Under

On Sunday, I braved the cold to drive out to the edge of London with Tim Bowditch and Nick Rochowski.

Tim and Nick have been taking photos of the M25 - or, more specifically, they have been taking photos underneath the M25.

(A quick note to say that [obviously] these aren't Tim and Nick's pictures - these are, as always, low quality digital photos from my phone)

All around the motorway are underpasses - some of them are small tunnels that allow the road to cross streams, others are more traditional underpasses that bridge small roads or footpaths, and some, like in the above photo, are for farmers to drive tractors between their fields, divided by the M25.

This tunnel had some unique graffiti with a big focus on anal concerns.

 

And the usual hastily sketched cocks.

Tim and Nick are trying to avoid the graffiti - their photos will highlight the material, abstracted nature of the architecture.

But Nick said something which, for me, connected the graffiti to the architecture in an interesting way. He was trying to rub off a chalk mark on one of the walls and he said that the tunnels were like the surface of the moon - any human trace would be preserved for many years, protected from the elements that would normally wash them away.

I was also thinking about "bad" graffiti (tags, lewd comments, drawings of cocks), and how it tells you a lot more about the social history of a place than "good" graffiti (skilful spray-paint work, big colourful letters etc.). Like the EUROZ tag in the photo above. When did the tagger choose his name? Surely before the crisis in the Eurozone? Or is it a comment on the economic situation? If I was a tagger I'd go for RENMINBI (the Chinese currency) in the current climate.

We ended the day here, a large underpass over a river and public footpath. These triangular areas of negative space caught our eyes immediately - unintentional masonic symbols brought about by the extreme functionalism of the architecture.

These are the sort of dead zones that feel almost haunted - the M25 is right above you, you can hear the suspension in the bridge working constantly - echoing, clunking, swishing noises.

From far away the road sounds like the sea. Up close it is more like factory - the noise never ceases, inseparable from the functioning of the motorway. Maybe the noise is the product? Or maybe it is a symptom? The tinnitus ridden ear canal of a giant.

The camera Tim and Nick are using for the project has an achromatic digital back. That means that it can take photos in almost total darkness because it picks up the whole light spectrum, including infrared waves.

The camera takes in a huge amount of visual information, with the surface of the concrete rendered in textural detail that is breathtaking - zooming in on a few hi-res images on the computer is like taking a magnifying glass to the surface of another planet.

The downside (on a cold January night) is that the photos need long exposures - up to an hour. And this is then doubled by the in-camera processing.

On the other hand, this long, enforced habitation of dead space becomes an extreme meditation on the built environment. Squatting in the cold, on a muddy bank, for two hours, certainly focuses your mind on what's around you.

This focused attention is always there in photography - especially landscape or architectural photography. Noticing and planning and understanding the shot you want to take is as important as your technical skill with the equipment.

I suppose it is a sort of enforced mindfulness, or this idea of 'the importance of paying attention' that I have written about before.

Also, the language of photography allows Tim and Nick to talk about embarrassing, romantic ideas like beauty or the sublime in technical terms. The need for a certain depth of field or exposure time is a technical appreciation of the task of capturing such a landscape in one image.

We had to give up on the last shot, it was getting late and they couldn't get the angle that they both understood to be the essence of the picture they wanted. Nick said, 'it's so frustrating - you can see it in your head, but it just isn't there'.

I'd say that this ability to conceive of a unified image that isn't there is one of the basic functions of human understanding. Without it we wouldn't be able to think about ideas that we couldn't directly perceive: like the idea of 'London' as a single place; or 'Me' as a single identity; or the M25 as a single road, circling the city endlessly, chasing its own tail. Round and round and round.

Lars Iyer

Here is a brilliant extract from an interview with Lars Iyer. It perfectly captures the sense of total impotence that encompasses contemporary creative activity, and then turns it on its head, making it the only reason anyone should carry on creating.

Lars Iyer's new book Dogma is out in Febrary. His first book, Spurious, is a masterpiece of adolescent humour and philosophy and you should read it if you like that sort of thing.

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Have you found it possible to make a living by writing the sort of thing you want to, without other work? Do you think there is a place in our current economic system and climate for literature as a profession?
 
Making a living by my writing? No! I have a job, and the writing I do is a sideline, a hobby. I use this belittling word on purpose. My literary endeavours bring in no more than pocket money… In some ways, I deserve to be mocked, not because I carry on writing literature without understand its posthumousness, but because I go on regardless of the very real material proof of its posthumousness!

