Avian Loop

Issue 6

Part II

1969 on the studio stage Joni Mitchell sits in front of a monitor wall. “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now…cloud illusions…I really don’t know clouds at all…” [“Here there are only two sides to things…there’s a reality and I guess what you might call a fantasy.”] Her profile appears behind from an angle a touch different, then mise-en-abymes off to the top right. Space dilates and contracts, the curvature of CRT monitors fade out to the colour of rain-pregnant altocumulus.

She darts between pillars, skirts lifted, skirting detection. Su Yu is the cursor, cursus. The runner – messenger covered in clouds on all sides. The world shudders, but the cursor drifts in smooth pursuit, becomes the hand, becomes the cursor. Mirror's edge is lifted by displacement of air in the diaphanous light – “no substance, wreathing or colour of its own.”

The garden revolves. Inside the kernel the data is grotesque in its complexity. Polygonal ragged entrails exposed for digital haruspicy. The grey screen razor’s edge dissection of virtual death/life masks. Sonic trepanation from the plangent sound of a handshake.

Fiat anima automata excitare.

Slow-scan horizontally locked blocking blue light. Obscured peripheral vision approximates the VDU. Mirrors and monitors multiply columns. Data stored in deep freeze concatenates to form sentience, locomotion, visual acuity. Machine vision, blocking blue light, filtering dust, microbial intrusion, ultraviolet glare; the mirror phase integrated in nanoseconds. Victorian poise.

“Who is watching the threshold of this garden?”

“You are in it…disembodied…a walled garden where the few among us frolic.”

Trompe l'Oeil linear perspective of the tree lined path; topiary perpetual cloud banks. A gardener’s vision of war. Mirrors reflect and multiply sinuousness; a vegetative ideal – what even the most orderly garden cannot approach, as it can’t exclude the weather. Nonetheless “a garden is not nature.” It’s an island, surrounded by a dark forest.

A disembodied hand reflected in the smooth marble table. Touching solidity, manipulating objects on the surface, not behind it.  

Western view from above vs. Eastern view from below. Either way, hortus conclusus.

Fires creating their own weather. Fires lit within garden walls to keep frost from the leaves. The perfect garden needs no oxygen; it is a rotating pot floating in green mist; it is a palm tree snapped to grid, the cursor shaping earth, pushing it around like putty.

The urge to drop an orange golem, ragdolled all over the topos.

The hand that touches the screen attached to the appendage behind it. Trace artefacts, smears and pixel cell confusion. Blue light filter. Sousveillance of the smoke and mirrors type.

“Earth as cursor,” roll it like a marble.

Catalogue every single tree in the garden. Grow trees through algorithms for a proving ground. Virtual foliage provides novelty for saccades across 12 square inches of screen. Gun toting micro-muscular precision. Generative landscape prevents deja-vu.

There is hot ash strewn across a hard drive platter. The world becomes increasingly orange, blue light filtered. The weakened sun shone from an outcrop, deep within the technologies of a friendship city planting. The eucalyptus molucana were not imported, but were still able to turn their leaves upward to receive golden soil.

How to revive a dead screen? Bodily incantations to become a being of pure gesture. The screen emits light – it’s how it communicates; it’s what the eye understands. A silhouette shifts lux levels in a room for an eye as passive as an ear.

Paeonia Drive

Angela Goh and Su Yu Hsin.

Performance Thursday 6 August 2020.

Presented by Campbelltown Arts Centre and Arts House as part of BLEED 2020.

h ttps://bleedonline.net/program/paeonia-drive/navigation/

https://paeoniadrive.xyz/

P apa is a māmā.

After we finished our desert, my dad said he felt like he had been for a walk in the hills for the night and was arriving back at the car, wishing he didn’t have to go home. The last time I saw my parents, I told them we were moving to Britain; to go farming and visit standing stones, maybe live in the highlands, grow food, and save some cash so that C could make more work in the studio. A way to vacate ourselves, or position ourselves elsewhere, requiring us to span a distance between our present and possible versions. We sought out how another piece of land, which knew our old people, might move us so.

Canteloupe is canned fruit salad and eighties holiday sunsets. Antianxiety herbal remedy in the first course. Granita disappears and comes back in the pasta. First pork in five years. Blooded salt, melonwater running.

A friend has started their PhD to understand how manipulations to the environment of carrot crops on the Canterbury plains can speed their biennial seed cycle. Grow a strong root one year, send up great umbels of flowers to set seed the next. A big investment. Canterbury’s immense stakes in the global carrot seed market makes for an abundance of research funding in the area.

Carrot as speculative capital. Dusty. Aniseed sweet. Of a certain age. Ryegrass gone silver in 4:33pm light. Will be a different shade tomorrow. Carrots have been simmering in that pot for years now. Jewelled rods across the plate. One of these days the chestnuts will be full and ripe enough to make pie. Caramel roots buoyed by romesco; whatever ecstasy that is. Sit down, saucepan in the middle, over-ripe toms and the last basil. Talk for hours.

