Here

The White Queen

2012-01-31T13:30:00.008Z

You can download some music demos for my forthcoming project here :

http://www.mediafire.com/?dc2dk92makdrsxs

The Changing Face of Cantopop

2011-08-12T00:17:00.007Z

Track by Martin Byrne/James Hollands as part of Martin's Song A Day For A Year project.

<a href="http://sadfay.bandcamp.com/track/100811-day-222-changing-face-of-cantopop">10.08.11 - DAY 222 - Changing Face of Cantopop by SADFAY</a>

Electric Sound

2011-05-30T21:31:00.003Z

New compilation from Electric Sound Records, featuring a track from me :

http://www.electricsoundrecords.co.uk/esrcdr01

Goto the link to download or buy a physical copy, to listen to the compilation :

ESRCDR01 by Electric Sound Records

Poltroon

2011-05-30T21:28:00.001Z

Some of my spoken word work up on

http://www.poltroon.org.uk/

Telepathy 101 soundtrack

2011-05-17T20:27:00.000Z

Jim Hollands

Telepathy 101

Cassette, limited first edition of 60

£6 inc P&P from Entracte.

For further details on the cassette and to order from Entracte*, see a video or hear a music sample:

http://www.entracte.co.uk/project/james-hollands-e108/

If vimeo doesn't work for you, the video and a new track not on the tape are also available to watch on youtube :

http://www.youtube.com/user/jamesblhollands

For further details on Entracte, see here :

http://www.entracte.co.uk/Wire320_October_2010.pdf

* Allon from Entracte put the money up for the cassette and design. We split the number of cassettes in production, so he sells some and I have some to give away.
Should anyone not be able to afford the £6 and desperately want a physical product, see me.
If you don't want a cassette but still want to hear the music, the download link is here :

http://www.mediafire.com/?xyvz59avt13oxj6

although the cassette comes with an extra track.

James Hollands / Mark Ferelli Divus Prague 25/02/2011

2011-02-21T09:45:00.003Z

Telepathy 101 soundtrack

2010-12-20T15:11:00.004Z

You can download the soundtrack to 'Telepathy 101' for free here :

http://www.mediafire.com/?xyvz59avt13oxj6

Telepathy 101

2010-11-26T09:54:00.002Z

A new version of 'Telepathy 101' showed at the Gaywise Festival at the Cochrane Theatre last week

http://www.gaywisefestival.org.uk/performance.php

Barenzirkus and Harmony Korine

2010-07-20T10:05:00.007Z

Barenzirkus showed at the Bongout Outside The Box Outdoor Art Festival in Berlin alongside work by Harmony Korine, Gob Squad and Susanna Wallin, curated by Carolina Hellsgard, thanks to nine and Geoff Cox.

Here @ the ICA, Friday 7th May

2010-05-05T23:12:00.002Z

'Here' is showing at the ICA this Friday 7th May, further details on their website.

http://www.ica.org.uk/?lid=24599

Telepathy 101

2010-04-25T17:20:00.007Z

TELEPATHY 101 by PATRICIDE

Introduction to SIMADological Telepathic Communication*

Evening performance, Monday 26th April 7.30pm

Curated by Mike Lowther and Michaela Freeman

as part of The Southend Film Festival's E2PROM

(Electrically-Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory) strand.

CoExist Galleries & Studios @ TAP The Old Water Works North Road, Southend on Sea, Essex, SS0 7AB

http://www.coexist.org.uk

Using C.I.A techniques of telepathy and remote viewing, Patricide synthesise audio and visual signals to bring about a radical destabilisation of the system - either nervous or political; a battleswarm of images, text and sound whose aim is to invoke a telepathic network of being to the audience.

Patricide take modern cultural warfare, post-Clausewitz (alpha waves, sub bass, light flickering at 8-16hz) to induce a chaoplexic condition; a chthonic battlespace of the imagination; polemos which manifests as a violent and searing rash of chromeostereopsis, aural ruptures, layers and lesions which irreparably wreck dominant spatio-temporal and ideational paradigms.

Telepathy 101's causal effects so far have been thus :

Nick Griffin death threat :

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8603314.stm

and

http://www.metro.co.uk/showbiz/817386-elton-john-ups-security-after-youtube-death-threat

Patricide are an audiovisual unit who have played the Tate Modern, Liverpool Biennale, The Whitechapel Gallery as well as residencies in Berlin and Prague. Current durational work on the internet is Patricide TV - 365 instrumentals and videos posted one a day throughout 2010 :

http://www.youtube.com/user/patricidetv

Current live project is Telepathy 101.

