This entry was written by EZ, posted on September 22, 2014 at 2:18 pm, filed under saliva, warm and tagged world wide web. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Emile Zile leads a collaborative workshop on (mis)using the internet for the purpose of art/lulz. Through a range of participatory exercises Zile will demonstrate techniques to detourn everyday social media and search engines in dynamic performative ways that offer new perspectives on these ready-to-hand tools.
With his history of performances that engage with popular culture and consumer technology Emile Zile recently premiered OMG_Sisyphus. The Greek mythology of Sisyphus, a tale of burden and absurdity, is used as a prop on which to enact a contemporary performance situation: being on YouTube. The performance happens in the midst of laptops, amplifiers, digital cameras, projectors and a heavy looking stone that the artist carries in from outside. In recent performances of OMG_Sisyphus at (Open Archive Melbourne, 30 November 2011, Palais Paradiso Amsterdam 16 February 2012) Zile enacts a humorously calculated switch. In his treatment we begin to understand that the laptop/webcam is now a rock, or vice versa. Its physical presence, weight, and texture become entwined in a passage of worship, as the ubiquitous Apple product is now something more equivalent to a Chinese scholar stone (Gongshi). Throughout the whole performance it is as if through some application of post-production what we should be seeing as a computer (the adored gateway to online audiences) is now a small volcanic boulder. Simultaneous slips between live action and published content begin, as Zile sits staring at the rock we imagine him staring at his computer, alone in a room while addressing an imagined YouTube audience. In doing so the actual live audience sitting in the gallery space is distanced, even denied.
At some points in the piece we are made to feel the joys of web 2.0 publishing, light relaxation muzak plays, we are all connected by technology. But the gallery space begins to fall out of step as the artist struggles against what appears to be self-doubt and loneliness. The rock remains motionless on a small table under lamplight. Is real life different to projected life? Maybe it used to be. Zile seems to suggest a new friction is built in this crossover rather than a seamless merger. Whilst various elements of the performance are online, the crux of this work hinges on being present live in the gallery space – where multiple facets of contemporary being are felt and fired simultaneously. As it happens we are pointed toward a space where states of alienation, corporation and intense connectivity collide into a state of indivisibility.
Screened: new performance in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney and Singapore.
Liquid Architecture is an Australian organisation for events, exhibitions, performances and situations of the world’s leading artists working with sound.
Once a “sense-specific” festival, interested in listening and the depth of individual sound perception, Liquid Architecture is broadening its focus of concern to engage the social, cultural, political, economic as well as aesthetic frameworks in which sound takes place. Now in its 15th year, Liquid Architecture’s 2014 festival program brings together work from across a range of disciplines to audiences in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Singapore. Marking the new direction driven by curators Joel Stern and Danni Zuvela is the festival’s focus on social and conceptual questions, signalling a more sustained engagement with the discourse, sound and practices of contemporary art. This is a move into the investigation of the audible as an expression of the myriad, sometimes inaudible forces enframing, encoding, describing and producing what we hear – whether that is considered music, sound, or noise.
Christof Migone gives an artist talk, no a TALK ARTIST
Alessandro Bosetti demonstrates MASK MIRROR
New Waver loads up THE KING OF PPT
Ur 1st Luv propose A SOUND INVESTMENT
Johannes Kreidler adresses THIS TULIP OF WHICH I AM SPEAKING AND WHICH I REPLACE IN SPEAKING
Kusum Normoyle is SILT (Screaming In Lecture Theatre)
Emile Zile performs SCREENED
Makiko Yamamoto is UTTERLY SILENT, UTTER SILENCE, UTTERLY SOMETHING, OR UTTER SOMETHING, THINKING THINKING, UTTERLY LISTENING, UTTERLY UMMM.
In partnership with NGV and ABC Radio National’s Creative Audio Unit.
Further performances of Screened will occur during the Liquid Architecture tour in Brisbane on October 1 at IMA, Sydney October 5 at UNSW Art and Design (COFA), Singapore October 10 at LaSalle College. Full details at http://www.liquidarchitecture.org.au/program/
FREE LUNCH Free lunch, final wisdom, total coverage – Hunter S. Thompson
The ‘Blue Marble’ image released from NASA’s Apollo 17 mission. The image was released after solicitation from Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue as well as The WELL, the first open digital community.
