Author: Emmanuel Neill

(TW, Possible animal abuse)

Through struggling with the feelings of guilt for the Latex Maid, I became very interested in art that rubs up against the threshold of the morality of art. This led me to the work of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. I found one piece particularly challenging – Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other, 2003

“Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other” combines installation, behaviour and interaction. They chose a mixture eight, trained to be, highly ferocious, pit bulls and rottweilers and put them on a specially made treadmill. The dogs are split into groups, both sides of the room are lined with four treadmills, the treadmills are pushed together just enough so that the dogs on either end are about a foot from each other’s snouts. The dogs are constrained by a brace which holds them as they bolt at one another, yelping and barking, some dogs more furious than the others. These dogs have an incredible present antipathy for one another. One which is obviously denied.

CBW talks about the piece –

“In today’s highly competitive world, have we been manipulated by those in power to become blind, belligerent fighting dogs in the workplace, chasing our imaginary enemies all day long until we are not breathing? Meanwhile in the age of Internet, when people are confronted with controversy, we fail to communicate at all but quickly split into two extremes—left or right, unification or independence, conservative or liberal—screaming and going at each other’s throats without coming close to any consensus!”

I felt moved by this piece, but not in a meaningful way. I don’t feel like it has much to say and what is being said feels shallow and only there to prop up controversy and a hollow spectacle. Sharing this piece with friends a thought always seemed to crop up. Maybe the piece is supposed to make you think of the threshold of morality in art. Is the cruelty of art like this worth forcing people to think about the problem? Is it worth using to spread information about dog abuse in China, or the basic take that political extremes are bad? I don’t think so. I can’t find the sense in it. I think it’s hollow and edgy. The response to this piece is usually just one that upsets people, no one ends up thinking about the political or social implications, they just want to turn it off and do something else. It feels weak and boring.

I enjoy thinking about the moral threshold in art and the limits people wish to push it. I think it can be incredibly useful to help compliment a message. This piece made me feel like I had to handle the content of the Latex Maid responsibly and in a way so that it isn’t hollow or just a piece of spectacle. I think this kind of care humanises the piece.

In complete darkness a mouth materialises to pour an epiphany, a buzzing in the head, to feel no pain or pleasure, confusion and acceptance for the reasonless decisions to punish by God.

“stand up woman … speak up woman … stood there staring into space … mouth half open as usual … waiting to be led away … glad of the hand on her arm … now this … something she had to tell … could that be it? … something that would tell … how it was … how she … what? … had been? … yes … something that would tell how it had been … how she had lived … lived on and on … guilty or not … on and on …”

                                                                                                                                          “Not I” (Samuel Beckett)

Working with a dental mannequin was the initial idea for Latex Maid. I’m fascinated by medical equipment, how it works, and its total intimacy with strangers. These objects have a lot to say with prestige in every society. I loved these ideas and how well they complement what the Latex Maid wants to communicate.

I called two medical universities, desperate to get through to a department which would let me buy a mannequin. I eventually got through to the department of nursing for Queen University in Belfast. The conversation was awkward, but they put me in contact with their medical equipment supervisor who was willing to send me two heads from Ireland. A week later they arrived at my house in London. I thought the aesthetic similarities to the mouth in “Not I” was uncanny. I was excited.

I felt very connected to the themes of reasonlessness, torment and jumbled thought in “Not I” I wanted to twist and use these ideas and see how they work in my own life. This is when I came up with the plan to build a personality using the thoughts and opinions of the people around me. I would record the things people would say that would affect me, I would write peoples DJ mixes, things that made me laugh, people they disliked, events they thought were okay. I felt guilty at first even though they knew.

I started feeling like all these small, sometimes mundane statements had a lot to do with how you’re perceived, why people like or dislike you. The Latex Maid turned into something with a profound anxiety, it is someone who is as sinister and malicious as they are sweet and trustworthy. 

In August 2022, Dazed Digital published an article entitled How Ketamine Chic Became The New Heroin Chic. It announces that it’s “it’s cool to dress like an unwashed urchin, emerging from the landfill of consumer culture like a blabbering Minion”, and interviews the proponents on London based club night ‘Swagchella’. The article goes on to explain how ketamine chic is an attempt for London’s youth to explain the internet jargon they were raised with. Fashion for the terminally online, some may say.

