The Invisible Revealed

This is an unedited version of my PG seminar for Sydney College of the Arts and then
delivered on the fly, at The University of Tasmania School of Art June 2008.

I want to talk speculatively today, not about the totality of my practice that has been going for a long time, but about some of the qualities within my practice, that given some recent discoveries and learning over the last couple of years, is now presenting what I feel is a significant possibility for the future of my work .Today, I want to go out into the savannah and graze, hopefully, not as a bit of a donkey, but more like an elk.

Throughout the body of work, there is the presence of things that are usually invisible; revealed. There is no real overarching adherence to a particular form in the manner of the old ways, (though some forms in the work stick out more than others by there reappearance,) but there is a styling that passes through the body of work, which is much more important, less to do with a representational subject or artistic persona, and more to do with a launching forth, into a field of energetic forces that make up an intensive zone. I am not saying that the work sits outside of representation but I want to investigate some other qualities today.

Gilles Deleuze, spent his life creating a language to describe these kinds of territories and expressions, but it’s not my intention to present a detailed paper on his work, but hopefully, many of you will recognize his presence in the room – intensively, the way he would have wanted it.

What is a force you might say? – Its not that complicated. A force belongs first to movement and then to a multiplicity and a becoming. A force is a movement, an interaction – “when a mountain collapses, what was once still beneath the sky falls downwards and interacts with what it touches. Thankfully, it’s not always this dramatic. A force then, is simply a dynamic interaction between some states.



The forces in the works that are unleashed, however, exist at a different scale to the mountain, they exist at the scale of the molecular and the energetic, in the form of waves – pressure waves of sound, or photons of light commonly thought of as a wave, but actually a frequency and now, lately in my work - actual molecules – things that are normally thought of as having not much substance or even no substance at all, in the case of the work in the gallery they are an emission of types of energy, providing a strong psychic and physical presence in the space, they figure more obviously in the collaborations that involve the electromagnetic, but also lets not forget that forces operate at the level of ideas (which is something that has no physical substance) and they also operate at the level of representations that transmit time from beyond the present into the present. It’s important to remember that there are gentle forces as well. Forces that are the barest whisper, soft rain like we get in the mountains – or a lovers breath and even the works that don’t have resonating sculptural structures in them also contain other mysterious forces.

Sometimes forces are fabricated virtual arenas – fabulations – synthetic fabulations - a house vents its contents into an imagined and yet credibly realised artificial anti -gravity – or a different kind of house vents water endlessly, forever, as if nature had found a menacing musical dimension in the form of seemingly infinite loops, eddies and reversals of flow.

Even models and simulations can create a force in the world if they are capable of giving shock or wonder. If even something as still and manufactured as a maquette or model is capable of shock, then naturally, concepts and ideas can also create shocks and rifts out of the chaos –“tearing a slit in the firmament” as DH Lawrence would say.

Representations are signs that emit, but this emission at the level of signifier is also a force that is on par with the physical dimension of forces that I am describing. The Neo-Gothic house in the work, House Two gathers up and transmits the gothic line into the viewers mind – the gothic line enters the room softly as a familiar trace. This is why I like the gallery space – it’s a container for these things, a container without distractions.


Let’s not forget what it means to be an Artist. An artist is a force in the world as well. So is a priest, or a judge or a teacher, forces are not limited to only non human phenomena – there are powerful musical forces. Walking in a manner is also a force and even a style, a certain gait, I have a friend, she has a beautiful style to the way she walks, sometimes fast with long strides, sometimes stealthily like a cat. I saw it the other day at twilight in the mountains – we where filming with a contraption that also causes one to walk in a mysterious and extra dimensional way; there are different modes, speeds and differentials, a whole multiplicity to walking.

Humans are capable of extra dimensionality. This is why Tarkovsky’s, levitational love making scene in his film The Sacrifice, totally stands up, because it’s not really that far out of reach and it seems natural within the very curious logic of the narrative. Have you seen that man who fly’s through the air with jetpacks and wings on his arms on Youtube ?

