The Flitter

Had a great couple of days filming The Flitter with Carl Hancock Rux and Benjamin Tiven last week. Ben also worked with me on The Gist n in January and he’s a great camera operator/general technical supervisor as well as a very good artist in his own right. You can see his work here.

There are a lot of links to Carl on the web – I’d follow any and all of them. He’s an amazing writer/ performer/ musician and an extraordinarily generous talent. I was thrilled he agreed to work on The Flitter with me and he made some very difficult material his own. We’d planned to film in segments but he performed the entire text in a single heroic take of over two hours on Friday morning…

I’m really, really pleased with the result and very grateful to have had two such fantastic collaborators. And of course, none of it would have been possible without the generosity and support of the EMPAC team. Curator Kathleen Forde has been a longstanding supporter of my work and I’m looking forward to working with her on a show of my work next year. And Ian Hamelin and the rest of the technical staff at EMPAC are doing amazing work in demanding circumstances.

On to editing now – a version of The Flitter will be shown at Sketch in London in July. More soon…

More Gist shots (Anthony Perullo)

Anthony Perullo as ‘The Henchman’ on set at EMPAC

Filming Jim Fletcher for The Gist n

I’ve been filming at the Electronic Media and Performing Arts Centre (EMPAC) for the last couple of days. Working on a project that grew out of the section of my book entitled ‘Spectres of Marks’ (see here) – specifically the part that mentioned the movie ‘The Sting’ and its relationship to David Maurer’s earlier book on language and con tricks, which in turn I’d been interested in in relation to language in spam e-mails. Here are a couple of images from the first session with performer Jim Fletcher. It went really well – set a great tone for the rest of the week. More to follow…

Intervener

From today’s spam…:

SSAGES. CAMP VICARS (Mind.), P. I., May 7, 1902. Announcement: The 
troops of the Lake Lanao Expedition have been paraded in order that the 
following messages may be read to them: FIRST. MANILA, May 4, 1902. TO 
GENERAL DAVIS: Order that the following message of the President of the 
United States be read to every company and troop in your Brigade. It 
will be published in Division Orders for the information of other 
commanders, and as a special mark and tribute to the assaulting force of 
the Battle of Bayan. (Sgd.) CHAFFEE. PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE. WASHINGTON, D. 
C., May 5, 1902. TO GENERAL CHAFFEE, MANILA. Accept for the Army under 
your command, and express to General Davis and Colonel Baldwin 
especially, my congratulations and thanks for the splendid courage and 
fidelity which has again carried our flag to victory. Your fellow 
countrymen at home will ever reverence the memory of the fallen, and be 
faithful to the survivors, who have themselves been faithful unto death 
for their country’s sake. (Sgd.) THEODORE ROOSEVELT. SECOND. MANILA, May 
4, 1902. TO GENERAL DAVIS: Please accept my congratulations for 
yourself, and express to Colonel Baldwin and all the officers and men 
engaged in the Battle of May 2, my high appreciation of the 

Persuasion

 

 

 

 

 

The images above are details of a diptych called ‘Persuasion’ – after the Jane Austen novel which forms the basis for the prints. I mentioned elsewhere the work with ‘small print’ and this piece is part of that ongoing work. It’s from a series of such prints based on (mostly) 19th century novels. The novels in the series have two things in common:

a) they’re hosted in their entirety online and have been used as source material for spammers to strip text from to paste into their messages (to get them past filters)
b) something about their theme or title suggests a certain sense of humor at play in choosing them to pad spam (Persuasion; Great Expectations; The Master Key)

The print on the left represents the entire text of the novel rendered as a solid block of text. The small gaps correspond with fragments of the text that have cropped up in spam e-mails and which are shown in a corresponding print on the right.

There’s some more information on this sequence here. Persuasion was first shown in the show You Silently curated by Marina Warner and a revised version was one of a set of 3 print works released to mark the U.S. launch of my book at Miguel Abreu Gallery. More on those soon.