So, after a long and arduous mental battle, Marconi’s Shipwreck finally washes ashore on DVD and digital via Broken20. You can view the piece in compressed form in its entirety below. If you’re interested, this page contains the inspiration and motivation behind the work.

Marconi’s Shipwreck from Erstlaub on Vimeo.

You can pick it up directly from the label via this link. Please note that Bandcamp have a fairly ridiculous set of filesize limitations so while the download appears as 2 separate tracks, a link is included to download your preferred format in its proper form as one continuous track. The DVD edition comes with a limited edition transparent sonogram of the piece and download code.

There have already been a few bits of press around it including features at Darkfloor, No Fear Of Pop and Phuturelabs, the latter of which contains an exclusive 32 minute mix of unreleased, rare or otherwise not readily available material straight from the recent archives titled ‘Restructured Narratives’.

Thanks.

D

So, another lengthy gap since the last post and things have been in a strange state of balance between insanely busy and guilt-spawning less surface apparent quiescence. So what’s been happening other than my ability to fall out of the habit of regular bloggery? Let’s see.

Well, I bought a new Macbook seeing as my old one had reached a point of doing a passable impression of sounding like a hovercraft without any programs running and have hit the wonderful wall created by the lovely people at AVID meaning that my main audio interface (mbox mini 2) is currently about as useful as a housebrick under OSX Lion – cheers guys but I doubt I’ll be spending any more money on your awful ProTools software or another locked in, we don’t really give a shit about our customers after they’ve bought stuff from us hardware setup. Back to the drawing board on that, if anyone has a recommend for an affordable alternative to the Mbox (2 ins/outs, XLR/Phantom Power, preamps) it’s be greatly appreciated.

A couple of weeks back I finally dragged myself out for a little drift taking in the Victoria Dock end of Dundee. It’s currently one of those wonderful borderlands surrounded by modernisation and homogenisation with a little pocket of abandonville at it’s core. I’ve not really written it up so it just stands as a visual derive investigating the microlandscapes contained within a larger framework.

You can see the rest of the set here.

I made this little audio visual work at the weekend as a tentative footstep into an idea I’m throwing around about the space between the mundane and the sublime. I have a couple of ideas relating to this series but may or may not decide to action them depending on whether the time is right or not.

Under/Inside from Erstlaub on Vimeo.

As part of the Blue Skies Festival here in Dundee, I had the wonderful opportunity of spending 4 days assisting London based artist Alistair McClymont in the making of rainbows at Olympia, The Tower Building and Mills Observatory. It was long hours but really rewarding and challenging both in physical and artistic ways. I thoroughly recommend seeing his work in person if you get the opportunity, otherwise there’s a nice selection on offer at his website.

Finally in terms of recent pieces, I made this little flash number after getting sucked into a beautiful sunset last weekend and staring into the sun a little too much. *May cause seizure related issues if you’re wired that way, sorry*

You can see the full browser sized version here (flash reqd).

Marconi’s Shipwreck finally makes it’s way out next week, I’ll do a dedicated post about it closer to the time. There’ll be some streams and an mix of exclusive unreleased stuff from the recent archives coming soon.

I should probably just mention incase I forget that the mighty Warren Ellis (writer of amazing things such as Freak Angels, Transmetropolitan, Supergod, The Authority, Planetary, etc. as opposed to the violin playing Nick Cave man) included one of my works in his generally awesome Spektrmodule podcasts. It was really quite a nice little surprise as I am a massive fan of his work and general all round being an amazing guyness. You can hear/download it here and you really ought to go and buy his work because it’s brialliant.

Anyway, thanks for your patience (I’m still looking for £3500 for my MFA fees by the way, feel free to paypal me it if you feel so inclined).

D

Aye, it’s been a while I suppose. There’s been lots of things happening behind the scenes I suppose which I’ve not posted here for various reasons (primarily revolving around slackness).

Top of the pile I guess has been applying for the MFA here in Dundee and the excessive filling out of funding applications to attempt to take some of the brunt of the £3400 invoice for the course. I received an unconditional acceptance and start back at DJCAD in September.

