A thing is happening.
Beauty's at work through
pure and selfless acceptance,
through everyday transcendence
that remedies the chaos,
an antidote to the sorrow
on this earth for eternity.
Music heard so deeply
that it is not heard at all.
You are the music while the music lasts.
Insist on beauty in spite of everything.
Decorum.
As I'm walking, I see
you on your motorbike.
I can see your blue eyes
and nose peering underneath
the crash helmet.
And it's not you.
It's just a man that looks like you.
I'm disappointed every time.
Every time I see a man on a motorbike,
I think it's my dad.
I'm not sure why this is.
Sometimes I forget
what your bike looks like.
Everyone's eyes and faces
look the same underneath
black crash helmets.
From a distance, everyone looks like you.
Although soon I realize it's not.
I remember you used
to paint pictures of naked women
in crash helmets.
Their identities were hidden too.
I always wondered who these women were,
their shiny black round heads
like lollipops.
Props.
Who were they, dad?
(inhales softly)
(exhales softly)
(silence)
Breath.
(approaching footsteps)
A laughing heart...
Your life is your life.
Don't let it be clubbed into submission.
Be on the watch.
There are ways out.
There's light somewhere.
It may not be much light,
but it beats the darkness.
Be on the watch.
The gods will offer you chances.
Know them. Take them.
You can't beat death,
but you can beat death in life sometimes.
And the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
Your life is your life.
Know it while you have it.
You are marvelous.
The gods wait to delight in you.
Rascal was a wildcat
when it was four degrees outside.
When I moved in she'd stand
with me in winter and rain,
sleep with me, mostly outside.
Hunter, I never tried to break her spirit.
Hit by a car in front of me.
I was shocked.
I buried her by cat litter and wild food,
her sunshine place
could only dig the stones
because of city sewage pipes
about three or four feet.
I wish it was deeper, next to keep
other animals from digging her up.
When I find stones, I'll cover up
[inaudible] begin to swell.
If so, I'll put more soil on top.
First, cat and friend.
Hi. Yeah.
I saw you last night. Hmm.
I was in the club. Yup.
I saw who you were with too.
She was holding you so tight.
Because she knows you want me.
Oh, naw. She can't love you.
She can't love you like I do.
I said to myself that
you must be out of your mind.
You were there with somebody else.
You know you're wasting your time.
Oh, no.
But she can't love you.
She can't love you like I do.
You're missing my beat
and I'm needing your moves.
Let's give it one more try.
Let's get back in the groove.
Because she can't love you.
She can't love you like I do.
When I was younger,
my father was the producer
of a transvestite troupe
and it seemed a dream for me
to be able to observe
what was behind the curtain.
I think this is when it all started,
while growing up.
I kept on searching
for this feeling of wonder,
this taste for metamorphosis.
I direct speak of cabarets,
shows, or even strange.
From video to another,
off the same protagonist progresses
in this mysterious
and phantasmagorical universe.
I consider my videos as living paintings.
I use the camera
as a painter with his brushes.
What could my world be made of?
Red. Green. Blue.
Red. Green. Blue.
Red. Green. Blue.
If you want to turn yourself
into a proud samurai warrior,
you need the katana samurai sword.
This high-quality plastic weapon
is a Japanese long sword
which will look just perfect
with your traditional Japanese hakama
and the traditional Japanese geta.
And add the finishing touch
to your Asian outfit:
the black and gold katana samurai sword
comes with a matching black scabbard
so it can be stored safely.
The Japanese sword
will protect you in fights
and is sure to make you
an eye-catcher in any party.
Size length, 105 centimeters.
Blade length, 70 centimeters.
Material, plastic.
Yeah, so... a couple years ago
a bunch of us went down to the beach
and we got there and coast guards running
all up and down the sand like,
"You can't get in the water."
You know?
Screaming at us.
So we waited a bit and they went
further down the beach
and then we decided we would go.
Like, what the fuck?
Why did we come here?
So my buddy went down there and he's like,
"All good, come down here, man."
So I walked over and we looked down.
