2nd Performance

The piece is a mix of electric voice, computer cartoon, electronic music, and mass-media video loops. It combines real time improvisation as well as scripted sections. Blake & John create an audio-image of a trance-like world of bodies in transition between embodiment & disembodiment while Ruby improvises graphics at her Amiga workstation and Howard orchestrates the mixing of Ruby’s images with other appropriated moving and still images, including images of the audience and performers, which are then projected onto a large screen and routed to a number of television monitors.

A note on the story
The narrator of the piece is an out-of-work security guy.  Alone in his room he has gradually drifted into a dissociated state wherein he imagines that he is a sort of cosmic security agent, keeping track of everything that’s going on in his neighbourhood. He has the eyes of surveillance. He’s not sure if they are implants or if he has only recently discovered a natural ability to see through walls, all across town, into the various clubs & dives that he knows about. It’s almost as if he doesn’t have a body. In the state he’s in, he doesn’t need one. He doesn’t make any distinction any more between what is real and what is a thought. Reality, then, is somewhat ephemeral, less than solid, fissured, semi-transparent and peopled by memories, ghosts, things lost and then rediscovered but changed. His mind is peopled with wireless bodies, bodies that have become detached from their flesh, bodies that have become unplugged and lacking the third dimension drift down the neon-lit alleys of Television, float up out of magazines like the smell of wet printers ink into the nose of a man with no teeth. The wireless bodies of memory drift into his brain on the beams of weak sunlight comes through the dirty window that might as well be an eye. He muses on how the agents that hang out at the Money Mart over on Terminal bring in tourists from other planets, how they come in on a vector, how the virus personalities make them come in on a vector, how the virus personalities make a buck, where the xerox children go, how …

Covert Cartoons
The show is, in one sense, all about the cartoon and the relation of the cartoon to the more detailed image of what we call visual “realism.” The image of reality stripped of extraneous detail (an essential image) collides with the host of details that like a swarm or insects or viral entities is no less lethal because they are invisible. Or so commonly visible that they remain unnoticed.

Blake Parker, in the cartoon-like persona of Norman or Harry, an out-of-work security man, muses on the nature of the world while Ruby Truly improvises flat cartoon images with broad strokes in primary colours on her Amiga work station. Harry’s world is peopled by wireless bodies, those essential cartoon images that rise like steam off the cooling dung heaps of popular culture. His world is a world of stereotypes, that is, types that have separated themselves from the flesh and are now free to circulate in his neighbourhood with only the psychic police on their trail.
Within the matrix of these words and images, John Mills-Cockell improvises an otherworldly music that evokes an almost terminal nostalgia for sunlight & the youth of planetary bodies, animal bodies that can still contain a mystery within them. Animal calls, the sound of rain, the ocean, birds all mix with the sound of the city, traffic, footsteps in the interior landscape of Harry’s lost world.

And lastly, or in fact, in the very first place, Howard Bearham mixes the imagery to create the surreal world of wireless bodies. He mixes media images, both still and moving, images of the performers themselves captured by two surveillance cameras during the show and the improvised cartoon imagery created by Ruby Truly. Images layer up, show through each other, fade into and replace each other. The face of Harry opens up to reveal a newsperson in his mouth.

A note on the surveillance camera
The surveillance camera turns people into criminals. The insider body becomes the outsider body. The domestic body becomes the wild body. It is dirty looking, low-definition, black & white. The surveilled body is the body reduced. Surveillance cameras are deployed near money, consumer products, gas pumps, private property. Whoever appears on the camera is a suspect. When something happens and something is bound to happen, then, whoever appears on the camera can be retrieved, brought into focus, analyzed, typed and hunted.

And Harry’s memories are like the desiccated mouse or other small animal that one finds behind the piano or in the basement, the skin dried out & become transparent so that the bones show through, the lips are shrunk back to show the teeth exposed, the eyes dried out. So something very much itself, not rotted, not disintegrated, but whole & very much itself but dead of course & preserved, mummified, abandoned & yet retaining the preciousness of bodily articulation.

The very image of nostalgia, of a memory preserved, dried out but held close to
the bones of the mind. Or something lost & then found again in field, the field of remembrance.

And the sounds of this sort of memory, a desiccated music, at once evocative and lost, the nostalgic world of a museum curator, a curator of the lost civilization of a self dedicated to staying safe, keeping other people out, the vigilance of a mind delicately tuned to the machines of vision turned inward and now stalking the stray animals of an internal night. A desiccated sound, a desiccated melody—the content of the sound or melody still intact but the "quality" of the sound has dried out, is no longer alive but mimics the aliveness, a sound which is subtly transparent and so shows the bones through. The bones of a music, part street music, part the music of nature, stray sounds, traffic, bull frogs, part Romantic European music, and part the machine beats, whines and stutters of the computer. The music that wafts out of doorways, that is played by itinerant musicians, spills from the TV, clubs and CDs but always never quite heard, but overheard, a music whose surface has been distressed, a music which has somehow aged in its movement from source to its reception. The bones show through its translucent skin, that something that has happened over time, (which some people would call death) something that happened a long time ago but which is now discovered or rediscovered but now is only a shell of itself, whose spirit is far away but still attached somehow, not wired but not entirely dead, a something that changes into the abandoned exo-skeleton of a cicade, also hardened, transparent & the centre living thing long gone away.

The distressed surface of imitation music. Radio signals as they come through late at night & waver thinly are "distressed" signals. Something that travels through time &/or space gets distressed. In terms of the metaphor of surveillance, of the low quality image of the surveillance camera, I suppose there is the equally low quality sound of a surveillance mic…something, then, heard through a wall or bounced up to a satellite & bounced back, something with some static, some blurring of the edges & I believe that, to go back to Ruby's talk, this blurring can reveal the essence of the thing. My narrator in his musings about this and that has that sort of consciousness that is haunted by old things, worn out things. In my mind, now, he sees himself as running surveillance on everything all around him, he can see through walls, all across town, can see different time periods. He is an almost disembodied intelligence that no longer makes the distinction between reality and what he thinks. He watches the transport agents bring in people from different planets down at the money mart. You can't see them. But he's got the right kind of eye & experience so he can see them. He can see the mythic shoddiness of the old tapes played over & over -- a tourist trap for astral travellers. Everything is skewed, all the images are worn & appear in that sort of worn light, one thing shows through another. They are distressed. And the term distressed also brings to mind the term "granular"—things get grainy, some of the surface information of representation is lost, there's a flicker.