Stuart Croft - Century City

Stuart Croft - Century City
8 min 46 sec, continuous gallery loop
As an artist and a film maker, Stuart Croft utilizes the aesthetics and linguistics of cinema and presents it in the context of a gallery. Writing and directing dialogue based narratives, Croft's films often weave together Hollywood styled characters in an endless cycle of story telling. Always shown on loop the films never have a beginning nor an end just an elliptical narrative that folds into itself. 

In Century City, the murder of an actress prompts an illogical, circular phone conversation between a detective in Cape Town and a movie director in Los Angeles. As the plot unravels so does the fiction of the film studio. Lighting rigs, camera's and scenery flats start to interrupt the narrative and thus our attention is directed towards devices and structures deployed in film making.

This is an edited clip from the film (8 min 46 sec) which is played on a loop. Century City was also shown by Open File as part of 'Admitting the Flats' at MK Gallery, May 2012

Douglas Gordon - Meaning and Location

Douglas Gordon Meaning and Location

1990
Installation view at Tate Britain

In Douglas Gordon's early text work Meaning and Location the artist has taken a passage from the Gospel of Luke (Luke 23;43) and created a cyclical composition in which, at first glance, the text comes round on itself and repeats. The simple shift of a comma, however, demonstrates the change in meaning made possible by such a slight alteration:

Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.
Truly I say to you today, you will be with me in paradise.

The phrase itself is an oft quoted promise, purportedly made by Jesus on the cross to the repentant thief, crucified with him. The work calls into question the possibility of exegesis of this text  in the face of such ambiguity. This change in meaning, simply caused by the change in the comma's location, draws attention to the specificity of our grammatical system. The book of Luke is translated into English from an ancient Greek manuscript, here documenting words presumably spoken in Aramaic; how can we hope to be sure of the intended meaning of these words?

Installation view at University College London

Jean-Luc Nancy - Elliptical Sense

Jean-Luc Nancy - Elliptical Sense, Research in Phenomenology, 1988

As a chapter in his journal Research in Phenomenology, Elliptical Sense by Jean-Luc Nancy addresses the work of Jacques Derrida. Aware of their similarities and proximity in writing, Nancy uses this text to explore subtleties of difference between themselves, and consequently the particularity of sense making and definition.

Using the poetic symbology of the 'ellipse', Nancy explains how thoughts often converge around certain points, but as the ruminations fall short of being circular, the orbit of thought both helps to centre and de-centre it from meaning. This linguistic tactic by Nancy demands a poetic distancing from the topic at hand and therefore he realizes that to write on ellipses would require him to not exactly write "on Derrida", but requires "accompanying the movement or the movements of the ellipsis for no other reason, in sum, than the pleasure of repetition."

Read the full text here

Sean Edwards - Portrait (for a screenplay) of Beth Harmon

Sean Edwards Portrait (for a screenplay) of Beth Harmon

Exhibition image for 2009 show at Limoncello, London

Richard Bevan Chess Club 2012

Installation view, Limoncello, 2009

In this ongoing project artist Sean Edwards invites artists, curators, writers, musicians and actors to read Walter Tevis' 1983 novel The Queen's Gambit and to produce a work in response to it. The novel follows the life Beth Harmon, an orphaned child who is discovered to be a chess prodigy, from the age of 8 through to adulthood. The novel was praised for the accuracy of its portrayals of the professional chess circuit and the internal workings of the mind of a chess player. Harmon has a lucid and almost visual sense of the powers the pieces exude over the board as she moves them into place. 

Chess, and in particular children playing the game, are a recurring image in Edwards' work. He sees this project as a way to expand the life of this fascinating character beyond the 243 pages of the novel. The resulting works are studies - sketches towards a final work that may never be realised.

SaraMackillop String Piece 2009

The screenplay of this novel has had a troubled past; numerous failed attempts have been made to turn the novel into a film but never has it come to fruition. Most recently Heath Ledger had been working on it as his directorial debut at the time of his death in 2008.

Pierre Huyghe & Philippe Parreno - No Ghost Just a Shall

Pierre Huyghe & Philippe Parreno - No Ghost Just a Shell, 2000

In 1999 two French artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno bought a digital avatar from a Japanese agency that develops Manga characters. For $428 the artists acquired Annlee (or Ann Lee), designed as a character with specific qualities, in an essence she was a blank slate waiting to be exercised by a narrative. As the prices of the avatars vary depending on the complexity of their characteristic traits, to own the copyright for Annlee was cheap, and she was therefore 'nondescript'.

No Ghost Just a Shell, became a project where they began to 'fill-in' the character traits of their avatar imposing various narratives for her to exist. Inviting other artists such as Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Rirkrit Tiravanija to produce animated videos using Annlee, she acquired multiple identities and multiple voices. However, after many manifestations of the avatar Huyghe and Parreno called an end to the project by transferring the characters' copyright to the 'Annlee Association'. As a legal body owned by the avatar itself the document meant that Annlee (and her image) could not be exploited ever again (unless she herself warranted it). This act granted the character simultaneous freedom and death.

"Annlee’s ambiguous status as a girl without qualities invites the viewer to project his/her own fantasies on her, yet she resists those projections by virtue of her utter lack of any captivating traits. No matter what they do to Annlee, she will never be real. Still, her vacuous image haunts you. You think of colonialism… of the co-option and exploitation of women and their images for commercial purposes… of the ephemeral, manufactured nature of fame… of the synthetic personae created for real women by the entertainment industry and what it does to their lives (Garbo, Marilyn, J.Lo…) You know her memory will live on in the discourse inspired by her for years to come. And you wonder if Annlee will become a cult figure whose legally protected image and persona will be pirated by who knows whom and for what purposes, now that she’s gone?" - Marcia Tanner, 2003

Félix Guattari - Machinic Heterogenesis

Félix Guattari Machinic Heterogenesis

from Chaosmosis 1992

In Machinic Heterogenesis Félix Guattari takes the reader through an expansive and extending consideration of the 'Machinic' seeking to "....envisage machinism in its totality, in it's technological, social, semiotic and axiological avatars." The text leads us through simple technological systems such as a lock and key through to complex intersections of numerous 'machinic assemblages', such as Concorde. 

Guattari broadens out and leads us to think about social structures as machines - 'urban State machines', 'royal machines', 'commercial and banking machines' and so forth - before leading us into a consideration of the possible application of the machinic to ethical and ontological investigations. He concludes with an examination of the machinic in relation to omnipresent homogenised capitalist exchange value. 

Taken from Guattari's final book, Chaosmosis, the text also touches on examples of 'machines' found in his earlier writing - desiring machines, abstract machines and writing machines. 

Full text here.

Sample from the first Page:

Ben Grosser - Interactive Robotic Painting Machine

Ben Grosser, Interactive Robotic Painting Machine, 2011

oil on canvas

As a fully automated autonomous device, Grosser's Interactive Robotic Painting Machine creates pictures in response to its sonic environment. Attached to a microphone, the machine 'listens' to its surroundings and considers what it hears as an input to the painting process. When there is no other sound the machine will make work in response to its own noises, 'listening' to itself. 

The robot was made as a response to the mediating effects technology has on our lives. As technological systems grow in complexity and intelligence, Grosser was interested in asking about how  that intelligence changes what passes through it and therefor how that intelligence evolves to make something for its own needs. 

Many of the paintings made by the machine are made with the audio input of Grosser critiquing the robot as it paints. Commenting on how he understands and views the marks as they are being made. 

Interactive Robotic Painting Machine (2011) from benjamin grosser on Vimeo.