And we couldn't see it
from where we were parked,
but when we looked down,
we were really close,
you looked down and there
just all these fucking jellyfish.
Like, one every... like all over the place.
One every two or three feet.
And from where we were standing,
you couldn't really tell
if they were living or dead, you know?
'Cause some of them were still moving,
but then others were just totally limp.
So... tell me what it's like
growing up in Singapore.
Well, we had... I had
these really magnificent memories
of my childhood.
We had these magnificent playgrounds.
There was, like, these big watermelons.
I remember I used to climb
to the top of the watermelon
and I'd rub myself on the ridges
to give myself pleasure.
You think we could fall
in love on the internet?
No.
'Cause it wouldn't be love.
It'd just be porn.
I don't think so.
Seen from a distance,
almost everything looks beautiful.
As the distance increases,
the more you romanticize.
All the small details from
the everyday reminisces the past.
Because things we want to forget
are the things we can never forget.
DO IT!
JUST DO IT!
Don't let your dreams be dreams.
Yesterday you said tomorrow.
So just DO IT!
Make your dreams come true!
Just DO IT!
Some people dream of success
while you're gonna wake up
and work hard at it!
Nothing is impossible.
You should get to the point
where anyone else would quit
and you're not gonna stop there.
No, what are you waiting for?
DO IT!
Just... DO IT!
Yes, you can!
Just do it.
If you're tired of starting over,
stop giving up.
Emerging gaming technologies
operate within a nexus
of social relationships that
characterize the modern world.
These technologies enable
a constant commentary
which has become
the quintessential quality of power,
often operating as mechanisms
that dictate our action
and pre-ordain our expectations.
The work interrogates
the cultural logic of feedback
as a metaphor and material condition.
It is live, cybernetic, reactive.
Sensory data translated
through visual and tactile apparatus.
Disillusion of the virtual
and corporeal boundary,
reorienting perspective of the existing
and the alternative space and time.
An avatar in symbiosis with the subject,
taking the lead in a continuous loop
of action and reaction.
We're surrounded by forms.
Yet it's still so elusive, right?
You know, sometimes it feels
like we fill that void between us
with something that grows slowly,
like it's overtaking us or something.
Through the way we speak,
or what we do,
where we put stuff around us,
even the stances we inhabit
or the faces we make
or even the body parts, you know?
The food we eat. Whatever.
Sometimes it gets heavier, you know?
Or more light, but
it's like all the distinctions
are starting to melt away.
The forms, the resemblances,
the symmetries,
the repetitions, the patterns.
Patterns that we know we have always had,
that have always been there
and we're not sure why.
And now... the outside looks
more and more like the images
that were contained in us
since the beginning.
Hi. Thank you for waiting.
We've been running
a little bit behind today.
Right.
As you know, we've taken a few readings
and these get sent away.
We have a look at them.
We meet, a group of us.
Many years of experience.
We have a look and we see what we can see.
Does that make sense?
If I ju--
If you just have a look here, really...
The system's really slow,
so it's a case of monitoring.
And you monitoring
and you just letting us know
if you notice anything unusual.
Would you be able to do this?
Hmm?
You have any questions?
Double.
Double-sided.
Minds. Different paths.
One runs after sunlight,
one follows the rising moon.
They either congregate,
connect, intersect, touch,
unite at sunset for eclipses...
play and then separate
for long interstices.
Later, re-enacting past meetings
forever lost in repetition.
Ebb and flow, edging closer.
Expanding warmth.
That point just before the pressure bursts.
Capillary rush.
Tension. Resisting.
Each muscle, each limb,
each breath under control for now.
Questions of limitations
dissolve into the blur.
Eyes open, but horizons fall away.
The burn increases now.
(Shia grunts)
The pain sensors...
one of you escapes, but I pull you back.
Heh. Duality.
Existing only as a whole.
Weakened by quivering joints.
Lungs push for release,
a struggle to hold on.
Control surrendered, suspended in dullness.
Eyes close.
Now numb.
Running, reaching, falling,
skipping, turning, sliding, walking.
These are all words
that describe ways of moving.
