10.2.10
7.2.10
It is secreted by trees, used by bees, and also etymologically refers to the suburb which binds or seals cities.
propolis |ˈprɒp(ə)lɪs|
noun
a red or brown resinous substance collected by honeybees from tree buds, used by them to fill crevices and to seal and varnish honeycombs.
ORIGIN early 17th cent.: via Latin from Greek propolis ‘suburb,’ also ‘bee glue,’ from pro ‘before’ + polis ‘city.’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propolis
4.2.10
25.1.10
17.1.10
15.1.10
antepress @ David Roberts Art Foundation, Wednesday 20th January 2010
For his first solo exhibition in London since 2007, Damien Roach presents Shiiin, Jet Stream, White earphones. This multi-layered project sees Roach continuing his research into modes of perception and understanding, analytical thought, creativity and mental freedom. Beginning by looking at the object of an exhibition in its most simple terms - as space and time - Roach has set about creating an environment in which these two fundamentals can be used to their fullest potential.
Roach employs an ambitious and constantly shifting exhibition design, transforming the gallery into a liminal space between lounge and garden - sites that find counterparts in the most open and public communal spaces (airport lounges, parks) and the most enclosed and private situations (living room, home, garden). Borrowing expertise and problem-solving approaches from disciplines as seemingly diverse as architecture, improvised music, garden design, psychoanalysis, stand-up comedy, Quantum Physics and philosophy, the exhibition space becomes a dynamic site of potentially constructive frictions and a bridge between, or rather a conflation of, both inside and outside, public and private.
A series of wide-ranging discussions, lectures, screenings and events will take place during the course of the exhibition, offering the audience the opportunity to engage with the space more as users than viewers.
PROGRAMME OF EVENTS:
Saturday 16th January, 2.45 pm: Zurich-based curator and critic Burkhard Meltzer will present and discuss his research project Prototype - furniture in and art design.
Wednesday 20th January, 7 pm: Experimental lecture on 'ekphrasis' by imprint and project platform antepress, followed by organ music from the Organ Octet.
Wednesday 27th January, 7pm: Screening of excerpts from Fun to Image (1983) a documentary about Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, followed by live music and projections by band Hype Williams.
Saturday 30th January, 1 pm: Charlie Woolley will transmit his radio station RADIO SHOW live from the gallery, joined by curator Paul Pieroni.
Wednesday 3rd February, 7 pm: Sebastian Boyle introduces an evening of live projections and films related to the seminal event Son et Lumiere for Earth, Fire and Water by Mark Boyle and Joan Hills from 1966.
Saturday 6th February, 2.45 pm: Philosopher Sue Golding/Johnny De Philo will plunge the gallery into total pitch-darkness to envelop the space with her live, spoken 'fractal philosophy installation' The Assassination of Time.
Wednesday 17th of February, 7 pm: Laura Mulvey will introduce the screening of her and Peter Wollen's groundbreaking film Riddles of the Sphinx (1977).
Saturday 20th February, 2.45 pm: Psychoanalyst Noga Wine will present the lecture The Drive and the Unconscious: two psychoanalytic concepts, which sustain the dimensions of time and space.
Wednesday 24th February, 7 pm: Live music performances by bands Temperatures and Sculpture close the events programme.
For further information, please check:
www.davidrobertsartfoundation.com/events
9.1.10
e-flux: Sherif El-Azma
http://e-flux.com/journal/view/90
Sherif El-Azma
The Psychogeography of Loose Associations
I look down. I feel awkward, although I act otherwise.
I hear him speak. He is talking to me.
“We have a new type of ruling,” he says. “A rule of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures, and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decisions. They are representatives of abstract forces and have assumed power through a surrendering of the self. They are rulers by accident — inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, so they bring in experts to tell them which buttons to press.”
I think of who “they” might be. Perhaps “they” are a non-governmental institute that deals with architecture, art development, or geography.
The stalker is a guide, and the job of the guide is to summarize information that might exist in a certain space and time. Guides also centralize and filter history, not only in an attempt to make the traveler a continuation of it, but to comfort the traveler in some way by making him feel that the center of this megacity is actually a village.
3.1.10
26.12.09
Take the simple sentence "It is almost perfect."
