Art, performance, developing video archives of performance art and cultural memory in SE Asia, Finland and USA. Phone: +60123916909 Address: B-5-8 Le Chateau 2 Lg Syed Putra Kiri Kuala Lumpur 50460 Malaysia -------------- 1417 South Grandview Tempe, 85281 AZ, USA
It was the day after my tenth birthday in March 1958, the month when Massachusetts always had the... more It was the day after my tenth birthday in March 1958, the month when Massachusetts always had the final winter storms, and I couldn’t wait to get outside to play in the snow. I went down for breakfast. When she heard me enter the kitchen my mother turned. (Pause) The kitchen had a bitter cloud hanging in the air. Not a great cook, Mom was experimental and always developing new health concoctions. One frequently changing recipe fell under the general rubric of “Tiger’s Milk”. Holding a half-filled glass of the brownish liquid out to me, she said ‘Today we’ll eat breakfast a bit later, but first have your Tiger’s Milk. It’s special today.’ I recall she looked at me fixedly, emphasizing her words, ‘It will show you the world through your Granddad’s eyes.’ The phrase ‘through your Granddad’s eyes’ stuck to the walls. She seemed sad. To see through his eyes would be odd enough, but he had died just two weeks before. Seeing through the eyes of a dead man was horrible and a little thrilling. After the usual resistance, her impenetrable will overcame my ad hoc struggle to curtail her former rights over what went into my body. She joined me in a ‘toast’ and we both chugged it down. I felt slightly nauseous. She said it was normal and would pass. I wanted to get beyond the reach of my mother’s will and went up to the library where the 78rpm recordings of Edward R. Murrow, ‘I can hear it now’, were sitting next to the phonograph. I put on one of the records, and sat on the floor to listen to the voices of Adolph Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, with Murrow’s own deep, authoritative and reassuring voiceover. I didn’t know these people, but was drawn to the ambient sounds of vehicles, crowds, cameras and the variety of phonemes, languages and accents opening into a deep sonic domain. I began watching the stylus moving across the record towards the central spindle that poked through the centre of the disc. I picked up my father’s magnifying glass from his desk, and watched more closely how the needle vibrated and scraped the walls of the grooves, collecting an intricate ball of dust in its path. The groove seemed to expand to the scale of a valley, and then to a city street. The stylus seemed like a huge careening drill digging into the black asphalt, scraping walls of the buildings on each side. I began to feel that the drill was somehow reading the street and that the sound I heard was the street speaking to me, for me, in a language only I understood. The rotation of the record had a hypnotic effect. I felt that I had become that stylus and it was I who was scraping the grooves. I watched the action more closely and realized then that there was only one groove and even though I, the stylus, appeared to be moving according to my own will, in fact I was enslaved to the groove, the record and the turntable. I had no will of my own. It was the turntable that moved while I remained still. I resented my helplessness as I was inexorably drawn to the centre of the record. It felt like death was at the centre and it wasn’t fair. Death should be at the side, not at the centre! And, why did it have to be there at all? The record held me hypnotically in its thrall. I thought that this must be what my Granddad’s eyes saw. My father came into the library. I noticed him at the side of my visual field. I didn’t recognize him or what he was. I looked up. He looked so strange, towering “Riddle Coma” Enthralment at the Neuro-receptor Theatre
"Performance Decade consists of Aapo Korkeaoja's historical review of Fluxee and the fin... more "Performance Decade consists of Aapo Korkeaoja's historical review of Fluxee and the finish performance art scene." -- p. 9.
Not solitude and solidarity, not solitude or solidarity, but solitude-solidarity will be the new ... more Not solitude and solidarity, not solitude or solidarity, but solitude-solidarity will be the new adventure chanted by new poets. (Leo Bronstein, 1953) In the following pages I will present a reading of the intellectual lives of two cognitive scientists, a Singaporean-born, Chinese-American, Lan Gen-Bah (who in recent years has often presented herself simply by the initials LGB), and her mother, the late Chiang Mo-Jo. It is my hope that these personal topographies may reveal certain performative tendencies embedded in the ‘cultures of science’.
Unpublished Doctoral Thesis. Centre …, Jan 1, 2003
Publication View. 50654219. Performing the Singapore state 1988-1995 (2003).Langenbach, Ray. Abst... more Publication View. 50654219. Performing the Singapore state 1988-1995 (2003).Langenbach, Ray. Abstract. This dissertation explores performances in Singapore as indicators of divergent visions of the nation-state. To understand ...
House of glass: culture, modernity, and …, Jan 1, 2001
... demands from the electorate, in spite of being a single-party domi-nant government with scant... more ... demands from the electorate, in spite of being a single-party domi-nant government with scant political opposition in parliament"(Chua 1995, p ... in returning to the deployment of social engi-neering in Singapore is that, in practice, instruments of social engineer-ing are generally ...
... dream of locomotion, its technologies and its representations, and led me to look at two art ... more ... dream of locomotion, its technologies and its representations, and led me to look at two art works that demanded an intensive dialogue between location and motion: a street performance in Dresden in 2000 by Singaporean artist Amanda Heng, and Hsieh Tehching's durational ...
