BA exhibition 14.11.11 - 05.06.11

Here is a link to some documentation of my piece in the BA show, which opened last night. More info and documentation to follow. Kunstakademiet i Tromsø.

Morgenbladet.no - Ligger Tromsø i Norge?

Morgenbladet.no - Ligger Tromsø i Norge?

Klipp dikt/clip poem

This is something I started in the autumn of 2009.

"Klipp dikt" was a project I never really finished, and what I've posted here is more a sketch than anything else. The idea was that by presenting a poem through video I could influence the reader to a much higher degree than in printed text. Through this medium I can control at what speed and in what rhythm they read, as well as adding sound and visual effects. One day I hope to complete the project, which falls into a group of work/experiments with genre definitions.

The Autonomy Capsule 1.

The autonomy capsule started as my semester project for the group exhibition "Spaces after frantic movement", in May 2010. At the time I was into spaceships, steampunk aesthetics, existential ideas (more in the sense of the ideas about existence than in the sense of the philosophical movement) and the concept of autonomy. I was influenced by "TAZ", by Hakim Bay and "Why hasn't everything already disappeared" by Jean Baudrillard. The project later evolved into the structure exhibited during Festspillene i Harstad in June the same year (see The Autonomy Capsule 2).

These pictures are from its first incarnation, when it was kind of clean looking, with only five texts within and one introductory text outside. In this version the space within was intended to be kind of objective and meditative, while the text on the board outside was more personal and frantic.

The idea was to present a fictive character who built the capsule in an attempt to create a space outside of society in which to exist without association. The character goes through an existential crisis, and becomes obsessed with the search for her existence outside the perception of others. Eventually she arrives at the conclusion that it is impossible to perceive yourself without including outside experience/perception.

 The prologue text was:

When she was observed she no longer existed. Her viewer designed an image for her, compiled a self from fragments, actions, moments they had seen or taken part in, for her to reside within. She became associations, she became habits, she became preconceptions, she became who she was thought to be.

The observers granted her names to connect her with already accumulated knowledge. She was “feminist”, “white”, “female” and she grew into her names. Her beautiful multiverse faltered. The unending, boundless realm of her mind shrunk yearly as the preconceptions spread, like a black cloud over her imagination, leaving her a grey and empty receptacle for their expectations. She started painting her toenails red, remains silent about it, with her shoes on, and began to wonder if her nails then truly were red when no one was aware of it. When she was alone she would take her shoes off to study the varnish and pick at it, leaving flecks of red on the floor. If she forgot about it, what then? Perhaps the varnish was more real than she was, being secret and unnamed.

She tries to create an image with no subtext, and fails, finding subtext even in the words “no subtext”. She abandons the project.

“To analyze is to dissolve.” She states, an obsessive fear of the associations her words and actions cause ensues.

“By describing the subconscious we bring it to consciousness and thus it ceases to be.” She says.

A lover names her “Girlfriend”. Capital G. Her lover knows her best, knows the details of her anatomy, her likes and dislikes, how she is difficult to wake in the morning. He destroys her with his definition of her being, he grows blind.

Realizing that there is no true or false, society having crowned the individual sovereign, she floats free within her own existence, realizing that every right is wrong, every truth a lie and every choice, by and large, irrelevant.

A decision is made. In order to preserve the existence of her self she will go where she cannot be observed.

When the first version was shown it was in a dark and continuously smoke-filled room. The structure was the only source of light, aside from a small lamp illuminating the sign outside. The viewers were asked to enter the structure one at a time and to close the door behind them. Once inside the windows became mirrors due to the difference in light, and you were effectively isolated while still visible to those outside. Inside there were five texts centered around a pillow for the viewer to sit on.

  The texts inside were:

1. 

Definition ends existence.                                                               
By defining a thing we come to see the definition of that thing and not the thing itself.
In naming the subconscious we bring it to consciousness, and thus it ceases to be.
We see the subtext before the surface
We see the signifier and not the signified.

2.
This is my search:
Within the complicated network
of habits, desires, ideals, misconceptions, social scars, pain, hunger, complexes, fears, pretenses, love affairs, hatreds and denials,
there is a core self.
A genetic potential or a soul. That thing which lies still and centered, and which we identify as our “self”
from the moment of self-recognition until our death. Some aspect that can only be observed in stillness, in silence and in solitude, remains within, unobserved. It would disappear through its own description.

3.
 What is necessary in order to achieve an existence, free of preconceptions?

I construct a space in which to isolate myself entirely. I remove those layers of being that no longer seem true or relevant.


Within this space I am
Within yours I am another,
The name you utter is not mine
The image it evokes is not me.

4.
My mind is formed within the structure of language.
I cannot exist within it, I cannot express without it.
I become

signifier             signified
             void


5.
Definition is existence.   
If a thing does not exist in any mind then it does not exist at all,
existence being a matter of the human mind, reality being what we define it to be,
 and perception being the only known truth.

           *Some of the  photos above are taken by the lovely Susanne Sakariassen. Tusen takk. :)

Animations.

Here are some animations, just because I happen to like them.














Also, a link to a William Kentridge video that I'm forbidden to embed..

The Autonomy Capsule 2.

The second incarnation of the autonomy capsule was exhibited in Harstad during "festspillene", a music and arts festival in June 2010, as a part of the exhibition "Take a chance on me".

Many of the texts used were the same as in the previous version (The autonomy Capsule 1), but the installation took on a more trashy, personal look. The concept was the same but the expression was more chaotic. The installation was accompanied by a soundclip by Sigurd Gurvin.

 

This time the project incorporated a piece I worked on during my stay in New York in the autumn of 2009.