Everything that interacts belongs to the nature of a force. The colonisers used walking in a different way – armies marching across the fields – a terrible kind of harnessing of chaos – and then our indigenous peoples mysterious walking on their dreaming tracks – I walked on one in the Wollemi wild country recently and saw drawings on the walls of caves, some look like women with ectoplasmic nets coming from their mouths or maybe I wondered, if these powerful drawings was also some kind of premonition of the speech bubble, to come.

What is a becoming you might ask? It is a joyful leap into plurality, an embrace of change and experience – a discovery of freedom - it is according to Nietzsche to live life naturally, with the multiplicity, rather than through fixed conceptions of the one truth or how the One universe is conceived. The common model then is thrown out the window. One no longer has to struggle with the reconciliation of a fixed abstract conception that never seems to adequately stand up to the reality of the polyphony of a life and change becomes a productive force away from the centre rather than an experience of discomfort.

I have come to think of the artwork itself – any artwork as a kind of transmitter or radiator of energy, once it reaches the brain, new pathways are electrically connected and wired up and we gain extra consciousness as a result. A necessity when the world presents a continual unceasing, multiplicity. This might be one part of the reason that Art has had such endurance, even through great traumatic events in history, or has managed to have a place in the most turbulent of cultures. Perhaps it’s playing a role in the drive towards the required evolution of our subjectivity. – it might be the hunger in the brain – its appetite.

The vibe I am detecting of late, is significant interest within some parts of critical theory and philosophy, with cognition and neuroscience; that presents a turn towards something far more visceral , expressive and trans-disciplinary – another multiplicity. There is still interest in an emission of signs, of course, but there is also a biological investigation brought into the fold that goes as far as taking into account even the quantum level of scales which are mysterious forces to say the least.
And, I think this is a productive turn. Deleuze himself says that he believes more in the future of molecular biology of the brain, than in the future of information science, or of any theory of communication, perhaps some people are taking their cues from him, after all, Foucault joked, “ that this century would become Deleuzian “.

With the art then, it’s both a mind fuck and a physical thing; they can’t really be separated. It could be said that the work happens in the head, a strange manifestation of touching the cave and folds of the inside of the head. Thankfully then, we are really talking about waves, particles and photons and mental images, not anything larger than that. Molecules are indeed tiny; you cannot see them with the naked eye

The work then is all about revealing a force - something in movement – light that enters, sound that enters, forces that act on the senses. The works are structures that stand up for a time, that enter the body. Why use the word “styling” you might ask? Because style, is as much a question of inhabitation of a particular territory, as it is of a particular type of speaking or syntax – ‘you wear particular ensembles of clothes that present your style” style creates a territory, it’s also an inhabitation, of a multiplicity of modes and qualities.

Fashion sense, its easy to dismiss, but look at the way its changing all the time – there is a definite time base, involved – tied to capital for sure, but also tied to desire, so we cant even dismiss something that feels vulgar at times – marketing – the true enemy of fashion. The winds of change in dressing are tied to a flow of data as much as to what costumes we decide to emit. Even if you don’t think you have style, you have a style.

I assure you that as transparent and smooth and apparitional as these few examples I will show might look, when you are there with them there is also a real visceral feeling that presents itself. The things that enter can be felt. Without the viewer, these forces –molecular and energetic, cannot get inside, cannot complete the circuit – the forces are waiting for some one, this is why Art is the necessary vehicle for these forces. The curious thing and one that encapsulates possibly a much longer train of thought, is this question of the interphase, the relationship between something appearing externally at a distance – a force let loose in the world like an avalanche or a force that acts internally with a body. In the later, there is an absolute co-dependency – a symbiotic interphase between movement from the outside sparking a phenomena, that only properly manifests when it literally enters the body. It creates a state of reaction at which point emerges the event

The force could be said to be waiting for its coupling, this is a strange idea – one of completing the circuit. Art then is also another kind of electricity.
Art calls to the viewer. It doesn’t always call out in the same way that the media does, or other types of communication do – overly clipped and in high resolution – something literal and vulgar – art allows for mysterious and unintelligible forms of communication to be part of the equation and done with a kind of elegance, even if its of the ugly, this is its primary difference from the “everything else, whatever” and provides an antidote for what Adam Gezy described the other day in his seminar , as the “tribunal of boredom” in our contemporary world. Art puts a show stopper on opinions and provides a kind of “station break “ where we can all finally put down our guns and breathe a sigh of relief.

