Noli Me Tangere
Slide found in carboot sale during research for "Noli Me Tangere"
Noli Me Tangere was a 2011 commission from the Soundwaves Festival in Brighton to respond to the Brighton and Hove Museum and Art Gallery. The work was experienced as a strange audio guide and inspired by the horror novel The Whisperers by John Connolly that I happened to pick up at an airport to read on the way home. From the exhibition pamphlet:
“When I started Noli Me Tangere, my focus fell on particular objects amongst the glass cabinets and display cases. The shiny surfaces of a whistling kettle; an enamel creamware mug (with the wabi-sabi of a brown crack visible on its lip); an oat and orange Ungaro dress and jacket cut in a 60’s Space Age style; and a glass vase that looked like a distended cat’s eye marble. Returning to the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery for visit after visit, I found my list of favoured objects kept growing and growing. Faced with an impossibility of choice, I shifted from artefacts to atmospheres, from the singular to the plural. I was still interested in getting objects to sound out loud, in revealing their textures and structures to the mind’s ear. But I also wanted to draw in closer to the world that these objects might have inhabited: hearing the processes of craft production, listening to their proper acoustic environment. All that you hear in Noli Me Tangere is counterfeit.
Fake Murano, for example, is a representation of an island to which I have never been, far less recorded. The sounds we hear are ones I captured in Crete, Finland, Japan, France and on the Brighton seafront. Even the craft processes - the hand loom, the metal workshop – aren’t really authentic since the people I recorded were working on a new generation of objects, not those already in the Museum. In An English Pastoral, the ceramic objects that I activate using a guitar pick up aren’t precious at all but were pulled out of my cupboards and shelves. Yet this inauthenticity feels quite right to me. In the gap that opens up between the stretching hand and the out-of-reach object, it is the imagination that rushes in to fill things out, to make things up”. You can hear the tracks from the audio guide here.
“When I started Noli Me Tangere, my focus fell on particular objects amongst the glass cabinets and display cases. The shiny surfaces of a whistling kettle; an enamel creamware mug (with the wabi-sabi of a brown crack visible on its lip); an oat and orange Ungaro dress and jacket cut in a 60’s Space Age style; and a glass vase that looked like a distended cat’s eye marble. Returning to the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery for visit after visit, I found my list of favoured objects kept growing and growing. Faced with an impossibility of choice, I shifted from artefacts to atmospheres, from the singular to the plural. I was still interested in getting objects to sound out loud, in revealing their textures and structures to the mind’s ear. But I also wanted to draw in closer to the world that these objects might have inhabited: hearing the processes of craft production, listening to their proper acoustic environment. All that you hear in Noli Me Tangere is counterfeit.
Fake Murano, for example, is a representation of an island to which I have never been, far less recorded. The sounds we hear are ones I captured in Crete, Finland, Japan, France and on the Brighton seafront. Even the craft processes - the hand loom, the metal workshop – aren’t really authentic since the people I recorded were working on a new generation of objects, not those already in the Museum. In An English Pastoral, the ceramic objects that I activate using a guitar pick up aren’t precious at all but were pulled out of my cupboards and shelves. Yet this inauthenticity feels quite right to me. In the gap that opens up between the stretching hand and the out-of-reach object, it is the imagination that rushes in to fill things out, to make things up”. You can hear the tracks from the audio guide here.
In Arcadia
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In Arcadia was a collaboration with Corrado Morgana. A messy kind of ethnography, it involved setting up a virtual camera in a video gameworld that had been gently hacked to remove some of its display artefacts. A soundtrack - recorded at my allotment - worked to make the apparently pastoral scene into something more damaged. Probably my favourite work, for all its faults, its has had few outings since Corrado and I first made the work in 2008: once at a games conference at Edinburgh University, once at the Audio Extranautes symposium in Aix-en-Provence and once as part of the In Arcadia group show at IMT Gallery in London in 2011.
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"In Arcadia" (2008 -2011) screengrab
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Badges and Placards
"Hate / Love" at Viso Come Territorio (2012), photograph Chiara Caterina
The “Hate / Love” badges began in 2007, with the first design by Ian Noble (RIP). The badges have since been seen at Galerie 7m3 in a group exhibition curated by Valerie Vivancos and Rodolphe Alexis as part of City Sonics 2008; on the ResonanceFM stand at the Frieze Art Fair in 2011 (in a new version by Mark Pawson); and at the launch of the Viso Come Territorio exhibition in San Cipriano Picentino in 2012 (this time designed by Insight in the colours of the municipality). The placards - each displaying a meditation on silence chosen from various sources (De Gaulle, McLuhan, Cage …) - are an occasional project where a placard is made and then attached to a public wall or other surface with little ceremony.
themepark
themepark was a magazine created at the turn of the millenium by Andreas Fjeld, Andreas Lange and Maurice Vandeven. Five editions of paperback format magazines were published where writing, photography and fashion circulated a chosen theme: Violence, Nature, Home, Motion, Economy. It was designed by envision+ (Esther Mildenberger and Brian Switzer) and the Fashion Director was Atlanta Rascher. I contributed articles and interviews to every issue, becoming contributing editor for issue two and then editor for the last three volumes. The original editor, the beautiful soul Andreas Fjeld, became ill and later died in what was - and what remains - a tragedy. Contributors to its pages included: Andrew Cross, Bill Drummond, David Spero, Dan Holdsworth, Harold and Paul Smith, Jonas Mekas, Lisa LeFevre, Lucy Orta, MVRDV, Mark Fisher, NATOARTS, Nigel Bennett, Paul Shepheard, Paul Virilio, RMS, Sabina McGrew, Sophie Calle, Tamara Horbacka, The Yes Men, Tom Hunter and Valerie Phillips.
