A seasonal installation by Iona and Zali at Shepherdess Walk in Londonstrendyhoxton. Cheers!
A seasonal installation by Iona and Zali at Shepherdess Walk in Londonstrendyhoxton. Cheers!
In the bleak midwinter of 2001 I was working on a project called Fritware Painted With Lustre. There wasn’t too much to the project other than the name, but that was how I worked at the time. I felt that titles contained stories, pictures, songs and worlds which could be unlocked, unwrapped and presented to an audience.
One of the follies of this album was an interpretation of Veni, Veni Emmanuel which is one of my favourite Christmas carols. There’s something modally medieval in the melody of this carol, although that’s not entirely uncommon in the canon of carols. There’s also something peculiarly messianic, in a Jewish sense, about the song. Jesus is being summoned not to bring redemption to mankind or to take away our sins but to “ransom captive Israel”. We feel a slide back from the Gospels to the Torah.
None of this explains why it came out so apparently apocalyptic. Israel no-longer captive has become an aggressor once more jealously defending the land of milk and honey, smiting neighbouring people and generally putting on a bad show. I have also never quite cast off the mood of Walter M Miller’s classic A Canticle for Liebowitz. This novel casts us into a post-apocalyptic future in which monks attempt to preserve the fruits of science and learning, the bitter fruit which devastated the planet, for the return of civilisation.
Perhaps it was with these in mind that I recorded myself as an echoey four-part choir. At the time I was using an eighties Fostex reel-to-reel tape machine for all of my recordings. So the voices were pitch-shifted by physically altering the tape speed, meaning that while I slowed down the tape to record the treble part the bass rumbled into the floorboards, giving my neighbours a terrifying seasonal treat. As to what exactly is being chewed up and regurgitated by the Casio SK5 sampling keyboard to create the torn plane of desolation around the finished piece, I really can’t remember.
A decade later in another mild winter after the end of the world, it seemed like a good idea to find some footage to accompany this piece. Archive.org as ever came up trumps with a nuclear test film by Joe Bonica. Haunting, awe-inspiring – I can take no credit for this – and it was only later that I remembered about Britain’s nuclear tests in the Pacific Ocean in the fifties. Most notably at Christmas Island.
Which is pretty much where we came in; now knowing the place for the first time.
Facebook was the beginning of the end.
It changed our relationship with the internet forever. When we first discovered the internet in the 90s everything was up for grabs, everything was ours. We filled the space with hypertext pages, links, images. A lot of it was quite gaudy and pointless but at least it was vital and more importantly at least it was ours.
This is not one of those rants about ownership and the invasiveness of Web 2.0. We can take all of those things as read. Neither is it some kind of polemic about dumbing down, the quickening of the attention span and the increasingly paperthin nature of our online interactions. Although it probably should be. As the post-millenial decade accelerated into the farcical world we know now we have found ourselves barking, yelping, reducing our communication to the gesture of clicking the “like” box.
Don’t get me wrong: I like Twitter. The 140 character medium and the cross-fertilisation of hashtags blossom into an immediate flowering of a thousand urgent stories from around the world. Too much to take it all at once. Migrainous. Twitter offers information rather than data but perhaps too much of it for our increasingly butterfly-like consciousness.
And I hope you are taking as read that every time we say “we” here it might well only refer to “I”.
Time to slow down. Time to adopt a longer form. Time to speak to fewer people but more coherently and in greater detail.
When my grandparents were still alive the family seemed to congregate frequently around a very long dinner table. My mother was one of nine children. Not all of them were found around that table, but when you added grandchildren, friends and hangers-on to the table it was became a busy and occasionally noisy place to eat. Imagine one of those Jewish family flashbacks from a Woody Allen movie and you get some idea of the scene.
At this sort of family dinner table you develop a fractured and multi-layered consciousness. You listen to a half dozen conversations and contribute to most of them. A word here, a gesture there, a smile, a laugh or an acknowledgement. As with the extended dinner table of Facebook you develop panopticon eyes: clicking a like box, dropping a comment here, and a fuller reply elsewhere.
Sometimes you need to leave that generous dinner table and learn to engage in smaller scale conversations, deeper conversations, and even withdraw from conversation altogether to meditate and continue the longer, slower conversations with oneself.
