory like weighted bodies, finding at every level a new assessment, a new evaluation in the human heart.

"Lovers are never equally matched - do you think? One always overshadows the other and stunts his or her growth so that the overshadowed one must always be tormented by a desire to escape, to be free to grow. Surely this is the only tragic thing about love?"

2009-10-14T12:39:00.000+01:00

A-Z published in Soanyway

New Books

2009-10-12T19:53:00.000+01:00

Gladtree Journal

2009-09-29T16:32:00.000+01:00

AASpace published in Gladtree Journal vol.3

Review

2009-07-27T15:57:00.001+01:00

Claire Potter at ‘Portrayal & Perpetration’, Wolstenholme Projects, Liverpool, April 2009

After being intrigued by CP’s exhibition at Greenland Street last year, I juggled a hectic schedule and scrambled into Liverpool at the last possible opportunity to see her latest offering. The group show on the two upper floors was varied and thought-provoking, but my main focus lay below ground! I descended through the yawning trap door and down the anomalously pristine stairs into what appeared to be the black mouth of an unlit, crumbling-walled, spidery Hell, navigating with two flash-lights lent by the most helpful Sue and finally finding the Table & Chair with some relief! Even more relief to discover that it had its own standard lamp! Click! I sat with my back to the gloomy void, put on the earphones, opened the battered, much-thumbed A-Z of Leeds and Bradford. Baedeker-like, CP, who lived in that region as a student, takes the listener through a trip from the Saltaire area into Leeds, partly on foot and partly by public transport. I myself know some but not all of the locations, providing a variety of experience (‘Ah yes, I recall ... Oh, that sounds really interesting!’). The account fluctuates between instructions as to the route (which one follows on a series of pages in the post-it-noted & marked-up A-Z), plain description of the scenes, CP’s own thoughts and impressions, personal reminiscences of events, and (strikingly) interludes involving the apparently unedited texts of emails sent and received at the time of CP’s West Yorkshire sojourn. Inevitably the selections too are personal (we all focus on different aspects of a place). They range from historic buildings such as Titus Salt’s ornate church, via the obviously fascinating bookshop nearby, to the homes of friends where the human dramas of student life were played out. But it is all sculpted into a varied but coherent whole, and it finishes, if anything, too quickly, one’s appetite whetted but perhaps by design not satisfied. By the time the tape faded into silence I had forgotten the darkness and the spiders. The genre is somewhat unusual, and not everyone could bring off such an exercise, especially given the mundane and personal nature of the material. But it is part of CP’s life – and by way of exemplification the lives of the many others who have traversed this urban Yorkshire landscape, and of all of us as we traverse the landscapes of our own life journeys. I look forward eagerly to whatever CP has up her sleeve for the future!

Mark Newbrook

Collaboration, Town's Syndrome

2009-07-09T16:15:00.000+01:00

Album can be downloaded freely from the Town's Syndrome website.

(Intro) As Slow As Shadows
You must know how grateful I was to receive your letter dated December twenty-ninth. To learn of my little nephew's first adventures in life brought me as much courage as it did joy. Children are so fearless and as they cannot help but be guided by nature, they seem to side-step doubt. As you know, with my darling Anna away attempting to state her curiosity for the unknown, I live moment to moment in wait of contact or some news that she will return. But as ever, realisation creeps as slow as shadows and the thought occurs to me that she will continue her days without so much as a backwards glance. But as your son serves to remind me, the young are beginners at everything and with only twenty-three years to my name, I cannot know love yet. I must resolve to endure my doubts and continue in my learning.

(Outro) Shadows Of The Past
Dearest Esme, I have bore witness to some strange wonders since leaving you my love, and I have known men as never before. I cannot begin to relate the experiences that now lay behind me as they still reach far beyond my comprehension, though I can tell you that I remain forever uninspired by the intentions of men. But though my heart grieves for an innocence now lost, I find some solace in the wisdom that time and fate have allowed. Esme, from this distance I am able to think of you with the warmest appreciation. I recall stolen moments sweet with your breath and hazed by faithful whispers of resilient love. These moments are strengthened and gilded by the passing of days, and your refined image follows my troubled steps as I continue on this path. You are as rare a bird on this earth as the black swan and just as water rolls from your feathers, you remind me that to be in this world without becoming attached to it is a far great achievement. And so I will continue.