We live in an ecological period of history, our assumed model and image of the world is that of an ecosphere. Within this sphere everything matters, everything has the potential to be part of everything else. Each instance is imbued with the potential to affect, in a causal chain, everything else. There is no outside .
This could be described as the hell of the butterfly effect, a kind of contingency-overload. How is it possible to separate out the specific from the general within this milieu? What is a significant as opposed to an insignificant event? The question becomes epistemological; how do we know?
Emile Zile’s new video work Western Digital is set on and around the central thoroughfare of a northern Laotian city, Luan Prabang. A city on the confluence of Mekong and Nam Khan rivers, Luan Prabang was the royal seat of Laos until Pathet Lao communist took control in 1975.
Each morning a ritual known as Tak Bak takes place. Tak Bak is a giving of alms to the cities Theravada Buddhist monks. As is shown in Zile’s video, this event takes the form of a procession where monks receive alms in silence, without returning thanks to the giver. There is no giver and receiver in Tak Bak, only giving and receiving. Through Tak Bak the material and spiritual sustain each other without direct encounter; what is beneficial to the monks is meritorious for those giving. Tak Bak is not charitable in the Christian sense.
As Zile’s video shows, the daily procession is two simultaneous events, alms being given and the witnessing of the alms being given. Each morning TAK BAK has nearly as many witnesses, in the form of tourists, as participants.
The images we see being produced in Zile’s work, like the offerings made to the monks it features, have a double life. They’re are on the one hand a document of a specific time and place, and on the other user generated content being uploaded and distributed across a digital network. This freely produced ‘content’ is the one of the key aspects of the ‘third industrial revolution’ that is reshaping various economic, social and political relations; creating new forms of power relations and placing control in the hands of newly emerging organisations. This new economy is part of an experiential ambiance brought about by the advent of a widely deployed digital infrastructure. This is a new economy of free information, not of goods and services, a milieu of TED talks, not public libraries and of freelancing and internships, not jobs. This new milieu of free and ‘open’ information, content and entertainment is what Franco ‘bifo’ Berardi calls the ‘new techno-social framework of contemporary subjectivation”.
To the organisations and companies leading the capitalisation of this new techno-social framework the resource it produces, in the form of digital ‘content’, is an almost alchemical, infinite, resource. A ‘virgin’ resource, like the new world once was to Europe’s colonial powers. As Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, explained to Bill Clinton during his first term as president, the effects of the digital economy was like ‘finding a new planet’.
This new resource is the product of the labour executed by the same ‘class’ of consumer of it as a product, in a mediated feedback loop. The product in question, personal expressions has existed in various forms for decades, (home videos, diaries) however, it is only since the advent of web 2.0 that it has become a widely produced and consumed resource. Every Tweet, every Instagram of ‘info-commodity’ is what Berardi calls ‘Semio-capital’, an expression of the interaction between language and labour. Semio-capital is the production of cultural material that puts ‘neuro-psychic energies’ to work as labour. Expressing subjectivity, like the old times of keeping a diary, is now a form of work, of productive labour; the ‘self’ having attained the currency of a resource. Twitter, Facebook et al are in a constant battle for our self-expression.
However, this labour is not paid for in the conventional sense, what you receive in return for producing content for, say Twitter, is free access to the service as a consumer. For the consumer it is an entirely money free transaction, an economy of giving and receiving; not working and paying.
The companies that trade on the production of semio-capital are driving a new economy that could ultimately rewrite the entire concept of exchange value, labour and employment. In turn this new economy (which within the digital is already well established) could therefore go on to fundamentally determine the process of subjectivation of the individual as part of a 21st century economy.
In Zile’s film we see ‘content’ and ‘experience’ in mutual production as a site of subjective personal experience; experience being the critical site of content production. Furthermore we see the two bound together as an expression of an emerging social and economic reality where the site of production and consumption become blurred to the point of indiscernible difference. This indiscernible difference between labour and leisure, between work and life is an outcome of a specific period of social and technical developments that was influenced by the Buddist practices that feature in Zile’s film.
The ‘Californian Ideology’ is a catchall term for the mixture of post war systems theory, popular interpretations of Buddhism and an Ayn Rand style radical individualism that has driven much of the development of both the infrastructure, culture and business models that dominate the digital network today. The idea of a stable, free environment is at the very core of our networked paradigm.
