Satellites Programme 2014 by Collective

Satellites Programme 2014

6 Foreword 8 Catrin Jeans 14 Kathryn Elkin 20 marie Michelle Deschamps 26 Matthew richardson

30 collette rayner 36 dane sutherland 42 laura yuile 48 biographies 50 image credits 52 colophon

Foreword

2014 marked an exciting transition for Collective. It was the first full year of exhibitions and events at our new home in the City Observatory on Calton Hill. Refurbishment of the full City Observatory site is still in its development phase but we have been busy getting to know our new site and creating a diverse programme that responds to these unique surroundings. The walled complex that Collective is now based in, houses the City Dome and City Observatory, which were designed by William Henry Playfair in 1818. The City Observatory is designed in the classical Greek style and was a central feature during the Enlightenment period in Edinburgh. There still remains a charged atmosphere on-site, where the excitement of early scientific advances and the legacy of the Enlightenment can be felt. The make up of the site has allowed Collective, for the first time, to simultaneously produce and present multiple new commissions through the Observers’ Walks audio guide series, exhibitions in the City Dome space, and importantly, a year-long series of exhibitions and events developed through the Satellites Programme. Satellites Programme is Collective’s development programme for emergent artists, curators, writers and producers based in Scotland. It has been adapted from the long-established New Work Scotland Programme to respond to the changing needs of emergent artists in Scotland and to reflect Collective’s growth as an organisation. In 2014 the opportunity included two six-month internships for research-based projects and five opportunities for artists. 6

Chosen through an open submission process, this year’s artists and interns were selected by a panel that consisted of: Devrim Bayar (curator Weils, Brussels), Simon Martin (artist), Mick Peter (artist) and chaired by Collective’s Director, Kate Gray. Collective aims to foster discussion within the group of selected Satellites Programme artists and interns. To this end, the selected group participated in a schedule of discussions facilitated by artist Fiona Jardine. The discussions complement a host of other development opportunities including: a retreat to Hospitalfield House, Arbroath, a residency at Studio Voltaire, London and studio visits with the Collective team. Satellites Programme is now established as a year-round development and exhibition programme that sits next to Collective’s City Dome series of exhibitions and events by international and national artists. This year’s Satellites Programme artists and interns all embraced the unique surroundings of Calton Hill in diverse and exciting ways; producing projects that pushed their artistic and research practices in new and challenging directions. All the projects are represented in this publication and we were thrilled to work with the participants to produce new commissions that comprised of: performances, film, installation, 3D animations, sound work, workshops, online art works and public consultations. Collective is committed to regularly reviewing and expanding the opportunities that we offer artists and audiences to engage with contemporary art in a meaningful way. We are continually developing the Satellites Programme, through feedback sessions and working with partner organisations and promise to have more exciting developments for the programme in 2015. Siobhan Carroll, Head of Programme

Catrin Jeans Recreationally Surviving: The Great Outside 8 February – 16 March 2014

Catrin Jeans devised a new installation and performance for Collective’s Satellites Programme titled Recreationally Surviving: The Great Outside. Catrin created a playful installation of a staged wilderness in the gallery, encouraging visitors to take part in survival activities and pose for tourist snaps amidst props that included hilltop heather, snowshoes and a campfire. Catrin also ran a workshop for children in which they made their own tools for life in the wild. Centered on a series of pursuits that were originally needed for surviving ‘in the great outdoors’, such as hiking, fishing and animal tracking, Catrin’s exhibition explored how ‘traditional’ skills have been adopted as leisure entertainment and weekend escapism. Catrin staged a performance on the opening night of the exhibition, adopting the persona of a wilderness activity leader. She instructed visitors on how to escape and endure hardships within this temporary and rugged landscape so that they could obtain maximum enjoyment out of their leisure time. A manual accompanied Receationally Surviving: The Great Outside to help ‘ensure full participation’ of the pursuits within the staged landscape. Catrin worked with the Huntly Brownies to make prototypes of the props, and all of the activities found within the manual were tested by the Brownies to help ensure visitors’ safety whilst they participated.

