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.

Putting Sugar in the Sea

Ethyl Maltol is apparently perceivable at 10,000 parts per billion in the air and this non toxic chemical smells of spun sugar. It’s warm and brown and makes me think of Iranian fairy floss which is something worth eating if one ever gets a chance.

Labdanum absolute smells like sweaty sex in a spice laden oasis.

Exaltanone is a musk that goes from bottom to the top but is not a lolly musk, but lives (for me) down the bottom end of what is perceivable, like an overtone in music you register the sound but cant tell what the source is.

Methylbenzodioxepinone – adds the transperant ocean. Similar to certain sexual atrractants known as Ectacarpones from Brown Algae. Some dismiss this chemical because of its overdose in Issey et al from the 90’s but I find it fascinating.

Corriander Seeds smell warm.

Long lasting skeleton that works.

Hacker Frag

Whilst dragnet fishing on the internet I found some Russian Fragrance formulas for very famous fumes. Things like Channel 5, Paris, Eternity etc (I would love to find even a half baked formula for L'eau d'Issey - just to satisfy my curiosity - we know it has a dose of Calone 1951 patented by Pfizer.Methylbenzodioxepinone (for the lover of technical names) or watermelon ketone, for those who like their white bread with peanut butter and jam. I also smell indole and some kind of white flower bot.
WICKI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calone

I decided to dial up the Channel 5 formula courtesy of the Russian space program. I had about 99% of the chems laying around anyway, so why not exercise a little reverse engineering in the name of education? I followed carefully through the list, trying to discern what was top, what was modifier and what was base and what I could see from the numbers, as in weight of materials or ratios of parts.

I imagine that the formula might have got spat out of miles of extra thin glass tubing from some kind of steam punk Gas Chromatograph in the backroom of some woodpanelled snowbound Siberian lab, in some unnamed pine forest.Unscrupulous types would then sell these recreations on Canal Street to unsuspecting tourists as knock offs of the real thing or perhaps they ended up as frags "in the style of...Channel number 5, or functional products, maybe to deodorise Mir etc.

I think some of the quantities of the concentrate seemed a bit off the wall. My source said that an experienced perfumer said they where heading in the right direction but there where too few components. (I like it - a sort of skeleton frag) Maybe it was a toilet spray in the style of channel 5,who knows. I certainly wouldn’t drink the stuff, that’s for sure and aldehydes are not really my thing. One aldehyde I had never heard of is the one signed(woody)but these might be inhouse accords that no one has seen this side of the zone.

What turned up for me was a waxy aldehydey strong lipstick accord. It’s an archetypal smell that makes one instantly think “shiny red lips!!!” - its kind of sexy and clean if you like that sort of thing. Add some synthetic Castorium and you might get lipstick and neoprene rubber; fetish anyone!(Castorium - the non synthetic type is the secretion from a gland near a beavers ass, a whole other kind of fetish, wouldn’t you say !)Humans are very experimental really, who would have thought to use that?

My smell memory of Channel 5 was marginal to say the least. I was in town with a few moments to spare, before meeting up with a friend, so I ripped into a third rate frag-dome full of celebrity crappolla (not J-lo glow on which more refined sensibilities than mine agree is well made. (I always thought it was interesting)
Found a bottle of Channel 5 lying under the rubble and took a whiff.In a microsecond, I recognized my Russian stuff. What I had made was a bit like in that sci-fi movie, where you land on that unnamed planet that looks something like earth for a a moment but it dawns on you pretty quickly that its nothing like it.

Where did I go with it? Too much decoration with acetates and other strange alcohols to try to make it green – back onto the lets make a garden and set it on fire, fragrance. At one stage a ring of light appeared that my friend encourages me to continue to seek!!!

I add here for sake of my faulty memory that the antiseptic note that arrived from the tinkering is I think an interaction between the waxyness of the aldehydes and the smoke from the rectified birchtar. The composition itself has melded and stabilised and my new impression is that the green alchohols and acetates where not as strong as first thought, but still interesting. After about ten minutes the birch tar turned up like somebody entering the room and the difference between the short lived top versus this new middle is like changing channels on the radio. I was thinking maybe this band aid smell might be shifted sideways with something like cinnamic alchohol or eugenol. The bottom notes are pretty piss weak, lipsticky still and faintly musk. The structure is obviously really flawed but all is not lost.

Found formula.

Chanel 5
1. Linalool 5.0
2. Benzylacetate 15.0
3. Woody Type Aldehyde 5.0
4. Aldehyde C11 10% 1.0
5. Aldehyde C12 10% 1.0
6. Aldehyde C12 MNA 10% 1.0
7. Ylang-ylang oil 5.0
8. PhenylEthyl Alcohol 5.0
9. Oakmoss 10% 1.5
10. Galbanum oil 6.0
11. Styrax oil 0.2
12. Aurantine 0.2
13. Labdanum resinoid 1.0
14. Methyl Ionone 3.0
15. Ionone pure 100% 3.0
16. Patchouli oil 0.5
17. coumarin 1.0
18. hydroxycitronellol 5.0
19. isoeugenol 1.0
20. Amyl Cinnamic Aldehyde 5.0
21. Benzylsalicylate 10.0
22. Musk Ambrette 10.0
23. Musk Ketone 5.0
24. Clary sage oil 0.1
25. Dihydromyrcenol 10.0

Working With Hermann Nitsche (& the antiseptic smell of animal blood)

“Now we will see how you are with the blood" was the first thing he said. He had on a pair of round, gold rimmed “speigals.” A thin line of red paint and congealed blood between the rims and the lenses aroused my curiosity about what we where getting ourselves into. Flecks of red paint on his gold watch also caught my eye. He wore a hat, a vest and a black jacket. He looked like a character that had come to life out of Proust.

