Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

Receive/Transmit Process (eg. amplification), transform, edit, reconstitute Modulate (parasite it, make it a carrier for some other signal) Interfere (disrupt, destroy) Repeat, split, divert Multiplex

There is no need to add art to walking. Walking already contains its own dimension of poetry. Practices such as the Situationst derive and psychogeography, for all their continuing charm, tend to suggest that just plain walking is not enough … Continue reading →

The French philosopher, Jacques Ranciere, describes politics as “the transformation of the sensory fabric of ‘being together’”.1 In this manner, he conceives politics in strongly aesthetic terms; it involves the redistribution of socially-configured sensible experience. Ranciere argues that possibilities for … Continue reading →

Alan Kaprow describes his ‘activities’ as having a paradoxical relation to art.1 They involve him performing everyday activities, such as brushing his teeth, but without any thought of the art institution – indeed without any particular thought of art at … Continue reading →

I need to speak more clearly about the relationship between art and aesthetics. I am tending to either blur the distinction or insist upon it very strongly. My general view is that art represents an institutionally-configured sub-set of the aesthetic. … Continue reading →

How are we to make sense of the relation between images and interference? On the one hand, it would seem, we are faced by the spectre of a vast and endlessly proliferating machinic economy of the image, in which precisely … Continue reading →

[jottings at Melb airport] Don’t really get the notion of objects without subjects. How can you think object and subject separately? They form a logical pair. Just saying that there are only objects without subjects does not solve anything. You … Continue reading →

Consistency is the death of thought.

Kant speaks of the unknowable thing in itself. This describes the thing’s alienation from the apriori – from the interiority of the categories of rational thought. Knowledge can recognise similarities and differences between rational categorical modes and the stuff of … Continue reading →

Working with electronic media involves a contract with oblivion, nonetheless still weird to discover old stuff that survives. Was copying old VHS tapes to DVD when I came across a number of audio tracks that I recorded in the late … Continue reading →

So at one level I reject the idea of a critical art – an art that stands outside life, engaging in interference, subversion, etc. Yet, at the same time, I also reject the idea of an art that blurs the … Continue reading →

Just watched Pare Lorenz The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937). Two pieces of compelling New Deal (Farm Security Administration) propaganda – beautifully photographed, with poetic expository narration and wonderful music scores (Virgil Thomson). I am … Continue reading →

Some weeks ago, in the reserve beside our house, this mattress appeared as a makeshift bridge across Byarong Creek. At various times I have considered dragging it out of the creek, but, with no clear strategy for disposing of it, … Continue reading →

Why pursue these dusk images of clouds? Especially after the brightest hues have faded, after red passes into pink, purple and blue; after darkness itself becomes tangible? Why portray them above the silhouette of parks, trees, hills and suburban roofs? … Continue reading →

Another dusk image – once again legible in terms of traditions of Romanticism…and, no doubt, photographic cliche. But no wish to assert the originality of this image. On the contrary, what interests me is that it is so easy to … Continue reading →

The start of a well-used path in a gully off Gipps Road. It heads up through steep bush to the old coal mine. The path used to be narrow and follow a single, devious line, but has recently broadened and … Continue reading →

A very strange sequence of events. Three days, three injured animals. Two days ago I’m entering the shower early in the morning and I see a composite shape stumbling through the small park beside our house – a small brown … Continue reading →

For many years I was deeply committed to programming-based projects. I could perhaps term them experimental, artistic projects, but I was never quite sure. They were certainly always equally engineering projects. The instrumental side of things was part of the … Continue reading →