The Great Indoors by Laura Yuile

‘On entering the echoing, 18-storey atrium, lined with a stratified cream cake of hotel balconies and zig-zagging escalators, visitors are blasted with artificial sea breeze, designed to “make one intoxicated, as if he were enjoying himself in the fabulous heaven”. Moving past aquarium walls and through a strange hybrid townscape of Polynesian huts crossed with a middle eastern kasbah, tourists arrive at the 400m-long coastline, where the largest artificial waves in the world break in front of the longest LED screen in the world – on which “the alternating morning cloud and twilight afterglow extend the horizon limitlessly in the temporal and spatial directions.”’1 For Recreationally Surviving: The Great Outside, Collective’s temporary gallery space is disguised behind a vinyl covering depicting scenic views of the Scottish highlands. A high definition dreamscape: the colours are seductive and distracting, bringing to mind the billboard renditions of future projections and picturesque views that might mask the edges of building sites and areas undergoing a transformation – or a piece of unsightly urban furniture naively attempting to convince us it’s an extension of a nearby garden. Cardboard cut-outs of heather, ferns and rocks construct a temporary, evolving and throwaway stage set, upon which the viewer can stand and pose for photographs while gazing out at the ‘real’ view over Calton Hill, where tourists happily snap pictures of each other posing atop the National Monument. In this cut-out environment, touristic activities reach saturation point and the faux-natural interior echoes our ongoing appropriation of the ‘external’ world for the enhancement of indoor spaces. 10

The external world has perhaps been redefined over time as a succession of scenery, views and sensations for us to enjoy and consume at leisure. The leisure industry thrives on appropriating nature and bringing its allure closer to us in a safe, convenient and clean manner. In this way, nature as landscape can be said to be a historically specific social and cultural construction. In writing on this phenomena, John Urry states that there is “the irony that something as apparently important as nature has largely to do with leisure and pleasure – tourism, spectacular entertainment, visual refreshment”2. In western societies, everyone has at least some rights to leisure, and taking breaks from work, for the purpose of rest and tourism, is now intrinsically tied into people’s thinking about health and general wellbeing – perhaps even survival – as a modern citizen. Through installing this mock-wilderness within the particular setting of Calton Hill, Catrin points us towards these notions of consumption in relation to leisure, tourism and nature (or rather, the Great Outdoors). The pursuits Catrin presents to us as leisure or play are activities once necessary for survival in the wild. Makeshift constructions mimic tools that would have been used for surviving life outdoors – hunting, fishing, hiking – while the flame of an artificial campfire, purchased in Maplins, flickers in the corner, inviting visitors to huddle around and feel the imaginary heat. These tools once necessary for obtaining basic things such as food and heat, have transformed into props for pursuing a hobby, or signifiers of a distant time. Catrin invites people in to interact with this space and use it as a backdrop for their leisure and, of course, their photographs. Tourists to Calton Hill who don’t have time to visit the Highlands while in Scotland may enjoy an artificial taste of the authentic Scottish experience. Afterall, if the beach or the coastline can now come to us – does it really matter if this view or experience is truly authentic? And if we can find high quality images of any scenic tourist spot in the world by 12

doing a simple Google search, do we really need to be there to take our own, less professional, photographs? In any case, documenting the experience has perhaps become the survival technique of today. 1

This quote is taken from an article about the New Century Global Centre in Chengdu, China. URL: www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2013/jul/09/largest-building-world-china-seaside 2 John Urry, Consuming Places (London: Routledge, 1995), p.175.

Kathryn Elkin Mutatis Mutandis 29 March – 11 May 2014

Kathryn Elkin is interested in the trauma of the body, or a traumatic split between body and mind, with particular focus on the roles of language, sex and gender. Her work frequently takes a reference, text or performance as a starting point; in Mutatis Mutandis this included the work and writings of Philip Roth, Erik Satie and Theodore Reik. Other influences, often stemming from the late 1960s and 1970s, include Robert Ashley, Stuart Sherman, Joan La Barbaea, Hollis Frampton and Clarice Lispector. Mutatis Mutandis is Latin for ‘changing (only) those things which need to be changed’. The exhibition included a new film work and installation. The film is narrated by a woman (the artist) and is twinned with images of a still life, which is interacted with and animated by an anonymous body (or bodies) that is (are) never fully visible throughout the film. The work enacts slippages between voice, body and object, with the vessels and other objects functioning as stand-ins for multiple ideas and body parts. The narrator appears to be preparing for and undertaking a performance; moving between vocal warm-ups, singing and a series of spoken narratives. The film has a physical intimacy and an almost-live quality, a development from Kathryn’s past work that has predominantly been realised as performance. Words and sounds extend like a meditation on a thought, seemingly captured in one take. The film sat within the folds of a large yellow velvet curtain and the screen turns to black intermittently, heightening the tension between watching and listening. 14

FADE IN / FADE OUT Reflections upon a conversation with Kathryn Elkin by Laura Yuile