Art is the best vehicle for the forces I work with too transmit, because they reach people who are receptive – it might be that some of these forces have appeared in the past as something uncanny in a science lab, or as data in a report, but who would they be reaching in that setting – who would they enter, not enough people. Not that the forces them selves care either way, of course – but from the perspective of someone who is interested in discovering them and someone who is a kind of medium of these forces, I think Art is the best way to allow these things to make an appearance in the world. There is a real specificity in art, in these relationships, because the works are formed from very specific assemblages and sets of relationships that would never be allowed to coincide in other disciplines. Look at the authentic characters of art that Brancusi gave us for example - a strange brass form resembling a bird and a kind of twisted smooth brass cylinder – a character to come later in the Alien films or as any number of future characters in science fiction, fashion, photography or architecture. Artists are literally sketching our future. I am no scientist, even though parts of the work use scientific principles; mindful of a formula set out by Proust, which is one of – “ speaking as a foreigner in ones own tongue” allows a certain kind of wisdom based on stupidity, to be elevated, never becoming too much the authority on anything, poking around in the dark , in other words, I like to grab what I need, from a multiplicity of activities, its one way to stop complacency, you never quite feel like one is on top of things - the algorithm for images, physics and optics for imaging the sun, perfumery ( that one alone contains a lifetime of experimental knowledge to be explored). Make no mistake about it, the methodology may follow aspects of scientific or technological processes, but it’s always done only in relationship to art and curiosity - which is the work. Is there not a hidden wisdom even in Naivety?
Is it not then a kind of becoming science in art – But better still, it’s more like a becoming cosmos gathered into an assemblage of Art. Put the Art first because that’s the ground that all of these experiences rise up from.

The forces that are revealed are tied to the specific assemblages or laminates of Art. What is an assemblage? I barely need to say it; but for the sake of the argument today, it is a construction of things, a bunch of materials – a compositional plane (the canvass – or the projection – or the political meeting) that provides the surfaces and corridors that allows the forces to transmit. A lamination is an overlay of elements welded together, a composition or composite of things solid or not solid. A kind of ramshackle, though sober constructivism is what I think I am engaged in.

We are all working in a discipline that is totally able to assimilate failure at the level of the work and the concept - is open enough to encompass the inadequate as much as the sublime and that allows for a whole universe of tangible and intangible things to coincide – such is the nature of the poetic. There is a lot of freedom in all of this, that makes our field unique as an activity…as you can see I am a lover, not a straightener – embedded in a practice that may even be able to encompass ultimately something as unimaginable as a collapse of the forms I’ve built up, the possibility of one day an inversion of all of the principles discovered in the trajectory, even at a cost that it becomes a kind of dark star on the work, that has preceded – Some days I dream about inverting everything – a folding back – eventually just making a turn around and why NOT !

Art is a totality that can accommodate its opposite – Anti-Art. What about engaging in a sweeping arc, a beautiful and graceful piroughette. Instead of emitting energy in the work, maybe the work could be all about sucking it in – Art as a black hole. Instead of a black house, build a house of timber and light, with crystalline shard forms instead of boxes. Or instead of gathering the energy out of the air -hold it back – invert all the forms . Instead of Noise - Silence. A ghostly presence suggested this on an airplane flying over the Pacific. Maybe the process has already started. A new work (a much too soon work) titled Telepathy, will start to do some of this inversion stuff.


I like this group statement very much from New No York – a bunch of friends working in the experimental sound scene, on the lower east side of Manhattan.

We have often been told that what we make is not music and generally we have no argument with that. If music is only sound constructed within what this day survives as the common notion of musicality, then, no, we don't make music. This is not to say that we reject all sound-constructions developed within 'music' (in its narrowest sense) — there are certainly ideas developed within this tradition that we use — but we do believe that the traditional concept of music is too impoverished to encompass the sound worlds we wish to create. …..we are with those artists that desire the freedom to reject all rules/relations from everywhere. Taking our cue from Herbert Brun we call this Anti-music. As with Brun's concept of anti-communication the 'anti' of anti-music is "used here as in antipodes, antiphony, antithesis, not meaning 'hostile' or 'against' but rather 'juxtaposed' or 'from the other side'."

