I began a new project documenting of art and music in singapore. because if we don’t document it, who will? i focus mostly on the less “commercial” art forms such as performance art and sound art.

Visit: DOCUMENTATIONS

BUILD! – A Collection of Links about maps, art, architecture, non-places, urbanism, psychogeography, metaverses, transportation, technology, sound art, augmented reality, data visualisations, and other fun things.

 
 

A Solo Exhibition by Debbie Ding
For the Substation Open Call 2010
The Substation Gallery
2-26 September 2010
12-9pm Daily

The Singapore River is a site of historical and commercial significance for Singapore, as well as a site to socialise at and dream of things to come. But what does the Singapore River look like? When prompted to reflect on the river, many find it hard to recall the geography of Singapore’s most significant river – which has changed drastically in purpose, form, and colour over the last hundred years. \\ is an interactive map installation exploring the Singapore River as a “psychogeographical faultline” where reality, memories and imagined spaces interact, merge, or drift apart – like a series of tectonic plates.

Documentation of Works at \\ : Exhibition

Here the River Lies (A Psychogeographical Game about the Singapore River)

Shape of the Singapore River (Series of 20 Images)

Interactive Map Table. (Opensource tangible touch Installation)

More about the Substation Open Call 2010

Here the River Lies

A Collection of Memories around the Singapore River.

I first encountered the idea of viewsheds (also known as isovists) through the work of Space Syntax, a London-based firm which conducts research on the pattern of human traffic through public spaces, and the viewsheds/visibility from various points along streets. Borrowing ideas from Bill Hillier’s studies on spaces, its focus is on studying the way in which people’s perceptions of spaces affect the way they interact with the spaces. As common sense will tell, complicated street layouts and blocked views are likelier to repel people and breed antisocial behaviour in those areas, whereas areas in open view through which people can navigate through in a straightforward manner are likelier to be popular areas, with a correspondingly higher property value; Space Syntax is the sort of research which means to provide information and “academic” evidence which city planners can then use to plan better and safer communities.

Viewsheds are defined as “areas of land, water, and other environmental elements visible from a fixed vantage point”. In architecture, viewsheds are usually defined in reference to areas of a particular scene or of some historical value which is worthy of preservation, such as in the way green/open spaces may be intentionally preserved near public monuments or statuary for the sake of preserving a clear view of that monument. The point of defining “viewsheds” thus arises from the need to evaluate if that particular viewshed is still worth keeping — in other words, whether it should be allowed to be “destroyed” or buried amidst the city. But my interest is not in the physical city; I have no authority to speak on that. I’m thinking more of that magical inner city that comes to life long after the lights have been turned off — the architecture of dreams. In this respect, I think the idea of viewsheds is particularly pertinent to dream spaces; in looking at the viewsheds of dreams, what is brought into question is its worthiness to be preserved.

So what is the value of dreams? My dreams are of no consequence to others. But they are mine still, and just as real as any other experience I’ve ever had. I’m comforted by the glimpses of massive dream spaces which linger in my memory in the morning; these memories are no less valuable than my memories of tangible spaces which I’ve actually been in. For what is the city made of, but memories? Cities where people trail down familiar well-worn paths like pavlov’s dog tugged along by a string of comforting memories, places where one remembers having been in and can almost re-envision in great detail — perhaps cities exist only in the memories of its inhabitants, if the city did not have a view to be admired then it would lose its attraction and we might not stay in the city in the first place. So to turn our attentions from hazy rose-tinted memories of old haunts to those hazy early-morning memories of dream spaces would not be so far a stretch.

Documenting dream spaces

The question that arises is: would it be possible to document or even analyse dream spaces in the same way one would evaluate viewsheds for a real and physical city?

=== – trnsprt&tlvsion

=== – trnsprt&tlvsion from Debbie Ding on Vimeo.

=== – 2Mylvstrndrd

excerpt from live set played at R.I.T.E.S (Rooted in The Ephemeral Speak), at the Substation

Rooted In The Ephemeral Speak (R.I.T.E.S)
Presents Cai Qing, Marc Chia (One Man Nation), Tengal Drilon (SABAW Media Kitchen), Debbie Ding (===), Zai Tang
An afternoon of performative presentations and an evening of electro-acoustics you ain’t yet seen nor heard.

Thanks to mark for playing it on his free music now show on unpopular.radio!
tune in to free music now live every wednesday night 1030pm to 12mn.

 
 
For a few weeks I became obsessed with tabulating everything I had consumed and then produced. From what i ate to what i listened to or read or searched up on. I imagined it gave me focus or a record of the random facts i was absorbing. A big surrogate fine-toothed comb to sieve thru the interesting bits and retain what’s useful or entertaining enough to lodge itself in the memory. It seemed as if my ability to withstand the tedium of recording it came from the regularity of my routine in my small space at the time – which was suitable for taking a series of daily shots of me in the same chair every single day. However, I moved house and since then I’ve been working on a mobile desk and chair at different spots of the new room so I rapidly lost interest in continuing this desultory project…

Above: From Bae Bien-U’s Mountain Series

I recently saw Bae Bien-U’s works at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Deoksugung. One of Korea’s most celebrated photographers, he is famous for photographing pine trees, mountains, and other landscapes, and his works apparently appear frequently in primary textbooks. The level of visiblity which he has been getting, and the fact that he is the singular artist being represented at the Museum of Contemporary Art suggests to me that the Koreans themselves might consider his work representative of a “Korean aesthetic”.