1. Memory as cultural construction. Memories are shaped by the context in which they are constructed and re-constructed. Culture shapes our memories and, thus, our identity; with identity taking shape through an accumulation of the memories of relations and places that form the continuity of an experience. Isolated scenes sit in our minds like heavy furniture, gathering dust over time; bound together by the act of remembering – the streams of consciousness that weave in and out, spilling over and filling the gaps between disparate markers in the sequence of our life. 2. Masochism; the form of the relation between individual desire and collective imaginary. Kathryn spoke of “the problem of making the experience of gender binary – the problems of gender as a cultural construction being a predominant part of how we experience our bodies and how we are understood within culture”. Through masochism, sex is abstracted into a conceptual act that promises personal transformation through the channelling of sexual will, down a path that has been perverted – thus provoking an equivocal exchange of roles and energies. Masochism indicates a decision to participate in a transgressive relation to the idea of language as a cultural construction; acknowledging the fluidity of meaning that undermines our personal identity. 3. Magic, or the transformative power of language. “Write down a desire in the form of a sentence. Take out all of the vowels. Take out the repeated consonants. Take the remaining consonants and rearrange them, overlap them, extend 16

the letters, move them around, transform them, until you’ve got something that doesn’t look like your original sentence. This is your sigil. Now activate it: look at your sigil, meditate on it, and masturbate while you’re staring at it.”1 A sigil is a symbol used in magic that refers to a symbolic representation of the magician’s desired outcome. In the above instructions for creating a sigil, words and letters are abstracted towards silence; language exposes itself as an operating 17

system that can be hacked, with letters twisted into abstract design and activated through a concentration of sexual intent. By creating a sigil we abstract the collective imaginary towards an undefined symbol full of yet-unfulfilled potential – twisting and muting language towards the promise of transformation through magic. 4. Music as continuity of sound and silence. “Music produces silence, which in turn reduces music to its elemental self, almost perfect. Music produces silence like a beautiful musical singularity, a rare example of harmony. To my ears this is also a sensible truth: when hard noise ceases, soft silence carries the promise of the most complete of all the arts. Music surrounds or envelopes or includes silence, carrying no single meaning in order to elevate all meanings. When music ceases, in turn, silence reappears, naked, and is reborn, sublimated. It has two sides, one turned towards the great din, the other towards words and meaning.”2 Music has a structure that is activated through form; much as our structure as human beings is activated through the form of our lives; the continuity of which will vary between individuals and cultures. The sound of Erik Satie’s 1st Gymnepodie played on violin fills the gallery. Speaking of what he saw as the importance of ‘Furniture Music’, Satie spoke of a music that “will be part of the noises of the environment”, one that would soften the noises of cutlery and fill awkward silences between friends dining together, sparing them “the trouble of paying attention to their own banal remarks”3. According to Walter Benjamin, the language of things – of the furniture and cutlery itself – is mute; it is magical and its medium is “material community”4. 5. Positions within a nonlinear context. The space of the sounds and things we encounter depends on our positioning within a given environment; within a physical and psychological context. As with Satie’s ‘Furniture Music’, a looped video presents itself in a nonlinear manner: it moves 18

beyond simply delivering its own context – time is manipulated and transcends the idea of a purely physical time towards the individual’s inner concept of time. We are presented with an undefined sense of time and space in which to situate ourselves; to listen and to look. Events and objects fade in and out of prominence; viewed from endlessly shifting angles and moments within a nonlinear timeframe. With windows to the past framed and obscured by the curtain of the present, fragments of darkness flicker in and out, allowing for glimpses of ever-mutating pasts and re-directed futures. 6. Fluctuating fluency. “Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on ... For all I know, I am beginning with the ending.”5 1

Grant Morrison, instructions for creating a sigil,taken from a lecture: “Doing Magick and Getting Results”, URL: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rfqErvqoU, accessed 2014. 2 Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008) p.136. 3 Quoted in John Cage, Silence, (MIT, 1969) p. 76. 4 Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” from Selected Writings: 1913-1926, Volume 1 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004) p.67. 5 Quoted in Tony Hilfer, American Fiction Since 1940 (Routledge, 1992), p. 155 (from a 1984 interview with Philip Roth).

Marie-Michelle Deschamps  Don’t trip over the wire..! 26 July – 7 September 2014 Marie-Michelle’s practice incorporates sculpture, the written word, artists’ books, and sound. She is interested in the relationship and boundaries between language and objects and in the spatial manifestation of language or voice, constructing systems that enable her voice and identity to be broken down. Inspired by Collective’s surroundings on Calton Hill, Marie-Michelle created the ambitious new sound work Don’t trip over the wire..! in collaboration with musician Philippe Lauzier and singer Erika Angell, drawing on a history of sound poetry and visual scores. The sound work filled the gallery in a carefully staged room that was intended to draw attention to what is outside of the gallery, inviting the audience to sit and listen to the work while contemplating the panoramic views of the park, city, the Firth of Forth, and beyond. Don’t trip over the wire..! was the first part of a longer-term research project initiated by Marie-Michelle on the work of schizophrenic American writer Louis Wolfson, whom she has been in conversation with over the past year. The title of the exhibition is taken from a passage in one of Wolfson’s books, where he describes his translation method and his attempt to eschew any contact with the English language. As an instruction, the title also relates to the processes by which the sound work has been made, and as an instruction not to stumble over something it is evocative of the artist’s interest in struggling with words and communication.