There is something glorious about Kafka’s night-time writing in his room in his parents’ flat. Something wonderful about his obscurity, about the fact that he published so little when his friends published so much. We can read his diaries and letters and think: there’s a man of integrity! That’s what it means, really means, to be a writer! But our impression is dependent on Kafka’s eventual success, and on a culture, his culture, where there was a potential audience for his work all along.

There is, by contrast, something pathetic about my obscurity. The blog, Writers No One Reads, celebrates forgotten writers whose work is barely known in the English-speaking world. But I’m already a Writer No One Reads, whose work didn’t register sufficiently in general culture to be forgotten. I say this without self-pity, rather with a certain amusement. Nevertheless, it is pitiful in some strong sense. I really am wasting my time... Why bother?, I ask myself. But the challenge is to pose that question in the work itself.

How is that possible? It means, for me, the foregrounding a kind of imposture, not only in what the characters say or do, but in the form of the novel, too. For me, my novels mustn’t look like literature in the old sense. I’m not aiming at producing meta-fiction in the manner, say, of ‘60s American ‘high’ postmodernists. Their work, for me, still shows a belief in the novel. It is still supported by the collective fantasy of the novel, of ‘literature’. There was still a crowd before which they performed their hi-jinks. The experimentalists produced tolerable perversions of the still-sacred Novel, and their works could still be taught in the university.

For me, what needs to be exposed, laughed at, is the fiction of literary autonomy, of l’art pour l’art. For me, the literary novel itself is a fiction, existing through a kind of collective fantasy. In our time, the literary novel has to show its efforts to be itself – its sweat, so to speak. The literary novel must show how it hustles for itself, promotes itself. Because it’s become increasingly apparent that there is no ‘itself’, that the collective fantasy which sustained the novel is breaking down.

It might be objected that this breakdown reveals what was always the case: that novel-writing has always involved a performance of novel-writing — an act of belief, a kind of ritual on the part of literary reviewers, literary publishers, etc. This is true. But, still, it is the moment at which this fantasy reveals itself, the moment at which it breaks down, that is crucial. For me, this is what has occurred since the ‘high’ postmodernity of the 1960s, when it has become clear that all the ludism in the world cannot by itself expose the literary imposture. There is a terrible melancholy to this realisation, I think. It opens no new horizon, no fresh world for literature to conquer. Something really has been lost …

This is what, for me, career literary novelists, who understand literature as a profession, never understand. They believe in what they write, and their publishers believe in what they sell, and the reviewers believe in what they review. Good luck to them! The ‘current economic conditions and climate’ will allow them to thrive for a little while yet …

MILLENNIUM

I'm finally getting down to do some real research for this project at The Royal Standard. I've started reading Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory. Which charts a series of walks done by the writer across London in the mid-nineties.

It's good. He seems less angry than in London Orbital, which was written much later, in 2002. But then again, by 2002 Labour had been in power for five years. Tony Blair was about to throw us into a nine year war in Iraq, and, for a resident of East London, such as Sinclair, the Millennium Dome  was there, just waiting to bring the bile up to the back of one's throat.

Sinclair references the Dome a lot in his writing. For someone interested in the city as a mystical place - with city politics as black magic - the Dome is an obvious touchstone. The Dome is something that everyone remembers for the wrong reasons, and as a signifier for corrupt and pointless acts of government expenditure, you can't get much better. Well, not yet anyway. London 2012 awaits...

Anyway, as I'm reading a lot of Sinclair, I thought I'd walk to the Dome and see if I could sense any of the dark energy being picked up or sent out by those yellow metal struts.

---

To get down to Greenwich foot tunnel I have to walk through Canary Wharf. That place is mystifying. It has its own security force. Not the people in the orange jackets - sure they're paid to stand around and look at you with a beady eye as you take photos. No, the real security are the joggers. The infinite lunchtime joggers.

As I approached the roadside security hut (private land - if you're driving you get checked on the way in. No undesirables - not that anyone would know what Canary Wharf desires, apart from incredibly fluid capital, but how do you fit that in your car?) I saw a guy jogging up and down the road beside Billingsgate Fish Market. Back and forth. Sprinting slowly. He would hit a wall as he got to the edge of the land owned by LDDC (London Docklands Development Corporation). Perhaps he was trying to escape. Needed a run up. Maybe he had one of those metal tags in his feet, like a supermarket trolley with a magnetic security feature. Everyone gets one when you work here.

