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

http://youtu.be/shrWe1i_nQw

This beast of a live talk show is now embalmed on YouTube for all interested parties to witness, both now and into the future. I think I did an ok job as a co-host but I am not game enough to watch the whole show again just yet. Shout outs to Sina and Harry Merry.

Mediamatic Amsterdam 14 April 2011

On December 9 I will leave Melbourne to begin a year at the Rijksakademie (or longer, depending on the funding situation in Holland).

Four weeks to have lasagna at Pellegrinis, float in the ocean at Point Lonsdale, have a beer with Marcos, paint mum’s fence, visit Sam Bear for socks and survival gear, eat stretched zataar from Mankoushé, find office rooftops, make an Oxo Ovo video, learn the Melbourne shuffle, eat spanakopita from Le Bon, watch Ancient Aliens with Bob in the forest, write a script, eat an ‘everything’-bagel from Glicks, throw away old band tshirts, work on my melanomas, eat a bbq pork roll from Nhu Lan. Not to mention Open Archive, Warneet Ngargee, BYOB Melbourne…

http://www.gouldgalleries.com/Exhibitions/tabid/84/ctl/ExhibitionDetails/mid/420/eid/18/Default.aspx

http://prdctvsm.com/

Marc de Jong FLOCK WORK
Gould Galleries, 270 Toorak Rd. South Yarra
Opens Thursday 08 September 2011 – Saturday 08 October 2011

EXPANDED FERVOUR (SUBTERRANEAN UNDERGROWTH)

In Marc de Jong’s FLOCK WORK we are presented with explosive moments of energy controlled and contained. Removed from their origin as stock photography they appear to be slowed to the point of growing organically. His images of curling ocean waves, fireworks, volcanos, black holes all deal with brutal, spectacular energy. Electricity, water, gravity, fire – elemental forces man has tried to contain. These are portraits of entropy – a moment of peak energy about to dissipate – the greatest force frozen and permitted to grow a mould-like flock veneer. In this manner they are meditations on the speed of global image culture, overgrown phosphorescent works that contain our shared visual culture.

COPY PASTED (SIGNED AND SEALED)

Stock footage and universal logotypes have long been a fascination for de Jong. From the early sign-jacking of the re-advertising project to his re-appropriation of Mad Max in oils, to the alternate reading of nationalist pride in his combination of Australian Aboriginal colours and the Eureka stockade flag. Marc has continued a tradition of very precise and controlled re-use of contemporary imagery. In FLOCK WORK we are witness to a sifting of imagery from stock photography libraries that privilege moments of dynamic intensity only to seal them in their explosive state and alchemically make them permanent on canvas. Somewhere between printing, painting and electrostatic experimentation lies de Jong’s flock process. Generating sparks in their big bang moment in the studio, these canvases represent and also contain the energy used to make them.

SERENE SMILE (YOU VAIN CREATURES)

de Jong’s Buddhas stare out from the walls, peacefully surveying the folly of man’s attempts at longevity and permanence. These heads stand apart in this body of work as the only manifestation of a human form. A humble, resigned, knowing, curling smile that sees the world from it’s jungle home at Angkor Watt, Cambodia. These faces are the key to understanding Marc de Jong’s metaphysical concerns – they are the serene reflections of man surveying and attempting to understand the world. Fame dissolves, humanity is extinguished, but life continues in the pores of the earth. Surfaces of the world will again creep with lichen and moss, much like de Jong’s flock seems to grow and emit a faceless living energy.

Emile Zile 2011

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/103/10353

Philip Brophy, in his catalogue essay for Five Production Company Logos in 3D, sees Emile Zile’s groin-level gesturing aptly as a ‘spoof’ on masturbatory corporate excess. It strikes me also as a kind of post-mass-media shadow-puppetry, almost as though Zile might be telling us a story around the campfire, his flickering hands casting the shape of mythical battles or god-heroes onto thin air.

Orginally screened at Lost and Found, Amsterdam’s long-running night of cultural oddities, video and storytelling hosted at the Theatrum Anatomicum.

http://limboland.tv/kunst/het-beste-van-lost-found/larry-emdurs-suit

Hard copy available at Overtoom 301 — PDF offbeatcinema

My new video Five Production Company Logos in 3D is showing in Melbourne at Dianne Tanzer gallery + projects in April 2011. Philip Brophy wrote a catalogue essay available at the show or online at PhilipBrophy_EgoLogos.html

An excerpt…

Emile Zile’s Five Production Company Logos In 3D presents an imaginary ‘real man’ behind these grandiose charades born of selfimportant declaration. Just as design company CEOs probably come in their pants when they look at their Maya-rendered fonts casting shadows on planets, so are Emile’s hands ‘working magic’ as he performs aerial jack-offs synchronised to Adam Milburn’s gilded melodic refrains. His hysterical hand movements hilariously replicate the excessive overload of those corporate logos which move around like Jane Fonda doing Zumba on crack. Best of all, it simply looks like Emile is masturbating as if he uses some amazing technique to whack a super load into our faces. Which is exactly what the proud designers of those gleaming chromed star-cruiser logo-ships imagine they’re doing. And a grand tradition it is, for what is Coke’s ‘dynamic ribbon’ but the allusion to a frothy foaming cum shot.

April 2 – 23, 2011
Diane Tanzer gallery + projects
108-110 Gertrude St. Fitzroy
Melbourne Australia

tired of the mirrors, noise and eyes.

tired of prickly, intimate and fleshy human relationships being flattened into ‘friend’-nodes, the erasure of myth by constant visibility and exhausting availability.

what kind of network society do i want to support? a closed compound of willingly data-mined crayons or an open net of chance and unpredictability?

if facebook is the brightly-lit suburban mall of internet communication, i want to be under the bridges; in the torrent-swapping irc channels, small social networks, anonymous message boards and darker locations thriving with their own individual languages and codes.

tired of feeling exposed, of being infantilised, of being farmed.

the incessant ‘now’ of FB started to infect my creative process; making for ‘blip’ attention spans and the enormous appetite of the beast, as Geert Lovink puts it ‘feeding a machine’. I want to think in longer time frames to make deeper work.

tired of feelings of interpassivity and the formless mild angst it instills in me; spectacle 2.0 and the build-your-own-ego-ghetto.

hello friends, goodbye facebook.