 |
 My 2001 online necro-micro fiction 100 BLACK BOXES has been reborn as a blog; one hundred words by one hundred different characters about the moment they died.  
This book, published by Art Editions North and English Heritage, features an interview with me and critical text on my Phantom Power films, along with some nicely produced images from them. "Lavishly illustrated" is the appropriate cliché. The book's called The Berwick Gymnasium Fellowships: An Archival Record and documents the work of me and all the other Berwick Fellows from the beginning of the scheme in the early 90s. It's now available from your local art book shop or from our evil overlords at Amazon. When I do talks, workshops or readings, people often ask me what I'm reading or what I'd recommend to them. Now anyone who's interested can find out which books, films and other media I've been impressed by recently. (NB: Only partially an attempt to stop people asking me these things...)
_Input:
 The Video Vortex Reader is a collection of texts about online video, with an essay by Broadcast Yourself curator Sarah Cook discussing works from the recent exhibition, including my Nowhere Plains webcasts. The book is available either in printed form or as a PDF download from Amsterdam's Institute of Network Cultures.  
My most recent book Uncanny Valley (ISBN 978-1-4092-1113-6) is available as a print-on-demand title and PDF download. It collects most of my published short stories from the past ten years or so, a few from the now offline The Nothings fiction project, plus several completely new and previously unpublished ones. You can get it at book shops and worldwide at online stores including Amazon, but it's still cheapest and easiest to buy it directly from the link below. You can preview some of the stories by going to the fiction page at this site. BUY THE BOOK OR DOWNLOAD VERSION OF ‘UNCANNY VALLEY’ HERE. A book of images from my 2006-2007 residency and digital video installation Three Times True was published in August 2007 by the Genomics Policy and Research Forum at the University of Edinburgh, and launched at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh during the Festival. You can obtain copies of it from Amazon.
I am a writer and artist, or an artist and writer... sometimes both. The work I make for publication, performance, broadcast and installation is often “subversive” (SFX), at times “startling” (The Independent) and occasionally even “fascinating” (The Times). Scroll down for news, updates and a peek at what I've been reading, watching and listening to this month.
 VIDEO INSTALLATION PHOTOGRAPHY FICTION INFORMATION Veuillez me contacter si vous voudriez des informations sur mon travail en français. Treten Sie mit mir bitte in Verbindung, wenn Sie Informationen über meine Arbeit auf Deutsch möchten.
_Real World:
_Elsewhere:
BOOKS: HISTORICAL SATIRES AND THE PRESENT
At the moment I think we're all in need of some intelligent and calm perspective, and we're certainly not going to get much of that from the profitable scaremongering of the news media and advertising industry. They're not books, but Chris Morris' current affairs satires Brass Eye and The Day Today were prescient ten years ago and seem almost restrained now with their manufactured moral panics and the smug, vapid nonsense vomited up on cue by Collately Sisters at the financial desk. The strange thing about the best satire is that many of the specific references and inspirations fall away over time, but the skeleton still has equal or greater power because all satire is basically attacking the same, eternal thing; the folly of humanity. It's both amazing and depressing that you can read the ancient Roman Juvenal's bitter Satires on venal politicians or fame-hungry celebrities parading around in see-through togas and it still all makes perfect sense two thousand years on. Britain's expenses-fiddling, public prude/private porn hound, surveillance-crazed Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, or Britney Spears' latest "accidental" paparazzi upskirt shot are nothing new and they'll occur again. Talking of the Home Secretary and the current British government, they seem to be using 1984 as an aspirational script rather than as a depressing cautionary tale. Check out the recent ad campaign urging us to rat on our neighbours if they have the temerity to look foreign or do anything out of the ordinary; it doesn't take much to imagine these posters pasted on the walls around Winston Smith's neighbourhood. Orwell's other work of timeless genius is Animal Farm. Again, this arose from his very specific disillusionment with the Communist movement and the Stalinist turn taken by the Soviet Union, but the "all are equal, though some are more equal than others" tautology at the heart of the book can be clearly seen in the contemporary world around us. The grandaddy of all satires in English is of course Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (make sure you get the unexpurgated, scatological adult version). It's one of my favourite books and influenced two works of my own: LPT BNB GDD LGN JPN and Nowhere Plains. Nobody knows very much now about the Tory/Whig conflicts, Hanoverian dynastic issues or personal grievances that inspired the book, and I doubt that many people care or need to know. What we're left with instead is a caustic and at times hilariously crude and misanthropic attack on the stupid and ignorant. Half the world's current bloody conflicts make no more sense than the egregious idiocy of Swift's Lilliputian Big Endians and Little Endians, warring over the proper end of a boiled egg to crack first, further divided into mutually opposed sects of high heel wearers and flat shoe fanatics. Swift clearly expresses his disdain for such small-minded people by having Gulliver piss all over the royal palace of the miniature hate mongers. If you're feeling the urge to do something similar right now, I recommend spending some time with these highly intelligent and righteously angry authors. As Juvenal wrote, for somebody with their eyes and ears open "it's hard not to write satires."