As I took this photo (there is the Dome, lurking in the background, behind the masonic pillars that mark the edge of the territory [maybe they send out the magnetic signal to stop escapees?]), two more joggers passed me, on lunchtime patrol. Australians. Talking about their Olympic tickets. I imagine Olympic tickets raining down on Canary Wharf like confetti, or torn up £50 notes.

Here is a nice dead zone across the water. I think I can get onto there - maybe something to try when Colin Dilnot comes down to visit me for more research. What would I do there? Perform shamanistic rituals? Sacrifice a Pret a Manger sandwich? Gymnastics? How long would I last before the joggers dived in, swam over and escorted me from the property? Is it in their jurisdiction, or would they bounce back off the LDDC's force field, and watch me from the edge of their Zone, wondering what on earth I was doing and how I could possibly monetise it?

As you get across to South Quay, the money starts to fade away. More fencing, less security. Less brand names. More independent (read: weird) retailers. Faceless warehousey-offices designed by no-namers. Here is a nice altar upon which to perform for passers by - mostly lost tourists and shame faced Canary Wharf workers who live the wrong side of the South Quay footbridge (because who else would live here? Why?).

And here is some fake grass around the base of a tree.

---

Greenwich Foot Tunnel. The lift is out of order (has been for at least a year) - so it is stairs down, and stairs back up the other end. I'm surprised by the amount of drain covers in the tunnel. What are they for? Surely we want to keep the borders pretty tight on this place? And why are there puddles on the floor? Is there something we should be told? Occasional light rain perhaps. Spilled bottles of water. Dogs who can't wait. We hope.

Then along the Thames path for a while, From Greenwich towards Blackwall Point (Points and Quarters, very regeneration-y terms. Don't see them much outside of the yellow signs that attempt to navigate you around a blank world of new build houses and empty streets). Many diversions, because of all the developments - thousands of empty flats. Sorry, luxury riverside apartments. Almost as many flats as there are pubs called The Cutty Sark. Maybe someone should call a meeting. There should be a catchment area around the ship which gives pubs the right to call themselves The Cutty Sark. It gets confusing.

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As I approach the Dome from different angles, I keep seeing the big hole that pierces the side of the tent (For that is what it is, a big tent. Let us not forget.) like a trepanated skull. Maybe it lets all the bad vibes out. The sad John Prescott energies. It lets all the good energies in. The O2 energies. The branded energies of well known food chains. The Cineworld vibes.

 

 

I get to the Blackwall Tunnel underpass.More Dead Zones to colonise. To inhabit. Good places to drink tins of super strong lager and howl at the sky. Exorcise New Labour with Big Society street drinking and sick up the life blood of Peter Mandelson into a discarded traffic cone. Carry it around like an Olympic torch. Pour him back into the river.

 

To walk to the Dome is to miss the point entirely. Why do you think we built all the roads? What was the Jubilee line extension for?

I'm on Millennium Way here. A begrudging pavement finally accepted me after a haphazard road crossing. I went over the roundabout, climbed it like a shit mountain, and dropped onto the traffic-less approach to the Dome.

Fenced off water feature. Everything is still being built. All the time. For ever. Nothing has been finished here since they started building it.

These water features are on Peninsula Square, in front of the entrance to the Dome. They look like they are a mistake. Bad plumbing. Oozing filthy water up from the Thames. Maybe from the drains of the Greenwich Foot Tunnel.

I don't know what this is, but it was humming and no one else was looking at it. Does the Dome have its own  power station? Is it sentient? Maybe it creates the Millenial force field within which the correct '2000' style conditions are maintained in order for the Dome to stay erect.

---

I went into the dome, got my bag searched (Standard. They should have done it when I crossed the border into Canary Wharf). The whole place was empty - it being a Friday morning in January. No big shows. No summer crowds. Putting on a brave face. It was me, the security guards (no joggers), and a few more lost tourists.

There is a big sign advertising the opportunity to download a Kasabian gig that took place on New Year's Eve (2011, not 1999). The band look sad in the photo. Like they know that they are stuck within the Millenial force field, forever failing to create music that sounds like the present. Retro-necro at the Dome. Maybe they never played on NYE. They just ran a tape from a gig in 2000, did some video FX to make them look a bit older and fatter. Richer.

