You know how the first time you see an architect’s scale model it really grabs you, the perfect detail, the way it plays with your sense of scale, of reality. For Stuart, this was when he was 15, on work experience at his local council. Of course he’d seen model railways and villages, but there’s something precise and idealistic about an architect’s model. Then in Taiwan recently we saw an architect’s model of the gallery in which the model sat. We could almost imagine we saw tiny models of ourselves peering at a model of the model, and so on to infinity.

It wasn’t until seeing the recent show by Calum Stirling at the new Vivid project space in Digbeth that we started thinking about how they represent a kind of fractal extrapolation of signs.

The key piece in the show was a model of a city commercial district on a revolving platform in a locked office. The model could be viewed through a window, but also via an old black and white CCTV set up back projected in the main space. Together with the accompanying music, the piece took on the feel of an atmospheric, European film - an impression reinforced by the German signage on all of the model shops.

by Ana Benlloch & Stuart Tait

Trial subject 92 K. L.
Dr M. M. Unlock 2004

Subject received memory by neuroinsertion, combined with visual and auditory reinforcement stimuli, over the 3rd - 26th August 2004. Absorptions rates were higher than average, with a 73% acceptance using the Barndt-Millais congruence scale. The following account was transcribed from the subjects recall of the inserted memory, at the end of the process.

Operator 5: “Can you just confirm for us that you’re comfortable talking about this?”

Subject 92: “Yes, that’s fine, go on.”

Operator 5: “Well, if you just close your eyes and let yourself relax, you might find the memories just drifting up to the surface, becoming clearer all the time. You could find that you seem to be living those memories again, seeing all the details that you want to, feeling only what you are comfortable feeling. Just let the words start to flow and tell me whatever comes into your mind.”

Subject 92: “OK… well, it was about three years ago, I was between ‘A’ levels and Uni., summer… God, it was such a great summer, it was like all the stress was over and I could just… y’know be myself for a bit… Anyway, I used to go and hang out in the fields outside of town. They were full of these yellow flowers that year, the ones they put in now and then, I think they make cooking oil out of ’em…

“So this one day, I’d gone there to hang out, my mate said she might meet me, but she didn’t turn up, so I just sat and read for a bit - something by Philip K Dick I think, cos it started to do my head in and I had to lie down and think about it… It was pretty hot and I think I must’ve dozed off for a bit, but when I woke up my head was in this weird little puddle, I remember it clearly ’cos I freaked out at first, thought it might be blood, but it was just water… very dark water… seeped back into the ground after a few minutes, but it left me a bit, kind of, prickly, like something was going to happen.

“I had to get up and go for a walk to try to clear my head. It was odd ’cos it was such a bright day, but I felt kind of cold and… hollow…”

Operator 5: “Do you want to stop?”

Subject 92: “No, no, it’s OK…”

Operator 5: “You don’t have to feel anything uncomfortable, just let the memories flow through you…”

Subject 92: “OK, well, I’d been walking for a bit, and I thought I might have heard someone calling me, so I looked back over the field and there was this… spot… this dark patch in the sky above where I’d been laying. I didn’t think much of it, but then something made me turn round to look at it again. The patch was bigger, it looked like a kind of… rip in the sky, but it was moving around, shifting. I couldn’t figure it out, you know how sometimes you see something and you just can’t interpret it, can’t fit it in your frame of reference properly… I felt pretty stupid when I realised it was just a mass of birds, crows I guess, although I’d never seen them flock like that before, is that the right word? There’s a proper word for a group of crows isn’t there? It was like when starlings are going around, getting ready to migrate or whatever, but because they were bigger birds, it wasn’t like some graceful, fluid motion, it was… lumpy… heavy… dirty…”

Operator 5: “Are you OK?”