Is this where I am heading then with the idea of reversing all my works – initially an odiferous vapour trail – then some inversions – then simply into a whole other way of working. Is this what Deleuze is talking about then with his wonderful and curious phrase – “a becoming imperceptible” of the Artist?

From Deleauze

"There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules, and particles of all kinds. There are only heksay-atees, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages. […] We call this plane, which knows only longitudes and latitudes, speeds and hecsay-aties, the plane of consistency or composition (as opposed to a plan(e) of organization or development)."[3]

Lets come down to earth for a minute.

As some of you know already, I have a practice that is both individual and simultaneously I have worked collaboratively (in the beginning I collaborated quite a lot with my friend John Conomos – gave it up for a long time -about 7 years and then returned to it again, with Joyce and after all the projects that are happening this year we will take a break, – its an oscillation thing.

You can never escape rhythms of time in a practice) I have worked in the area of video art and sound art and in musical composition (corralled as a kind of clandestine activity but publicly performed mostly out of this country) and occasionally with objects, but they are very particular anomaly’s that almost stand out, sometimes photographic images – maybe more of those in the future?. Maybe some objects again one day, who knows what, is to come? I worked in colour field painting as well – it returns occasionally as an influential figure in some of the projections. I showed text based paintings for some time – now dead and buried.

A new phase has appeared that is likely to dominate for a while – the arrival of molecular chemical compositions – the use of aroma molecules to spark olfactory experiences – smell; an under utilised sense in Art.

In the collaborations with Joyce, my main role has been with the temporal projections and how to help manifest the sound and Joyce does the objects – though we both push up against, what those will be and the same with the images, – and it all gets rather complicated when I think about it – the question of authorship, but never a source of friction or anxiety, but generally its safe to say, Joyce is with the object side of things and the sound they produce – my expertise and responsibility is with the formation of the image plane - though it always remains a kind of knotted critique of the works internal logic and out of this chaos – a work that should be harmonious and true to whatever internal logic we have invented at the time it arrives, but in reality behind the scenes, the work has been chopped and carved out of the air like a zigzag, a lightning bolt – the z of creation, the z of the arc of the sword. It can get quite metaphorically violent, even if driven by simpatico and understanding of what each other needs. It’s been at times a big long debate. The same principles apply with my individual works – a kind of benign war takes place – you all know the struggle. A lot of Blood has spilled for these works – they don’t give themselves over so easily - lately, a bit less intense as we become more professionally orientated, shifting the work from place to place and maybe turning more inwards as we run, always towards the next deadline.

My individual work is generally – one of solitude - I learn the trades and craft myself, use little outside expertise in the production. But as we all know from our own practices, one is often learning a new trade every time we make a work. I often have to relearn the trades I thought I new. The work can get quite involved and complicated, especially in the area of the virtual side of the practice - 3d rendering and modelling, but that’s something that has been of interest to me for a very long time – like learning a language, in fact it’s a language I am now very comfortable with. You do have to study when you work with 3d visualisation because it’s an evolving field. I like 3d rendering because you are conjuring virtual objects out of an infinitely dark space. No lights in the scene nothing appears. One can invert the laws – give a light source in a rendering system a negative number and the renderer casts darkness rather than light. Tell gravity to work at -9.8 m per second and everything falls upwards. It’s a nice experience of abstractions,.

But back to the forces –let’s be more specific by way of some examples. I will outline some of the qualities, but I won’t go into a lot of detail about the totality of the works themselves, just create a kind of schematic and then talk in more detail about the work I am doing with aroma molecules and olfactory sensations. I will flash up some video and some stills to decorate the examples.