The subject is ‘It’. The predicate is ‘is almost perfect’. The complement is ‘almost perfect’. The copula is ‘is’. ‘Almost’ is the adjunct (part of the sentence that modifies the verb) and ‘perfect’ is the predicative adjective modifying the expletive ‘it’. ‘Almost’ modifies ‘perfect’ and is the predicative adjunct. ‘Perfect’ modifies the subject ‘it’ and hence ‘almost’ is a predicative adjunct to the subject.
Aurélien Le Roux - Demolition Studies
Inside Out from Aurélien Le Roux on Vimeo.
Dust Utopia from Aurélien Le Roux on Vimeo.
Bullring from Aurélien Le Roux on Vimeo.
25.12.09
time and the grey line
http://timeandthegreyline.blogspot.com/
I am working on an antepress residency with Art on the Underground here. We are working with the Jubilee line.
22.12.09
About facing.
audio works:
Attempts at formal analysis:
[Writings based on a contemporary amateur film archive of WWII pillboxes in Kent.
The structures are revealed temporally, in similar patterns of observational behaviour, and this close reading of each building is translated into the sparser, slower temporality of language. They are objects as cadavers.]
Where is it? It is not here, and yet it is not anywhere else. Nowhere? But then nowhere is here. The cadaverous presence establishes a relation between here and nowhere. - Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus
I
The beginning is close.
Tangled vivid green foliage with weak limbs conceals a tall wall situated apart from the main structure
mirroring the entrance wall.
The tall wall swings to the right.
Ahead are the lumpen knots of trees.
Above the tendrils stretch between the narrow corridor and mask sunlight into contoured breaks.
In the same instant a fresh gap appears on the left
vertical
the width of shoulders.
Bricks flush into view gripped by mortar
and disappear as the darkness takes shape and then removes it.
There is clicking and the sound of breathing.
And the clicks are regular
and the breathing is irregular.
Inside the darkness on the right is the first cleanly incised bright light aperture facing outwards.
Light enters
It casts a dim green bouncing off the metres and metres of chlorophyll staggering around the outside.
Through a narrow interval far to the left of a brick wall bisected by a plane of leaching white mineral residue
two more apertures appear.
Obtuse, distant, all the forms lit by them form diagonally in light purple
flexing against rotational symmetry.
Upwards to the left there is a pink alcove, brief, that vanishes.
Now veer back into the slim anterior room to face the apertures as they emerge and say
One there.
One there.
One there.
One there.
As if all frames must be counted. And each one when it is counted stutters at the centre, and disappears.
It is not look through so much as looked at, to mark the border.
The walls are transparent in this way
The walls become transparent.
Finally there is a narrow slit surrounded by darkness, and it is not counted, but it is noticed
and it hangs succinctly as punctuation.
Then okay and twist roughly into the green and purple light, of the bisected wall, and the bricks ahead, at the exit, look like chromotography measures
and their edges are too soft too soft.
There is a black grill lying diagonally against the door frame
and the skim of a baying aperture with a rust-brown plate bolted beneath it
And the outside emerges with the same mottled light on the tall wall.
The shapes trodden in the middle of the room are stepped as repeats outside
facing inwards against the rough skin
mirroring the way they would have watched the landscape.
Each superficial recess is cast by the murmur of plant matter
collapsing into soil
sealing lids shut.
II
The structure looms on a shallow tump grasped at by two trees
always, as always, in motioned hiss
snug against the flanks.
It is late Summer.
Sunlight bleaches the breeding tips of long grasses
through which a narrow path trodden upwards
siphons footprints towards the dark mass.
The light flashes briefly, once, and the entire image turns white,
and then gently returns.
…
The structure is formless and shifting on the ascent.
A small opening moves into view, followed by the dark space of the door moving in from the left.
The walls are rough shale, with light spots pixellating against the cast blocks all grey -
a solid mist hanging orthagonally.
In the dark corridor ahead and to the right there is an instant jumble of colour, massed clothing, rope, filth, huddled into a shallow recess, knee high.
Round the corner there is more
and more,
and more,
heaped with a broad meniscus against the walls
and glare of the regularly spaced high set apertures.
Pull backwards.
The image whitens again, adjusts to daylight
and each facet is traced anticlockwise
and hovers for a moment against each stepped embrasure
counting silently one, two, three.
The angles shift, and the apertures are blacked against the inside as white as they were from within.