A - Z (April 2009)

2009-04-28T17:27:00.000+01:00

Installed at Wolstenholme Projects, Liverpool

A-Z is an audio guide and accompanying street map that takes you on a
guided tour, describing local, social and personal histories from
Lister Park to Saltaire, on through to Leeds, Hyde Park and finally
finishing on the Leeds Liverpool canal.

2009-04-08T23:15:00.000+01:00

New work at this exhibition.

Three Poems After Berlin

2009-04-06T23:05:00.000+01:00

Published on 3:AM

Research for TAXED: The Other Xeno-epistemic at A Foundation

2009-03-24T12:54:00.000Z

10. Fernand Deligny, Cahiers de l'immuable, vol.1 voix et voir, Recherches, no.8 (April 1975)

When considering my angle for this research event, I automatically focused on the word recherches - not purely because it translates as 'research' (though this will come relevant I'm sure) but it made the sentence 'A la recherches du temps perdu.' come to mind, and not because I want to talk directly about Marcel Proust's seven-volume novel, but because of a memory which in turn sparked my path of research.

When I was studying in Amsterdam I had this sentence, the title of Proust's novel, written on a piece of wood on my desk because it had been stuck in my head for a number of days. I'd obviously read it somewhere but I didn't know what it referred to. The translation is 'In Search of Lost Time' and it was the idea of turning over, or looking for the past that became my main focus while living away from the UK - having the distance to be able to reflect on what seemed like a past life. During that time away I spent a lot of energy going over old ground; family stories, specific events from the past and semantic memories, which are more like associated feelings and images, as a way of mapping or understanding some thing that I couldn't put my finger on.

"All the same, for a hundred dead stories there remain one or two living ones. These I evoke cautiously, occasionally, not too often, for fear of wearing them out. I fish one out, I see once more the setting, the characters, the attitudes. All of a sudden I stop: I have felt a worn patch, I have seen a word poking through the web of sensations. I sense that before long that word is going to take place of several pictures I love. Straight away I stop and quickly think of something else; I don't want to tire my memories. In vain; the next time I evoke them, a good part will have congealed. "

- From Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre

From here I want to talk a little about memory distortion and the majority of what I'm about to point to has been gleaned from an archive of lectures from the The Philoctetes Centre in New York. Their main focus at the centre is a multidisciplinary study of imagination which is arrived at through input from a variety of disciplines in both science and art.

But back to memory...Neuroscience has arrived at a stage where brain activity can be pointed to in a particular areas of the brain when a subject is in the act of remembering and also imagining. It is the stance of neuroscience that memory is not an accessible data-bank of stored information, there in nothing 'there' so to speak, but it is to be likened to imagination in the sense that if you were to suffer brain damage in this area of the brain you would be unable to tell what has actually happened and what you have made up. Memories 'happen' like imaginings do, they are not once fixed and then distorted from that point onwards.

For psychology, William Hirst, a leading expert on memory and a professor of psychology describes memory distortion in this way;

Our present attitude shapes our past, in some ways our past is stuck in our present...you are constantly reconstructing your past to make it consistent. All memory is selective in that it distorts to give meaning...we distort to make ourselves comfortable with ourselves and comfortable with each other.

I was taken with this idea of constantly reconstructing the past to make it consistent, rather than memory distorting itself and leaving you at a loss, or Sartre's suggestion that memory is worn away the more it is handled. It brings to mind something Alain Robbe-Grillet quoted in an article titled Commitment, and that was something said by a Soviet writer (Ilya Ehrenburg), "Anguish is a bourgeois vice. Our answer lies in reconstruction." And though the context of that sentence was originally political, I think it has relevance when talking about psychology and memory and also if I am to begin talking about artistic practice.

The notion of distorting to make ourselves comfortable with ourselves seems relevant to artistic practice as it reflects the idea that writers have pre-existing narratives within themselves eager to speak themselves. I would say that we all have a theme as artists or researchers and even just as people, whether general or specific and we selectively remember or reconstruct information that corroborates our narratives at that particular moment, given to our needs/projects.

And as a side note, even through researching and the retelling of the research for this event, I am reminded of sentences or quotes or sections of text that I have underlined, repeated to myself and written down as being of importance, or of relevance, or as having some personal truth in the same way that you would experience and place emphasis on a particular memory or memories.

In the question and answer section of one of the lectures I refer to, a student commented that memories are a reflection of how we process experience, that we take in information and associate it with the models we understand in the physical world and that in this sense, memories are an asset that we call upon to make sense of other associated situations a degree of separation away.