In the Presence of Absence by Laura Yuile

“The unknown language, of which I nonetheless grasp the respiration, the emotive aeration, in a word the pure significance, forms around me, as I move, a faint vertigo, sweeping me into its artificial emptiness, which is consummated only for me: I live in the interstice, delivered from any fulfilled meaning.”1   For Don’t trip over the wire..! Marie-Michelle has drawn upon the history of graphical music scores and experimented with her own methods of abstracting language and systems of notation. Graphical music scores emerged and evolved in the 1950s as a more flexible form of notation, one that allowed experimental composers to incorporate noises, effects and random elements that could not comfortably sit within the generic staves of standard musical manuscript paper. Sprawling arrangements of squiggles, patterns, clusters, loops, geometric and abstract shapes replaced the familiar musical language, making way for a different kind of structural consistency, one that functions more as a map of a musical territory than a set of clearly defined instructions. Marie-Michelle often takes a set of rules as a starting point for her work. Her method of constructing the sound piece presented in this exhibition was generated through a process of abstracting and reconfiguring such rules. This process prompts a shift in the relationship between artist, performers (which here may be referred to as interpreters) and finished work – a restructuring of a typically hierarchical relationship into one that accommodates an exchange of salvaging and the acceptance of loss. 22

Adopting a similar approach to that of a graphical score, the artist has invited the musician and performer to have freedom of interpretation, giving up a certain amount of control over what the final output might be. With the abstraction of systems of notation prompting a move towards a more untrustworthy form of language, the interpreters must draw upon their own creative and cultural experiences in order to read and translate visual information. The communicative process turns its back on certainty and embraces an abstract dialogue generated through a complicated relationship to the notion of control. We might refer to this act of interpretation as a performance whereby the artist sets some limitations, or guidelines, and by doing so, sparks the translation of a score into its realisation in sound, gestures and perhaps words, pronounced out loud. In performing the score, the already abstracted rules are further deconstructed into a sonic architecture that will never be fully accessible to us; a rhythm that echoes with that which it lacks, and that which may still be possible. Soundscapes and sonic architectures affect our visual perception of a space and present different ways to engage with its physicality. In mapping the musical territory and thinking about the spatial and visual dimensions of sound, we might wonder what the sound re-translated into shapes, patterns, or words written down might look like. We can try to grasp at the edges and seams of sounds and silences, in order to embody the music and translate it back into something solid. We can try to imagine what we hear as tangible material with a certain amount of fixity and determinacy â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a blueprint from which various slightly differing interpretations can be derived. But what we hear performed is perhaps not fully contained within the material that produced it, nor its performative interpretation, rather it is partially held, or masked, within the invisible residue that escapes the process of abstraction. A translation materialises as a conglomerate of two structures 24

that includes the features assigned to the language of translation itself, which attempts to adopt logical models that are rooted in the universal workings of the human mind. In any interpretative exchange between systems of visual, verbal or non-verbal signs, we must accept both that which is lost and that which is gained, situating ourselves within this conflicted space and finding a way to contend with the loss of meaning. To interpret something is to make sense of it, to assign it significance. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t trip over the wire..! is an invitation to interpret or translate; a finger that traces a line around spaces and sounds as the listener steps in to replace the loss that has occurred throughout this process of abstraction, or the final step in a process of exploring the limitations and emotive possibilities of the unknown in both visual and verbal forms of language. â&#x20AC;¨ 1

Roland Barthes, The Empire of Signs (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), p.9.

Matthew Richardson PM 20 September â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2 November 2014

Collette Rayner Access as Idiot Distraction 22 November 2014 – 25 January 2015

Collette’s practice incorporates collage, drawing, writing, sculpture and animation. For her exhibition at Collective, Collette’s work was based on research into the Principality of Sealand, a sovereign micronation located six nautical miles off the Port of Felixstowe on the east coast of England. Sealand, initially constructed in 1943 for naval guards, has been occupied by the Bates family since 1967 and is currently under the charge of Prince Michael Bates of Sealand. It has a complex history and at one stage functioned as a computer storage facility, allegedly holding fraudulent data for a number of corporations. This unique history and the monumental sculptural qualities of Sealand were used as starting points for a new film, a text and a sound work. Collette explores the site as a sculptural object, focussing on its fabric and structural features to transcend its almost mythical and contested history. The film consisted of a series of three digital animations, made in collaboration with animator Alan Nicol and in conversation with Hackspace in London – a non-profit, hacking community that runs workshops on model making, drone building and robotics. Collette employed digital model making techniques commonly used in architectural processes and gaming industries to imagine the structure of Sealand from various vantage points. The artist couldn’t gain physical access to site, but pieced together a projected idea of the form from fragments of her experience on a boat close by. In this sense Collette uses digital animation as a way to reclaim an unsuccessful attempt to gain access to the micronation. 30

