Emile Zile is an artist, filmmaker and performer.
‘Forever’, the analogue feedback music video for Love Of Diagrams screens in the Rojo Nova Audiovisual Sessions, happening July 1st – August 15th 2010 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. http://www.rojo-nova.com
If you cant make it to the museum in Brazil, you can watch the video here: http://www.messandnoise.com/tv/3916440
Dafna Maimon’s take on arts industry workers, recent art school graduates, art guards and the dreams and fears of the people at the frontline of cultural institutions. The protagonists use black parcan theatre lights on mic stands to frame their monologues. A white light too strong. Lights. Camera. Action.The repetitious scenes were almost nausea inducing in their hammy under/overacted delivery. Exquisitely bland dialogue, sometimes directed to audience members or the unwitting gallery visitor who becomes part of the narrative. Tiny, intoxicating scenes that would be repeated over the course of an hour.
Inane moving of lights. Incessant moving of the framing devices. The power a directed light has to focus energy and create an immediate stage is profound. The spotlight gives license to the characters to deliver lines in much the same way that social networking platforms or micro-blogging services gives licence to transmit little traumas, everyday desires and narcissistic impulses. These individuals prepare their monologues for the amorphous mass, one liners that are both media-conscious and personal. They recite language to the ether, not a directed conversational language, but a never-ending stream of quotes, self-critical comments and weak commands. The dialogue of mediated individualism. I felt we were trapped in the lucid daydreaming IM chats of bored gallery sitters and wannabe curators.
Melodramatic pauses and romantic dialogue interspersed with asides to the audience “If this was a film I would be shot over the shoulder in medium close-up”. Characters moving in highly artificial arcs. The pacing is drawn out and gives ample room for slippage, coincidences and accidents. A character sighs and delivers a highly breathy and despairing “Help. The website is stuck again”. This is anti-depressant operatic tragedy set to the scale of 21st century comment culture.
09/01/10. W139, Warmoesstraat 139, Amsterdam
Directed by Dafna Maimon
Performers: Anu Vahtra, Lot Meijers, Steven de Jong, Timothy Moore
Google screenshot painting by Tyler Wilde.
Article by Dutch-Australian media theorist Geert Lovink on google, society of the spectacle/query and the shape of critical thought in this info-glut.
‘The society of the query and the Googlization of our lives’
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-09-05-lovink-en.html
An excerpt
Ever since the rise of search engines in the 1990s we have been living in the “society of the query”, which, as Weizenbaum indicates, is not far removed from the “society of the spectacle”. Written in the late 1960s, Guy Debord’s situationist analysis was based on the rise of the film, television and advertisement industries. The main difference today is that we are explicitly requested to interact. We are no longer addressed as an anonymous mass of passive consumers but instead are “distributed actors” who are present on a multitude of channels. Debord’s critique of commodification is no longer revolutionary. The pleasure of consumerism is so widespread that it is has reached the status of a universal human right. We all love the commodity fetish, the brands, and indulge in the glamour that the global celebrity class performs on our behalf. There is no social movement or cultural practice, however radical, that can escape the commodity logic. No strategy has been devised to live in the age of the post-spectacle. Concerns have instead been focusing on privacy, or what’s left of it. The capacity of capitalism to absorb its adversaries is such that, unless all private telephone conversations and Internet traffic became were to become publicly available, it is next to impossible to argue why we still need criticism – in this case of the Internet.
Mock up on Mu
dir. Craig Baldwin (USA, 2009, 110 min)
Première: 3 December, 22:00 hrs Smart Project Space
A new movie by Craig Baldwin, straight out of the Other Cinema compound in San Francisco. The latest in his canon that includes Tribulation 99, Sonic Outlaws and Spectres of the Spectrum, all intoxicating feature-length films that use pre-exisitng media. Screening this Thursday night in Amsterdam.
Mock up on Mu dir. Craig Baldwin (USA, 2009, 110 min) Première: 3 December, 22:00 hrs. Smart Project Space Amsterdam
A radical hybrid of spy, sci-fi, Western, and even horror genres, Craig Baldwin’s Mock Up On Mu cobbles together a feature-length ‘collage-narrative’ based on (mostly) true stories of California’s post-War sub-cultures of rocket pioneers, alternative religions and Beat lifestyles that creates an alternative American history.
‘..an often hilarious, sometimes inscrutable, always original film that’s part pop-cultural fantasia, part capitalist critique’ – New York Magazine
a day-long symposium on the changing nature of cultural development, ‘amateurism’ vs. ‘professionalism’, the shifting sands of creative consumption and critical construction… gatekeepers now left with no-one at the gates… playlist curatorial selections and niche/long tail sales techniques… for a long time it has been sensed that artists are the new curators, filters that set signs into collision, to paraphrase Bourriaud. i’m interested to to see what this gathering has to say on the consumer as curator, and how the curators see it…
please note: ‘Captcha’ as logo
speakers include Bruce Sterling, Rick Poynor and Metahaven.
produced by the Breda Graphic Design Museum, headed up by Mieke Gerritsen
hosted by Koert van Mensvoort of the always excellent nextnature.net
While museums are developing strategies to digitalise their collections, online cultural production is growing steadily, with hundreds of thousands of new images posted each day. A lot of potentially interesting work is being produced online, which never reaches the physical world. The distribution of this high quality work is increasingly decentralised, leaving museums, foundations and professional magazines at a loss on how to redefine their role as gatekeepers. On the other hand, the time spent daily behind the computer on internet networking is pushing the demand for a physical experience of our fleeting culture. Designers, artists, mediators and policy makers need to redefine their position, because new technologies define to a large extent today’s possibilities and means of presentation and archiving. The search is for new quality criteria, new frames of references, and alternative methods for enabling connections between the virtual and the physical space of today’s culture.