Each action is packed
with many micro-movements.
It's hard for us to recognize
these small movements individually.
When describing how to walk,
we use the simplest terms possible
and struggle to explain all
the mechanics of a simple movement.
Understanding body movement
in the terms of everyday language
should be simple, however
our muscle memory takes over
for our brain and our body
becomes a strange system
of levers and pulleys
that maneuver by our command.
She sits.
I squirt toothpaste in my mouth.
I start to brush.
She's looking at me.
I look at her.
I keep brushing whilst looking.
Whilst I look at her,
she looks at me
and I continue to brush,
getting faster, getting harder.
I start to gag.
My eyes leak and I still look at her.
She looks at me and I keep brushing, gagging.
I feel like I'm gonna be sick.
Am I gonna be sick?
Gagging! Paste down my face,
my hair, on my shirt.
Dripping, and I still look at her
and she looks at me.
Enough.
The sculpture, the painter,
the video maker,
the figure of the artist has been
as fetishized in Western culture
as the Hollywood actor,
the town drunk or the Messiah himself.
Michael Peter's TateShots
attempts to reconfigure
the concept of creator or creatrix
by placing himself in the position
of artist as meme.
Watch, enjoy, and be one.
We are all children of the universe.
Yeah, absolutely.
I feel my absence
in the absence of all things.
Belief in living has been
contorted into this shortened life
of contempt and pre-determined imprisonment.
And I...
(sighs)
I feel it all collapsing.
I CAN'T FUCKING EMBRACE IT!
(sighs)
(sighs)
It's near and here I stand...
wasting my last moments,
cursing thee who impress me this
your fate.
You give nothing.
No mercy, no empathy.
Only self-hate.
To you, I'm just a fucking plaything.
An amusement replicating the cries of man.
You replay the last moments
of my life over and over and over!
I'm just a fucking charade
suspended at the core of ridicule
and I pity for those whose end mirrors mine
and I pity myself.
(sniffles)
I'm helpless.
Thank you.
I'm tormented by the inescapable
rewinding collapse.
Don't let them see me like this.
Man is under surveillance.
Where is he going?
Almost into a state of euphoria, of relief,
as though he's happy about it.
He has to act as a looking glass
rather than a mirror
of social conventions.
He disintegrated perfectly,
but never reappeared.
He became translucent to reveal his reality.
It's impossible unless he is,
or was, insane.
He changed his mind.
You know how men are.
Perhaps it symbolizes something deep
in the subconscious.
(silence)
Feeling genuinely upset.
Tears level. Hmm.
Shame on me.
My face is receptacle on surface,
a surface that's throwing up
what's already there.
Wet wear and hard [inaudible] stuff.
Confrontation is post. Preferably.
Living in lilts like over and under.
With grapple here
is approaching confrontation.
Or surface lump rolled out.
You go through the dump
to form a projectile semi-bound
like protest song collapsed.
Needs filled for no other.
Forced partly forever as long
as I leave you together.
Art hits.
Whatever I point at is big.
Snapped leg. Snapped leg.
Chalk circle.
Another one of those days where you think,
"Shit, I've done nothing today."
This London Underground journey
needs no excessive
mental activity to perform.
I'm stuck in a strange
modern day meditation.
This space asks for an interruption.
When it happens, it's a moment
of pure panic and confusion.
All previous expectations are obliterated.
There's a second of elation.
The rules are being broken here.
Quickly, it passes.
I'm back in the routine.
There's an expansion
of discovery and limitation,
even if I'm thinking,
"Fuck. This is boring"
as I scribble repetitively onto the floor.
Between the visible and invisible lies
a glistening rectangular pane,
a transparent veil.
This thin glossy sheet of glass,
so innocent looking,
is the frontier between
the physicality of toil
and the ignorance of immateriality.
Liquid crystals oscillating between
a seamless fluid and solid state
produce a viscous reality
that's almost palpable,
almost attainable but succeeds
only in abstracting.
The heightened artifice
perpetuates anonymity,
outsourced and far away.
