The Nerve Metre

The Nerve Metre: Full Title:

Marker Scheme No: 333.890.00 ...to avoid the micro-politics of a-signifying semeiology, Xek, Abelard and Trone go fishing in the Georges river; See me, ...hear me, (The Nerve Metre). (2002-2006), 2006

"Subjectivity is becoming isomorphic to capital - an axiomatic governed by a fractal attractor. It is being disengaged from the plane of transcendence of 'human' being, becoming an immanent abstract machine of mutation (with the mass media serving as its collective assemblage of enunciation, and a range of apparatuses from television studios to fashion shows to health clubs combining to form its machinic assemblages)"

Brain Massumi, "Monstrosity" in A user's guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
Cambridge: MIT, 1992. p135.

fabrication,

the now...

Mechanisms of Fabrication have become increasingly evident, as mainstream semeiology is molded into a non-signifying, though perpetually malleable material flux; a point of pressure now encompasses social structures, attempting to re-fabricate them at will into structures of transparent reference; conversely, a-signification continues to formulate, initiating a semeiology of rhythms and fluid indices.

These re-configured, fabricated modes exist for the purpose of, among others, producing and selling mis-guided information for mass consumption. A need to reevaluate hitherto utilised semeiological systems now appears more necessary than ever; as this previously less tampered of methodologies now gathers momentum as another potential instrument of fabrication by accumulating numbers of corporate, political, mass-media, and social conglomerates.

application,

The Marker Scheme installations endeavour to negotiate a space in-between ideological systems, philosophy, and actuality. A project of an accumulative nature, the installations re-combine contemporary consumables, pre-fabricated objects and technologies, old and new, into mechanisms, instruments, devices; machines of activation. The series is an ongoing body of work that aims at a continued re-evaluation of the implications that technologies have on our reception, interaction, and relationship to the physical realm - the capriciousness of technological 'development' and the ramifications of genetic engineering upon the individual and society.

The resulting installations become, empirical laboratories, low-fi sculptures and recombinant: (re-fabricated) objects, sounds, situations, and identities. Objects and ideas re-applied and re-combined to activate, or be activated by the space in which the work is installed.

designation,

The Nerve Metre takes its title from one of Antonin Artaud's later collections of prose poetry; a re-applied title. The installation attepts to simultaneously inhabit the inherent beauty of the indecipherable, a moment(s) of apprehension and a perpetual state of espial. Interstitial space can be indecipherable. In a world where physical space is at a premium, sanctioning space into presciptive zones proliferates, Political, social, theological, epistemological, perhaps even meta-physical connections accumulate, a papable essence, again not immune to the mechanisms of fabrication. Our shifting relationship to physicality is in part instigated by technology and ideology. The Casula Power House (where the work was first exhibited) tests the notion of gallery space; the exhibition spaces float in the building, its permanent artworks, and its industrial heritage - frozen in time, a building that watches over itself, history and structure constantly shifting in dominance. The Nerve Metre installation will ignore these distinctions between designated gallery space and the other. Its readymades', resonating with short wave frequencies, electrostatic, and manipulated recordings of the space itself, will derive through the building. A network, or system, hiding and illuminating, amplifying and distorting, at once; object, light, and sound reducing the interstitial space perceived as between.

David O'Donoghue. Sydney, October 2005.


Images: Ian Hobbs

(Not to be reproduced without prior consent!) Contact. david@urbanality.org