The focus on the process of association seems important and it brings to mind an observation made by neurologist Russell Epstein when talking about aesthetic experience during a discussion called Psychogeography. He likens the experience of art, place and memory in this way;

Aesthetic experience is a judgement about how you feel about an object, a cognitive emotion. We make the judgement because we can't see all the aspects at once. We understand the relationship between all the aspects of a place or a work of art, and we can understand that to be beautiful...
The emotions we feel about place are very much like aesthetic emotions. For example in Proust when Baldassare remembers things or people, he remembers them as a unified whole - there is something beautiful about that/them that he longs for or misses. The reason we feel like this about places and likewise about art, is that our brains aren't set up to take all the information in at once. Instead we think, 'There's something there that I can't grasp, but it's there and it's really important.'

I have no conclusions to draw from anything I've undertaken to say, only that what is being discovered about memory and what I have read about it's function as the happening of associations rather than the recall of stored facts is mirrored in the concept of research itself and is certainly the model I have used in considering the footnote assigned to me.

Footpath Guide Writing

2009-03-06T22:04:00.000Z

A short, enclosed path leads into a drive; turn right, and from a stile on the left a path leads across a field to a road where you turn left for a few yards, past one house, to an iron gate under an arch.

In the road behind the hedge turn left and ignore all lanes to left and right until a house is reached on the left. Immediately opposite is a stone stile and a track, which you take through a wood. Avoid paths to the left until emerging from the wood, then keep to a hedge on the right along two fields and so skirt a farm on the left to the farm approach, turning right to the gate.

- Footpath Guides, The Wye Valley by Arthur Clarke.

The authorial voice is projected into the future, providing immediate and specific information from a temporal and physical distance. Overall this gives the text a dark, watchful and controlled undertone. The authority of the invisible guide puts the reader in a particularly obediant role, following out instructions given by a person not even present, and this relationship is reinforced by the reader's environment seeming to corroborate the author's instructions. When he says that there will be a track opposite, it is sure to be there.
Taken down the path of psychology, one could further infer that this relationship reflects that of a parent and child, one being lead/guided by the other in blind trust, but I'm more inclined to read a sexual undercurrent in the text. This is due to the fact that a dominant/submissive relationship has been established and one party is controlling the bodily actions of another. Of course this is not inherent in the text, just an already weighted reading on my part, but this style of writing lends itself well to the theme of sadomasochism and brings to mind the writing of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Notes on asethetic experience in place and memory

2009-02-07T15:02:00.000Z

"He decorated scenes of his death with images of this world - images which surged up within him but which distance, already detaching him from them, turned into something hazy and beautiful; and this deathbed scene, long premeditated but endlessly embellished and renewed with ardent melancholy, was like a work of art."

- Proust, The Death of Baldassare Silvande Viscount of Sylvania

***

Aesthetic experience is a judgement about how you feel about an object, a cognitive emotion. We make the judgement because we can't see all the aspects at once. We understand the relationship between all the aspects of a place or a work of art, and we can understand that to be beautiful...
The emotions we feel about place are very much like aesthetic emotions. For example in Proust when Baldassare remembers things or people, he remembers them as a unified whole - there is something beautiful about that/them that he longs for or misses. The reason we feel like this about places and likewise about art, is that our brains aren't set up to take all the information in at once. Instead we think, 'There's something there that I can't grasp, but it's there and it's really important.'

- Taken from Russell Epstein's comments at a discussion on psychogeography.

This is why we feel 'drawn' to places and are seduced by memories.

AASPACE

2009-02-05T23:25:00.000Z

Audio, text and drawings published on Soanyway

2009-01-22T09:29:00.000Z

Support Independent Bookshops

2009-01-21T14:54:00.000Z

Memory isn't to do with fact or truth, it can have to do with sincereity; what you believe happened...Memory is a form of artistic recording.

- Judith Thurman
Autobiography / Biography: Narrating The Self

2009-01-21T14:47:00.000Z

[Writers are] born into a milieu that doesn't really offer them the reflection which they seek in books. They seek friendships, sort of spiritual friendships with other writers and that becomes a real community of people - that may not ever meet, or need to meet but that is what is real to them.