It was somewhat difficult to distinguish this aesthetic style from a traditional sense of a “Chinese aesthetic”, which I also consider to be similarly influenced by Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. While in modern times Korea has developed its own distinct character and grown very seperate from China and Japan, historically it has had a great deal of cultural influence/transference from China, by dint of proximity and the development of a Korean Confucianism. Similarly, the etymology of korean toponymy is also a rather curious thing – i lost my English subway map on the first day of my short trip in Seoul, forcing me to consult my backup copy of the subway map which was in Chinese. I realised that korean place names were simply hangeul transliterations of the Chinese names for the places. for example, the subway station from which i first disembarked was called “Mangu”, or “망우”, and this had been translated from “忘忧” (“forget worry” or “nepenthe”). For Koreans who don’t read Chinese, could the process of transliteration have effectively obscured the original meaning of their place names from collective consciousness?

Kim Jong-Ku’s Mobile Landscape

A piece I really liked at the Seoul Museum of Art was this “Mobile Landscape” by Kim Jong-Ku. composed of a CCTV (Infrared) camera setup and steel shavings on a white floor board, from the horizontal viewpoint of the CCTV camera on the ground, the steel powder formed delicate monochrome mountains, seemingly replete with the fuzz of pine trees. it was a pity i was not able to read Hangeul as it seemed as if the steel shavings were spelling out another message in a calligraphic style when viewed from a vertical perspective. While it may be an feature of the material itself, the detail of steel filaments aptly reflects the silhouette of pine trees on a mountain, which seems even more apparent now that I can put Bae Bien-U’s work side by side with the Mobile Landscape. It is written frequently that pine trees are richly symbolic for the Koreans, held up as a Korean conception of “beauty” and representing longevity and a long Korean history.

I did not know if the actual use of CCTV cameras was truly prevalent in South Korea, but there was certainly widespread use of CCTV signage everywhere – from dingy street corners even to the mom and pop store in residental areas. much to my amusement, many small corner stores (including the ever-so delightful Daiso Korea!) seemed to sell CCTV signs in all sorts of designs and vast quantities. Needless to say, it is not necessary to actually be surveillancing people, as long as people can be convinced into thinking that they are being surveillanced, and a CCTV sign can be yours for as little as 1500 Won (SGD1.80/less than a quid)!

So does Korea really buy into the CCTV myth? Perhaps some true-blooded Koreans might like to come up and disabuse me of the notion, but from casual observation, South Korea already seems like a well-trained panopticon city. The behaviour of people on the subway can be used as a good social indicator: although food and drink appears to be allowed on the train (just as it is also allowed in places like London), there is absolutely no litter to be found anywhere in the cabins, which is remarkable – an average train in London quickly finds itself taken over by the detritus of food wrappers, illicit beer cans, and dismembered copies of the Sun. Also, the special red seats on subways allocated to the elderly, handicapped, or pregnant are never misused by healthy young people, even in peak hour – unlike Singapore where they’ve had to resort to “Kindness Campaigns” where the face of comedic figure Phua Chu Kang and Rosie have been plastered onto MRT windows with the desperate outcry “BE GRACIOUS!” – and seemingly, to very little effect, other than sparking a healthy debate in the Forum pages on whether or not fictional character Phua Chu Kang was capable of being gracious and being in character at the same time.

I am impressed at the resultant orderliness in Seoul, but all the same I think I am slightly wary of places where they seem to be more CCTV signs than Toilet signs. And Mobile Landscape is a clever twist on a traditional image; I wonder if the metal pole (also present at the museum) from which he derived the steel filings was of equally interesting or significant origin…

Photo I took along Hangang River, Seoul (2009)

On Basements

In Seoul, the roads are like thin lines which cut horizontally through the landscape, irrespective of relief and topography. in my mind it becomes like a vein dissected and carefully propped out on a board; but traversing a country with real geographical features for once, also makes the concept of relief ever more so apparent, as i cross toll bridges, valleys, and misty mountains. as i watch from the window, the landscape occasionally dips below the surface and then bursts out from the skyline at completely unexpected moments.

To try to compare a vast sprawling country like South Korea to a country like Singapore with no notable geographical features is pointless, like forcing yourself to compare a house with a plank of wood.