In addition to this, I’ve managed to get a job at DCA as Gallery Assistant where I start at the end of this month. For the interview, I had to do a little presentation on a piece of work which I decided would be Bill Drummond’s ‘For Sale, A Smell Of Sulphur In The Wind by Richard Long, $20,000’ (why I decided to pick such an awkward title to say, I have no idea but it paid off in the end and led to a strange little sequence if Drummond based intersections including the reading and thorough enjoying of his most recent book ‘100’ and then last weekend the fantastic broadcast on Resonance FM of score #398 for the 17, ‘At The Age Of 59’ which saw The Man playing a song (or audio) from the full 59 year long performance that has been Bill Drummond and talking about what these pieces meant to him, now mean to him and offering general opinions on the state of the universe over the course of 13 hours (while simultaneously building a bed in the studio). One of the most interesting and enjoyable pieces of performance that I’ve experienced in some time.

We had a bit of a pulling out of the stops for the release of TVO’s ‘Red Night‘ tape release on Broken60 which featured quite a lot of additional inserts and pieces, details of which you can see by clicking the image below.

So, moving on, I’ve had three pieces selected for inclusion in NowhereIsland Radio, a broadcast event taking place at the beginning of August to coincide with Alex Hartley’s fantastic NowhereIsland reaching Plymouth. Elsewhere, my previous release on Broken20, The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep is to be included in its entirety in Scottish lens based auteur Alastair Cook‘s forthcoming ‘Little Forks’ project, which I’ll obviously share more details on once they emerge.

There has been a slow expulsion of audio works since the last post ranging from subsurface textures to full on noisy pedal improv business, draw your own conclusions.

An Insect Kingdom by Erstlaub
Barge Adrift by Erstlaub
Bohm’s Mandala by Erstlaub
The Wall Is A Circle by Erstlaub
The Stone Speaks To The Tree About Time by Erstlaub

Finally, I’ve posted up a highly compressed (not easy to fit 72 minutes of audio/video into a >500mb file without compromising lots of quality) full version of Marconi’s Shipwreck which some of you might have seen as part of Crossing Point, my degree show exhibition. This will be available on DVD and digitally from Broken20 in the next month or so, I’ll post up once it’s out, in the meantime you can dive in below.

Just as a little note also, I’ve temporarily disabled the old Erstlaub site as it was starting to fall to bits, I will update it fully at some point but in the meantime it redirects to the more active parts of my site. You can still contact me through the usual channels if you want to give me a big pile of money, replace my dying macbook or just give me a hug.

I’ll just take a quick moment also to point out a couple of things I’ve recently absorbed which I completely endorse. Bela Tarr’s Turin Horse, man, just the biggest, most beautifully produced piece of metaphysical bleakness I’ve come across in ages. 2 and a half hours long and made up of just 30 shots, it’s strange to think that this is Tarr’s last film but also strangely fitting for a man who is so paced that he sometimes makes Tarkovsky come across like Michael Bay. I also finally got around to watching Grant Gee’s Patience (After Sebald) which manages wonderfully to mirror Sebald’s scam of making a piece of work that is sort of about something while not actually being about it and being largely about something else entirely. I loved it and of course the underpinning by The Caretaker’s ever evocative soundtrack was the icing on the cake, well worth the tenner or so on Amazon.

Until next time.

D

So as the carnival of Degree Show leaves town, we’ve reached that point of impact. A car being driven full pelt with three years of creative acceleration and momentum straight into a brick wall, the camera pulls back and does that Zack Snyder thing where time expands, the camera running at 12,500 frames per second highlights every shard of glass and bone, the twisting of metal and the watermelon impact of flesh against brick, each drop of blood a perfect sphere suspended in enforced zero gravity while some juxtaposed operatic libretto highlights the beauty, held even in destruction.

This morning the whitespace in the Time Based Art studio reverted to its latent form, the walls stripped bare, the energy dispersed, turning widdershins three times to dispel the magic trapped there by the summoning which had taken place. I had an interesting conversation with the fantastically talented artist/writer/thinker Kevin Smith yesterday where we mused on the fact that regardless of context, a painting will always be a painting, while the ephemeral genie of conceptual and installation work at some point needs forced back into the bottle, often quite awkwardly.

Earlier, while closing out the Chronacair file, a certain order of things presented itself to me. An installation, by my understanding, is an intervention in space and time, by its very nature a finite crossing point, a bridge between concept and ‘reality’ and as such, the ephemerality of it is as important as its existence. After all, an intervention which endures becomes a fixed point, it becomes part of the everyday which, as artists, we battle against. By breaking the spell we have cast and by means of this banishing, returning things back to their lifeless, constituent components we move on, ashes to ashes.