And that was it really. A lot of empty restaurants. A few bars. Oh, and a Nissan promotional 'Experience' where you got to pretend to drive an electric car.

And design an electric car.

And have your picture taken in front of a green screen with an electric car. You got to choose what caption went on your picture. Mine says 'grim'.

Memory Waves

I was in Newcastle for a few days, working on an ARKA group project and surfing the alternate waves of fear and nostalgia that always threaten to drown me whenever I visit the city. Every time I go there it seems smaller. Clumps of memory held together by threads of physical movement.

I am getting ready to do some work in Liverpool with Colin Dilnot, a historian and psycho-geographer who I'll be meeting later this month. We'll be knocking around some ideas for Dialogues, The Royal Standard's education/free school program. Everything is in its embryonic stage at this point, but we'll be thinking about the Situationists and the notion of the Dérive.

I suppose my first connection with psycho-geography (apologies for those who don't like the term, but it is a useful description) was through the works of W. G. Sebald. The Rings of Saturn is my favourite book because it was the first Sebald I read, but also because it dragged me through an East Anglian landscape that I knew from my childhood. This is the natural territory for Sebald's strain of memory travels. Movement is the physical connection of ideas, and walking through your own history (or, having Sebald walk through it for you) is the most obvious way of demonstrating that mode of connection.

So what about Liverpool then? Colin is from Liverpol, and so is David Jacques (an artist from Liverpool who spends a lot of his time surfing the city's great waves of history). Even Daniel Simpkins and Penny Whitehead (who I collaborated with as part of my Royal Standard residency) have lived there for long enough to weave themselves into the fabric of their adopted home. I spent three weeks there in 2010.

How do I access that privileged realm of history when I have so few of my own memories of the city?

After taking part in three residencies (Birmingham, Liverpool, Gdańsk) in the past few years, I've had to think about that question a lot. Why should an outsider get a voice, and what can it say? What is the conversation, and who sets the parameters of the discussion?

I've dealt with it in a number of different ways, but the successes always involved collaboration with the people who know more than me, and are happy to share. I like to piggy back on other people's histories, then mesh them with my own. Maybe that's why I like the techniques of psycho-geography: walking, talking, remembering. Just as you lock in step with the people you walk with, you might lock in step with how they think and start making sense of your journey.

S W I T Z E R L A N D

My new Dogtanion e.p for Tape Club Records is called S W I T Z E R L A N D and it is out now.

You can download it for free from the Tape Club Records website.

And you can come see me play tracks from the album at Catch in Shoreditch on November 9th. 

And below you can watch the video for the first track from the e.p, called Cheap, featuring Kerry Leatham. Enjoy.

More Drawings

Power Cup, pen and pencil on paper, 2011

Chilli Pepper 3D Logo, pen and pencil on paper, 2011

Neon Cross, pen on paper, 2011

Rhomboid 2, pencil on paper, 2011

Recent Drawings

 Black and Yellow Circle, pen on paper, 2011

 Black Cylinder with Yellow, pen on paper, 2011

 Black Glove with Yellow, pen on paper, 2011

 Hindu Peace Sign with Shading (Swastika), pen on paper, 2011

 Just a Little Hindu Peace Sign (Swastika), pen on paper, 2011

 Mobile Phone, pen on paper, 2011

The Number Five, pen on paper, 2011

Medical Robots

Recent Drawings

 British Medical Association, pen on paper, 2011

 Feather Ball Flesh Tunnel, pen on paper, 2011

 Rhomboid, pen on paper, 2011

 Cube with Blue, pen on paper, 2011

Feather Ball 2, pen on paper, 2011

DEEP MEMES

I've been thinking about the utopian elements of technology. Open access to information. Total choice. The ability for individuals to produce content that can theoretically be as easy to find as content produced by large companies. Connected, distributed communities. Non-hierarchical forms of communication.

And I've been talking to people about left politics, and how increasingly, the word most associated with political action is resistance rather than progress. Resistance is reactive, and conservative (in a pure sense of the word).

And I've been thinking about language and it's limits, and about the power of writing to create worlds that are beyond those limits. Using words to describe the indescribable.

And I've been laughing (along with a lot of people) at Blue Labour, Labour's short lived attempt to woo floating voters with a regressive stance on crime and immigration.