*SIMAD = Singularly Mobile Agencity Of Decay

after "Introduction to SIMADology : Polemos in the 21st Century" by Manabrata Guha"

Playing on the same night are :

Hybernation

http://www.stuartbowditch.co.uk/

http://www.myspace.com/autumnale

and

Beespace Transmissions

http://www.debug.org.uk/

http://www.bionisamp.info/

Thanks to Michaela Freeman and Mike Lowther.

Interview by Ivan Mecl

2010-02-08T18:38:00.002Z

The interview I did with Umelec magazine is now up online, read it here :

http://www.divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1440

You have to press the little blue 'EN' button at the top of the page if the interview doesn't translate it into English.

Patricide TV

2010-01-05T19:04:00.017Z

For every day of 2010, Patricide will be posting one of our instrumental beats onto youtube.

You can see and hear the work here :

http://www.youtube.com/user/patricidetv

No More Firmament

2009-12-22T14:36:00.004Z

Monday 21 December 2009 7.00pm to 9.00pm

London Spaceways present

Talk and Q&A with Rob Fabian

plus live music from Casper Spaceman

plus

the World Premiere of Jim Hollands' new short film

an adaptation of Antonin Artaud's libretto :

"There Is No More Firmament"

The London Spaceways talk will be exploring some great philosophical questions...

Who are we?
Where did we come from?
What are we made of?
Science, Philosophy and Religion have always asked the big questions... the vast emptiness of space has always stood as an answer....infinite and unknown. Some of the most symbolic expressions of 20th century science are the nuclear bomb, the spaceship, and the cinema. How does space relate to cinema? How does science relate to the global Nazi conspiracy? London Spaceways will be examining the reason for the apocalyptic mood of our culture, and why space may be behind it all..

To book a place call 020 7641 5250 or email: referencelibrarywc2@westminster.gov.uk

Westminster Reference Library,
35 St. Martin's Street,
London WC2H 7HP
All enquiries: (020) 7641 1300
Fax: (020) 7641 5232
Email: referencelibrarywc2@westminster.gov.uk
Nearest Tube: Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus, Charing Cross
Buses: 11, 24, 29, 176 or any that go to Trafalgar Square or Charing Cross Rd.

Projection at the Tate Modern, 31st October 2009

2009-11-03T01:25:00.002Z

Tate Modern

2009-10-30T13:58:00.007Z

I'm showing a new piece - a resubtitled version of Wolf Rilla's 'Village of the Damned' on Saturday 31st October, Halloween, at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, it's open from 7. I'll also be showing 'Barenzirkus', both films as projections without sound.

Incident

2009-10-04T22:41:00.001Z

Patricide : Common Purpose

2009-07-27T11:45:00.005Z

Live at Basso, Berlin

The Fool

2009-07-17T09:32:00.004Z

Barenzirkus is installed at this show for a couple of months :

The Fool

Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland

Dates: 31st July–19th September 2009

With Katia Bassanini, Natasha Caruana, Marcos Chaves, Moyna Flannigan, Michael Gardiner, Alexander Heim, Jim Hollands and Nick Osborn

More than an amusing diversion, the fool, with his bursts of cautionary homespun wisdom, had a very real function. The clown has been a staple subject in Western art for hundreds of years; a prime vehicle through which to ask fundamental questions.” Iain Gale on Alex Pollard, 2007

‘The Fool’ re-imagines the figure of the clown, the jester and the dandy for the twenty-first century, where the role of the Shakespearean ‘fool’ has a new relevance in contemporary art. Following the examples of predecessors like Bruce Nauman and Paul McCarthy, artists here, repeatedly portrayed comic or tragic fool-like figures to articulate their ideas.

For the artists the figure of ‘the fool’ is a way of taking a ‘vantage point’ – we might say a disadvantage point – from which to view society’s rituals and codes of conduct. For painters like Moyna Flannigan and Alex Pollard, their images almost resemble those of fairground mirrors, in which everything is distorted, and yet we recognise something new about ourselves. For filmmakers like Nick Osborn, drawing on the theatre of Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett, ‘the fool’ is the only figure able to discuss those subjects forbidden in polite society. For photographers like Michael Gardiner, the age-old tradition of the ‘carnivalesque’ in which the rules of our ordinary life are upended, is alive and well – and to be found in the most unexpected places.

‘The fool’ makes strange our relations to one another: he can tell uncomfortable truths when everyone around is bowing to received wisdom.

Here updates

2009-06-26T09:48:00.002Z

Follwing successful screenings at the Liverpool Biennial :

http://ccmedia.wordpress.com/2008/10/25/made-up-weekend-at-liverpool-biennial/

and a residency in Basso, Berlin

http://www.basso-berlin.de/

Patricide are currently working on new material, you can hear new tracks and see videos from Berlin here :

http://www.myspace.com/killyourfather

Please contact jim@chantdownbabylon.com for further information

2008-12-02T11:29:00.005Z

HERE

JIM HOLLANDS

3rd December 08 – 31st January 09

Bureau presents Here by Jim Hollands; a hallucinogenic dissolution between the screen and the viewer forming a radical new art agenda for the 21st century.

