When I say that presence is a kind of a problem, I'm speaking also about the limitations of the body as object that is bound by physicality, by laws of physics, by time, etc. Rooted in performance, my photo works, which are basically events/encounters staged for the camera, will be limited by what an actual body in actual space can do. ‘What is possible’ to depict in an image will be limited/guided/affected by what is possible for a body to do or enact. Doubling as the image-maker and the protagonist, one of the obvious, concrete limitations is that I am unable to simultaneously occupy the space in front of the camera and behind it.
There is a very nice long interview here with Vlatka at the great blog This is That, including a lot of visuals of her work.
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In that sense it's not even *about* gaming.. it's about worlds and how we make them, how we understand or creative narrative and narrative possibllity as readers. I mean - I'm really struck by the fact that if you say "In the next level of the game you will need a compass, a rope and a bottle of surgical alcohol" your mind is already starting to construct a narrative - already grasping for what might happen using those things, grasping for connections.
Two more blog reviews for The Broken World one here and one here, plus an interview I did about the book (quoted above) here at Subba-Cultcha.
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My friend David Williams started blogging at Skywritings which for the moment is a collection of his occasional writings on and around performance. The sute includes programme-note pieces on recent Lone Twin performances and David's contributions titled Light and Listening for the Marathon Lexicon project which I co-curated with Adrian Heathfield and produced with Forced Entertainment.
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Finally my opening address for last years Spill Symposium is included in a new publication/collection Live Art UK/LADA's Live Art Almanac. The Almanac also includes essays by Lyn Gardner, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Daniel Gosling, Leslie Hill and Rebecca Schneider amongst others. Copies from LADA's bookshop Unbound.
A few shots from my Art Flavours piece at the opening of Manifesta 7 in Rovereto last weekend. Top picture is the video installed in a tiny washroom space on the ground floor of Manifattura Tabacchi. The other two are at the start of the day, with customers rolling up to sample free gelato flavoured to illustrate terms from the province of contemporary art - Memory, The Spectacle, The Archive and The Body. More info on the project by following the tag below. Free gelato for somewhere between one month and two months... depending on how long the budget lasts. Get it while you can.
Sound of a helicopter in the darkness outside. Looping close and then away, scouring the streets I guess.
Once it's gone I say tuned somehow and the more I listen the more I start to imagine that sound might be fundamentally different in the dark - clearer, crisper, more vivid. Is this just a piece of projection - something connected to the way sound magnifies in the imaginative space created by darkness? Or does night tend to bring atmospheric or other changes that objectively alter the transmission of sound?
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Memory of hospital visit. Lain on the gray raised vinyl-covered semi-articulated couch/bed thing that is temporarily 'covered' with a strip of what could be extra-wide kitchen roll. I'm wearing T-Shirt, underpants and 'gown' (starched backless rag that has been washed thin, a million times). My trousers are discarded in the changing room. The door out to the corridor is locked she says, so its ok to leave things in there, so I do, the trousers bunched in balance on a three legged stool. On the couch/bed I am lain on my back at first, then on my side. Latterly I'm curled towards the ultrasound suite and she's rubbing the wand-thing along my legs, its progress (and conductivity) increased by the freezing cold gel she has slopped all over the skin. She's looking for clots, pushing back and forth up and down the leg with the wand, sometimes smoothing with her hand, tracing the path of the veins, groin to ankle. The smoothing thing she does is about upping the pressure in the vein so she can see the flow better. For a few moments she has the sound of the ultrasound thing turned up... I can hear my heartbeat, hear the flow of the blood in the veins, hear the rushes as she moves the wand back and forth. Star Trek acoustics. Maybe she doesn't need the sound, or maybe she only needs it for a while as she gets set up. Or maybe she thinks that sound is freaking me out. But in any case she turns it down after a while. We pass the next few minutes in silence, she's working up and down my legs, her face intent on the screen, lit by it more or less, since the lights in the room are now dimmed. I watch her for a while... but then I realize that I'm trying to read her face, looking for reactions. The pauses she makes, or the adjustments she makes to the calibrations of the ultrasound; are they meaningful? Does she look worried? Or is she puzzled by what she is finding? Does her silence now seem different than the silence two minutes before? I realise this is a fools game and turn away - I'll know soon enough. At that point, turned away, I am staring at the back/side panels of the Ultrasound unit, and looking faintly upwards to the underside of the monitor she is so intent on. What I'm seeing - face about 40-50 cm from it, is the plastic moulding of the equipment, ventilation/cooling structures, cables, ports, a small plaque with technical info. I'm imagining that a lot of thought went into the design of the other side of all this, but that no one considered for too long that people in my position would have this strange perspective. It's a vaguely Ballard moment, tempting as it is to fall into trance and trace the contours of the equipment, or to obsessively map the route of the ducting with the wires for the wand. It's over soon though and I'm out of there as fast as I can dress and walk. Showering later the skin on my legs is still tight with the dried gel.
