“… Here is the hub of ambiguity.
Electric spectra splash across the street.
Equivocation knots the shadowed features
of boys who are not boys; a quirk of darkness
shrivels a full mouth to senility
or pares it to a razor-edge, pours acid
across an amber cheek, fingers
a crotch, or smashes in the pelvic arch
and wells a dark clot oozing on a chest
dispelled with motion or a flare of light
that swells the lips and dribbles them with blood.”
Samuel R. Delaney, ‘Babel-17’ [from poem by Rydra Wong]
a night of post-apocalyptic and otherworldly video and performance by 0rphan Drift, Bankrupsea, Nicola Woodham and GROK, and DJ set by Cascade Erase. Featuring: screenings of A Wilderness Of Elsewheres by 0rphan Drift (2009) and music video The Great Attractor by GROK, performances Poo-tee-weet? by Bankrupsea, and Teravocal (2017) by Nicola Woodham, followed by a DJ set from Cascade Erase.
The works performed and screened reenter traumatic pasts and projected futures via technological and ritual processes. They share a ‘sonorous materiality’ of aural and visual sensibility that resonates with the aesthetics of the exhibited paintings.
In 0rphan Drift(0D)’s A Wilderness of Elsewheres, “dark abstract video spaces flow into bright photographic landscapes, populated and de-populated by collages of architecture and fashion… neo-romantic and science fictional blending of first and third world materiality. In relating the contemporary screen, with its multiplicity of function as window, mirror and portal to the notion of the black mirror as a predictive device, we felt this physiological wilderness extending to include real world places and global consciousness.
“A Wilderness of Elsewheres describes miscegenation between human production and geologic time, primitive and contemporary technology… The tundra, iceflows, burns, flotsam and jetsam convey elegiac sublime tone - proliferating landscapes of aftermath - still and unyielding. The audio carries with it the persistent sense of an event. At once immersive and deconstructive, the work is collision, co-habitation, evolutionary fever-dream. For us, to dream the future, to channel the predictive obsidian mirror, science fiction and technology become tools, such as magic once was, for transformation.”
While 0D channel old and new technological process, GROK’s lo fi videos and soundscapes are inspired by retro futurist sci-fi and manipulated into being with iPhone apps, film editing software and synthesisers, collaging science fiction films and found footage with experimental soundscapes. The Great Attractor recontextualises nostalgic fears of nuclear war via filters and edits against an anxious, jittery soundscape, creating apprehensive glitched familiarity and the contemporary sense of history repeating, differently. There is a dialogue between the past trying to portray the future and the future trying to recapture the past, which contrasts with Bankrupsea’saudio aesthetics of event post-trauma.
Bankrupsea (Robin Bale) will present an improvised vocal and musical performance, utilising a self-made variation of a vernacular percussion/string instrument which has been called in various places at various times a stumpf fiddle, devil's stick, bumbass, humstrum. The piece is titled Poo-tee-weet? In homage to Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five, in which this interrogative onomatopoeia is used as a refrain. It transcribes bird song; a non-semantic response to the aftermath of a massacre.
In Nicola Woodham’s new performance Teravocal (2017), chance generation of sounds animate the inanimate sound making instruments. They speak. Automatic processes are channels for voices from other realms. As is noise, electronic-energetic overspill made sonic. The spirit world entwined with the thumps and bumps of signal overflowing and being resisted. They create portals for new forms of animation, for vocal others that cannot but be imagined and formed as they mouth words back, distorted and heard from a random direction. This zone, like dreams, imagination, fiction, memory are all ontologically equal to, if not more present than, mechanised-monitored time. These speaking, electronic mouths are sentient, to be listened to, have rights.
Domain of Sensible Knowledge is showing at ASC Gallery from May 10th – June 6th. Cruz & Moran curated the exhibition Myth Material at The Old Waterworks, Southend, last summer. This exhibition continues their research into painterly and performative process and the construction of meaning.
Thursday 1st June, 7.00 – 9.30pm
ASC Gallery, Taplow House, Thurlow St, London SE17 2DG
Part of the exhibition domain of sensible knowledge
curated by Cynthia Cruz and Stephanie Moran.