I am a cell, a nucleus of propaganda. My name is not important. My post mortuary aesthetic a function of a medium that buries itself in cryptic threads to detour you from the beginning of the end that is always exhaled reluctantly with post coital attention to the infection of unprotected conjugation. In our title to avoid such intimacy we install the simple grammatical device of the colon : Post, Preset Softwar.
As you are all no doubt aware, Nathanial Whitlock used this device in the title of the world's first photographic manual. "Photogenic Drawing Made Easy : A Manual of Photography. " One hears the colon at work:- it ranks between period and semi colon, sometimes used to mark antithesis, illustration or often with a dash to signify a quotation. Here it serves to bind the antiquarian to the modern. Photoglyphic impressions render the invisible visible and deconstruct the field of vision and inter perspective as a quaint regime of illusion. The colon is also and primarily the greater part of the larger intestine. It digests the photogenic to excrete the photographic.
In the encrypted space of the sentence or epitaph, the chemical process of transmutation occurs. In the time it takes to smoke a cigarette a process of development transpires. The positive of the cigarette becomes a negative column of ash containing traces, memories even of bodies overexposed to the twilight of the twentieth century. We mourn those whose final shower was a naked encounter with the sewage of human imagination, or the fifteen-millionth of a second flash of the nuclear bomb, we mourn the imagination smashed by the brutal propaganda of media mercenaries, spinning sublime telluric cartographies from broken worlds, whirling like smoke, mixing metaphors with carcinogenic intensity until the wake becomes an hallucinogenic feast where "Psychostasia" is consumed mesmerically, a crumbling column of letters, a random interface with the sedimentary city, the evocation of gods and art long dead, the seductive if obtuse inhalation of mythology in the cinematic tomb. PreSET SOFTWAR parasites the anxiety caused by the end of the aesthetic dimension and invites the other to become implicated in the game of disappearance. Merging and morphing across rigid identity we create tombs for abstract entities that might otherwise haunt the cities of the next millennium. Our work might be called electronic demonography. A fusion of tradition and experiment in the creation of soft metaphysical epitaphs. A questioning of the laws and rituals of burial in our multicultural agoria. Evoking the meshworks of belief that have been scrambled in order to create spiritual hegonomy.
Psychostasia uses subtitles to draw you into the colon, underground into sewer networks and transport systems It is a CD-Rom for the end of history, the end of philosophy, the ends of man etc ad nauseum, As artists we will render aversion to the : un sens un et nu : one - and - naked meaning : of the work of art. We render the mixed ashes of the multiplicity that might define the City, even a City of God like York whose foundations are sedimentary cultures, nomadic machines that stopped rambling to build monuments, architectonically resonating beyond arcane walls, across borders and cells of resistance, through the chronologistical dissemination of the cross or chiasmus.
The romance of the corpus is over. There is nothing else to wager in this face to face with the telluric rings of mystic grammatology. I force readings from Shakespeare's Richard : Versions II & III to pass the monumental hours that this story will take to render and download. This City has no walls to hold us but its ghosts will fragment once the tourists arrive we will be left to defend our art against their siege. We create lines of escape from the modemised missives of information the system requires. We create engines of interpretation that are programmed to create fictions - theoretical in inspiration. We search the archived arcadia of mythology to map the territory of the chiasmus, the X point of the territorialisation of space. These lines of escape are used to bypass information and enter into symbolic exchange, the fatal economy of the corpus. You can see us everywhere. We are the mercenaries whose polished shades dazzle the other into our abyss of infinite reflection where nothing remains except the spectre of the nomad warrior in the machinery of war. The Art of deception is an offensive weapon.
That cigarette is dead and I haven't even begun the discourse on the origins of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society which was founded on a collection of fossil bones in 1822 .
Perhaps a history will be encrypted in the work of art
Mark Waugh 1998
Audio Extracts from the film Psychostasia