Darren Sylvester – I was the Last in the Carpenter’s Garden.

Darren Sylvester.

I was the Last in the Carpenter’s Garden.

2008.

Multi-channel video.

Midway through reading Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, I visited Darren Sylvester’s solo exhibition at the NGV – and gardens were already on my mind. The garden as anti-culture, the garden as an interface between nature & culture, the garden as a purely cultural construct; all of these contradictory models hold some power. Haraway argues in her text, that as cyborgs we no longer need dream of returning to that pristine garden, and more than that – in becoming cyborgs we have learnt that this garden never existed to begin with! The shabby artifice of Sylvester’s garden would seem to support this view and it’s unlikely the original Carpenter’s version, with its hodgepodge of spiritual tokens and tacky water features would be much different. All this is useful to me in considering that relationship between artifice, virtuality and the constructed self.

Sylvester. D. (2008). I was the Last in the Carpenter’s Garden [Artwork]. Melbourne, Australia.

Categories: Making Worlds

Simon Zoric – Self Portrait.

Simon Zoric.

Self Portrait.

2009.

Inkjet Print.

Liquid Architecture have an upcoming exhibition at Gertrude Contemporary, loosely built around the practice of ventriloquism. It’s fitting that the primary image for the show should be an artist (Zoric) re-made in the form of a ventriloquists doll. After trawling the internet for supplementary information regarding this work, I couldn’t find much more than short paragraph from Simon himself, explaining that he made the work during a period in which he himself regularly featured as subject matter in his art – so I’ll be forced to think for myself here.

It makes me think about who speaks through artists, or maybe who do artists speak for. Maybe like ventriloquism, art lives in a precarious gap between what the artist show us and what we already know of how the world works.

Ventriloquism also has some similarities to both Bunraku theatre and Vocaloid fan culture, in that artifice is foregrounded. It’s appeal lies largely in just how flimsy the whole illusion is. There is a perceptual investment from the audience which is required to make the whole thing happen, and naturally the audience wants a return on that investment. They are implicated in the minor-crime of is deception, and the only way to erase that crime is to absorb the entire act back into their own ‘real’ world. In this way the hyper-fake very easily flips into the hyper-real. But maybe that’s stretching things a little.

Zoric. S. (2009). Self Portrait [Inkjet print]. Accessed 23/05/2019 – https://www.simonzoric.com/work/self-portrait/

Image: simonzoric.com

Categories: Avatars / Processed Voice

Sam Kidel – Voice Recognition DoS Attack

Sam Kidel.

Voice Recognition DoS Attack (from Silicon Ear EP).

2018.

Audio.

Sam Kidel is yet another artist who is interested in the way the voice has been disembodied, fragmented, mutilated and subsequently problematised through our relationship to technology, in particular digital technology. Drawing on his time spent working in a call centre, he takes this voice as commodity and weaponises it back against the current all encompassing techno-capitalist framework in which we live.

Kidel. S. (2018). Voice Recognition DoS Attack [online file]. Accessed 23/05/2019 – www.samkidel.bandcamp.com

Image: samkidel.bandcamp.com

Categories: Processed Voice / Post-Human.

Mckenzie Wark – Nice Life !

Mckenzie Wark.

N i c e L i f e !

1991.

Magazine Article.

An enduring argument championed by writers such as Barthes and Nick “Momus” Curry – proposes that much of the Western world’s fascination with Japan, comes from seeing itself refracted back, altered, digested – a mirror in which everything looks new. This is certainly true of Wark’s article, which explores the ways in which the messages of Japanese consumer culture have poetically mangled the English language. Words and phrases are cut loose and put to work in making something new to sell. If it sounds good, then use it! A cigarette is not longer just that, it’s an “encounter with tenderness” (p.46). For the West, (where the Word has been handed down directly from god, rendering the world readable and knowable through a network of symbols) – this freedom of language is blasphemous. No such problem in Japan.

Having worked this semester on collaging fragments of digital audio code (rendered in the roman alphabet), then vocally performing the results. I have been worried the work has become too dry, too formal. Wark’s article prompted me to consider how bringing textual information back in to my work can be an intuitive process, and that there may be great pleasure in both new and un-expected combinations.

Wark. M. (1991). N i c e L i f e ! In: Tension (25). Melbourne, Australia: Tension. pp. 45 – 46.

Categories: Making Worlds

Susan Sontag – A Note on Bunraku

Susan Sontag.

A Note On Bunraku.

Essay.

1984.