Speaking of houses, not too long ago, i read bachelard’s poetics of space, which expounded lengthily on the psychical effects of living in a house and considered how we imparted memories to different parts of our childhood spaces, and in particular, to different parts of a house. his argument seemed logical enough from a western perspective, from the viewpoint of people who came from places where houses seemed to come in as many parts as a washing machine: comprising of – a doorway, a hallway, a living area, a basement, an attic, a garage, and maybe a garden – amongst other things. it is indisputable that a house will always seem warmer when you are inside it and it is raining or snowing outside, and that certain types of associations will be made with the basement (a dank, dark and eerie crawlspace where the monstrous homicidal washer lumbers about like the minotaur in his maze) or the attic (the cockpit of the imagination, from which one embarks on flights of fantasy) due to the appearances of these spaces.

i was keen to consider all these, but there was one problem. your average singaporean was likely to grow up in a flat with a single storey – so these fanciful notions of houses and their clearly differentiated spaces could not apply. lets consider the Basement as an example: from inference, i have observed that a large proportion of older landed houses in singapore are built without basements. newer landed property is likelier to have a basement these days in order to comply with the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) requirement that new and redeveloped houses must also include an bomb shelter (under the Civil Defence Shelter Act 1997). but for the older houses constructed in singapore, it would seem a less popular feature. for example, none of the remaining colonial black and white houses, or conservation shophouses have basements.

there is a straightforward explanation for this:

• climate: basements are not suitable for warm and wet climates since they cannot be cooled naturally or kept dry. architectural features more common in singapore and southeast asia include: houses on stilts, raised flooring, louvers which diffuse light and let air in, etc

• socio-cultural: basements are considered to have “bad fengshui” due to the accumulation of excess “Yin” or dampness, so the Chinese tend to avoid them
• structural: most of coastal/reclaimed singapore land has a high water table which does not make it particularly conducive to building a basement.

so where did our memories go to hide? they could not have divided themselves into the different storeys of one’s childhood home, since our entire world was encapsulated in a single flat storey. so would that be likely to have altered the way the average singaporean sees things, thought about things, or even dreamt about things?

along with the aforementioned factors, i am also tempted to suggest that our inability to think of different levels in a house is also due to the fact that for the most part we never experience any diversity in relief – of hills, of valleys, of steep slopes, gentle slopes, or any sort of dramatic geographical anomalies. i should imagine that the experience of true terrain is really necessary for one to properly conceive of space in all its dimensions.

i think it begs the question, which came first? Were our houses and flats shaped like flatpacked boxes because we lacked the space and earth to dig deeper into, or were they flat because the people who built them also had flattened imaginations to begin with?

This is a picture of Singapore as a Black Hole.

Next Stop Raffles Place Interchange is on every single day but is generally (and preferably) only attended on weekdays.

Two maps drawn of four places where i have previously lived. Eusoff Hall and Kuok were both in the same campus, and Lordship Road and Shacklewell Lane were both in walking distance with each other. Staying in the same area for considerable amounts of time allowed me to get to know a small and specific area very well.

1. Eusoff Hall, Kent Ridge, Singapore
2. Kuok Foundation House, Kent Ridge, Singapore
3. Lordship Road, Stoke Newington, London, UK
4. Shacklewell Lane, Dalston, London, UK

Roads were depicted as lines because roads are always experienced and remembered by the traveller as single-line paths, rather than actual two-way roads/single carriageways or even the case of “dual carriage” roads with two sets of two lanes (eg: highways).

Notably subtitled plaques tournantes en psychogeographique, or “turntables” of psychogeography, Naked City’s fragments are linked by arrows, but these are fragments which are linked to each other in different orientations (almost as if they could all be manipulated or turned to any direction or orientation at their own will (plaques tournantes refer to things like the railway turntable or a big plate which enables one to switch the direction of the path by simply turning this plate). the fragments do not include all of paris and the distance of the gaps between fragments do not illustrate the real distance between fragments. the arrows, while facilitating the egress of our imaginary psychogeographical wanderer, also seems to put spatial distance between the fragments, creating the gap, which is like what Michel de Certeau (from “Walking in the City” in The Practice of Everyday Life) describes as a procedure of “Asyndeton”, or “opening gaps in the spatial continuum” and “retaining only selected parts of it that amount almost to relics”.

From Tom McDonough, “Situationist Space”: “Debord’s map images a fragmented city that is both the result of multiple restructurings of a capitalist society and the very form of a radical critique of this society. Its figuration of a type of inhabiting is simultaneously related to and distinct from Fredric Jameson’s “aesthetic of cognitive mapping”, a concept most succinctly described in his classic article “Post-modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Jameson concludes that fragmentations of urban spaces and the social body create the need for maps that would “enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of the city’s structure as a whole.”

i note that my walking maps (which documented the roads which were accessible to me by foot – involving manageable distances which i’d have usually walked and would rarely have considered taking a bus in lieu of walking) of dalston and kent ridge were full of peculiar gaps or wrinkles in the spatial continuum. spaces between intended destinations or interesting landmarks, spaces which we deliberately gloss over in the process. Certeau also smartly connects the idea of these deliberate gaps or spaces to walking, a “pedestrian rhetoric”. “in walking it selects and fragments the space traversed; it skips over links and whole parts that it omits. From this point of view, every walk constantly leaps, or skips like a child, hopping on one foot. It practices the ellipsis of conjunctive loci…”

“Synecdoche makes more dense: it amplifies the detail and miniaturizes the whole. Asyndeton cuts out: it undoes continuity and undercuts it plausibility. A space treated in this way and shaped by practices is transformed into enlarged singularities and seperate islands. Through these swellings, shrinkings, and fragmentations, that is, through these rhetorical operations a spatial phrasing of an analogical (composed of juxtaposed citations) and ellipitcal (made of gaps, lapses and allusions) type is created. For the technological system of a coherent and totalizing space that is “linked” and simultaneous, the figures of pedestrian rhetoric subsitutes trajectories that have a mythical structure, at least if one understands by “myth” a discourse relative to the place/nowhere (or origin) of concrete existence, a story jerry-built out of elements taken from common sayings, an allusive and fragmentary story whose gaps mesh with the social practices it symbolises.”