I’m really just musing in an effort to keep my mind from straying too far into dangerous waters here but, I expect if you’re reading this you’ll probably have a decent enough picture of how it tends to be round these parts.

I’d like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank everyone who came down to visit my space at the Degree Show and took the time to engage with the work. It’s been such a hugely rewarding week. At artschool (which I categorically love by the way), almost every conversation about work is centred around your influences, concepts, processes, grade, etc. and it really is a strangely constructed, artificial environment, sure it is flexible and (in academic terms) necessary but at the end of the day, when opening our spaces to the general population, we are met with a much truer reflection of our work. Art is something which you look at and it either resonates with some buried part of your psyche or, you simply don’t like it. No amount of explanation, papertrails and lists of other artists you admire will ever change that. People like art and engage with it, or they don’t. Oscar Wilde writes in the preface of A Picture of Dorian Grey. “All art is quite useless” and in this, lies true beauty. If art were ‘useful’ and served a function other than some form of mental drift, escapism, aesthetic rapture, whatever you want to call it, it ceases to exist in that wonderously liminal space where the ‘soul’ resides, the very thing that makes us human.

On a slightly more capitalist note, I’ve got a few bits and pieces left over from the show, I’ll list them below, if you’re interested or have any queries, please drop me a line at dave (at) erstlaub.co.uk and we can work something out. Prices listed exclude postage which will depend of what you want and where you live but wont be much more than £1 or so I reckon. Any transactions will be done personally via Paypal, I’ll try to throw in some goodies (or downloads) with every purchase. I’m living up to the stereotype of being a poor artist so go on, treat yourself, it’ll be greatly appreciated.

A Field Guide to the Island of Chronacair: A5, 23 page, full colour artist book compiling many of the elements which make up ‘A Return’ – £7
Traditional Songs From the Island of Chronacair: A5, 12 page, artist book of sheet music composed for ‘A return’ – £4
Spirit Trap: Exclusive to Degree Show Audio CD, Running Time 36’08”, each contains an individual 100 x 75mm photographic print – £5
Marconi’s Shipwreck: Exclusive early release DVD, running time 71’58” (note – also avaliable on DVD/Digital from Broken20 later in 2012) – £5

A small selection of prints are also avaialble although I’m a bit wary about postage costs so will need to look into it, let me know if you’re interested though.

Concrete Poems: Dundee Sequence: A set of three, A4 concrete poems in clip frames (view) – £45
Entropic Recall: A triptych of  100 x 150mm prints mounted on black in A3 clip frame, comes with over three hours of audio as download (view) – £30
Hymnal: A single A4, visual/prose poem in clip frame (view) – £25

Thanks for everything.

D

So, today was red-letter day and I’m happy to be able to report that I am now the somewhat befuddled new owner of a first class honours degree in Time Based Art and Digital Film.

I’d just like to take the opportunity to thank everyone that’s been part of my life for the last few years, it’s been a weird old ride and the coming years, I’m sure have even stranger secrets to reveal. It is genuinely appreciated though.

Well done and thanks to everyone that I’ve had the pleasure of crossing paths with along the way at DJCAD, I hope your envelopes mirrored the passion and energy that you’ve put in (and if not, then hold onto the passion regardless). Extra shouts to Steven James Herd and Robbie Nolan on their firsts also, truly deserved gentlemen, proud to have served alongside you both.

Anyway, I’ll have some more useful chat at some point soon, in the meantime, please do come along to see the degree show, so much amazing work condensed into such a small space that it’s breathtaking. Open this Friday and runs until the following Sunday.

You can have a 2d, digital precursor of my show here. Please drop by, take in the work and I’ll be more than happy to have some chat if the desire takes you.

D

Another little bit of cataloguing of process for degree show, I figured it might be of interest to put together a collection of quotes which I feel go some ways to mapping my inspirations, thought patterns and processes. The list appears in no specific order other than that in which they come back to me. But first, here are some little teaser images of how the installation is progressing.

A little more here.

QUOTES:

Here follows a small selection of quotes that I feel have particular resonance in the context of both my work and my general mental makeup.

