Still I Rise :: Documentation Stills
Our 1999 Murmur Avatar video was installed between works by Tai Shani and Linda Stuppart in this important retrospective exhibition. Our inclusion in the ‘A Spell: Feminism Beyond Humanism’ group acknowledges 0D’s contribution to imagining being outside of the usual (male) human restraints – 0D itself being a collaborative artist avatar that merged the creative identities of it’s core female protagonists. 0D also created spaces of power and non human collaboration away from the patriarchal structures that constrain our thinking and being (see catalogue introduction).
In relation to this exhibition theme, the Murmur video chosen by the curatorial team exemplifies Simon Reynold’s analysis of 0D’s work in ‘Seeing the Beat: Retinal Intensities in Electronic Music Videos.
‘0rphan Drift represent dissolving, ego-melting, boundary-hemorrhaging femininity. They consciously articulate their work as an attempt to close the gap between the visual and the aural. The video effects resemble solarisation, equivalents of audio production effects like flanging, phasing, ghosting, filtering. Also there’s all these abstract, abject-looking pulses and filaments and oozings of color-texture – and there’s kaleidoscopic effects combined with abstract patterns. Usually the visual lags behind the sonic, it can’t have the same power to penetrate, subsume, enfold, irradiate etc our bodies that sound has, that terrible intimacy and proximity of the sonic whereas the visual has an inbuilt detachment and perspectival mastery of the field of vision — this lag between the two senses, and their corresponding artistic mediums, is something they’re trying to close with the video work.’
Murmur 1999 – 2019
Video 0rphan drift. Audio Kode9, voices CCRU & 0D.
Murmur 1-8 is a SYZYGY avatar. It is a spirit of immersion and depths, signalling or ushering in a collapse between far outside and deep within. Our avatars were elemental- see the chart attached and an invocation written from notes, 1999. (Incidentally, we are currently working on a new project- Speaking with Octopuses- so it seems that this avatar has something more to say!)
An Invocation:
below the surface, it’s alien. it is the webmaker. it is depth and surface at the same
time. liquid camouflage. hidden frequencies. shape shifter. each surface takes a turn
to shimmer. it is able to see everything at once because it is connected to everything
at once and tracks itself. it has too many eyes. it tries to take you if you resist it
because you have contacted it and so you are part of it. it is the web, it is what it
perceives. it is see through skins and screens and tentacles. it hunts in dreams.
camouflage wave patterning as a space that hides and carries things. synthetic
artificial weaves. it is superhighways, algorithms, circuitries, superfluids. violet
pattern invisibles. a vibrational ocean. it is immersive space. everything you touch
ripples and changes. it makes webs of touch. endless morphing. touch becoming,
becoming touch.
(from the 0D Murmur avatar notes for the Ccru SYZYGY collaboration 1999).
TWIN FOCUS: MURMUR NETSPAN [8<>1]
TIME RELATION: time rider. passes on time.
TRAVELS IN: camouflage, tidal rhythms and perceptual warping.
webmaker, tracker, navigator.
COLOURS: violet pattern invisibles and ultraviolet blues.
DYNAMIC PRESENCE: immersive, fluid, water monsters and waves,
morphing, the old ones, alchemical.
LIGHT ASPECT: lights that search, light bending, moonlight, cold light,
deep heavy darks.
SNAKE ASPECT: skin camouflage, navigates in all spatial planes (fluid
spine), vibrational ocean.
METAL ASPECT: circuitry, wirings, optical fibers, liquid metals
(mercury), shifting between solid and liquid states.
BLOOD ASPECT: lunar bleeding, womb blood, heavy blood.
DIGITAL ASPECT: fluid image mutation and morphing, echoes undersea,
wet metal sound effects, slow sound diffraction,
gradually falls apart.
MAGNETIC FIELDS: perceiver and invisible time tides (rip tides).
there is no zero.
Tags: 0rphanDrift, Kode9, xenofeminism, perception warp, tentacles, machine vision, camouflage, liquid AI