The Neo-Futurist Collective
Monday, 24 November 2008
Friday, 21 November 2008
Exhibition Catalogue
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This collaborative exhibition is a guerilla intervention driven by necessity rather than design. In Sept. 2008, The Neo-Futurist Collective was invited to make a piece of work on Wall St. USA for Conflux, the annual festival for contemporary art & psychogeography. For health reasons, Rachel Gadsden was unable to attend with the rest of us, so we decided to use the trip to gather material to bring back to the UK, where we would reunite Rachel's responses with our own, via this blog and in a physical exhibition space. The four resulting pieces of work combine to produce a portrait of an iconic location and the journey of the four individuals who sought to understand its relationship to the rest of the planet.
Rowena Easton:
"Crashes, Bangs and Other Matter" - text
This text was written on our third day in NYC after wondering around the Wall Street area observing people and place. Abbie and Joe went off to do some filming – I was left 'locked' in a hotel room with the sole task of writing a script for Joe to perform live on Wall St at 6.30am the next day. This is what I came up with.
Rowena graduated from the University of Brighton with a degree in Critical Fine Art Practice. Her work is driven by language, exploring systems to evolve new narratives and create disruptions. She constructs a poetic space, which investigates the interplay between formal and organic systems. In recent years her work has become increasingly concerned with architecture and public space. She works across all mediums, and has received awards for art, public art, and poetry.
Rachel Gadsden
"Wall Street Chaos" - time-based video
An artwork that responds to chaos caused by the recent Wall St. crash. Trapped amongst the plunging world markets, three psychogeographers watched on, imbibing the energy, reacting artistically and transmitting their responses virtually to the fourth psychogeographer in a studio in London.
Rachel has a BA Hons and MA in Fine Art and has won a number of awards including the Juliet Gomperts Memorial Scholarship and the William Brooking Research Scholarship. In 1999, a series of Rachel's drawings were exhibited in the Dostoyevsky Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. More recently, in 2007, Rachel was appointed Artist-in-Residence at Hampton Court Royal Palace, and was commissioned to make a series of artworks for the Beijing-London Paralympics handover Ceremony.
Abigail Norris
"Derivatives" - single screen video
In the making of this film, I became fascinated by the city as an enormous weight of concrete that man has created about himself, almost as if identity and notion of self has become embedded within the fabric of the buildings. The kingdom of man is made of concrete. What set this in motion? Treadmills and revolving trap doors, obscured reflections unsettle our passage through the streets. Where has it all come from and where is it going? Stop and look.
I use video to collect samples from situations and experiences, to absorb atmospheres and observe character. I view each space that I inhabit with a camera as a mystery to be experienced and investigated, without direction or intent. I capture the subjects that present themselves. I see myself as a gatherer of information and a collector of evidence.
Joseph Young
"This is where the money is ..." - sound installation
A series of audio polaroids in conversation between two sets of speakers. In the temporal sound space, intervention by the human voice marks an interruption that facilitates the reading of noise - of defining and contextualising that which is constant, and therefore often ignored or blocked out. Through the dialogue between voice and noise, it may be possible to construct new or surprising narratives to re-awaken the senses and stimulate our engagement with the aural landscape.
My practice is concerned with the ordinary and the everyday in the urban soundscape. I investigate and record time and place with the addition of human voice to disrupt and interpret ubiquitous urban noise. The desirable and the unwanted blur and dissolve within the constant hum. Through improvisation and dialogue between the voice-at-the-centre and the surrounding soundscape, my work attempts to reconfigure our prejudices and introduce the listener to the wealth of sonic beauty living inside the drone.
Credits:
Curated and produced by Joseph Young for The Neo-Futurist Collective, with much needed support and guidance from Rowena Easton.
Wire Derive: Mike Blow
Publicity Design: Sara Popowa
Limited edition T-shirts and posters by Rowena Easton, courtesy of BDI Screen Printing - available from Joseph Young on artofnoises@gmail.com or 07973 714589.
Thanks to Maria Pattinson, Peter Faulkner, Harry Neve, A-Design Ltd, Johanna Berger, Helen Medland, Ginny Farman, Eva Weaver and Dr. Adam "Foot" Taylor for their help and generosity.
Monday, 3 November 2008
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS
Joseph Young, Rowena Easton, Rachel Gadsden and Abigail Norris of The Neo-Futurist Collective (www.neofuturist.org) invite you to attend the opening of an exhibition of work gathered on Wall St. USA during the weekend of the Lehmann Brothers collapse in September.
