TEENAGE HALLUCINATION / NOUVEAU FESTIVAL opened yesterday at the Pompidou (February 22 - March 12) featuring GISÈLE VIENNE and DENNIS COOPER
This is from the premier issue Novelty of the journal Critical Contemporary Culture (London School of Economics), which is out now and definitely worth a look.
My words, Kenzie Burchell
“My Words” is a video engagement with mobility, metadata and identity. These are the recorded lists of people’s personal dictionaries on their mobile phones. In contrast to the manufacturer’s default dictionary, these words were saved into the phone when the individuals were texting. They were saved, often unconsciously, mid-process by the users because these were words not included in the default dictionary, yet used so often by the individual. The result is a localized and highly idiosyncratic portrait of each person. They were filmed with a mobile phone, seeing their list for the first time as they read it.
TriQuarterly’s inaugural video essay edition is out and definitely worth a look (Curated by John Bresland and Marilyn Freeman). Nice work and impressive venture.
How does the visceral nature of digital technology—sound, image and the sometimes cruel edgelessness of the screen—alter the writer’s relationship to language? The seven video essays in this collection, curated by John Bresland and Marilyn Freeman, raise a host of thrilling questions, not least: How is writing today different than it was yesterday? What does it mean for writers to build a text with, as Virginia Woolf once cannily advised, whatever pieces come your way?
Uta Barth
Ground #77
Chromogenic print mounted on panel
1997
David Batchelor, Idiot Stick I, 2003; Plastic bottles, polycarbonate, fluorescent light, cable
The inner life of this world was entirely hidden: nothing was allowed to spill out from its allotted space; all circuitry, all conduits, all the accumulated stuff that attaches itself to an everyday life remained concealed, held in, snapped shut. Every surface was a closed, impenetrable façade: cupboards were disguised as walls, there were no clues or handles or anything to distinguish one surface from another; just as there were no protrusions, neither was there a single visible aperture. In this way, openness really was an illusion maintained by closure, simplicity was ridiculously overcomplicated, and unadorned clarity was made hopelessly confusing. You really could become lost in this apparently blank and empty white space.
—David Batchelor, Chromophobia
(Source: jwvpk.wordpress.com)
Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, Gravel Plants
It’s accumulation, the series, that helps develop the fantasy of infinity, but what you do not see is the threshold of critical mass. At some point, too much is too much. The process is the equivalent of the abolition of all these qualities. It’s a black hole.
—Jean Baudrillard
Santiago Sierra, Nine-foot Line Tattooed on Six Remunerated People, 1999
Jonathan Schipper, Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle, 2007-2008; Slow motion car crash
Woe to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating the movement that exceeds them with the narrow mind of the mechanic who changes a tire.
—Georges Bataille
Arcangelo Sassolino, Untitled; hydraulic piston, wood.
History itself haunts modern society like a spectre, pseudo-histories are constructed at every level of consumption of life in order to preserve the threatened equilibrium of present frozen time.
—Guy Debord
Nina Canell, Perpetuum Mobile (40 kg), 2009-2010; water bucket, steel, hydrophone, mist-machine, amplifier, cable and 40 kg cement; dimensions variable.
“A bowl of water sits on the ground next to a paper sack of cement. Activated by sonic vibrations, the water is frothed to a fantastical mist, which solidifies the adjacent building material imperceptibly.”
My point of view is not an ethical one, but that of a strange topology or topography that expels from “home” the most intimate, most secret moments of existence.
—Jacques Derrida
