one of ten issues circulated by post.
25/10/2008
13/10/2008
INSTALLATION (June 2008)
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.
11/10/2008
From Walter Benjamin's Unpacking My Library
"To renew the old world, that is the collector's deepest desire."
09/10/2008
From the last page of Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet
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.
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.
08/10/2008
From Nude Magazine Issue 13
-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'
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.
-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.
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