It never had a title, but was a kind of alter/fiction dedicated to a woman who I never met, but whose possessions I came across while I was there. She lived and worked in New York, and had recently died at the age of 104. It was such a strange thing to contemplate, all the knowledge and experience a person gains through 104 years of life just being gone. So I started researching this random life of a stranger, trying to find out what was left behind.  

The alter and accompanied text were among the results of that research. Although the text is fictional the subject-matter is based on what I found. The text from the alter is at the bottom of the page.

Because the situation in this exhibition was much more festive than on the previous occasion I dispensed with the rules of use, and rather than focusing on the viewer focused on the fictive inhabitant. I attempted to create an environment reflecting her state of mind. I wanted it to seem like she'd been in there a while, processing her ideas, living there. 

 

The "alter" text was as follows:

I never really asked her any questions, not about her life of where she lived before Mahatten. I never asked how she came to be here, or what her take was on the world. Being small I took her for granted and at face value. Growing older I came to see her almost as a pice of funiture in my expanding world, something I understood the form of and could difinitively name, that I had no need to further classify and found less and less use for. Less need for a familiar lap.

She must have had a life of her own, summer holidays, brothers and sisters, she must have been through sixty years worth of life before I met her. In those days she called herself Betty. I wonder what her wages were, for looking after me all those years? What did she return to when she left our upper middle class opulence?

She lived to be 104. One hundred and four years of exerience, of learning and forgetting, of seeing things change. She saw women get the vote, get jobs, get miniskirts. She saw houses get electricity, then phones, then internett. She saw the dawn of TV then the dawn of MTV. She saw the world turn upsidedown.

The flat is empty, still, stale. Since she went to die in hospital no one has been here. There has been no one to send these three years past, since she walked out on her own two feet, locking the door behind her. So they have sent me to remove what was left, before renovation, before scrubbing her off the face of things.

Around me these possesions. They seem so flat, so irrelevant. What do they reprisent?

As I sift through papers I patch together a stranger. Her name was Betty. Her name was Boy Fong. I find an old bank statement form 1952. On it she has pactices in a childlike scrawl, in a hand unused to western letters, her new signiture, her new name; Betty, betty, betty, down the entire leangth of the envolope. Perhaps Boy Fong is not a easy name for a woman in New York. Yet she reverted to it. It seems like Betty only ever existed between the four walls of our apartment.

She must have had a husband. At some point she becomes Boy Fong Lee, the Lee having been added later in life. But there is no trace of this man beyond a few old letters written in Cantonese, of which only the name and address make any sence to me, being printed in careful english for the US postal system.

I find an old book. “Companion of the night”, the only one still here, though empty shelves suggest that there must once have been others. I suppose she sold them as her sight grew weak, or else gave them away. But this one she kept, perhaps I think, a dirty secret, an old ladies dirty book.

Next to the grimey front window is an old, old chair, upholstered in a muskey green and red rose pattern. As I sit down it sends up a cloud of dry and cloying dust. The book is marked on page 31 by a check dated March 18, 1959. Its for ninteen dollars and ten cents and was never cashed. It is signed David Y. Soon. 

Another pice of a puzzle. I know she must have been liberal minded. Such things my parents would never have stood for, so she will have kept it close to her chest, but the book gives her away. It is a political story in defence of the rights of protitutes. Not terribly well written, but reflected and to the point, only 127 little pages long. On one page, under the word “occasionally” are some words in cantonese in careful pencil script, each line made with even, light pressure to the pencil.

I put the book back down. There is so little here. A rice cooker, some clothes. A mebershipcard for the Tropicana in Atlantic city, she must have liked to gamble. Behind the bathroom mirror, in a blue envolope from the Irving Trust Company, are old banknotes, stuck together by damp, forty dollars. In desperate times, what good are forty dollars? The newest note is from 1963.

An old photo shows her staring at the camera, face forward, looking austere and in some way, recessive, deep within herself. I assume it must be an old passport photo or the like. Another shows her walking away in the background, the main focus of the picture being a group of asian men, looking leasurely on the steps of a building. When I knew her she was always the only asian in sight.

Everything that existed within her, her preception, her experience, her trials, her long and changeing life, is gone. One hundred and four years of life. With no children, no masterpice, no biography left behind. 

 

Many thanks to Monica Anette Svorstøl and Susanne Sakariassen for lending me documentation.

Sub Rosa

Sub Rosa; The secret garden of a schizophrenic interplanetary colonist.   

Sub Rosa was the result of my first winter in Tromsø, and was my first really conscious attempt at uniting text and environment in order to create a visual, nonlinear narrative. It was shown at Kurant visningsrom in the group exhibition "Set the alarmclock baby, don't miss the sun", in June 2009.

The project tells the story of a fictive character, a colonist who finding herself deep in space and far from all things natural begins to grow plants in discarded jars in a hidden corner of the spaceship. It was the story of a human in crisis, trying to recreate some fraction of a lost life. Part of the narrative was expressed through excerpts of the text from Book one & two which were pasted to some of the jars.

The space was closed off, small and dark, the only source of light being the diodes illuminating the plants and a sort of central hub. The viewer entered through a narrow gap to a room filled with glowing jars containing growths in various stages of life and decay. Each jar represented a micro environment, completely dependent on nutrition and light from outside, trapped within a finite space. It had something of the mad scientist and the sadist over it, and at the same time it was naive and curious, compelling the viewer to inspect each jar and its little world within.







The installation was accompanied by a text in the exhibition catalog, which was freely distributed to visitors. The text had a more analytical approach to the work itself, looking at the metaphorical aspect.  

 

Here is a slideshow from when I was working on the project.