Glued to the ATM

Found this 2p coin stuck to the cash machine outside the Co-op today.
It says "SERIOUS COGNITIVE IMPOTENCE MACHINE"

Smash Austerity Nostalgia

Mugs now available here:
http://www.cafepress.co.uk/smashausteritynostalgia.1726639400

Mugs now available here:
http://www.cafepress.co.uk/smashausteritynostalgia.1726639400

On the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster:

"One of the few test printings of the poster was found in a consignment of secondhand books bought at auction by Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, which then created the first reproductions. First sold in London by the shop at the Victoria and Albert Museum, it became a middlebrow staple when the recession, initially merely the slightly euphemistic “credit crunch”, hit. Through this poster, the way to display one’s commitment to the new austerity regime was to buy more consumer goods, albeit with a less garish aesthetic than was customary during the boom. This was similar to the “Keep calm and carry on shopping” commanded by George W Bush both after September 11 and when the sub-prime crisis hit America. The wartime use of this rhetoric escalated during the economic turmoil in the UK; witness the slogan of the 2010-15 coalition government, “We’re all in this together”. The power of Keep Calm and Carry On comes from a yearning for an actual or imaginary English patrician attitude of stiff upper lips and muddling through. This is, however, something that largely survives only in the popular imagination, in a country devoted to services and consumption, where elections are decided on the basis of house-price value, and given to sudden, mawkish outpourings of sentiment. The poster isn’t just a case of the return of the repressed, it is rather the return of repression itself. It is a nostalgia for the state of being repressed – solid, stoic, public spirited, as opposed to the depoliticised, hysterical and privatised reality of Britain over the last 30 years."

Owen Hatherley: Keep Calm and Carry On – the sinister message behind the slogan that seduced the nation
http://gu.com/p/4fgza/stw

Smash Austerity Nostalgia!

On the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster:

"One of the few test printings of the poster was found in a consignment of secondhand books bought at auction by Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, which then created the first reproductions. First sold in London by the shop at the Victoria and Albert Museum, it became a middlebrow staple when the recession, initially merely the slightly euphemistic “credit crunch”, hit. Through this poster, the way to display one’s commitment to the new austerity regime was to buy more consumer goods, albeit with a less garish aesthetic than was customary during the boom. This was similar to the “Keep calm and carry on shopping” commanded by George W Bush both after September 11 and when the sub-prime crisis hit America. The wartime use of this rhetoric escalated during the economic turmoil in the UK; witness the slogan of the 2010-15 coalition government, “We’re all in this together”. The power of Keep Calm and Carry On comes from a yearning for an actual or imaginary English patrician attitude of stiff upper lips and muddling through. This is, however, something that largely survives only in the popular imagination, in a country devoted to services and consumption, where elections are decided on the basis of house-price value, and given to sudden, mawkish outpourings of sentiment. The poster isn’t just a case of the return of the repressed, it is rather the return of repression itself. It is a nostalgia for the state of being repressed – solid, stoic, public spirited, as opposed to the depoliticised, hysterical and privatised reality of Britain over the last 30 years."

Owen Hatherley: Keep Calm and Carry On – the sinister message behind the slogan that seduced the nation
http://gu.com/p/4fgza/stw

BLEEDING IMAGES Screening in Leeds Feb 14th

[Description] BLEEDING IMAGES (1982, 46 minutes, VHS) THE FOETAL GRAVE OF PROGRESS (1984, 34 minutes, VHS)

Perhaps THE quintessential audiovisual statements of the post-industrial music scene. Provocative in content, prescient in style, these medium-format videos captured the subversive interests and activities of the pioneering sound art project against a contextual backdrop of the UK between 1981 and 1984; a time rife with mass unemployment, civil unrest, media hysteria, political indifference, terrorism and war overseas. Burroughsian cut-ups reveal subliminal imagery hidden in exploitative mainstream broadcasting; shocking images of real-life violence against living beings are critically employed to expose our complacency in everyday cruelty; the thunderous soundscapes and ritual performances of the Nocturnal Emissions awaken the viewer's senses to our undermining culture controlled by fear and repression...

Rarely viewed since their initial home video releases and screenings at the Tate and ICA in the UK as a result of the 1984 Video Recordings Act, both videos remains impressive today as early influential examples of the extended music video and key moments of the British independent video art movement. Countless artists and broadcasters have emulated or outright stolen the ambitions, aesthetics and techniques used in the videos of The Nocturnal Emissions, either directly or through watered-down copies - few however can match the tremendous power of the original works, long overdue public and critical reassessment in these increasingly pertinent times.