Here is a seventy-minute remix of a rarely seen existing work written by Joe Orton, called ‘The Erpingham Camp’. Originally screened on TV in 1966, it has been experimentally remixed in sound, image and words, with subtitles, and partly in anaglyphic (red/cyan) 3D. Large parts of the work operate under flicker frequencies of 8-13hz, and as such are viewable by epileptics or those prone to seizure at their own risk.

Called 'one of the most important new videos to be made in the UK in recent years' by Ian White, film curator at the Whitechapel, London, its psychic 3D odyssey erases and re-inscribes Orton’s play with a viral anti-narrative. Here transposes modern life into a structure, drawn as much from the cut-ups of William Burroughs, as it is from the psycho-social machinations of the internet, and by doing so becomes video as radical communication.

Jim Hollands is an artist working across film, sound and performance. He was the resident curator of a major avant-garde centre in London, The Horse Hospital, between 2000-2006, and is a member of the experimental sound group, Patricide.

LISTINGS INFORMATION

Exhibition: Here
Please note: The film Here is 70 minutes long and will screen at 12.30pm, 2pm and 3.30pm daily, during the gallery opening hours. 3D glasses and refreshments will be provided.

Artist: Jim Hollands

Exhibition Dates: 3rd December 2008 – 31st January 2009

The gallery will be closed for Christmas & New Year as of 21st December 2008 to 14th January 2009.

Venue: Bureau, Ground Floor, Islington Mill, James Street, Salford / Manchester. M3 5HW
Email: info@bureaugallery.com
Website: http://www.bureaugallery.com

For further information about Jim Hollands: http://here.chantdownbabylon.com

Gallery Opening Times: Wednesday to Saturday 12 - 5pm
Admission: Free. Fully Accessible.

A live performance by Patricide (Jim Hollands, Aryan Darzi and GazCloud) will take place alongside the exhibition in late January. Details to be confirmed. Please visit the Bureau website for information.

For further information & images please contact Bureau at:
press@bureaugallery.com

Here : the trailer

2008-08-29T21:21:00.001Z

Here : the trailer from Jim Hollands on Vimeo.

Here / Patricide at the Whitechapel

2008-08-29T21:04:00.006Z

Here and Patricide are playing at the Whitechapel Gallery in London on the 28th September 2008. We will also be playing and screening at the Liverpool Biennial in October, details of that to follow, details of the Whitechapel below :

Here: Radical Animation Now
Jim Hollands & Patricide
28 September

7pm Here, Jim Hollands, 2007, 70mins followed by Patricide, live

This is one of the most important new videos to be made in the UK in recent years.
Its psychic 3D odyssey erases and re-inscribes Joe Orton’s rarely seen play The Erpingham Camp with a viral anti-narrative. Here transposes modern life into a structure drawn as much from the cut-ups of William Burroughs as it is from the psycho-social machinations of the internet and by doing so becomes video as radical communication.

The screening is immediately followed by a live performance by Patricide whose music and projections continue the video’s hallucinogenic dissolution between the screen and the viewer.

Jim Hollands
Jim Hollands is an established filmmaker, sound artist, artist and performer whose work has been shown internationally. He was the resident curator of The Horse Hospital, London 2000-6 and is a member of the experimental sound group Patricide.

In association with LUX and Animate Projects

Evening ticket £7/5 concessions and Whitechapel members
Weekend ticket £10/8 concessions and Whitechapel members

Free for Whitechapel Patrons and Associates
Booking essential

There's also a great screening of work on the Saturday 27th by Barry Doupe, for further information about both and booking, please see :

http://www.whitechapel.org/content.php?page_id=4648

For further material by Patricide, goto :

http://www.myspace.com/killyourfather

Patricide : Darling, I Used a Man's Face

2008-08-29T21:00:00.007Z

Video by Patricide, live at Divus Unit 12.08.08 :

Darling, I used a man's face from Jim Hollands on Vimeo.

For more Patricide material, goto

http://www.myspace.com/killyourfather

Patricide : Can't Take It Anymore

2008-08-29T20:57:00.004Z

Video by Patricide, live at Divus Unit 29.07.08

Patricide : Can't Take It Anymore from Jim Hollands on Vimeo.

For further Patricide material, goto :

http://www.myspace.com/killyourfather

Interview in Umelec

2008-08-29T20:49:00.008Z

There's an interview with me in this quarter's Umelec magazine, I'll post it up soon enough but I'd recommend buying a hard copy, it's a great read and they're good people who do good things.

http://www.divus.cz/umelec/en/frame.htm

Won't Get Fooled Again

2008-08-29T20:41:00.004Z

My last short film, Barenzirkus, is showing in the group show called :

WONT GET FOOLED AGAIN

Guaranteed to be an overview of the pack of lies which constitutes much contemporary art, Jon Purnell has selected 15 video and performance artists to play with our perception.

