FINDING COUNTRY, DOWN CITY STREETS WORKSHOP - KEVIN O'BRIEN

(Photo 1&2 courtesy Gilbert Grace)

Finding Country is an ongoing project initiated by Kevin O’Brien in 2006 and continuing as a pluralist contest between the idea of Aboriginal space (Country), and European space (property) in Australia. Aboriginal Country is excluded from the Australian city and even more so in the derivative architecture. .. The Finding Country position is that this paper is not empty, but is full of what can’t be seen. ... we were asked to do some controlled burning to re-purpose our city grid for half of the population.. here is my rationale..

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3-d tile of A-8 featuring Sydney Entertainment Centre and Chinese Garden.

An explanation of the process for controlled burning

The area is full of cultural spaces, I was talking to Sian Hromek earlier about her work with Firesticks, and how fire is traditionally used to claim cultural spaces, so I use a controlled burning technique to reclaim these areas for communities.

Sand is used as the sculptural material as it is the main component of cement.

Sydney Entertainment Centre takes up almost half of the grid. This will be the site for most of the controlled burning. The Entertainment Centre is burned so all that is left is a skeleton structure. Outdoor cultural events, will now be held here instead, as with the Chinese Garden, tents are allowed to be pitched for nomadic entertainers and travellers.

The controlled burning of the Chinese Garden allows some native regeneration and it is opened up as a camping ground.

This ungentrification of these cultural areas result in 50% of the population in the buildings on the East of Harbor St to move, especially to be closer to their families, during this controlled burning happening through all of Sydney.

Grasses slowly grow between the cracks of the pavement as the open, concreted areas are continually burnt using a high temperature fire. Sculpturally, Paper collage of grasses represent the vegetation that will be regenerated by the fire,

The orange coloured PVA is for the sandstone beneath the roads, that will eventually be exposed.

Coloured Play-doh represents foreign plant infestations that will still grow after the fire, the Chinese Garden holds many Privet trees which when uncontrolled can create a monoculture forest. Hopefully the controlled burning will regenerate the native grasses and trees before the privet has time to regrow

The Artist Is Present - Photo Documentation

Performed from 7.20 pm until 10.00pm on Dec 27, at Other Film Festival 'Institutional Capture' at Boggo Road Gaol, Brisbane.

 

Performance 

Screening:

Photos: Alan Warren and Bryan Spencer

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My father was a screw. He started with seemingly impossible ideals of social change in the Joh era and ended a very cynical, tough as nails, one-punch man. Thirty plus years later in 2014, we find ourselves in a ‘social turn’ of contemporary art,[1] where art is trending towards activism and our conservative governments are selling/leasing off public interests to private concerns. A private company working for profit could soon operate the jail my father worked in. I find myself unable to share my father’s righteous belief in the Law when the Law and (other Institutions like Art Institutions) are increasingly serving private interests and the accumulation of value. Working towards the contrary, other artists and I produce our art within the context of this ‘social turn’ to disseminate ‘the power over’ hegemony into ‘the power with’ community. Without the technocratic skills of hacking, I wish to interrupt the surveillance technology with community concentration. In doing so I ask Art to take a look at itself: what does activism from within the Institution look like, what does it hope to achieve and how can it do so without serving private interests. 

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[1] Anne Marsh. Performance Ritual Document (Melbourne: MacMillan, 2014), 20.

'The Artist is Present' Performance and Screen Installation at Other Film Festival 2014

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This Wednesday night, I present a performance at Boggo Road Gaol (Jail). My work is about discipline, about architecture and surveillance - panopticism - the minority watching the majority. Whereas you may remember my 'Legally Lolita' performance in Indonesia, which also redresses discipline via re-enactments of my father being a Corrective Services Officer, Policeman, Security Guard and father; this performance is more about Institutions and how they instil discipline.