From there Certeau goes on to expound on those figures (synedoche, asyndeton) from which “moving trees/forests of gestures” sprout from, which transform any scene but arent fixed in any certain place by images [fleeting, like a haunting?]. They can’t be captured in the form of image, nor their meanings of their movments “circumscribed in a text”. He writes that it constitutes a “wandering of the semantic” produced by masses that make some parts of the city disappear and exaggerate others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it from its immobile order…”

after reading all this it seems even more apt now that i call it a dream syntax. syntax as rules and the rules in most syntax being the spaces between words, those little invisible bridges that form the glue of language, yet keep the constituent words apart (wouldn’t there also be a way for us to relate this “glue” to the very walls of our little pigeon holes here? the houses which keep us rooted here, the houses glued together into HDB blocks which the govt might fancy could be envisioned as communities when still its just separate boxes glued together). even the real space travelled between destinations is often ignored or overestimated, folded up like an accordian or in other cases peculiarly elastic and bendy. so what more the dreams, made of even more fractured fragments, and for us to attempt to read the dream syntax?

1. Synecdoche: using a word in a sense which is part of another meaning of the same word / expands spatial element in order to make it play the role of a “more” and eventually take its place (eg: window = neighbourhood, crown = king)
2. Asyndeton: supression of linking words such as conjuntions and adverbs (eg: from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was thick, warm, heavy, sluggish)”

美丽芽笼时光 Geylang Happy Hour: A bi-weekly dose of diasporic Southeast Asian cha-cha, Hokkien Ah Beng Techno, and the occasional Russki Disco.

NEW UPDATES COMING SOON

Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is but surely one of the most memorable and iconic images of the romantic period, the view of the wanderer gazing out onto the peaks styled after Bohemia, conquering a mountain only to be dwarfed by its fearful hugeness.
 
 

Singapore Version: Composited the painting with an image of Singapore City (Jalan Besar and City area). It was around the period of National Day (9 August) at the time so I put in a helicopter flying past with the National Flag.
 
 

London Version: Composited it with an image of the Square Mile. Unintentionally it ended up darker and more apocalyptic, reminding me more of that awful moment in Dragonhead (ドラゴンヘッド, 2003) when Teru Aoki finally claws his way out of the destroyed subway while screaming for help – only to find out that the subway was not the only thing which had been destroyed in the disaster, but actually all of Tokyo had been destroyed and they are all alone.
 
 

Paris Version: Composited it with an image of Paris for Justin.
 
 

Original: “Der Wanderer uber dem Nebelmeer” (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog) by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

 

 

Kitchun Sesshun was a sound project made in 2008, from recordings made in a Stoke Newington kitchen.

Related Links

In March 2010, I did an interview with TimeOut about the Kitchun Sesshuns project

Hulk Dash was a music night that me and some friends organised in the East London area.

Hulk Dash 8

28 MAR 2009 (SATURDAY)
CAFE OTO

Pimea warmed up the system with some ultra low bass incursions, contact mic explosions and light-audio interfaces sourced from some futuristic Finish sound laboratory or something. Shogun Dismay rattled all present with their variety of trashy noise rock, odd vocals and endearing experiments in logic. PNAK brought a lovely touch of jazz and noise and subtlety rarely felt at Hulk Dash, top nice guys to boot! (F)ave (M)uslim amused myself with some classic delinquent noise and laptop antics, all whilst sporting his own rucksack throughout! Terrordactyl swooped down into the audience with some full on jazz-spaz sax and intense drum workouts, never seen anything like it. Grind-core jazz may well be the future. Finally Bradford Bahamas upheld the finest traditions of Hulk Dash by bringing the night to a close with some invasion of sorts, not sure how many members were actually going to be set up to play but unfortunately they managed to impress the venue manager so much he exploded.