Central to the works in Access as Idiot Distraction is a tension between real and digital encounters and an enquiry into representation. Sealand is pictured in idealised, fragmented and abstracted forms, and at points the animation is suggestive of a gallery setting, featuring a prototype sculpture. This slippery or ambiguous quality is key and stems from the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interest in drawing.

Permission to Land by Laura Yuile

“The bunker is not really founded; it floats on ground that is not a socle for its balance, but a moving and random expanse that belongs to the oceanic expanse, and extends it. It is this relative autonomy that balances the floating bunker, guaranteeing its stability in the middle of probable modifications to the surrounding terrain.”1 For Access as Idiot Distraction, Collette Rayner has developed an abstracted prototype for an isolated and existing structure – one that is both a functioning ruin and an appropriated monument that has attained the status of micronation. The Principality of Sealand (previously know as Fort Rough Towers) – a seafort built in 1943 to help protect Britain from air and sea invasion during World War II – is a rusting platform sat atop two concrete support pillars: a modern monolithic architecture that protrudes from the sea. Generating a fragmentation of the flow of time and space around this structure, information gathered during a trip to Sealand (in which the artist was denied permission to land on the principality) has been used to develop an animation that appears as a diagrammatic form made after the fact – a plan in reverse that proposes the structure’s two supporting pillars as purely sculptural monuments sat solidly in contrast to the unstable motions of the surrounding water. Collette presents the gallery folded in on itself: a container for what Collette describes as ‘prototypal illusions’. Within this container sits an abstraction of her experience of encountering – or not encountering – Sealand, or a disembodied version of it. This exercise in communicating a failed attempt at ‘inva32

sionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; through a form of mapping the space around and outwith the structure â&#x20AC;&#x201C; or micronation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; speaks of the instability of historical and political contexts and the possibilities of structural advancement and the ownership of meaning. By reprocessing information gathered during an encounter with this site, stability is lent to the intangible ideas and histories that surround it. Experience is organised through the construction of a new visual space containing discrete points and boundaries and emphasising notions of enclosure, visibility and dis33

tance. In the presented animation, the suggested camera has become embodied in the movements of the water. Incorporating this instability into the depiction of what appears on the surface as a solid and stable structure and mimicking the notion of the eye as primordial camera, casting its lens over personal landscapes and landmarks amongst a faded succession of moments in time. The function and meaning of this isolated site is perhaps as unstable as the waves that literally flow around it. Waves that morph like the ever changing time-space that historical and political meaning resides within; the monument, an armature that allows conflicting times and meanings to coexist within a fluctuating steady-state. In generating such a ‘prototype’, we see an interruption to the relation of the structure to its context, emphasising both the physical and conceptual isolation of the object itself. Access as Idiot Distraction is a closed vessel and a fragmented space that mixes orders of the virtual and the actual. The reconfiguring of Sealand into a simplified visual plan mirrors the idea of the past as a presence we cannot fully access – the resulting diagram speaking of both this presence and absence and thus propelling the tension caused by a confrontation between a sense of permanence and transitoriness; endurance and decay. Through the use of these ‘prototypal illusions’ we are led to consider knowledge and experience in relation to various fragments of political and personal histories, but also more generally. The instances of embodiment and isolation we encounter here, speak of the ways in which knowledge and experience move amongst places and contexts but never fully possess them. Instead, they displace and replace them through an ongoing process that forges and remakes vaporous links between the real and imagined; the remembered and forgotten; the visible and invisible. 1

Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeologies, trans. George Collins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995) p.5.

Dane Sutherland Exploit.zzxjoanw.Gen May 30 2014

During his time as a Curatorial Development Intern, Dane Sutherland developed the project Exploit.zzxjoanw.Gen, working with a number of leading artists to create new music, sound artworks and texts which are available to purchase as a limited edition USB stick designed by Plastique Fantastique and published and distributed in partnership with Punctum Records. It is also available as a free digital download from Collective’s website, alongside a PDF publication containing essays and written fictions. Curated by Dane, the audio zine includes work by AAS, The Confraternity of Neoflagellants, Plastique Fantastique, Head Gallery, Jillian Mayer, WE, English Heretic, Michelle Hannah, Benedict Drew, POLLYFIBRE, The Cult of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ, Xempeer and Kornelia Remø Klokk. The artists selected, all – in various ways and to differing degrees – generate worlds and narratives consonant with the genre of speculative writing and science fiction. The project is concerned with the virulent possibilities of sonic fiction, and with speculation as a method of probing and mutating the present through (re)imagining the future (as noise).