Free entry with small donations welcomed. Doors open at 7:30. A short talk and introduction by the organiser will precede the first video at 8pm - second video will be shown after 9pm. Please be aware that these videos contains flashing images and some footage that may disturb those of a sensitive disposition.

Special thanks to Nigel Ayers/Earthly Delights and Piitu Lintunen for making this event possible.

http://www.facebook.com/events/407157019370475/

*Wharf Chambers Co-operative Club is a members’ club, and you need to be a member, or a guest of a member, in order to attend. To join, please visit wharfchambers.org. Membership costs £1 and requires a minimum of 48 hours to take effect.*

Artistic License

On Spatial Detournement

Since the 1950s, guerrilla sign ontologists, situationists and psychogeographers have delighted in using the power of the map to decode the urban landscape. They have explored Manchester using a map of Milan , wandered Newcastle guided by a map of the Berlin U-Bahn, and explored Hackney with a map of the moon. This re-use of maps may at first sight seem to be a simple economy measure, but these were in fact experiments aimed at creating spatial détournements, subverting the commodified image of the city. By the intentional misreading of city space, the city would “be experienced not as a thing at all, but as possibilities”. Our ritual walks are in contrast to the concept of the dérive meaning an aimless walk that follows the whim of the moment, sometimes translated as a drift.

French philosopher Guy Debord used the dérive idea to encourage readers to revisit the way they looked at urban spaces. Rather than being prisoners to their daily routines, living in a complex city but treading the same path every day, he urged people to follow their emotions and to look at urban situations in a radical new way. The notion was that most of our cities are so thoroughly unpleasant because they were designed in a way that either ignored their emotional impact on people, or indeed tried to control people through their very design. The basic premise of the dérive is for people to explore their environment without preconceptions, to understand their location, and therefore their existence. The flaw in Debord’s notion is that town and rural planners now use very sophisticated methods of emotional route-manipulation to move consumers through a series of consumables. The radical way to counter this manufactured routing is not to rely on emotion to guide us, but instead to devise more precise and radical methods of rambling. A better way to explore space is instead to adapt another of Debord’s concepts, that of the détournement, where an artist reuses elements of existing media to create a new work with a different meaning, often one opposed to the original. Détournement is similar to satirical parody, but often employs more direct reuse or mimicry of the original works rather than constructing a new work, which merely alludes strongly to the original. Another technique we suggest is to adapt the cut-up or fold-in technique to design walking routes. William Burroughs and Brion Gysin applied this to printed media and audio recordings in an effort to decode the material’s implicit content, hypothesising that such a technique could be used to discover the true meaning of a given text. Burroughs also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination saying, “When you cut into the present the future leaks out”. Burroughs also further developed the fold-in technique as a method for altering reality. Burroughs’ explanation was that everything that could be recorded could be edited. Later the CrimethInc Ex-Workers Collective developed behavioural cut-ups as a method of changing one’s life by performing activities which are created by cutting up two socially acceptable, routine behaviours and recombining them to form an new more amusing activity. The intention is that you perform a series of cut-ups for a long period until it becomes second nature and your behaviour is altered significantly. Détournements, fold-ins and cut-ups may all be contrasted with recuperation, in which originally subversive works and ideas are themselves appropriated by mainstream media.

In spatial détournement, a rambler reuses elements of a known territory to explore a new psychic space with a different meaning, often one beyond the boundaries of the “original”. In this case maps of outer space are folded into maps of terrestrial space. So our ritual walks are spatial détournements based on precise plans to overturn external temporal/spatial manipulation of our rambling. We have created our own walking system instead of being enslaved by another man’s. We do not advise others to follow these routes, but instead to create their own pathways of exploration. Looking at the patterns drawn on a landscape allows us to analyse their origins in the communication between human and animal life, technology and landscape. A detailed study gives us insight into how we remember our travels. Using GPS, a follow-up analysis of a created map provides a different perspective on how the Bodmin Moor Zodiac was organised. By looking at various data from above, below and within, moving through both time and space, we are able to make additional observations, analysis and conclusions regarding our rambles that might not be possible from ground level.