- Judith Thurman
Autobiography / Biography: Narrating The Self

2008-12-18T19:59:00.000Z

The Stranger Song

2008-12-01T19:50:00.000Z

Exhibition at A Foundation

2008-11-24T11:49:00.000Z

AASPACE (November 2008)

2008-11-08T17:34:00.001Z

AASPACE concerns the histories, both real and fictitious, of the Artist's Anonymous installation, Communication and Association, currently in exhibition at A Foundation, Liverpool. The audio cassette recordings, which are available on Walkman throughout the installation, were arrived at through recorded conversations, remembered events/experiences, and also engagement with texts found in the installation.
Collectively, these elements form a disjointed narrative of events and description, with loose associations and references to one another. Once written and recorded onto cassette, the narrative may be listened to and engaged with, inside the space which is used as the setting for the text. This allows the listener to trace, and indeed, to place the narrative within their immediate surroundings.
The physical history of the space is indefinite due to the transformed and whitewashed appearance of the connecting rooms, only photographs remain on the walls as an indication to their past physical state. The task is to identifying and piece together, re-wind and re-interpret, to decipher what is fact and fiction in order to pin some sort of history onto the elusive atmosphere within the installation space.

***
AASPACE
Communication and Association
A Foundation
Greenland Street
Liverpool
25th - 29th November

this paper's from the chippy (August-September 2008)

2008-10-25T22:05:00.000+01:00

one of ten issues circulated by post.

INSTALLATION (June 2008)

2008-10-13T20:19:00.000+01:00

Installation 2008

The individual projects from left to right are MIXTAPE/ME, SELECTIONOFTEXTS, ARRANGEMENTS, COMBINATIONSLIDES

MIXTAPE/ME is a 25 minute long mixtape of songs and spoken word pieces. The main concern of the project was to explore a relatively new form of speech or storytelling that uses a method of borrowing and arranging to create a narrative. This borrowing and arranging is interesting not only as a method of construction but through cultural references and associations it becomes a layered gesture - a intention or a will to speak but doing so through the words and actions of others.
The project was presented on a double tape deck with headphones. Blank tapes were provided with inlays should the listener want to make a copy for themselves.

SELECTIONOFTEXTS is a microfiche viewer with 93 written pieces on two sheets of microfiche. The texts were composed between the years 2006 and 2008 and they range from three word combinations to flash-fiction. This part of the installation rests on the connotations of the microfiche viewer. The assumption with an archive is that the material is of importance enough to preserve and to be researched. By creating this focus on the texts, as archived collected documents, the viewer is engaged as a researcher, inviting them to spend more time to read and analyse the writing as singular pieces, and as a body of work. This project was somewhere close to a solution for my concerns about presenting writing in a visual arts environment.

ARRANGEMENTS What started out as a sort of aesthetic game where postcards where intuitively selected and grouped then arranged based on their images, developed into an method and process of creating or discovering narratives. The postcards provided settings, protagonists and actions which were written and recorded into short audio pieces of up to 6 minutes. The postcards were presented along side the audio pieces so that the listener could relate the visual information with the audio.

COMBINATIONSLIDES For each piece two slide projectors where positioned in such a way as to overlap their projections and align aspects of the images to create the impression of one space. For me this is a visual example of what can be done with narratives in writing, and was an illustration of my methods in my written work; using/focusing on one detail to change or combine separate narratives.

Tom McCarthy on Black Box Transmitter

2008-10-12T16:11:00.000+01:00

From Walter Benjamin's Unpacking My Library

2008-10-11T09:48:00.000+01:00

"To renew the old world, that is the collector's deepest desire."

From the last page of Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet

2008-10-09T20:46:00.000+01:00

It is the latter which provides the subject for the conversation. Psychological complications aside, it is a standard narrative of colonial life in Africa, with a description of a tornado, a native revolt, and incidents at the club. A... and Franck discuss it animatedly, while sipping the mixture of cognac and soda served by the mistress of the house in three glasses.
The main character of the book is a customs official. This character is not an official but a high-ranking employee of an old commercial company. This company's business is going badly, rapidly turning shady. This company's business is going extremely well. The chief character - one learns - is dishonest. He is honest, he is trying to re-establish a situation compromised by his predecessor, who dies in an automobile accident. But he had no predecessor, for the company was only recently formed; and it was not an accident. Besides, it happens to be a ship (a big white ship) and not a car at all.
Franck, at this point, begins to tell an anecdote about a truck of his with engine trouble. A..., as politeness demands, asks for details to prove the attention she is paying to her guest, who soon stands up and takes his leave, in order to return to his own plantation, a little farther east.

