I’m happy to be accepted for a three month guest residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten Amsterdam to develop new work during February-April 2017.

‘Zile tests these components of identity against the realities and outcomes of the most efficient methods of mass communication available to the artist, and others, today. They converge with overbearing entertainment, unfixed place, the separation of bodies in social contact, heightened demands for personal expression and enraptured capitalism. In Zile’s practice, corporeal realities, philosophical consideration and intimate expressions of love and loss flick at the force of digital mass. The artist undermines fantasies of fulfilment through boundless media and technological output, consumption and connectivity, conceding meaning to the bent tread and vulnerable closeness of the hungry human body.’

Digital Communion Elise Routledge
UN.magazine article issue 10.2, Melbourne 2016

Full article online at:
http://unprojects.org.au/magazine/issues/issue-10-2/emile-zile-digital-communion/

Memory Machine II – A series of exhibitions, debates, performances & publications on cultural memory & identity, initiated by Castrum Peregrini Amsterdam.

Exhibition & public program

Things to Remember
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27 February – 25 March

With works by Mehraneh Atashi, Dayna Casey, Amie Dicke, Nickel van Duijvenboden, DNK Ensemble, Maria Guggenbichler with Margit de Sad, Romy A. More, Egbert Alejandro Martina and others, Jonas Lund, Antoine Viviani, Emile Zile. Curated by Radna Rumping

How are digital media, endless storage space and new ways of communicating shaping the way we capture, share and retrieve our personal memories? The things we want to remember, do they still fit in a shoebox or are they floating around somewhere in ‘the cloud’ amongst the thousands of e-mails and images that our external memory can contain nowadays?

Saturday 27 February 2016, 16.00 – 17.30

Free entrance. A conversation with Amie Dicke, Simultaneous/Synchronous (Song) Performance DNK Ensemble (Koen Nutters & Seamus Cater), Performance Emile Zile

Interval Projects
Mining the Cloud
A series of desktop documentaries
Thursday May 26, 7pm
Schoolhouse Studios
81 Rupert St. Collingwood
$15

Interval presents Mining the Cloud: a series of desktop documentaries by local and international artists.

Charting the multitude of the Internet through the desktop interface, these films and performances record the virtual as real, traversing landscapes that fall outside our visual circuits. From abandoned virtual realities to electronic dumping grounds of Ghana, this is the detritus of late capitalism in a time of rapid technological change.

The desktop documentary is an emerging practice drawing from the disciplines of ethnography, archaeology and contemporary art. Using desktop browsers as both lens and edit suite, these films and performances excavate artefacts from under the “cloud”. These artists respond to the human impulse to navigate, archive, interpret and ultimately control the world around us.

Lettres du Voyant by Louis Henderson (UK)
Lettres du Voyant is a documentary-fiction about spiritism and technology in contemporary Ghana that attempts to uncover some truths about a mysterious practice called “Sakawa” – internet scams mixed with voodoo magic. Tracing back the scammers’ stories to the times of Ghanaian independence, the film proposes Sakawa as a form of anti-neocolonial resistance.

All that is Solid by Louis Henderson (UK)
A technographic study of e-recycling and neo-colonial mining filmed in the Agbogbloshie electronic waste ground in Accra and illegal gold mines of Ghana. The video constructs a mise-en-abyme as critique in order to dispel the capitalist myth of the immateriality of new technology – thus revealing the mineral weight with which the Cloud is grounded to its earthly origins.

Utopia 1.0: Post ­Neo ­Futurist ­Capitalism in 3D! by Annie Berman (US)
A first­-person expedition to Second Life, the once thriving virtual 3D online world, in search of what remains. Given the invitation to come build anything imaginable, what is it that we chose to create?

A performance by Emile Zile (AU)
Emile Zile’s performances use new-age healing apps, YouTube monologues and algorithmic portraiture to create audio-visual meditations on augmented spirituality and networked representations of the self.