The Door – a solo work - multi screen installation first shown in the exhibition “ Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf – The occult and fairytales in Art, that was in NZ – the big thing that comes into play in this work are the molecular actions of the drug Oxy-contin, a synthetic opiate molecule that I used to help produce the narrative and performance in the soundtrack – prior to ingesting the drug, I had no idea what the narrative of the soundtrack would consist of, or what was going to happen. I had never taken a narcotic before. I am so glad it didn’t turn out like it did for Heath Ledger, who died from an Overdose of the same drug (and a few others).
I was very careful not to push things too far – this experiment was after all in the name of Art. It would be stupid not to meet the deadline by being dead. Anyway I had no real interest in taking the drug recreationally - this was work. It was by no means an unpleasant experience thank goodness; it would have been a really big challenge if it had of been and it had undone my psyche. This is the problem with free territories, when the experiment gets out of hand, when there is an overinvestment in chaos, it can spin into a different kind of disaster to the one we thought we where escaping from. I survived my life as a rock-climber and I have seen the real consequences of recklessness.

I recorded the voice part of the soundtrack live under the full effects in the witching hour, between four and five o’clock in the morning and the performance is a big part of what we hear on the soundtrack.



I thought of it as a kind of embrace of a molecule and a kind of folly - using a narcotic as a random narrative generator. There are many poetry generators on the internet that use algorithms and data to produce autonomic works of poetry, this one directly seeks out a molecule that crosses the dermis into the brain – it was a kind of chemical collaborator - one that would help me solve a big problem in the work. How to kick start the narrative! The work reveals this process in action, but then the whole routine gets swept up into the play of a broader occult situation – sounds where added in surround sound , to creep up on the viewer – we can’t hear it now, because it uses 6 speakers in surround mode. It’s a work full up with ghosts. As well received as it was, I don’t plan a series or anything.

Purple Rain - reveals the normally invisible energetic spectra of broadcast television signals. This one was in collaboration with Joyce Hinterding – it was the National representation for the Sao Paulo Biennale in 2004. It is a system that detects the energy in the room – the waves of energy that are passing through the space.
A system of home made electronics, makes the carrier wave signals audible and also uses the electrical intensity of the fluctuations of electromagnetic energy in the room to control or throw up sequences of images on a screen – in this case, a synthetically derived image of a mountain in avalanche, one that is photorealistic. These carrier wave signals are normally inaudible, but on the back of every image sequence that you see on your TV screen is a signal that holds the information in the forms of oscillating waves that given the right treatment, can be heard as a shape in them selves. This is what travels through the air from the transmission station to your TV.

When I made the proposal we had no ideas, I started with a line – it was literally the very beginning of the work – the zero point of the work, “A mountain falls from radio waves “ in other words we worked up from that premise –“ how do you do that? “ was the first question “can we actually make this thing” and Joyce “we can use the energy that’s in the air” me –“oh if that’s the case, we might need a random number generator” – in fact, randomness came from building an electronic form of a roulette wheel. Its tricky getting randomness but that’s another big story. There are some good ways to do it. The roulette wheel is not my favourite; it uses lots of small fiddly components – the gambling side felt nice about it though.

“A mountain falls from radio waves “ at the time, I didn’t really know exactly why I wrote that, but of course the war had begun in Afghanistan and mountains where literally falling from radio waves every single day - the TV was on constantly in the background flickering like a glowing halo.

The 17th Century – an solo work – was shown in the 2002 Sydney Biennale titled (The World May Be Fantastic) Its all generated inside the computer. The left hand side was sequenced by hand, along layers and layers of timelines. It took nearly twelve months to make. It was like knitting or weaving a scene on a loom. One friend tried to help – she vowed never to return. I was interested in the emission of house lights as signal devices. It’s similar to a scene out the window of my old flat in Coogee. But I added extra bits to make a new “elsewhere”..untimely elements like the Shinto temple, the flag, buildings from other parts of Sydney and I set the work in my version of the 17th century. Why Not! It’s precisely what an artist can do – make it up. The work has bizarre origins based around a real world experience and a kind of fantasy when ever I stood at my window at night. It was a great view, so there was plenty of opportunity to dream up scenarios. It was for me the untimeliness of the work that was interesting – what if the seventeenth century looks just like our world does today.
The house lights of the suburban scape that are being turned on and off in obvious patterns are like a musical force in themselves, a sequenced pattern of on and offs sometimes making striking rings or animal shapes…the suburban nightscape becomes a computer or musical synthesizer or an inferred supernatural intelligence might be at work, producing a spectacular order - forms appear out of what should be a random event of people going about their daily lives. Early computer programs worked exactly the same way – paper with punch holes making a sequence or a rhythm. There was very little sound in the work – some aeroplanes flying through (upside down ones) and just the nightscape.