An example of Buddhist inspiration can be found in one of the pivotal figures in both the counter culture of the 1960’s and the World Wide Web. Stewart Brand was the founder of Whole Earth Catalogue as well as the WELL, the first online community. Brand asserted during his counter culture days that the Tao Te Ching by Chinese sage Lao Tzu was in fact the ‘first systems theory book’. The systems theory that Brand refers to gave the Hippy generation a model for a lateral society of anti-Cartesian self-determining, self-organising individuals, free from what they perceived as the corrupt and war mongering institutions of politics and the state.
It was in Buddhism, that had already influenced the avant garde of the 50’s, that the counter culture found its mythology. The selfless, egoless, Buddhist, in the eyes of Brand and others, was equivalent to the cybernetic subject – where the Cartesian self that transcends the material world was reinscribed as a node in a total, planetary, system. As Jefferson Airplane assert in their seminal protest album of the period, Volunteers, ‘see how small your are…the human name doesn’t mean shit to a tree’, expressing the idea that ego of the modern subject is meaningless when culture (and the individuals that make it up) are seen inseparable from the material world as one, total, system.
Systems theory found a home on both sides of the establishment. Jay Forrester at MIT, among others, developed a vision of the world as a total unified ecology of natural and industrial systems. Both the researchers into systems theory at MIT, the wider military-industrial complex and the counter culture movement became strongly attached to the idea of sustainability as the ultimate end of a systems theory view of both nature and culture. This sustainable ecological vision of the world proposes to overcome politics by way of the efficiency and strength of its design as a system, a system designed to bring about harmony and stability. It was and is a project with a utopian dimension directed towards an implicit ultimate end, that of a harmonious world.
However, with the widespread failing of the self-sufficiency and back to the land movement its key proponents were looking for ways to reintegrate their ethos into the mainstream. As Stewart Brand has said of this period ‘self sufficiency didn’t work, so now it’s time to collaborate’, and so the first online community, The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) was born out of the same self-sufficiency ethos where every voice is equal, the dawn of user-generated content had come. It was with four ex-members of the largest back to the land commune, The Farm, that Brand started The WELL.
The cyber-utopian narrative that came out of the California Ideology of an egalitarian society, ecological sustainability and a boundless life world enhanced by the digital network may have entered a new phase after the 2000 dot com crash and the 2001 attack on the twin towers. What was considered a tool of mass emancipation has become, in a surprisingly quick period of time, dominated by very few corporations and has become a tool for mass surveillance. However, the idea of giving persists as a new economic model, the idea of free information of digital ‘commons’ is a major part of the global network. Producers-consumers give their ‘neuro-psychic’ labours to companies and corporations that provide ‘free’ services. Contrary to the wishes opined in counter culture author Richard Brautigan for a cybernetic infrastructure that would make us ‘free of our labours’, the cybernetic ‘meadow’ we have instead has made old practices into new types of labour, performed for free.
Life in a new world without boundaries (paid/free, employed/unemployed) has to establish and active resistance to the network, or find its psyche colonized and commoditised. The strangest, and most pernicious, aspect of this new regime is that both colonisation and commoditisation are voluntary but irresistible. The spirit of voluntary labour, a benign act of egoless community merit is warped by the digital network into the entry box at the top of any facebook page, requesting the user to enter ‘what is on your mind?’ As one of the first critiques of peer to peer media, made during its early days of the 1990’s wrote ‘Cyberspace is a black hole; it absorbs energy and personality and represents it as an emotional spectacle.’
And this is where we find the nexus of Zile’s film. Within its constellation of ancient Buddhist ritual and networked image production we see a dialectical image, in the sense of Benjamin, emerge.
The location of Zile’s film appropriately makes up its title; the work is literally set in a spatial and temporal location of northern Laos, a much-marginalised nation and forgotten part of the world. However, as Zile’s film makes us aware, everywhere is significant to the ecological vision of the world; there is no outside of the system. Furthermore, Zile’s work shows us that within this milieu of significance substance based value becomes secondary to the psychic, labour is not just about the execution of products and services but also psychic and emotional output. Like the ceremony in documentation shown, a mediated economy of voluntarily giving is taking place whinin our new digital economy of the mind. For the Buddhists involved in the ceremony, the economic exchange is mediated by a belief system, for the tourist, the exchange is mediated by Facebook or Instagram, who, unlike the consumer, make a traditional monetary profit from the meta data of the users.