All day screening and monitor presentations: 13 – 21 September 2008, Wed – Sun, 11am – 6pm (Saturdays 12 – 6pm).
SPECIAL LAUNCH EVENT WITH PERFORMANCES: 13 September from 3 – 6pm.

Contributing artists: Antoine Catala, Erica Scourti, Alex Staiger, Beagles and Ramsay, Adam Fearon, Jason Dee, Jonathan Trayner, Calum F. Kerr, Jim Hollands, Cack-U-Like, Simon Reuben White, Karen Russo, Dave Ball, Mark Brogan, Rose Eken.

Cafe Gallery
By the lake, Centre of Southwark Park, London SE16 2UA. Tel: +44 (0)20 72371230.
click here for map
http://www.cafegalleryprojects.com/html/Location.html

see links below for further details
http://www.cafegalleryprojects.com/html/Exhibitions.html

http://www.cack-u-like.com/id2.html

Quote from Cathi Unsworth about Here

2007-12-28T12:55:00.002Z

"The fiercest sense of queer rage since Ronnie Kray heard George Cornell call him a fat poof"

Cathi Unsworth, Nude Magazine

Here press stills

2007-11-13T00:53:00.000Z

Notes on HERE

2007-08-19T01:21:00.000Z

by James Butler

I can't help thinking about Here in terms of its accidence rather than simply its substance, the physical aspects of its transmission. In particular, memories of the film are, for me, intercut with the feeling of the sharp cardboard of the 3D glasses at my ears, wondering about when was the 'correct' time to be wearing them.
Certainly, there were moments where the film clearly dictates conventional or anaglyphic viewing, but there are phases where one encounters uncertainty: how am I meant to be viewing this? This serves to establish a recursive loop between viewer and film, where the 'correctness' of the viewer's reading is continually called into question. Reinterpretation is perpetual. But the accident of its viewing for me - struggling to see the film around the bobbing and weaving head in front of me - reflects some of the strategies employed in the film itself: my struggle to see the film was not, of course, simply a question of my physical positioning but the strategies of multivocality employed in Here itself. The questions I am presented with as a member of the audience are manifold: do I interpret this in terms of what I know about its author(s)? Do I attempt to read it in the light of its theoretical position? Which elements of the film should precede others in an attempt to interpret? Is my act of interpretation an act of violence against the integrity of the film's hermeneutic? Indeed, is the film's hermeneutic circle closed or infinitely open?

There are several narrative media that operate within the film: the primary visual narrative of The Erpingham Camp itself, the narrative of the visual effects, editing and graffiti overlaid on the original, the textual narrative of the subtitling, the vocal narrative (which frequently diverges from those subtitles) and the protean musical narrative, which shifts between unifying the various strands and holding them in counterpoint and tension. It is important that the film is not soundtracked - that is, its musical narrative does not exist as a series of conventional tropes to prompt the expected emotional response in the viewer. There is no easy swell of synth strings, or reliance on traditional cinematic signifiers of love or heartbreak, but a musical palette that reflects the uncertainty, combativeness, strangeness or softness of the film's methodology. The multiplicity of the musical resources point up the mirage of corrosion and quotation that make up the texture of Here - and, in particular, the reliance on musical forms outside the normal purview of contemporary 'art' film for much of the soundtrack demonstrates what I read as Hollands' attempt to totalise his queer experience, and thus necessarily raise questions about how far totalisation is possible in any medium. It should be immediately apparent that a single voice, a single author cannot accurately reflect or encapsulate any theme: Here is not only an assertion of the death of the author, but an attempt to push the tissue of multiple voices to its limit.

We live in the age of the digital simulacrum. Contemporary culture places a reliance on the abilities of the digital world to accurately reflect life that can be best described as naïve, and sees the digital world as something that is simply inscribed: recording what happens in the 'real' world, a one-way transaction between the real and the digital, reactive rather than having its own agency.
Throughout Here there runs an understanding of the possibilities of the digital: that we are born from the simulacrum and of the strategies of representation its use, abuse and perversion open to us. This is most obviously evident in the corrosive, pixellated effect used to treat much of the original film, as if the singularity and purported unity of the primary text were being exposed and collapsing in front of us.
The extraordinary shift into three dimensions is a clear signifier of the depth and levels of meaning, articulated and unarticulated, that exist in the new, remixed text. The problem that immediately comes to mind is about the nature of graffiti: what does graffiti say except 'I was here', or even 'I declare my authority over this surface, this text; now I own it'? I, my, me. But the entire process of Here involves the explosion of the personal into the total: how does this fit?