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A financial consultation. They ask how many kids I have, how old, their dates of birth and with a little bit of thought about the years I reply. The guy says "Some people are *really* unsure.... I had a bloke in here some weeks back who had to find out the birthdays of his kids by checking his tattoos. He just opened up his shirt and was reading off the dates..."
Boxes of materials marked urgent and fragile and urgent again piled all around. In the courtyard of brilliant sunlight people come and go, fetching carrying, workers and carpenters and painters and artists looking for this or that, or for someone that can help with this or that, labourers with shirts off carrying absurdly heavy crates or stacks or rolls of things, technicians, assistants all heading to and fro. Segmenting the space thru which these travelers pass at any moment there are the static forms of people arranged at a distance from each other and talking on their cell phones in a variety of languages. The artists labouring over the tarmac they are laying for an installation/construction – pitch melted, poured and then spread along the ground in an activity designed as if somehow to double the heat of the courtyard, whilst beyond them, in the distance at the very end of the courtyard, an Icelandic guy is stood alone in a moment of contemplation, with a paint brush in his hands, also upping the temperature, as he considers the not-yet-completed leaping red flames of hell that he’s busy depicting in a kind of mutant carnival/circus trailer style on a huge construction of wood. Here and there and everywhere you see piles of debris – timber, broken glass, the wrapping that a huge bale of material came in, or the strewn plastic tethers (hi tech version of string) that might once have held together poles or packages during transportation. Enter the shade of the building and the corridors take you past numerous rooms in which people are working – painting or constructing a wall, stacking timber, or focusing the beam of a video projector or arranging objects, or making patterns with the light from lamps or (for the most part really) engaged in some activity that is most likely work but which is impossible to figure at a glance, not knowing in any case what is being made or built or installed) or else, stood staring vacantly, lost in thought or wondering about the arrangement of things you cannot see, or else, again, very often not working at all or stood or walking or crouched and speaking into a cell phone in a variety of languages. As many rooms as there people working in there are at least as many again in which work has stopped, or perhaps not even started. Marie Celeste arrangements of tools, materials and water bottles. Piles of debris everywhere here – shredded cardboard, smashed timber, swept dust. At the top of a staircase a nest of old light-fittings, tangled like octopi, all metal curves and trailing cables. Outside a room nearby a discarded mess of polythene which unfurls or uncrumples as you pass it on successive journeys through the day, opening like a flower, whose ragged malformed petals are a surface smeared with paint in streaks, blobs, brush strokes and tangled footprints. Outside a further room there is foil of some kind laid out in a hurry which bears an unexpected harvest of cactus leaves arranged to dry, the spiked flesh wet with what might be rain (?). Empty rooms. Or rooms with boxes. Rooms with boxes, speakers, pots of paint empty and full, posts of filler empty and full, benches, plinths, trashed boxes, broken benches, broken plinths, unhinged doors, shattered chairs, improvised carpets of polythene and of newspaper, video monitors wrapped in plastic trailing headphones, SCART cables or speaker leads. Impossible to iterate it all. In yet more places work seem to have stopped half-way thru. Maries Celeste again. A piece of metal has been positioned and nailed into the wall to cover a hole, but the nails are only driven a short way into the wall. On some random corner a ladder leans against a wall, killing time. An extension cord is plugged into the wall but leads nowhere – the other end, with the socket, has been looped and lightly knotted over a window handle, as if this gesture alone might save it from being borrowed, stolen or otherwise taken away.
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