“Hush; may I ask you all for silence?
The dreamer is still asleep
May the goddess keep us from single vision
And you to sleep
The dreamer is still asleep
The dreamer is still asleep
He’s inventing landscapes in their magnetic field
Working out a means of escape
We’ll cut across the crop circles”

Jhonn Balance, The Dreamer Is Still Asleep, 1999

“Sous les pavés, la plage”

Anon. 1968

“I believe in the light cast by video-recorders in department store windows, in the messianic insights of the radiator grilles of showroom automobiles, in the elegance of the oil stains on the engine nacelles of 747s parked on airport tarmacs.

I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.”

JG Ballard, What I Believe, 1984

“The road behind co-exists with the road ahead, we are Stokers’ undead, see nothing of ourselves in the rearview mirror. We see the tarmac ahead, we see the vanishing point, we travel on with only the radio for company, we move through space and time, memory receeds, we become cosmonaughts, we become lost.”

Iain Sinclair, Orbital, 2002

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how much was mine to keep”

Kurt Vonnengut, Slaughterhouse V, 1969

“Liat conceives a building that enfolds the road, a museum of memory. Sensors monitor traffic, affecting the fabric of the building, influencing the dreamers in their alcoves. The walls are thin as paper or they are thick as the masonry of the Tower of London. The wonder is that such resonant projects begin with a tatty map, rescued ephemera from a building that remains suspicious of its own legend.”

Iain Sinclair on Liat Uziel’s Museum of Memory, Orbital, 2002

“as so often, the archive, despite its plentitude and profusion, invokes what is missing rather than what is present.”

Michael Sheringham, Archiving (Restless Cities), 2010

“Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadow of our eyelids and we have never stopped…to ponder what we are seeing and living, to draw conclusions, to contemplate from the distance.”

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities,1974

“I shall traverse my room up and down and across, without rule or plan. I shall even zig-zag about, following, if needs be,  every possible geometrical line. I am no admirer of people who are such masters of their every step and every idea.”

Xavier De Maistre, A Journey Round My Room, 1871

“Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see the increasing complexity of our mental constructs  a means for greater understanding, even while intuiuively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.”

WG Sebald, Rings Of Saturn, 1995

“The Universe, which always was a computer, will, for one moment- not even that- be so dense and have so much energy that it will be able to compute anything atall. So why not simply program it to simulate a new one that will never end. This moment will be called Omega Point, and, because it has the power to contain everything, will be indistinguishable from God.”

Scarlett Thomas, Our Tragic Universe, 2010

“There’s a palace in your head boy. Learn to live in it always.[…] You don’t think this world is any less real than the one you left do you? Everything that ever happened to you is real, even your dreams. Them most of all. There are many worlds, many cities, and all of them are just shockwaves spreading out from one single moment of clarity and understanding. Ripples.”

Grant Morrison, The Invisibles, 1994

“You are living on a Plane. What you style Flatland is the vast level surface of what I may call a fluid, or in, the top of which you and your countrymen move about, without rising above or falling below it. I am not a plane Figure, but a Solid. You call me a Circle; but in reality I am not a Circle, but an infinite number of Circles, of size varying from a Point to a Circle of thirteen inches in diameter, one placed on the top of the other. When I cut through your plane as I am now doing, I make in your plane a section which you, very rightly, call a Circle. For even a Sphere–which is my proper name in my own country–if he manifest himself at all to an inhabitant of Flatland–must needs manifest himself as a Circle.

Do you not remember–for I, who see all things, discerned last night the phantasmal vision of Lineland written upon your brain–do you not remember, I say, how when you entered the realm of Lineland, you were compelled to manifest yourself to the King, not as a Square, but as a Line, because that Linear Realm had not Dimensions enough to represent the whole of you, but only a slice or section of you? In precisely the same way, your country of Two Dimensions is not spacious enough to represent me, a being of Three, but can only exhibit a slice or section of me, which is what you call a Circle.”