Dead labor turns to capital
and power relations dissolve.
All that is solid melts into the air.
These light installations do
not provide an original experience.
Instead, the audience
will witness occurrences
they have previously encountered
in their everyday lives
on bedroom walls, floors,
and through bus windows
but may have never noticed.
Observing, recording,
and recreating studies of light,
this series of events are light occurrences
that have captured
and digitally recreated using projectors
as the technology to stage
them in this space.
Do you either go noticed or unnoticed?
What you're about to witness
is quite definitely harrowing.
British artist Jack Evans,
when he was raised in Mansfield,
part of the Midlands, is now at
one of the most southern parts
of the UK, Brighton Beach
in the hellish winter cold
laid out in nothing but Raybans,
his favorite pair of speedos
and a fucking tacky shit gold watch,
eating what I believe
those Brits call a 99 Flake.
His body looks glorious
as it shivers in the wind.
I do have to remind you,
especially the ladies,
it was fucking cold.
Enjoy.
Hold your breath.
Count to two.
Come with us in a world of pure imagination.
Take a look and you'll see
into our imagination.
We'll begin travelling
in the world of our creation.
What you'll see will have no explanation.
Look around.
There's no life to compare
with living with no pixelation.
Joe Moss was Shia LaBeouf
before Shia LaBeouf was Joe Moss.
We only got 30 seconds,
so I mean, I'll try his voice
but... I don't know.
Who makes that choice?
Who's pretending to be who?
We're pretending to talk
to a you that doesn't exist yet,
but what's really going on here?
I... fuck, I don't think
any of us understand.
Maybe you do.
There's always reflections
of you in the screen,
but I can't speak.
I'm dumb.
I'm the dumbest, but Shia talks.
Fuck, 30 seconds.
All right.
Pressure, whatever.
Hey, mom, it's really Joe.
I bet you never thought
this would fucking happen, huh?
(chuckles)
Work number 24 oscillates somewhere between
a durational performance in live sculpture.
The work seeks to act both
as a social and institutional critique
of "What is an art school?"
presented then in the form
of a bookshop, as opposed to a library,
arguably a democratic equivalent.
The work seeks to explore
the currency of ideas,
how trade and exchange
is not only commoditized,
but perhaps how conversation
is perhaps a vital component
in the flow and disruption
of how culture manifests.
A practice revolves around
questions of fact and fiction
and the blurred line that lies between.
I'm interested in how surveillance images
can be manipulated
and orchestrated in order to create
a particular narrative,
creating an unreliable narrator.
There are three parts to the work:
Footage of a factual space,
whereby a sequence of events
has occured, the digital
drawing of the space,
and a stripped-back stage
to its crude simplest skeletal form,
where the sequence
of events is re-enacted.
The stage is a factual representation
of a real life space
whereby every property
is identical in dimensions.
57,910,000.
108,200,000.
149,600,000.
227,940,000.
778,330,000.
1,429,400,000.
2,970,990,000.
4,000,000,500.
4 million, 5 billion...
913,520,000.
I can't stop looking at my phone and computer.
Separate connected entity making
me lose time/space awareness.
Where's my phone?
I need to make this sunset digital.
A stone preserved in binary code
until the server breaks
and the national grid
runs out of gas.
I can't find my money.
Dad left the physical sphere long ago.
All I see remind me of things online
or in a video game.
They are so real in the moment.
I climbed that mountain
with my mind and fingers.
My body didn't even get close.
All my experiences turn
into light and pixels.
Errrrrrmmmm.
Ummmmmmmmm.
Oohhhhhhhmmmm.
Ooohmmmmmmm.
Errrrrmmmmmmmm.
Ummmmmmmmmm.
Ooohhmmmmmm.
Ohhmmmmmmm.
Errrrmmmmmmmm.
Ummmmmmmmmm.
Ohhmmmmmmmm.
Ohhmmmmmmm.
Errmmmmmmmm.
Ummmmmmmmmm.
Ohhmmmmmmm.
Ohhmmmmmmmmm.
Errmmmmmmmmm.
Ummmmmmmm.