“revolt, she said” presented by Wylde
Symposium:
- ISEA2016: 22nd International Symposium on Electronic Art
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More presentations from ISEA2016:
Session Title:
- Germs - (Re)volting data
Presentation Title:
- revolt, she said
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Dodie Bellamy’s essay “The Feminist Writers Guild”, describes her experience with a short-lived activist group in relation to Julia Kristeva’s concept of “tiny revolts”. Bellamy writes: “Need the success of a political group be measured by its impact on a larger social order? What about the ways it transforms the lives and psyches of its members –their tiny revolts—are they not profound?”. Revolt she said, revolt.
For this paper I will take these this idea of ‘tiny revolts’ as a starting point to address, mongrelised revolting data within some of my recent video works. I will discuss recent work that addresses amongst other things, ideas relating to the feminine écriture, pleasure, monstrosities and madness within practices of art writing and video installation. Anger is of little importance. The presentation also draws on Deleuzian concepts of assemblage and multiplicitous attractions and influences –inflections through my video works. Assembled edits and cuts within my recent video work and writing are rendered both exact and invisible, inciting both problems and provocations and ‘tiny revolts’. Identity is dead. Processes of performative assemblage, internet searches and Youtube browsing are constants through recent work; as a both a critical engagement with postproduction and the mediated. These processes, also act as a critique of Big data and the inaccuracies of decision making.
In this paper I links discuss links between ‘creativity’ and trends/un-trends, of the internet and the mediated in the fabric of everyday lives. Before the internet, in an interview, televised after his death, ‘L’Abécédaire’, Gilles Deleuze discusses with Claire Parnet the crucial link between creativity, the very possibility of thinking, and animality, through the practice of être aux aguets (being on the lookout) for rencontres (encounters). The best of Deleuze can be found on the Internet for sure. I discuss ‘L’Abécédaire’ (1988–1989) and practices working and thinking through performative assemblage(s) of browser doings, apparatus or equipment structuring’s, rhizomatic unfolding’s, nonhuman historiographies, and philosophies. I introduce as a response to these ideas, the artworks ‘A as in Animal’ and ‘Enflamma Diagra’ these works collide reverse path tracings; dissonance, discordance and difference, bringing into contact amongst other things; keeping fit with Donna Haraway, Derrida, blue and green screen special effects and spy mission project ‘Acoustic Kitty’. Emergent indeterminate properties pervade both sound and image. This approach articulates activities of tiny revolt, accumulation, arrangement and movement that call to attention processes, which are improvisatory as, expanded critical and aesthetic tactics.
Through this process less, emphasis is placed on observation, representation and subjectivity. Articulations stutter between different intensities, intensities that include, over-saturation of colour, shimmering substances, nondiegetic sound and trans-disciplinary couplings that resonant a rubbing up with the non human. The paper discusses how these video works are shaped conceptually by site and the context of peripheral indifferences. Software pre-sets and preconditions are cut with modalities of classification and taxonomy that flicker with continued involuntary repetition of sounds and image. ‘The (female) cat breaks the fruit bowl the cubists spend their time hoping to glue it back together’.