Hulk Dash 7

7 FEB 2009 (SATURDAY)
KORSAN BAR, 161 KINGSLAND ROAD, E2 6AL, LONDON

Everyone at Hulk Dash 7 brought the Hulk scene to new industrial depths of mayhem. First up March of Alka Malka, hailing from the distant north provided some spaced out guitar and electronic dabblings, ushering those present into the new era. B.C. subsequently marched on into a resolute future of John Carpenter-esque sci-fi dub-trotting. Tickling goosebumps and tantalizing brain cells with a sickly fresh flesh sound. Sly & the family drone next exploded from the reverie into some kind of tribal noise whirligig, handing out instruments of percussive torture to the enthralled crowd. Sloppy Seconds developed the thread of insanity sporting huge mice masks, an ode perhaps to White Mice? Who knows, except they were better and their masks were much more funny to look at. Terrifying and hilarious in equals measures… Horse Vomit brought things to a worrying level of chaos with their machine chomping face searing noise, narrowly avoiding beer taps whilst traversing the bar, and destroying all their own equipment in a frenzy of amusement; all at the request of the venue’s newly appointed manager (ahem…). Atomck consequently reduced their performance to a stop start managerie of insanely deft and brutal guitar out-takes from a recently axed commercial for BBC Masterchef. No actually I don’t know what I’m saying anymore. Atomck essentially were the best heavy duty spaz grindcore to be seen, well…anywhere. And all the way from Wales as well!! Fe bac tied up the evening with some slick n crunchy 8-bit dance abstractions, dizzying all present into a wobbly jelly like motion of the legs. Watch out Dj scotch egg, props to the new 8-bit mad-stylez!

Everything was rounded off into a particularly juicy tasting experience by DJ Charity Shop and the commonly spotted DJ Fuz. Some heavy licks and shapes were thrown by ‘selector’ and ‘punter’ alike. Cheers to everyone for a wiked night! Hope you all enjoyed.

Hulk Dash 6

29 NOVEMBER 2008 (SATURDAY)
KORSAN BAR, 161 KINGSLAND ROAD, E2 6AL, LONDON

DogGs / Ghouls of Reduction… these two underground veterans united once more for this live set broke the evening in nicely with a wall of noise and extreme sonics… “what music do you call this?” one barman asked. ‘Lovely music’ we thought. **k worked the room into a dizzy spin of hand crafted riddims and synths progressing, all broadcasted through his own sound system which he brought down!! Extnddntwork disorientated all with his portable strobe light, sonically bombarding the crowd with quirky off centre drum loops, slow tribal psychedelia and splatters of noise, all rounded off nicely with toy mic vocal distortion. Bromancer confused all with their stop start drums and spazzy vocals, culminating with an on stage fight between band members! Choice! The Toxic Pijin raised the bar of nonsense with their own unique mix of grindy hardcore thrash madness. We couldn’t find a drum kit in time so they found random junk on the street, causing nearby satellites to collide on their space dish snare. The feedback incurred caused the punters to throw BREAD; a horrible food/oil/metal mess then ensued. Vindicatrix beautified proceedings with some super-human vocal performances, classical synth progressions and some unique drum exercises, all accompanied by his own projected slides; the girls fell weak at the knees. Bangerz N Mash popped it hard with their own slick mix of trashy uk hip hop, propelling all warm blooded men to yelp in excitement. A refreshing mix up to say the least, watch out Salt n Pepper! Cementimental blew the system away with his amplified “HULK…SMASH” toy glove and innumerable other hacked toys and devices, propelling crowd members to unconsciously spazz out, destroying satellite dishes and any other objects that came to hand. Luckily we managed to calm it all down before we were all thrown out. SMASH T.V rounded off proceedings with an intensely hilarious smathering of classic furious mashup of breakcore/gabba nonsense and rave-tastic shout outs, allowing the hardcore select remaining to flex out the last of their breath on the dancefloor.

Hulk Dash 5

23 OCTOBER 2008 (THURSDAY)
KORSAN BAR, 161 KINGSLAND ROAD, E2 6AL, LONDON

Anti-lyrical warmed the cockles with some fuzzy guitar space explorations setting the mark for what was a sick set from our newly found Shacklewell Lane neighbours in crime. Quth confused all with hypnotically repeating loops of doom cross wired with some blinding visuals from mysterious allies… Kayaka sent the whole place into some kind of druggy spin out… people were recorded setting up tiny sacrifices of hair and teeth. Talking of teeth, Gum takes tooth completely laid waste to their surroundings with a full on mash up of drums, noise, computer weezels and damn right ingenious live setup and performance. Leading on to DJ Tendraw & the Gypsies Dog‘s metallic shards of bass, vocal n circuit bent doom, leaving all left standing devoid of internal juices. A luscious splatfest sealing the approval of all who bore witness. Not forgetting specialist sound interventions from dj polipo and dj fuz3.

Hulk Dash 4

25 SEPTEMBER 2008 (THURSDAY)
KORSAN BAR, 161 KINGSLAND ROAD, E2 6AL, LONDON

Teeth!!! flooded the place with positive shouts, bleeps and lo-fi electric drum explosions. BBBlood wiped clean blocked veins with an envelope of sound grounding zero within each and every ear drum. Spax called in aliens with his moblie phone noise contact explorations, striking fear into the hearts of nearby kettles and fish tanks. No, Really? and Deepkiss720 mustered the spirits with a spacey crackle-n-pop festival for woodlouses and lumberjacks. Box Master, the mysterious man behind animal fact and guns n horses boxed it up with a unique blend of minimal thuds and hilarious whirring melons.