On the right hand screen, these beautiful ugly eruptions – an unknown category – the churning smoke of a mathematical sequence – a non physical camera rendered the sequence – a ray marching engine did the maths from my inputs – who knows what that really is ? – a formula designed to make cloud like forms that seem to reach out to the limits. Someone needed this formula to model pyroclastic phenomena in nuclear explosions.

Working with these things is like making a dream become present done always at night – in front of the screen it seems like one can be anywhere and make anything – beyond the confines of travelling in the real world to an actual location. I like the image because its not based on anything – much.

Electromagnetique Composition for building plants and stars came out of a residency at the Sendai Media Tech in Japan. Toyo Ito’s building was a great inspiration. His statements about what his building is actually doing are a masterpiece.
Our work put in place, around the column in the gallery, a 14 km long copper wire coil that was an energy gathering system, it works off induction, similar to Joyce’s longstanding project Aireology and the coil, without any other electronics other than its turning around the column was able to resonate with the frequency of the background noise of the milky way, was able to hear the activity of the sun as the ions exploded out of its thermonuclear reactions and it also was able to detect the data flows within the building – the wiring systems, the wireless network. One of my parts was to add into the ensemble the electromagnetic emanations from the overgrown plant life by the river that ran next to the building. Could we hear the plants speaking in another language was my big question (a popular idea in the seventies) we plugged ourselves into the plant life and they spoke a clocklike ticking language. We filmed this event as a spooky green image, turning day into night. I wanted to add greenness.
We also added a chaotic antennae – more Marcel Duchamp than the actual theory of antennas to see what would happen and it somehow gave a signal upsetting just a little our understanding of radio theory. There always has to be a place for little bit of madness or drunkenness in these works, for fear of the cold. Or “just try things out”

There are actually quite a few works past this last example such as Two Works for Willhelm Riech and the latest one Black Canyon with Earth Field 2008 that all have similarities to these works but also extra differences, between them. Even though we are building systems that gather real world phenomenon we are also launching these into fictional and semi fictional fields of filmed and constructed and synthetically derived imagery – even when a real world location is shot, it forms part of a composite image plane that is as much synthetically derived. Something about the algorithm in action has had me thinking about a matrix array of movement that has no actual movement – equations are very strange things, very abstract machines.

Just like magic, a mysterious and wonderful form of cold energy can be produced by simply knocking two crystals together to form a white light, a lightning bolt inside a stone, a kind of primitive action – triboluminescence that I discovered for my self just by chance one day. It turns out is at the heart of the digital circuit because it makes for an efficient timing mechanism – a pulse – a kind of ghostly knocking. Computer technology then, is completely part of the nature of stone. We think of technology as existing outside of nature, but it is not outside of nature at all – it pre-exists us merely as a potential force to be unleashed.

I actually grew up in a house where a ghost knocked on the wall all the time amongst other things – no shit, it was not that fun, though it led to some funny moments. Seeing my then 18 year old rock-climber mate run and jump onto my parent’s bed in absolute terror was one of them.

This energy found in the coil thing is not so much a timer but the result of sympathetic resonance - through an arrangement of wire we are able to listen to these phenomena inside the ear, taking the form of pressure waves of sound.
The objects bring the field up to the level of the spiral of the ear. Hearing is the act of touch in the ear. Light in the projection is bouncing photons back at the surface of the eye and the organ is able to detect the frequency that it is reaching the retina and is interpreted by the brain. Colour is inside you. How we think about it once it gets into the brain is another thing and a task for the receiver and the analyst or the semiotician.

In the case of the aroma chemistry work, a composition of molecules reaches the receptors in the nose and the chemical stimulates the nerves that reach up into the amygdyla part of the brain – part of the limbic system, its tied very closely with the emotional system, intuition, emotions and fear, its in the front of the skull – this is why smell evokes such powerful sensations and why it produces such strong associative memories.