The answer lies in the first part of our premise: that we are born from the simulacrum, from the intertext. In particular, all over the film lies the mark of the Father - in this context, on this level, Orton - and the graffiti, the very process of remixing, is an oedipal yell, an attempt at decapitation. And yet, of course, there is a persistence of vision: Orton's film is the very substance of what is being remixed, overwritten, and the process of overwriting necessarily participates in that original substance. This oedipal reaction is itself queered throughout the film through the obvious lovesong to Orton that makes up much of its verbal content, thematically parallel to much of Orton's own work, simultaneously scatological and deeply concerned with the avenues of identity through which sexuality comes to be expressed. In this sense, it's possible to read Here as the loving and inevitable oedipal hammer-blow to the head of the Father and a record of the new possibilities found among the shards of bone and fragments of voice.

But this interpretation doesn't totally circumscribe the film. In particular, one of the voices present in the film, at times significantly in the foreground, at others less evident, is the voice of loss, despair and heartbreak. This stands in a complex counterpoint to the voice of ferocity and stance of combativeness that characterises much of the visual effects work and sexual brashness: they both reflect, grow out of and rely on each other. One of the most emotionally cathartic moments of the film for me came at one of the transitory moments in the middle, where the various narrative strands(textual, musical, visual) come together, push out of the screen into three dimensions to ask the stark question: 'what if my life had taken another direction?' - the juxtaposition of this question with the various graphic and unashamed assertions of desire serve to undercut the distance and hardness of that other voice. This voice of heartbreak is evident through the film as a voice that is in love with the idea of the total, the unified, the singular identity but is equally aware of its impossibility.

One thing that is immediately apparent from the very beginning of the film is the importance of overwriting and revoicing, but nowhere is this more evident than the credits sequence, with the refusal of the textual or vocal narratives to line up withthe demands placed on them by the karaoke sequence on screen. This revoicing doesn't simply signify aural graffiti as an act of defiance, but an assertion of queer identity: the process of asserting such an identity is not simply a question of making the queer voice louder, but muting the dominant voices that always appropriate and overwrite queer voices. In this sense, it could not be enough to simply make one's own film, but employ the techniques of oppression in another way: now is our turn to put our words in their mouths. And yet this technique itself is already doubly strange: revoicing is always the act of the minority, of the oppressed, and Orton himself writes from a queer perspective. Again the oedipal theme recurs, but this time in the context of allowing a multiplicity of queer voices to emerge - queer voices that take delight in their contamination, that they are always already implicated within multiple lineages and networks of ideas. But this should not imply a happiness or comfort in these voices: not only do they articulate the anxieties of the interior and the discomfort of being found in someone else's mouth, but towards the end of the film reach even outside the limits of language. The voice escapes language into a scream: the scream is the primary ethical confrontation - it is an inarticulate cry of identity and anxiety at the same time, and the first signifier of new life. An infant's scream has many messages: notice me, feed me, take care of me - but also, who am I? where am I? what have you done to me? The scream is always the marker of an individual who has become subject to an extra-personal force.

Syllepsis in this film, the disjunction between the narrative strands at any given point, signifies a break, or an opening in its texture; similarly, the encroaching corrosive or explosive visual effects give the sense that it is visually opening out into something wider than itself. There is, therefore, an inevitable sense of space that pervades Here - not only a visual space, but a space in the texts of the narratives themselves, composed as they are of quotations and different voices.
This puts me immediately in mind of Benjamin's Passagenwerk, a palimpsest similarly composed of quotations severed from their original source, yet the two works are also entirely distinct. The feeling of space in Benjamin exerts no stress, whereas the feeling of space in Here looms massively over the entire experience, in part because the film escalates to a point of self-destruction a desire to simultaneously assert itself against the blank space and be absorbed into it.

It seems to me that Hollands is of the apocalyptic school of film-makers, and Here becomes a revelation of the absolute, collapsing the infinite stresses of identity into the immediate. That is its name, after all: it becomes a locus for everything in the queer experience of identity-shaping without attempting to reduce it to a single voice.
I found it utterly heart-breaking and entirely moving.

Here, preview screening

2007-06-18T01:52:00.001Z

The Chamber of Pop Culture and The Killing For Company present :

HERE by Jim Hollands ( UK, 70 mins )

featuring the voices of
Li Cassidy-Peet
Vincent Deary
Mark Ferelli
Paddy Glackin
Jim Hollands
Patricia MacCormack
Bertie Marshall
Geff Rushton
and
Tai Shani

Screening August 9th 2007
Doors 7.30pm
Screening 8.45pm

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the murder of UK playwright Joe Orton by a hammer to the head from his lover Kenneth Halliwell, The Horse Hospital is proud to present a world preview screening of Jim Hollands' latest video work, 'Here'.