Exploit. zzxjoanw.Gen by Dane Sutherland

Coined by writer, artist and self-proclaimed ‘concept engineer’ Kodwo Eshun, the term ‘Sonic Fiction’ refers to the myriad statements, titles, costumes, relations, speculations, rituals, hidden tracks, production techniques, economies, patois, basslines, gestures and images that weave together a genre of music, generating a trans-media narrative, immanently connected as they are to the speculative potency of the sonic grain of each song. As the enigmatic art collective 0(rphand(rift> have said, “the solitons of the music tell a story.” The key development that has made thinking Sonic Fictions possible is certainly Afrofuturism: a name for the alternative histories and alien futurities generated amongst Afro-diasporic cultures. As an epistemology, it considers Black artistic production as a dispersed modality of wresting forms of science fiction, utopian thought and modernity from a situation in which the Black subject is inherently alienated by the events of dominant historical narratives, speculating upon this alienated character as a future-oriented subjectivity in-production. Consequently, it is familiar with the disruption of dominant cultural imaginaries, while claiming for a Black diaspora, a relationship with some kind of ‘Outside’ – whether this is the future-as-noise or a cosmology based on a Black kinship with outer-Earth. This contravenes popular modes of understanding art as representation, revising such reductive socioeconomic-centric readings of, say, Jazz as being a musical form wholly representative of a Black improvisational struggle for freedom within the context of a racially hostile American culture. Instead, Afrofuturism tends towards an enquiry of the peculiar material arrangements that make up such musics as 38

speculative objects themselves – paying attention to the proposals of the images invoked by Jazz, Hip Hop, Detroit Techno, and moving away from a “compulsory [biographical] logic explaining all Black Music, conveniently hearing antisocial surrealism as social realism.”1 Exploit.zzxjoanw.Gen was developed around these very ideas of the political valence of science fiction, with speculation as a method of probing and mutating the present through (re) imagining the future. The artists contributing sound-work and 39

music to the project, responding to the concept of Sonic Fictions in different ways, either conjure alien worlds and narratives that reveal radically alternative futures to the one tethered to the present, or they mine the occulted entrails of the existing world in a contemporary form of nekyia – an ancient Greek cult-practice through which ghosts were invoked to be questioned about the future. Plastique Fantastique record the final exploits of human consciousness as it prepares to merge with technology, birthing the post-human experience-less subject, Neuropath Feedback Loop 3.0; Head Gallery describes the scatological activities of a post-apocalyptic Nu York artworld; The Cult of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ continue the work of their deceased namesake in a Hip Hop inflected ritual frenzy that scrambles through the rubble and collapse of modernity; POLLYFIBRE generates a post-digital opera; and Jillian Mayer’s pop tunes advertise a post-human techno-singularity as a desirable consumer product. These tracks, and several others, all appear on a limited edition USB device designed by Plastique Fantastique. The USB was produced with the objects of veneration of Cargo Cults in mind. Such a phenomenon describes the impact of networked trade-routes upon Melanesian residents who discover lost cargo washed up on their shores. The objects are unable to be decoded as commodities attached to their intended purpose and thus mutating a given system with alien values. The MP3 tracks act as indexes of alien futurities, cargo cult objects washed up on the shore of the present. 1

Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet Books, 1998) p.4.

Laura Yuile  Conversation of Monuments 27 May – 29 June 2014

Laura’s practice incorporates sculpture, video, events and performative installations. Her recent work has explored the boundaries between public and private space, the fetishisation of transcience, and notions of displacement, transition and transformation in relation to time, place and space. For her Satellites programme project she set out to discuss and deconstruct the term ‘monument’, reconsidering what our relationship to so-called monuments might be. The research conducted during Laura’s time as Critical Discourse Intern, materialised as both an installation and a public research process; centering around the aim of developing a proposal for a new monument for the global city. The gallery functioned as a tourist information centre in reverse – one in which information and feedback would be extracted from the visitors, rather than any service being provided. Central to the installation was a new video work that introduced visitors to the project, adopting the language of a promotional video for a corporate context and the tone of a homemade conspiracy theory videos found on YouTube. The video considers what a monument today could be; posing questions about the invisible or hidden infrastructure that allow society to function and asks how we may represent this in our perceived ideas of what a monument is. Laura was present in the gallery for two hours every day, conducting focus groups and interviews with visitors in order to generate feedback.

