Governor Glitch [Video]

Governor Glitch

'Butane Blood Bubble' renamed to 'Too Polite to Ask'

Too Polite to Ask

Installed as 'Butane Blood Bubble (Internaut Naught Naught)' in the exhibition Passage, Belgium.

'Butane Blood Bubble' was a name chosen out of a passing obsession with alliteration and is essentially meaningless. Later, when the work was to be exhibited, I added in parentheses '(Internaut Naught Naught)' to the end of the title in an attempt to summarise the exploratory nature of the work. However, given time to consider and debate the effectiveness of a name I have decided to change it.

'Too Polite to Ask' is a reference to Gore Vidal's famous quote on the subject of his bisexuality. When asked about the gender of his first sexual partner, Gore Vidal replied, "It was dark, and I was too polite to ask." For me, this sums up this video installation.

Firstly, I must point out that the videos are arranged in order to be read, from left to right, and as such are in effect a narrative. Between the two videos a scenario of observation is introduced. The first video presented has the hallmarks of internet-video, reduced in resolution and image quality to better be transmitted. As an internet-video taken from it's original context and placed in an artwork, it is a symbol of mass observation. The second video introduces the observer who is outwardly acting the process of observation. The protagonist is building an interpretation of the video with the limited tools that have been allowed him, until he has something that resembles the original.

Now, the question referred to in the title is asked by the protagonist and it is this: "Am I watching the video? Or am I watching my video?" When observing, there is truth, and then there is our construction of the truth. This, I think, is applicable to how we construct ourselves. The constant narrative that we construct and tell to ourselves is rooted in this same questionable act of observation.

Beyond our minds is darkness and, like the ancient idea of the human eye being a source of light illuminating the objects we look at, we incorporate the illumination provided by our own distinctive perception. To ask what truth these objects would hold in the darkness without the light of our eyes is a profane question.

Hexagon Traffic and Venetian Babies [Video]

Hexagon Traffic (cut)

These short video clips are from experimental works Hexagon Traffic and Venetian Babies. The original videos were made exploring the idea of making video as another instrument in a musical composition, following it's structure and mood.

Venetian Babies (cut)

"The Upside Down People 2007" for Il Tempo Del Postino, Manchester [Project]

In 2007 I spent ten days wearing upside-down goggles with 11 other people for the benefit of Carston Höllers' work in Il Tempo De Postino, a time based (as opposed to space based) gallery experiment. The exhibition was held in Manchester's Opera House and lasted ten or fifteen minutes. Here are some images from the ten days that lead up to the show.

Seen Scenes [Photography]

Schiphol in Fog [Photography]

Solemn Figure (from the series Defrock) at the Temple Bar Gallery and Studios [Exhibition]

photo Barbara Knezevic

Video work 'Solemn Figure (from the series Defrock)' on display as part of the Circa Culture Night 2008 Video Screening. Circa, Ireland's contemporary visual art and visual culture magazine, in conjunction with Temple Bar Gallery and Studios hosted the first Circa Culture Night video screening on the 19th of September 2008. The screening was curated by Lee Welch, artist and co-director of Four Gallery, Dublin.

Conway Kawaii [Video]

Conway Kawaii

"Kawaii: (kah-wah-ee) Japanese for 'cute,' but beyond that it refers to the exclusively Japanese cult of cute."

British mathematician John Horton Conway developed 'The Game of Life' in 1970 which is an extension of ideas introduced in the 1940s by renowned mathematician John von Neumann and is still today one of the finest examples of cellular automaton.

'The Game of Life' is a zero-player game based on an infinite 2D grid. Each square on this grid can be in two states, alive or dead, and interacts with the eight squares that neighbour it, abiding to a set of simple rules. These rules can construct massively complex systems from very simple beginnings.

Musicians like Brian Eno have adopted this ability to simply govern complex systems and continue to develop and use such systems to create compositions, not by playing and arranging instruments, but by devising rules that the music must obey and letting it write itself. These pioneering musicians and artists are setting a precedent for creatives to change their roll in their work from medium or muse to a god-like creator of idea ecosystems. Intelligent generative systems in which the creator does not create, but governs the process of creation are becoming a wide spread creative practice.

This is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1757 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart devised "Musikalisches Würfelspiel" (Musical Dice Game), a very early example of generative art. There was the emergence of 'open' compositional systems, such as those by John Cage and visual art generation techniques using notation, instruction and restriction by the likes of the Fluxus artists, Hans Haake and Andy Warhol's 'Factory' in the 1950's and 60's. More recently these veins of investigation have developed and evolved into technology focused divergent species such as 'livecoding' (another livecoding link) and new-media works by artists such as John Klima and Kitty Clark.

Posting Drop Off [Apology]

I would like to apologize for the lack of posts in the last month and a bit. In most unwelcome fashion, several parts of my hard-working laptop decided to fall to pieces at the same time, leading to a long (but thanks to an extended warranty - not costly) repair induced blog hiatus.

However, posting can now return to whatever normality existed before. To get the ball rolling, here is the above video.

Congested? [Illustration]

Congested Sinuses? Imps only make it worse... Drawn in Flash.