'Here' is a 70 minute remix of a rarely seen existing work written by Joe Orton, called The Erpingham Camp. It was originally screened on TV in 1966. It has been experimentally remixed in sound, image and words, with subtitles, and is partly in anaglyphic ( red/cyan ) 3D. Large parts of the work operate under flicker frequencies of 8-13hz, and as such are viewable by epileptics or those prone to seizure at their own risk, and is best watched whilst under an influence. Hammers are optional.

Jim Hollands is an established filmmaker, sound artist and programmer who was the resident curator of a major avant-garde centre in London, The Horse Hospital, for the five years. He has just completed a masters in Digital Art, and his last work "Barenzirkus' is being distributed on DVD by Purescreen.

Following this screening of 'Here', the work is part of a residency at http://nod.roxy.cz/ Prague, from 24-29th August.

For further details please contact
jim@chantdownbabylon.com / popculture@thehorsehospital.com

Jim only has 150 3D glasses - they're really fucking expensive! - so places are limited. Please phone 0207 833 3644 for bookings.

The Horse Hospital
Colonnade
Bloomsbury
London
WC1N 1HX

Here, a treatise on hallucinema

2007-06-18T01:46:00.001Z

1. Rationale.

This project explores the nature of the authorial voice via the media of video, sound and text by remixing a pre-existing work - a digitised version of a VHS video transfer of a 16mm print of a television programme made in 1966. The pre-existing work was THE ERPINGHAM CAMP by JOE ORTON, which was commissioned by Rediffusion Television and produced in June 1966 and directed by James Ormerod. The work has been renamed 'Here'.

"Here" is a remix of this TV play, not only of its sound and its images, but also its order and its original text, utilising new actors and new musicians. Elements of the original are kept, in image and in sound, but not in their original form. Jim Hollands was present at the only public screening of this work since 1966 at the National Film Theatre, 1998, and recorded the reaction by the audience to it. Elements of this are also incorporated within the finished work. The original screenplay has never been published.
In its complete remixing, "Here" delineates 'The Death Of The Author', a work of Roland Barthes, using multiple voices to mimic various strands of thought arising from the process of making the work.

2. Introduction.

"Here" is Jacques Lacan on The Magic Roundabout, a work which in itself was re-dubbed by Eric Thompson deciding to ignore the original scripts altogether. By working with the volume turned down to avoid distraction, he completely rewrote the French stories and redefined and renamed the characters, injecting much irony,
wit and melancholy in to the re-edited shows.

In its original form as The Erpingham Camp, the work was first produced for television and later re-written for theatre, with 60 percent new material added.

Its current remixer, Jim Hollands, has taken the theatrical version and erased Orton's original dialogue, replacing it with a lateral dialogue composing of elements of text collected over the five years prior. Working backwards, he obtained a copy of the television production, which is timecoded and transcribed for new dialogue to be inserted. Using theories of homosexual literatures ranging from Catullus to Burroughs and Gluck via Firbank, the author/director has inserted into the pre-exisitng work an interior transtextual dialogue, a re-animation, of the present homosexual experience, taking as his main theme the death of the Father, which is also the dominant narrative of the original author's text.

The desire to use this work ( Joe Orton's The Erpingham Camp ) was both a random decision ( literally pulling a book from a bookshelf, eyes shut, opening a page and scoring out a word, it turned out to be the play ) and also after that initial action, a desire to re-habilitate Orton's work from the 60s revivalist productions that his work is now known for, and to place his work back into the experimental and shocking tradition from which he came.

'Here' is a remix in sound, image and narrative with added subtitles.

3. Preliminary Research.

3.1

The Death Of the Author

Roland Barthes ( 1915-80 )

"Death of the Author" (1967) is an essay by the French literary critic Roland Barthes that was first published in the American journal Aspen. It argues against incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of text; that writing and creator are unrelated.

In his essay, Barthes states that “To give a text an Author” and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it “is to impose a limit on that text.” Readers must separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate it from interpretive tyranny , for each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings.

In a famous quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a “text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations,” drawn from “innumerable centers of culture,” rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the “passions” or “tastes” of the writer; “a text’s unity lies not in its origins,” or its creator, “but in its destination,” or its audience.

No longer the locus of creative influence, the author is merely a “scriptor” (a word Barthes uses expressly to disrupt the traditional continuity of power between the terms “author” and “authority”). The scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work and “is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and] is not the subject with the book as predicate.” Every work is “eternally written here and now,” ( my emphasis ) with each re-reading, because the “origin” of meaning lies exclusively in “language itself” and its impressions on the reader.