Conceptual Discussion -

Currently our collective life force is shaped and organised by many institutions. Foucault argues the guiding force behind these institutions is the “culture of discipline,” a system of discipline honed within jails, the panopticon/panopticism, the unequal gaze, the observation of the many by the few. [1]  The prisoner could never be sure if they were being watched at any given moment, for one is less likely to break the law, if they believe they are being watched. My ‘The Artist is Present…’ performance and screen work repurposes the architecture of Boggo Road Gaol to redress the ‘unequal gaze’ in surveillance of the incarcerated, whilst at the same time introducing the possibility of psychic interference in surveillance, by sharing a special mental and physical state of intense concentration with each audience member. I sit in a single confinement jail cell and invite the audience to sit with me, one-by-one, in a non-verbal concentrated gaze.

Panopticism (a social theory devised by Michel Foucault) is a central concept of punishment in jails in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries. It is “the general principle of a new 'political anatomy' whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline.”[2] The panopticon is represented by an image of single cells within a transparent, circular cage, with its high towers powerful and knowing; it describes a project for perfect discipline. Practically, it encloses the inmate from companions; it is lit up for the supervisor; the inmate is seen, but he does not see. The inmate is the object of information, never a subject in communication.[3] Hence the major effect of the panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power - “Bentham [founder of panopticism] laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.”[4] The Panopticon ensured the internalization of the disciplinary individuality within the bodies being controlled.[5]

Boggo Road Gaol’s architecture of the historic Number Two Division still holds the panoptic ‘culture of discipline.’ ‘The Artist is Present’ subverts the ‘culture of discipline’ in the jail’s panoptic architecture by opening up the jail cell to 1) holding an intimate moment between two people in a solitary space; and 2) presenting an external, non verbal one-on-one ‘equal gaze,’ opposed to the unequal gaze between the always visible prisoner and sometimes visible warden and 3) opening up the insides and circuitry of surveillance technology.

A one-on-one performance in a place which once confined an inmate in solitary reverses the tradition and function of the architecture of a jail cell. There is no punishment and no need to escape written within the walls, whilst it is also not a meeting place, a muted gaze indicates a place for communal reflection to remember the injustice of incarceration and acknowledge deaths and abuse in custody. 

An equal gaze suggests no hierarchy, no one is physically higher than the other, each person is equally lit, each person is in plain clothes and can see each other fully. This open disclosure of equality is a refreshing experience as we find ourselves herded in institutions by uniformed figures of authority or at worst in a jail, peered at by a visible but unverifiable figure of power. Are they really looking at you? Well, in ‘The Artist is Present,’ I am really looking at you but have no visible signs/symbols of power, in terms of your escape from the jail and punishment, I might as well be invisible..

The ‘culture of discipline’ in jails has evolved - zooming from 1901, when Number Two was built, to now -and panopticism in jails use technology for its surveillance, no longer using architecture. Boggo Road Gaol’s Number Two Division shut in 1989 and was not remodelled.[6] It’s panoptic discipline definitely lies in its architecture, but ‘The Artist is Present’ also redresses the panoptic control of surveillance. Currently in society, panopticism has advanced through technology and we have surveillance so tight we could predict what’s going to happen. The surveillance is hidden but we know it’s there, we have CCTVs everywhere, and even now, private Institutions (not the Government) monitor our purchases and whereabouts (increasingly by self disclosure, like Facebook). The screen work for ‘The Artist is Present’ uses a scattered plethora of deconstructed screens with exposed circuitry to present a recording of ‘The Artist is Present’ press-performance from the day before. In doing so, documenting a staged performance for media, rather than recording real-life transforms the function of surveillance to a dull entertainment in a classic V is for Vendetta, Fight Club anarchist movie plot kind of way. Therefore IRL, the baddies are getting away with it.