Subject 92: “Yeah, yeah, sorry… but they didn’t seem to be making any noise. There was this big bunch of birds flying over the field, loads of them, more and more all the time it seemed, but completely silent. I mean, I was a bit away from them, but it seemed like I should be able to hear something, some kind of call… It was like they were sucking the sound in, making a whirlpool that nothing could get out of…

“Then I found myself pulled in as well, like I wanted to be a part of it, and I was stumbling towards them through these plants that came up to my chest, but I got fixed on the idea that if could join them then everything would be OK, all this weirdness and confusion would go away, so I kept trying to float up to them, y’know how you do in dreams, but this wasn’t a dream so I couldn’t, and I tried to get them to see me, to help me, but I couldn’t pick out any one bird, anyway there were always more and more of them, and every time I thought I was getting close, I’d trip over a clod of earth and it was like they’d got further away again, and I was scared that I’d scare them off and never be a part of this huge, powerful force, so I was trying to sneak up, but get as close as possible so I’d be able to see them better, but the sweat was stinging my eyes and I couldn’t see properly through the watering, and I think I might have started to cry, give up hope of ever getting there, then suddenly I was there and it was like I’d been there all along, up in the clouds with my brothers and sisters…

“Then something popped silently, I don’t know if it was in my head or outside of it, and there was a kind of explosion… no, implosion… and I saw that there was only one crow… maybe there’d only been one all along… I’m not sure.

“I watched it fly off.”

Operator 5: “Any more?”

Subject 92: “Well, this is going to sound pretty weird, but… during that whole memory my hair was blonde… ”

watched : can you see me?
watcher : yes, I like your eyes
watched : thank you
watcher : they’re very expressive
watched : expressive?
watcher : yeah, you can really tell what you’re thinking
watched : and what am i thinking?
watcher : well, right now you’re trying to think of something strange, that I’d never be able to guess
watched : lol
watcher : I was right, wasn’t I?
watched : yeah, you got me
watcher : I certainly have
watched : but only the surface
watcher : that’s what you think
watched : what do you mean?
watcher : well, the part I can see is a connecting point, it links us, and from that point, that door into you, I can see everything I need to, I can reach through and get the rest of you
watched : you wish
watcher : you can’t deny it, you know it’s true, you like to think you’re safe behind your screen, but you know deep down that you’re not
watched : still, you can’t do anything, you can’t touch me, everything i’ve said to you could be a lie
watcher : sure, but that kind of thing doesn’t matter here, we’re not in ‘real’ space any more, we’re in a space that only exists because we believe it does, so all I have to do is make you believe something and it becomes real
watched : hmmm, maybe, but what makes you think you can do that?
watcher : I already have, every word I say to you is constructing a reality, making you believe certain things about me
watched : no more than when i say something to you
watcher : exactly! see, you’re starting to believe in my reality already

We must learn to subvert existing cities. It’s the way to finally take charge. All you need is a computer, a viewpoint and the ability to express it. The separation and hostility between the “world” of art and the “world” of everyday life finally exploded in deep and voiceless grief. I did not know even the circumstances that had precipitated the conflict. Nothing has ever happened here, and nothing ever will. Conflict of interest, competition and exploitation are, in this context, notions devoid of content, punctuated by sharp screeching sounds; automatic equipment was intoning the phrases of the researchers who study cyberspace addictions. Are they addicted too? They expect everything and have nothing to fear, and at that point we’ll see some amazing social changes.

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Fantasies about the body and technology and human/machine or organic/inorganic combinations. There’s just typed words. You see this attempt to go through language to something beyond. Is it as real or more real than reality, is it mistaken for reality, or is it a new reality that shows up the constructed, performed, artificial nature of our old off-line reality?

He was particularly interested in the questions of thought transference and of apparitions of the living, and in November, 1896, he commenced a series of experiments in conjunction with Mr. Vincey, of Staple Inn, in order to test the alleged possibility of projecting an apparition of one’s self by force of will through space.

When I read the advertisements in the paper I see they are all lies. Funny little Martians that laughed at us humans for eating real potatoes! Featuring Menacing Motor Action! The making of the big machine progressed all the more rapidly for this. Once you push the “Upload Photo” button, depending on your connection speed, it may take a few minutes to upload. When freedom is practiced in a closed circle, it fades into a dream, becomes a mere image of itself.

Check out this girl. I think she’s in love with you. Do you know a weed when you see it? Of course, one person’s weed is another’s flower, so the answer is partly personal and philosophical. When I start painting I shall stop writing!

I had seen the Magic Shop from afar several times; I had passed it once or twice, a shop window of alluring little objects, featuring three authentic Cyberman commands. Being asked to become a wizard often is a powerful experience for a user. In the ancient Egyptian mysteries it was attributed to the god of catastrophe and drowning.