Edwin Abbott, Flatland, 1884

“Most people don’t consider the dimension of time in their lives because the way we live, we see sections of time. In order to get here, you had to come through that door so, can you point to coming through that door? In order to get here today you had to be 10 years old, can you point to being 10 years old? No you can’t because the way we experience time, we can only see it in memory, we can’t actually go there even though we know there is a place called the past where all this stuff happened, you can’t even point, you  can’t show me a direction where the past is. think of yourself as the leading edge of you, this is you right now, moving forward through time but behind you there’s all these different versions of you going back and back and back. Imagine if you could see that in time, it wouldn’t just be a front and a back, it would be a long trailing thing and it contains all of you, it’s got all these arms and eyes and it moves backwards through the door and backwards down the stairs and it’s getting younger all the time through that trail but as I say, we can’t see that but if we could see it, it would look like a huge snake and it would keep going back and there are lots of these snakes and they all weave together and eventually you get ot be one year old somewhere in time, you are, right now, one year old because if you weren’t, you could be here today and that one year old dissapears back into its mother’s womb . And the same thing happens to your mother and father going back into their mother and father and you take it right back, everybody in the human race goes right back to the same human root and somewhere along the evolutionary tree we’re joined by apres but it’s all still the one thing and the tree is rooted 3 1/2 billion years ago in the ocean which is where the first living cell appeared and started to divide. The first mitochondria cell, the DNA cell is still dividing inside your body right now, it’s immortal, it never died, it never went anywhere, it just keeps dividing and making more copies of itself in all living forms so what we actually are is this amazing divided single cell which has grown itself across 3 1/2 billion years into a gigantic structure, I see it as an anemone.

If you can see the whole thing, if you can see life as a thing existing in time then there’s only this one huge thing that lives on the planet earth and feeds on the forests and feeds on itself, and that’s us, that’s what we really are.”

Grant Morrison, 2009

“Say its name, the absent town, the city in remove and there it rises in the backyard of our eyes, some common landmark, snapshot first, and then, specific street, and house, and room, specific chair. Say “Birmingham,” and the Rotunda rears within us, our imagination squinting in the traveller’s fair glare of Newstreet Station. Or say “Folkestone,” and recall the quayside’s sudden still beneath our feet. These are the towns of light, built from remembered brick, conjectured beam, that stand in Hilbert space, a plane of concept and idea where thought is form. Where the recalled smell of fresh paint upon forgotten stairs is an event in place and time. These detailed weightless urban sprawls we carry in our fragile skull, that teem with reminiscent traffics, populous with bias, opinion, rumour, legend, lie. Locations we shall never visit that yet have their hearsay substance in our lives, and so are never far from us. They rest in occult Mercators where distance is not marked from point to solid point, but calibrated there between the spark-gaps of our free associations, yielding geographies with Land’s End next to John O’ Groats, an Earth with poles adjacent. Continent, nation, mapped outside of matter, state of mind. Metropolis erected out of nothing, only metaphor, and ringed with slums of dream. Mnemonic highways made from smears of field glimpsed once through glass at speed, or from the jaundiced strobe of gone-by sodium lamps, hot amber necklace on the night’s bare throat, monoxide dabbed upon her pulse-points. Strung between the shimmering fabricated towns, inroads of anecdote, synaptic rails to bear the trains of thought, a beaded web across our gazetteer of the interior. Seen from above, the glittering threads of meaning run like mercury, converge on the imaginary capital, a shadow London, our idea of London, flickering in the forebrain. When we are not here, this apparition is our only London.”

Alan Moore, The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, 1994

D

Partial update, partial freeform rambling (sorry, in the psychogeographic/subconscious archeology context I should really call it ‘a mental derive’) I guess. Degree Show is rapidly encroaching, time appears to be folding in on itself and, while weeks are passing in the blink of an eye, the inevitable conclusion still feels decades away.

First of all, a little conjecture in progress, I’m working away on material for degree show and various forms applying to do a Masters degree and trying to obtain the funding to allow me to do it so am faced with the age old nightmare of trying to classify and categorise one’s work slightly more socially acceptably than ‘it’s just what I NEED to do to stop my universe from collapsing in on itself’, this afternoon whilst wandering the City Centre, the following thoughts came to me.

