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

Commissioned for: Dysfunctionalities Conference, by EKATE Cyprus, March 2021.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuNoMR0s0EE

A zoom lecture performance, the film revises Alvin Lucier’s 1969 minimalist sound work, I am Sitting in a Room, in the context of pandemic capitalism, far right (attempted) coup, and the cybernetics from below of the George Floyd Uprising. I Am Sitting in a Zoom considers the generative potential of a global ‘steersman’* that isn’t white or middle class, while invoking the psychedelic force of sonority in contemporary political articulation.

*Cybernetics studies organization, communication and control in complex systems by focusing on circular (feedback) mechanisms. Cybernetics derives from the Greek word for steersman (kybernetes).

See: Short Circuits: Finance, Feedback and Culture
Mute Magazine

Lecture version: Goldsmiths, University of London

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 as 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 ofc 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).

Second wave

One nation under a grave

Opportunities

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in_lovely_blue.jlg/rip

I am sitting in a Zoom

Second Wave

Oil Spill

the game of freedom