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Sudden Sway

Klub Londinium, 1990

Four audio walks with related production art and materials, correspondence, and ephemera.

Materialist, 46 min 5 sec.

Mystic, 46 min. 3 sec.

Outsider, 45 min 4 sec.

Hedonist, 36 min 9 sec.

 

Photographs of “Klubbers” on Hedonist Tour, London 1990, by Richard Ilett / Out-Take Collective

 

Francisca Benitez

Rub to work, 2012 / edition 2018

64 manhole rubbings across London, steel, magnets

 

Martin Beck

Turn Take Merge, 2011/12

38 min, HD video with sound

 

Liz Wendelbo

Via Negativa, 2023

Fragrance Oil, Hand Painted Glass Bottle, 15ml, India Ink, Glass Medium, Edition of 1

 

Aphotic, 2023

Video, HD 1920x1080, NTSC, 3 mins 35 sec., loop with sound

 

Garret Linn

C-TWON (excerpt), 2016

3 channel video with sound, 4 min 30 sec.

 

Eros/Collaborations

(The) Resonance of ELVES, 2023/24

audio, backlit film on lightboxes, ephemera in signage display, videos

 

James Beckett and André Avelās

Scarano Drywall, 2024

5 extracts of drywall from a Robert Scarano finger building, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, plexiglas

 

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Sudden Sway | Klub Londinium 

 

Klub Londinium was the creation of the conceptual art-pop collective Sudden Sway and took place across the streets of London during the early 1990s. It created a three-dimensional immersive landscape which superimposed a journey into the psychologies of various personality types over a walk through physical space and urban history. Combining music with aural atmospheres, an internal voice, and a narrator Klub Londinium pioneered the psychogeographic experience by creating a club with no specific location in time or space, one which allowed participants to travel in and beyond themselves whilst experiencing a London simultaneously located in its past, present and future…

 

The experience began with participants being directed towards secret locations where they met with the Klub Londinium doorman. The doorman assisted them in completing a questionnaire which placed them within one of four personality types: Materialist, Mystic, Hedonist and Outsider. Participants were then assigned a tape-

guided walk through corresponding areas of London based upon a personality wholly distinct from their own This forced them to confront their own identity and to experience differing ways of perceiving and thinking about their environments. As participants were guided through these different parts of London as Outsiders,

Hedonists, Materialists or Mystics their aural landscapes were not only perfectly synchronized with sights and transitions in the external landscapes, but also with actors situated along the different routes who would interact with them in predetermined ways. These actors would highlight and flavor what the participants were experiencing on their walks, sometimes adding threat or menace, at other times directing their attention to specific objects, posing riddles or heightening their emotions. The effect was to emphasize the otherworldly nature of the seemingly mundane and to leave participants unsure about what was real in what they were witnessing or how far it was a product of the personalities they were temporarily inhabiting.

 

Klub Londinium anticipated the interest in psycho-geography and immersive theater which have since become contemporary staples but did so in a time just before the internet and the smart-city, digital society it prefigured. Using largely analogue recording techniques and media it was able to create a series of many layered sonic

textures which underpinned the visual and sensory experience of the walks. In the 30 years or so since it was first staged, the physical landscape of London, like that of other world cities has, inevitably changed, But the emotional, psychological, historical and geographical landscapes Klub Londinium explored remain as ever present traces of a deeper, shared subjective universe, a world which is always there to be excavated and re-encountered.

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Liz Wendelbo |  Via Negativa 

 

“Via Negativa” means "the study of what not to do." The scent is reminiscent of burnt candle wax and evokes the act of reading - in the dead of night. Base notes of Black Agar and Labdanum hint at dark excavated caverns; and top notes of C11 conjure up an inverted image, the exact opposite of darkness, like a negative.