From the book Bodmin Moor Zodiac by Nigel Ayers

The Walls of Dobbe

Using a dowsing instrument like a map, or a digitalised aerial photograph, allows your subconscious to tap in to the wealth of information available from this superconscious energy.
aerial photo from google maps




View Larger Map
the above as embedded data

see also http://nigelayers.blogspot.com/2010/02/walls-of-dobbe.html

It follows, therefore, that dowsing using digital information is the most physical type of dowsing because it is closely related to your body's own sensitivity to the informational currents that surround us. Using computer graphics in this research allows the physical body to tune in to electrical currents. It becomes more psychic in nature however, because you really have to let your rational mind let go of preconceptions in order to get in touch with energies of which you may not be fully conscious. This simple intuition is the reason many people talk to their computers.

http://bodminmoorzodiac.blogspot.com/

The Walls of Dobbe

The Walls of Dobbe, a group of three stone circles in the village of Dobwalls, Cornwall. These circles are interpreted as aspects of a lunar goddess. The first circle represents the left hand crescent moon, or virgin, and comprises of seven irregular granite stones. The second circle, represents the full moon or mother, also comprises seven irregular stones of similar height. The third circle represents the left hand crescent moon or crone and stands beside a row of trees. It consists of six stones, one of which is distinctively pointed and taller than the rest. As water courses run below the stone circles, the power of the stones are encapsulated and controlled by the cultural form of the triple circle. The centre axis of the circles extends southwards into an accurate moon observation line, whilst to the north it marks the rising of the star Spica. These stones of the triple mother-circle are finely and firmly set. They are cleft but not further tooled. At the centre of each stone circle the original carved and finished central stones have been replaced by cast iron plates.

These stones of the triple mother-circle are finely and firmly set. They are cleft but not further tooled. At the centre of each stone circle the original carved and finished central stones have been replaced by cast iron plates. Each plate is inscribed with a replica of the labyrinths that were originally carved on the central stones. These labyrinths seem to have served as dance mats in the triple centres of this ritual place.

Sacred Dance Mat

The honouring of Sophia as the mystical bride of the philosophers or "mistress of the inner world" , often intersects with worship of divine Mercurial water. Here, the tree-crowned Sophia stands upon a sacred dance mat.


The dance mat is inscribed with a labyrinth design. The labyrinth is a weaving or spinning image, referring to a woman's capacity to weave a child in the fabric of her own body. A Hindu birth ritual involves sketching the labyrinth in saffron on a bronze plate and washing it off with water. It is then fed to the pregnant woman.This thereby permits the child to move easily through the labyrinthine seven uterine "wombs". There are two holes cut through the dance mat plates marking where a cord (representing the umbilical cord) may have been threaded.

Sponsor's Message

Banksy versus Bristol Museum

Nigel Ayers describes his visit to see the 'expanded-media cartoons' of Banksy in Bristol

As we arrived outside the Bristol Museum on Sunday morning, the queue stretched round the block. This wasn’t an ordinary art show, it was a must-see popular event. And with 100,000 visitors in the first three weeks of opening, this was no “underground” artist either.

Banksy crossed from subculture to mainstream a few years back, following his move from Bristol to the art capitals of the world, a bestselling coffee-table art book, and his work getting regular exposure on TV and in the international press. Not to mention the phenomenally high prices being paid for his paintings at auction. So this is the local boy giving something back to the hometown that still bears the marks of his early stencil-work. The flyer says “PG Contains scenes of a childish nature some adults may find disappointing”.

The queue turned out to be for one and a half hours. I usually avoid events you have to queue for, but it was a nice sunny day and we were treated to the occasional sight of middle aged women joggers dressed in pink bras puffing and panting their way up the hill in support of a breast cancer charity. Also I found the queue added to the theatre of the occasion, and as you got closer to the entrance of the museum, the excitement seemed to build with the first whiffs of aerosol paint.

And it also added to the irony of the occasion, as you’re shepherded into a really old-fashioned museum by security guards employed by an artist who has built his reputation on dodging security guards. And this is to see art that has an image that is supposed to be way too rebellious to be sanctioned by fusty old institutions such as this.

The artist has chosen to hire this museum and cover all the expenses for what must be his first major show in this country. And admission is free. And there’s no Banksy merchandising at the museum, apart from the book “Wall and Piece” (which you find all over Bristol anyway) though the Oxfam shop across the road is doing a nice line in Banksy stickers and postcards.