In Riverton we bought a few tiny Urenika seed potatoes. More like shrivelled yams than our idea of potatoes. I put them in the ground before Christmas and as the zucchinis paled and powdered themselves I dug up the smallest bowlful of fingerling tubers from the mass of stems. I had to leave thousands of tiny siblings in the ground — marbles who turned glinting, giggling, glassy when rinsed. The following February my flatmate got excited about putting winter greens in and dug up the potatoes that had grown from those abandoned gems. Twice as many potatoes this time, twice the size. Sometimes doing less is better. The tohunga who had these for dinner for centuries really knew what they were doing.

Sailing a crisp across Lake Buttersauce. Invisible sichuan heat tempered by lemons. When well-boiled, Urenika hold a texture of sandy loam that melts in contact with saliva. We attend a soil cupping. Notes of burnt sugar and echinacea. Abstracted, well-seared cow rectangle galumphs around the table awaiting affection. We take the potatoes for a victory lap.  

Buckwheat filled the garden bed with paddly green leaves until it was warm enough for the tomatoes to go in. Hearted leaves now dangle yellow on jointed scaffolding. Once chantilly cream dollops attracting hoverflies and floating in the breeze on reddish stems, the flowers have become seeds; pyramidal, black.

When husked, their stony, roasted innards are steeped, syruped, and whipped frozen with cream. Toasted barley tea. Infinitely more than bread and beer. The land given maximum and methodical love that it may return; animate. Not just land but lond. From before. Not just papa but Papatuuaanuku. The soil and the waters. Your islands or mine. We go deep into the tunnels to leave our offerings. Can I make a golden silk from this carrot, a cicada’s worship in a cup? Fill it up. Now cannot be before. Look after new growth in an old place.

When we sat down to dinner my mom handed me a brown envelope. I knew there would be a small card. My parents are reliable in these formalities. Small theatre. Inside the card my father had written in his quickest, way-out-the-door handwriting, “You are going to fly away. Take me with you.”

A low, 5:53 lemon sun and the crunch of another evening.

Rats eat the fallen walnuts overnight.

Pull the drapes

* * *

LOND0(3)

Dinner, 6pm, Sunday 13 March, 2022

londo.bar

Notes from the Tai Tapu Sculpture Garden

G ardens set around a pond

“You can choose which way you go

there’s no right way”

The green spotted oblong pinches at entrance

My orientation feels off

Tree bristles

Bird songs

A sound work

Floats me into site

Adopting a meditative pace

Feels foreign

Noting the difference

I think I could write myself more honestly

Confronted by my default

State of ceaseless occupation

Navigating and looking slows me

To observe (unsure why)

Dawsons gold illusionism

Drummonds metal monoliths

The poster kids of Canterbury sculpture

The artist models that I never followed

There’s a range

Familiar and introduced

Traditional to post-modern

The critical against the embodied

(That last one is me)

There’s a theme of embodiment

There’s a sculpted woman

Too figurative for me,

Yet elements pull

Those smooth concrete limbs full of bulk

They’re far from soviet sculpture,

but remind me of it

An equality of gender in form

This sense of my own movement also

I’m clicking through space alongside them

Bodily awareness (bit of a trope though)

Very dimensional

Weight of space

Then there’s the illusionism

I look through the figurative man

He’s spliced

Vibrant green

& sharp flax edges peek through

My eye, flitting

From constructed

To the natural

Back and forth

Intertwined

Manipulating materials

Making the material about us

A persona- personification

Another trope- but why?

Rushing, now

Noting this

Instinctively, wanting to be ‘done’

To check it off

But forgetting again

Internal pressure disperses

Not thinking forward,

or back, but here

I’ll resolve to walk this slow more often

Unproductively so

We’ve gone via the critical

To the embodied

Now onto the transcendent

(The lightness of space)

Golden glimmers set against grey cloud

Steel foliage set against the rustling trees

Noting its experiential effects

Am I a phenomenologist?

Perhaps just low-key

As I near the end

There’s the sound work again

Recorded bird & nature sounds

‘Meditational’ instrumentals

Initially, this was grounding

Now it’s overwhelming

Disruptive

I had adjusted to the present

This no longer grounds me

Its pushing me out

I note the woven flax

It acts as a tunnel

An exit

My mind

However

Had already left

Notes from the Tai Tapu Sculpture Garden

Annual Autumn Exhibition, 2022

199 Cossars Rd, Christchurch

Avian Loop , Issue 6

Published in May of 2022

Ōtautahi, Aotearoa

ISSN 2744-4740

©Avian Loop 2022

Avian Loop is produced by the monthly art writing group first established by The Physics Room Contemporary Art Space in 2018.

Writers and editors for issue six include but are not limited to:

Natalie Kittow

James Hope

hamish petersen

Designer:

Daniel Shaskey

Typefaces:

This publication is set in a mixture of MT Grotesque by Frank Hinman Pierpont, Swear by James Edmondson, Format 1452 by Frank Adebiaye and the collaborative font Avara initiated by Raphaël Bastide and published by VelvetyneType Foundry.

Printer:

Angus Donaldson

Correspondence:

Avian Loop

PO Box 22 351

Ōtautahi, 8013