I shall be opening my studio as part of the Hackney Wicked Art Festival next weekend. If you happen to be in that part of town, come down and check it out. The opening is on Friday night and the party is ’till late.
Monthly Archives: July 2009
Obey – an hypnotic apparition
A banner ad that follows me around the internet, subliminally hypnotising me with its artifice.
How it knows where to find me, I’m not sure. How it knows why to find me, I’m even less so. I am far from its target demographic. But lurking in a 160×600 box on the right hand side of innumerable web pages, it always does. Sandwiched between an anonymous quote with its instruction highlighted in red against browser default, hyper-link blue and a series of news network badges that act as authenticators of fact, shifting the subjective into the objective, are two portraits of the same woman; one before, one after. It is these pictures and their persistence in reaching so many web pages before me and not the command they follow that I realise hypnotise me most.
Perhaps, as a male, I am more easily drawn to the breasts framed in the same red as the instruction at top to obey. Perhaps it is the instruction to obey in the same red as the bikini top in the “after” picture – the result of my subservience to its command – that draws me to them. But it is not this. This I realise is a distraction. This is not the thing here that is hypnotising me. This is so obvious a tactic that it can no longer be acknowledged as artifice.
No, the thing that I realise that hypnotises me here are not the breasts – their exposure after as opposed to their covering before and, by implication the confidence gained by obeying – but the face.
I am drawn first by the eyes. I notice how dark they are. I notice this independently of their contrast against the whiteness of the smile. I expect a white smile and I am blind to it. The darkness of the eyes is much more noticeable against the pale pastel colouring of the rest of the photo in any case. It is this contrast that creates the optical vacuum that begins to hypnotise me. I look in to them.
I begin to see both sets of eyes at once – stereoscopically. They are on a separate plain to the rest of the image. They hover above the face. As I look into them, they slowly begin to pull the rest of the face forward. Both images, the before and the after are now in three parts; the eyes, the face and the body in descending order. Disembodied like this, I realise what it is that hypnotises me about this image. It is the same face in both pictures. Not the same person, the same face and then not of the same person as the body. In each instance the face has been superimposed, mirrored, tilted and correctly toned. It is the same image in facsimile to represent the same person, a different person, in two different states of being. One person before and one person after. Two different people and no discernable differentiation in time. Three people to create the perfect doppelganger. Obey.
Excerpt from the Grammar of Ornament, p.40, Pompeian Ornament
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Excerpt from Auto-da-Fé, p.14-15
His eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. But he could not read; that was a great pity. He pulled down one volume after another, turned over pages, contrived to make out many of the names. Later on he scrambled up on to the ladder. He wanted to know if the upper shelves had any secrets to hide. He tumbled off it and said: I haven’t hurt myself! The floor is hard. The books are soft. In a book shop one falls on books. He could have made a castle of books, but he regarded disorder as vulgar and, as he took out each new volume, he replaced the one before. His back hurt. Perhaps he was only tired. At home he would have been asleep long ago. Not here, excitement kept him awake. But his eyes could not even make out even the largest titles any more and that annoyed him. He worked out how many years he would be able to spend reading in this shop without ever going out into the street or to that silly school. Why could he not stay here always? He could easily save up to buy himself a small bed. His mother would be afraid. So was he, but only a little, because he was so very quiet. The gas lamps in the street went out. Shadows crept along the walls. So there were ghosts.During the night they came flying here and crouched over the books. Then they read.
Gif response to tumblr dramr
Posted this on tumblr a couple of days ago. Seems a bit more relevant today.
Preview: Internet ornament, plate 2 – walls