There is something of a ‘fashion’ in art at the moment for activism, the packaging and selling of ‘issues’ as a vehicle for social change (or something along these lines). It strikes me that the works I’m currently involved with can’t really be seen as trying to stop global warming, or the capitalists, or antisocial behaviour, or whatever other big things are currently making headlines but what I am attempting, is a form of micro-activism. By presenting the viewer (I always struggle to give people experiencing art a collective generic term but that’ll do for the time being), with my observations, I hope to instill their confidence, or open them up, to reappraising their own relationships with space, both the physical spaces they inhabit, and to give weight and reverence to the invisible kindgoms constructed of thought and memory and light which we all build within us. Whether utilising the mechanics of psychogeography or producing a physical manifestion of an emotional space through sound and/or visual art, giving people the opportunity to excavate space, to view it from a different perspective, by delving through the layers, of history, emotion, cause/effect, time, etc. helps people to become more sensitive to causes around them and to highlight the fact that we are all just parts of a much larger complex machine, but still equally important (you can read this as history, society or more abstracted views of continuous time if you wish). Giving the people the motive and means to explore and engage with space, internal or corporeal, with a view to wider social change.

As I say, it’s a concept in progress, happy to have any discussion on or around the subject. And so, to me slightly grumbling about academia for a little bit.

I’ve always had a bit of an issue with ‘research’ in the way that it’s dressed up within an academic art context, hell, I’m not going to try to start addressing the issues I have with art in an academic context but I digress. In supporting material which I’ve previously handed in for assessment purposes I’ve always made a clear point that, in my opinion, research is a constant and indefinable process, every drain cover, line of text, cloud, passing face, overheard conversation, film, book, wallpaper, etc. is a potential flashpoint for inspiration and it’s not something I tend to record and catalogue, things have a habit, especially on a subconscious level, of presenting themselves as the only obvious direction to take on a project. It slightly appalls me that in order to tick certain academic boxes, that people end up sitting googling every single other artist who has worked in a vaguely similar field or medium, a self defeating practice. When you start down that path, it doesn’t take long for self doubt to bite and you decide that ‘your’ idea has already been done a thousand times, far better than you were going to do.

So, that said, I’ve compiled a list of artists and works which I feel have some level of reference worthy note with respect to the collected works which will be exhibited as Crossing Point (this is the non-working title for my degree show as opposed to any previous iterations which may have appeared). This list is by no means exhaustive, hell I’m not even sure that it’s accurate but here you go, because boxes must be ticked (and I figure anyone googling for really cool people might end up here by accident) I present you with a big bunch of names of people and things which I deem influential to me as a practicing artist.

J.G. Ballard, Andrei Tarkovsky, Patrick Keiller, Will Self, Iain Sinclair, The Conet Project, D. Defoe, G. Debord, Xavier De Maistre, J.F. Lyotard, Bill Drummond, Peter J. Carroll, Aleister Crowley, Edwin Abbott, Franz Kafka, J.L. Borges, Herbert Ponting, Kurt Vonnengut, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, W.G. Sebald, Thomas Browne, Chris Petit, Paul Virilio, Italo Calvino, John Cage, William S. Burroughs, Jim Woodring, Chris Marker, Alvin Lucier, Edgard Varese, Torsten Lauschmann, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Stanley Kubrik, Lars Von Trier, J.L. Goddard, Casper Noe, Tom Weir,  Charles Avery, Throbbing Gristle, Coil, David Toop, Nietzsche, David Foster Wallace, Scarlet Thomas, NVA, Stewart Home, LPA, Leyland Kirby/The Caretaker, William Basinski, Jacob Kirkegaard

And here’s a list of slightly more specific works which I’d claim as a loose, very incomplete bibliography to the works which make up Crossing Point.

A Journey Round My Room – Xaver De maistre

London, Robinson in Space, Robinson in Ruins, The Robinson Institute – Patrick Keiller

Tlon, Uqbar – VL Borges

What I Believe – JG Ballard

Slaughterhouse V – Kurt Vonnengut

Lecture On Nothing – John Cage

The Invisibles, Doom Patrol, Supergods, et al. – Grant Morrison

From Hell, V for Vendetta, The Moon & Serpent Theatre of Marvels, Unearthing – Alan Moore

The Naked Lunch – WS Burroughs

The Inhuman – JF Lyotard

The Invisible City – Italo Calvino

Flatland – Edwin Abbott

17, $20,000, 45 – Bill Drummond

Rings of Saturn – WG Sebald

The Conet Project

The Book of The Law, The Book of Thoth – Aleister Crowley

London: City of Disappearances – Various, Ed. Iain Sinclair

London Orbital, Lights Out For The Empire, Orbital – Iain Sinclair

The Society Of The Spectacle – GE Debord

Restless Cities – Various, Eds. Beaumont & Dart

Assorted Works – Stewart Home/LPA East Section

A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland – Johnson & Boswell

Sculpting in Time – Andrei Tarkovsky

More or less the entire back catalogues of Coil, William Basinski, Arvo Part, Steve Reich and countless others.