Aphotic is a synesthetic companion to her scent "Via Negativa II" The video, created with video synthesizers, is a source of color that moves along synthesizer sounds that echo the fragrance. The title "Aphotic" means "absence of light," which refers to the video synthesizer process that creates images in a seemingly dematerialized process using Red, Green, and Blue analog video signals to create a material video image. It is also a salute to photography, which is the exact opposite: the presence of light. The video has three layers: an RGB base, superimposed with scanned analog photo negatives of images the artist photographed with a 3D camera on her travels in Riviera di Ulisse in Italy, and scanned details from the photos. The artist recorded an ambient soundtrack in which she plays an analog synthesizer, the Roland System 100M.

 

Liz Wendelbo is a conceptual artist who is interested in synesthesia and metaphysics - all the senses and their manifestations in space and time. She uses scent, video, photography and electronic music as a medium - with an emphasis on the poetry of synesthesia and the esoteric workings of memory. A scent that sounds like a color, that vibrates like a shape, that triggers ancient memories and moves towards the future. She is also in the electronic music synth duo Xeno & Oaklander whose new album is due out in the the fall of 2024. Formed in 2004 in Brooklyn, the band Xeno & Oaklander has been deeply involved in the analog synth community and has helped promote and inspire the revival of synth wave in the US and throughout the world through their extensive touring and prolific output. Xeno & Oaklander record their songs and film scores in their Connecticut studio and are known for their commitment to recording and performing on analogue synthesizers. They perform at art institutions, music venues and festivals worldwide, and have performed at SF Moma, PS1 Warm Up, Miami Art Basel, Kunsthalle Zürich & the New Museum NY. Festivals include SUBSTANCE LA , Cold Waves LA, CMD Mexico City, OMBRA Barcelona and Wave-Gotik-Treffen. They’ve appeared on numerous live streams and NIGHT FLIGHT TV in collaboration with Scott Kiernan. Liz Wendelbo has shown her work at the New Museum, White Columns, Microscope Gallery NY, Agnes b./galerie du jour Paris/NY and at Olfactory Art Keller Gallery NY. She also DJs music from her rare collection of obscure and excavated synth music from its early lab experiment forms till today, at The Lot Radio Brooklyn and Knockdown Center NY opening for Tangerine Dream. Notable Xeno & Oaklander remixes are for John Foxx, Tobias Bernstrup and Robert Calvert of Hawkwind.

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Bradley Eros | (The) Resonance of ELVES

 

An ongoing project by Bradley Eros a mediamystic maverick, who prefers the night  & the perfume of eau de cinema. An artist-catalyst actively involved in diverse aspects of the New York underground, working with myriad media: experimental film & video, collage, photography, poetry, performance, sound, text, installation, expanded & contracted cinema, plus a curator, designer, researcher, composer & investigator. Concepts include: Mediamystics, Optipus,ephemeral cinema, Erotic Psyche, subterranean science, Vampÿrates, Mushroom Archive, Ocula, cinema povera, metaBody, poetic accidents, fragmentstein, musique plastique, Oysters of the Id, Narcolepsy Cinema, Artaud-Butoh, The Owl of Minerva, Velvet Hermetic System, Imageless Film & Black Hole Cinema.

 

He has exhibited at 2004 Whitney Biennial & The American Century, MoMA, PS1, The New York Film Festival, London Film Festival, Performa09, Exit Art, The Kitchen, Millennium, Ocularis, Light Industry, Issue Project Room, Microscope Gallery, Participant Inc, Cabinet, ABC No Rio, White Box, The New York Underground Film Festival, Migrating Forms, Warhol Museum, Pacific Film Archives, SF Cinematheque, No.w.here in London, Lightcone in Paris, Arsenal in Berlin, Image Forum in Tokyo;  Also works with the New York Filmmakers’ Cooperative, Anthology Film Archives, Optipus (film group) & co-directed the Roberta Beck Mercurial Cinema.

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Martin Beck | Turn Take Merge

 

A film about the visual mapping of space in relation to memory and history. The work is based on a set of directions that lead a contemporary traveler from the intersection of Haight-Ashbury-Streets in San Francisco to the former site of Drop City near Trinidad in southern Colorado. Haight-Ashbury is commonly known as the historic nodal point of 1960s counterculture in California. Founded in 1965 and active into the early 1970s, Drop City is the commune that inspired many 1960s and ’70s utopian socialities. The two locations are of seminal historic significance for late 1960s countercultures, but both have changed dramatically since and offer little, if any, memory or sign of the events that led to their notoriety. Today, Haight-Ashbury is the location of an ice cream parlor and a souvenir shop decorated with a neon peace sign the Drop City site has been mauled over and turned into a storage location for a trucking company, offering no trace of its history.

