concrete[i]land

2015 | bangkok

OF MUD AND TURD / Something was lost … the relation to the initial system of knowledge transmission … In this ‘Idiocratic’ post-capitalist regime, no one reads, language has been reduced to a daily life commerce … Slum dwellers, in their interzone, lawless situation, can re-question this social, global XXI century political and cultural Alzheimer … via a transgressive line of escape … sniffing books’ ashes, shots to a cinematographic subculture adaptation …

SCREENINGS: Chicago Biennial 2015. TARS Gallery Bkk 2015. Kino Moviemiento Berlin 2016. Bangkok Underground Film Festival 2017.

CREDITS: from a concept by M4, Camille Lacadee & Francois Roche, with Vongsawat Wongkijjalerd, Daniela Mitterberger; Michigan Architecture Students/ Po-Jen Huang, Te-Shiou Chen, Jakkrit Jannakhon, Linnea Cook, Salam Rida, Min Zhang, Weiqi Zhang, Stefan Klecheski, Beth Carliner, Peter Sepassi, Tracey Weisman, John Yoon

(bkk mαkkαsαn)
a ‘post-culture’ spasm / The Bowl of mad-mud

In the muck-dirt-turd / human cradle to cradle loop / where substances meet in all their states of chemical transformation / from the fruit of the earth to the rejection /
Human Matter…”where it smells shit, it smells human” to quote Antonin Artaud (‘Là ou ça sent la merde, ça sent l’être.’ Pour en finir avec le Jugement de Dieu, 1947) from body metabolism…. As a cycle… of rejection – recycling (physical context), extracted, pumped, remixed, extruded from the open sky sewage ground below the pilotis… emerging on the above level, the visible level.
Robotic production from recycling matter, first antagonism.

The Ghost Content
Something was lost… the relation to the initial system of knowledge transmission… in this ‘Idiocratic’ post-capitalist regime … no one reads no more… and language has been reduced to a daily life commerce… banality and merchandising.
The people of the Slum, because of their interzone, lawless situation, can re-question this social, political and cultural Alzheimer global XXI century phenomena… via a transgressive line of escape.
We derive, we drift within the situation… to shift this relation to knowledge (rapport au savoir) in a subjective, immersive mode…
In the library, people aren’t expected to read… but to sniff the ashes coming from the books, targeting a travel ‘shot’ to a subculture cinematographic adaptation of the book.
Book readers are sniffers, disseminated in the Slum in a subjective immersive ego-trip, in the pursuit of the Selfie, a self-portrait in Alchemist mode.
At the opposite of Pro-Bono enterprises usually intervening in the slum to promote politically correctness and right consciousness…

Concrete[i]land / short film
from the book of Ballard /
Mαkkαsαn, a kind of ‘Alpha Ville’, as the fear of word’s disappearance, now a fact, with the emotions that came with them, as the impoverishment of the means of expression, as a displacement perhaps and yesterday’s world might be gone and dead. The rise of the selfie as the only way to witness one’s life. To take it and put it there, nowhere really, directly, with no one acknowledging it. The absence of meditation, permanent obsession of self-portraiture, the obscene display of solitudes.

The short film is about 2 worlds (upper-condo/highway and below-slum self-organization). Below is the genetically diseased autarky, island of degeneresence, living among their rejects, in the acceptance of society’s garbage, where the social contract is a constant work in progress, unstable.

What is burned though is our memory, our culture in the form of books. The written world is sinking in the canal slum water, putrid, smelly-belly. While North Pole polar bears change their gender membership to increase their reproduction probability in the melting-ice age, here in Makkasan, people are developing by-product of substitution, a kind of cultural methadone, of easily-accessible stirring stifling barely-bearable immersive-emotional self-suggested shots.

Robotic voice process / The shelter components are done through real sensor interface robotic system… where ‘nick’s reading of the book affects the trajectory of the nozzle (voice intensity and timber) / Microphone + Sound voice recognition + RSI-Kuka = seismograph movement of the robot linked to frequency and amplitude of the sound sinusoidal curve)/ & the shelter petrified the Books reader’s voice … witness of a lost paradise (Milton)…
A positive entropy engaging a counter movement in the negative mode, as the first Thermodynamic law in the Anthropocene balance ?