The other thing which is incredibly difficult to put into a list like this is concepts/idioms/events “I REALLY like the aesthetics of crackly SW radio” just doesn’t feel like it fits, so it goes.

Ok, if you made it all the way down here, well done, I’m sorry, sometimes these things just have to happen, anyway, I had the absolute delight of seeing a quite scratchy 35mm print of the greatest film in the entire universe ever (Tarkovsky’s Stalker) last week and in tribute, made an audio piece in which I mentally revisited the train journey into the Zone. It’s called Schuhart’s Burden after the protagonist from Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers which the film is based around. You can download it if you like.

Schuhart’s Burden by Erstlaub

Degree show is coming along nicely, I’d say I’m about 60% installed or so, sorry I don’t have any pretty or interesting pictures for you in this post, they’ll be along soon.

Cheers

D

So, I figure it’s about time to start trying to rationalise this year’s work leading up to degree show. I think that maybe if I put it down in writing then it’ll help me resolve a couple of issues (or more likely give me a better picture of quite how sideways my brain is going).

At present, the working title of the show is “A Return” although this is highly likely to change. The exhibition is, intrinsically, an investigative excavation into internal space comprising of four main works (although there might be a couple of additions depending on the overall narrative flow of the space). The works can be broken down as follows.

Spanning

A concrete poem of sorts relayed via static floor projection, the text lays out a manifesto on being receptive to the notion of crossing between internal and external space, the concept of a ‘bridge of light’ has been plaguing me for a while, an updated version in some ways of De Quincey’s Northwest Passage.

The Numbers At The Threshold

A partner piece to Spanning, an audio/text work, based addressing the same area, each letter of a prose poem has been transcribed using a one time pad  and then relayed as a numbers station broadcast, a willful obscuration of message. The speakers playing the looping audio and the text will face each other in a space which visitors will pass through, breaking the line of sight between the message in both forms, inhabiting the space that lies between (both literally and metaphorically). more…

The Numbers At The Threshold by D.Fyans

Marconi’s Shipwreck

Having crossed over the threshold pieces, the next piece in the grand narrative is Marconi’s Shipwreck. This is a 72 minute audio-visual longform drift piece built from individual movements, composed entirely in modular synthesis which act as small, self portraits based on mental states arising from dissatisfaction with the subverted  21st century ideas of connection and interaction. With the rise and rise of f*cebook, it dawned on me that relationships have become, in many cases, little more than the pressing of a button, people becoming so entrenched in the technology that their every move is a capturable, saleable, marketable commodity to be sold to the highest bidder – we have become a population obsessed with taking photos of us having a good night out to post online to prove we were having a good night out rather than actually enjoying ourselves. Maybe I’m just rapidly becoming a grumpier, older man but this piece followed by a talk by John Armitage on Virilio led to me finally disconnecting from that site. The underlying idea that since Marconi invented radio, the signal to noise ratio has been increasing and now, we find ourselves scuttled in a sea of information/data with very little actual content or purpose within. The accompanying visual treatment uses an old TV set, a projector and a video camera set up in recursive feedback systems, the screen noise being captured and reprojected into itself building sets of visual static for the viewer/listener to scry with, searching the noise for some form of pattern or cognitive landmark. Marconi’s Shipwreck will be released on DVD under my Erstlaub persona on Broken20 (hopefully by very late April).

A Return (working title)

This is where things get a little less opaque and difficult to define. Over the last year, I have been undertaking what I’ve only recently decided I’m comfortable enough to class as ‘subconscious archeology’. Consider it the application of the fundamentals behind psychogeography applied to internal space (or non-space if you like). So, in 2006, my life changed majorly, I responded in the only way I could by channeling Erstlaub and making my first album to get a proper release ‘On Becoming An Island’ on Highpoint Lowlife (you can get the whole thing for free here). Given the passage of time, I decided to go back and try to make sense of the landscape, to conduct (as proper as you can get with this sort of thing) a proper geographic, historic and cultural study of this space and it’s disappearance from the physical.