 

Turn Take Merge is composed of eighteen video segments filmed at various locations between San Francisco and Colorado. Contemporary internet mapping tools such as Google Maps or MapQuest mark the journey between Haight-Ashbury and the former Drop City location as a set of eighteen directional entries. These entries are waypoints at which a traveler is instructed to change direction or make a change of road, such as “Turn right at Oak St” or “Merge onto the I-5 S”; The image segments of Turn Take Merge’s are based on filmed representations of the movement that the directions at each of those waypoints require. Some of

these movements are 90 degree turns (e.g. “Turn right at Freedom Rd”), some are merges from one road into another (e.g. “Keep right to take the I-40 E toward Needles”), others mark an exit from a highway (e.g. “Take exit 18 for El Moro Rd”).

 

The waypoints are the locations where a traveler makes a distinctive choice that affect the journey as well as the destination. Some are very close together, others are hundreds of miles apart. By focusing only on the contemporary waypoints, Turn Take Merge does not depict the journey itself (as the cinematic convention of the roadmovie would do). The sequence of images in Turn Take Merge abstracts the journey and, rather than offering a narrative, translates it into a structural apparatus composed of imaged nodal points.

Such an apparatus allows for imaging and measuring space in a way, and that points to and constantly redraws the relationship between space and time.

 

Camera: Garret Linn

Edit: Martin Beck, Garret Linn

Sound: Martin Beck, Garret Linn, N.N.

Titles: Prem Krishnamurty

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Francisca Benítez | Rub to work

 

A book of rubbings made in London in 2012 during my residency in Gasworks documenting many textures under my footsteps in the walks between home and studio and the research walks to prepare a big one titled Through sites of dissent. 

 

Benítez was born in 1974 in Santiago de Chile and lives in New York since 1998. She holds degrees in Architecture from Universidad de Chile and Masters in Fine Arts, from Hunter College of the City University of New York (USA).

Some of her solo exhibitions include: «Riego», Die Ecke Arte Contemporáneo (Santiago, CL, 2022); «Cuerpos Comunicantes», Die Ecke Contemporary Art (Barcelona, 2019; «NEW NOW»: Francisca Benítez», New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut, USA, 2017); «Poemas Concretos», Die Ecke Arte Contemporáneo (Santiago, CL, 2016); «Oro Dulce», Cuchifritos + Project Space (New York, USA, 2014); «Canto Visual», MAVI (Santiago, CL, 2013); «Eigentumsgrenze», Nothing Lokal (Vienna, AT, 2009); «Chamber», Lokal.int (Biel-Bienne, CH, 2009).

Notable group exhibitions include «OTRXS FRONTERXS», Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Santiago, CL, 2019); «Escrituras Visuales», Die Ecke Arte Contemporáneo (Santiago, CL, 2018); «Video Sur», Palais de Tokyo (Paris, FR, 2018); «Rotative Repository of Latin American Video Art», El Museo del Barrio (New York, EUA, 2017); «Soulèvements», Jeu de Paume (París, FR, 2016); Bienal de La Habana, Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales (La Habana, CU, 2015); «Desire Lines / Líneas del Deseo», Espai Cultural Caja Madrid (Barceloa, ES, 2012); «Contaminaciones Contemporáneas», Museu de Arte Contemporánea da USP (Sao Paulo, BR, 2010) and «Turn on, Turne in, Drop out», Beijing Biennale, (Beijing, CN, 2009).

She has received grants and awards from FONDART (CL), DIRAC (CL), Beca AMA (CL), New York State Council on the Arts (EUA), Lambent Fellowship (EUA) and Amerigo Marras Fellowship (EUA).

