in_lovely_blue.jlg/rip
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.
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.
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).
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 predominantly GEM 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