The style attempts to align itself with the anti-capitalist culture that has always perpetrated the world of raves and free parties, but wraps itself up in a layer of modern irony that makes what it is trying to achieve as a part of the internet jargon they claim to be rallying against as an eight year olds YouTube home page.

When I initially read the ketamine chic article, it would be hard for me not to say that I was amused. Indeed, much of the article reads like the speech in the monologue for my upcoming piece The Latex Maid because the way the interviewees talk dominates modern rave culture. In a world wherein an Instagram aesthetic can mean more than any of the music you play at your night, it can become easy to get lost in the ironic world that the social media not-quite-known live in. That is not to say that I am anti-fun, and that my critique stems from believing simply that we should all go back to Wigan Pier. Instead, I want to encourage introspection within the scene, and to ask whether or not actively participating in consumer culture while also actively denouncing it seems to be the best way for subculture to thrive? Or whether, perhaps, we should strive for an underground music scene which wants more from its participants than simply donning a pair of wraparound sunglasses and calling something swag?

The light sound of rain and the whooshing of water fills the room. I am standing in the dimly lit exhibition room of Horse Hospital, a gallery in Russell Square. Surrounding me are several objects of rubber fetishism, specifically found images of one person’s photography of themselves partaking in an underwater rubber autoerotic practice. The images which make up the exhibit were, according to the sign Augenblick Press provided, found at a car boot sale, and thus it can be assumed that they were discarded by either their creator or their creators family. Yet, what was once someone’s most private moments are now on display for an audience to see, and the subject of the photos has no idea at all.

Horse Hospital’s exhibition space is dark, a little damp and windowless. Its gray walls and darkness make me feel as though I, too, am sinking into the water with the photos.

Furthermore, it can be presumed that in this person’s real life they would not share this side of themselves with anyone, despite how important it clearly seems to them. If this other person is flesh, rather than plastic, who were they to the subject? A partner? Or something else? If they were real, why did they let these images end up in a car boot sale? The images are simultaneously intimate and distant, they fill me with more questions than answers.

My upcoming piece The Latex Maid was, in part, inspired by the aesthetics of rubber fetishism in vintage porn magazines, as well as the exploration of gender which exists within the genre. However, unlike both the club kids whose words are at the center of the performance and the models who appear in the magazines, the model in the Rain Time exhibit was not dressing up for anyone.

Not for the gaze of instagram, not for the gaze of anyone sexually aroused by this aside from themselves. Not for anyone, or anything, else. They were not even doing this for any large circle of friends, because the images are distinctly private. Much like the monologue in The Latex Maid, which is a collage of recorded statements made by people during raves and their after parties, Rain Time interrogates parts of yourself not supposed to be put on display. However, there is a key difference in that Rain Time’s images were supposed to be recorded, but never displayed, while the statements in The Latex Maid were supposed to only be heard by a few people in a throwaway moment, rather than recorded and played to a wider audience. 

As I leave Horse Hospital and return to the bright light outside, I am struck by how strange the world sounds without rain in the background.

My body is not my home. I have felt like a creature without a mouth, unable to feed in a world of plenty. My body is not my home. I have felt othered in a room filled with friends, unable to see myself how they see me. My body is not my own. I have felt as though the space I occupy is both too large and too small, as I struggle to understand the form that I have been given.

South Korean artist Lee Bul’s work primarily focuses on sculpture and performance art. Her performance Sorry For Suffering – You Think I’m A Puppy On A Picnic consisted of Bul spending twelve days travelling from South Korea to Japan wearing a costume which she made. She wore the costume throughout the entire journey, including going through airport security and on the plane. The piece is widely considered to be a feminist critique of the way in which woman’s bodies are controlled in East Asian society, and Lee achieved this by making her own body the centre of the piece.

I am neither East Asian nor a woman. However, as a non-binary person I found Sorry For Suffering… to be an arresting portrayal of the human body, and the othering that can occur when you do not understand your own.