One of the trees creates a barrier, halts the course. There is a smooth arc,
then stumbling
back and forth
back and forth.
Swing right to face the fields watched
waited inside
a river
dilated prospects.
III
A squat black hexagon transpires out of the haze of ripe wheat beneath a flat grey sky.
There is a slow bumping spiral inwards.
Each face as it occurs seems identical
repeats.
The same stepped-in apertures rotate as the texture of the walls moves into view
dotted with the flowering of mustard lichens.
Entering from the rear, the back wall is flatter, longer, holds two apertures cut cleanly either side of the door opening. For a moment there is a view straight through the shallow space and the sky from the opposite side moves inside the socket hole of the left aperture.
Any part may be connected to any other part.
They are compound eyes, ossified.
A tall blank wall adducted here as endoskeleton
is yellow clay bricks hooking round to the left.
The smooth grey cement interior walls are ridged with vertical casting lines.
The floor is flat dark mud and levelled blank.
The apertures eye height seem wider on the inside
between each the regular crease line of the vertices marks a change in angle.
To the right the yellow bricks seem to create a dividing mass across the diameter
of uncertain geometry.
To the left in eye lines out the fields form slowly
supporting a dark island of trees.
Past the second aperture there is a letterboxed slot
low down on the third wall
bevelled into nothing.
Half its faces are black.
Shifting perspective slightly, a shallow enclave forms in the viscous shadow.
The apertures and low slots reiterate in between the vertices until only the brick wall is visible.
There are two narrow vertical holes pressed into the wall and held suspended in the darkened lost shape of a metal plate.
Above the aperture on the right is a name scratched thinly.
There is pockmarking in the ridged cement
half moons
soft pinks against the grey browns.
The bulbous abdomen of a spider hangs against the blanched field
permeable borders projected by the sun at a high angle
forcing the clean tracking lines of light inside the structure.
Arresting the movement through the interior space
the brick wall gives way to the doorframe.
Without exiting turning
moving back through the space faster
reviewing the swinging ridges
a zoetrope whir
aperture lights
around the yellow bricks and grey cement
back past the apertures to the entrance side where the same shape of sunlight repeats
pause
but for a few degrees.
The same empty landscape of blanched wheat disappears towards the grey sky with the slimmest line of trees between.
Now out, facing the yellow bricks, which skim in parallel lines. There is bright white blanching again
the lichens emerge on the breeze blocks
and there is a slow bumping spiral outwards
where the image appears as it had.
V
A diagonal swathe of hedgerows spills in from the left
hung with small leaved white flowers that thrust up towards overhanging trees.
The trees cast shadows over the loosely mown grass
and the structure is tucked in beneath
facing the fields beyond.
The motion towards it is unsteady
and as the branches slide upwards the dark line of the door fattens on the right
and grass is revealed thickly spilling over the roof.
The wall
held away from the entrance as a solid line is brown brick
crisp edged.
One squat slit watches.
The corner of the structure facing the tall wall is sprayed with silver lichened growth. A parallel line against the blank wall is traced with a visioned arc that peers between the wall and the door.
The wall is skirted, this time on the outside, and fills the entire field of vision.
A dip reveals ferns and long grasses leaning towards the far side, struggling into a sandy line between the wall and structure.
There is a slide back across the same brick surface
to move in between and towards the door frame.
Once more there is a wall directly inside mirroring the wall that faces it
angled around at the edges to snag entry
green with moss.
To the left a bevelled aperture gazing into daylight
hard edged and lit in brittle planes.
Moving backwards and skimming the same wall
moving towards the opposite side
towards the lip that protrudes against the dark space it conceals.
The objective is calmer now
to continue to cut spaces into dressed hexagons.
Patterned self-similarity.
The symmetry slips into duration and cannot be experienced as such
so the swinging round the edges attempts to fix things
and reconstruct the perfect geometry inside the memory.
and back to the left
and round the lip
towards two apertures
two calciferous sockets
with no flat walls in between
held apart by the crest of a corner where the sills meet
and the angles splay towards the rim.
Red bricks support the lintels beneath the concrete
the floor hangs underneath the rim of shadows cast by the apertures.
The apertures are skimmed
the first focussed and then upward towards a confluence of angles
and a dark stain.
