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Tor
DESCRIBE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH MATTER
We are a suspension of silver salts in gelatine. We are upheld by paper, glass or plastic. We are stable in the dark. In our different forms, our small crystals of silver salts are exposed to light and some of our atoms are released to a latent state. We are an alchemic being and we long to morph and mutate with the specific liquids fate seems to send our way. The mutation comes from an interaction with a world outside of our flat one. We live in the dark but sometimes, for a split second, there is a blinding brightness. Compared to our years of darkness and stillness, this sudden explosion completely rearranges us into a new kind of flatness with different densities.
The light is indifferent to us and we are indifferent to light. Yet we are conducive to each other. We are an alchemic being and we sense another being which we cannot see. This another does not consist of photons why we cannot interact with it. Yet we suspect this other to be of pivotal importance to our mutations and reactions. There seems like there must be intimacy with this other energy which we cannot conceptualise.
We consist of an array of sensitive surfaces. We are so so sensitive but only to photons. We feel the shadows of matter. We are absence of matter. We see ghosts and perhaps we are also ghosts. We are a ghost array. All the shadows of things we can never touch – stone, forests and weather. Skin, fur and conversations. Smells, laughter and roadtrips.
Alchemic ghost arrays, we have been fixed to this wall and our chemistry is parroting the shadows of moments. We are a single spectrum ghost that is fixed and ethereal. Our relationship to matter is instant and brief and devoid of all intimacy but our relationship to matter is also forever and etched into us with perfect detail and memory.
Nicholas
Video piece, 8 min. Title: Can we talk about the eggs now please? 2014
Are you in love?
I don't think i am in love but, those within me are. Or was. I have an excessive and irrational commitment to love. I loop with love.
I am a love story about possessed objects and “those” obsessed. I am definitely excessively preoccupied with a single emotion: love, but not into love? Or in love? With some-one or some-thing. Both within me.
So. If an object can be loved, then the should the object be able to love back? Within me objects love other objects. Love happens within me.
I am the generator for objects believed to have supernatural powers. I have given life to objects and they have the potential to love one another. But some man-made objects that have power over others.
I was based on love and now driven by that love, and I am because of that love. Love was my starting point but now I have become neutral. I am continuously popping out with the same image and producing the same emotion again and again. For the user and for myself. And neutral because i loop and never end!
Some told me they loved me. Some not.
I am made of some lovely situations, which takes place in some very lovely places. I am in bed with a kissing couple.
I visit the beautiful death of a sanitary napkin within a Prada store. Dancing hearts in romantic hotels of Venice.
I am greatly concerned with a few things: one is not to disappoint a small child.
Two! I wish to talk about the eggs now please! but, i am continually deprioritized.
Dan
AN INTERVIEW
What is today's date?
Wow - some time between 1930 and 1970.
How often do you see your family?
In the past the man would formally introduce me to them once and then I'd mostly see them from a distance. But now I'm living in very close quarters with a few of them which is awful.
What are your rules?
Do not sit on me. Have a good time all the time.
Why are you inside a box?
You'd have to ask the man. He never took me out, he seems to like keeping me in here. When he was here with me I understood why but now I'm baffled.
Do you find yourself attractive?
O, big time.
Describe how thoughts reverberate inside your corrugated compound?
(in a sing-song voice) They go up and down They go round and round They have a great bloody time
What is your favourite thing about your appearance?
Rude. How do you restore your energy levels when they get low?
Redundant.
Do you like being lonely?
It's my favourite way to be. It's the only guarantee that I'm among equals.
What are your politics?
Me first.
What is the meaning of life?
Life is not something that interests me.
Do you like being lonely?
I've already answered that.
What do you wear?
Nothing, but if I wore something I'd wear it better.
What do you do for a living?
I'm well looked after.
Do you like being lonely?
It's preferable. If I could make choices I'd choose it.
Do you like being lonely?
(sings) The first time ever I lay with you, and felt your heart beat over mine, I thought our joy would fill the world and last till the end of time, my love, and last till the end of time: (normal register) I've never felt this way.
Do you like being lonely?
It's all I know.
Do you like being lonely?
As far as I know he isn't coming back.
Do you like being lonely?
(sings) I get along without you very well, of course I do. Except to hear your name, or someone's laugh that is the same. But I get along without you
very well
Do you like being lonely?
I'm not lonely I've got the entire modernist canon.
Do you like being lonely?
Ok listen: there's really no way for me to answer that. I was designed and constructed in a certain way. This is the only way of being I've ever known. I've been instrumentalised into expressing something about loneliness and I don't think you can expect me to say whether I like that or not.
I express what I express. What I am is a reflection on and a proposal about a distance between things that on some fundamental level can never be bridged. Whether or not this distance actually exists outside this proposal I do not know. Somewhat incidentally I also describe one strategy that might be used to soothe the awareness of this distance, which may or may not exist. This is my condition.
