Peak Anxiety Satellite (Riga, Latvia)

I am using a technique designed by scientists under the Reagan administration to release cold war anxiety.

Peak Anxiety Satellite (Newcastle)

The participants/audience lay beneath the balloon.

Peak Anxiety Satellite (Newcastle)

At this point in the event, I have just used an antenna to transmit human anxiety to the balloon/satellite…

Ways to cry

..you have spent your life
Inviting calling promising,
Hoping sighing dreaming,
Convoking invoking provoking,
Constituting engendering producing,
Naming assigning demanding,
Prescribing commanding sacrificing

The prayers and tears of jacques Derrida

Posthumanism- Freud

“With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning…man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god….we will not forget that present day man does not feel happy in his godlike character.” Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and it’s Discontents (The Prosthetic Impulse, Smith and Morra

ARCHIPELAGO

I
ARCHIPELAGO was a mixed exhibition of installation and performance at Cafe Gallery, London. Each co-existing artist marked his or her territory, chose whether to defend themselves against the others or cooperate, to trade or start a war. Photographer Hydar Dewachi and film-maker Olga Koroleva were commissioned to document the evolution of the exhibition. Watch the film and download the online document with text by Gary Stevens.

You can see my piece at 5:22.

http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/artsonline/130/archipelago-online-publication-and-

Democracy of Belief Film platform

I’m working on a video platform for users to navigate though a film, making decisions based on their beliefs about specific situations. The film is not static and linear, it treats each clip and scene like a hyper-link, pulling from news, user generated content to construct a narrative. So there’s this choose your own adventure part of it, and if the adventure is based on topics to do with the upcoming election, the film is also a straw poll. I imagine users being able to self generate propaganda which they can send to friends.

Books to read

I’m going to start compiling a list of books.
Need to read this and also this: http://www.amazon.com/Denial-Death-Ernest-Becker/dp/0684832402

Performance in Slovenia

I’m doing the Peak Anxiety Satellite talk in Slovenia via Skype for an event organized by GRUPA. Here is a description of the piece in English and Slovenian:

The unknowable and the uncertain seem to be taking up more and more space in everyday cognitive reality. Politics, science, technology, and religion propagate beliefs and promises which are at odds with the realities of everyday living. Namely, that we can remake the world and generally become happy and healthy indefinitely. It’s a source of anxiety. Peak anxiety satellite, is an amateur experiment which tries to bridge the gap between our desire for a better future and our everyday anxiety about the present compromise. In this experiment, Ounanian, reproduces the design of a soviet era anxiety receiving satellite (whose design may or may not have been released on wiki-leaks); sending human anxieties over a short distance to be received by a 12 foot arial balloon set to orbit the earth.

Zdi se, da nepoznano in negotovo zasedata vedno več prostora v vsakdanji spoznavni realnosti. Politika, znanost, tehnologija in religija širijo vero in obljube, ki so v nasprotju z realnostjo vsakdanjega življenja. Da lahko namreč ponovno zgradimo svet in na splošno postanemo srečni in zdravi v nedogled. To je vir tesnobe. Peak anxiety satellite je amaterski eksperiment, ki skuša premostiti vrzel med našimi željami za boljšo prihodnost in našo vsakodnevno tesnobo zaradi pričujočega kompromisa. V tem eksperimentu Ounanian reproducira oblikovanje satelita, ki sprejema tesnobo, iz sovjetskega obdobja (čigar dizajn je morda bil, ali pa tudi ne, objavljen na strani wiki-leaks) in ki na kratko razdaljo pošilja človeško tesnobo 3,6 m velikemu zračnemu balonu, ki kroži okoli Zemlje.