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1st mail, desiring, interent, gearHello.This is the first letter, although the intention started over a year ago. Some people might have ended up on this mailing list who didn't consent so remove yourself or ask me too or stick about if you feel. no judgement. I had a long time in and out of social media, but the decline is now in full effect and have fully lost the insta account and also decided to delete my website. (although a new one might surface) The difficulty to feel like your work gets out there, or you are a part of a community, or finding (art) income without social media always reels you back. But then you realise your work is here and still exists, the community you have also live in meat/decay/growth world and maybe you will crosspaths in this realm in the next few years and finally your art income was terrible anyway and if that's why you made work you would have stopped.The other day I went to a PV in Plymouth and not knowing what time it started, without insta to check, I ended up phoning the gallery. It felt very strange to get that info from a phone call and it reminded me of my time in London when I went to a swimming pool on my own. It had been a time in the months before leaving London. I had recently committed to a life without substance use and was going to meetings daily. I could get £1 swim at the leisure centre in elephant and castle and the first time I went I felt so alien, total imposter syndrome, I knew the routine you took off your clothes in the changing room, put them in a locker got in the pool and swam lengths etc. shock/curiosity/amazement at the idea of this is what people do or some people choose to do overcame me but also the amazement that yes I can do this/be this too, was exhilarating. Anyway phoning a gallery reminded me of that.
The Internet so troubling at times. The reward of individuals, the unseen effects that you have on others, the vast expanding meaningless and the insane production of knowledge we create all day long with our devices in our pockets (that is not used in my (our?) interests.) I started thinking about these platforms through Deleuze the incredible way capitalism can deterritorialise then reterritorialise and it's enduring success through that technique. The social media platform offers a deterritorialised digital space, a space of freedom to upload to create connections friendships, sharing and caring. A free space we get to fill and territorialise. Yet ongoing in this is the recapture by the structure of power and this structure ends up reterritorialising us and the way we are able to think and act in the world, it's power used to help and nurture our inabilities to think of/ imagine different civilisations (yet most never had capitalism and this is very very new). The parameters of the platform funnel an increasingly individualistic sense of self, (vital tactic). Who we think we are increasingly informed by how we think we are seen in the world through the gaze of the other. The insane disconnect this produces and that contradiction we must hold alone. Anxiety land!!! (I hate it, it's awful, but it's a ride I know, so let's go again)
Aka..... The town square being a place to converse, hangout, be together, share news and plans, to trade, to commune. Then the advent of the mirror and private bedrooms in a household changes the town square into a place to be seen (status)..... ((any radical potential of solidarity/community in the square is lost))The endless scroll feeds the endless and insatiable desiring. Last year I gave up on committing to no drink and drugs. I got to a point where the binary of that thinking (and my failings in its rigid ideology) was problematic. But for me the failings were not the problem the rigidness and its knot with the word recovery was. That substance use was just a surface symptom of a deeper recovery. Anyway the meaning in that R word became confused. And slowly drinking came back in my life, for it was not where the work was located, drinking in all its fun and sadnesses came back. 2023 ended up being a mixed bag, drugs returned at times and stayed around longer than in previous relapses but also went away again probably through the sheer boredom in using all day. Yet it managed to do it's damage through hurts and severs in relationships. I think using opiate based drugs is a way of not desiring. You desire the drug because with it you don't have to desire the things of life and the world. You just don't really care that much or enough to desire. Maybe it's a break from that, but desiring is fun and yet its painful and awful, terrifying, horrific and beautiful and in all of these things desire is absolutely necessary to make connection. desire must connect to the other and in the connection it produces, produces things, emotion and new possiblities, also the ability to reject can only be made through desire. Maybe in the hyper saturated worlds we have constant access to, the desire can't produce, connect or make meaning anymore, it just gets drowned by a million other desirings and lacks the potentiality, staying stunted in a loop.. Anyway.... maybe that famous phrase of "choose life" is more like choose how you desire and who you will desire with. (as a non-believer of a sovereign self, moving closer to comrades, whether human or not is important in this) So we got here in desiring rejection and now desiring another way, lets see how it works out.Some links on the Internet I been munching up recently and I recommend.
Alt narratives to the hippy lefty utopias of early Internet imaginings. Palo Alto, Silicone Valley built on eugenics and genocides.