This fantastic cult classic authentic Dalek commands keeps getting better year after year. You want to put on your custom button and flashing lights with brand new pictures. The subservient battle hardened silver androids resembling humanoids in armour and date fact-file. This is the collectors group of vinyl and rubber, sensor rich mannequins that have selfishly saved thousands of lives by being ‘accident-prone’.

Ethnographers typically begin their research with a set of research questions from which to guide their observations. Do you feel like there’s something missing from your life if you don’t blog for a day? If a behavior is rewarded, it is more likely to be repeated. If it is punished, it becomes suppressed.

Despite the incredible distances and differences that exist between these areas, the movie spectaculars, the junk food, the consumer electronics, and the pre-recorded bits of entertainment, we will be in control of a prized asset, and we will seek to develop its potential, raising it to new heights. The birds would return and sing once again.

The worldwide technological revolution of our own era–the digital, networked, information age– provides a context for a retrospective analysis of the cultural meaning of technology. How is the introduction of technology represented as a “fall” from an idealized origin? Convergence and complexity are the key words of the Information Age.

writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

The term “android” was invented by science fiction writers to denote an artificial human made mostly of organic parts, in distinction to a robot, made of purely mechanical parts (though Carl Capek, from whose work the term “robot” comes, actually depicted androids). It comes from the Greek word “andros” meaning “man” and the ending “oid,” meaning “similar to.” George Lucas’ untraditional use of the term ” android” to designate purely mechanical robots who could be like R2D2, not at all man-shaped, has hopelessly confused the terminology ever since.

It’s some sort of temporal divergence. As you look around, you realise the only noise you can hear is the faint sound of wind whistling through the nearby buildings. It’s a ghost town. The radiation levels are perfectly safe now. “Well, what am I going to do now?” you ask the time machine. The lights on the console blink confusingly.

AWHFY - Are we having fun yet?

It should by now be common knowledge that the camera is primarily a tool of social control. The camera as used in advertizing presents to the populace the goods and lifestyles that are deemed desirable. The camera as used in film and TV then educates the populace on how to live one’s life in a proper manner, so that one can acquire these goods and lifestyles (whether by legal or illegal means).

In order to keep us happy and spending more as consumers then capitalism is going to have to tap rather more darker strains in our characters. Perverse inversions and unsettling paradoxes, they appear to be meaningless. The psychopathology of everyday life, cold and distant or abstract. The consumer society hungers for the deviant and unexpected. A perverse sexual act can liberate the visionary self in even the dullest soul, affectless casualties of the nihilistic, over-mediated consumer landscape. A paralysing conformity and boredom that can only be relieved by some sort of violent act. Our latent psychopathy is the last nature reserve, a place of refuge for the endangered mind. Morality reduced to aesthetics, a controlled and supervised madness. All we have left as an ideology is consumerism, searching for meaning in a meaningless universe, by taking your mail-order Kalashnikov into the nearest supermarket and letting rip. The total acceptance of the substrate of violence in consumer societies when it manifests itself. What else can drive the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that will keep us ‘buying’?

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I give you bitter pills in sugar coating. The pills are harmless; the poison is in the sugar. The Spectacle is not just a collection of images. It is the medium of communication between images and is the means by which the real world is interpreted. Public Relations. The mass media is spectacular. Even in extremis it is unable to see itself as a participant in real life. Instead it turns real life into a spectacle - and participates in that. The spectacle offers ‘new lamps for old’. Powerless and alienated in our real community it encourages us to live the community life of Ambridge, Crossroads or Coronation Street. All is conterfeit. So confident - it can taunt us with our own gullibility. Does your life match up to the spectacle?Isn’t real life best left to the experts? …Enjoy. The producer sells; The Consumer buys; and the COMMODITY gets sold. The TV companies produce the programmes, the advertisers culture. That really big commodity. The one that sells all the others. The mass media turns real life into a comic strip. “The black panther”, “The Jackal”, “The Penguin”. The blood is real but the language is the language of Gotham City. In the right words. In the right order. Without the mass media there can be little effective propoganda. …. with it there is very little else. ‘You might just as well say’, added the March Hare, ‘that “I like what I get” is the same thing as “I get what I like”‘. Sometimes the mass media will even bite the hand that feeds it….. but it will never bite it off. It’s only Rock n’ Roll! Technological Valium. Programming? Isn’t that what they do to computers?