In her brief 1984 essay on Bunraku puppet theatre, Sontag lists key devices on which the practice depends. In similar to style to Barthes (1), she places particular emphasis on Bunraku’s foregrounding of artifice, whereby the multiple puppeteers for each character are always visible and themselves integral to the reading of the performance. Though never explicitly stated by Sontag, it’s difficult not to see her deconstruction as closely tied to post-structuralist thought more broadly. Two passages in particular highlight this – “What the audience sees is that to act is to be moved” & “inanimateness of the puppet was the pre-condition for the precondition for expressing an ideal state of the spirit”.

In this way we can see the power of Bunraku’s double move. Firstly for the characters, the visibility of their puppeteers dissolves any notion of the soul or even interiority more generally. Secondly, their visibility removes any possible space in which God can exist. No invisible strings, no divine hand of intervention – behind actions are only other actions, and so on and so on.

Sontag. S. (1984). A Note on Bunraku. In: The Threepenny Review, No. 16. California, USA: Threepenny Review. pp. 16.

(ref 1) Barthes. R. (1983). Animate / Inanimate. In: Empire of Signs. Los Angeles, USA: Hill & Wang. pp. 58 – 60.

Categories: Avatars / Processed Voice

Harry Dacre – Daisy Bell

Harry Dacre.

Daisy Bell.

1892 – sung by IMB704, 1961 / Hal 9000, 1968 / Hatsune Miku, 2013.

The speaking voice functions historically as an interesting point of contact between humans and machines. Both in part because our brains are biologically programmed (already the human / machine dichotomy begins to collapse) to detect and prioritise sounds which fit the rhythmic and harmonics patterns associated with speech, but also culturally where the voice acts as a marker of individual agency.

The musical voice then raises the stakes at this point of contact for several reasons. Firstly, as music is widely considered to be closely bound with early language (early humans imitating the calls of birds through song & imitating the polyrhythms of frogs and insects through percussion etc), so when music spontaneously erupts from artificial intelligence the status of the machine is elevated, as it becomes interwoven with all of human history. It doesn’t even require that this theory of early music be true, all that’s required is a cultural mythology arising from the theory, one with a strong enough foot-hold.

Secondly, because there is a perceived critical difference between the machine which gathers information to perform tasks, and the machine which gathers information and then combines it all to synthesise a kind of over-arching temporal and spacial plasma, giving rise to consciousness. Music here serves as the marker to indicate that this line has been crossed. In particular the song Daisy Bell works because it’s protagonist addresses themes of – time, aspiration, desire, autonomy, reproduction and selfhood.

Dacre. H. (1894). Daisy Bell [composition]. United Kingdom: J. Albert & Son.

Kelly. J, Lockbaum, C, Mathews, M. (1961). Daisy Bell [recording]. USA: IBM.

Kubrick. S, Clark. A. C. (1969) 2001: A Space Odyssey [film]. UK / USA: Stanley Kubrick Productions.

Matsuo. Kyoya. (2013). Daisy Bell [recording]. Online source. Retrieved 29/04/2019 from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJF7iBB6Z18

Categories: Post-Human / Processed Voice

John Gerrard – X. LAEVIS (SPACELAB)

John Gerrard.

X. LAEVIS (SPACELAB).

2017.

VR Work.

In John Gerrard’s 2017 immersive VR work – X. Laevis, the viewer enters a VR world to find a frog suspended mid-flight and weightless, as if frozen in time. A blunt instrument though which the artifice of Virtual Reality can be undercut, highlighting how all laws of physics within VR have total plasticity. In particular, this included time which is no longer required to flow steadily forward.

This work is of interest to my own practice in two main ways. Firstly in demonstrating how art concerning virtuality can expose its own artifice to such great effect. Like a virtual idol whose hardcore fans are lucid in their understanding of the performer’s artificiality, or a puppet whose multiple operators are clearly visible to the audience, these examples of the real and the fake sitting together without conflict are pertinent to my own work.

Secondly, i’m interested in the way John Gerrard draws a long, historical line within this work. He links together the experiments conducted by Luigi Galvani during the 18th century, where the legs of dead frogs were animated with electrical current, with the current proliferation of virtuality today. Only thinking of this virtuality as a sudden and catastrophic historic rupture leads to a kind of thought paralysis, whereas looking at it within a historical context including fiction, science, the super-natural, economics, and mythology can be far more useful.

Gerrard. J (2017). X. LAEVIS (SPACELAB). [artwork]. Haarlem, Netherlands: Teylers Museum.

Image: johngerrard.net/

Categories: Avatars / Making Worlds

Critical Annotation

___________________________________________________________________________

Approaching the end of my third semester within the MFA program, I have been working to distil my broader interest concerning the voice within art, down to a more focussed enquiry into how disembodied voices always refer to an implied body. This relationship between the voice as a sonorous material (phone) and the body may on the surface seem a niche subject, however I believe that it’s rich territory with significant implications. It’s a relationship which highlights the contingent nature of perception. When phantom bodies can be conjured so easily, it then begs the question – to what degree can we claim that any bodies are inherently stable and clearly demarcated?