There is a slow movement down to the small apertures and they are held too low to expose anything other than the continuation of the flat plane of the sill on the outside
and knotted plant stems beyond.
On the triangle towards an identical gap, there is one more obscured by stems clinging to the wall.
All the edges fade down to black shapes punctuated by the rotating gaps
and up against the corner of the wall
slid around and out into the bright light bricks of the door frame and emerging.
There is a tracking round to the left and backwards into darkness.
You weren’t sure whether these things, these hybrids, watched you,
but you stepped inside them, and they spoke amongst themselves.
Cusped and axial
all duration
The land became striated into terrains that were marked under the auspices of visibility. All of the land in between these floating points, falling slowly, slowly away from use.
You poked your face into the gaps in rhythms and saw yourself approach,
in the hazy rectangles crisped against the edges
stepping tentatively
feet stamping into wet strands and furrows.
Some of them were staring out to see but most shuddered in woodlands near fields
and filled up with mud and the tang of urine, and people wrote their names and dates because.
You thought about repetition
and rot
circling and encircling
clasping each mutation in form, spill and depth of field.
There can be nothing but resemblance and its signs everywhere
details steeped in rational origins
in angles.
And there was a sadness each time you couldn’t step inside, but you would ram your face as far into the slots as the edges would allow
burnishing red lines into your aging skin
waiting for your eyes to adjust.
6.12.09
3.12.09
2.12.09
21.11.09
antepress @ Whitechapel, Saturday 21st November 2009
I will be performing a text at Volatile Dispersal:
Festival of Art Writing at Whitechapel Gallery as part of the Known Unknowns, organised by Francesco Pedraglio.
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/27/product_id/385
17.11.09
15.11.09
13.11.09
12.11.09
11.11.09
This Is The Lake Of Our Feeling
I was having a conversation with Landscape Architect Apasia Kouzoupi in Athens with regards to a lake she is working in Greece, with with some students:
There was a lake in the mountains, that was two metres shallow in many parts, and every time it rained the boundaries of the lake would shift in and out of the landscape. The lake teemed with freshwater fish, and many years before the fishermen from the surrounding area moved onto the lake, building small floating platforms with conical dwelling structures on them.
The shallow lake also provided an ideal habitat for mosquitos, and because illness transmitted by the mosquito bites was rife in the area, the lake was eventually drained by the authorities to remove the problem. The entire unique socio-architectural tradition of lake dwelling was eradicated, and passed into the memories of the people who lived in the area.
Recently, due to infrastructural demands, a reservoir has been created in the area, and so the lake was replaced. Fish are being reintroduced, and rivers diverted to feed the water supply. The local people think of it as their lake returned, but the lake is now a reservoir, with a civic function. It's re-emergence is estranged from the original common ownership and use, the dwellings cannot return, and the dwellings have forgotten how to return, but the people still think of it as a lake replaced, even if it has become the image of a lake that holds them at the shore.
10.11.09
3.11.09
30.10.09
Locus Solus update
LOCUS SOLUS
Byzantine Museum, Athens
7th November 2009
http://www.outoftheboxintermedia.org/
27.10.09
25.10.09
24.10.09
23.10.09
22.10.09
19.10.09
14.10.09
18.9.09
antepress @ FormContent
On Saturday 19th September 2009, 12-6pm, antepress will be presenting recent works and discussing strategies for collaborating with FormContent in fostering a dialogue between various exhibition formats and what constitutes art writing. This relationship will culminate in a publication released in 2010.
FormContent is a curatorial project space, initiated in 2007 by Francesco Pedraglio, Caterina Riva and Pieternel Vermoortel in London’s East End. Its mission is to create a space in which to experiment with ideas and exhibition formats, to foster an active collaboration between artists and curators while challenging their roles.
7.9.09
3.9.09
On leaving
______Clear views faced forwards, wide to the horizon.
___There were bone-rimmed holes, milk-coloured, and rust-rimmed
_____________________________________________They built a shell
__Succulent eyes were pulled backwards through these burrows, and narrow architectures were popped away from limb by limb.
The crisp edges of doorways form fades.