I jumped up onto the back of the open tray truck filled with white plastic drums. One of the plastic drums touched my leg as I picked it up. I could feel warmth through plastic. In my minds eye, I remember a slow motion movie of cows falling, percussive thumps, big brown eyes becoming cloudy, the blood somehow magically ending up in these buckets. We lifted the white plastic 40 Ltr pails down to the ground and then took them into the large wooden gallery space that floated on top of backlit green jelly like water.

Later, Nitsche was being wheeled around on a scaffold by some of the other assistants. This old world looking man, hurling buckets of blood at the wall like he was a strange artist/priest.He wore a white gown.We had spent days stretching canvasses to the wall, but Nitsche was throwing and wiping the blood, almost as soon as they went up.Unlike Jackson Pollock, Nitsche liked to mostly throw and wipe the blood with the canvasses already attached to the wall(though,he did also throw it onto floor canvass as well). The blood and bright red enamel paint, would run in thin and fat streaky columns that where strikingly beautiful,like a drip landscape, the blood would seperate into little masses of cells, tiny fillegrees of this incredible organic pigment that formed a field. I will never forget that smell.

It was interesting to be part of a process that allowed for improvisational ju-ju within a fairly formalised compositional strategy.It seemed like a good way to work -a methodology that produced both consistency and the nice things that come from accidental procedures; pours and splashes and sweeping actions creating an ocean wave of blood or a red blood cloud. I learnt something from this.

Everyday, the space was full up with press people. I looked up to see a frozen sheet of elongated blood heading in my direction. Milli-seconds later, I was blindsided by the stuff. The blood went smack! soaked my lower body and filled my shoe. Specks of blood splashed up onto my face.Time stopped, except for the gentle pop of the press photographers flash guns and the whir of moto-drives. Everyone gasped for a second and froze in their tracks.I caught Nitsche’s eye for a moment. He was carefully judging to see if this was going to be some kind of set back. I smiled up at him and he smiled back, he paused awhile longer, to see that things where ok, and then went back to the job. Ever the performer, he knew that how he painted the work, was as much the work as the finished thing. He named it a " Painting Action" in a loud banner, on the outside of the building.

Late one afternoon A and myself where given the job of disposing of some leftover blood. It had been sitting around for a long time, maybe a couple of weeks. What was incredible was how the blood would congeal into this solid jelly. You could have poured it onto the ground and it would have held its shape like a sculpture. It didn’t smell like balsamic, antiseptic, plastic, anymore - it had a spikiness to it that was like a thousand pin pricks in the nose, but not like rotting meat, this was somehow a kind of pure rankness. We suddenly decided to do something very mischeivous. No one was around to see us, so we hurled the contents of the bucket overboard into the harbor. Remember, it was dusk. This is the time of day that your dog will get knocked off if he goes for a swim and everyone knows that sharks arrive in numbers at this time of the day for a feed, especially in Sydney harbor. The best bit was watching the blood form a giant black stain, just like in the movie Jaws. We watched in vain for the arrival of the circling dorsal fins.Sadly, they never came.

After six o clock, when the press had finally left to go to the pub and most of the biennale people had gone home, Nitsche had some of us put on the white gowns that appeared in the work. These then had blood poured down from the neck, forming rivers from the neck down. It was a macabre and powerful gesture. We then placed the gowns throughout the installation and they hung like religious smocks of murdered priests picked up from the floor of a Dionysian orgy.In hindsight, you can see why people might react, especially the sensationalist press who had a field day with the whole thing.

Later we added 50 or so animal brains and bouquets of yellow ? flowers to the installation.

Nitsche had real presence; I had never before met anyone like him.I guess he was the first A-List Artstar and media star that I met. Hermann had brought with him a large wooden crate of books and cd’s, records and videos. It was the videos I think, that eventually brought in the vice squad. They almost shut the whole thing down. I am not sure what they where responding too? Some of the videos showed his yearly ritual performance in Prinzendorf, Austria. It may have shown some perfectly innocuous blood sodden naked art students, but it also showed some happy people stomping grapes. The strongest image was probably of a cow being disemboweled(a dead one) Hermann was pretty much incapable of hurting anything, I would think. If my memory serves me correctly, the vice squad eventually gave everything back, after a few weeks of analysis. Hermann didn’t seem too worried about any of this. I got the impression, that every time he did one of these works, which was frequently, some sort of controversy would follow.

Hermann talked openly and extensively about his life and the people he knew, which seemed to be everyone. He was generous in the way he was interested in what we where working on, we where just finishing artschool. I remember getting the impression that his life was strangely rarefied, sheltered in some ways, protected by his lovely psychoanalyst wife and also romantically driven by his artistic vision and that came through in the way he was totally genuine about what he was doing. There was no sense of irony that I could detect. Nitsches life is elevated. And in the long hours of many a restaurant meal, a nightly ritual that seemed to go on for weeks and weeks, (at his expense, we where all very poor students) Nitsche talked about personal things, things that where real and unreal, things I could never really talk about here.

Helional - Ozonic & Marine

hydrocinnamaldehyde, alpha-methyl-3,4-(methylenedioxy)

Described as harsh, fresh air, marine green with top notes of fresh mown hay this is one of the materials that is classed as Ozonic.

