Keynote Presentation | Philip Brophy

Voiding Effects & Terrorized Language: The Unreality of ISIS videos

The clutch of late 2013/early-2014 ISIS videos have been near-unanimously accepted as being real — mostly out of fear that they might be real. Yet the videos employ multi-camera set-ups, pixel-tracking, void-compositing, particle effects and diffusion plug-ins which are utilised in Hollywood, television advertising and video art production — all of whom ape cinematic effects for various purposes.

The contemporary dilemma is not whether one believes the videos to be real or unreal, but how one distinguishes their divination from the consternation of Zero Dark Thirty, the hysterics of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, or the rhetoric of Harun Farocki’s Serious Games. Each voids the others’ effects through mimicking, adopting and transplanting each other’s desperate drive to evidence reality, and thereby transform the world in its image.

‘Institutional critique’ thus runs rampant, supplying an endless demand for symbolic intervention. Lo-fi terrorist tracts, ethical Hollywood movies, and large-scale museographic commissions all subvert and re-route language codes from one channel of cultural address to then re-broadcast it as liminal or oppositional information. All effectively terrorise their language of address.

For the intelligentsia, this involves acts of ‘decoding’ and ‘exposing’. For ISIS, it involves recoding and posting. The question to be begged: if it is socially acceptable for the intelligentsia to mount critiques of ‘the State’ deemed responsible for inducing terrorist acts, why is it ethically unacceptable for a terrorist cell to engage in identical critiques by using identical artistic and linguistic operations?

Philip Brophy

Time: 2.30pm
Location: Level 2, Seminar Room

Performance Program

Curated by Roslyn Helper, featuring Jannah Quill and Eugene Choi, Matthew Linde, Peter Blamey and Amy Ireland

Jannah Quill and Eugene Choi
Motorised Motion

Motorised Motion is the first collaboration between Jannah Quill and Eugene Choi, and combines the artists’ respective sound and performance practices to create and disseminate a series of human-via-machine messages. This performance speaks to surveillance and the techno-regulation of bodies as the machine interprets, fractures and disperses the actions and reactions of performer and spectator alike.

Time: 12pm, 2pm, 5pm
Location: Level 2, Studio 2.01 and common area

Peter Blamey
Double Partial Eclipse

Peter Blamey explores themes of sound and energy, and the reimagining of technology through questioning accepted notions of connectivity, variability and use. This performance sees handheld photovoltaic panels harvest energy from available light sources — lightbulbs, the sun, strobe lights and video projectors — to power ebows (small electronic string-driving devices) on electric guitars.

Time: 3.30pm
Location: Level 2, Studio 2.01

Matthew Linde
Spring Cleaning

What better way to end the year than with a spring-clean? A performer takes on the role of artist Matthew Linde to play with the constructs of the fashion system and its artifice: minimum wage, aspiration, acquaintances, taste, ‘cool’ as a positive, bodies, style, display, flowers, groups, social, uncut fabric, sitting around, meeting, party, discussion, burnt velvet, presentation, fakes, elegance, drinks, D&Ms, conversations, instant chat, dinners, cachet, smoking…

Symbolism that has gained cultural capital via online systems is re-communicated through this newly visceral embodied performance. What will he keep and what will he chuck out?

Time: 1.30pm, 3pm, 4.30pm
Location: Level 2, hallway

Amy Ireland

Amy Ireland is an experimental poet and theorist based in Sydney. She is a member of the technomaterialist transfeminist writing collective, Laboria Cuboniks; co-convenor of the philosophy and aesthetics research group 'Aesthetics After Finitude', and she is currently engaged in various poetry projects involving sound, linguistic transcoding, 3D-printing, stealth technology and projectiles. Ireland will perform as 'writer-in-residence' during the Finnisage, taking over Artspace’s social media channels to live-commentate the event.

Time: 1pm, 2.30pm, 4pm
Location: Level 2, Studio 2.01, Seminar Room and Artspace Twitter