____________________________ Now it is brittle
____________________________ brittle waiting to be ground down, or smashed into fine sand beaches amongst all the other husks coughed up on the shore
______________________________________________All movement had been lateral
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Clear views faced forwards, wide to the horizon
There were rimmed holes, the rust-red eye-stalks of cannons watch blankly against blinkers
They built a shell knocked into the rocks and waited soft in the shadows for hard things to come and split them, flame licks and the mosquito whine of engines
Succulent eyes were pulled backwards through these burrows, and narrow architectures were popped away from limb by limb.
The crisp edges of doorways form fades.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
26.8.09
18.8.09
6.8.09
18.7.09
MOCCA screening 18.07.09
I curated a screening in collaboration with Ben Prus, Executive Editor of One Hour Empire
Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
952 Queen St W
Toronto
Ontario
30.6.09
Resonance - Digestives
A short fiction about a man obsessed with mapping all the matter in the omniverse into a single diagram, that lives in a tobacco tin in a swarm of letters.
http://www.antepress.co.uk/digestives.php
http://resonancefm.com/
Broadcast 30.06.09 at 4.30pm
Repeat 03.07.09 at 7.30pm
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>LINK HERE
23.6.09
16.6.09
6.6.09
5.6.09
4.6.09
3.6.09
1.6.09
Location of A Circle - Sol LeWitt
Lewitt, Sol, “The Location of a Circle”, in Ann Demeester, Will Holder, Dieter Roelstraete (eds.), F.R. David: “The Stuff & Nonsense” Issue, de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam, 2007, pp. 45-7
To unravel the planar knot of the diagram in language can be agonising – we can refer to Sol LeWitt’s The Location of A Circle from 1974. Cut loose from the illustration, it becomes an obfuscating horde of points played out amongst their relationship to other points in a narrative that positions them in a buzzing field of nested associations. In isolation this reads as a hermeneutic translation rather than a model for a heuristic process. LeWitt challenges the relationship between an idea as diagram and the art it produces.
31.5.09
curves
The walls of the Whispering Gallery at St. Paul’s Cathedral are scuffed paint, rising, buttermilk hued, with block-cut Portland stone, behind. Pressing against the membrane of the paint, it demonstrates right angles nestled.
By an accident of architecture, the walls are so thick and dense with matter that the frequency of the human voice cannot penetrate.
If you were to lean into the curve and speak softly, the sound would remain trapped, swell through the plenum wavering above the vertical drop, and collect into a point on the opposite wall, unscathed. There an osseus labyrinth may collect the sound, funnelling it past vestibules, navigating the canal, converging towards the cochlea. It can be siphoned, absorbed, rattle fine bones.
We could have begun this before by ascending, there’s already a trajectory here, bounded by a narrow spiral skirted by more cut stone. The treads are shallow, but deepen, the frequency shifts. Time is variously a labyrinth, a spiral, a crystal: shapes cutting against the shapeless, shifting.
The voice itself is an accident of architecture.
27.5.09
26.5.09
Kenneth J. Knoespel
http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~knoespel/publications.php
Generous array of pdfs on the diagram.
24.5.09
Stalker Lab
19.5.09
17.5.09
Robert Harbison - Eccentric Spaces
Andre Deutsch, London, 1977
Chapter 8 - Contracted World: Museums and Catalogues
p.141
"... Ruskin's chapters are the reader's days--he takes him down the Merceria and across the Rialto Bridge, tells him to look back and he says he is looking at the end of the noble Venetian history. He repeats the same walk the next day looking at different things and chooses a series of five architectural sculptures, making a historical set that begins at St Mark's and ends by Palazzo Labia near the railroad station. These five little examples tell the whole history of Venice's rise and fall, her glory and degradation, the movement away from the centre of the city coincides with the terrible moral progress. Ruskin is a thoroughly spatial and kinetic thinker who expresses here a mythical idea of the space of a city.
His experience feels more literal than that of other critics, the chance encounter of a real man with a real thing, which leads to unforseen consequences for both of them. His immediacy and his urgency converge in the hope of solutions springing up in walks through the streets. Though like all guides and guidebooks he is a parent, his imaginary tours constitute genuine initiations into reality. His objects are works of art and his collection of them into a book a kind of museum, but he brings together a museum and a map, because he locates his objects in real space. Most museums now try to take their objects out of space and produce a neutral filing, laboratory slides, so the best embodiment of that mentality would be a slide show that called things before our thought without requiring activity. By giving a sense of a few things with a lot of space around them Ruskin conceals the fact that he assembles a museum, but his powers of selection are making an order discriminate like a museum, not indiscriminate like a map, and what feels like a further freedom, leaving things where they live, is the occasion for a further order."
orphaned pavilions
I can't remember where I found this.