So, we found ourselves being corralled into this old stuffy museum and being greeted by friendly museum staff and - thank goodness - they don’t have art explainers showing you round.

At the entrance, there’s a Stonehenge made out of heavily-graffitied portaloos (right), a stuffed crow is perched on top, and in its beak is a bloody tampon. “Welcome to the museum now wash your hands” reads the sign.

As you shuffle down the corridor, there’s a candlelit shrine in homage to the recently deceased pop star, Michael Jackson (below). It’s an oil painting in Victorian genre style of a fairytale cottage in dark woods, with The King of Pop as the wicked witch Jacko leaning out of the doorway offering candy sticks to tempt two lost children inside.

Once you’ve got through all this entrance malarkey, you’re free to wander round the displays, and the museum is large and not so crowded once you get inside. And you’re allowed to take photographs.

The first room is exclusively Art of Banksy, with a militant looking false ceiling of army-surplus camouflage net. And behind a screen of chicken wire you can see a full-scale mock-up of the artist’s studio, hung with loads of cardboard stencils, newspaper headlines about Banksy’s graffiti, filing cabinets are labelled “good ideas” “bad ideas” “other people’s ideas” and “porn”, a knitted cardigan that reads THUG FOR LIFE hangs off the artist’s chair. There’s the sound of a London radio phone-in on some Banksy controversy or other. On the easel is an oil painting of pixellated-faced portrait of a hoody in a baseball cap, the same self-portrait used in the Wall and Piece book.

The walls of the rest of this gallery are covered in “original” Banksys (as far as “original” work is concerned, just about every image in the show is a remix or update of existing cultural product), paintings on canvas, modified reproductions of paintings, small drawings.

In this gallery setting, it is possible to admire the quality of the brushstrokes and to examine closely the various techniques used to remix and remodel. On a craft side, it’s obvious that the guy works with a range from hands-on traditional craft skills to computerised techniques. He can draw, he’s pretty good at painting and can cut a mean stencil. And he’ll tend to abandon technical virtuosity or anything “deep” in favour of quick visual impact.

Rather than calling it the culturally-loaded term “art”, Banksy-work may be more precisely described as expanded media-cartooning which plays with the signifiers of modern urban experience. Each piece within the show works as an easily-readable visual joke. The humour is often cheesy and has gently satirical edge, the context and framing of the work is vital to its meaning. A lot of the jokes are mild, usually visual puns or updates of familiar old paintings. Both the strength and weakness of his output lies in the fact that rather than serious message, serious technique, or serious “cool”, Banksy tends to err on the side of cheeky humour.

In the next room are the pieces that I’ve really come to see, the animatronic petshop. There are surveillance cameras acting like roosting birds, fish fingers swimming round a goldfish bowl and lots of little cages with pet sausages wiggling about in them.

The animatronic effects are of Hollywood quality and fascinating to view. They don’t share the handmade qualities of his other work, so I will presume that this is expensive stuff that he has hired professional fabricators to make.

Throughout the rest of the museum, there a mixture of the museum’s collection and additions by Banksy. There’s a burned out icecream van converted into an information booth, modified faux marble statues and joke oil paintings inserted into the museum’s existing collection of old masters. You find yourself on a treasure hunt of Banksy interventions, and sometimes you’re not quite sure what if you’re looking at is part of the museum’s regular display, or a Banksy addition. An ornate gypsy caravan has been issued with an eviction notice. A stuffed fox in a British wildlife display holds a bloodied Countryside Alliance placard. There’s a hash pipe inserted into another display. I’m not sure whether the “Dinosaur Sick” is an original part of the fossil display or a Banksy addition. In the modern art room, a Banksy-looking painting of a bombed-out farmhouse turns out to be the once-censored “A Farm near St Athans” (1940) by official war artist John Armstrong.

A common technique in Banksy’s art is to play on the edges of the surface on which he is painting. Figures wander out of holes to take a break, a waterfall spills out of the bottom of a painting, UFO's fly out of the canvases zapping ancient galleons with death rays. The grit and mess of the urban environment is integrated into the stencilled paintings, giving texture and trompe de l’oeil visual puns: painted figures engaged in the act of painting.