Unpacking Sound, Text & Speech

This talk and presentation will look at the staging of sound based works in gallery and non-gallery contexts, and the relationship between sound, language and visual representation. Featuring Emile Zile, Speak Percussion’s Eugene Ughetti and their Artist-in-Residence, Kaylie Melville, Alice Hui-Sheng Chang and Philip Samartzis (facilitator).

http://www.c3artspace.com.au/talk-3-july-1st/
http://abbotsfordconvent.com.au/whats-on/events-exhibitions/c3-talks-unpacking-sound-text-speech

My 140-character tweet review of the Ryan Trecartin show at NGV, re-presented by NGV social mediators.

Emile Zile witfully uses the ‘truth’ of video in constant movements of distanciation that reaffirms our position as spectators—in the gallery and in the world—to draw us back with the question: where is the individuality of our self-expression, in a banal act of connectedness?
– Anabelle Lacroix, Curator

Opening reception and artist in Q+A: Saturday 30 May, 3pm
Dates: Friday 29 May – Saturday 13 June 2015
Venue: MARS Gallery, Black Box, 7 James Street, Windsor VIC 3181

As part of the ‘Put Up a Signal’ Australia-Indonesia program I will be hosted at MES56 from 11-22 November to create new work and exhibit.

http://putupasignal.info/artist

Nayla, Wok the Rock and me practising our wrestling press-kit team pose, 2011.

Thanks to Bus Gallery Melbourne, Mes 56 and Asialink Arts.

Liquid Architecture festival interview by Line Jensen and Ronja Moss.

emilezile_sonicportrait.mp3

Emile Zile leads a collaborative workshop on (mis)using the internet for the purpose of art/lulz. Through a range of participatory exercises Zile will demonstrate techniques to detourn everyday social media and search engines in dynamic performative ways that offer new perspectives on these ready-to-hand tools.

#cavemanVJ #expandedhomecinema #officeworksavantgarde #postitnotebrut

With his history of performances that engage with popular culture and consumer technology Emile Zile recently premiered OMG_Sisyphus. The Greek mythology of Sisyphus, a tale of burden and absurdity, is used as a prop on which to enact a contemporary performance situation: being on YouTube. The performance happens in the midst of laptops, amplifiers, digital cameras, projectors and a heavy looking stone that the artist carries in from outside. In recent performances of OMG_Sisyphus at (Open Archive Melbourne, 30 November 2011, Palais Paradiso Amsterdam 16 February 2012) Zile enacts a humorously calculated switch. In his treatment we begin to understand that the laptop/webcam is now a rock, or vice versa. Its physical presence, weight, and texture become entwined in a passage of worship, as the ubiquitous Apple product is now something more equivalent to a Chinese scholar stone (Gongshi). Throughout the whole performance it is as if through some application of post-production what we should be seeing as a computer (the adored gateway to online audiences) is now a small volcanic boulder. Simultaneous slips between live action and published content begin, as Zile sits staring at the rock we imagine him staring at his computer, alone in a room while addressing an imagined YouTube audience. In doing so the actual live audience sitting in the gallery space is distanced, even denied.

At some points in the piece we are made to feel the joys of web 2.0 publishing, light relaxation muzak plays, we are all connected by technology. But the gallery space begins to fall out of step as the artist struggles against what appears to be self-doubt and loneliness. The rock remains motionless on a small table under lamplight. Is real life different to projected life? Maybe it used to be. Zile seems to suggest a new friction is built in this crossover rather than a seamless merger. Whilst various elements of the performance are online, the crux of this work hinges on being present live in the gallery space – where multiple facets of contemporary being are felt and fired simultaneously. As it happens we are pointed toward a space where states of alienation, corporation and intense connectivity collide into a state of indivisibility.

– Ry David Bradley, February 2012

Saturday October 4, 10am – 1pm.
Capacity is limited and bookings can be made through the MCA at http://www.mca.com.au/events/reschool-emile-zile-internet/