Darren Tofts

Commissioned essay for Peter Milne Monograph Beautiful Lies: Notes Towards a History of Australia.

Queensland Centre for Photography, 2011.

Milne’s fascination with the melodramatic properties of Australian political history underwrites his understanding of myth as something that is larger than life, a form of camp sensibility, a narrative in excess of the ordinary, potentially sublime but at the same time, in the artist’s words, ‘a little bit sad’. This technique of seeing a molehill in a mountain has been fruitfully explored in three series, ‘Dreams of the Skull’, ‘Brief Shining Moment’, ‘Running Dogs’ and ‘The New Australia’. His approach to the interface between history and myth presumes that truth in photography is never fixed, unproblematic or beyond dispute or negotiation. The notion of the epiphany is the rhetorical lens through which he views and constructs cathartic moments or turning points in the narratives of his subjects.

http://www.qcp.org.au

Commissioned catalogue essay for Sue McCauley and Keith Deverell’s The Housing Project.

Featured work in the 2011 Victorian State of Design Festival

20 July-26 August

We have forgotten how much of our daily social experience is abstracted from the world of atoms, translated into the electro-magnetic field of bits and bytes.  We press buttons and poke screens, blithely ignorant of how these slick abbreviations correspond to an outcome elsewhere that we never see.  The artists elegantly observe of the work that it is “embedded in issues of tactility in an age where we are gradually losing our sense of touch”.  

http://www.stateofdesign.com.au/Festival/Search/The-Housing-Project

A Conversation with Ted Nelson

21C Magazine

Nelson’s standard byline credits him with such coinages as “intertwingularity.” Try getting your mind around that one and you just might get a glimpse of Xanadu.  And this may well be in fact Nelson’s enduring legacy. Rather than a technological innovator he may be remembered as the Sausalito sage, a visionary techno-soothsayer of “how we may think” in the 21st Century and beyond. 

http://www.21cmagazine.com/#1298197/Darren-Tofts-interviews-Ted-Nelson

Invited remix contribution to Mark Amerika’s remixthebook: the remixes

Marcel Duchamp vs. Professor VJ: Game 1, Philadelphia, February. Starting with the arrival of Picabia, Berliet then films the chess sequence, which is from a scenario commissioned by Rolf de Mare for the Ballets Suedois. Duchamp and Professor VJ sit astride the low balustrade at the edge of the roof with the chessboard between them. An IBM technician is nearby. As they play, a medium close-up of Duchamp’s head, a chimney on the left and an aerial view of Philadelphia in the background, is followed by a close-up. Duche to play …

http://www.remixthebook.com/and-we-shall-play-a-game-of-chess

Essay on Led Zeppelin’s film The Song Remains the Same.

Lola, Issue 1: Histories

Edited by Adrian Martin and Girish Shambu

The Song Remains the Same must be retrieved from the unforgiving dustbin of history. So fuck Ian Haig, fuck the American and British rock press and every other two-bit motherfucking hack that’s canned the film over the last thirty-odd years. The Song Remains the Same is a bad film that no one likes, but it might yet be cinema.

http://lolajournal.com/1/dying.html

Commissioned essay for “Seeing to a Distance: Single channel video work from Australia”

Curated by Amanda Morgan

2-26 August, 2011

Level 17 Artspace, Victoria University City Campus, 17/300 Flinders Street, Melbourne 3000

The intergalactic traveller of Jean Luc Godard’s 1965 sci-fi noir thriller Alphaville may seem an unlikely figure in the history of video art.  While the title of this exhibition has its origins in nineteenth century speculative science, Lemmy Caution is its atavistic guide.   A traveller in time and space, he represents that which is at a distance, from afar, a stranger in a strange land.  Between smokes and dishing out rough justice he can tell you all you need to know about advanced technology, computers, urban screens and artificial vision— themes that are central to Seeing to a Distance. Single Channel Video Work from Australia.

http://seeingtoadistance.com/

Essay commissioned for UrbanCodemakers, Melbourne Laneways Project, 2010.

I’m not simply talking about the everyday experience of “walking in the city”, as Michel de Certeau would have it.  I’m talking about the residue of the street that builds up on the soles of your feet, the dust and fumes that irritate the mucous membrane, the seduction of the olfactory imagination with the aromas of grimy restaurant exhaust fans, caressing the air with the spunk of a dozen promiscuous cuisines.  

http://urbancodemakers.net/blog/hitting-the-deck-traversing-the-embodied-city/

Lisa Gye & Darren Tofts

The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices is cultural anthropology. It seeks to recover those moments of intuitive prehensile dexterity, when the famous and the ordinary alike felt the unconscious desire to occupy their hands for an as yet unknown purpose. Like Roy Neary’s obsession with the image of Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), this gesture was vague, uncanny and compelling. It is the intimation in images of a gestural second nature to come.