AH (thanks Gemma): ‘The Hut Project’, 2005, Fold-Down Expandable Structure, Wooden Pallets, FM Radio Transmitter
http://www.limoncellogallery.co.uk/pages/thppics.asp
16.5.09
Rosie Pedlow and Joe King - Sea Change
http://cms.streamuk.com/import/brandcastmedia/rosiepedlow_full_16.9.mp4
Time. Glide. No inertia. Silent documentary. Perfect.
Winners of Jerwood Moving Image Awards.
Umberto Eco: Casablanca, or, The Clichés are Having a Ball
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_casablanca.html
When all the archtypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.
Notes: Peter Wollen; Cinema 2 - Chaper 2; Kristeva's Genotext/Phenotext
http://www.luxonline.org.uk/articles/the_field_of_language_in_film(1).html
Verbal language is a crucial component of film, both as signifier and as signified, as crucial as the image. Each is deprived of a dimension of its sense in the absence of the other. This is not to argue, of course, for a mutual reinforcement of the two-standard practice in commercial cinema, where word and image are used to add more and more reciprocal redundancy. On the contrary, it is in the dialectic of fit and misfit that the value of working with both word and image lies, as well as in the heterogeneity of the registers of each. Language is the component of film which both threatens to regulate the spectator, assigned a place within the symbolic order, and also offers the hope of liberation from the closed world of identification and the lure of the image. Language, therefore, is both a friend and a foe, against which we must be on our guard, whose help we need but whose claims we must combat. Hence the fractured and dislodged body of language in our films.
---
Cinema 2, chapter 2, Recapitulation of Images and Signs
pp. 24 - 5
Relations between cinema and language.
Christian Metz asks: ‘under what conditions should cinema be considered as a language?’ – a double reply, first as a fact and then as an approximation.
1st reply – constituted as such by becoming narrative instead of in other directions.
Approximation: from that point, the sequences of image, a single shot, are assimilated to propositions, or rather oral utterances: the shot will be considered the smallest narrative utterance.
Metz himself underlines the hypothetical character of this assimilation… substituting an utterance for the image, he can and must apply it to certain determinations which do not belong exclusively to the language system [langue], but condition the utterances of a language [langage], even if this language is not verbal it operates independently of a language system. The principle according to which linguistics is only a part of semiology is thus realized in the definition of languages without a language system (semes), which includes the cinema as well as the languages of gestures, clothing or music. There is therefore no reason to look for features in cinema that only belong to a language system, like double articulation. On the other hand language features that necessarily apply to utterances will be found in the cinema, as rules of use, in the language system and outside of it: the syntagm (conjunction of relevant present units) and the paradigm (disjunction of present units with comparable absent units). The semiology of cinema will be the discipline that applies linguistic models, especially syntagmatic ones, to images as constituting one of their principle ‘codes’. We are moving in a strange circle here, because syntagmatics assumes that the image can in fact be assimilated to an utterance, but it is also what makes the image by right assimilable to the utterance. In a typical Kantian vicious circle: syntagmatics applies because the image is an utterance, but the image is an utterance, but the image is an utterance because it is subject to syntagmatics. The double of utterances and ‘grand syntagmatics’ has been substituted for that of images and signs, to the point where the very notion of the sign tends to disappear from this semiology. It obviously disappears, clearly, to the benefit of the signifier. The film appears as a text, with a distinction comparable to that made by Julia Kristeva, between a ‘phenotext’ of utterances which actually appear and a ‘genotext’ of structuring, constitutive or productive syntagms and paradigms.
---
http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/feminism/kristeva_1.htm
III. Semiology is based on two concepts -genotext and phenotext.
A. The genotext is the body of the bio-physiological process constrained by the social code, and it is not reducible to the language system.
a. The genotext exists within the phenotext, which is the perceivable signifying system.
b. Genotext ,which Kristeva refers to here as semiotic disposition, breaks those normal rules.
B. Semiotics, as a metalanguage, cannot get outside of the signifying system to explain the deviations from the system. In other words, as soon as semiotics tries to deconstruct the signifying system, it recreates the signifying system.