Others in this class of marine and ozonics (in various shades) include Ultrazur, Maritima, Scentenal,melonal, methoxymelonal, bourgeonal, florhydral, cyclamal, silvial, precyclemone b, vernaldehyde, myrac aldehyde, geraldehyde, citronellyl
oxyacetaldehyde (muguet aldehyde), ozonil, isofreshal nitrile, adoxal,
ozofleur, aphermate, pinoacetaldehyde, arbozol, tangerinol, melafleur,
melozone, azuril, floralozone, fleuranil, dupical, gelsone, intreleven
aldehyde, octacetal, decave, decyl methyl ether, undecenol, dynascone,
cyclogalbanate, cyclaprop, cis-3-hexenyl salicylate, algae abs. (a large number of the above as suggested by Timon from the mailing list Perfume Making.)


Before a thunderstorm – the asphalt seems to float up about six feet, releasing its medicinal vapor like a blanket. Another invisible force as movement and shape – the road rises off the ground, its aura, its second body, its double, its twin, its particle version. How many of these things form part of our world. We should make a map like te sound ecologists tried to do with sound. Sound Ecology perhaps a bit side tracked with a mild fixation on the essential qualities of the natural, over the man made.Undoubtedly influential and some great work done but not if it just leads one back to the same old orthodoxys, the binary of culture/nature.

Far away, standing in scratchy deep green heath, forked lightning approaches. The air changes and we smell gunpowder flint, the breaking of rocks, a percussive dryness, the white hot flash of a lizards tongue through the sky, however, is it actually Ozone or the excited particles of burning air I can smell? We weave our way up out of Wollemi Creek in a blessed thunderstorm (it was red hot in the build up, making the ascent an almost frightening prospect) we jumped at the strikes as they went to ground on either side of the ridge we where climbing.

Super charged something’s, the smell of electricity, burning ions, overheating wires. In an instant, the speed crack of malfunction, mixed with burnt plastic. Blitzen & Thumpen. The circuit board sizzles and dies, right at the last minute before the opening. Influenced perhaps by Solar Weather. Sun spot cycles that blast the earth with radiation, everything’s in a cycle, a wave, a movement.Could it have been that hidden time.

(future of television) “ And on the space weather front things are not looking good for tomorrow, Tony. We have a large ionic storm approaching, leading to the possible failure of handheld devices and navigation systems” though far more likely it will be more like >“We communicate more and more in more defined ways than ever before. But no one has got anything to say It's all very poor it's all just a bore”em> - Stereolab End Station Break

Torching dust and displaying it, like some mad Duchampian experiment. “How is it you make your Art, again?” (Pause for a second) “Oh I am a professional dust burner upperer. I heat it with a flame. It takes me all around the world, mate. “ Anything’s possible in a capitalist system!

I am looking at some of the ozonic and marine molecules for a commission we have fo based on a river. This is some river; it’s in the backwaters of Sydney Harbor. It has many distinct zones. Fresh water at the top above a weir and tidal below that, eventually leading to the famous harbor and out into the wide blue Pacific.

In its furthest reaches and catchments there are weed infested creeks. The very same ones that I used to explore in my childhood. On the banks in the tidal section, shiny twisted Mangroves rising out of nutrient rich, acrid, industrial waste sodden mud? On the banks, in some places wild Fennel smelling of aniseed, one of the essential oils of amphetamine, tangled in amongst the natives. Was the fennel planted by migrants? I suspect that’s the case.

Rust is blood and the hulks of industrial machinery lay everywhere, like a battle that’s taken place in the future. Remember, in the land of OZ where we live, the future is Mad Max style - Bricollage boundary riders, all improvised space ships as if designed by Alison Cloustan and buxom amozonian alpha women that straddle levitating motorcycles, ready to drive that wooden spear, straight “up ya ass, mate”

Before river side suburbia completely takes over in the area, around Ryde, we have the astonishing contraptatron of the Shell Oil refinery. A Sydney landmark for its eternal flame seen daily from one of our major highways and the subject of a brilliant Australian Novel, by one of our finest writers, David Ireland.

“The Unknown Industrial Prisoner” I discovered in the first year of high school. Here was a book that described so directly, in utterly vivid and surreal terms, using a newfound syntax and structure,the very world I was living in. It takes you into the full on intensity of living on the edge of the interface between the vast tracks of the ghost of market gardens and fruit orchids and penal colony archi- shadows of reclaimed suburbia and the chug and pulse and mystery of the factories that where starting to flourish in post 1960’s Australia. When I think about it, this part of Sydney is full of quasi mythological ghostly structures and installations – sandstone quarries that provided the building blocks for the nineteenth century mental hospitals, gaols, government houses, tree stumps from the first farm, yard rails(where we where told as kids that they killed the blacks) and Masonic halls that no one seemed to go to anymore and not forgetting the almost impenetrable substations that hummed like summer cicada's. All of this, amidst various levels of freshly painted 50’s and sixties modernism (if you could call it that)and the strange flimsy housing commisions. And then, the creeks mentioned above. Always either in flood or showing the signs of a former flood – reeds along the banks swept back like a flick back hairstyle, of the latest crush. But always signifying danger – the ghosts of dead children inhabited almost every bank, another kid sucked into a slimy drainpipe during a storm, the subject of a futile rescue attempt, snuffed out by dirty black water. I bet it was a cold death.

Along the main channel below the Parramatta weir, a decommissioned gasworks, rubber factories, and eventually reclaimed land, fast tracked little utopias. The modernist housing villages worthy of J.G Ballard, cut grass and beautiful jacaranda trees and shiny rails and square windows and grey bag renderings with fake wood and yellow stone; probably churned out of a factory in India. Assembled god knows where and shipped in as panels – a perfectly serviceable looking feaux hand crafted dry rendered stone wall.

