fear

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1)

BOOK OF A HUNDRED GHOSTS is a virtual reality installation, a Chinese parable staged in the form of a virtual tableau.  It reimagines the history of an ancient land as a Book of falling words and crushing signs, inciting awe, fear, pain and carnal pleasure.

-https://www.ipyukyiu.com/book

hatchet    (video - 29 seconds, in color with sound)

hatchet is a fright of fancy - a concrete poem part rage, part fear. Decapitated segments are propelled in phonetic sequences suggesting threat, violence (domestic violence, stalking, rape) and escape. Words moving, pulled, hacked, torn and swallowed in a scream and blood red tear-drop; fighting flies; a “hatchet” refrain in whispers chugging like a train or train of thought locked in madness or fear. Audio recordings of trains squealing, a girl’s metallic screams and a cloying backdrop of “Tonight You Belong to Me” sung by Patience & Prudence are used, in part, to depict the tumbling psychological confusion often resonant in these crimes (e.g., she was asking for it; I made him mad; etc.). 

Sonically layered, pictorial and linguistic, functioning as text and subtext, words in hatchet are expressive through their shape,  color  and motion.  Unsynchronised from any audible words in the turbulent passage of the short piece, their chaotic silence corresponds conceptually to that of victims in predatory or violent relationships – e.g., historically, in the literal and judicial suppression of a victim's voice (or that of any powerless member of an unequal relationship). While reminiscent of aesthetic tropes in graphic novels,  the prominence of the text here is meant to evoke, on a visceral level, the shock and physicality of violence. At times unmasking the action or a memory of violence – catch her, hit her – and the pleas of protest erupting and disappearing throughout, a simmering persistence of revenge (fantasy) finds expression beyond words, through violence turning in on itself and an escape through that violence turning outward.

The brevity of the piece is intended on many levels. Aesthetically, each frame and sound bite is treated as elements in any work of art (e.g., painting, poem or soundwork) would be – that is, only what is precisely and perfectly necessary for aesthetic, conceptual, dramatic reasons is there.  The brevity is conceptually relevant as the video depicts a kind of powerlessness or diminutive position of the protagonist, the relationship of smallness to large, and relative largeness or smallness - forces, physicality and claustrophobic space.  Using essential aspects of the medium, time and rhythm, brevity and pace here mimic the kind of internal timing of memory, of fleeting thought, of instances of violence experienced, witnessed, remembered. 

Underbelly is a playable media fiction about a woman sculptor, carving on the site of a former colliery in the north of England, now landscaped into a country park. As she carves, she is disturbed by a medley of voices and the player/reader is plunged into an underworld of repressed fears and desires about the artist’s sexuality, potential maternity and worldly ambitions, mashed up with the disregarded histories of the 19th Century women who once worked underground mining coal. 

Created in Flash for the web, Underbelly incorporates a rich and often grotesque mix of imagery, spoken word, video, animation, text, interactivity and random programming within a traversable map-like narrative terrain. Its design is based on the remarkable uterine qualities of the Hereford Mappa Mundi combined with diagrams of female reproductive organs and 19th Century illustrations of mines and pit workers. Video, shot in  point-of-view close-ups, represents the woman’s above-ground activity and conscious concerns, but it’s persistently undermined by visual, vocal and kinetic elements generated by the ‘subconscious realm’.

Winner of the New Media Writing Prize 2010

Winner of the MaMSIE Digital Media Competiton 2010/11