I'm very happy with myself. I'm very beautiful. I'm in part about loneliness. Do I like that about myself? Do I like being lonely? Am I lonely? -
(sings) I get along without you very well. Except perhaps in spring, but I should never think of spring, for that would surely break my heart in two.
'ANNI: Sacre (2015, made with Jaakko Pallasvuo), what shape do you have, and what is your understanding of climate change? I am an around 20 minutes long, two dimensional audiovisual piece in 16:9 aspect ratio. I consist of four major scenes that together form a story. These have been created by shooting video and editing it. Overlapping these major scenes are other video or animation clips, some of them shot by my authors themselves, some found and stolen online. The resulting entity could be called a montage which nevertheless insists on featuring a narrative and relies largely on the cinematically created material. Superimposing different materials reflects the nature of human existence in the current cultural moment – we are simultaneously in physical and virtual places, living our lives while being exposed (both voluntarily and involuntarily) to media. The snippets found from online give new meanings to the original material so that a drink that appears on the video which was in reality a fruit smoothie suddenly becomes a mix of nachos and cannabis energy drink. Or the meanings get complicated by, for example, adding yin-yang symbols onto a scene which portrays an unbalanced power situation between two characters.
I am in a good state, I feel fresh because I was completed recently, and alive because the way I was created was quite unrestricted. Most of the video material that was generated to make me ended up being included in the final version, so the makers demonstrated confidence in ideas and actions that came up spontaneously. What also makes me feel alive is that the video shows events like they happened. By this I mean that the story proceeds chronologically, with synced sound and many of the events and dialogues weren’t preplanned or written beforehand but rather took place instinctively when the material was shot. I am also in a weird shape, feeling funny as well as a mix of sadness, fury and solemnity. These layers are coexisting me rather than my state oscillating from one emotional landscape to another. This multilayered and mixed emotion nature of mine is a mode of communication through which I want to speak to you and affect you. I’d be curious to know how it affects you but also how you view my decision to speak to you that way.
When it comes to my understanding of climate change, I view myself having a relatively small carbon footprint in a sense that my production involved transiting by foot or public transport only. I can also be distributed online without the authors or myself having to travel by airplane or car in order to show me. What I regret is that I feature a mozzarella pizza and some sour milk that were bought for the shoot. I have turned vegan since.
ASH
WHAT WOULD IT TAKE TO EXIT THE BOX? The physical presence of other people is required for me to be understood properly. Images and text are not communicating me in any way that I find remotely sufficient. However, this was also the problem with how I was made. It's as if I'm a baton that never connects with the hands who carry and transmit me. There is not platform from which I have been communally fashioned or regarded, only physically isolated moments of handling and re-mis-interpretation and disconnection.
HOW DO YOU LIKE IT IN THERE? I really like it but I don't think this fondness is reciprocal. I wanted to be relevant and new and interesting here but this place doesn't need me, doesn't really care about me. It's wondering what I'm doing here and sees no point in trying to work m out…it existed without me, now exists in a way that includes me, and that will soon end.
HOW DO YOU RESPOND TO BEING HANDED A TINY BABY? I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THIS, AM I DOING IT RIGHT? I DON’T THINK IT LIKES ME IT KNOWS I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING PLEASE TAKE IT BACK.
WHAT ARE YOUR FAVOURITE TROUSERS? Here I am always in shorts. It's too hot for trousers and it's pretty casual generally. Sometimes it feels a little skimpy but in the climate, it’s the best option. In the winter, probably heavy-weight cotton drill overalls will be required.
IMAGINE YOU'RE IN A DARK CAVE, WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DRINK? One "Reading has a texture, do you know what I mean?" [Emma Fitts]: One part gin [Virginia Overell], one part Cointreau [Clementine Edwards], one part pure spring water, carbonated [Xin Cheng]. Strained through two lenses formed of ice, that have been pierced by focusing sunlight through one another until the ice begins to smoke and melt [Susan Jacobs]. Served in a tall copper tube [Eliza Dyball], with the top coated in MSG crystals [Debris Facility].
HOW'S YOUR DUTCH? Very limited, but it never gets used so that’s fine. People first engage me in Georgian, then when they realise I don't understand, they try Russian. I can't speak that either, so they ask German, though they don't speak it, then finally English. The truth is that even in English I am constantly faltering and mixing up tenses, genders, parts of speech. I am more like a material, non-linguistic version of Esperanto: a failed attempt at basic communication through lowest-common-denominators of textile, plastic, metal and glass. At times my language is a complex and poetic system, highly refined, composed with great care and delivered in a remarkably articulate manner; for instance, a two-by-three metre panel of delicate, hand-made felt that has been inserted into a template of heavy cotton canvas, with cut-out windows in the pattern of the pieces of clothing worn by a factory worker, reverse-engineered from old propaganda films of the factory. Other times it is simply and workmanlike, practical, transactional. A photograph, candid, printed cheaply and laminated, mounted with cable ties.