I see on the bank a crashed car, more rust smell, this time with oil and in keeping with the theme of Ballard, a mud soaked G string, once red - now sun faded pale menstrual pink, also muddy - a used condom in the sun and what looks like spatters of something like blood on the car bonnet. Loads of weird rubbish. Comme de Garcons Garage, anyone ! Not quite, but almost. Definetely a blood accord required.Something with an iron molecule. I remember pouring hundreds of liters of blood for Hermann Nitsche - it smelt antiseptic, thick, balsamic and somehow amazingly like plastic.

To do this latest task, I have been building a collection of marine odorants. First arrival was Ultrazur, a proprietary accord from Givaudan – what a bunch of molecules this is. This stuff is overwhelmingly strong. I notice it has a life of 400 hundred hours on the blotter. I must test this idea, but it seems to me this stuff is just full bore intensity from whoa to go. Some perfumery materials are like this. Vanilla is one people are warned about, how it will override everything else in a composition. For some that might be a pleasant outcome but this accord is not something that you want to pour a bottle of over yourself in a hurry (not even your worst enemy). According to the Givaudan website, its said to be Inspired by a visit to the islands of the Indian Ocean. Reminiscent of walking on the beach, this high impact, substantive base features an accord of clean ozonic air fused with sun dried tropical woods.

Some walk on the beach! Straight into the mouth of a dead whale. I get something much more fecund and challenging out of the smell of this material than a walk on an indian ocean beach (even in extreme dilution) I have also observed a change of perception with this one, where one is initially hit in the face with a raw egg yolk nuance (sulphurous perhaps) that becomes less and less prominent over time. Could this be impurities leaving the bottle – or continuing maturation of the material? Why not? It happens with any accord and even an EO like patchouli ages over time. The other day with Katherine, as we walked we smelt the sea...whacked in the face with sulphur and taken back to fishing with my father. Very few molecules in the perfumery world contain sulphur. Next Maritima by IFF, someone nice, recently sent me an aluminium flask of the stuff. A very knowledgable perfumerer pointed out to me Maritimas Oddball character. A blood note. Now thats a coincidence re the above.

Some time later.

I know what he means – 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 get any saltiness what so ever which is interesting given the name. It’s long lasting. Three hours later it smells exactly like it did when it was first put on the strip out of the bottle, though the so called blood note has risen up in pitch it’s neither meaty nor animalic. Apparently it’s a nitrogen bearing molecule, a pyridine which is fairly unusual. (4-(4,8-dimethyl-3,7-nonadienyl) pyridine) on the IFF website its olfactory description doesn’t mention 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 and post 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 aint got no fish smell.Its all air.

So heres an idea for something linear. It struck me walking out in the Wollemi area a few weeks ago, how aromatic and herb like this tract of Australian bush is. Eucalyptus is dominant in the Austrlian bush along with very dry banksia, dry schlerophyl is the common name for a lot of the country near to where I live. But somehow we had landed in another eco system altogether ( we had escaped the smell of eucalyptus) and wherever we went (we where off track or bush bashing as they call it in this part of the world) the aromatic nature of the crushed plants was not familiar at all. The fragrance experience was very linear,perhaps defined might be a better word.It was nothing like a lot of classical perfumery, where you have accord heaped upon accord creating something unworldly and hyper-blended. This was the single smell of some unknown plant mixed with the smell of the breeze and maybe a little dust but mostly air, plus something, plus something else. Three things then two of them fairly non descript or unnamable and one strong thing that was also unnamable. Curious experience. Up on that ridgeline and later down in the valleys it was tough going and very hot, but it would be great to go out there and spend a week making smell maps and even maybe tincturing some of this stuff.

Get some Maritima and add things to it.

A series of linear accords hence we could have for starters

Air & dry leaves
Air and dirt
Air and Rust
Air and sandstobe cave
Air and native holly etc etc

A week later I go back to the smelling strip with Maritima on it, smells very similar in intensity as to when it was fiorst dipped and the " Blood note" rings loud and true - it smells metallic and there is also a slight lolly like nuance maybe like iceing sugar smell to what is basically a very fresh smelling long lasting chemical. Fresh blood with breeze and cake !

Urine & Sweat

" Dogs and horses can smell fear in humans. Recent work by Denise Chen (Chen & Haviland-Jones, Physiology and Behaviour 1999; 68: 241-250) has demonstrated the ability of underarm odour to influence mood in others. Karl Grammer, in Vienna, has recently demonstrated that the smell of fear can be detected (by women) in the armpit secretions of people who watched a terrifying film (Ackerl, Atzmueller & Grammer, Neuroendocrinol Lett 2002; 23(2): 79-84). The implication of this work is that a chemical signal is secreted in sweat which communicates the emotion. "

ripped from http://www.cf.ac.uk/biosi/staffinfo/jacob/teaching/sensory/olfact1.html



(8S,9S,10R,13R,14S)-(+)-Androsta-4,16-dien-3-one - "very persistent odor of urine & sweat"

Threshold = 0.98 ppb

Ref: G. Ohloff, B.Maurer, B. Winter & W. Giersch, Structural and Configurational Dependence of the Sensory Process in Steroids, Helv. Chim. Acta, 66, 192-217 (1983); G. Ohloff, Scent & Fragrances, Springer-Verlag (1994), p. 27; John E. Amoore, et. al., Chem. Senses Flavour, 2, 401-425 (1977)

Flora-zal accords - Ultra High Resolution

1. Jessamine: A rough cut of Jasmine made only from aroma molecules, no naturals. I disavow nature.Taken from a list of compounding notes for flower accords in Perfumery- Practice and Principles. by Robert R. Calkin & J. Stephan Jellinek using things like Benzyl Acetate, Phenylethyl acetate, Hydroxcitronellal, Linalool, Geraniol, Cis 3 hexenyl Acetate, Cinnamic alchohol, Hedione , Indole etc

Emerging out of a void and appearing 3 dimensionally, a Jasmine flower unfolded after only three of the aroma molecules where added. Then little by little the complexity ramped up.At one stage the whole thing losing its identity & becoming a chaotic mess and then coming back into focus again. Finally, added the Indole – it turned into something of a giant scary thing. A runaway Jasmine monster emerged.

