Art on the Internet.
With work by Cat Chong, Josh Vyrtz, Briony Hughes, Chloë Proctor, Yvonne Litschel, Terry Silvester,
Huma Aatifi, Sean Dahlman, JD Howse, Rushika Wick, Martin Wakefield, Alan Cunningham, and Iris Colomb.
This filmic iteration of Plain Air: An Apology in Transit explores Alison Kafer’s conception of ‘crip time’ in relation to disability, ecology, and public transport. Defined in Feminist, Queer, Crip; ‘“crip time” means both “a flexible standard for punctuality” and “the extra time needed to arrive or accomplish something”’. This durational project investigates the phenomenological affect of crip time in relation to the precarity of relying on British Rail to travel independently within London - a city recently halted by climate protests. This work embodies Anne Boyer’s ‘patient and loyal ingathering’ of ecological damage through the lived experience of illness, recognising the uncomfortable medical complicity in environmental harm, and renegotiating the body simultaneously as toxic while practising acts of environmental care. The human body is foregrounded as fundamentally perishable within the ongoing act of sickness.
Cat is a transcultural twister child negotiating an embodied rejection of fixity and belonging, they’re a graduate of the Poetic Practice MA at Royal Holloway currently doing a PhD on global female authored illness narratives at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. They’re a proud queer crip and happy sacrificer of sleep for poetry, whose durational work flails wildly between conceptual and confessional tendencies. They have a forthcoming book chapter in The M-Word with Flint Books edited by Caroline Harris, an upcoming extract of their Masters manuscript in Ache Magazine’s Issue 3, and have recently been published Permeable Barrier – an online journal created by JD Howse. Their interests include ecology, feminism, gender, health, contemporary poetics, medical humanities, and disability studies.
Cat can be found on instagram @marbledmayhem
GENDERED TOILET GRAFFITI VS My Studio Tour!! explores my reaction to a body of self-enacted research into the re-enforcement of hegemonic structures of power through anonymous acts of bathroom graffiti. The narrative then unfolds following my realisation that male bathrooms, to which I frequent, are 'replete with ‘sexually violent content’ unlike female bathrooms that are, in their majority, more commonly adorned with supportive statements pertaining to bowel movements. Finally, this vlog charters my attempts to reach out to the other occupants of my studio complex through the creation of my own bathroom mural depicting a futuristic act of kindness.
Josh Vyrtz (b.1992) is an artist based in London and Stoke-on-Trent working across performance film writing and image-making. He uses the archetype of the performer to engage with social issues. The bulk of his time is spent collecting research. When creating a new project he aproaches the work from two sides - one that is journalistic and simultaneously one that is deeply personal and autobiographical. He has devised two shows that have completed runs at the Edinburgh Fringe festival exhibited both nationally and internationally taught developmental workshops at Focal Point Gallery (2018) and been shortlisted for both the Kaitak Centre residency (2018) and the Red Mansion Art Prize (2017).
Josh can be found on instagram @joshvyrtz or at joshvyrtz.com
This work was created by Briony Hughes in collaboration with her rabbit, Honey. Mindfulless 1 is centred around establishing new methods for reading and interacting with tabloid newspapers. By doing so, Hughes hopes to refigure her relationship with the violence of newsprint. The structure of the videos borrow from aspects of EMDR cognitive therapy, placing poetic process in conjunction with psychological reprocessing.
Briony is a poet based between Devon and London, currently studying towards a PhD in poetics at Royal Holloway. She is interested in vibration and kinetic movement in language, the archive, and site-specific writing. Her first collection, ‘Dorothy’, is forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books in May 2020. Her work has recently been featured in Datableed 12, Stride Magazine, and Decorating Dissidence. Her work can be found in Senate House Library, the National Poetry Library and Foyle Special Collections, King's College London. Briony is a founding member of the Crested Tit Collective and curates the Crested Tit Collective pamphlet series.
Honey is a dwarf lop based in Briony and Laura's living room. She is currently interested in kale, hay, relaxing under the coffee table, and pulling bits of paper out of the printer. She has previously been featured in a range of work, including 'Batches' by Laura Hellon and performance work by Cat Chong. Her main poetic influence is Donna Haraway's Dog.
Briony can be found on instagram @bristaceyhughes or at brionyhughes.blogspot.com
Honey can be found on instagram @honeythedeafbunny
This Will Not Bring You Heaven (2018) is a film poem discussing the two lives of the same woman; firstly as Vanity, leader of Vanity 6 and protege of Prince, and secondly as Denise Matthews, born-again televangelist.