FILMS
Miike Takashi: Sukiyaki Western Django Miike’s most stylish and enjoyable film yet is a gleeful mashup of classic literature about 12th century Japanese inter-clan warfare and the spaghetti westerns of Sergios Corbucci and Leone, with splashes of Miike’s own totally ridiculous black humour. Shakespeare, Hokusai and Kurosawa's samurai films also get thrown into the anachronistic mix. The Japanese cast perform in English with varying degrees of success, but even this limitation is used knowingly and to great effect; it’s a witty call back to the blatant postproduction dubs and ludicrous lip-syncs of their Italian predecessors. Even some of Miike’s best films have production values that could at best be described as flat and documentarian, at worst amateurish and slapdash, but SDW’s cinematography, colouring and production design are interesting by any filmmaker’s standards. The costumes are among the best I’ve seen in any recent film; an inventive fusion of authentically filthy 19th century frontier Americana, squeaky clean Yoyogi Park cosplayer, and street urchin refugee from some kind of disgraced idoru boy band, all of it worn with a parodically macho swagger familiar from Miike’s numerous yakuza films. Even a prologue featuring a mercifully brief attack of fanboy Quentin Tarantino’s “acting” can’t sink this film. Na Hong-Jin: Chugyeogja (The Chaser) I’ve said many times before that you need to get a long way from Hollywood if you want thrillers that thrill and horror that’s horrifying; here’s another great example of original storytelling and genre commitment from South Korea. The chaser of the title is a pimp who grudgingly, painfully recovers vestiges of his own morality and decency in the process of tracking down several prostitutes he’s sent out to clients, only for the women to vanish. Kim Yun-Seok’s well calibrated slide from callous, belligerent bully to hysterical lone crusader is all the more remarkable given that feature films are usually shot non-chronologically; his face and body seem to have physically altered by the end of the film, almost to the point where it could be two actors in the same role. As one might expect, there are some harrowing scenes of abduction and violence in this film, but I think that’s as it should be if such scenes are going appear at all. Puritan America clearly disagrees, deeming images of people being riddled with bullets or dissected on autopsy tables suitable for twelve year olds, but squirming at the idea of two men kissing, or the sight of a normal woman who doesn't look like she's starving to death and entirely made of plastic simultaneously. The Hollywood remake that's regretably imminent will probably turn this into another misogynist torture porn travesty for popcorn-munching adolescents, which is the polar opposite of where the Korean filmmakers’ intentions and interests lie. Three new stories in the June edition of PULP.NET. You can also check out the huge archive of short stories from the past six years, my own Multi Medea and Googlehead among them. These two stories are also in my printed short fiction collection Uncanny Valley. Pulp.Net's first LitCamp in September 2008, with London Metropolitan University and Lulu.Com, was very successful. Thanks to all the writers and industry people who attended and participated.  Recent additions: Video With National Characteristics is now available to watch online. A new page for LPT BNB GDD LGN JPN, a short animated film inspired by an unusual combination of Gulliver's Travels and Aleister Crowley; the Great Beast gets his parka on... Watch my collaboration with Joe Magee, Hypnomart, in full online at the Animate Projects site or at Channel 4's 4mations site; you can read more about Hypnomart here. There's a new page for the films/video installation I made in late 2008: Taxonomy (Some Attempts at Racial Discrimination) and Racial Discriminator. New page for the first of my nocturnal live art/storytelling/live roleplaying events, which took place in Yokohama, Japan: Kitsune Yoru (Fox Night).
The first few images from an animated project in development: Seijou Ôkisa Kaiju [Normal Sized Monsters]. All new Photography page. Recent exhibitions and publications: Kitsune Yoru (Fox Night) at Dislocate 08, Yokohama, September 2008. Scroll down or check the appropriate page for more details.  
June 2009 Update:
|
 TOP OF PAGE - VIDEO - INSTALLATION - PHOTOGRAPHY - FICTION - INFORMATION |