3 days later, diluted in alcohol it had become tamer. Taking a few seconds to appear on heavy blotting paper. This, time-delayed apparition business, might be something to really try to take hold of. But how would you track that ? – with a lot of rigorous procedure involving spreadsheets and a gazillion tests I would imagine or as intuitive knowledge developed over a long period of time. Either way, with experience! There is a lifetime of distracting work in all of this.

The indole got onto everything and I don’t know how, I was being very careful.
The most miniscule amount of this material is all that is needed. I am using Indole 10 % in IPM and then I further diluted it again in PGE. When I came back to the house I was surrounded by a floral cloud and I had to shower to get rid of it.Twice ! You can see why the animalic, feacal materials are so useful.

What is interesting is the way the accord smells fine, delicate - high resolution even. This question of resolution is amazing. One can really see why synthetic molecules have been used for ever. There is this geometrical feel to the smell that is very hard to describe. It’s like there are intersecting planes of something within the smell, but they are not hard edged jagged shards of spiky solvent, these are smooth flat planes, like sheets of transparent - I don’t know what. You can sense the resolution of the molecules – its all daylight & clear, temperature? None!

What is high resolution Jasmine? If not a kind of Honeysuckle and that’s what this smells like after 4 days. J picked it immeadiately.

Victorian households forbade Honeysuckle because it was said to instill erotic dreams in teenage girls.In the early 18th century the Turkish "Secret Language of Flowers" was introduced to Europe by Lady Mary Wortley Montague, wife of the British ambassador to Constantinople. Flowers had long been a sign of romance but now lovers were able to send secret messages to each other by means of sending a posy of codified flowers.

Baudrillard in his essay "Subjective Discourse or The Non Functional System of Objects" meditates on marginal objects (primitive, exotic or quaint) making the point that “it no longer has any practical importance it exists solely to signify”

“A whole category of objects seem to fall outside the (functional) system we have just analyzed: rare, quaint, folkloric, exotic or antique objects. They seem inconsistent with the calculas of functional demands in conforming to a different order of longing: testimony, remembrance, nostalgia, escapism. One might be tempted to see them as relics of the traditional and symbolic order. Yet, for all their difference, these objects form part of modernity and this is the source of their double meaning. “ …amazingly he claims “ We already saw that the cigarette lighter was mythological to the sea” and that to me folks is one corkscrew of a leap in signification.

2. to follow and so on....
Starting point for a second version of this accord.

yellow ring of the the sun washes over the top of me - I am underwater. A purple after image, all limbs stretched out; total saturation at the limit of seeing, at the limit of thought, at the limit of matter, infinite star you are a magnet.

Feuilles de Fantome (Ghost - Leaves)

Feuilles de Fantome

Notes: another green garden recreation. This time looking for the smell equivelant of a plant halo, like Kirlian photographs of plant auras from the 70's, but in smell.The approach from my notes went something like;

Hedione, Galaxolide,MPHyd(ctnll)accord, Hellional, Linalool, Scentanal, C(rdm),C(orndr), Cis 3 hex, Blck (P), Menthol, P(mnt) + Phenylacealdehyde tweaked in later.

3 months later what started as a promising attempt, got blown away by the Phenylacealdehyde.It must have been put in at way high dose, because now it smells like a 300ft high flower creature, with an echoe of that once ghostly green halo, far, far, away in the distance.
It might be rescued by dilution.

What I was looking for and didnt get, was extreme linearity. Simply - fresh cold air -crushed plants. When you look at whats in the thing, somehow I am not surprised !

Menthol derivatives, mixed with ozonic molecules as an accord. It would be nice to have the cooling effect without the minti-ness. And a super fixative that would just lock in any note and make it last for ages.



A "chain" of 1 carbon is meth- or sometimes form- (as in formate, formic acid).
A chain of 2 carbons is eth- or
acet-
3 carbons = prop-
4 carbons = but-
5 carbons = pent- or valer- or amyl
6 carbons = hexa-
7 carbons = hepta-
8 carbons = octa-
9 carbons = nona-
10 carbons = deca-
11carbons = undeca-
12 carbons = dodeca-
13 carbons = trideca-and so forth.