Everything in this show is humorous, and it’s just as often daft, trite and sloppily done as it is carefully executed. The work is both about messing with illusions and creating the illusion of Banksy as pixellated superhero dodging the surveillance cameras, breaking free from Disney-matrix mind control and sticking two fingers up at Burger King. The meaning of these images is created by the way they are set up in this particularly stuffy kind of museum: the kind of museum you get dragged round on school visits, and not all cool and white-walled and trendily-converted former industrial-space like the Tate, Arnolfini, Exchange, etc etc.

I really enjoyed the show, it was far better than I expected. The dodgy quality of a lot of the work humanised it and made it seem more intimate and uncontrived. As well as there being more jokes, there is an ethical dimension to Banksy’s work which makes a refreshing change from a lot of contemporary art-bollocks.

Looking at criticism of Banksy, I think a rather false argument arises about whether his art is “subversive”. Certainly Banksy consistently plays with the idea of subversion, in the imagery used, in the means of production, and in his pseudo-anonymity. Throughout his work there is a constant ridicule of authority figures and institutions, including contemporary art institutions. This is in common with a lot of youth- or subculture-oriented cultural product. It has a broadly leftist/anarchist/punk/environmentalist undercurrent and consistently celebrates “street” culture. Twenty or thirty years ago this kind of art might have been seen as more subversive than it does these days. Back then, along with the CND, Trades Unionists and new age travellers, artists like this might have attracted the attention of the security services, and even found themselves on Maggie Thatcher’s hit list. Nowadays a few minutes on Google will tell the shape-shifting lizards in charge of the secret state all they need to know about this artist’s real name, what he looks like, where he went to school, who his Facebook friends are, etc.

If being subversive means it undermines the way we currently relate to art, globalised capitalism, and the mythology of artist-genius, then of course Banksy’s work isn’t subversive at all. The way the world is at the moment, to work as an autonomous artist and to live out the myth of individualism by “expressing yourself” requires an amount of financial cushioning, whatever scale you work on. Banksy is best-known for his unsanctioned painterly interventions into the civic landscape. Remaining anonymous may be sensible to remain ahead of the legal repercussions associated with this kind of activity, but this is a pseudo-anonymity, as the signature BANKSY has often featured heavily. The artist with the Banksy tag has been using the celebrity-commodity system in a very pure form, creating the specific artist name, artworks related to this name and the idea of one person as a genius behind it. Speculation about the “real person” behind the name creates a media story which Banksy continues to exploit. So the artwork follows the specific rules of capitalist production, aimed to accumulate economic capital and/or symbolic capital which is the currency of all scenes and subcultures.

Nigel Ayers 25//7/09

Photos by Lesley Ayers

(for www.artcornwall.org)

Crunch Art not Credit!

"I was asking people to send any money that they have found which has been changed in some way. I put it out there as an idea on my website and someone sent me some so I want to keep it going now."



Here's the latest. A decorated 10 Deutschmark.
Translated into English:
"Art = Capital"

It's a bit retro, I think the artist should have used Euros.


As we move into a more abstract information - based economy, the opportunities for individualising interactions, like handing over altered, worn, mucky cash are lost. It all becomes ones and zeroes. It's not as if money is abolished, it becomes this equivalent information code kind of thing, and the codes get more and more impersonal. So why not strike a blow against the information economy. Take part in this guerilla mail art project.


Write a message on, or decorate some paper money (any denomination). Or just send me your worthless Euros, Dollars and Yen. You don't need to decorate them if you don't want to. I need something to burn this winter.

Open entry - no returns.


Mr N Ayers
Earthly Delights
PO Box 2
Lostwithiel
Cornwall
PL22 0YY
UK

Dirty money: Nigel wants to turn cash into art

Nigel Ayers with his new `money art' and one of his older summer solstice sculptures.
Picture. James Ram www,jamesramco.uk