And I've been thinking about some previous artworks and describing them as being about the links between political ideology and shame.

And I've been thinking about 'Market Realism' and it's dominance in political discussion. The assertion that market led societies are a reality that can't be challenged along with a simultaneous embrace of thinking that gives more power to the market within society.

And I've been researching into photophobia in plants and in humans.

And I've been searching for pictures of David Cameron next to Thomas the Tank Engine and the bloke from Keane. But all I found was this.

Sorry I haven't Posted in a While

This is both an honest recognition that I haven't written or posted much for a while, but I've been busy in the real world so I think that's ok.

Anyway, this is also a chance to post a link to Cory Arcangel's project called,

Sorry I haven't Posted, "Inspiring Apologies from Today's World Wide Web"

Which is a blog that re-blogs other people's blog posts that have'Sorry I haven't posted...' somewhere in the text.

Ironically, the the Sorry... blog hasn't been updated since November 2010. I think it's time Cory wrote an apology.

Jennifer Aniston

A while back I wrote a story called Friends. The TV Show and it got posted up on the Foolscap Journal.

The story is about a re-make of Friends starring a mixture of real cast members and look-a-likes.

Someone got in touch via the comments at the bottom of the blog post.

> Author : Jennifer Sullivan
> E-mail : jenniferanistondouble@yahoo.com
> URL : http://www.facebook.com/JenniferAnistonDouble
> Whois : http://whois.arin.net/rest/ip/99.41.93.113
> Comment:
> I am a Jennifer Aniston double/look alike. I will play Rachel Green. Cast me.

Check the Facebook page. She is an amazing double. Now I just need look-a-likes for the rest of the cast, a studio and about £100,000 and I can make the artwork described in the story.

The Pale King and the Importance of Paying Attention: PT 2

I possibly had a thought which might link the ideas of paying attention and duty, for which if that makes no sense then read yesterday's post.

So, an e.g.

In The Pale King there is a long section where an IRS employee describes in detail his growing up and being a classically disaffected college student who takes drugs and embraces a sort of affected nihilism that probably is recognisable to all people who have ever been young. The relevant part of this story is that he constantly disappoints his father and also doesn't respect his father's way of life - which is to say conservative and structured and regular and dutiful.

A particular part of the story takes place while the character is staying at his father's house, in between college courses (which he variously fails, or drops out of, or is asked to leave) and his father goes away on a business trip and the character and his friends smoke a lot of weed and watch television and eat junk food and disrespect various wishes of his father re: treatment of furniture + use of kitchen + general cleanliness and the father comes home early and walks through the door and looks around and is obviously disappointed but doesn't say a word and only later on in the character's life does he decode the meaning of his father's face as he (the father) walks in the door and takes in the fact that his son has disrespected all of his wishes.

There are various elements in the 'journey' of the character in this section of the book, but essentially the story is that of the character working out that his father's way of life is not illogical and repressed and ridiculous to the extent that the character thinks it is. This realisation comes about through the character (with the help of recreational amphetamine use) concentrating, thinking directly about, and paying attention to things in the world, out there, beyond his own self, and then using these observations to try and think objectively about the set of assumptions and prejudices that he has mistaken for his own beliefs for such a long time.

And in this section of the book the explicit subject is not only the act of paying attention, but being aware of your own attention, and choosing what to direct it towards. And this perhaps is the thrust of my argument. Wallace, here and elsewhere, is using a post-modern sense of self (a sense of being a fixed consciousness with no direct access to an objective world, along with an acute awareness of how you are seen by other people, whose inner states you cannot confirm the existence of or ever understand, and then the paradoxical sense that you yourself are a construct of your environment - which is the very world you can't really access) to re-appraise the idea of a good, functional society that has supposedly been destroyed by post-modern conceptions of self-hood and individualism.

Wallace seems to be getting at the idea that all this crippling self-awareness that we are lumbered with, which makes us all so cynical about the possibility of, say, altruism, or honesty or even the idea of society itself, is the very thing that keeps the possibility of these things alive. By being truly self-aware and really trying to understand the way things are in the world (not just the limited self-awareness of cynicism and aimless, endless irony), you can reach through and beyond your subjectivity and to the idea of other people's inner states and needs and wants, and the idea of having obligations to those other people, i.e. duty.