Our ambitions are clearly megalomaniac. The depletion of modern forms of art and style is all too obvious. The development of this task presupposes a revolution that has yet to take place. This desire gets smothered. It is their timidity that keeps people from looking beyond the decomposition, the pursuit of fragmentary works combined with simple-minded proclamations of an alleged new stage, a mechanistic idea whose function is to reassure. Very much “of today” in relation to their audiences, and nothing more, sidetracked in outdated theories, no longer offers even the memory of a reality.

In keeping with Channel 40s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts in living color, you’re going to see another first – an attempt at suicide.

I could not recognize a single constellation. A distant voice reached me through the murmuring and crackling, shifted unexpectedly, penetrating my pneumatic cocoon. I had missed the precious moment. Successive bursts of static came through the headphones, and ran through my entire body, organic, sentient, unimaginably powerful, profoundly indifferent. The stars having vanished long since the vibration reached me, I felt no fear, I was falling against a background of deep, low-pitched murmuring. My gaze was swallowed up on the pale reddish glow of infinity, swaying with a peculiar slow-motion rhythm imposed on it by the artificial magnetic field, filtered through the insulating layers of the outer skins the lurid sky became grey, distant and flat; everything was blotted out; I was falling in a spin. I turned round. There was total silence.

From Constant Gibson Blog Performative Writing project.

All text taken from other sources and re-presented.

Catalogue Text

so we were thinking about science and fiction and science fiction, and figured it’d be a good way to thrash out a bunch of ideas we had and get some other people to join in too, of course this was a while ago and now we’ve driven ourselves mad with it all, but we love science fiction even though we know it’s escapist and perpetuates the status-quo by giving us something outside of the everyday that we desire and then when we’re addicted they sell it back to us, and we’re too blinded to think about how little revolution there actually is in the future, but still, it was watching and reading those things that pumped up our imaginations so that we believed we could make something happen, and the lower the budget and the more cobbled together the sets, the more you see what’s really important, that everything is as true as we want to make it, and that the future doesn’t exist, so it’s all about now, the most outrageous plots and aliens are no more fiction than any gritty drama or politicians speech, and science is fiction anyway, it splits everything up into manageable pieces and makes things seem valid by using a method, but art and literature use methods too and no-one thinks they always tell the truth, science is always changing what it tells us: the world is going to be wiped out by a giant asteroid, no it’s alright we could destroy it in time, oh no we couldn’t, oh yes we could, some science accepts the uncertainty, the fuzziness of logic, but what’s always presented in the media is science as a solid, trustworthy authority, white coat = believe, its all acting, and it spreads into fiction, people trust the opinions of actors who play doctors more than those who play killers, and have you noticed how there’s all these programmes where it seems like they’re fiction but everyone talks like they’re real, as well as all the ones they admit are fakes, we’re all losing our boundaries between truth and fiction, which can be a good thing if you are aware of it, and make use of it, but sometimes it gets difficult and you find yourself caring more about who wins big brother than something really important like, like, see it’s getting difficult to say what’s important anymore, we’re getting our information about the world through media which we know are flawed, so we doubt everything and maybe that’s what they want, of course the idea of ‘they’ is another fiction, this conspiracy theory that those in authority are plotting how best to manipulate the masses, which is probably partially true, but as individuals they’re all as fucked up and self-obsessed as the rest of us, but we like to think there’s someone out there fucking with our heads so that we don’t have to face the fact that we’re fucking with our own heads, that we want to believe the lies and that’s why they work, even though we know it just makes us more likely to waste our lives and money if we identify with this film, this computer game, this book, this comic, this album, this computer, this mobile phone, we still do it, we’re still wired to project ourselves outside our bodies into stuff, use a bone, use a phone, and it’s very easy to imagine that art is immune from all this and we don’t have to watch for the same stories here, but of course that’s just wishful thinking and we’re just as likely to idealise our favourite artist as a rock star, believe that something is a good piece of art if we see it in a respected gallery in london, or think an organisation is professional if they produce an orderly, attractive web site.