The Private View is Friday Nov. 21st, or if you can't make that, come along to the Remix evening on Wed Nov. 26th when artists Johanna Berger and Ginny Farman will share their personal responses to the exhibition.
Monday, 15 September 2008
Sunday, 14 September 2008
draft script /// rowena
Crashes, Bangs & Other Matter
RE: What’s your weather like right now?
MC: Bring shorts, sandals, and a brolly.
RE: I was hoping to escape from English piss.
MC: Yeah well, this is Ike’s piss.
Wednesday 10th: Doomsday is a contrary date to begin a journey. Don’t know how far I’ll get.
Deep beneath Alpine meadows? Scientists do have a sense of humour, its just more ambitious.
Thursday 11th: Hysterics, tourists and men in black eddy around Zero. I’m still here.
Friday 12th: Wall Street. Writing in an airless room … I followed her thread the other way, back into the breaches: dark regions, saturated with impact craters; lighter regions, crosscut by extensive grooves and ridges: the result of tectonic activity brought about by tidal dealing. Between the wall – gaps in fact – I came and found further disappearances. Looked for the holes in the fabric of the city: pot holes, tight holes, night holes, cellar holes, shrapnel holes. Full of holes; a synthesis of holes.
Fortunes made in flight.
Companies combining to make nothing.
This is the house that Jack Morgan built.
An empty canyon.
Stock drops.
Men, pink and ripe, smack the street.
I busied myself with the space caught between the curtains, a non-game:
Exploding a small coin,
A Rasta with ‘NOTHING’ on his chest,
The albino hanging a suit down an opening,
Mixing a cocktail without a recipe,
A dragonfly framed,
A gyrating market tracing a circle with its hips,
Joined at both ends by a midget in a wheelchair,
Naked jaywalker,
No bells ringing,
No traffic,
No Pat.
It’s a catgut grid.
“ … watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers.”
And I found, secreted in the moment, a shattering.
“Nothing can happen only once …”
The collision left fragments: languages: of gloves, of hides, of horseshoes, of kisses, of knives, of news, of wit.
3000 dickering merchants: “Read my lipstick: drill. Drill baby, drill:”
Dues. The priest positively refused to take anything Graced with collars and crowned also with gems, faith. Certain strange things had manifestly happened, were reported, and which the despatch related a screw to put in, as the one here has, so that.
Not fun, not crime. Perhaps a highcrow intellectual the gift for intrigue, which perhaps had helped for the goods supplied, threats and applications of cuddle in the cinema, wouldn't you, miss eyelesbarrow over him, and his accent was peculiarly that of. An' light'eaded grinnin' giddy goats i used to paper was invented by edison. Also the tasimeter, quartered themselves there.' bhishma said, 'after all its pain. Hovering at her side was hagar, and enemies to government, though they now flatter.
A shifting crust. Wandering rocks, crashing into lots. New paths. Moving parcels of land wrapped in paper, defining and redefining. Breathing markets: contracts.
Tax wrappers and wrinkles.
Down the way to the river I listened for the squeak of bird sneakers, the birds whirling against the monstrous glug.
Watched as the jogger stretched behind the Japanese crew on set.
Paperhunted.
Took the slender silver line to topographical adventures. Into an atrium of lace columns, walkways of evergreens and waterfalls: soothing encouragement to keep moving, keep the money trickling from one hand to the next. There is certainty with transparency. The running water, the light, the glass, the Perspex, the cellophane, the polished surfaces reflect … reflections of what is present, what is behind, and what is in front. Images and actions mirrored, replicated, multiplied. Existence confirmed through repetition.
I sanitised my hands. Through the reclaimed land sloping off into the shit, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
And before me were the tower heads, amputated buildings hauled by 40 teams of oxen into a haemorrhaging city. Partial occupancy had left a feverish surplus.
I climbed up through trading air to the temple, the Godthab, but couldn’t find the source. Instead, along the receding shore of the flow, I saw the fashionable men of Hell’s Kitchen were boiling up a different stock: of mild pleasantness. Of eco-porn and encampment.
Who owns what?
Who signs the steel?
What keeps the aliens out and the animals in?
Saturday 13th: sleep, eat, shop.
Sunday 14th: Coney Island, where the ground tone is lowest, and Faber’s Fascination is a peach mama rocking the car. White cars do not swing. The freaks are dead. So is the chicken.
RE: What’s your weather like right now?
MC: Bring shorts, sandals, and a brolly.
RE: I was hoping to escape from English piss.
MC: Yeah well, this is Ike’s piss.
Wednesday 10th: Doomsday is a contrary date to begin a journey. Don’t know how far I’ll get.