Barthes' best-known work, the essay “The Death of the Author” (1968), saw the notion of the author, or authorial authority, as the forced projection of an ultimate meaning of the text. By imagining an ultimate intended meaning of a piece of literature one could infer an ultimate explanation for it. But Barthes points out that the great proliferation of meaning in language and the unknowable state of the author’s mind makes any such ultimate realization impossible. As such, the whole notion of the ‘knowable text’ acts as little more than another delusion of Western bourgeois culture.

I've obviously been indebted to Barthes in my work, but also the work of Jacques Derrida within deconstructionist thought, and the writing of Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose ideas of multiplicity, planes of reference and rhizomatic identity one can see within both the visual style of the piece and the writing.

3.2

The radio work of Glenn Gould, with reference to contrapuntal radio.

Glenn Gould was a composer in Canada, born in 1932, died in 1982, who was celebrated in his lifetime as a virtuoso concert pianist, who gave up live performance in 1964, dedicating himself to recording.
 In the 1960s and 70s he produced a series of innovative radio and TV documentaries for the Canadian Broadcast Company.

His most famous documentary The Idea of North was first broadcast on CBC Radio in 1967. It was the first installment of the Solitude Trilogy.
The trilogy deals with people outside the mainstream in remote circumstances such as the North. Gould focuses on how northerners' spiritual strength helps them cope with solitude and isolation.
 The musical structure of the fugue influences Gould's radio documentary work. He would mix two or three voices as well as music on top of each other, using the human voice like different melodies in a piece of music. He calls this method "contrapuntal style."

Counterpoint in music is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in countour and rhythm, and interdependent in harmony.

Contrapuntal radio was an idea invented by Gould for his idea of North, which in operative effect was montage, creating new forms, effects and emotional connotations through strategic editing. In 1971 in an interview he gave he says he wanted to "create a structure in which one could feel free to have different approaches and responses to the same problems that emerge simultaneously". he acheived this effect through vocal counterpoint.

For his purposes, the voices in Idea of North were not people so much as disembodied voices representing points of view, and by abstracting them, by taking names and personalities ( and hard data and topical references ) out of the equation, he was underscoring the metaphorical and autobiographical import of the program.
"It's very much about me" he is quoted as saying "In terms of what it says, its about as close to an autobiographical statement as i am probably going to make at this stage of my life".

In 'The Idea of North Gould synthesises three ideas, documentary,drama and music.In order to achieve this effect he often edited the raw interviews into more polished vocal 'music' - splicing word by word, syllable by syllable; an idea used contemporaneously by King Tubby, nee Oswald Ruddock, in Jamaica, who is cited as the first person to have invented dub. regularly used now by modern hiphop, RnB and especially 2 step garage producers, but which was nascent when Gould made his work, having only been adopted by experimental composers such as Ligeti or Stockhausen. These forms are used extensively within 'Here'.

3.3
Rober Racine

"For each of the pages, a reading has been made, but by a reader who has left his reading on the text" Racine explains. "I touch, blow on, underline, gild, mark, cut out, colour, delimit or encircle an apparently neutral text to make it unique - like what an actor does on stage. Looking at this choreography of stage directions, you would say to yourself "Someone spent time on this."

The mark Rober Racine has left on the dictionary is indelible.

First, spending what he himself calls a 'strange task' - cutting out the 55,000 words in the French dictionary, gluing them onto small pieces of card, 2,130 pages of work, 5,000 days of labour.

Then, in his work, 1600 Mirror-pages, the dictionary becomes a symphony, all that was required was to read it. Every day from 1981 to 1995 - fourteen years - Racine illuminated the 2,130 pages of the 1979 edition of the petit Robert 1. He giled the openings of the letters a, b, d, e, g,o, p and q, numbers andd nonalphabetcial signs, highlighted th espace between the text columns with the same gold, underlined in green the names of Quebec authors quoted, indicated refernces to music with a teble clef, added red, green, pink and blue squares in accordance with an obscure codification, pricked pinholes and, beneath the lines of print, cut slits that illuminated the page, and pointed out the notes of the scale embbeded within the words.

Racine picked out the notes within each word ( do - ssier, re- pit, mi-toyen ). Using an extremly basic musical form, he copied them out as a musical form and then played out and recorded the notes of the scale, forming a synaesthetic work of sounds created from words. his work has never been exhibited in the UK, and parts of this text come from a meeting I had with him in Quebec 2005.

4. Methodology.

4.1 Imagery

"Here" is a video remix of a pre-existing work.

