Boom, labubu!
28 November 2025 →
The game of freedom
with Veronica Diesen (RIP), 2025 →
In lovely blue
with Xiaojuan Zhang, November 2022 →
I am sitting in a Zoom
February 2021 →
Second wave
July 2020→
One nation under a grave
with Veronica Diesen, January 2020 →
Blackout
June 2020 →
Opportunities
2018 →
You make me feel so (1917)
with 트G* (TransGeneration), 2017 →
Dead the ends
2017 →
Can dialectics break
Gravity?
Bang!
Dir: Matthew Noel-Tod 2012, Script: B. Seymour →
Olympicfield
2009 →
The London Particular
with David Panos, 2004 →
The Occupation
with David Panos, 2001 →
→
Boom, labubu!
OUT NOW – Nov 2025
If every labubu is a unique surprise...
Boom, labubu!
Verse 1
Charli was a teacher in UK HE
but one day they XCX’d her.
Got herself a job in a factory
working 996 far across the sea.
Working 996 in the factory
making cute labubus for you and me
Verse 2
One day Dua joined her, new girl on the line
packing dolls in boxes one at a time.
“Wouldn’t it be cool,” she says with a wink
“if things could really boom – just not how they think?”
CHORUS 1
“Boom boom, labubu!
baby, bye bye!
Boom boom labubu.
I think we could try?”
Verse 3
Way back west & deep in decline
Trump is on top but
Bibi’s on the line:
“Yes, yes King Don, we’ll stop it, be cool
Just send us some more …aid
So we can blow up this school?”
“Sure thing, Bibi, baby
well what can I say, you know we’ve got your back
have a beautiful day.
Wait a minute – I’ve just had a thought
I’m going to send a little something
just to show our support!”
[to aide: ‘Send Mr Netanyahu… the best labubu they got!)”]
CHORUS 2
“Boom boom, labubu!
Bibi – buy buy!
Gonna smile so hard
I think he might cry”
Verse 4
Charli looks at Dua:
“What you trying to say?
You know I love to Vroom Vroom
but we can’t drive away.
We’re not Thelma & Luigi
or Bonnie and Clyde…
If we break out of here,
we’ve got nowhere to hide”
“Wait a minute, Charli,
there’s some thing you should see.
Things aren’t quite as bad
as they seem to be.
If every labubu is a unique surprise
maybe we can break out
without going outside?”
CHORUS 3
“Boom, labubu!
Bibi, bye bye
Boom boom, labubu!
but she’s on our side” [Xi’s on our side]
Verse 5
Back in Washington
Seems all is not well
Trump is scowling
Like his gift went to hell
“Get me that labubu company,
nobody gets to take out my buddy Bibi!”
But guess who’s down at Pop Mart for a visit today?
“He looks like a labubu
but from farther away?”
“He’s not quite a labubu,
More like Winnie the Pooh!”
“Nihao Mr President,
how the fuck do you do”
Chorus
“Boom, labubu!
Bibi, bai bai!”
“Xi jiu women ao bi xu zijiu?”
“Ming ming bai bai”
“习救我们？还是必須自救”
(Xí jìu wǒ mén? Ao bì xū zì jiù?) [Will Xi save us or must we all try?]
“习救我们？还是必須自救”
(Xí jìu wǒ mén? Ao bì xū zì jiù?)
“习救我们？还是必須自救？”
(Xí jìu wǒ mén? Ao bì xū zì jiù?)
“Is she gonna save us or must we all try?”
“I think we should try”
“Ming ming bai bai!”
[it’s very clear]
In lovely blue
with Xiaojuan Zhang, 2022
Frances Kruk already said it: I ordered a hurricane and I am still on this island.
2 or 3 things I know about clouds and power in October 2022.
Shot in Greece and UK, this is a sketchy meditation on the blue of the heavens, the systematic confusionism and terror under which we live, dead auteurs and whited out retail windows as the economy shifts into a new kind of ‘death spiral’.
Holderlin wanted to run away from Germany to Greece but only got as far as France. He realised it was more Greek than Greece itself, and stayed put. We ran away to Greece but found it occupied by cops and Californian algorithms; kind of the UK but more so, and first.
Wikipedia kept us (in)sane but still this was no garden of Eden. More an airbnb compound by the sea where we researched Abraham and Sarah and the Old Testament of everyday life – call it ‘contracting social reproduction’.
The impossibility of travel under the cloud brought us back home, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, to an unanswered phone call to the Mental Health system about a mad woman in my ends – my successfully failed attempt to be of use to her.