Hulk Dash 3

28 AUGUST 2008 (THURSDAY)
KORSAN BAR, 161 KINGSLAND ROAD, E2 6AL, LONDON

Le Couteau Jaune drilled the crowd with their own special recipe of rave mash ups and shouty confusion and shoreditch slime. Team Brick disturbed all present with a perturbing mix of monkish singing, tribal drums and beautiful noise waves. Melvis Tibet and Dawn Scarfe warned the surrounding populace of weirdo attacks with subtle edgy contact tones and drones. Sputniko! broke down rival egos with sugar pop cyber femme nippon pricks to the face. Real Feal. feat Agaskodo Teliverek struck barrages of guitar melt with appeances by hungarian sausage suspects of the agaskodo tribe.

Hulk Dash 2

24 JULY 2008 (THURSDAY)
KORSAN BAR, 161 KINGSLAND ROAD, E2 6AL, LONDON

Ove-Naxx dropped some filthy circus shaped wasabi on the floor and made the poor sods swalloe whole. Dokkebi Q. feat Kayaka dripped out some sickly flavoured dub licks with guitar noise assistance from kayaka. Sonic Dragolgo frazzled nearby brain waves with his electro pop tastic covers and mentalist guitar picks. Horacio Pollard exploded himself with drilling guttural splats and mic feedback spaz attacks causing eyeballs to fall out. oMMM‘s bouncy phat beats and melodic swirls were iced on by cakey audience vocal randomness.

Hulk Dash 1

6 JUNE 2008 (SATURDAY)
KORSAN BAR, 161 KINGSLAND ROAD, E2 6AL, LONDON

Go Arse Over Tit broke everyone in with some heavy duty dark rhythmic noise tastyness. The Wolves Will Eat You ate everyone else who was left standing, like a 60s monster movie. Pseudo Nippon drove the girls going mad for his dance flexy moves and pseudo pop sound excursions. Wang Wang Gou was having a smoothie with bananas and mincemeat. Katapulto‘s polish dumplings were plump and plummy, providing satisfaction and girlish orgasms to everyone who nibbled on them. Finally, Michael Forrest creamed off the party with some spunky beats. The fans were last seen on the dancefloor slippin over everywhere.

This is a series of photographs which I took in a cottage in the Cotswolds during Christmas, 2008. No one had been in the cottage for a while and it was winter. The children sat in the reading room, the cat pawed at the stairs, and the flies were dropping dead by the windowsill.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Larger prints available.

In this exercise, I made impressionistic 5-second-sketches of the faces of passerbys while commuting to and from work. It all began when I realised that caucasian and african face shapes were completely alien to me (unlike asian/chinese faces to whom I could always relate to other asian faces which I had seen before).

When I first arrived in London and met all sorts of new people and new colleagues, I could not relate their faces to any of the faces I’d previously seen, so I had little by which to remember people’s faces. I decided to create a bank of faces so as to rectify this particular blindness, as making the little sketches would provide a sort of handle for recalling faces.

Patterns also emerged after a while. I noticed that during the morning hours of 9am to 10am, there were more females on the street along Kingsland Road, while during the evening hours of 6pm to 7pm, there were significantly more males wandering the streets.

Most of the sketches were made along Kingsland Road, from Dalston to Shoreditch or vice versa. A few were made on buses around Whitechapel and other parts of Hackney (which in itself is in particular very multicultural – with large carribean, turkish, vietnamese and indian communities, amongst many others)

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]]> http://dreamsyntax.org/2008/peoplespotting/feed/ 0 http://dreamsyntax.org/2007/disarming-venus/ http://dreamsyntax.org/2007/disarming-venus/#comments Sat, 15 Sep 2007 14:17:28 +0000 debbie http://dreamsyntax.org/?p=10

The marble sculpture of Venus de Milo has been widely regarded as an epitome of Western Classical feminine beauty, but the Venus de Milo is also famous for the mystery of her missing arms, which have been missing since the famous sculpture was first rediscovered amidst the ruins of an ancient temple in 1802 on the Greek island of Melos. It is interesting to note how her disfiguration does not appear to affect her reception as the embodiment of feminine beauty, although her lack of arms could also have been otherwise construed as a grotesque mutilation of the female body. As such, I wish to offer an alternative reading of the sculpture of Venus de Milo, of it having become a symbol of violence against the female body, rather than a passive symbol of feminine beauty. However, it should be noted that Venus is not truly disarmed through the disarticulation of her marble arms, but rather her real disarmament comes about when the viewer accepts her broken and incomplete body–a passive, armless body–as the much revered standard in classical feminine beauty.

This is not to say that the issue at hand is man’s intentional amputation of Venus de Milo’s arms, because there has never been any doubt that she had been originally sculpted with all her limbs intact. The existence of numerous inferior miniature replicas of Venus, bearing startling verisimilitude to the Venus de Milo, give hint to what might have been its original form (Alexander 245), and Venus de Milo is also said to have been originally found along with the fragments of an upper left arm, and a left hand holding an apple, although it cannot be completely ascertained if those parts belonged to the Venus de Milo as they have since been lost. In general, her arms were unlikely to have been intentionally severed from the rest of her body, but are more likely to have been damaged as a result of neglect, most probably during the Byzantine Iconoclasm when pagan religious symbols were destroyed. Restoration attempts were made while the Venus de Milo first came into the possession of King Louis XVIII of France, but in the end a decision was made to leave the sculpture in the same state it was originally found in.