A LOSTWITHIEL artist wants people to send him money in the post.
Nigel Ayers is a post-punk musician who has an interest in political artwork.
On discovering a website displaying altered banknotes he was inspired to embark on a similar project himself.
"I found the concept of altering bank notes with lyrics or art interesting.
"Writing on money was a tool used by the Soviet Union to spread subversive messages."
On his website he has displayed a photo of a five-pound note with one of his songs written on it, Never Give Up.
He wants to hear from anyone who has found money with doodles, drawings or messages on.
Nigel, 51, said: "As we move into a more abstract, information-based economy, the opportunities for individualising interactions, like handing over altered, worn, mucky cash are lost.
"It all becomes ones and zeroes. It's not as if money is abolished, it becomes this equivalent information code kind of thing, and the codes get more and more impersonal.
"So why not strike a blow against the information economy? Take part in this guerilla mail art project."
He has had money sent to him doctored by an activist with very strong anti-capitalist imagery on it using red ink which looks like blood.
Nigel said: "I was asking people to send any money that they have found which has been changed in some way.
"I put it out there as an idea on -my website and someone sent me some so I want to keep it going now."
Nigel's notoriety peaked in the 1980s when his industrial band established a firm fan base in Germany. The music produced by Nocturnal Emissions is inspired soundscapes often made by looping tapes. Nigel is due to release a vinyl box set
of music he made in the 1980s. He lives with his wife Linda and their two grey cats and now works for Cornwall Community Space Program.
He once designed a graphic for the Stop the War movement, which showed George Bush's face and read: "George Bush War Killer." He was delighted to see it appear on the front page of a national paper, when famous footballer Diego Maradona wore a T-shirt with the design on during a demonstration in South America.
The guerrilla money art project in a similar way focuses on using a certain type of media to deliver a message.
Write a message, or decorate some paper money (any denomination) and send it to: Mr N Ayers, Earthly Delights, PO Box 2, Lostwithiel, Cornwall, PL22 OYY.

from
Cornish Guardian Wednesday September 24, 2008

Molotov Boy

I'm sorting though my old files today...here's Molotov Boy, one of theThe War Against Terror series of detourned illustrations I did back in 2005.

Guerilla mail art project

I just got these yankee dollars in the mail today from DN of Portland, Oregon. I'm not sure the bank will accept them, so I'll pop them in a clip frame."we're building a new tomorrow" is a line from "bring power to its knees" another song that I wrote back in the day, and like I say..


As we move into a more abstract information - based economy, the opportunities for individualising interactions, like handing over altered, worn, mucky cash are lost. It all becomes ones and zeroes. It's not as if money is abolished, it becomes this equivalent information code kind of thing, and the codes get more and more impersonal. So why not strike a blow against the information economy ??? !!!. Take part in this guerilla mail art project :,

Open entry - no returns.




Write a message on, or decorate some paper money (any denomination) and send it to:
Mr N Ayers
Earthly Delights
PO Box 2
Lostwithiel
Cornwall
PL22 0YY
UK



And I'll post the best ones on the blog.

Weapons Inspection at RAF St Mawgan 2003

Scratch and Run

SCRATCH AND RUN
CITY LIMITS OCT 5-11, 1984
Cover feature by Andy Lipman


• Press ‘play’. Guillotined battery hens are falling into an Electrolux mixer. Riot police storm hair spray adverts, electrode-manipulated laboratory rats collide with stuttering newsreaders, the buckle of a straightjacket is refastened endlessly. The sound is a low melancholic drone of synthesised echoes and radio static. Eject. This is `Bleeding Images' by Nocturnal Emissions.

• Press ‘play’. Goose-stepping soldiers in Red Square receive the salute from Thatcher and Heseltine at the Conservative Party Conference. The Saatchi Tory logo, an ice-cream cone with flames leaping out, blurs into the hammer and sickle. Lady Di glides by waving to the beat of New Order's `How does it feel to treat me like you do?' Eject. `Scratching for a new texture' by the Duvet Brothers.

• Press ‘play’. Sultry eyes blink on screens within screens. Joan Crawford slaps William Holden. Violins play a distant tango, interrupted by snatches of dialogue from Hollywood melodramas. Floating layers of images are washed away by seeping pinks and crimsons, like the jelly blobs in those novelty table lamps. Eject. `Polka Dots and Moonbeams' by Sandra Goldbacher.

HIP HOP Video, image breakdancing: television does a body-pop. Broadcast TV is scoured for arresting images and fed into video editing systems like shredding machines. The fusion of funk rhythms and visuals on collision course crumble original context. Reassurance and sweet reason, television's facade, disintegrate before your bombarded eyes.
Paul Maben of `Protein Video' hands over the choice of images to a computer, attempting to simulate an organic, visual osmosis. His ambition is to mix sound and vision live. Grand Master Flash toasting live broadcasts with pre-recorded tapes. Image-rapping in a video disco.