Chloë Proctor is a London-based poet. Chloë’s work has appeared in Azimuth, the Ecology of an Ear (ed. Patrick Farmer, Sonic Art Research Unit), Alterity (Centre for Alterity Studies) and the Contemporary Poetry Series: Nature & Language (Corbel Stone Press) as well as Bedford Square 10, an anthology of new writing from the Royal Holloway Creative Writing programme, where she is studying an MA in Poetic Practice. She has also created several self-published projects, most recently including Saprotrophic (a study on eco-auto-destructive art) and Tunnel (a hopeful wail into political echo chambers), as well as a web-based bot project s p o r e s.
Chloë can be found on instagram @chloproc and online at chloeproctor.me
inflection points
after Noriko's Dinner Table (2006)
unorange as tangerine cheeks
it prequelled it ~ tearing red thread
; a void calls at train tracks
the station drawn out as a circle
panning a spiral nine hours ahead
all of the coin lockers are full &
there’s talk of placemaking
infants inside when it’s a case
of the thread as a column
pointillism is existentialist teaching
outlines undone spill over
cross-legged intersections
deracinate roaming in relation
to -ing defined by its
happening until it stops
Written in response to Noriko’s Dinner Table (紀子の食卓), inflection points draws on select imagery from the film, with a specific focus on Tokyo Ueno Station. The station is a particular point of transience in the narrative arc, and the author’s own experiences there are interwoven. A liminal space only until the moment it ceases to be one.
Yvonne Litschel is a writer and artist living in London. She has three solo publications, Moth Dust (Sampson Low), Immurement (Broken Sleep Books), and ræfs (Ghost City Press). Her work has also featured in two Sidekick Books anthologies, as well as been published in or is forthcoming in journals such as The Interpreter's House, PERVERSE, and The Projectionist's Playground. In 2019 she placed second in the Streetcake Experimental Writing Prize for poetry.
Yvonne can be found online at yvonnelitschel.com or on instagram @yvlitschel
Sometimes I Want To Cash My Car Into Oncoming Traffic (2020) is composed of found VHS footage by artist Terry Silvester. The title accentuates the self destruction and violence in the content which was recored by the artist's father in the mid 90s. The piece is an autobiographical look into the artist's family dynamics growing up in Britain.
Terry Silvester is a moving image artist based in Bristol and London. Through his work he has a fascination with creating a discomfort; producing an uncertainty to the image and its motive leaving the viewer in a state of apprehension and unease. His work exists in this borderland between the real and the imaginary. Silvester has screened videos in galleries and film festival nationally and internationally, including London, Los Angeles and Barcelona. In 2018 he won Best Experimental Film at both UK Cine Fest and Fylde Film Festival.
Terry can be found online at terrysilvester.com or on instagram @terrysilvester
This work is an amalgamation of different projects - a set of songs for Aatifi's band Unda Fluxit, video exploring the suburban architecture of Boise, and poems in response to postcards from the Department of Defense archives. Aatifi is interested in how the postcards portray Afghanistan’s culture. The description on the back of each postcard adds to the oddity of their presentation. For a land which is occupied, they are written with innocent language and often read as alluring, illusive and enchanting with scenic compositions. The video explores the juxtaposition between the imagery of the postcards to ordinary objects in our surroundings. Aatifi lives in a very suburban neighborhood interlaid with 70’s ranch-style architecture, and the video shows a new house being built over 2-3 months. This new style of suburban archetype will be dated in a similar way as her 70's house.
Huma Aatifi is an artist living in Boise, ID. She is from Afghanistan and immigrated to the US at a young age in 2001. She continues to paint, write, and record in her residence in Boise. Her music project Unda Fluxit released the debut cassette on Spacecase Records in 2019.
Huma can be found on instagram @huma_aatifi, and bandcamp undafluxit.bandcamp.com
Chasing the Wind' was recorded by Unda Fluxit on an iPhone on Dec 13, 2019.
Intermittent shots taken of postcards :- Aribuabo, Joselito. Kandahar. Department of Defense. 2011. TFE02-068. Postcard. Carter, Michael and Pete Thibodeau. A day in Afghanistan. Department of Defense. 2012. TFE02-065. Postcard.
Organ explores how destructive acts can be beautiful art practices. Dahlman's aim was to create a work built around contrasts; the visual becomes progressively clearer and the destruction of the organ undoes itself in direct opposition with the audio, which is degraded by the artist using magnets.
Sean Dahlman is a musician living in Boise Idaho. Focusing on classical compositions and experimental videos. He started experimenting with slow motion destruction three years ago with a gopro, a lot of guns, and gasoline. Since then, he has moved towards a more human touch, experimenting with dance and the human form.