For the practical purpose of organising the blog’s posts I’ve continued to use the following four categories, which are accessible from the dropdown menu –

The newest category – artifice, collects precedents in which the mechanics of representation are laid bare, often integral to the work. Examples include Tacita Dean’s Foley Artist (1) for the distance it allows between the suspension of disbelief and its exposed support structure. Are they experienced simultaneously? Are they separated spatially in the gallery? Is time-lag used to separate the two? These questions a crucial for my own work as I attempt to refine its presentation over the coming months.

The second category and by far the broadest – processed voice, continues to draw together examples where the voice has been extended, either through digital or analogue processing, or in in some cases simply technique. This includes works such as Mamoru Oshii’s – Ghost in the Shell (2), where a sound Spatializer (cutting edge technology at the time) was liberally applied to the film’s dialogue, in order to continually shift its relationship to the body.  

The third category – Transhuman, refers to those works in which mediated voices call into question what we consider to be human, or how our collective understanding of the human might be transcended. Here the voice is often used as the marker to regulate both difference and resemblance within expanded representation of the body. One such included example is Hideaki Anno’s The End of Evangelion (3), in which the body’s drastic inflation is simultaneously anchored through the dense placement breaths, stutters and hesitations.

The final category – Voice as Material, takes it names from Simone Schmidt’s essay The Material Value of the Voice in Art (4) and collects works in which the voice operates outside of, or at least tests the threshold of language. One such example is David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (5), in which non-verbal sounds of the body are foregrounded throughout the film, deliberately abstracting and confusing its fleshy borders.

(1) Dean. T. (2009). Foley Artist. [Artwork]. Accessed 22/09/2019 here: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dean-foley-artist-t07870.

(2) Ghost in the Shell. [Film]. Dir. Oshii. M. Pro. Mizuo. Y, Matsumoto. K. Iyadomi. K, Ishikawa, M. (Shochiku, 1983). 82 minutes.

(3) The End of Evangelion. [Film]. Dir. Anno. H, Tsurumaki, K. (Toei Company, 1997), 85 minutes.

(4) Schmidt. S. (2017). The Material Value of the Voice in Art. Retrieved 27/08/2019.academia.edu/36571280/The_Material_Value_of_the_Voice_in_Art

(5) Videodrome. [Film]. Dir. Cronenberg. D. Pro. Héroux. C, David. P, Solnicki. V. (Universal, 1983). 89 minutes.

Lu Yang – Material World Knight

Lu Yang.

Material World Knight.

2019.

Mixed Media Instillation.

Lu Yang’s work uses the well established visual languages of anime, science fiction, console games, manga and music video to simultaneously interrogate both personal identity, the mediums themselves and the many the ways in which the two are difficult to neatly seperate. The myth of Frankenstein, which has come to posit humans and technology as opposing forces is vaporised here in an instant. Replaced with the mutant offspring of Astro Boy to form what what Frieze Magazine correctly described as work which is – “joyously accelerationist” (Zang. 2019. p 110). Yang’s work doesn’t point to a generation of zombies, bombed into a state of confusion by a hyper-visual culture. Instead it’s an attempt to make the world bearable while picking through the wreckage, taking what’s useful and leaving the rest behind.

Yang. L. (2019). Material World Knight. [Artwork]. Shanghai Bienalle. Shanghai, China.

Zang. G. Z. (2019). Frieze Magazine, Issue 201. London: Frieze Pub, pp. 110.

Image: seditionart.com

Categories: Avatars / Making Worlds / Post-Human

CCRU – Writings 1997 – 2003

CCRU.

Writings 1997 – 2003.

2015.

This collection of essays written by various CCRU members between 1997 and 2003 presents a compelling mix of philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari were clearly a huge influence), video-game fan fiction, alternate histories, deadpan equations for time travel and methods for communicating with extra terrestrials. It’s a prime example of how in order to speculate on the conditions of a near future, multiple disciplines can be successfully brought together as raw materials for world building. If things seem a little jarring, all the better!

As my own practice is currently exploring virtuality and within that, drawing on the post-human, the digital, collective fantasy and language – these writings from the CCRU have been useful in demonstrating what can be gained from collaging together such a wide range of material.

CCRU. (2015). CCRU 1997 – 2003. Falmouth, UK: Time Spiral Press.

Categories: Post-Human / Making Worlds / Avatars