- installations loop footage to divulge and liberate the charms of liminal processes, objects and subjects
- …circumspectly unravels the relationship between the camera, its subject and its maker through various techniques of disclosure
- subtle graduations of influence we might steal over our environment
- sculptural presentation and the power relationship between object and viewer
- wishful longing for an impossibly romantic reality
- understand our subjective positions in the world
- nihilistically adopting and discarding personas
- apocalyptic vision
- new form of narrative
- outlines its plans to appropriate high culture
- control methodologies
- control desires and control solutions and their own absurdities
- offer us a space for reflection
- take up directly what might be called the beauty issue
- micro-symmetry within the motifs and a macro-dissymmetry in the composition
- elevation of artifice
- paintings are rather screens
- remnants of another image of a natural world
- distance between signs and their signifiers
- pointers to particular epistemic systems, to sciences for example, which have drifted too far to be accessible any longer
Detox
Hotlinking: an exhibition of images from the Tate with immunity from seizure
Hotlinking is a mini-exhibition put together from highlights of Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World, showing at the Tate Modern from 04 Feb 2010 until 16 May 2010. The works have been generously loaned by overseas collectors and international museums and are presented here via the Immunity from Seizure page of the Freedom of Information section of the Tate website. This show, in its current form, will last for as long as the images remain there – when either the page is updated with new content, or sooner if the Tate decides to restrict hotlink access to their images. After which time each work, as access is denied, will be replaced by a browser generated broken image icon and continue indefinitely. I think I speak for Van Doesburg when I say that this icon retains the spirit of Elementarism; the dynamism of its diagonal lines reaffirming that he was in the right in his argument with Mondrian over them, and a worthy addition to the show and his legacy.
The physicality of beige
This is the way it used to work: computers were housed in a rough, beige plastic casing. They got grubby. They were boxy, they were clunky, they were heavy. Clusters of dead skin would coagulate on the corners of the CPU, large grey/brown smears would radiate from the CD eject button and the letters of each key on the keyboard would be circled by a ring of finger dirt. As the hardware grew older, the retardants in the plastic grew darker and yellower. Years of use were recorded on them as well as in them. My life was being involuntarily being recorded on to it. Every so often, I would inspect the underside of my mouse and scrape several full fingernail’s worth of gunk away from the area around the roller ball. It was like it was slowly becoming a cyborg – part human, part machine; a synthesis of organic and synthetic parts. It was immensely satisfying. There were traces of me everywhere, my life on my computer was physical.
This is the way it works now: computers are housed in shiny black plastic or brushed metal casings with incredibly smooth surfaces. They are sleek and light-weight. They don’t get grubby. They reflect my image back rather than collect fragments from it. My reflected image can become distorted in the high gloss by a build up of greasy finger marks, but these can be wiped off with the end of a sleeve and they constantly are. And doing so is immensely satisfying. It’s smoothness is designed to repel. It’s shape has become ornament. My life now is voluntarily recorded within it and through it. My preoccupations and procrastinations are chronicled across the web, every trace of me exists deep within my hard drive or remotely in the cloud.
Ritual
Turn on the computer yourself. Turn it on from a complete shutdown, not a restart from standby or hibernation. It is important that you journey with the computer from an offline state. This allows for complete synchronization and determines your rhythm. It gives you ownership. Start a new session on your browser, do not restore. If you have saved tabs, close them. Your browser’s homepage should be the only thing you are welcomed with. Think of this as the trunk of a tree. Everything you do from now on will branch from here.
Observe each webpage in its entirety and do not read in an F-shaped pattern. If you must skim, do so in a figure of 8. Do not run an ad blocker. Ads are an important part of the page, they provide a context and are an important decoration. They tell you as much about the content as reading does. Investigate every link; hover over them and look to the bottom left of your screen for their destination. Remember the url’s. Absorb them. A naked url reveals more than its anchor text; it provides an abstract of the forthcoming page. Investigate every link, but don’t follow every link. Following every link is a distraction, it prevents you from building up momentum. Momentum is important. Surfing is about decision making, decisions are best made with momentum.
Do not repeat old or memorised searches. If you are stuck, take your time; reflect. Search within yourself first and the search engine second. Enjoy this moment. Have no destination in mind, only a place to start, you will soon forget your initial curiosity and be invigorated instead by its offspring. There is no destination, only a series of resting places. Record these.
Weight all results from a search engine equally. Ignore all rankings, imagine the results are displayed randomly. The results on the 17th page are just as important as those on the 1st. Search engines do not provide you with what you are looking for, at best they are springboards. As you progress through the pages so does the disconnect from your original search term; you are looking for the disconnect. The disconnect is where you are consumed by someone else’s interpretation of what you originally meant when you started your search. What you meant when you started your search is no longer important. Investigate image searches as thoroughly as web ones; the disconnect happens sooner. Links laid out in “hand crafted” pages however are immeasurably more valuable than those found in a search engine. Follow these with more vigour. Anyone who has laid out a links page or hyperlinked text from their article has done so lovingly and knowingly. These links come readily endorsed, researched and verified. Respect this. They will take you to places you couldn’t get to on your own. Enjoy broken links and embrace holding pages, examine these with the same intensity as you would any page. They are wonderfully lost souls that can’t be found through searching alone. There are no dead-ends on the web, but they are as close as you will come.
1 minute of opposition