Dane Sutherland is a curator, writer and pessimist from Scotland. A skeuomorphic malware interface and co-director of Embassy Gallery.

Here, he talks about his zine…

“The solitons of the music tell a story.”
- 0(rphand(rift>

Exploit.zzxjoanw.Gen is an audio zine, curated by Satellites Programme Intern, Dane Sutherland which is now available both as a limited edition USB flash drive designed by Plastique Fantastique, and as a free download, from Collective Gallery and Punctum Records.

Exploit.zzxjoanw.Gen includes contributions from: AAS, The Confraternity of Neoflagellants, Plastique Fantastique, Head Gallery, Jillian Mayer, WE, English Heretic, Michelle Hannah, Benedict Drew, POLLYFIBRE, The Cult of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ, Xempeer and Kornelia Remø Klokk

Along with the mp3 files, there is also a PDF publication (see below), containing essays and written fiction.

Exploit.zzxjoanw.Gen contains music and sound-works, sonic fictions by artists who in various ways, and to differing degrees generate worlds and narratives consonant with the genre of speculative writing, science-fiction.

This project is concerned with the virulent possibilities of sonic fiction, the political valence of science fiction, and with speculation as a method of probing and mutating the present through (re)imagining the future (as noise).

The mp3 tracks act as indexes of such futurities, cargo-cult objectiles washed up on the shore of the present.

+/- +/-+/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/-

The rubbled architecture of the semantic apocalypse is a jambient meshwork of infectious crypto-fictions, arche-hymns, cargo cult objectiles and the untethered futurities of permanent collapse. A tentacular-empire-machine.
Swarming visions, speculations and transmissions are hereby retro-clothed in vapourware, to be neurocast for further maladaptation by these memechanics of the salvaged future.

+/- +/-+/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/-

Dane has developed this project as part of Collective’s Satellites Programme, and is working in partnership with Punctum Records to publish and distribute it.

More: SoundCloud | Issuu

//////

Find more zines we’ve featured here.

With this in mind I was curious to see Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth’s installation at the City Observatory on Calton Hill, produced by Collective as part of Edinburgh Art Festival. Staged explores precisely that sense of the uncanny, in a setting which is slightly removed from the city, raised up and looking down on it from afar. On entering the Observatory you pull back a heavy cloth curtain and step into a small square room. Projected on each wall are a series of videos which are intermittently removed and replaced with new images. It’s unclear who is controlling them and they come and go in an irregular pattern. Looking closely some appear to be taken from cameras just outside the building and some seems to be CCTV footage, but is it in real time or is it delayed? And are these ‘real’ people or actors?

There are so many fascinating discussions that come from this work (which I barely have space to touch on here): performance in the digital world; the fluid nature of identity especially with the arrival of social media; voyeurism; our desire for entertainment… the list goes on. Staged seems like the perfect piece to present in Edinburgh during the Festival madness and I found it an intellectually rich work to contemplate.

The one gripe I have is that I felt the execution of the exhibition didn’t quite rise to the level of the themes it was exploring. Perhaps it’s just my film background but I was lusting for a giant expansive space where such huge themes could be explored. I ended up chatting to a friend for a good half an hour in the exhibition space about completely unrelated matters, without the images catching my attention or drawing me away from my chatter. Then again, maybe this in itself says something about how we interact and relate to such footage – our immunity to images, our apathy at being watched and ultimately a lack of concern about the assimilation of performance and living.

Staged is on at the City Observatory until the 15 August 2010.

As part of a very enjoyable friday evening in Edinburgh, i found myself engrossed in Patchwork Cinema, part of Torsten Lauschmann’s current show at the collective gallery. One part of this compilation which particularly intrigued me were clips of a film, ‘death by design’, partly because of a pavlovian response to anything with the word ‘design’ in it, but secondly for an amazing erudite nobel scientist talking about intuition in the sciences and how she felt her process was as ‘artistic’ and it was ‘scientific’, describing in some detail her work with cells. Thought this whole exhibition provides much food for thought in terms of ‘moving image’, and very worth a visit.

While on the subject of moving image, there is some great moving image work in this year’s Visual Communication degree show at GSA. I’m really interested in where this might lead, and how critically reflective designers can use this expanding set of tools in useful and exciting ways. There does need to be some critical thought though – If only to counter the ever-creepy Kevin Roberts, who talks about this need for communication to embrace ‘sisomo‘ (that’s sight, sounds and motion, because we, the dumbed-down recipient of this type of garbage, can’t understand all those words, together, at once, and he can’t stick a ‘TM’ on it…) — there’s clearly a market for his kind of multi-platform whizzy-ness, but it’s interesting (indeed exciting) to think about how the post-digital and screen fatigue may help make the decisions about when, where and why to use technology more nuanced.

In case anyone thinks I’m being excessively mean about Kevin Roberts… something from the archives.