My body is not my own. When I walk down the street, I feel the same eyes looking at me that watched Lee. The costume itself is heavy and not designed with movement in mind. When I visited the TATE Modern and saw videos of the piece in person, I was struck by how often Lee falls over or comes close to becoming injured. In one sequence, she struggles to get down a set of stairs in, what looks to be, a train station. A crowd of people gathered to watch her, many, I am sure, unaware of what they were witnessing. By placing herself in a situation where she has to be watched, Lee forces an audience to come to terms with the space which she takes up. Whether they are willing to or not, they have to confront the body she occupies.

As I watched Lee stumbling around, I began to consider the limitations of space within performance art, and how I could best utilise the spaces of display which I am given. Unlike the piece like Sorry For Suffering…, my practice resides in sound art. Like the piece Sorry For Suffering, I am interested in the spaces which audiences occupy alongside an artwork, and how to make a piece force attention. Much of my practice is created with the audience becoming overwhelmed in mind, with the intention being that they are made uncomfortable, as they are forced to challenge aspects of themselves that they may not otherwise consider.

Lee forces her audience to be confronted with her body. I will force my audience to be confronted with theirs.

A little boy went out to play. When he opened the door he saw the world. As he passed through the doorway he caused a reflection. Evil was born. Evil was born and followed the boy.

‘A Woman In Trouble’.  A film-within-a-film. A world mediated by grainy images. A disruption in time. The Hollywood sign. What does it mean to act? What does it mean to make a film? What does it mean to understand any of this? If all the world’s a stage then who is the audience? Are you at the heart of terror? Perhaps you should go deeper.

Have you ever woken up and not known what day it is? Or felt like you’re in a body that doesn’t belong to you? Or been walking somewhere but, suddenly and quite inexplicably, forgotten where you were going?

And what of the rabbits?

This is a story that happened yesterday. But I know it’s tomorrow.

I know that INLAND EMPIRE was directed by David Lynch. I also know that it stars Laura Dern. I know this because I’ve seen it. Yet as the grainy images play out on screen, Dern’s character, actress Nikki Grace, moving through the underbelly of Hollywood, I cannot imagine anybody working on the film’s construction. INLAND EMPIRE feels as though it was birthed on some disgusting memory card and vomited out to the world via computer virus.

It is like something uncanny. Something I have witnessed before and, at the same time, something I have felt my entire life.

If today was tomorrow you would be sitting over there.

Imagery of Hollywood radiates through INLAND EMPIRE. Not Hollywood in its glamorous spectacle, but Hollywood’s filthy delirium. Nikki is, perhaps, a once great actress, cast in her comeback role. The film that she has been given the lead role in is rumored to be cursed. Last time the script was taken on, its two lead actors were murdered. This is passed off as Hollywood gossip, the inherent evil of the script isn’t even something considered until Nikki can no longer tell the difference between what is happening on screen and what is happening in real life.

Nikki wanders through the filth of LA, overlooked by the Hollywood sign, inhabiting soulless mansions and film sets. Hollywood itself is a nightmare, Nikki’s nightmare, an inescapable world of cameras and screens. No event in Hollywood is tangible, none of its inhabitants exist as themselves. Even if Nikki isn’t being watched, she is. Even if Nikki isn’t reading from a script, she will find that she is. Even if Nikki is herself, she will quickly find herself someone else.

If the apparatus exposed itself, laid bare at the intersection between Hollywood and Vine, perhaps INLAND EMPIRE is what it would look like.

I first started creating this piece by working on synthesis that I felt would fit thematically. I wanted the sounds to be eerily playful and colourful as well as harsh and noisy. The main synth I used on this piece was GlitchMachines’ hybrid synth – Polygon. I used samples of my voice and foley I found appropriate. I heavily manipulated these samples using fast and overlapping LFOs, these LFOs controlled the envelope, filters and grain parameters of each sample. I wanted to create a bass sound that resembled a horn more than a traditional bass, I feel this adds to the apocalyptic themes of the track.

I composed a slow, lamenting sounding melody to accompany sections of the track, I wanted to create a ‘dragging’ sounding melody to compliment the themes. I layered strange foley from film and games to create the more percussive sounds.

I really felt like this piece was able to convey the themes I had originally anticipated. I had a lot of fun working on it and composing it.

