Author Archives: brogan

In November last year I wrote of an unfinished walk. My aim was to head up Mt Nebo, around to Mt Keira and then back down. Unfortunately the track had become overgrown in the jungle section beneath the old coal … Continue reading →

Mt Nebo – MtKeira circuit: Water tower: six mins Mt Nebo top clearing: 14 mins Four ways gate: 19 mins Waterboard gate: 24 mins Rough trail start: 30 mins Steep drop: 40 mins Coal mine: 52 mins Robertson lookout: 58 … Continue reading →

Art does not describe an order of phenomena, but rather an associated characteristic or quality of phenomena. It does not take its place in a concrete taxonomy. There is nothing that is substantively (and exclusively) art or not art. Art … Continue reading →

Tuesday – early morning, moon.

Saturday – late afternoon.

Full circuit again: Water tower: six mins Mt Nebo top clearing: 14 mins Four ways gate: 18 mins Waterboard gate: 23 mins Rough trail start: 29 mins Steep drop: 39 mins Coal mine: 49 mins Robertson lookout: 54 mins Byarong … Continue reading →

My mind is like the autumn moon Shining clean and clear in the green pool. No, that’s not a good comparison. Tell me, how shall I explain?1 Han-shan (or Hanshan) was an early Chinese Buddhist poet writing during the T’ang … Continue reading →

Very careful. Something about flat ground does not suit me.

Guy Debord, in a very Platonic fashion, contrasts the realm of images (within the context of consumer capitalism) to the terrain of authentic experience. Baudriallard imagines he has taken an additional step with his conception of the simulacrum – no … Continue reading →

I distinguish walking from art, but not as things that are simply opposed. In all kinds of ways the two activities – the two discursive fields – intersect. They both offer the promise of freedom. They both enable a space … Continue reading →

What is the relation between image and signal? Are the image and signal evident at once, or does the recognition of one entail a shift in attention away from the other? Traditionally, the mimetic image is associated with a space … Continue reading →

Let’s try again. At one level an image can be regarded as a type of signal. This is in terms of conceiving the signal in the general sense of something that behaves like a sign – that works to communicate … Continue reading →

Very short, modest run around the oval. Large flock of easily disturbed egrets.

Multiplexing, the process of combining multiple component signals within a single overall signal, depends upon a more fundamental feature of electronic signal processing, modulation. Modulation involves varying one or more properties of a carrier signal via a modulating signal. Aspects … Continue reading →

At the end of his 1959 film, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, Guy Debord describes the limit that his film has reached, which takes shape as the limit of film as … Continue reading →

The notion of interference – art as a mode interference – is associated with the conventional avant-garde self-image of critical subversion. The latter envisages that there is something like an unreflective signal – cast in terms of notions of power, … Continue reading →

So interference can appear as a mode of resistance, a means of integrally disrupting and undermining some larger signal flow. This is, as I say, its heroic guise. But interference can also be regarded in less heroic terms – as, … Continue reading →

The last couple of days have been dark and wet.

Of course, if I don’t choose interference as a strategy, it is partly because my aim is not to critique walking, running, etc. It is to reflect upon these activities – observing them, pursuing them, articulating them elsewhere. Here my … Continue reading →

Dropped D at train early this morning. Still dark when I got back, but clear signs of an unsettled day ahead. Reddish tinge on the dark clouds behind Mt Keira. May as well take a few photographs. May as well … Continue reading →

Alongside the various conceptual terms (image, signal, interference, multiplexing, etc.), and the various more or less subjective activities (walking, running, climbing, etc.) there are also the set of specific sites (backyard, local park, escarpment, etc.). The escarpment – the escarpment … Continue reading →

Just finished teaching a subject (with Lucas Ihlein) called Social Intersections. The aim was to review traditions of socially engaged art practice, from Dada and Surrealist efforts to recast lived experience to contemporary experiments in ‘social practice’ linking art to … Continue reading →

In what sense do the Jodi SOD game modifications interfere with the Wolfenstein 3D engine? They interfere with the engine not in order to fundamentally disrupt or disable it, but in order to fork it elsewhere. Strictly speaking, the engine … Continue reading →

My concern is not to represent walking as art, but rather to gaze sidelong at an activity that is irreducible to art – that exceeds art. The point is not to merge art and walking, but rather to find means … Continue reading →

The second volume of Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, published in 1961, is famous for positioning the field of everyday life as a vital social and political concern.1 Turning away from the typical political-sociological focus on the sphere of … Continue reading →