----
Theodore Tagholm
Shortlisted for the Jerwood Moving Image Awards.
I have been thinking about this film in relation (structurally) to Sundial by William Raban, 1992, and The Black Tower by John Smith, 1987.
Notes on a weird postcard.
In one thousand years (I say in, but actually we speak at the opposite border, the exit route, so the in is watched backwards from without, and the time between is lost apart from the traces of its play on surfaces.)
After one thousand years facts such as blue skies and sunshine will probably remain. This building will continue to have become a museum of itself. The shape will remain unchanged, apart from the odd bubbling of wear and the snapping in of new bolts and scaffolds. But, slowly, unavoidably, the intention will have shifted, simply because as much as old knowledge desires reinscription the code mutates with every death.
The fence that it is viewed through, a grid, a grid, will have been replaced and replaced. It will have become more or less vicious. Sometimes it will have kept things out, and sometimes it will have kept things in.
13.5.09
12.5.09
11.5.09
folding
The folds in film and text perhaps bring attention to the surface into play...
1
The Baroque
…If languages can be said to speak only of themselves we draw back into etymologies of words and their objects to begin multiplications. 
The epidermis of the mantle, or pallium, of a mollusc, more specifically that of the oyster, secretes alliterative calcium carbonate and conchiolin and sculpts a shell around itself. The words mantle and pallium both originally referred to a cloak or cape, the shape frozen echoed by draped cloth which folds around the wet beast inside.
When a foreign body invades the flesh the epithelial cells form an enclosing sac which secretes a crystalline substance named nacre, or mother of pearl, that builds in layers.
Within these alchemical transferrals of matter between surfaces emerges a pearl, whose surface gave birth to the terminologies of the Baroque. Synonyms adduct materials, that hover in common parlance. As if a soft tongue rasps round sediment and licks a fresh word into shape. The mollusc gave birth to a rough pearl that named the Baroque.
The language of the fold is baroque as the era that birthed it, and calls attention to the soft surface of itself. There are folds, crenellations, waves, tuckings, pleatings, images concertina with sharp edges, or fall against smooth curves. Things crumple, or envelop.
Leibniz sees curves, repetitions, and snaking lines as matter unfolds to produce new matter. All the words and frames carry alongside them all the memories of perception. We refer backwards, and backwards to Greek fathers.
10.5.09
Yes, yes, I know what it is, but what is it not?
A MORPHOLOGY.
One, the Splice
“The image must turn from extension or exteriority or extensiveness in space toward a genesis in mental relations or time…“
Clear then, the binding of adjacent frames, whirling in as opposites, but these images cross-fertilize. You know the brain (I say ‘the’) must unpick and fray the edges of all things against all other things. Kuleshov or otherwise, we know what is coming. Sort of. We mark velocity. We feel anxious.
• a tense constricted feeling in the body
We watch water approach the deck, water, deck, water. Zoom in, and the smooth blond wood whorls and darkens. To keep moving in is to be swallowed by detail. The narrative thickens and slows beneath the crust of image.
• a hard lump of tissue in an animal or human body.
This would be a dead end perhaps, a swelling head:
Two, the Manrope
All strands are gathered and form a sphere. The resolution is tucked inside, somewhere, tight and hard. Or invisible. But, bored of this seal, perhaps eyes reverse up the rope, seeking:
• a tangled mass in something such as hair.
• a complex and intractable problem
Next week:
Eight, the Overhand, and also Eight, the Figure of Eight
(Watching forms form, no prestidigitation, and also, attempts at modelling infinity under finite conditions)
END
A useful way to visualise and manipulate knots is to project the knot onto a plane—think of the knot casting a shadow on the wall. A small change in the direction of projection will ensure that it is one-to-one except at the double points, called crossings, where the "shadow" of the knot crosses itself once transversely
A knot is created by beginning with a one-dimensional line segment, wrapping it around itself arbitrarily, and then fusing its two free ends together to form a closed loop (Adams 2004)(Sossinsky 2002). When topologists consider knots and other entanglements such as links and braids, they consider the space surrounding the knot as a viscous fluid.