***

The husband uses the conversation of the novel between his wife A... and Franck to comment on his marital situation - The chief character, being A..., is dishonest - affair with Franck. The company perhaps referring to his marriage and the predecessor being Franck. A car wreck is described only once in the book before these final pages, which either suggests that it actually happened (unlike the repeated description of a small number of actions which suggests that they are revisited memories) or that it was a wild fantasy of the husband's, quickly dispelled and not thought of again. But surely jealousy would cause him to revisit this fantasy of getting rid of Franck - possibly even A... too. There is a peculiar unlabored shortness and certainty to 'and it was not an accident' in light of the weight of the rest of the text that implies that it is something that did occur and further still, that is was the husband's interference with the car that caused it.
The more and more I re-read these final pages, the more I'm of the opinion that the husband had killed both A... and Franck and the events of this story are his ceaseless recollections of events in the house, spurred on by his guilt.

From Nude Magazine Issue 13

2008-10-08T15:30:00.000+01:00

-Recreation Myths : Nick Clements by Suzy Prince
In the introduction to his sadly commercially unavailable book, Simulacra, he explains that these photographs are 'reconstructions...but not of any existing photographs or illustration. Instead they have been reconstructed partly from the memories of those who were there at the time, and partly from my own memories of events, films and photography of the period.'
When I met up with Clement's in his London townhouse to talk about his work, he elborated further: 'if I did it from photographs that would be re-enactment and what I'm doing is re-creation. One comes from memory and feeling and intuition the other is a historical phenomenon.'
I'm impressed by Nick Clement's work, but I was still curious as to what had driven him in the first place to go to all the effort.
'I don't know why,' he answers. 'Even as a teenager I had a feeling for the past. I think I'm just one of those people, and there are plenty around...'
'I lived in Germany and Italy for two years each. The working classes in those countries look to the bourgeois classes for the way they should ideally dress and act, and social manners and so forth. Since the end of World War II it has almost been the opposite way around in Britain whereby people look to the working classes for ideas. Which is unusal and it turns Marx and Engles idea about 'whoever owns the means of productions own the ideas of the day' on its head, because certainly the British working classes have an incredible cultural influence on Britain. More than the aristocracy of the middle class. Even though ultimately of course, they get the money out of it.'

From 'Seoul:Until Now'

2008-10-08T11:10:00.000+01:00

Taken from the article, 'Seoul. The Complex Ornament' by Kang Su-Mi

-A city underconstruction
In this sense, Seoul, in general, always has been, always is, and always will be, "under construction". No matter how much this sentence indicates past, present and future of a city, Seoul lives a life restricted to its present. A very dominant present, a sucession of "moments", autonomously ballooning, unfastened from history. Therefore in Seoul, moments of the present can overlap and stack, but can never build up into a history; just like there is no sense of history to a construction site by a street, which was broken open in order to fix the failures of the work, finished just the day before...

-The ornament of the capital
Every big city on this planet is trapped in a labyrinth stairway of "profit" (although, I am not sure, whether a rural township in the most distant Kangwondo in Korea or Alps will be free from it). All these labyrinths are connected by the ceiling of "global capitalism", under which every metropolis in the world strives for the next level of profit, hurrying from one level of economic growth to the next. It is rather and escalator, since under the global capitalism, you do no longer achieve these goals by physical work like in the early steps of industrialisation. This new global economic order reaches its profit-heights by a combination of international capital and specualtion, mulitnational corporations with sophisticated marketing and advertising techniques, mass-distributed cultural industry products. In short, it gains profit through non-material labour. On a stairway you have to keep moving by yourself in order to get up, on a elevator the ground on which you stand is moving and in most cases, it is hard to overcome the passenger in front of you. Masked by the ideal of horizontal economical exchange, the global capitalism sucessfully hides the fact that the rules are laid out by those few players, who were in advance anyway. For those who did not get a head-start into the race, keeping pace is more than difficult...

...The ornament of global capitalism lays upon the culture and art scene of modern cities, is a diagram of concentric circles. The centre is firmly anchored in capital, while all the areas of culture and art, education, and the individual lives build up the circles. As the core of the ornament - the capital - moves, every connected circle follows its direction. I will not stress the dependencies within the relationship of centre and periphery, but it is fact that economic concepts like "cultural industry" or "capitalist competition principle" have found their ways into the areas of culture and education.
As natural as you will lose you way in a maze, it is quite obvious that peoples' life will get lost in the cities, which huddle under the roof of global capitalism - no matter whether they helped building it it or were forced to enter. A critical examination of the cultural structure of our time seems to be the most important thing in circumstances like these.