The Dust of Accumulation

A Reflection Upon Conversation of Monuments by Laura Yuile If everything is eternally floating somewhere within a process of ongoing ruination and decay then perhaps things that do not yet – and perhaps never will – have a physical structure might already be deemed as ruins: as dust, or remains. Robert Smithson believed that in the ultimate future, the universe would burn out into an all-encompassing sameness, viewing entropy not as something negative but simply as a form of transformation of society and culture. He wrote that “buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built”1. Conversation of Monuments set out to reverse the presumed process of conservation that goes with such historical constructions. Over the duration of the exhibition, the conversations that took place around this potential new monument started to corrode the very idea of developing the plan at all. Aiming to generate an accumulating pool of data that I would then somehow translate into form, I asked questions of visitors that offered pared down options and provoked deliberately simple answers; the notion of the management and translatability of this information being of interest to me, as well as the ongoing back-and-forth between hierarchy and accumulation. What remained of these answers and interactions, in notes and checkpoints, remains like the dust of this intended monument, as it slowly and invisibly crumbles towards the ground. But what can be done with these ruins or remains, of a plan or design never fully formed? And what about the dust that escaped during this process, never to take any visible form at all? The problem of determining which leftover fragments of any ‘past’ are ‘meaningful’ – worthy of conserving – and which 44

fragments might be discarded in the rubbish bin of history is evidenced in our eternal processes of recycling and reworking. Hierarchies of broken fragments are established and differentiations between ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’ information are made, but the duration and stability of such arrangements is unclear. Rem Koolhaas said that we have “built more than all previous generations together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales. We do not build pyramids”2. Clean corporate metal and freshly painted beige facades now blend seamlessly into each other; provoking a sense of disorienta45

tion that leads to confusion over where one thing ends and another begins. Might all space become neutralised into the same, privately owned, container? Today’s constructions are towering glass blocks and flat-packed constructions, gleaming in the polluted skies like oversized perfume bottles and threatening to collapse at any moment, with any slight shift of the ‘natural’. But what message might be passed onto future civilisations through the very absence of these skyscrapers, shopping centres and makeshift apartment blocks? From the dust or the imprint they leave on the ground? A monument that conveys something – or everything – about the present day towards an uncertain future, must surely adhere to today’s trend for inbuilt lifespan and planned obsolesence – communicating our ‘message’ through its very disappearance and replacement. With advanced capitalism’s agenda of constructing faster than we can consume, might the best monument be that of the resistance to simply building more? This idea of ruins in reverse has led me to consider what it is that remains besides the visible remains. What ‘invisible’ counterpart is suggested by that which melts into the surrounding landscape, or dissolves into the sky? How might the remains of my planning process depict what can no longer be seen, or this structure that never happened? And how does the information that does get recorded and passed throughout time – as well as that which slips between the lines of recognition – shape pasts, futures, and generate new narratives?

Robert Smithson, A Tour of the Monuments of of Passaic, New Jersey, in Flam, J. (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkley: University of California Press, 1996), p.72. 2 Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace, in The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Taschen, 2002), p. 245.

Catrin Jeans is an artist interested in leisure and participatory performance. Recent works include a 24-hour game of football, a keep-fit workout and an art crawl performed in the guise of a Club 18-30 Rep. Since graduating in 2008 from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, Catrin has created events and performances for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, The Royal Standard at the Liverpool Biennial and GENERATORprojects, Dundee. Catrin is currently Cultural Health Visitor for Deveron Arts. Kathryn Elkin is an artist based in Scotland. She is a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art and Goldsmiths College, and was a participant of the LUX Associate Artists Programme 2012/13. Recent exhibitions and performances include: Speaking Art Writing, 2012, Whitechapel Gallery, London; Mutatis Mutandis, 2014, Collective, Edinburgh; and Till The Stars Turn Cold, 2015, Glasgow Sculpture Studios. In 2015 she completed a 6-month ‘Artists and Archives: Artists’ Moving Image’ residency at the BBC to produce a new work titled Michael’s Theme. Mutatis Mutandis featured as part of the 2014 London Film Festival. Marie-Michelle Deschamps lives and works in Zürich and Glasgow, where she graduated with an MA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2012. Recent exhibitions include Ne trébuchez pas sur le fil..! 2014, a three person presentation in Paris (with Emmanuelle Lainé and Éléonore False) curated by Triangle France; and on this no more than 2014, Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich; Having a good time 2014, Galeria Edizioni Periferia, Luzern. She has been an artist in residence at Triangle France, Marseille, Studio Voltaire, London and at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta. In 2015, Deschamps has an upcoming exhibition at Battat Contemporary Montreal. Matthew Richardson studied at The Slade School of Fine Art, the Glasgow School of Art and Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. Forthcoming and recent exhibitions include External Stimulation, 3236RLS, London, 2015, Loves Worn Circuit, (with Alan Michael), Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich, 2015, Angel Food, 48