‘The Artist Is Present’ wishes to undermine the panopticon’s method of surveillance technology, and brings a handycam and audio recorder into Boggo Road’s Number Two. I believe we can cause spiritual (natural, non-physical) interference with these technologies so that we can see and hear things that the Warden, the Policeman, the Prime Minister, the Miner, the CEO do not see and hear. I believe this electronic interference is only observable post-moment. I have previously tested a group’s ability to manifest a psychic interference in technology.[7] To avoid disrespect and kitsch, no motto/model of any particular former prisoner will be used as a guide for psychic energy. So therefore, the audience is invited to simply sit opposite me. I posit the power of deep concentration between two people is enough to create a disturbance.  In the screen work, the surveillance is monitored for any electronic disturbance in the moment and post-recording.

‘The Artist is Present’ performance and screen work transforms panopticism’s ‘visible and unverifiable’ to ‘invisible and verifiable.’ The panoptic architecture’s and my own power function becomes invisible and the presence of two people at equal gaze, verifiable and re-shown as entertainment rather than surveillance; whilst a deconstructed panoptic technology is used to verify any electronic interference that was invisible/undetected at the time. Punishment turns into an act of psychic and physical creation, an intense physical and mental concentration between two people in a de-comissioned jail cell, in an art Festival in Brisbane, Australia. The subversion of panopticism’s architecture and surveillance technologies is paramount for those concerned with civil liberties in our neo-liberal environment. As we see these methods formerly used by Governments to punish are increasingly implemented in order to ‘manage’ us by Private Institutions in detention centres, schools, art museums, shopping malls and online security.

Physical Description:

‘The Artist is Present’ [Screen 30min] One-by-one I invite the other artists and media in Institutional Capture to sit opposite me in a single confinement jail cell. Our gaze is concentrated and non-verbal. An audio recorder, white noise generator and handy cam are present to document any electrical interference that may occur. The documentation is screened at Other Film Festival ‘Institutional Capture.’

‘The Artist is Present’ [Performance 30min] Audience members are guided one-by-one to sit opposite me in a single confinement jail cell. As we concentrate, I try to psychically manifest an electrical interference in the surveillance equipment that will be post-recording observed. A glitch in surveillance.

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[1] Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977) pp200-228)

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bentham in Michel Foucault 227

[5] ‘Discipline and Punish’ Wikipedia. Accessed Nov 9, 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish

[6] ‘Boggo Road Gaol History’ Boggo Road Gaol. Accessed Nov 9, 2014. http://boggoroadgaol.com/history/

[7] Nicola Morton ‘The Spider in the Machine’ Freerange Vol.8 (2014: 56-64)

A Walk Walk With The Moon

Slow footsteps chasing ephemeral ecstacy,
Cautious conscious repetition for chance outcomes,
Planetary cycles, rubbish bins, shoes that no longer run
Musical connection in the void where words don’t mean a thing
these steps are my void reality wings
so i walk nowhere.

Free Improvised Music. Free Improvised Walking in search of provoking stimuli. The void connects concentric circles of chance. Architectural voids in undustrial wastelands, the heart void, the head void, the home void, all collapsing into one moment.

 "on the streets - be seen - as artists - as the fabric of culture - a fabric of change - a fabric of life- art walk walking art - walking - art” - Michael Mayhew


Released on vimeo click there: 6th June for Psycho Subtropics at Serial Space, Sydney

or with an alternative soundtrack

Of the Space of the Sound Of the Angel's Trumpet - Writing & Video

An experiment with Datura and creating a utopia that doesn't exist and my failed dating rites.
Here Is the video I gave Andrew Wilson to solve


Tea Ceremony to Solve Suburban Disillusionment from nicola morton on Vimeo.