For a long time I thought of post-modernism as anti-modernism. A set of ideas that were purely critical and not constructive. More recently I've been trying to understand what a constructive post-modernism might be. Maybe if Wallace had lived longer than he did, we might have seen him map out another way of escaping the impotent cynicism of post-modernism; a constructive use of a deconstructive mode of thought.

The Pale King and the Importance of Paying Attention: PT 1

There are, obviously, many sad things to be said about David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel, published from manuscripts and notes collected and edited after his death - mostly things that are obvious re: unfinished novels in general; suicide and long term depression; genius and/or excellence and expectation.

But there is a smaller, less obvious thing - or perhaps, and at least for me, it is less obvious in that I have just thought of it (whilst reading Oblivion, a collection of short stories from 2004, which is extremely good [so good that in a weird moment of self-reflexive panic at the idea that I was some kind of DFW obsessive {which, I am aware, that by using the acronym DFW I am, obviously, a DFW obsessive to some degree, but then I haven't had a literary crush for some time so I feel like that is ok, ok?} I sort of forcibly criticised the idea of his genius by thinking 'Yeah, not every thing he has ever written is genius, some of it is only excellent'].).

And that thing is that I think I have just clocked what Wallace is describing, or getting at in almost every piece of fiction and non-fiction that he wrote. And also that isn't the thing, really. Really the thing is that The Pale King feels like the novel that could have addressed this thing (that he was getting at) directly, head on, with Wallace realising that he was addressing the thing, and really doing it in a purposeful way, and that the direct addressing of the thing would have been so wonderful to read (in its completed form - which is certainly not what The Pale King is.) and also would have made the next period of Wallace's writing so exciting to read.

And the thing that The Pale King addresses directly, and all his other writing addresses in some way or another is this: the importance of paying attention.

What's funny (for me, not for you, and even for me only funny in a sort of 'revelation of ignorance' way rather than 'enlightening and humorous' way) is that it was only half-way through a story in Oblivion called, Good Old Neon, that I realised the thing about The Pale King and paying attention, which means that I probably wasn't paying very much attention when I was reading The Pale King.

So in Oblivion there is a passage about a man who is going to kill himself and he keeps having these profound/banal thoughts about how this is the last time he will ever look at such and such a thing before he dies, and how this is the last time he will do such and such a thing before he dies etc. etc. And this passage, obviously, is about paying attention to things, but is also handled by Wallace in a way that belies the amount of attention paid by Wallace in the writing of the passage. And this confluence of subject matter and style made me think about The Pale King again and about how some of the more... dense sections of the book are about people whose job it is to concentrate on things for long periods of time and how this ability to concentrate on things is the product of/creates the conditions for, psychological states which are possibly the nearest thing to transcendence or a full expression of human consciousness or something equally spiritual sounding that probably no-one wants to talk about directly because of possible cringe worthy implications of talking about things like spirituality and transcendence and full expression of human consciousness.

There is a morally conservative nature to a lot of Wallace's writing, which before now I think I forgave him for because I enjoyed reading him so much, but, actually maybe it is this morally conservatism that is central to his writing, and maybe I only noticed it when I disagreed with it's conclusions, or perhaps when I thought he'd pitched it a little bit too sentimentally for my tastes or whatever.

And this attention he pays to paying attention is, I think, the core of that moral conservatism (we don't have to call it that, if you don't want to - discomfort with the idea of conservatism [rather than the detail of proposals that are properly defined as conservative] is understandable. I'm sticking with the phrase moral conservatism, but if you like you could call it a 'respect for traditional values', or a 'defence of political and societal proposals stemming from enlightenment thought'), because Wallace seemed to be writing towards a 1:1 authentic depiction of society, which is to say, an honest appraisal of what societies (such as America. I hope it goes without saying that Wallace would [hopefully] have never dreamt of believing he could write for that which he does not know) need in order to function, and need to be honest about needing, in order to progress (with all the caveats about the ideas of 'function' and 'progress' that obviously come along with these words).

As in, in The Pale King, he is trying to describe and depict the total denial of individualism that bureaucracies like the IRS have to impose on their workforce in order for their workforce to do the work the bureaucracy needs them (the workforce) to do. And how for some people this sort of work is a calling of some kind, as in, they feel themselves drawn to work which is totally necessary and incredibly boring. And but for some/most people it is not a calling, but it is still totally necessary (the job's existence is) and incredibly boring. But either way the work needs to be done for society to function and if we want to be 'good citizens' who can constructively criticise the society we live within, then we need to recognise that certain things that are necessary to society will always be anathema to Modern and Post-Modern ideas of the centrality of the individual. This is the idea of duty. Something that needs to be done, not for personal gratification or self actualisation, but for other reasons. Reasons you possibly don't understand, and are possibly questionable (and part of duty is to question the reasoning of the reasons the dutiful act needs to be enacted).