If the "number" has "iso-" in front of it, it means the chain isn't straight, but has branches but still the same number of carbons.Di does mean 2, tri means three. But they aren't used to describe carbon chain lengths but rather, for example, how many hydroxyl groups. -ol, the alcohol group.Test questions: How many carbon atoms does Ethanol have? Methanol? Propanol? Isopropanol? Butanol? Amyl alcohol? (from Mike Storer)

A Deconstructed Flower: Variations 1-9

Notes:Variations 1 - 9

1./ The dusty floral qualities of Phenylacetaldehyde was explored in combination with aroma molecules that smell of crushed leaves & stems, this was put into a cloud of synthesized Black agar from(G)which is incensy, powdery and highly diffusive, almost peppery with exaltanone(F)a famous musk & in line with a more traditional base accord. It conjured the image of a late afternoon cumulo-nimbus cloud bathed in amber light. Black Agar for me, is decidedly a brown cloud with black points in it. (the image on the left is the Phenylacetaldehyde molecule as a 3d object, the second image is of exaltanone musk crystals taken from the Firmanich website)

The nobel prize winning inventor of exaltone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruzicka_cyclization

2./ minute amt of dilute Styrallyl acetate was added providing prominent green juiciness

Hallucination Art

My body sings in every nerve ending as it glides towards a singing body.This singing body lives up to Spinoza’s expectation that “we don’t even know what a body is capable of “nor can “we know what a body is”.Since it was at once uncategorizable, without a proper name and yet undeniably there; Animal, Vegetable or Mineral?

This “Singing body” would call and I would levitate towards its sublime soundings by passing through bands of light and hovering motifs that resembled Japanese kites, - mind and body stretched on a rising polyphonic wave of motor-cross derived music.

Suburban creek and bush cave explorer, zones of intensity unfolded amongst wild fennel. Enfolded in balloon vine and touching the earth, grounding out a circuit that hurled each and every atom towards a deep and mysterious tidal pool at great-speed.It was brackish. For some moments I became the Martian landscapes of Daniel Paul Schreber.

The singing body - a plant being, animated geometry at the head and a non distinct mass at the base before me. Forming from a kind of image-light - a thin film of non- photons that appears not from daylight but from behind the eyes in the darkness of the skull. It was at once both a two dimensional and a three dimensional figure.

Light and colour manifest at the level of perception, the product of electrical energy. Receptors are stimulated & produce a change of state in the brain, in this case from a molecule that crosses the dermis via the lungs. What I was seeing was the light and colour of dreams during wakefulness. Perhaps a form of Anti- light and colour, like the place known as Antikythera (the opposite other) - a tiny island in the Ionian Sea, that sits next to the main island. Is this not then, the light and colour that sits to the side of sunlight,- a subteranean image field that manifests occasionally when awake, from the pockets and folds of the productive body and the chemical signals it produces. We are image factories. What is it about the molecule that allows one to produce everything internally - images and sounds ?

Generally, light and colour which hasn’t derived from the sun is considered to be artificial, an abberation. We know the common meaning of artificial “man made” but if we look back further we see it comes from the Latin “of or belonging to art," from artificium. This is light derived inside the body at the level of perception. Some animals emit chemical light, producing bio-luminescance, but my feeling is that the images of perception that are lit up in dreams might be being formed at the sub-atomic level.

This notion of internalised light and colour, becomes an interesting corollary for me, when we consider the role of the virtual camera in the production of images using 3d animation. This technology is central to my work in video art and photography – the camera doesn’t exist physically in the usual way. The camera is made up of binary code that acts as a data processor algorithmically working, on sets of coordinates expressed as shaded values on a screen.

What is remarkable is that this is an image system that is beyond glass optics. A method of representation known as ray tracing, partially made possible and used by Descartes, in his analysis of rainbows.4. These images generated by computer are simulations that can seem so real as to easily convince the viewer that what they are seeing has been photographed conventionally. Raytracing uses a collection of formula of physical laws in a Cartesian coordinate space, to draw a picture. In short, ray-tracing is a system of virtual - photography. Technology occults, it de-conceals. Insistently, images are born out of the darkness of this mathematical universe. It’s like a miracle. The function of a wave.

Video art works are hallucinatory & luminous apparitions, cast as light on the wall of a gallery. A surface without substance - smooth space of the image, turned on and then off, in the same way a vision in the mind appears and disappears. This is dematerialised art as opposed to the fattiness of impasto, the heaviness of stone or the immobility of a stuffed cat, wrapped in sticky tape and melted plastic.

I discovered early on, that the actions of molecules produced events. In my current exploration of the molecular affects of the aromatic molecules of perfumery (and there role in the production of new types Post Object Art) we find ourselves swept up in another, (thankfully) far safer form of intoxication - one that is a powerful trigger of thoughts, sensations, memories and feelings.

Perfumes seem like intoxicants, far more benign than the aromatic - hydrocarbons that are central to the act of sniffing glue. Aromatic molecules enter the body and go very quickly to the brain. The mechanism of smell is not yet entirely understood. Some of the chemicals behind common perfumes are the starting materials of psychedelic tryptamines that have been thoroughly explored in organic chemistry and consumed throughout the twentieth century and explored for millennia as part of traditional religious rituals.5. Many of these precursors, are also found in food and knowledge of the interaction of some of the more challenging odorant molecules has helped inform the radical and fascinating food movement known as Molecular Gastronomy. A field that amounts to in some ways as the “high art” branch of the experimental culinary arts. Other aromatic molecules are known attractors in the world of animals.

Take a molecule like Indole, it is found in lots of places, in nature – Indole is an important perfumery molecule and is also a close relative to Serotonin, it also forms the central ring of LSD. It is said, that serotonin doesn’t smell like Indole because apparently it is non - volatile. Serotonin doesn’t fly like Indole. Its use in perfumery is because it is found in Orange Blossom and Jasmine and I suspect because it has a strong boosting effect, in the same way that your shit has a density to its odorousness. Its certainly has a feacal character.

