FILMS
it is a short film about myself. the majority’s public opinion is not the criteria of self-evaluation for me since I am the most radical critic of who I am, what I do and where I am going. I don’t need your praise, yet there are the people who disgusted by me for the fact I am uncompromising in all of my gestures, ventures, undertakings & enterprises - and there were many of them, countless indeed - over the 41 years I spend in this mostly rotten world, 20 of which - in London. I am much cooler, smarter, faster, multi-skilled, and sexier than many of you, and always have been. the strangers speechlessly fail to read my biological age. I know my value and I don’t need anyone’s weak sugary preaching, especially by those whose sense of logic is inapt and the feelings are atrophied. as a matter of truth, I do enjoy when those flimsy bunglers flee from me or fearfully turn their eyes away. there were innumerable faceless clowns who spoiled my way up. keeping all of them far off my life, living by myself without distractions and constant indiscernible noise made me stronger as a unique individual, who is courageous beyond reach. just a few can equal me.
this film is the act of a revolutionary self-love. many of you are trying to achieve it via therapy or other capitalist tricks, by taking anti-depressants or abusing drugs while surviving on social benefits, by doing pricey retreats, by cowardly hiding behind other people’s back, by being stuck in the shakiness of open relationships and inevitable self-waste, or by being pretentious while critically spineless. I did nothing of that and I am proud of myself that the relentless dedication to work almost 24/7 over the last 17 months became the technique of perfecting my individuality - in each and every field, whether professional or informal. the praxis of excelling and standing out.
I never felt better because I am finally the boss of myself, setting the goals and overachieving them. laziness and relying on someone else are the plagues of the contemporary society. I do not need to defend myself or to prove anything to anyone, I establish my own cost which is priceless.
I am still and forever 14 years old rebel, poet, dreamer, warrior, who climbs the trees at every opportunity, sails the waves, jumps over fires, conquers the heights, dances on the edge of the rooftop, fuelled by the distinctive music I choose. I never diverted from my path, and will go even further. every step is a leap up. my actions are sharp & precise. if I look back, then in anger. that’s in my DNA - to bite with the zesty venomous words when I see injustice and to poison with my intelligence. a persistent lingering aftertaste will pollute your brain indefinitely. a joker smile on my face.
however, I am forever grateful to a very few rare individuals who continue being a motivation and a passage into how life must be perceived - an equilibrium of openness & rigid boundaries, self-focus & discipline, and a fascination with every single day, no matter its harshness, uncanniness or extreme euphoria.
the film is there to catch you off guard. a lot of raw archival footage & uncensored photographs dating as far back as 1998 featuring me behind the camera, gatecrashing the parties, climbing, by the mixing desk, parachuting, etc - all soundtracked by the snippets of my DJ mixes & unreleased tracks. watch till the end - the film is 8m 17s.
SELFISH
‘The Interstice’ (2017) is a scriptless, yet deep and emotionally charged work - an audio-visual contemplation on the themes of escape, language, the altered, non-linear, time, dispersed perception, and the moments remembered, recorded and then recollected.
a journey stitching together the words, the sound & the moving imagery. the footage is from my numerous pilgrimages to Japan, whereas the country remains an ephemeral allegory, the patchwork of the fragments in flux. I wrote the text to the film which is a part poem, part inner dialogue, part fictional story and I recorded the soundtrack using the hardware I had at the time - Waldorf Blofeld & Roland JP-08.
the film is loosely inspired by Roland Barthes’ ‘Empire of Signs’ & Jaques Ranciére ‘The Future of the Image’: playing on the ambiguity of resemblances and the instability of dissemblances, the image is as interruption, the transformation of the visible into the tactile and of the figurative into the figural, which is only possible through the specific labour of the words in sync or async with the sonic counterpart - the feelings remain unpresentable, they are the strangers in the house hovering at the horizon of expectations - the one you want to plunge in. the film as the surface to the conversion, either one or many, with the strangers, the narration is there to organise a clash and to construct a continuum. the sound is the nebulous thread stitching across the heart.
THE INTERSTICE
the archaeology of my live visual performances spanning 8 years 2012 - 2019 in snippets titled ‘SIMULACRA’ reframing the narratives of:
rare earth metals extraction vs space exploration >>> data centres amidst the unstoppable velocity of urbanity >>> the solar & hydro renewable energy vs nuclear power >>> time reflection, cellularity, atom compression, stereoscopic vision
loosely inspired by Godfrey Reggio ‘Qatsi trilogy’ & theoretically based on Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Simulacra & Simulation’:
- simulacra that are natural, naturalist, founded on the image, on imitation and counterfeit;
- simulacra or that are productive, productivist, founded on energy, force, its materialisation by the machine and in the whole system of production - a Promethean aim of a continuous globalisation and expansion, of an indefinite liberation of energy;
- simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game - total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control.
‘nothing separates one pole from another anymore, the beginning from the end; there is a kind of contraction of one over the other, a fantastic telescoping, a collapse of the two traditional poles into each other: implosion - an absorption of the radiating mode of causality, of the differential mode of determination, with its positive and negative charge - an implosion of meaning. that is where simulation begins’.
I presented my live visual shows at the venues & festivals >>> The Bowery NYC; Roundhouse, Earth, Islington Assembly Hall, Village Underground, Corsica Studios & Sinfonia Smith Square in London; Musikinstrumenten Museum & Volksbühne in Berlin; Modern Art Oxford; Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow; LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur Münster; and at Glastonbury, Urbanscapes Malaysia, European Media Art Festival Germany.
the soundtrack is the sketch I did using Arturia Microfreak Stellar + Tasty Chips GR-1 and post-processed in Ableton.