Perhaps this time has arrived, now, when mobile telephonic and teletextual communications are unavoidably associated with the spectacle of intimate bodily gestures. But this intimacy has a prehistory, a psychopathology of unconscious gesture in search of a purpose.

http://www.secretprehistory.net/

Image: Nina Sellars, Ear on Arm (2008). Reproduced courtesy Nina Sellars.

“Interiors”: Essay on George Bataille’s notions of pornography and the sacral in relation to Nina Sellars’ photographs of Stelarc’s Extra Ear surgery, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris and Perry Ogden’s photographs of Francis Bacon’s studio.

An unwitting allegory of post-humanism, “Rock DJ” segues into metaphysics as a commentary on the ascendance of a new philosophical conception of the body and eroticism more generally.  When traditional forms of seduction no longer work, it’s “time to move your body”.

NEW FROM LITTERARIA PRAGENSIA:

PORNOTOPIAS: IMAGE, APOCALYPSE, DESIRE
eds. Louis Armand, Jane Lewty, Andrew Mitchell
ISBN 970-80-7308-291-8 (paperback) 272pp
Price: € 12.00 (not including postage)

This volume of critical writing and photography includes previously untranslated work by renowned French thinker Georges Bataille, alongside essays on David Lynch, Pierre Guyotat, Carolee Schneemann, Alicja Zebrowska, Kathy Acker, Stelarc, Francis Bacon, Swinburne and the Victorian cult of flagellation, 9-11 and the architectural fetish, cyberculture, Freud, and Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris.

***REVIEW COPIES AVAILABLE ON REQUEST***

Please write to the Managing Editor at litteraria.pragensia@seznam.cz

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CONTENTS

Darren Tofts - INTERIORS
Stuart Kendall - SOUND, MIND, BODY
Thierry Tillier - (((DISPARITION PROGRAMMÉE,,,
Johannes Birringer - AFTER BACON
Benjamin H. Bratton - FIGURES OF DESTRUCTION
Ruark Lewis - BANALITIES
Florian Cramer & Stewart Home - PORNOGRAPHIC CODING
Jane Lewty - BLUEJACK, DATAJACK
Louis Armand - THE MEDIUM IS THE FETISH
Karmen MacKendrick - HUMILIATED SUBJECTS
Pierre Daguin - SIX FEMMES
Georges Bataille - EROTICISM
Vadim Erent & Bonita Rhoads - REPLAYING FORT/DA
Ian Haig - FUTUROTIC
Jena Jolissaint - PIRATES, PRIESTESSES & PORNE PILLAGE THE PANOPTICON
Lara Portela - INCORPORATING OBJECTS
Malwina Zaremba - NAKED TRUTH
Beth Lazroe - VISUAL ASSAULT
Andar Nunes - AUTOEROTIC

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BLURB

“Bodily existence is an existence lived in constant fascination with a world beyond one’s reach. Embodiment, desire, metaphor. To exist on the verge of nonexistence. In the headlong pursuit of the real, of the other. Of the base materiality of the world, of religious hypothesis, of absolute relativity. Every utopia is a pornography, a recrudescence and pathological disillusionment, a lure into the vortex–paradoxical annulment of pure reason, compulsion, repetition, consumption.”

“The body cannot be neutral or indifferent. Its design is such that it must respond to both exterior challenge and interior impulse. Our means of survival, the sex act, galvanizes the body into a unique state of existence, which, though transient, becomes the essence of being; the concentration of an idea, the heightening of sense, the ultimate dissolution.”

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For more information see www.litterariapragensia.com

Dialogue between Stelarc’s Prosthetic Head (and his alter ego, Facetted Head) and Murray McKeich’s p-zombie.

H+ Magazine

H+ covers technological, scientific, and cultural trends that are changing human beings in fundamental ways.

p-z:   What are you reading at the moment?

PH:  Russell’s Analysis of Mind.

p-z:   Which edition? 

PH:  Funny you should ask that.  It’s the very one Borges refers to in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”.

p-z:   1921 Allen & Unwin if memory serves me correctly.

PH:   Yup.  And you?

p-z:  Just dipping into Pound’s Cantos.  You know the opening line is a translation of the first words ever written in Greek?

PH:  “And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea”.

p-z:  Ah, you know it. Scans well doesn’t it.

PH:  I always thought so.

http://hplusmagazine.com/digitaledition/2009-winter/