White Noiz is a song that I found particularly inspiring during the composition of ‘Flick a Tooth’, I felt this track had a connection to themes I want to convey but in a more lamenting manor.

The game opens with a pallid skinned James, staring into a bathroom mirror, arrogated by grime and filth accompanied by the first track playing in the background – ‘White Noiz’. Immediately I am absorbed, the sound is to interestingly peculiar, the pads feel like their weeping, it has a sinister, mysterious comfort, it’s dreamily pitiful. I want to critically analyse ‘White Noiz’, I feel this track holds the secrets to how to create a space with such enthralling nature.

Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill 2’s composer and lead sound designer) acts like an architect, connecting and painting with an acute meticulousness. He is constantly working to build both structure and the personalities within the world. Understanding and becoming totally in touch with what you are creating is an absolute fundamental to creating a world both tangible and holistic. 

Strangely the pad has history with one of the most prolific synthesis designers of all time, Eric Persing – ex Roland chief sound designer, founder of Spectrasonics and creator of the highly acclaimed soft synth, Omnisphere. The pad comes from the Spectrasonics’ Distorted Reality series, in an interview with sound-on-sound Mr. Parsing details the creation of the samples for Distorted Reality stating,

“Many of the ambient sounds of Distorted Reality have no source at all but were generated by letting six or seven effects processors feedback on one another for hours. How? Subtly change the send levels to each feedback effect (which in turn feeds another effect and so on…) and then walk away – recording to hours of DAT tape. Come back with fresh ears in a few months and edit the best bits. Those beds can then be used as fresh source material for further processing and layering in a sampler or computer”.

I absolutely love this technique and find it eerily contextual to the world I wanted to create – leave the sound to itself and let ghostly chance take the reins, creating worlds with almost no human interaction – it is its own. This technique is closely related to the ethos of the Kierkegaard quote – chaos, unpredictability and meta-ness are all deeply rooted in what I want to convey. This technique became a major influence on how ‘Flick a Tooth’ was made and was directly inspired by ‘White Noiz’. I think using this technique I was able to create the densely, ghostly, chaotic world inspired by the quote

I felt like a lot of the aspects of our performance turned out to be confusing and disjointed. Due to the opacity of the bags, we were not able to perform the chorography we had previously planned. Feedback was a problem with my microphone and my vocals were sometimes sheepishly buried in the mix instead of being centre as we had previously expected. Although I do feel like the performances had some shortcomings there were sections that sounded huge and noisy, resonating out of the hall as we had hoped.

If I were to do this again, I would approach the project with more confidence and better planning. I think our project suffered, mainly due to the limited amount of time and disjointed communication due to covid. There are sections of the piece I am proud of, I really loved the sound layers our group had put together and the visuals really complimented the themes of what we had planned.

During this morning’s class, Jose gathered us to talk about ideas for a live performance we would be performing in a week. To come up for ideas for this performance, Jose got the class to participate in an automatic writing exercise. Using this automatic writing exercise, we were able to subconsciously generate themes that were in common with the group. The words I chose were;

We then began to narrow down the themes that we had in common during the automatic writing exercise. The two main themes we chose to work with were war and occultism. We then took the class outside to begin a brainstorming session to organise the aims and logistics of how the performance would work. We decided that we would each use a sound source and improvise over synthesis and music we had made prior to the performance. We would also be using visuals to compliment the sonic aspect and religious / occultist implications of the performance. We wanted to create the appearance of our own cult, using sound and sigils to invert traditional religious sounds and imagery. We planned for myself to be in a figurative position of power, with the other members of the group slowly dragging me into their cult by symbolically putting a bag on my head.

For my sound source, I decided to use my WWII tank commanders throat microphone as I felt the object had significance both thematically and sonically. I planned to record myself shouting and screaming in tongues for my sound layer, we agreed that doing so complimented the themes and aims of the piece. With this in mind, I went home and began the processes of recording.

I liked some of the ideas and themes integrated within our piece, although I found most of them to be too general and the choreography to be logistically confusing. I feel like we needed more time as a group to better establish the themes of the piece so that it may feel more connected and purposeful.