Practical information:
19/12/2009
Location: Paradiso, Amsterdam (Weteringschans 6)
Entrance: €25, €10 (studenten) english spoken
Reservations: symposium@graphicdesignmuseum.com
Advanced sales: AUB ticketshop amsterdam/ticket service nederland
Contact information:
graphic design museum
t +31 (0)76 529 99 00
www.graphicdesignmuseum.com
Being locked out of my Sandberg studio while holiday renovations take place creates time for exploring the Amsterdam forests by bike, watching EasyJet 737’s full of anticipatory stoners land from my balcony and reading books.
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Australian Screen Classics series. Currency Press, Sydney.
Philip Brophy
Brophy’s reading of the signs within this iconic Australian film is a euphoric textual overload. Few other writers cause me to verbalise my intellectual agitation during the act of reading as Brophy does. I find myself floored by the spiky analysis, unexpected connections and sharp wit. His analysis is incisive and the language used is never jargonistic or cluttered. The author generates a highly subjective theory-fiction, akin to Baudrillard or Barthes’ analysis of the products of culture. Just as valid as any other potential reading and certainly not pandering to any pre-digested self-image of the Australian Film Industry. A highly provocative reading of the gay/straight, male/female, urban/rural energies contained in this film, the passages on Chrome-plating and the Rolls Royce Spirit of Ecstasy, Scarves and the Village Roadshow logo leave a lasting impression, as too the Freudian disfiguration of the land to make way for the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric scheme. I come away from this book thinking where are all the other analyses of popular culture that refuse to tow an accepted ‘Margaret and David’ canonisation of certain cultural works. Where is the psycho-sexual re-reading of Antiques Roadshow, Channel 10 Late night news or The NRL Footy Show?
http://www.currency.com.au/search.aspx?type=author&author=Philip+Brophy
Cultural Activism Today. The art of over-identification. Episode Publishers, Rotterdam.
Bavo (editors)
I have been intending to read this collection of essays for the past year. Subconsciously avoiding it until I had decent time and space to take it in perhaps. Beginning with Slavoj Zizek’s concept of over-identification with ‘the enemy’ (advanced capitalism, totalitarian regimes, neo-conservative agendas) as the only form of cultural activism that doesn’t automatically lock into a played out notion of Left-Right politics, with all the perfunctory role-playing that such a binary opposition summons up. Post-ideology activism for a post-ideological age. The argument is that to face the opponent with an image of itself so magnified, heightened and detestable is the only way of exposing the inherent hypocrisy within that system. Santiago Serra, Christoph Schlingensief, Atelier van Lieshout are discussed at length and the cultural shockwaves that their performances and installations generate. Schlingensief has always fascinated me. His ability to be the enfant terrible for German-speaking culture, making unsettling film, tv and theatre work that implicates it’s audience, funders and participants. A kind of double-bluff that provokes a social black hole of shame and responsibility, of which Schlingensief isn’t immune to either. Schlingensief’s projects discussed in this book include the African Twin Towers film installation and Bitte liebt Osterreich, a protest against the extreme-right party of Jorg Haider joining the Austrian government; In a makeshift container camp in the center of Vienna a Big Brother-type reality show asked Austrians to vote asylum seekers out of the camp and out of the country. The ‘most integrated’ refugee at the end of the game won a residence permit. A superb analysis of the Slovenian industral band Laibach is undertaken by Alexei Monroe, dismantling their seemingly ultra-nationalist symbols such as the Slovenian Stag, Alpine romanticist oil painting and traditional folk costume. True to the image of themselves as ‘State Artists’, Laibach’s administering organisation NSK offers a passport to the public from their website for admission to their ‘state in time’. All the artists discussed in this volume keep their poker face. It is an ambiguous and complex gesture that provides no easy recuperation or dismissal.
http://www.niederer.info/new_site/archives/23
Laibach Live 14.11.03 Ljubljana, Slovenia
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EoPI-xO4PU
Destroy All Monsters. Marion Boyars, London.
Ken Hollings
A sharply non-linear novel that runs at breakneck speed between visiting aliens, Tokyo teens, reanimated Elvis Presley and the interior monologues of the President of the Unted States, Destroy All Monsters is a thrilling read. Elliptical narratives. Cascading plots and thoroughly media-soaked characters scattered around the globe. Also highly recommended is Ken Hollings and Simon James’ ResonanceFM podcast series on American 1950’s Science Fiction, Fantasy and Fact; how the cold war, space race and the very real ‘little green man’ hysteria influenced popular culture and vice versa: Welcome to Mars
http://readers.penguin.co.uk/nf/shared/WebDisplay/0,,74271_1_12,00.html