Utilising Final Cut Pro, imovie, and VJ software Arkaos and Modul8, the original work is shaped and transformed, giving an impression of frame by frame remixing upon viewing. Indeed within Scene 7 of the work, the scene has been rendered into 1900 still jpegs which were then re-animated. Effects are applied in the style of mimicking seminal animation works such as Stephen Lisberger's 'Tron' and the live visual effects created by analogue video synthesisers such as the Scanimate. This gives an effect of digital distortion, as if the pixels themselves are corroding, creating a hallucinegenic effect, a hallucinema, the desired effect mimics the visuals processes of current drugs such as 2CB and ketamine. Parts of the work - though not all - have been rendered into anaglyphic 3D ( red/cyan ) to heighten this hallucinematic effect.

The work also has subtitles which sometimes match the text being said, and sometimes form a commentary to that text. These are added using LiveType and then masked on in Final Cut.

4.2 Audio

The original work is transcribed and re-written, line by line, to incorporate new dialogue for the existing characters to speak. Parts of this resemble the original speech of the characters in its vowel formations. These lines are then workshopped with actors, and recorded for reinsertion into the original work.

The audio of each character within 'Here' has been recorded separately, with each actor having no knowledge of what they were speaking or it's context, in order to lend an isolated style to each character's voice, a mimickry of sampling. These were recorded on minidisc and the vocal samples then collected into a sound file of each character's samples.
These are then edited together as full scenes of the video, and on occasion matched using the BPM, pitch and autotune functions of Melodyne, again this function is to startle when it happens rather than impress, 'Here' is a durational work, and as such has to keep momentum.

The sound is added to the visual work in both Final Cut and imovie, using Gargeband, ProTools, Ableton, and Native Instruments Melodyne programmes. For music, the works comprise either beats made by myself on an MPC1000 or other tracks from contemporary artists in the Uk grime / dubstep and alternative noise scenes. The beats reference the cut and paste / montage history and culture of hiphop, and the effects on the vocals reference the work made in dub of externalising the vocal track.
The process of the audio ( sometimes ) matching the visuals is a form of audio dubbing. For this I obtained information from Steve Roberts at St Martins Animation Studio
http://www.characteranimationin3d.com/
in his study of basic phonemes.

4.3 Presentation platform

As a digital work, 'Here' lends itself to varied presentation formats. The work could also be burnt to DVD, and distributed thus, or due to its flexible nature and the director's previous history of never repeating a screening, the work will be available without music to be re-soundtracked live by musicians. The work can be shown in theatres, cinemas, pubs, flat screens, TVs; there are no specific format ideals - it could be an installation, a movie, a live theatre piece or a gig.
Indeed the director welcomes any new suggestions. In order to distribute it widely, I will be burning it to DVD and also recording it to VHS tape.

4.4 Presentation Environment / Space requirements

In the praxis of my work I am against any prerequisites with regard to screenings, type of screening, available equipment, space requirements, types of space, and am flexible with regard any type of exhibition of the work, I've shown in squats in Leipzig and in purpose built halls in Sao Paulo, I wouldn't want to restrict my work at all, to anyone.

The first screening of this work will be at a central London venue on August 9th, which is the 40th anniversary of the murder of Joe Orton, the original author.

5. Technical requirements

The techincal requirements for this piece are dictated by the space within which it is shown, which could be one VHS video player and one RGB output cable to projector or screen and one audio lead to amp, amp to set of speakers, in people's homes, or could be using a 15K sound rig and the IMAX. The size of the projection, and the format upon which it is projected, will be dictated by the space. I use these vagiaries of technical requirements due to a 10 year history of film presentation and curation, and find that these forms of equipment definitely work without hitches. I have shown in galleries and cinemas from America to the NFT in this fashion

6 Bibliography / sources.

Can't Stop Won't Stop - A History Of The Hip-Hop Generation - Jeff Chang, Ebury Press 2005

Hollywood Flatlands - Animation, Critical Theory and The Avant-Garde - Esther Leslie Verso 2004

New Vocabularies In Film Semiotics - Stam, Burgoyne, Flitterman-Lewis, Routledge 1992

Subtitles, on the foreigness of film, ed Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour 2004 MIT and Alphabet City

Soundscape - The School Of Sound Lectures 1998 - 2001 ed Sider, Sider and Freeman 2003 Wallflower Press

Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema trans Claudia Gorbman 1999 UK ed Columbia

Michel Chion - Audio-Vision - Sound On Screen trans Claudia Gorbman 1994 Columbia

Mladen Dolar - A Voice and nothing more - short circuits, edited by Slavoj Zizek, MIT 2006.

L'Emploi Du Temps - Acqisitions recentes en art actuel - Musee National des Beaux-Arts du Quebec, 2003

Rober Racine - Jean-Paul Dubois - Musee National des Beaux-Arts du Quebec, 2001.

Wondrous Strange - The Life and Art of Glenn Gould - Kevin Bazzana, Yale Press, 2003.

Culler, Jonathan. Barthes: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.