Sean can be found on instagram @dahlmansean. This piece was made with the assistance of Seth Graham who can be found on instagram @runnysauceman
[please turn on subtitles] [Contains NSFW content of a sexual nature]
Told partially through collage and partially through new material, Accessible Digital Eternity is a simultaneous psychogeography of my physical and digital existences over the last 3 years. Working through tensions between Derrida and Fisher’s understandings of hauntology, between the deeply personal and the abstractly anonymous, between history and the present, Accessible Digital Eternity explores how the self is constructed through an accumulation of history, society, memory, and place. Accessible Digital Eternity is the first film in a three[?] part series called CRT Seance. The next episode, An Aphorism/An Anachronism, is currently in production.
JD Howse is from London and lives in London. He has a BA and MA from Royal Holloway, University of London, and works as a producer for a publishing company. His creative practice explores hauntology, memory, and epistemology through the lens of ecology, queer-theory, and neurodivergence. He curates PermeableBarrier.com and, with Sarah Dawson, he co-run the LGBT+ experimental poetry night Theatre of Failure.
JD can be found online at jdhowse.com or on instagram @jdhowse
by Rushika Wick
Using the new metric that somehow quantifies survival -Two Metres- as a mantra, the speaker in turn appears to issue external and internal directives.These utterances take on new semantics depending on where in the continuous loop the listener starts/ ends. Connections between the COVID-19 Pandemic and ecological disruption might emerge. The video highlights transgression via proximity as being the new social stigma. Another impact on population mental health is implied by the demarcation of distance providing those with obsessive tendencies painful substrate. Like a pale balloon floating in the background, the State mismanagement of the Pandemic is brought into focus by the ridiculous simplification typified by the metric.
Rushika Wick is a poet and doctor with an interest in social impacts on the body. Recent work can be found in Tentacular, Datableed and Ambit.
Rushika can be found on instagram @rushikawick
Villanelle for the Birds by Cyd Poireau
by Martin Wakefield
The sounds in this video are computer-spoken lines of a villanelle composed of the human-transcribed sounds of non-human beings. Martin's work is about meaning: its persistence, the struggle for it, and the struggle against it. It's source text is John Bevis's Aaaaw to Zzzzzd: The Words of Birds. The images are of certain apotropaic objects and images and other esoterica.
Martin Wakefield is a poet from London. His latest publication isZugunruhe, a collection of poetic texts, published by Hesterglock Press in November 2019.
Martin can be found on YouTube at https://bit.ly/yt_martinwakefield, Instagram @martybabytram, and Twitter @martinwakefield.
Inspired by the concept of gnosis as personal knowledge or awareness, and by the opportunity boredom + solitude in nature afford for bodily gnosis through ritualistic or habitual movements, A Short Boredom Film should be viewed in purely emancipatory terms : watch, reflect, repeat, re-enact.
Alan Cunningham was born in Newry, Ireland. His first book, Count fromZero to One Hundred, was published in 2013. Sovereign Invalid, published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe, came out in 2018. Other works have been published, both on-line and print, with gorse and Minor Literature[s], amongst others. A collection of essays, New Green Fool: Essays After The Green Fool, is forthcoming.
Alan can be found on twitter @alanmcunningham and instagram @alymikeyc
by Iris Colomb
'soaking' stems from the durational performance piece "soak," which was first live-streamed on 6 April 2020 in a London bathtub. Both 'soak' and 'soaking' explore ideas of isolation and stagnation, through material language, repetition, and duration. The project is a poetic response to lockdown in the UK.
Iris Colomb is an artist, poet, curator, editor, and translator based in London. Her practice explores different relationships between visual and spoken forms of text through projects often involving performance, experimental translation and poetic book-objects.
IT’S OK TO BE S[W]HITE, 2019 was an installation piece that used three films, each shot on an iPhone, to intervene into the landscape around Royal Holloway campus in Egham and Englefield Green through the removal of white supremacist posters from public surfaces. The work was initially presented on three phones placed together on a flat surface thereby inviting the reader to approach the film, the accompanying audio of the poem, and to witness the removal of white supremacist language through washing. This second iteration hopes to capture the small scale of the phone screen and simultaneity of the installation.
Cat a graduate of the Poetic Practice MA at Royal Holloway, a founder of the Crested Tit Collective, and a PhD student based in Singapore. Their work has recently been published in the Bad Betty Press’s Alter Egos (2019) anthology, and Stride online magazine. Their work has also been shown at The Small Press Book Fair with the Royal Holloway Poetics Research Centre, and can be found in the National Poetry Library, the BookArtBookShop, and Senate House Library. Their interests include ecology, feminism, medical humanities, and disability theory.
Cat can be found on Instagram and Twitter @marbledmayhem