Her works are part of institutional collections such as the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Santiago, CL), New Britain Museum of American Art (Connecticut, USA), and private collections such as the KADIST Foundation, Paris/San Francisco (FR/USA), the FAVA Collection (Santiago, CL), CaSa Collection (Santiago, CL).

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James Beckett and André Avelās | Scarano Drywall

 

Robert Scarano, a discredited architect known for his prolific construction of 'finger-buildings' across NYC, has been prohibited from even filing documents within the city. His designs frequently included additional concealed spaces such as bathrooms and mezzanines, which were not disclosed in the official floor plans. These hidden areas, delineated by temporary drywall, were a deliberate strategy to bypass regulations and maximize the usable space within each structure.

 

This artwork is a collaboration between artists André Avelās and James Beckett.

James Beckett lives in a building designed by architect Robert Scarano, in Brooklyn, NYC. The first two floors have never been occupied, and due to construction errors are often flooded. It’s a cheap knock off of an I. M. Pei building, where the windows are poorly sealed and the cladding compromised. The views are spectacular but the place is essentially crumbling.

 

Just adjacent to his apartment is 55 Eckford, “Brooklyn's 'saddest' building”* - also a design of Scarano. Permits were first filed for the 12-story structure back in 2004, which would tower above its neighboring houses. The frame made it six stories up by 2005, when the developer ran out of money, and it's been stalled there ever since.

 

In 2010, the NYC Department of Buildings barred Scarano from filing any documents with the city, effectively banning him from working as an architect in the nation’s largest metropolis. At 55 Eckford Street are a few feet of weeds, littered with beer cans, plastic bags and a forlorn old microwave. Orange safety mesh hangs from the upper floors, like the tattered shroud of some neon ghost. The armature continues to rust, whilst interleaving layers of cat and human urine form a melange.

 

André Avelās

born 1976 in Caldas da Rainha, PT

lives and works in Amsterdam, NL & Lisbon, PT

www.avelas.net

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André Avelãs (PT) is an artist who lives and works in Amsterdam. His works (performances, sculpture, installations, and recordings) explore the ways in which sound is produced, and how sound creates meaning in relation to space and the conditions under which it is heard. Central to his practice is a focus on sound not as a carrier of content but as a malleable material that shifts and changes in relation to the methods and machines through which it is generated, reproduced and experienced. He has showed and performed in places like Amsterdam, Basel, Lisbon, London, Melbourne and New York.

Solo includes IBID Projects, London, UK; groups shows include: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL; De Halen, Haarlem, NL; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, CH; Abrons Art Centre, NYC, USA; Galeria Boavista, Lisbon, PT; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, AUS; Triangle Arts Association Spring open studios, NYC, USA; Taut &; Tame, Berlin, DE; Zabludowicz Collection, NYC, USA

 

James Beckett (ZA/NL)

7/ 10/ 1977, Harare, Zimbabwe

Currently lives and works between New York City, USA and Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Beckett’s research-based practice explores overlooked histories concerned with industrial development and the built environment. His resulting installations and works for public space deal with cultural signs that shape our experience in the modern era. In addition to industry and architecture, his work investigates vocations as diverse as finance, chemistry and dentistry in a neoliberal context.

 

James Beckett was in residency at the ISCP, NYC, 2021 and has exhibited at the Belgian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2015; MAAT, Lisbon 2017; MCAD Manila 2017, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 2012, amongst others. His work is represented by galleries: T293, Rome; Markus Lüttgen, Dusseldorf.

He is the winner of the Prix de Rome, Art in Public Space, NL, 2003 and has significant works in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris FR Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL Centraal Museum, Utrecht, NL

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Garret Linn | C-TWON (excerpt)

 

A prologue to a longer film about the idea and spaces of chinatowns wherever they may be.

 

Garret Linn, born 1967, is an American experimental and documentary filmmaker. His films revolve around ideas of memory, travel and the representation of forgetting.

He is known for the feature length jazz concert film John Lurie and the Lounge Lizards Live in Berlin 1991 and the experimental feature film automobilux.

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