“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Bardo Videogame


“Do you think I'll be all right, after death, based on how I'm playing this?” I asked Doug.

We were playing with a videogame installation at the Art Gallery of New South Wales called The Outlands by Joyce Hinterding and David Haines. I had been wandering lonely as a cloud, floating over the rocks and trees, avoiding the strange shale-like pile of death emanating grinding, roaring sounds. But if you travel into it (the joysticks are like dowsing rods, they're made of twigs), you shoot into a space instantly recognizable as the after-death space I've seen in lucid dreams based on sleep apnea, when my brain used to decide I was dead. On a regular basis.



A scintillating space of surging patterns, superimposed layers of light. Electrifying, compelling. Not unlike Yukultji Napangati...


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