Starts like a romantic comedy, ends…

A normal weekend at herringbone where we do our I Ching sticks, the song that is playing is very important to sian coz she always mentions it when she tells the story (its Boys II Men), I don't remember the song but then she rubs her hands together and says, "the next man that walks in will be nicola's husband". We all secretly think it will be an ugly fat guy but in walks the hottest guy I've ever seen. He has a beard, but then I worry that he is German, because I find those germs so good looking but they really aren't for me. Score! I talk to this guy. He is from nz, likes bright colours, button cuff and has distinct style. This guy is made for me, he puts our navy sports jacket and light blue chinos on hold, he buys a yellow shirt. I love yellow. I put his hold under the name, "nicola's husband"

Next week, He comes back when im on my lunchbreak but has to come back coz there is a fault in the jacket. This time when he comes in I subtly offer him my staff discount, “Coz you seem cool, and my friends never buy anything from here.” He is damn good looking. I have googled him and he has a phd in maths and works in social research. He comes in during the last half hour, I’m at work late on my own. I should have shut the shop half an hour ago, but i stay to chat, i have my bike anyway and cant go on the train, i mention i have problems with authority, He mentions he got a ticket riding his bike thru the mall, are we soulmates???

He has to wait on one of the shirts, it takes 2 weeks to come. He comes in twice looking for me, my workmates leave suggestive messages for me to call him. He finally comes in late again, this time it's a Friday night, Sian is working with me and tries to angle the conversation towards a date. He talks about how he is going to Good Vibrations and what acts he is interested in seeing there, I talk about how last Good Vibrations I saw James Brown, Dee-Lite, Talib Kweli etc. According to Sian, we have broken “Band-Ice” He even talks about a band on tonight at the Press Club but I just can’t take the bait, I am seriously tired. Instead Sian and I talk about our costume party on Saturday night, he suggests we go as an octopus. But we fumbled that conversation, we were both so awkward, maybe I secretly love Sian J

Talking to every male I encountered on the weekend, it became more and more apparent that I fucked up and I needed to text him real soon if I don’t want to sound obsessive. Sian and I wanted to call, but in the end the males said “TEXT!” So I did, I made Kurt help me write the text, I sometimes have trouble keeping to the point. Then I didn’t hear back from him, I turned off the phone. Next day, I turn on phone and realise I texted the wrong Will in my phone. Poor other Will was a bit confused because we had a little history – he wasn’t sure how to interpret the text

The funny thing, is that they both have fantastic beards. So then of course I texted the right Will and he was keen to catch up, he remembered I had a thing for the Fig Daiquiris at La Rouche. And then…

Well that morning I ran into an old woman who last time I saw her, told me I would meet someone that I would fall in love with, and to not despair, I am not too old. She also instructed me on massaging my hands with olive oil to keep them looking young. This time she was dressed in all white with a veil!?!!? And we talked about marriage because I had a huge deep fryer on my lap, it was my gift for my Nephew’s wedding. She thought it was horrible that someone so young could get married. But she told me I was wise, and maybe she would have told me about my husband but then it was my stop.

So Friday night, rocks up, he is late. I am super nervous. All week it has been stormy and I have been dreaming of his handsomeness. Things go ok, we talk about our weekends and he talks about latin music, he is a drummer. Ok so good.. but.. I soon discover Latin music is all about the rules, the maths rules, this guy is structuralist and likes his gender roles ruled by nature. He thinks female journalists should not complain about how other males treat/question females in the media, unless they can offer a fixed solution - if they are just treating/questioning “how women are” then what do they have to complain about. CNN needs to know what Condaleesa Rice thinks of white weddings and ladies will just sit tight when verbally abused on the sports field. Maybe I am a little sensitive, but the conversation continues, I almost run away but then decide we can cope with a meal. But then comes more damned conversation. This time its “what society needs is wholesomeness,” “those reality TV shows where they take kids to the bush is where it’s at,” “hedonism and drug taking needs to be disciplined,” “jogging is a sign of evolution,” “hedonism is acting like an animal” WHOAH.

YES! HE IS STILL KEEN. But no, we are both too busy to meet and both going overseas soon. We probably won’t see each other for 5 months. Or for ever. Fate?