Now, normally I’m a bit of a control freak. I come up with the concept for a piece, the manifestation of thought presents itself clearly and the piece is realised. In this instance, I consciously decided to let go, to let the project direct itself in as organic a way as possible. This has led to a number of different, intertwined narratives, interventions between ‘real world’ events and people and the fictional metaverse being explored, the writing of folk song, founding/realisation of mythological beliefs, all manner of things. Almost everything contained within the project has significance, the names, numbers, concepts at play all have anchors within me or have been based on decoded subconscious interactions, the reference points are all of interest to me, certain authors are referenced (or alluded to), philosophies and observations recirculated from the external world into this internal space. The piece then in some ways exists to highlight that the kingdoms we build within us are as, if not more, important than the corporeal, four dimensions we inhabit in day to day life.

Chronacair Songs 4 by D.Fyans

The piece manifests itself as a ‘museum’ of artifacts for the viewer to engage in at the level they choose, hopefully with a view to considering the validity and importance of their own internal spaces. A return will consist of  a curated dialogue between text, audio, video and other physical objects.

Well, that’s probably a bit too much noise/not enough content but then I’ve always ended up hoisted by my own petard. It’s obviously a fairly static set of exposition, it really will be all about experiencing the show first hand so please do come along to Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee between the 19th and 26th of May 2012, I’ll be in the White Space in the Time Based Art studio (follow the arrows on the floor).

So it goes.

D

A couple of free to download, 40ish minute albums (click on the images to go to the download page) from me along with a couple of new pieces for streaming.

First up, available in its entirety for the first time is Atom Town.

Then comes Unfolding inwards.

And then a couple of newer pieces from the last week or so, an aesthetic continuation of the mental space staked out with Unfolding.

Always Sinking by Erstlaub

Still Wearing Out by Erstlaub

I’d say happy listening, but I think we both know it’d be in vain.

D

Just a little roundup of random bits and pieces from the last week or so. It’s been a pretty taxing with my body both mentally and physcially deciding to rebel but such is the shape of things and from the ashes blah blah blah.

So today’s major excitement is the keystone of a piece (that’s sort of an accidental pun I suppose) falling into place. In an incredibly brief summary, my degree show is along the lines of highlighting the validity of the internal spaces we build and carry around within us. For as long as the concept has been brewing (a year or so), I’ve had this phrase looping round in my head “you must build a bridge of light”, now I’ve done a few pieces about bridges in the past and find them a generally fascinating non-place anyway but today, after months of trying to work out how to realise the metaphor and a few pieces that conceptually work but are physically incredibly difficult, it all dropped into place. Make the metaphor literal, actually build a bridge out of light. It seems pretty obvious when written down but, as I expect Iain Sinclair has never said in his entire life, “sometimes you just can’t see the motorway for looking at the tarmac” (will this phrase catch on?).

This is a very early iteration and due to lack of space, long enough cables and other issues it’s just my projector propped up at an awful angle projecting onto my fairly horrible carpet. I think in its final form it’ll become a concrete prose poem of sorts projected down into the entrance/threshold of my exhibition space, the visitors literally crossing the bridge made of light (how that took me so long to figure out I’ll never know).

This week I also managed to write up a new piece On Confessions Of Breath for the NTC regarding some thoughts on recent improv. interventions, another few bits of writing are dragging themselves out of my head at ridiculously sluggish speed and I’ve also, as a result of listening a bit too much to the amazing Soul Jazz – Voodoo drums compilation been considering the use of electronics as a ritual mechanism, audio of the first contact below.

Zaraguin by Erstlaub

(edit.) I forgot about this as well, a mixed media piece for videotape, acetate and digital print. I’m considering making a little series of them which I’d be happy enough to sell at degree show but we’ll wait and see.

Anyway, that’s all for now, until the next transmission, I should point you towards the excellent Outer Church Community Broadcast #1 with all round stand up guy Joe Stannard only in conversation with Warren Freaking Ellis and Penny Red and also go and look at the website of The Fife Psychogeographical Collective who I’ve only recently come across but am very, very intrigued by, some excellent pieces of work there. Anyway, back to the crushing doom of Sebald’s Rings of Saturn for me.

D