listen this intersting chats
Low-tech, solar servers and redundant tech that needed for transformative ways of being (thanks Slug man for link)
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Also
Great doc particularly to do with sound but interrupting, disrupting powers at play behind media culture. From 90s but v relevant and translatable to today's digital cultures
An extra note on the times ahead for Europeans trying to escape desire. I thought it would come in 2024 yet we are seeing the first signs of it now in europe. 90percent of European heroin comes from Afghanistan. The stocks are drying up after the taliban takeover and ban on production. the synthetic worlds are gonna move in which we have seen in the US. A guardian article from few years back shows the intensely complex links between the US, Taliban, the poppy and the livelihoods of rural people's of those lands.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jan/09/how-the-heroin-trade-explains-the-us-uk-failure-in-afghanistanAlso...... Sackler....helping with thinking around desire at mo is mainly deleuze and guattari and their ideas in how social machines are constructed, the break down of everything into machinic parts, the parts all desiring, mouth machine desires cig, cig machine desiring fire machine and on and on. but i suppose a lot of more recent thinkings came about after my nephews 4th birthday, watching someone get indoctrinated into the world, a capitalist world, the bday party happening at my mothers house where across the flimsy back garden fence our Jehovah's Witness neighbours son is looking through to a different social machine of desiring. The flimsy borders of a garden fence cannot protect him or rather his given belief system from the other side. A friend recommended, actually bought me A Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed, after chatting about this, however its been on a back burner, probably cos I know it will hit me hard and i can skirt that with DNG anti-oedipus world of desiring machines head stuff. hopefully it wont turn into 'The Body Keeps The Score' that was given to my by a partner after we broke up and sat on the shelf looking at me and still does to this very day.Art things.Since a show of new and old work in the bar downstairs from my studio (Garrison Gallery) titled 'I used to make art, I still do, but i used to too.' earlier on this year, I have had a couple of group things, thanks mat, dan, tom, blair (sorry no links) also some offers i turned down and invitations followed by rejections.... but the main focus was Japan this summer. Was an important fam trip as my nana's house gonna get flattened early next year. Was a summer of sorting, sweating, eating, sweating, emotional work, sweating and listening to cicadas screaming all day. This summer noise must seep deep into the psyche, transformed into early chip tune Nintendo sounds and the chaos of pachinko parlors. The new work in Garrison I mainly used materials just lying around the studio. Too much stuff, got to use it up. Paint rags became surfaces as did glass palettes. One takeaway from sorting my nana's house was the stuff. The stuff that functions but no one wants. Not just lil things, cups and plates etc but a fully functioning house. Yet the house will be flattened and on top the cleared rubble of it a (newer)house will be built. Think many of us are trying to sift and navigate the new carbon negative, green revolution, ev worlds, what parts are rad and what parts are deep nonsense that sugar coats/cloaks a (new?) form of colonial extractivism. I don't want to burn fossil fuels, equally I don't want to spend months making a t-shirt of stinging nettle fibres sourced locally. But t-shirts are already in the world and come and go and get fixed and mashed with other tees and threads. Most days I out walking I pick up lithium batteries on the ground. Friends too have sourced me discarded batteries, and now have enough lithium to make a mega bike battery. Plus some lighting systems too. Scavenge, reuse, salvage-punk and those knowledges will be key, the Silicone Valley green-future-cities promise of utopia will be built on the same kind of death as our inherited world today and so its business as usual for them. no thanks.
2 south west artists dealing with these confusings and its complexities are...
Jo Lathwood who got a show on in plym
https://mirrorplymouth.com/whats-on/the-belief-in-things-disappearing
Sovay Berriman
https://sovayberriman.co.uk/When back from Japan I had to do a site visit for a show next year in Switzerland. A biennale in an alpine Valley. on big jetlag i took a 20 hour bus then 3 hectic days then 20 hours on the bus back. I became interested in these markings on the old farm buildings there in this valley. They reminded me of hobo symbols from the US. An old promise with others when evicted from a squat years ago in London was to tattoo a hobo symbol meaning 'this is the place' above the heart, some did but I never got that tattoo, (there is still time) These symbols on the farm buildings however were for demarcating property and family ownership rather than a nomadic people's communication technique of advice and solidarity. On the bus back as we crossed the Swiss/French border 5 men of colour and a child were stopped. They had no papers and language. The bus waited an hour while a bald guy infront of me watched trailers for the film Downfall. It was grim times, the bus left without them. I started thinking about marks, inscriptions, how privileged is it to make a mark and also choose a meaning for it. These men's bodies inscribed without consent (like all bodies are) however their inscriptions deny movement due to geopolitical readings of those inscriptions. The joke my friend k and I had before leaving was to shave my growing bold patch and tattoo "20hr bus (see stuff)", a line i said to make the idea of 2 20 hour bus rides seem fun, now actually seems like a good way to explore and deal with the complex worlds of bodily inscription. Sometimes u got to learn with ur hands and the marks they make. The insane privilege i have is having a hat I can put on and cover it up or to tell a different story about its value and meaning. The privilege in giving that mark a fluidity you can choose and shape when and how it is needed. Anyway maybe when I write another email will tell more about this alpine Valley show next year. On return I read a book by Marlen Hoschafer called Die Wand (The Wall). She wrote it in the 50s but was published in the early 60s. A dystopic novel where a wall appears in an alpine Valley where she is staying, she is alone and has to survive. The book is incredible and I really recommend, although it is tough in its insights and its own truths.
https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9780811231947/Wall-Haushofer-Marlen-0811231941/plp
(or I have a txt/epub file and happy to share)Realising this email getting long. Wanted to talk about dead stags on beaches and their final moments looking into the abyss. No chandon no bandon, no moet no show-eh (maybe a Clash line but also v relevant in unfunded art making worlds), homelessness, creating peace museums in underground MOD bunkers, hotel bonklard, ... Also wanted to talk about art and knowledge production and how art always having to latch on to other fields to legitimise itself. Anyway maybe in a month or two..One last thing I have attached an image of a painting I have, it's about 34x30inch and I trying to flog it.. I totes broke in this moment as many moments, and was asking for £250obo (better not nearest) however at mo will happy be with an n as it has to go. People... actually a dear friend says to me 'don't undercut yourself' but basic necessities don't have much patience with broke artists..., and also scraping is a way of life and a philosophy and keeps you desiring....!!! keep on desiring because if you get what u want it will be truly disappointing or horrific.
(I can't remember the title of the painting but can make up a new one with ur name in it if u like)I don't have lots of emails contact anymore as lost gmail accounts but happy for people to pass on or fwd to others that might be interested.. Likewise if you have mailing lists feel free to add me and if you feel chats email back x xPeace x maki x