Deep beneath Alpine meadows? Scientists do have a sense of humour, its just more ambitious.
Thursday 11th: Hysterics, tourists and men in black eddy around Zero. I’m still here.
Friday 12th: Wall Street. Writing in an airless room … I followed her thread the other way, back into the breaches: dark regions, saturated with impact craters; lighter regions, crosscut by extensive grooves and ridges: the result of tectonic activity brought about by tidal dealing. Between the wall – gaps in fact – I came and found further disappearances. Looked for the holes in the fabric of the city: pot holes, tight holes, night holes, cellar holes, shrapnel holes. Full of holes; a synthesis of holes.
Fortunes made in flight.
Companies combining to make nothing.
This is the house that Jack Morgan built.
An empty canyon.
Stock drops.
Men, pink and ripe, smack the street.
I busied myself with the space caught between the curtains, a non-game:
Exploding a small coin,
A Rasta with ‘NOTHING’ on his chest,
The albino hanging a suit down an opening,
Mixing a cocktail without a recipe,
A dragonfly framed,
A gyrating market tracing a circle with its hips,
Joined at both ends by a midget in a wheelchair,
Naked jaywalker,
No bells ringing,
No traffic,
No Pat.
It’s a catgut grid.
“ … watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers.”
And I found, secreted in the moment, a shattering.
“Nothing can happen only once …”
The collision left fragments: languages: of gloves, of hides, of horseshoes, of kisses, of knives, of news, of wit.
3000 dickering merchants: “Read my lipstick: drill. Drill baby, drill:”
Dues. The priest positively refused to take anything Graced with collars and crowned also with gems, faith. Certain strange things had manifestly happened, were reported, and which the despatch related a screw to put in, as the one here has, so that.
Not fun, not crime. Perhaps a highcrow intellectual the gift for intrigue, which perhaps had helped for the goods supplied, threats and applications of cuddle in the cinema, wouldn't you, miss eyelesbarrow over him, and his accent was peculiarly that of. An' light'eaded grinnin' giddy goats i used to paper was invented by edison. Also the tasimeter, quartered themselves there.' bhishma said, 'after all its pain. Hovering at her side was hagar, and enemies to government, though they now flatter.
A shifting crust. Wandering rocks, crashing into lots. New paths. Moving parcels of land wrapped in paper, defining and redefining. Breathing markets: contracts.
Tax wrappers and wrinkles.
Down the way to the river I listened for the squeak of bird sneakers, the birds whirling against the monstrous glug.
Watched as the jogger stretched behind the Japanese crew on set.
Paperhunted.
Took the slender silver line to topographical adventures. Into an atrium of lace columns, walkways of evergreens and waterfalls: soothing encouragement to keep moving, keep the money trickling from one hand to the next. There is certainty with transparency. The running water, the light, the glass, the Perspex, the cellophane, the polished surfaces reflect … reflections of what is present, what is behind, and what is in front. Images and actions mirrored, replicated, multiplied. Existence confirmed through repetition.
I sanitised my hands. Through the reclaimed land sloping off into the shit, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
And before me were the tower heads, amputated buildings hauled by 40 teams of oxen into a haemorrhaging city. Partial occupancy had left a feverish surplus.
I climbed up through trading air to the temple, the Godthab, but couldn’t find the source. Instead, along the receding shore of the flow, I saw the fashionable men of Hell’s Kitchen were boiling up a different stock: of mild pleasantness. Of eco-porn and encampment.
Who owns what?
Who signs the steel?
What keeps the aliens out and the animals in?
Saturday 13th: sleep, eat, shop.
Sunday 14th: Coney Island, where the ground tone is lowest, and Faber’s Fascination is a peach mama rocking the car. White cars do not swing. The freaks are dead. So is the chicken.
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Saturday, 13 September 2008
Friday, 12 September 2008
CONFLUX DAY 1 ///// ROWENA
Exploding a small coin,
A Rasta with ‘NOTHING’ on his chest,
The albino hanging a suit down an opening,
A dragonfly framed,
A gyrating market tracing a circle with its hips,
Joined at both ends by a midget in a wheelchair,
Naked jaywalker,
No bells ringing,
No traffic.
It’s a catgut grid!
A Rasta with ‘NOTHING’ on his chest,
The albino hanging a suit down an opening,
A dragonfly framed,
A gyrating market tracing a circle with its hips,
Joined at both ends by a midget in a wheelchair,
Naked jaywalker,
No bells ringing,
No traffic.
It’s a catgut grid!
Wednesday, 27 August 2008
Tuesday, 26 August 2008
Tuesday, 19 August 2008
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