It was the day after my tenth birthday in March 1958, the month when Massachusetts always had the... more It was the day after my tenth birthday in March 1958, the month when Massachusetts always had the final winter storms, and I couldn’t wait to get outside to play in the snow. I went down for breakfast. When she heard me enter the kitchen my mother turned. (Pause) The kitchen had a bitter cloud hanging in the air. Not a great cook, Mom was experimental and always developing new health concoctions. One frequently changing recipe fell under the general rubric of “Tiger’s Milk”. Holding a half-filled glass of the brownish liquid out to me, she said ‘Today we’ll eat breakfast a bit later, but first have your Tiger’s Milk. It’s special today.’ I recall she looked at me fixedly, emphasizing her words, ‘It will show you the world through your Granddad’s eyes.’ The phrase ‘through your Granddad’s eyes’ stuck to the walls. She seemed sad. To see through his eyes would be odd enough, but he had died just two weeks before. Seeing through the eyes of a dead man was horrible and a little thrilling. After the usual resistance, her impenetrable will overcame my ad hoc struggle to curtail her former rights over what went into my body. She joined me in a ‘toast’ and we both chugged it down. I felt slightly nauseous. She said it was normal and would pass. I wanted to get beyond the reach of my mother’s will and went up to the library where the 78rpm recordings of Edward R. Murrow, ‘I can hear it now’, were sitting next to the phonograph. I put on one of the records, and sat on the floor to listen to the voices of Adolph Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, with Murrow’s own deep, authoritative and reassuring voiceover. I didn’t know these people, but was drawn to the ambient sounds of vehicles, crowds, cameras and the variety of phonemes, languages and accents opening into a deep sonic domain. I began watching the stylus moving across the record towards the central spindle that poked through the centre of the disc. I picked up my father’s magnifying glass from his desk, and watched more closely how the needle vibrated and scraped the walls of the grooves, collecting an intricate ball of dust in its path. The groove seemed to expand to the scale of a valley, and then to a city street. The stylus seemed like a huge careening drill digging into the black asphalt, scraping walls of the buildings on each side. I began to feel that the drill was somehow reading the street and that the sound I heard was the street speaking to me, for me, in a language only I understood. The rotation of the record had a hypnotic effect. I felt that I had become that stylus and it was I who was scraping the grooves. I watched the action more closely and realized then that there was only one groove and even though I, the stylus, appeared to be moving according to my own will, in fact I was enslaved to the groove, the record and the turntable. I had no will of my own. It was the turntable that moved while I remained still. I resented my helplessness as I was inexorably drawn to the centre of the record. It felt like death was at the centre and it wasn’t fair. Death should be at the side, not at the centre! And, why did it have to be there at all? The record held me hypnotically in its thrall. I thought that this must be what my Granddad’s eyes saw. My father came into the library. I noticed him at the side of my visual field. I didn’t recognize him or what he was. I looked up. He looked so strange, towering “Riddle Coma” Enthralment at the Neuro-receptor Theatre
"Performance Decade consists of Aapo Korkeaoja's historical review of Fluxee and the fin... more "Performance Decade consists of Aapo Korkeaoja's historical review of Fluxee and the finish performance art scene." -- p. 9.
Not solitude and solidarity, not solitude or solidarity, but solitude-solidarity will be the new ... more Not solitude and solidarity, not solitude or solidarity, but solitude-solidarity will be the new adventure chanted by new poets. (Leo Bronstein, 1953) In the following pages I will present a reading of the intellectual lives of two cognitive scientists, a Singaporean-born, Chinese-American, Lan Gen-Bah (who in recent years has often presented herself simply by the initials LGB), and her mother, the late Chiang Mo-Jo. It is my hope that these personal topographies may reveal certain performative tendencies embedded in the ‘cultures of science’.
Unpublished Doctoral Thesis. Centre …, Jan 1, 2003
Publication View. 50654219. Performing the Singapore state 1988-1995 (2003).Langenbach, Ray. Abst... more Publication View. 50654219. Performing the Singapore state 1988-1995 (2003).Langenbach, Ray. Abstract. This dissertation explores performances in Singapore as indicators of divergent visions of the nation-state. To understand ...
House of glass: culture, modernity, and …, Jan 1, 2001
... demands from the electorate, in spite of being a single-party domi-nant government with scant... more ... demands from the electorate, in spite of being a single-party domi-nant government with scant political opposition in parliament"(Chua 1995, p ... in returning to the deployment of social engi-neering in Singapore is that, in practice, instruments of social engineer-ing are generally ...
... dream of locomotion, its technologies and its representations, and led me to look at two art ... more ... dream of locomotion, its technologies and its representations, and led me to look at two art works that demanded an intensive dialogue between location and motion: a street performance in Dresden in 2000 by Singaporean artist Amanda Heng, and Hsieh Tehching's durational ...
Uploads