Indole is found in pig’s liver, truffles and white chocolate and many other desirable foods. Once you know its bottom of grandma’s closet (napthalene - when in full concentration) you can smell it everywhere. Indole, in high concentrations (as a synthesised molecule) is downright faecal and with good reason, you would know it from the smell of your own shit which along with Scatol, the methylated version, is loaded with it. In extreme dilution it is rather pleasent. In spring, I can smell it in our garden and spring is that fragrant happy time when our mood lifts.

There are many examples of close resemblances to active molecules in perfumery. Calone, a synthetic ozonic, sea watery smelling molecule discovered by Pfizer in 1966, is used in large quantities in Issey Mayake and occurs in Brown Algae in nature, looks very close to its molecular relative Valium. Luca Turin entertainingly writes about this, in one of his perfume reviews in a Zurich magazine. Perfumery may be giving us homeopathic doses of these molecules and our bodies maybe doing things with them. This could be part of the mystery and allure of perfume.

Glue was a kind of perfume as well. It was a highly dangerous experimental perfume, that allowed interaction with another being in another time and space. It opened up the possibility of knowing a new language – instantly. This being and I experienced a form of empathogenic communication that existed in lines of coded melody. A record of these conversations where housed as zig-zagged golden amber needles, that where twisted into filigree constructions (like a pile of tossed yarrow stalks made of light, that then bent into a tangle of shapes) with tiny offshoot tendrils, forming an intricate open weaved and chaotic blanket hanging in space. A kind of wire-frame architectonics, something I would come to know later as resembling the wire frame sub-structure of 3d models. When the need arose, to recall some aspect of our dialogue, we would simply “draw from a kind of quiver thing” and the melodic phrase would sound and we would simultaneously listen, acknowledge the meaning of the melodic phrase and move on to the next stage of the conversation.

The dialogue no matter how far “out there,” always had the sense that there where levels and tasks to be undertaken. This gave a feeling of order and hierarchy to the situation. I also experienced this “order and hierarchy,” in a very different way in the “machines of delirium“ that occurred as a child when affected by bouts of fever during illness. The “regime of power” that existed in that experience was a diabolical form of torture that conjured extreme terror and was anything but an encounter with an em pathogenic being, more like an encounter with “pure evil” and this tells me, we are a multiplicity of beings in a fleshy body. And Spinoza tells us that we are “An infinite number of attributes for any one substance”.

This “angel of the vines” communicated to me in a way that could only be described as completely compelling; an encounter with a powerful spiritual form. Through out my meetings with this unstable poly-morphology there was the constancy of a melodic refrain that functioned as a beacon, as a powerful lure through the blackness that reached out towards desire – desire to be in its aura.

Non organic life form – a gift in fading light. Substance less body into being - no skeletal structure required. You are high octane spirit – catalytic conversion from coal tar earth to “Hydrocarbon Angel”.

Projecting a field of radiance, a sensation permeated that I was meeting with a deeply feminine presence, that is very difficult to put into words. Representational signifiers had collapsed to be replaced by an almost total affective experience. This being, was wider at the base than at the top (figuration)– the perception of defined organs, body parts and structural elements that make up a sensible figure seemed almost redundant. The being was mostly a field of vibrational energy that had become like a living work of modern art albeit, one that exists in the virtual of the hallucination, rather than crossing over into the organic plane of the real.

Where the body is liberated from the things that hold it together;it confirms its extra - dimensionality.

This siren lived in the “smooth deeps” of a dark and unlimited mental void, always waiting just around the corner in a space beyond the terrestrial, inhabiting the celestial and infernal realms.

All the familiar features of flesh and blood had long departed into the outer reaches of time and space, to leave in its wake an afterimage, of what years later would become familiar when I saw the works of Duchamp & Brancusi. The realisation that they gave us the gift of images and objects of human forms, that had crossed the borders of the possible into new non-organic life forms. Always in motion, the idea of a body that surpasses meat and flesh, for one of light and space, a hyper criss-crossing of lines of pure pigment and shiny metal armour interlocking fragments that remained part of the whole. A construction of composites and fragmented crystalline hybrids that ultimately produce the authentic characters of art, in order to open up the possibility for the world of creatures to come; the creatures of anime, the horror film, photography and science fiction.

The work I make is filled to the brim with occulted inhabitations and haunting(s).
Apart from early youthful drug experimentation, this might be because I grew up in a house that was said to be filled with spirits. I clearly remember my parents and their friends gathered around the Ouiji board talking to “people from the other side”. I remember the sounds of summer infused with Swedenbourg’s recordings of people speaking from the dead, crackling away on the record player between bursts of the soundtrack from Apocalypse Now, which interestingly for a cinema soundtrack is not just the musical parts, but the dialogue and sound effects as well. I enjoyed the arguments and debates that would take place with family members around the table about psychology, religion and politics that was a constant in the days before the internet appeared and colour television arrived making everyone silent. It’s from this background I guess, that a work like “The Door” becomes possible.

The synopsis of the work hinges on the combination of a number of seemingly unlikely events, that bring together the sounds of battle and deep thudding artillery.We hear the distant pulse of a dub reggae rave party with its voodoo call to the libido; poltergeists fly through the space from one speaker to the other. Logging trucks rumble and an opium induced voiceover whispers, recalling the arrival of “earth’s daughter” from the “other side.” She has finally come back to the community of tree dwellers, after ejecting from a time travelling space ship to meet with her boyfriend. Along the way, we learn of a green star that appeared above the horizon that brought great misfortune. We learn of some of the farming practices that take place within this so called “sustainable community,” all of this via the spooky intoxicated mumblings and slurring of some one who is under the influence.It’s a kind of junkie hippy narrative, meets a set from Nicholas Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth”. Despite all of this, I simply wanted to make a luminous green work.

