A few months ago I sprained my ankle. I kept checking it, to see how it was swelling and discolouring. As the day wore on, I saw it grow to the size of a separate appendage, bulging out from the normal line of my ankle. The flesh became tighter, like a sausage about to burst, […]
Michelle Mantsio
Sarah Aiken ‘Set’: Prestidigitation or so I like to imagine
An effective architectural plan can realise through floor plans and elevations a solid three-dimensional building. We imagine it forming in our minds and in that moment qualities of abstraction occur. Once initiated in this trickery, we can carry it with us anywhere. Might we become trained in our capacity to imagine more, to handle more? […]
Athens ‘House of Truth’ and ‘Hang ‘Em High #1’
At Documenta 12, 2007 as part of the living newspaper Chimurenga (Cape Town), editor Ntone Edjabe created DJ sets as performances called a House of Truth. Borrowed from a drinking pit in the old Kofifi, where the makers of the infamous Drum magazine gathered nightly for informal seminars with Can Themba as resident deconstructor, at the […]
Jonathan Nichols plays David Morse and Viggo Mortensen
In 1991 Sean Penn directed his first film, The Indian runner. It is a story about two brothers. Viggo Mortensen plays the charismatic violent younger brother and David Morse plays the stoic gentle older brother. The film was set in the 1960s, but its sibling themes are timeless, timed well and present a time that […]
Typesetting
When something new is coming through, I click my fingers. My thumb holds straight as my middle finger bends curving off and against it. Pressing to connect—straight lines and curves. The sound doesn’t really matter. It is to create tactility, to physically remind myself that the timing has changed, bringing forward a syncopated new speed […]
Don Celender and The Kitchen
Portraiture study If you could have your portrait painted by a famous artist of the past, or present, whom would you select? Why? Don Celender Picasso. Because my eyes are on one side of my nose. Herb Caen Don Celender surveyed part 2 comprises series of mail-out art, where Don Celender mailed out questionnaires to […]
Naval gazing: The busy beaver Turing machine and Justene Williams
In computability theory, a busy beaver is a Turing machine that attains the maximum ‘operational busyness’ (such as measured by the number of steps performed, or the number of nonblank symbols finally on the tape) among all the Turing machines in a certain class. (Wikipedia) With a beaver-like ethic, Justene Williams’s seven small monitors in the […]
Gotta dance
Tarantism by Joachim Koester is a film prefaced on letting go. Bodies writhe and lash around the screen in attempts to release themselves. Watching these photogenic bodies move around, we are hypnotised by the rhythmic metronomic projector throwing up the images. Hypnotic trances, when working well, open up sideline spaces, enabling the focal point to shift […]
You need a bad operation
As Dr Octagon (aka Kool Keith/Dr Dooom—all personas fabricated by American rapper Keith Matthew Thornton) said, ‘you need a bad operation’. This was just before he gruesomely cut the body open, with ensuing sounds of screams, blood spurts, farts and confusion. Robin Hungerford’s video, The fix, showing at Bus Projects in the exhibition Thank you very much, is a […]
Falling into a hangover. Don’t show images fast
So I’m wondering … I was in Greece recently talking to two brothers about the situation there, and they presented Sweden as a utopia. Social democracy. It worked. Did it work? Could it work over a sustained period of time? How might you get some? One month later I was in Klaipėda, Lithuania, at Falling […]