TG Gallery, Nottingham, 2015 and Je Suis Féministe, Penarth Centre, Peckham, London. He runs London, a gallery based in London and Athens. Collette Rayner lives and works in Glasgow. She is a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, and studied on exchange at The Academy of Arts Architecture and Design, Prague. Recent exhibitions and performances include Here, Right Now: Art Writing Reading, 2014, Edinburgh College of Art; 12 Hour Symposium as part of a Group Critical Writing Residency, 2014, Cooper Gallery, Dundee; Draw In, 2014, St Margaret’s House, Edinburgh; Penumbra, 2014, A.P.T. Gallery, London; Slippage 2014, Bermerton Project Space, London. Upcoming projects include Standpoint Futures Residency, Hoxton, London, and Structural Proposition ≥ Sensible Reasoning 2014 (The Shipping Container Bothy,) The Whisky Bond, Glasgow. Dane Sutherland is a curator, writer and pessimist from Scotland. More information on ‘exploit...’ can be found at: www. punctumrecords.com/exploitzzxjoanwgen Laura Yuile is an artist currently based in London and an Associate Artist at Open School East throughout 2015. Recent exhibitions include: Welcome to Ecumenpolis 2015, The Arts Foundation, Athens; Ribofunk 2014, Embassy, Edinburgh; SAME HOMEPAGE 2013, The Project Room, Glasgow; and Processing Progress 2013, Mauve, Vienna. She recently undertook residencies with Temporary Art Platform in Beirut and IOAM in Beijing, as well as organising a series of events that took place in the showrooms of various IKEA stores.

image credits

Catrin Jeans, Recreationally Surviving: The Great Outside Performance, opening event, 2014. Photo: Ross Fraser Maclean Catrin Jeans, Recreationally Surviving: The Great Outside Performance, opening event, 2014. Photo: Ross Fraser Maclean Catrin Jeans, Recreationally Surviving: The Great Outside Photo: Ross Fraser Maclean Kathryn Elkin, Mutatis Mutandis Installation detail, 2014. Digitally printed tea towel in frame Photo: Tom Nolan Kathryn Elkin, Mutatis Mutandis Installation view, 2014. Velvet curtain, metal structure, digital video, 13’00” [looped]. Photo:Tom Nolan Marie-Michelle Deschamps, Don’t trip over the wire...! Installation view, 2014. Photo: Marie-Michelle Deschamps Marie-Michelle Deschamps, Don’t trip over the wire...! Detail, 2014. Archival pigment on Hahnemühle paper, 26 x 32.5cm. Photo: Marie-Michelle Deschamps 50

Matthew Richardson, PM Installation details, 2014. Digital animation produced with the assistance of Thee Tosayanond. Photos: Tom Nolan Collette Rayner, Access as Idiot Distraction Digital animation, 6’40” [looped], 2014. Collette Rayner, Access as Idiot Distraction Digital animation, 6’40” [looped], 2014. Collette Rayner, Access as Idiot Distraction Digital animation, 6’40” [looped], 2014. Photos: Tom Nolan The Cult of RAMMAALLZEE performing Cultiplicate at the Exploit.zzxjoanw.Gen launch event, 2014. Photo: Collective Plastique Fantastique performing at the Exploit.zzxjoanw. Gen launch event, 2014. Photos: Collective Exploit.zzxjoanw.Gen, USB design by Plastique Fantastique. Photo: Dane Sutherland Dunbar landfill site, 2014. Photo: Laura Yuile Laura Yuile, Conversation of Monuments Installation view, 2014. Photo: Tom Nolan Laura Yuile, Conversation of Monuments Installation detail, 2014. Photo: Tom Nolan 51

Colophon Satellites Programme 2014 Edited by Laura Yuile Printed on demand with Lightning Source All images courtesy of the artists and Collective Designed by Maeve Redmond Typefaces: Marianne, Maison Neue ÂŠ Collective, the artists and authors ISBN: 978-1-873653-15-9 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. The publisher has made every effort to contact all copyright holders. If proper acknowledgement has not been made, we ask copyright holders to contact the publisher. Collective City Observatory & City Dome 38 Calton Hill Edinburgh EH7 5AA Tel. +44 (0)131 556 1264 www.collectivegallery.net