Just as Walter Benjamin elucidated the reflective energy of the iron windows and mannequins of Paris arcades to talk about the 19th Century, Zile uses the Tak Bak ceremony in Luang Prabang to make recognisable the boundaries and practices that inhabit our ecological, 21st century, milieu. Further to this, Zile’s film shows how the two conceptual schemes of the ‘self’ found in Buddhism and free market capitalism have synthesised into the digital economy, the new planet on which we now must live.
An invitation arrived to respond to Yoko Ono’s instructional film scripts. The suggestion of a film. Film as it exists in a proposition, an invitation, a request to think. ‘Visualise peace’ Yoko says. Visualise film. #summerofyoko
Q. Which Yoko piece(s) are you responding to and how?
A. I am taking Yoko Ono’s current day Twitter feed as an unrequited instruction set. I follow Yoko Ono and Yoko Ono follows me.
Q. If we imagine a spectrum in which predetermined structures, scores, instructions sit at one end and spontaneity, intuition, improvisation at the other – where does your work sit in that spectrum? Or is that spectrum faulty to begin with?
A. I have a structure within the walls of the MCA. The technology of the image projection. The design of the seats. We have voice, light, human will. I feel energised by unbridled human energy in tightly controlled environments.
Postscript. I don’t believe in freedom in art. It can only be given by imposing a structure or rule set upon it. There is no freedom. There is no restraint.
New performance
‘I follow Yoko and Yoko follows me’
Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney
6 February 2014, 6:00-9:00pm
I am a monk. I am a tourist. Within the street I see the stage for every human conflict and negotiation. Specifically for this video I was interested in contrasting the buddhist principles of mindfullness, meditation, removing yourself from time to the act of photography, grasping for permanence, embalming a moment. The last shot of my 2012 film Jack is a solitary figure passed out in a half-finished Buddhist temple in Footscray, Australia. This film is an oblique sequel.
There’s Emile, part Edward Scissor Hands/part Wu Tang Clan, ably filling the frame with studied awkwardness; not just in a video, On Television. The cognitive dissonance of seeing this for the first time was astonishing: it wasn’t just any TV – it was ultimate prime time chew-cud: The Price is Right. There he is cracking wise with plastic fantastic Larry, playing the game, not giving away the joke, carefully treading the line between performance and reality. A line that, in the wake of the 90s talk show phenomenon, and before reality TVs total dominion, had suddenly become very blurred. It was prescient – a death knell to hackish old analogue, sent from the past to the future, sincere, hysterical and knowing.
Melbourne Now celebrates the latest art, architecture, design, performance and cultural practice to reflect the complex creative landscape of Melbourne.
This ambitious and far-reaching exhibition across The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia and NGV International presents the various ways in which visual artists and creative practitioners profoundly contribute to the society in which we live, and to Melbourne as a city with a unique and dynamic cultural identity.
This screening will be a 2K DCP version in surround sound.
Melanie Bonajo – ‘Pee on Presidents’, courtesy the artist
Muzi Quawson – ‘Doll Parts’, courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery
Ursula Mayer – ‘Gonda’, courtesy Juliette Jongma, Amsterdam
Emile Zile – ‘Jack’, courtesy the artist
IDFA and the Amsterdam Art Weekend collaborate during the programme Paradocs, the festival’s line-up devoted to video art. Films submitted by galleries participating in this year’s Amsterdam Art Weekend, De Rijksakademie and De Ateliers, will be screened at the Tuschinski cinema.
‘As part of our critical forum, Video Art in the Internet Era, we asked a series of artists, curators and video brains to send us “video letters” responding to the provocation of our critical forum: how can video artists orient themselves towards or against the complex backdrop of networked technology, smart phones and prosumers of our current world?
Riffing on the YouTube genre of “unboxing”, Emile Zile performed a “boxing” of some usurped analogue technology, the detritus of many a media artists studio.’
Curated by Tom Milnes, Marcus Orlandi and Yana Naidenov
Preview: Friday 16th August, 6 – 9pm
17th – 18th August 2013, 12 – 6pm
110-116 Kingsgate Road
London NW6 2JG
‘8bit’ sees a host of artists create live works in the gallery space, satirical and humorous performances from international artists 6 – 9pm. An exhibition of works, including video documentation of the performances and sculptural responses, will be open on 17th and 18th August, 12 -6pm.
Artists include
Aaron Head (UK), Emile Zile (AUS/NL), Daniella Valz Gen (Peru), Louise Ashcroft (UK), Samantha Thole (NL), Petr Davydtchenko (S) Tom Milnes (UK), Marcus Orlandi (UK).
