ARTDICK

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Compilation of suicide videos performed on the video game Grand Theft Auto 4, sourced from YouTube. Part of a series of film adaptations of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus.”

Inspired by the Tao Wells video “A View To A Kill,” which consisted of a split screen video recording of Wells playing a two player first person shooter. In the top screen stands Player 1, unmoving. In the bottom screen Player 2, controlled by Tao, begins searching for Player 1. When Player 2 finds Player 1 he shoots him in the head. Cut. Repeat. Player 1 is still motionless in the top half of the screen, while Player 2 starts the hunt again. Finding Player 1, he slits their throat. Cut. Repeat ad nauseam. In Tao’s film there is a detailed exploration of our love of killing others. Here, we have the natural conclusion – we kill ourselves over and over again.

“Of course, capitalism was and remains a formidable desiring machine. The monary flux, the means of production, of manpower, of new markets, all that is the flow of desire. It’s enough to consider the sum of contingencies at the origin of capitalism to see to what degree it has been a crossroads of desires, and that its infrastructure, even its economy, was inseparable from the phenomena of desire. And fascism too — one must say that it has “assumed the social desires,” including the desires of repression and death. People got hard-ons for Hitler, for the beautiful fascist machine. But if your question means: was capitalism revolutionary in its beginnings, has the industrial revolution ever coincided with a social revolution? No, I don’t thing so. Capitalism has been tied from its birth to a savage repressiveness; it had it’s organization of power and its state apparatus from the start. Did capitalism imply a dissolution of the previous social codes and powers? Certainly. But it had already established its wheels of power, including its power of state, in the fissures of previous regimes. It is always like that: things are not so progressive; even before a social formation is established, its instruments of exploitation and repression are already there, still turning in the vacuum, but ready to work at full capacity. The first capitalists are like waiting birds of prey. They wait for their meeting with the worker, the one who drops through the cracks of the preceding system.” (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium)

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Part of a series of film adaptations of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2: A Thousand Plateaus.”

“If Andre the Giant had been the enduring icon of pro wrestling in the ‘70s, the ‘80s belonged to Hogan. It was inevitable that the two would meet so that Hogan could officially take over the reins. The clash took place in 1987 at the legendary Wrestlemania III, where millions watched Hogan bodyslam the 7’4”, 520-pound colossus. “I felt like I needed an ambulance after that,” says Hogan, who tore several muscles in his back performing the move. Though he was already the champion, and by no means a runt by any standard, Hogan emerged from the match as wrestling’s David, having vanquished Goliath and thus anointed the king of the ring.” (Caroline Ryder, Hulk Hogan)

“I’m sure everybody has this capacity. But it’s not activated… I think a lot of it is the fault of art critics who speak in a kind of highfalutin way… that unless you’re highly educated and very bright and know the right language you really haven’t got any rights to be having an opinion, so people are frightened, they feel they don’t know.” (Sister Wendy in Conversation)

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Experimental video art mashup of Britney Spears and Marina Abramovic. Part of a series of film adaptations of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2: A Thousand Plateaus.” Many thanks to the fashion blog Eternal Optimist for reposting this recently. One of two works exploring Britney Spears shaving her head and its relation to gender.

“I have to tell you something – they say she is about to go through a nervous breakdown. I mean I am going through, almost practically every day, through a nervous mini-breakdown and nervous breakdowns are very necessarily. And artists who don’t go through nervous breakdowns I don’t trust them. I don’t think I even like them. They are no good. They are just square, too normal. For an artist to be normal is a disaster. So, leave her alone, you square, normal, boring people… It has nothing to do with what she is singing or not singing. I am talking about her as a person… I am talking about the inside.” (Jonas Mekas on Britney Spears)

“I suspect that the day Britney Spears shaved her own hair off represented a kind of Sartrean or Socratic argument (rather than, say, a nervous breakdown). She was, in effect, by the use of appearance, shrewdly de-mythifying beauty. The hair lies on the floor, “inexplicably faded” (Sartre), and the conventional notion of femininity likewise.” (Andy Martin, The Phenomenology of Ugly)

“I brush my hair with a metal brush held in my right hand and simultaneously comb my hair with a metal comb held in my left hand. While so doing, I continuously repeat ‘Art must be beautiful’, ‘Artist must be beautiful’, until I have destroyed my hair and face.” (Marina Abramovic)

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Poetic reworking of the first ever television broadcast made by John Logie Baird in the 1930s, using 78rpm discs. Original footage sourced from YouTube. Part of a series of film adaptations of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2: A Thousand Plateaus.”

“The face is part of a surface-holes, holey surface, system. This system should under no circumstances be confused with the volume-cavity system proper to the (proprioceptive) body. The head is included in the body, but the face is not. The face is surface: facial traits, lines, wrinkles; long face, square face, triangular face; the face is a map, even when it is applied to and wraps a volume, even when it surrounds and borders cavities that arc now no more than holes. The head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face. The face is produced only when the head ceases to be a part of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have a multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code when the body, head included, has been decoded and has to be overcoded by something we shall call the Face. This amounts to saying that the head, all the volume-cavity elements of the head, have to be facialized. What accomplishes this is the screen with holes, the white wall/black hole, the abstract machine producing faciality. But the operation does not end there: if the head and its elements arc facialized, the entire body also can be facialized, comes to be facialized as part of an inevitable process. When the mouth and nose, but first the eyes, become a holey surface, all the other volumes and cavities of the body follow. An operation worthy of Doctor Moreau: horrible and magnificent. Hand, breast, stomach, penis and vagina, thigh, leg and foot, all come to be facialized.” (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus)

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