Hunter/Gatherer: curatorial essay by Scot Cotterell

Hunter/Gatherer: Search Theory or Data Bodies ¹ in X.s.²

site e-gallery’s current exhibition Hunter/Gatherer brings together works by three international artists that postulate on the notion of 'the search'. The search cuts across local and global boundaries, it fuses visceral and quantitative knowledge, imagination and data. The collective unison is that we all know, understand, embody and manifest the search in our lived experience. The ability of a search to yield unexpected results prevails in what can often feel like a bland, increasingly generic world. This drives the works in Hunter/Gatherer.

As I write this essay my body is ravaged by a particularly persistent variant of the Tasmanian flu spurred-on by late nights and busy times; my mind evokes images of all things viral, transmissive, mutational and organic and then pits them against a complex jumble of 'models of understanding' that have been conjured throughout history to attempt to know this thing we are all in.

In the foreground, framing that swarm-like conjuration, my short term memory hangs - as if stuck on an obtrusive nail - on a section of Pornographic Coding³. In this text Stewart Home discusses his use of pornographic passages in his published novels as, essentially, a scam; the re-use/cut-up of 'out-of-copyright’ generic text porn ‘ups’ the word count of his texts, drastically decreasing the time it takes for him to produce a book.

(At this point writing 'this is about the search', this is about 'the search', this is about the search.....over and over seems like an apt if not cheeky solution to the dichotomy between viral contamination and conceptual clarity, which needs to be negotiated in order for this essay to exist.)

This tactic by Home activates several dynamics. Not only does he dramatically reduce production time by the use of a cut 'n' paste analogy, he also adds a repetition, a kind of sub-layer wave flowing underneath the chaos; a familiarity of process, a structural loop on which looser threads can hang. The loop in this case both reifies and collapses the validity of the content in these passages, bringing it closer to being a symbol of something through it's re-use and subsequent weighting within the book as a whole, and conversely, flattens its impact into a meaningless lull.

The sub-layer wave or persistent hum of Hunter/Gatherer is the search.

Robert Spahr's Cruft series seeks out image and meaning in the internet's endless seas of digital noise traffic. Employing a largely conceptual process Spahr writes what he calls 'recipes', automated scripts that trawl, collect and re-compose internet images in order to question this age of networked terrorism we find ourselves in. ‘Cruft’ is a hacker/slang word for both physical and actual detritus; cruft is the unpleasant dust that gathers under your bed, cruft is also superseded or superfluous code. Spahr gathers and meshes fragments from an immense electronic cultural database. The resulting images, like the starburst's evoked in poet/novelist Jack Kerouac's famous quote about when the mad finally explode⁴, glimmer at us both universal truths and the immense crushing plurality inherent in our current media environment.

J.R.Carpenter's The Cape seeks to convolute fact and fiction by taking us on a user-controlled journey of fragmented narrative. The combination of formal, informal and sometimes seemingly inconsequential information activates an in-between state, a suspension of sorts where information seems ordered in meaningful ways, but we are never quite sure. For example, 'Cape Cod is a real place, but the events and characters of THE CAPE are fictional. The photographs have been retouched. The diagrams are not to scale' appears alongside anecdotal familial histories, 'My grandmother Carpenter lived on Cape Cod, in a Cape Cod House. My uncle also lived on Cape Cod, but not in a Cape Cod house'. Using field trip guide books and environmental guides, old maps, diagrams, and collected source code filtered through a low-tech aura The Cape gracefully addresses the tension between the knowing of and mapping of place and memory by bringing together the connotative powers of fact and fiction.

Jason Nelson's Death Spin presents itself as a game, presented in a fancy frame with tendril-like markers, scribbled outlines and absurd conflations of the linear timeline leading towards your death. We each start with a certain number of credits. We can spin the wheel of fortune again and again - until the credit expires. The combination of textual fragments that remains at the time when no credit remains is supposedly how we will die. Death Spin centres around the notion that life is a seemingly random aggregation of stories, and that death is a gamble vaguely framed by specifics.

Incidentally, and in resonance with the Kerouac quote cited earlier and the idea of viral mutation and media, my last 'life paragraph' in Death Spin stated: ‘Your ghost, spectre, spirit or banshee wanders confused until the sun explodes’. It seems this prophecy points to the possibility of there being much more 'out there' than just the random aggregation of stories.

in X.s - Scot Cotterell, 2008

--- End Viral Transmission.

Afterword:

Hunter/Gatherer is my second curatorial project for site e-gallery. As with all projects of this type considerable effort by multiple parties has been required to bring these projects to fruition. I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank the board and staff of Contemporary Art Services Tasmania, the site's host. In particular the Director Michael Edwards and the stock-site editorial team of Phillip Watkins, Mary Scott and Bec Tudor for their belief and support. I wish also to extend my gratitude to the artists Mez, Andy Deck, Andrej Tisma, Andrew Bucksbarg (Self~System) and J.R Carpenter, Jason Nelson and Robert Spahr (Hunter/Gatherer) for their invaluable interest.

Footnotes:

1. The term data bodies is used here in reference to 'The Mythology of Terrorism on the Net' published in 'Digital Resistance, Explorations in Tactical Media', Critical Art Ensemble, 2001, Brooklyn, Autonomedia. pp 37-39.

In particular the passages: 'Each strand in the trajectory of each person's life is recorded and maintained. The total collection of records on an individual is he/r data body - a state-and-corporate controlled doppelganger....What your data body says about you is more real than what you say about yourself....What we are witnessing at this point in time is the triumph of representation over being'

2. On 27th April, 2008 I 'signed' an email X.s, meaning literally Love Scot. Afterwards when I looked back at the mail the phoenetic 'excess' came to mind, begging the afterthought: is this 'from excess', or 'to excess', or 'in excess' (INXS)? This brings to mind the text Exe.cut[up]able statements: The Insistence of Code by Florian Cramer (2003) in which Cramer discusses the work of Mez (Mary Anne Breeze) (see site's first exhibition: Self/System) . Text at http://cramer.plaintext.cc/essays/executable_statements/executable_statements.txt (last cited 29/04/2008)

3. See 'Pornographic Coding' by Florian Cramer and Stewart Home, Crash conference paper, Feb. 11, 2005.
http://cramer.plaintext.cc/essays/pornographic_coding/pornographic-coding.txt (last cited 29/04/2008)

4. Jack Kerouac (1922-1969): American poet and novelist, leader and spokesman of the Beat movement.

'The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”'

See http://thinkexist.com/quotation/the_only_people_for_me_are_the_mad_ones-the_ones/334331.html (last cited 29/04/2008)