What we should be more concerned about is King Louis XVIII’s final decision to publicly display Venus de Milo without a restoration of arms, as well as the subsequent propaganda efforts by the French to emphasis the importance and artistic value of Venus de Milo after France had to return the famous sculpture of Medici Venus to Italy in 1815, which Napoleon Bonaparte had seized from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence in 1802. In order to compensate for the loss of what would have been considered one of the finest Classical sculptures known to western civilisation at the time, the French consciously chose to promote the Venus de Milo as an even greater national treasure — a symbol of “feminine beauty” — although incomplete in form. As a result of this insidous history of manipulation for nationalistic reasons, even when Art historians turn their attentions to the fact of Venus de Milo’s lack of arms, but most have chosen to read it as a matter of her “disarming beauty”, taking the “disarming” in the sense of a placatory, pacifistic disarmament that is pleasing to the eye because it is non-threatening, disregarding the fact that it is a matter of her body being broken. For example, as recent as in 1956, acclaimed art historian Sir Kenneth Clark argued that it is sculptures of the human form such as the Venus de Milo which have set the precedent of ideal beauty throughout art history as well as other aspects of visual culture.

The traditional reading of Venus de Milo as a symbol of feminine beauty thus becomes the tacit act of violence against the female body, justifying the voyeurism and the gaze which she is subject to because she is a standard to be looked up to. At the same time, it seems as if the Venus de Milo has been strategically disarmed so that she cannot defend herself against being used as a pawn to be fought over and traded between empires, a symbol of power to be manipulated by man. To relate this to the treatment of the female body in philosophy, the place of the female body has been disregarded in mainstream western philosophy, where Cartesian dualism has historically occupied a prominent place since the last three hundred years, becoming responsible for forging a system of reasoning that works upon dichotomised oppositions: oppositional pairs of mind versus body, male and female – and these pairs are correlated with each other, as well as hierachised. Society translates these notions of a “superior” male mind in opposition to an “inferior” female body, into practice through systems of human activity, and a reading of Levi-Strauss through Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Woman” suggests that social intercourse is regulated by kinship systems which are predicated on the giving, receiving and reciprocating of gifts between men. However, in these systems, women are also the gifts being traded between men, through marriage, or here in the case of Venus de Milo, being traded between countries as a “primitive way of achieving peace in civil society secured by state” (Rubin 199). In this, the woman is not able to realise the benefits of being exchanged, since only men can give and take and subsequently benefit from this trafficking.

If we take a Lacanian reading of this trafficking, our conscription into the systems of kinship take us into the realm of the symbolic where phalluses are circulated according to gender, and the phallus passes through the medium of woman from one man to another, which thus excludes women from any of the benefits of the exchange. It is perhaps also cruelly apt to have rendered Venus de Milo armless since without her arms, her remaining torso resembles a phallus even more. In Monuments and Maidens, Marina Warner notes that portraits and sculptures of men are usually construed as representations of very specific individuals, whereas the image of a woman’s body is more often than not, viewed as symbolic or an object of fantasy or desire, defined by everything that the male viewer wants, in terms of his potential possession of her. This may be why Venus de Milo has been construed instead as the ideal representation of the female body, since the amputation of her arms is a visible sort of castration that enables the disarticulated female body defines the male through its lack, in that she is everything that he is not. Thus the role of Venus de Milo is as an image or signifier, to reflect the subjectivity of the male rather than to represent the female body itself, and perhaps this is the cause for her overwhelming popularity in the largely male-dominated field of art history and criticism.

In more recent times, attempts have been made by women to reclaim their bodies, and as a start, more importance has been ascribed to the body by theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz. This is despite the fact that earlier feminists such as Rubin have shyed away from the question of the body, fearing the essentialism of the female body as a weak point at which women are prone to be attacked. Walcot’s study of Greek mythology suggests that the impulse to “disarm” the woman originates from man’s fear of being threatened by her. And so in trying to suppress woman, man exacts “justice” from the female through the most primitive form of “corporeal compensation”, which is visible in the bondage metaphor of amputation.

In light of all this, what Grosz suggests is that the body must be reclaimed by women and used to disrupt binaries through its corporeality, and she suggests moving the body from the biological to the social — to reconsider “the body as a site of social, political, culture, and geographical inscriptions, productions or constitutions”. In this we see a glimmer of hope for the possibility of rearming Venus de Milo. In order to empower the Venus with the ability to make meaning on her own, first we must dispel the notion of her being an “ideal”, and this recognition of the impairment of the symbolic female form will be the first step to rearming Venus de Milo.

