Madison, what, how, why?

---OMELAS---

WHAT

Omelas is a 7 minute video. It is set in an old ruin of a cottage, tucked away in native shrubbery by Port Willunga, a beach in South Australia. During the video, ten clones of the same naked figure sway, twitch, and climb pathetically over the ruin - but nothing really happens.

HOW The camera angle is set and does not change throughout the film. With the camera rolling, (and my mum standing guard), I enacted the central character - climbing over the ruin and performing different actions. In post-production, I layered the video ten times, to produce multiple figures.

WHY The work responds to Ursula Leguin’s short story The ones who walk away from Omelas, which describes a mythic utopia whose existence is wholly reliant on the suffering of one small boy. The tale is perhaps a metaphor for the ill-begotten Others whose unseen suffering enables US* both leisure and a clear conscience. It is this boys movements that I have tried to imagine, and reenact.

Steve's brief comments on text

[in brackets] 

WHAT Omelas is a 7 minute video. It is set in an old ruin of a cottage, tucked away in native shrubbery by Port Willunga, a beach in South Australia. During the video, ten clones of the same naked figure sway, twitch, and climb pathetically over the ruin - but nothing really happens. HOW The camera angle is set and does not change throughout the film.[suggest alt:The camera angle is static-S.] With the camera rolling, (and my mum standing guard), I enacted the central character - climbing over the ruin and performing different actions [what kind of actions? S.]. In post-production, I layered the video ten times, to produce multiple figures. [try neutral mode of address: the video is layered ten times S.] WHY The work responds to Ursula Leguin’s short story The ones who walk away from Omelas, which describes a mythic utopia whose existence is wholly reliant on the suffering of one small boy. The tale is perhaps a metaphor for the ill-begotten Others whose unseen suffering enables US* both leisure and a clear conscience. It is this boys movements that I have tried to imagine, and reenact.

• Upper-middle-class-white-man-human - INSERT BETTER WORD HERE.

---COLOSSAL SLIP---

WHAT Colossal slip is a large hanging abstract and amorphous blob. It is covered in mesh, paper mache, plaster and enamel. It resembles something between a floating mass and bodily organ. On the surface it is white, shiny and rough, with eight openings that have been closed with silver sequined fabric. Within, an intermittent drum beat sound makes the sculpture vibrate lightly.

HOW This work is set on a large wooden frame that is approximately two meters tall, and 1.5 meters diameter, at its widest. Three drums are fixed inside, an Arduino has been programmed to create a random beat that outlasts the sculptures lifetime.

WHY The work was installed as part of a show. It is a non categorizable thing, that could resemble many things. Its voice permeates the space, filling the gallery with aeonic sound, creating something akin to a Deleuzian non pulsed time.

---NUPTA CONTAGIOSO---

WHAT In this video, the central figure raises a dead blue-throated wrasse lovingly and carefully to her face, where she continues to hold it for the duration of the 3.30 minute work. Additional fish spring from mid air, and begin to swim around her in circles. They slowly multiply until she is engulfed or swallowed by more than 50 circling wrasse.

HOW I performed this slow connection with the fish, holding it to my face for extended periods. Later, I gently threw the same fish into the air in front of a green screen, before catching it again. In post production, I chose about 25 appropriate tosses, isolated the arc of the throw, and repeated it over and over to create the air-bound fish-flight.

WHY Nupta contagioso is latin for marriage with the diseased, or conjugation with a corpse. Etruscans once used this as torture method - so that the worms of the dead would fuse it with the body of the living. This coupling is of course consentual, and it produces a kind of animistic or sympathetic magic: air becomes water, and the performer becomes animal. The work inverts and plays with Bataille's claim that “Animals are in the world, as water is in water” - here, the performer shares an immanence with a school of waterless fish.