9.5.09
Architecture and Fiction
http://htcexperiments.org/2009/05/01/fictions-genealogy/
HTC Experiments
Experimental practices in architectural history, theory, and criticism — organized by David Gissen
8.5.09
3.5.09
2.5.09
28.4.09
Gary.
(exercises)
There are 30 seconds wedged between programmes.
They fall out barely remembered between the recollection of those that watched and read.
You cannot remember sequences.
Gary is approached with a pensive certainty.
30 seconds is condensed to the single text that breaks between two phrases.
It was not Gary.
---
A approached barely between between between breaks.
Cannot certainty condensed fact fall.
Gary Gary it is is.
Not of pensive phrases programmes read.
Recollection remember remembered.
Seconds seconds sequences single...
---
Gary clicks footstep upon footstep tracing parallels against storm drains and nude cement, a shape growing into himself, light blue and tan, emitting sounds first and then swelling as he tunnels out of the horizon.
The clicks become interspersed with the snare swoosh of denim, between, and smothered inaudible to the outside, between betweens, the soft click of a knee from an accident.
Facts arrived later, buttons gripped crossways by dark cotton, a grease spot birthed as a french fry tumbled sideways from the space between fingers and the small arches bubbled out of the furrows formed in closing lips.
Memories collide of you and Gary, Gary in the bar gripping brown bottles that wept into pools on scratched formica. You remember knuckles, and bootheels worn down on the inside softly kicking table legs in the hopes that in twenty five years they will buckle, but not yet.
The way all things were questions but the terminus plummeted, wavering, unmarked.
26.4.09
23.4.09
Locus Solus, Shunt Vaults
I will be working as an associate video artist here 29th April - 1st May 2009
21.4.09
17.4.09
16.4.09
pan 2
To punch a disc in the space, create ghost-sculptures which examine the impossibility of repetition and return. If the edges of a pan are joined seamlessly, there is still a virtual spiralling in perception. We cannot return to point a) but we can replay it, and watch it accumulate.
an embalming of space
If a film can be a strange embalming of an image of space, and the manufacturing of time in a fetish-state.
This was an insect until the amber rushed up to the brink and formed a barrier against decay. It ceased to function, and if a 'dead' thing is still almost the thing for us until the matter is absorbed back into the fray of particles, this is the image of an insect but also simply a small museum of spatial and material relationships.
If we treat the amber as film-space, where an object is flattened against a screen, stored and retrieved as a museum of matterless image, bar the vague materiality of light as translation of the skirting of a surface with deflected wavelengths.
To look is to receive only an image, flipped over, and to recognise small museums of spatial and material relationships.
It ceases to have any conception of the now, and simply relies on new nows conceived by the brain, referring only to itself in suspension, as an object, timeless, all objects turned towards the round lens that is replaced by the rectangular frame of transmission.
14.4.09
On Onomatopoeia
I was discussing the arbitrary nature of language, and it occurred to me that the words that approximate the most embeddedness in their objects of representation are onomatopoeic ones. The sound of the words are already sounds, which are annexed into the flows of language as speech, but retain a thin membrane as vocal approximations of the origin. We learn them early. I was remembering so young repeating what cows and sheep and ducks 'say'.
13.4.09
Minute Pavilions
An object that tells of the loss, destruction, disappearance of objects. Does not speak of itself. Tells of others. Will it include them? Deluge.
--Joseph Kosuth, "Jasper Johns (Art as Idea as Idea)", 1968, Photocopy on Wood, collection of the AGO, Toronto.
12.4.09
30.3.09
29.3.09
Montreal
We like to drift through tunnels burrowed by multinationals and their offshoots through the gauze of petrol clinging to cities where flavours are equivalent and fingers feel for light switches in the same places on walls. I am face half down into a white pillowcase while lights blink on beyond in the megaliths of downtown.
In bilingual texts sat adjacent to each other English, terse, places an idea squarely and face up, French trickles over the edges of the space hovering beyond comprehension. I feel for words and miss the journey.
28.3.09
Three Weeks
Toronto is soft grey light and eyes out across the surface of Lake Ontario dissolved, horizonless. There are a billion echoed small lakes reflecting skies from between the sticks and grasses of ice-parched land the colour of old paper.
I read Chronology.
23.3.09
corridor
An experiment in doubling disrupting the subjective camera movement 'into' a space with a slide towards the gutter of the image as lateral movement.