]]> http://dreamsyntax.org/2007/disarming-venus/feed/ 0 http://dreamsyntax.org/2007/a-city-with-no-memory/ http://dreamsyntax.org/2007/a-city-with-no-memory/#comments Sat, 15 Sep 2007 06:59:56 +0000 debbie http://dreamsyntax.org/?p=1

The city, sociologist Rob Shields once argued, is always “a ‘crisis-object’ which destabilises our certainty of the real”. Indeed, cities are sites of constant change. Sanjay Krishnan, a literary scholar, remarked that in Singapore “scaffolding seems the only unchanging feature in a city that sees itself in permanent transition”.

Even landmarks are not immune from crisis and change. The Capitol Theatre was originally built as a theatre — for performing arts — in 1929. It was taken over by the Japanese during the Occupation, damaged by a bomb in 1944, then converted to a “picture palace” by the Shaw group. Those from my father’s generation (or even older than that) may have fond memories of going to see the movies there, or meeting their dates at the Polar Cafe. But for a long while now it has closed its shutters and the good times have stopped rolling at the Capitol.

In 1998, it was listed for preservation as a conservation building, and was returned to the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). Nothing much has happened during that time. However, its central location at the intersection of Stamford Road and North Bridge Road means that the theatre, or rather, its residence, the entire Capitol Building, has remained as a highly visible landmark in the heart of town.

Now in 2007, for the Singapore Art Show, the Capitol Theatre will be used for yet another purpose: a site for art. On August 31, Mohammed Arif Zaini (Ryf), Faisal Rizal Alias, Rizman Putra, and Muhammad Sufian Bin Hamri, together with students and graduates of LaSalle College of the Arts, will present The Last Wayang — a one-night-only show which incorporates MTV-style montages, video performances, interactive installations and graffiti. Milenko Prvacki, Dean of Fine Art at LaSalle, is the project’s curator.

The Capitol Theatre was chosen because of its iconic status in the Singaporean movie-going experience of the sixties and seventies. The artists aim to highlight old buildings and spaces — especially to the younger generations who did not have had the chance to experience the Capitol Theatre during its glory days. And by utilising the site for this purpose, they also seek to “question the previous functions of historical buildings and sites with their new functions”.

Unlike most other instances of “graffiti”, The Last Wayang will not involve any alterations to the cityscape. This contrasts with the two other site-specific projects curated by Prvacki as part of this year’s Singapore Art Show — Forest and Paper Boat. The former involves the installation of a copper simulacrum of a forest in Sungei Buloh Park, while the latter involves filling up the old and closed-down River Valley Swimming Complex with origami paper boats.

And unlike the very physical interventions in Sungei Buloh and River Valley, at no point will any of the works in The Last Wayang actually be physically attached to the Capitol Building. There will be no physical traces of the artwork to speak of. The only evidence of the “graffiti” after the event will be in the memories of the audience.

The use of light and film projections is a particularly appropriate choice as the medium for an art work that questions the history and place of buildings in Singapore. French theorist Roland Barthes once tried to articulate his own discomfort with regards to film when he said that it “follows, like a garrulous ribbon: statutory impossibility of the fragment”.

Just as there will be no physical residue left behind from the Last Wayang performance, there are also no physical qualities to the memories which are responsible for transforming a “space” into a “place”. These elements remain wholly intangible in the same way the moving images in film continually create multiple layers of meaning.

Film, in all of its versatility, serves well as a metaphor the physical landscape of Singapore — layered with a multiplicity of invisible meanings, a plurality which is at once collective, and yet highly variegated in the readings we derive from it. And this form of light-projection graffiti tagging, while having much more flexibility than typical forms of graffiti in terms of dimensions and mobility, raises lots of questions. Can this actually be called graffiti if it does not physically alter the object? Are the memories of a night’s performance still attached to a building if we cannot see any marks or traces of the event? Which leads to the bigger question: what happens to our memories of a place when a building is destroyed?

Urban planning in Singapore has always been very focused and utilitarian because of the government’s contention that a small young nation cannot afford the luxury of retaining old spaces at the expense of newer developments. It is an ethos which has arguably served Singapore well in its early years of building up its economically-competitive “world-class” infrastructure. But this attitude towards change has, as a consequence, undermined the sense of attachment that many people who’ve built their lives here have to places.

This year alone we will have to say good-bye to many familiar structures. The National Stadium: closed on 30 June 2007, to be demolished to make way for the new Singapore Sports Hub. The Mitre Hotel: a beautiful but very poorly maintained building built in the 1870s that is likely to face demolition after its plot on Killiney Road was recently put up for sale on 6 August 2007. The Specialist Shopping Centre: a shopping centre built in 1970s but recently closed, to be demolished for redevelopment. And thousands of homes will be lost this year and in the near future due to the current en-bloc sales craze — the horseshoe-shaped Pearl Bank Apartments atop Pearl Hill, and the prefabricated boxes of The Habitat 1 & 2, just to highlight a few.

As sites where we enact our everyday lives, the intrinsic value of our buildings may not be missed until many years later. And as is often the case, the meaning of a building extends far beyond the purpose for which it was built. The Last Wayang takes us back, lures us into interacting with the old Capitol Theatre. At the same time, the project reminds us that if Singapore is destined to be a city with no memory, it will be entirely up to its own people to keep the memories alive.

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