I cut this bit out but you can still hear the ‘holding’ music – and in the end that’s key to the image of the moment (until the cloud consumes the telephone & its proletariat completely)? Forget about the loading gif, when you’re really fucked they ask you to call then put you on hold.
With the completion of the Tory-Labour merger, the sky not not falling on our heads (the hurricane you ordered...), negatives double or quadruple. But we’re not all volk, right?
Thanks to my collaborator Xiaojuan Zhang, and to Danny Hayward for added inspo.
JLG: RIP. Isou, IOU.
The video premiered at Dwelling on the Cloud, a group show at Lovely Duck, London 24-27 Nov 2022.
Second Wave
July 2020
Premier: Kunsthalle 3,14 Bergen, 20 August 2020
A new – contracted and s(p)ite-specific – edit of One Nation Under A Grave (2020), for a
pop up art show in Bergen mid-pandemic.Second Chapter at Kunsthalle 3,14 in Bergen.
This version notes the structural identity of the logic of Brexit and the logic of the pandemic under the reign of homicidal laissez-faire (make work and let die) capitalism.
Both Brexit and the Tory management of covid 19 are mechanisms decreeing expanded social murder for increased short term profits (and longer term collapse). Both, as mythologies and mechanisms for a right shift, stage a Reichstag fire for the age of social media and social distance. They are ‘freedom games’ in which the rich get richer and the poor die at an accelerated rate, all in the name of your freedom to (insert class specific fate: work/shop/etc).
This mechanism is built into the form and ‘address to viewer’ of the video, which was shown in a Bergen gallery at a time when it was questionable that any public space should be open, and during which, as film-makers / artists, we found ourselves needing to pressure the institution to make the viewing experience safer, in the end only their laid back promotion of their own pop-up protected the potential public from their idea of a ‘socially distanced’ (ie side by side) seating arrangement. This anticipated similar wrangles in Cyprus & UK art spaces (see later videos).
As a social relation (necessarily incorporating ‘institutional critique’ or ‘anti-relational aesthetics’?) this edit of One Nation Under A Grave testifies to the universality of the homicidal drive of late neoliberal /para-fascist regimes that impose work and sustain middle class cultural consumption without paying for the mass suspension of labour necessary to actually end a pandemic. We hadn't been pro-Corbyn for so very long before the election; in turn, the pandemic would make us nostalgic for Fidel Castro. But of course, the answer is neither Washington nor Havana nor even Beijing capitalism (etc) but global communism.
This version notes the structural identity of the logic of Brexit and the logic of the pandemic under the reign of homicidal laissez-faire (make work and let die) capitalism. Both Brexit and the Tory management of covid 19 are mechanisms for expanded social murder and increased short term profits. Both, as mythologies and digital mechanisms for a ‘right shift’, stage a Reichstag fire for the age of social media and social distance. They are 'games of freedom' in which the rich get richer and the poor die at an accelerated rate, all in the name of your freedom to (insert class specific fate: work/shop/etc).
I am sitting in a Zoom
March 2021
A Zoom lecture performance reprising Alvin Lucier’s 1969 minimalist sound work I am Sitting in a Room for the moment of covid lockdown, George Floyd Uprising, and Capitol siege.
By joining a single Zoom meeting with two different inputs (phone and laptop), the performer provokes the platform into a form of positive feedback, a self-inflicted Zoom bombing.
Cybernetics derives from kybernetes, the Greek work for steersman, and studies organization, communication and control in complex systems by focusing on circular (feedback) mechanisms.
Commissioned for the online conference Dysfunctionalities in Art at EKATE, Nicosia, Cyprus, 13 March 2021.
See also: Short Circuits: Finance, Feedback and Culture Mute Magazine, 2011. Lecture version: Goldsmiths, University of London, 2015.
Blackout, for the rioters of 2020
2 June 2020
After a long night shift at Royal Mail Greenford during the 2020 covid lockdown, the protagonist of this film was trying to set the Zoom backdrop for an online dinner party discussion of blackness at a US museum when he accidentally polarised himself. Together with a predominantly Global Ethnic Minority cast of disposable ‘Heroes’ he had just contributed to beating the all-time UK record for sorting mail – parcels, garden furniture, fast fashion, knickers, letters to Stephen Frears pitching films about Kathleen Cleaver, you name it. One class was at home in the garden ordering a parasol base, the other was working over-time with a significantly heightened chance of death. In the US, the vanguard of that class was rioting against the systematic state murder of a racialised population. Consequently, the protagonist is burned out on the morning of the Black Out Tuesday* social media shutdown in solidarity with the George Floyd Uprising. Sometimes the situation writes its own script. The rest is hysteresis.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_Tuesday