The characterisation solely takes place within the sound track of the work, making all of these events invisible to the eye, but alive to the ear.I wanted to make a work where the images of the characters appeared in the viewers head, rather than being seen on screen. I wanted the process of characterisation to be internalised, rather than external and I wanted to conjure ghosts. It was like a radio play in a strange and exotic setting. The sounds because of the audio technology of surround sound filled the space 3 dimensionally.

We see a two screen projection of an empty forest glowing in green luminous light. Bugs flitter in the air – the shadows move in the breeze. The forest is filled with sound.

The whole enterprise of cinema art is like a hallucinatory art – the art of assemblage, of sound colour and light that is projected. The computer is a machine that allows one to bring all of these thing together, it’s a kind of factory where a multiplicity of technologies exist, side by side, to produce these remarkable assemblages. When a work is successful, a great variety of elements come together to form a harmony, no matter how far away from each other in type, the elements seem to be. This potential for “difference” and synthesis to co-exist in a work of Art,is at the heart of novelty and for me is one of the most exciting aspects of the process of making art. Its like a new form of gymnastics – to make the body hold itself up in space in some interesting contorted positions, thus far unseen. The same thing then for ideas or materials, to make everything drunken and askew, frozen in time and space – a painting, a leap, a suspended white horse in the sky, a naked women fucks a cloud. (see fig 3.) Artists are human synthesisers.

Perfumery, in its history has paralleled cultural shifts and mood changes in society. It has had its modernity and within that certain styles have emerged that parallel what has occurred within contemporary art. The world of perfume composition is a highly developed field of knowledge and also a highly secretive and exclusive world. Part Art & Design & part organic chemistry as art, its commitment to discover new worlds for the senses through a remarkable compositional process & with an incredible palette of materials & commitment to conceptual ideas around the senses, surely makes this activity both an unofficial artform and a world of exciting future possibilities. Of course context is everything. The art of perfumery has been both strengthened & weakened by the forces of capitalism. There is "functional perfumery" that fills our world with smells and there is "fine fragrance" that manages to escape mass market imperatives.

Sniffing glue certainly “opened the doors of perception” but it is not recommended to anyone. It is a highly dangerous activity regardless of the magical gifts that it brings; it can easily end in tragedy.


fig 3. Jupiter & Io, 1531
Correggio.

Carbon Rose 1 - Radiation Series

The intention is to try to create an olfactory experience of a fire ravaged Rose Garden. This came about when I recieved a sample of Rectified Birch Tar, an extremely powerful substance that basically smells like bottled smoke.

I think about this accord as belonging to the Gothic style, funereal and something of a memorial. The desire then, is for a number of states of time to be expressed - the instant when the rose is burnt and releases its fragrance, (but in slow motion) and then the smell of the fire itself and its afterimage, a blanket of burnt timber.

This has sparked the idea of a "Radiation" series that are about energy - forces.The smell of a lightning storm, burning electrical wires, negative & positive ions, the smell of the sea and in this case, charred roses. What would an Atom bomb blast smell like? I have something in my collection which smells flinty, chipped granite or sand stone - it smells like broken rock.

" The quick of life would be the burn of a wound - a hurt so lively, a flame so avid that it is not content to live & be present, but consumes all that is present till presence is precisely what is exempt from the present. The quick of life is the exemplarity, in the abscence of any example, of un-presence, of un-life; absence in its vivacity always coming back without ever coming. "

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster.

Notes: Ozone, Rose Otto, Pyroclastic smoke, Charcoal, Crushed green leaves.

It has turned into a cigar accord. The start is exactly like opening a box of cigars, we then smell the rose. Time to get out the Indole.

Mis en Scene

The arrival of a landscape. It arrives, not in totality, nor as an ideal form because we are actually in it, but as a series of apprehended moments; movement as strobe, through the field of framed vision and with the thump of the feet that goes up to the pelvis, an obscure filtered low frequency plodding. But the ideal form is never far away. In these days of google earth some of us even carry a mental picture that comes from "space ships" of the country we are moving through - a kind of map image.

lonely walker humanoid
listening to forgotten sounds
tasting smells and colours
hiking mounts crossing rivers
humble biped you've come undone
you detached the mechanical
freedom it inspires
fusing with your desire
primal hiker lonely walker
re-discovering your own pace
left here to go elsewhere
abandon all impatience

reposess the senses
impression of freedom
time doesn't know itself
has mingle path and dream
animal survivor
you belong to nature
reposess the senses
impression of freedom
time doesn't know itself
has mingle path and dream

Stereolab: Puncture In The Radax Permutation

Fragmentary and through time, always moving through - always within - unfolding against the (un)fixed horizon - the curved line ahead, impossible to take in all the details simply because one with such a dangerous fixation, would fall into the deepest well, an abyss that would end in madness.

The general nature of what we call “the atmospheric” is certainly true to the word. “Something has taken over and filled the air” or “its misty today, we are living in a cloud” Atmospheres are diffusive and broadband and full of noise.

The radius that is always unfolding, the radius of vision; Would it be possible to put into the bottle a fearsome smell – the smell that makes ones skin crawl – undoubtedly a poison, but imagine a benign odorant, that sparked that creepy feeling you get when alone at night sometimes. Hormones or adrenaline relatives maybe ?


Fragrance as cinematic moment and meez on son, an installation in a bottle.

“Limitless space where a sun would attest not to the day, but to the night delivered of stars, multiple night “ Maurice Blanchot

The Sun -blinding, unrepresentable - always present.