George Barber takes the innately seductive quality of TV to mix colour, shapes and movement into hypnotic, fluid sequences. The screen becomes a crystal ball, triggering the subconscious. TV as the Dream Machine.

The Video Lounge at the Fridge in Brixton, with its 20-screen TV installation (presently moving house and re-opening on December 1st) has provided one of the few exhibition venues in London for scratch video to reach a wider audience. Now established video-makers like Derek Jarman, Cerith Wyn Evans and Richard Heslop are joined by bored TV addicts with a lot of state-paid leisure time on their hands, and a video recorder in the front room.

Scratching is so simple. Just playing with the TV remote-control console, quickly switching stations at random, is a basic scratch. What emerges isn't just a jumble of voices and images but the personality of broadcast TV itself. Its self-importance, its hectoring, its banality and plastic smile.

It's just this attitude to television which unites the diverse offerings of video-scratchers. The focus isn't narrative film genres, or individual TV programmes, but the effect of television on tap, the stream of the schedules. It was only a matter of time before television got the scratch treatment. We had to wait for the tools of TV and video to fall into the `wrong hands'.

An idea of this attitude might be an all-nighter of the movies ‘Koyanisquatsi’, ‘Atomic Café’, and ‘Videodrome’ with maybe the ‘Animals Film’ thrown in. That's a world out of control, a victim of technology’s own mindless momentum, with a humanity hopelessly alienated from nature, and, via the mass media, image-numbed into unreality. Scratch prescribes ‘Close Encounters of the Subliminal Kind’ as the antidote.

The latest tape from Brixton-based multi-media outfit, Nocturnal Emissions is called `The Foetal Grave of Progress'. It leaves you feeling you've just witnessed the final death-throes of a civilisation, sadly ours. All its past traumas flash by in seconds, before the last electronic bleep and oblivion.
The soundtrack is an aimless, pathetic whine punctuated with snatches of speech, traffic and baby chuckles, as if we're on remote control search for meaning amongst the image debris of an information overdosed world. Tanks at portside, radar scanners, smoke and rubble vie with fish fingers and toothpaste ads for our fleeting attention. The pulse of the Ghost in the Machine.

Such preoccupations inform Nick Cope's 391 scratch, `The View From Hear' clearly signalling that we should learn to `listen' to television, like music, rather than watching and analysing for meaning like the way we read books. Western culture prioritises sight over hearing, scientific rationality over intuition and feeling. Conventional television reinforces such myopic awareness, and information is packaged into easily digestible stories, whether it's the news or a soap. The problem is that the bits don't add up to a whole. To understanding.

391 draws scratchers in Sheffield and Nottingham together, and developed out of local fanzines, after they got bored with just covering bands, records and gigs. Like the Nocturnals and another Sheffield group, the Anti-Group, they see video as part of a broader movement to stage multi-media events, incorporating scratch sound, multiple film and slide projections as well as video installations.

Cope is fond of quoting Situationist writings to explain what he does. `Work follows the random fragmented path that our mind takes every day, turning from dream to reminiscence, from nightmare to prescience, from the longings for objects to the longings for sex. As the foundations crack, our society follows this pattern, as random event piles on random event, and like a drowning man the past of all ages flies before our eyes. Instead of imposing order, this vortex is received and celebrated, then concentrated into a force of unexpected power.’

Which is probably where Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV come in. Armageddon cultists and William Burroughs devotees, Psychic TV give innocent entertainment a very bad name. Which is just as they intend.
Their live performances of sensory over-kill, employing extreme imagery of satanic sex rites or spoof christian ikonography are experiments in mass disorientation. `Altered States' tests attempting to free the spirit from predictable control. Like those voodoo dances which induce trance-like states. If television's the opium of the masses, will orgiastic communal séances such as these be the bingo of the
future?

William Burroughs predicted as much in `Wild Boys' back in 1968. Along with punk style ('the chic thing is to dress in expensive tailor-made rags and all the queens are camping about in wild-boy drag') he gives us The Penny Arcade Peep Show-moving multi-screen video boxes, enveloping us in a fusion of sound and vision. `Fragmentary glimpses linked by immediate visual impact ... a sensation of speed as if the pictures were seen from a train window.'