Thanks to the world of perfumery and also industrialisation and the desire to smell good (though that last ones questionable) the palette of materials that one can work with is enormous, some 4000 singular molecules and bases. Perfume after the late 1800’s has never relied much on natural materials, in fact synthetics quickly revolutionised the art Perfumery – Perfumery as I discovered, has been through its avant garde phases, its modernities, its post modern phases and has kept abreast with its conceptual side as much as any other form of creativity. Interestingly, some areas of Perfumery have resisted the market and explored the limits of what a perfume can be for its own sake. The other side of the coin is that functional fragrance is everywhere, bordering on environmental pollution and is almost toxic, especially to the environment.

After all, these chemicals, like the electromagnetic scape we are currently living within, are all highly emissive – we are submerged in a cloud of electricity and also a cloud of chemical vapour and amazingly, they are both dependent on electrical field forces in order to manifest. The bonds of the molecules are only able to be held in place by virtue of electromagnetic charge - everything then is on fire – a cold fire mostly, but I find it heartening to think we are all made up of the material of stars.

One fascinating idea is an alternative theory about how we smell.Much has been written on it lately, in some mainstream books because the guy who thought it up is an intriguing character, Bio-Phyicicst, Luca Turin.His theory is that what we smell is the frequency of the spin of the charged particles in the molecules. This means that smell works in a similar way as we hear and see – frequency of the molecules in smell,frequency of light in the eye and frequency of pressure waves in the ear.

Lately, for a future work (that will hopefully be shown this year) that is fixated on the sun, I have been working with a class of Ozonic materials with names like Ultrazur, Scentenal, methoxymelonal, bourgeonal, florhydral, cyclamal, silvial, precyclemone b, vernaldehyde, myrac aldehyde, geraldehyde, (muguet aldehyde), ozonil, isofreshal nitrile, adoxal, ozofleur, aphermate, arbozol, melafleur, melozone, azuril, floralozone, fleuranil, dupical, gelsone, intreleven aldehyde, octacetal decyl methyl ether, undecenol, dynascone, cyclogalbanate, Helional and my current favourite, Ocean Carboxyaldehyde, or more sexily, Maritima. Someone kindly sent me an aluminium flask of the stuff. A very knowledgeable perfumerer pointed out to me Maritima’s oddball character. It has a blood note. – on the smelling strip there is certainly a metallic ring to this material, but it is also very fresh, like the smell of air. I don’t smell saltiness, which is interesting given the name. It’s long lasting. Three hours later the so called blood note has risen up in pitch, it’s neither meaty nor animalic but is like when you cut your finger and drink the blood. Apparently it has a nitrogen bearing molecule, a pyridine which is fairly unusual in aroma molecules. (4-(4,8-dimethyl-3,7-nonadienyl) pyridine) On the IFF website, its olfactory description doesn’t mention anything about fresh blood, but it does say Fresh, Ozone (Fresh Air/Marine) Powerful, clean, wet, fresh air tone, reminiscent of ocean breezes. I like this material, it smells very fresh and indeed airy – pre thunderstorm and a little bit flint like. I don’t much like the Wicki entry on Pyridines; they seem scary and toxic. This one is not subject to any allergen restrictions, so one may assume it’s fairly safe, but you wouldn’t want to drink it. Other Pyridines are apparently fishy. This one it’s all air – no fish. A week later, I go back to the smelling strip with the Maritima on it, smells the same in intensity as to when it was first dipped and the " Blood note" rings loud and true - there is also a slight lolly like nuance, maybe like icing sugar to what is basically a very fresh smelling extremely long lasting chemical. Fresh blood, with breeze and cake.

The thing I love most about all of this is the subjective and empirical nature of the whole process of evaluation which involves a quiet and focused space, like close listening in music. The other thing that I love is that the process is very similar to painting or composing with sound. You have all this formalism around basic procedure in organic chemistry, but the only way to find out what’s really going on is to sniff the stuff. You literally put the material inside the head. Every intuitive tweak sets off a chain reaction and often you end up with many, many minor variations on an idea. Perfumery always starts with an idea or an image and makes for seductive highly imagistic conceptual challenges. A garden after its caught fire.
Crawling through a tomato patch. The smell of someone you like. Books in a library. A dust storm in the desert. Or really abstract compositions – a solar accord.