Now I'm finding it hard to reconcile these two ideas of duty and paying attention, which seem to be the core things I'm writing about. And maybe this is because this is what Wallace was struggling with in The Pale King or maybe I just haven't got the intellectual machinery to work it through.

And actually, I think I'm going to leave it there

a) because I want to think more about these two ideas of duty and paying attention before I write any more.

b) because part of thinking about these ideas is the recognition that perhaps they don't coincide with any sort of concluding, revelatory force and that drawing a conclusion right now, simply because this is the sort of time where I would normally draw a conclusion would be a classic case of not paying enough attention.

Read Part 2 of this post here.

Borges - lectures and film

UbuWeb have put up a series of lectures given by Jorge Luis Borges in 1967.

By then he was almost totally blind, so he gave the lectures without notes. He holds the audience rapt, making jokes and constantly referring to his limited knowledge (which makes him sound graceful, if a little disingenuous).

There is also a documentary film about Borges, made in celebration of his centenary. It looks awful.

The player will show in this paragraph

More Recent Drawings

 Design for Pissing Machine, Red and Blue, pen on paper, 2011

EXCLAIM, Totem, pen and correcting fluid on paper, 2011

Feather Ball, pen on paper, 2011

Old Man with Flowers, pen on paper, 2011

Pyramid, pen on paper, 2011

Post-Industrial Revolution: Info-Dump

I've made a new video for the Post-Industrial Revolution show. It will be called The Politico Sexual History of Patrick Anthony Harrington.

It is a new work, but in a style I have used before.

Here is a previous example of this style of work, it's called Oh Sah Mah (2009).



I think of these works as Info-Dumps. They are made entirely of found material. In Oh Sah Mah, the videos are from Youtube, the text is from a book by John Gray, and the voice is an online text-to-speech reader.

Although I've re-edited these components and put them together as a (vaguely) coherent piece of video work that I see as art. I feel like I'm doing similar work to countless, unnamed (well, I don't remember their names...) Youtubers who have been re-mixing found material for years.

Here is a 10 minute(the maximum length allowed on a regular Youtube video) loop from an episode of The Simpsons, uploaded by ashwilliams123 in 2009.



The arbitrary nature of Youtube videos reminds me of private jokes - shared memories of things that were once funny. That's why I started making the Specific Cultural Reference series of videos. Like this one.



This is like a private joke that no one ever made. I just thought it was weird how Frankie Dettori used to have a branded line of tinned goods - tomatoes and chickpeas. You don't see them in the shops anymore, and you can't find any reference to them online. So I made this video as a sort of monument to what seemed like a weird moment in the history of a public figure. (See more of the videos here, if you google hard enough you might be able to work out the references).

Again, the idea is to act as an observer and editor, selecting references and source material according to a set of obvious search terms and a knowledge of my subject.

The obviousness of the material, colliding with the obscurity of a lot of the narratives is important. Here is a video I made last year with Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins called Disruptive Histories: Tatlin Tower



This is less of an Info-Dump - i.e. the story being told was based on real events, told by Penny and Dan and edited by myself. But the video is interesting.

When I show this video, people often ask if I made the inflatable Tatlin Tower. To me it is pretty obviously a video from Youtube. If you search 'Tatlin Tower' on Youtube, it comes up on the first page of results - but people don't necessarily know that.

The internet makes information completely available for those willing to seek it out. Otherwise, information just sits there, like dirt or rocks. Information is an object, it has depth and weight and just like an object it exists without us needing to observe it.

Sometimes I feel like the guy out of Nausea, but instead of being made to feel sick by the sheer physical presence of objects, it's all the information I could be accessing that makes me feel sick.

When I start a project I like to research, but research is endless - the internet makes it theoretically easy to access information, but sifting through that information and putting it together as a coherent history is incredibly difficult.

So that's where an Info-Dump comes in handy, just select the weirdest shit you can find, and mash it all together.

And if all else fails, just watch all the remixes of 'Keyboard Cat' (after watching the original of course).