They make their livings out at the airport, scavenging recyclable material from the trash containers which are dedicated to aluminum cans and certain kinds of plastic bottles, for later resale. A small group of people seem to work the same terminal. You spot a young asian woman, an old man that looks like he’s hardcore homeless. Another rather non-descript guy. Like ghosts they drift thru silently and alone, treading routes that cross repeatedly, though they don’t seem to make or seek contact with each other. Each place in the terminal they stop at they examine the contents of the recycling bins, discretely but matter of fact... turning the bottles over or around to see what the symbols are... micro-experts in the rules, regulations and logos of this strange detail of the consumption economy.. each with large laundry bag on wheels, one with a large shopping bag from KaDeWe, in which to gather their spoils. It takes you a while to even notice them as distinct from all the other passengers, meeters and greeters – but once noticed these curious itinerant workers are shadows that its hard to ignore, you see them more and more. Like background noise/buzz or the fact that a movie is out of synch - once recognized you cannot stop from noticing and you wonder how many other people around you in the crowd are also players in some not-yet-noticed sub-economy. What gives them away in fact is the repetition – their grazing/paths which take them back around in a parasitic cycle from one place to another and back again. Everyone else here only comes around once - one trip to the toilet, one to duty-free, one to the café or electronics store. These scavenging ghosts are on rails however, always cycling back to the same places. Hoping to be the first to get there just after someone drops another useful/resaleable item.
I'm doing a show of my video work at Sketch in London from 15 September to 3 November 2007. For the show, titled One Hundred and Three People, I'm exhibiting three existing pieces (Kent Beeson is a Classic & an Absolutely New Thing, Erasure and So Small) alongside a new work called 100 People, which conjures the imaginary presence of one hundred people, each of whom exists only by virtue of brief descriptions on screen. This last one is currently under construction. Like my earlier video Starfucker,100 People functions as a kind of minimalist anti- (or virtual) cinema in which simple presentation of unfolding text on a black background investigates the dynamic capacity of language itself to create images and to summon presence.
Sketch
is at 9 Conduit Street, London W1S 2XG Tube: Oxford Circus/Piccadilly
Circus. The opening reception is on Saturday 15 September, 12.30-2.30pm.The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am-5pm. Free
admission.
Also, as mentioned here before Starfucker will be part of Ein zweites Leben (A Second Life), at the Stadtgalerie Pavilion / Loge in Bern, opening on the 8th of September and running until the 21st October. As part of the exhibition there will be a special screening event with a selection of my other video-pieces on 19th September at 20.00 with an introduction/Q&A by curator Barnaby Drabble. More details here.
Finally on art-related matters the Drama Queensproject I made earlier this year with Elmgreen & Dragset has a very nice mention here in Kate Bush's roundup of Munster for ArtForum. I've written about the project a few times here in the notebook and have flagged other press stuff and youTube clips from it here too - use the tags below to locate this info if you're that way inclined.
Then, out of the blue comes the most beautiful spam subject line I've had in ages.
> i very want to find my love
Must use it as a title for something. It's from one of those 'I am biologically female, saw your profile on the internets, will be in your town soon and would like to meet you' invitations, which I have been collecting for no particular reason. I think I'm attracted to it as a project (like some of mine) about endless variations-on-a-theme. Also the performance of not-writing-very-well. Or the genuine not-writing-very-well. Or the combination of the two.
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A few things on the Nettime list recently that I liked reading. This interview by Jelle Bouwhuis with Norman Klein on the New Canon. A link by Olia Lialina to her article about Web Vernacular which led me, indirectly to this piece of hers from back in 1996, which I liked, called (I think) 'My boyfriend came back from the war. After dinner they left us alone'. Very much a Donald Barthelme kind of title. (Google Ads makes a very weird intervention on the first page of this work though, by pulling up random text-ads for anything to do with War - War Medals, War of the Worlds Tickets, Modern War Studies, Records from World War Two etc - hard to take against the minimalist aesthetic of the piece). Also on Nettime Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) pointing to this blog entry by Steve Shaviro reviewing William Gibson's Spook Country. I wasn't so keen on the book myself (I just finnished it and liked Pattern Recognition rather better) but Shaviro makes an interesting case for it.
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