Interactivity in New Media, often relies on very dumb slow interfaces – so much slower than the brain and the body can process, but this activity of working with aroma composition is like putting the computer program right inside ones head and it goes almost instantly to the brain, seemingly almost as fast as a thought. The fact that these things are highly crafted considered compositions of accords, that don’t rely on another badly designed operating system from Apple, to me, is something very positive indeed.

What we have here then, is something like a very soft and benign form of the drug experience and indeed ironically many of the molecules used are the precursors to a lot of designer drugs. Indole – part of the smell of your shit and also in Jasmine and Honeysuckle and many other tastes and smells is the central ring of LSD and also has the same shape as serotonin Indole, is the volatile version of the serotonin molecule. Volatility is the key that lets these things fly and reach our noses. Heavy molecules hang around longer, lighter ones fly away quicker This is exploited in fragrance design and it adds an element of time to the equation and this is why the character of the quite decent composition J Lo Glow goes through a number of phases starting with a very luminous yellow pineapple strawberry abstract fruit situation that eventually ends up in hyper modernist overdrive, all shards of metallic light (the glow part I guess) and completes with a dolly sweet clean smelling musk (galaxolide for the clean laundry at a guess and ethylene Brassilate for the lolly – musk, once a deer’s gland, then the offshoot of the discovery of TNT, later a nobel prize for exaltanone (one of the nicest crystal structures ever made). J lo glow definitely goes out with a bang.


The accord in fragrance design works like a small miracle. It relies on combinatory ratios and even something like a golden mean section, its all about harmony. But with an accord you have say, 9 of one material, 6 of another and 6 of another – this might create a new smell that is something very different from the original materials, it’s just like a chord in music. Butter + fresh Grass + green apple + Fairy Floss in the right combo of ratios = strawberry. – a complex fragrance will contain many accords – a linear conceptual Art fragrance might only use one or two.


Synergism is a mysterious element. Which chemicals need to interact with each other to create something diffusive and otherworldly and also lasting and powerful?
This knowledge of which chemicals are synergists is the closely guarded secret of every perfumerer. You will never find this information written on the internet.

I have recently been recreating a lot of hacker fragrances – these are stolen formulas by Russian mafia – scientists, that form the rip off version of things like channel 5 or other famous frags that you can buy cheaply. They are really accurate formulas, – the mafia guys use sophisticated Gas Chromatography to scan all the molecules – the formulas come from no-where.

Gaining access to the captive and synthetic molecules has been a great adventure in itself – they are not easy to get. Now I have regular parcels arriving in the post – many of the materials in your favourite fragrance are just one step away, if not actually a drug – Le Feu De Issey a favourite of many, is overdosed with Calone discovered in 1968 – it looks a lot like valium and was actually what the discoverers thought they had found – a new calmative. It smells watery and a bit like melon, but it also seems to boost all the other smells massively, until they become monolithic. That’s synergism 101 and considered now to be a bit of a passé chemical. One thing you can say about being an artist is that it’s a license for opening up doors to unusual places.

Finally, the application, of aroma as art in outline.

Two projects: a commission to produce a number of fragrances based around two parts of the Parramatta River – one based around the industrial tidal zone – all wrecked cars, spilt oil, used condoms, fennel and mangrove.

The other based around the headwaters of the river, which has phosphate ridden algal blooms, jacaranda trees, jasmine and since it was also the site of bloodshed during the colonial period, possibly the smell of death and spilt blood. Indole rates highly in Channel 5 and also corpse, at a certain stage of decay. I have smelt a corpse once by accident – it made us all sleepy – there was this narcotic perfume in the air, it was one new years eve, no one wanted to go out, we all lay around on the bed and the floor – we where not taking drugs or drinking yet. Everyone was saying how great the air smelt. We could barely leave the apartment block. We where literally I think, drunk on the smell of a corpse. That’s a true story.

Finally and very briefly, Second project Earth Star – We will film directly into the sun using hydrogen Alpha filtration with a dedicated Solar Telescope – It shows the sun in vivid detail. We shall be able to listen to the sun as it churns out energy and hopefully, if things go to plan we will be able to smell the ions of burning air – Anti- Cinema, the source, the lightning bolt that is, to quote Gilles Deleuze one final time , the Z of creation.