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 Queens project 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. 

To Brussels tomorrow (and then by car to Gent) for a re-rehearsal with the cast of That Night Follows Day, which starts to tour again very soon. Rotterdam is first, Graz is second. Full tour list on the Victoria site here. Looking forward to seeing it again. Victoria have done a four-language edition of the text - looks great - I just got proofs of the cover. Photo by Phile Deprez.

"I keep trying to think what would have happened had the war not taken place. I would have gone on living here [at Amherst Avenue], and probably would have gone on living in Shanghai. So I see around me here a sort of alternate life that I never actually managed to live because of the war."

Just came across this impressive website called Ballardian, devoted to all things J.G. Ballard.

The top item currently is a long review/reading of a 1991 BBC4 documentary called Shanghai Jim (there's even a link to the whole thing here on youTube and a complete transcript of the programme, here). I remember watching this documentary (quoted above), when it came out I guess, around the time they released The Kindness of Women. The frame for Shanghai Jim - which touches on events from Empire of the Sun - is that Ballard goes back to the city for the first time since just after the war - revisiting the camp in which he and his family were held, the house that they lived in and so on. There's something very interesting about this process of return/revisiting, I think partly because going back to anything, is such an elusive experience, and because it's so very resistant to capture, especially in the visual field. I mean what part of that complex, webbed, uncanny feeling of time-passed and time-collapsing can be captured on film? Very little, although David Lynch might get close to it, at least as on-form as he is Inland Empire. Even on the grainy youTube of Shanghai Jim though there is something extremely compelling about Ballard, in his super-well-spoken/unruffled/well-mannered way, navigating his way through the locations of his own past, sat out-of-place and out-of-time in his white blazer and his hat, top shirt-buttons undone, in the tiny room of Lunghua Camp's G block in which he, his parents and his sister were interned for nearly three years. "This little room..." he says, looking around "..is in fact probably as close as I’ll ever come to home, surprisingly..."