Frankie's `Two Tribes' is inspired by Mad Max II, a wild boy if ever there was one, and Marc Almond is signed up to star in the movie of Burroughs' book. Doublevision in Manchester distribute scratch videos of Cabaret Voltaire and 23 Skidoo, and the IKON/Factory label have just brought out `The Final Academy Documents', the early film scratches of Burroughs and Anthony Balch. The Rough Trade shop in Notting Hill stocks a small range of independent scratch cassettes.

Scratch has arrived. But will the media, as usual, simply detach the style from the substance to market newer bands and consumer durables? Charlotte Street becoming the new Kings Road?

Video-scratching is an inter-active response to the one-way arrogance of broadcast television. And perhaps the growing accessability of the medium, both for creating new messages and distributing alternative information, gives some hope. A flick through the extensive library of London Video Arts in Wardour Street, or the Videotheque at the ICA shows just how adept video-makers have been in subverting conventional expectations.
Clive Gillman's `Warning, Attack and Recovery' demonstrates the economy of scratch, and the irrelevance of soap-opera narrative, by saying in eight intense minutes what `The Day After' and `Threads' took hours to say. While Graham Young's `Ships, I See No Ships' brilliantly debunks the show-biz jingoism of a post-Falklands military tattoo, scratching the antics to a reggae steel-drum soundtrack.

Steve Hawley's `Science Mix' is a hilarious parody of TV commercials, mixing archive '50s soap powder ads (including a genuine no tangle wash-tub clip where radioactive clothing is rinsed static-free!) with present-day versions.

And Jez Welsh's 'IOD' (Information Overdose/Imagine Other Destinies) lays image over image in abstract, geometric designs, weaving around a soundtrack of buzzing radio frequencies, distant telephones and DJ bilge. As with much scratch video, the idea of image pollution, and our so far unrecognised need to develop an ‘ecology of information’, permeates the work.

Can video wean us off our addiction to the dominant television habits so assiduously nurtured by consumer capitalism? Certainly it can claim to have established itself as a specific creative medium, no longer in hock to the codes and language of film narrative or broadcast television. And scratch brings together the fluidity of videoediting, more akin to sound-mixing than montage film techniques, with a healthy critique of the mass media.

But are we ready for it? And with the absence of social exhibition venues, will most people ever be challenged to think differently about the sort of information they receive and how they consume it? When confronted with the apparent incoherence of scratch, are we prepared to suspend our critical faculties-in order to re-discover them?

If television is our shop window on the world, scratch has just chucked a brick through it, and is busy looting 30 years of goodies, with abandon. Will the results be inflammatory or wallpaper?

See Video Listings for details of forthcoming exhibitions of scratch video at ICA Videotheque, London Video Arts and Moonshine Arts Centre.

Andy Lipman
CITY LIMITS OCT 5-11, 1984

Progressive Political Pornography

There was something very Freudian about the Cold War.

Another Step Closer to Reality

I'm dusting off some vintage graphics for a vinyl box set of the early '80s NE recordings that's coming out shortly. When I say "graphics", I mean a lot of cut & pasted images snipped out of magazines and tatty black and white photocopies. It was progressive political pornography I was doing back then.

The original of this particular image was a collage clipped from the Sunday magazines then made into a dozen A3 photocopies,courtesy of a friend who had an office job with British Gas. It was used as a pull-out in Rock Wilson's Apocalypso A Go Go 'zine, and I also saw it recycled in the situationist-inspired 'zine Anti-Clockwise.

I never had access to Photoshop back in the day. Or should I say, “the means of production of this type of imagery was under much tighter control by the military industrial complex”? Or should I say Photoshop hadn't been invented yet?

Any which way, I never got to do this picture in colour before. It's nice to be able to re-shape monochromatic photocopies into something like how I imagined they should have looked.

Guerilla mail art project

I just found this site http://www.de-noted.com that is full of images of altered banknotes. So I had to show you this photo of this fiver, as it's got one of my songs written on it, "never give up".


As we move into a more abstract information - based economy, the opportunities for individualising interactions, like handing over altered, worn, mucky cash are lost. It all becomes ones and zeroes. It's not as if money is abolished, it becomes this equivalent information code kind of thing, and the codes get more and more impersonal. So why not strike a blow against the information economy ??? !!!. Take part in this guerilla mail art project :,

Open entry - no returns.


Write a message, or decorate some paper money (any denomination) and send it to:
Mr N Ayers
Earthly Delights
PO Box 2
Lostwithiel
Cornwall
PL22 0DW
UK



And I'll post the best ones on the blog.