ADSR Zine

009
CONTENTS

009.1 ATTACK

009.1.1 Survivor / Aline Lyons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

009.1.2 Re : Sounding - Mythology of a Drum / James Nguyen & Victoria Pham . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
009.1.3 Unison and Noise in Multi-Disciplinary Art / Liam Mulligan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

009.2 DECAY-SUSTAIN

009.2.1 Meeting Points: Experimental Series in Perth / Eduardo Cossio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

009.2.2 Place is always moving, like a sleeping cat / Tristan Louth-Robins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
009.2.3 On seeing Camouflage, then the Getty challenge - some thoughts on ‘nearly’ (or:
precision, pandemic, playfulness) / Cynthia Troup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
009.2.4 Our Imagined Future 1.0 / Vincent Giles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

009.3 RELEASE

009.3.1 Times of Covidity / Anca Frankenhauser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

009.3.2 Greenware / Rosie Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
009.3.3 untitled (sitting) - Serendipitous Sojourns / Allan Rand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
009.3.4 A Polemical 30-Part V-Letter To, From, & About Pre(care)iousness: 1.04.2020 -
20.6.2020 / James Hazel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
ADSR Zine 009.1.1 ATTACK

Survivor
by Aline Lyons

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ADSR Zine 009.1.2 ATTACK

RE:SOUNDING - MYTHOLOGY OF A DRUM

James Nguyen & Victoria Pham

Hà Nội - An archival photograph by Charles Peyrin of our

fictional character Jean-Phillipe, 1920s-30s.7

On a quiet evening in 1938, Jean-Philippe arrived in the capital of

Vietnam, Hà Nội. Losing his rubber plantation to bankruptcy and all
his earnings vapourised, J-P needed to prove that he wouldn’t be
swallowed up by the Far East. Hearing whispers from the hills of
mystical, ancient instruments, birthed from red-clay from the rainy
season past, his head was drenched with dreams of gold, gems and the
fragrance of highland opium.

The photos he had seen from Le Ministère de Colonies vision of the

Indo-Chine materialised right before his eyes, stepping off the wharf,
the streets suddenly bustled with small people topped in primitive
conical hats3. The damp smell of dirt roads, stirred into bone broth.
Jean-Philippe roamed the streets for a week. Seeing a parade of women
like trinkets. But all the time, he became obsessed with the lure of
more ancient treasures. Buried deep in the hillside. No one in the
markets could point to him anything substantial, nothing big.

Then one afternoon, in a cafe behind Đường Hai Bà Trưng, intriguing

whispers were murmured.

“Ils ont creusé. Ils ont trouvé du bronze. De grandes choses en bronze
à l'extérieur de la ville. Quelque part au nord.”

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 [They are digging. They found bronze. Big bronze
things outside the city. Somewhere North.}

Hovering whispers, J-P followed. Heading north,

beyond the realm of ancient city walls, he
managed to catch some locals who he could slowly
and loudly spell-out the Langue Vulgaire2, the
few slurred words of Annamese he had picked up
running the plantation. But slowly and surely,
on freshly cleared farmlands there was the
clatter of locals, and a clanging of metal.
Beside the tree stumps and trampled dirt was a
pile of turquoise bronze. Remnants of bronze
drums … just remnants. Nothing whole. Nothing
big.
Cover of a bi-lingual
French Dictionary, --------------------------
outlining French as Langue
Officielle and Vietnamese
as Langue Vulgaire.2

French Classification and “Discovery”

In the realm of Western discovery, there was the tendency for colonial
administrators to claim knowledge of local customs, or knowledge about
significant historical sites and artefacts as their own scientific
invention. The so-called “Angkor Wat Discovery” in 1860 by French
naturalist Henri Mouhot highlights this phenomenon. It is as if the
locals, who indeed brought the travellers to these archaeological sites,
were unaware of its magnificent presence within their own cultural and
historical lives. Lost cities such as these were never lost if one were
to simply consult the cultural memories of the people who are living
among their own inheritance. In the realm of Vietnam and French Indo-
China, objects such as these Đông Sơn Drums were subject to a similar
form of “discovery”4 and subsequent scientific “analysis.”

Now in the 21st century, we encounter and “study” many of these sound-
producing artefacts as silent and buried deep in the store-rooms and
display-cabinets of colonial museums such as Gillet Collection in Paris.
--------------------------

8
 Northern Village - An archival photograph by Charles Peyrin of our
fictional character Jean-Phillipe, 1920s-30s.7

J-P squatted in frustration, white linen was not to touch red dirt.
Yet amidst his frustration, emerged a reality - look at these locals
rejoicing at nothing but broken metal. A silhouette of their former
glory. But with this silhouette, glory could be restored ... Voila, an
idea struck!

A few months later, fresh new whispers appeared. Lots of bronze, and
lots of unusually whole artefacts. Ancient drums, once so revered,
started to be discovered all across the Northern hillsides. Word
spread that the Đông Sơn Drums had finally returned.

---------------------------------------
The Antiquities Market and the Black Market

The antiquities markets are a commodities and financial exchange of not

only cultural objects, but an open market of scams and legitimised
looting. Dubiously acquired, these objects undergo a process of cultural
and financial cleansing5. Scrubbed of their “blackness” they enter
collections and integrated into consigned provenance, continuously
cycled through the auction market, institutional exhibitions, catalogues
and publications.

This process of transfer from “black” to display legitimises these

objects for the purpose of voyeurism and myth-telling in museums and
gallery collections, divorced from the physical and cultural knowledge
traditions from where they originated. Orientalising8 these materials,

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they are stripped of cultural context and imagination. Instead, these
multi-use objects are rendered silent or stored and patronisingly
consigned to “mystic,” superstitious, and reproductive purposes.

Objects such as the Đông Sơn Drum of Vietnam have been dispersed across
the globe in this network of legitimised trade, ending up in collections
in France, Europe, North America, and even Australia. Our pursuit of
once again listening to their voice, or bronze call, brings into question
their journey from Vietnam into the glass cabinets of major museums.
-------------------------------------------

Jean-Phillipe’s fortune had

turned. With his team of
craftsmen and artisans, his
drums … ahem … the ancient
treasures of Vietnam’s past,
these “ancient” bronze drums had
come back into a global
imagination. Slowly but surely
his “discoveries” began to flood
local and distant markets. More
and more, collectors from France
hungrily devoured these ancient
instruments as did the museums
Commuting the streets of Hà Nội in a of Paris. Although it was the
Cyclo - An archival photograph by year of the Earth Tiger, emerging
Charles Peyrin of our fictional
from the mud, J-P’s new-found
character Jean-Phillipe, 1920s-30s.7
discoveries gave him his Golden
Pig.

Slowly, and all too soon, the tide turned. Just over the horizon,
the drums, evoking their ancient function to announce and warn
neighbouring villages of war, their “discovery” heralded another
cataclysmic war, a global war. The incoming new year engulfed J-P
and his compatriots in a flurry of chaos. Fleeing and deserting
the Far East to the advancing Japanese Army, leaving behind his
hoard of his drums. In the wake of his sudden notoriety and
absence, the drums once again slipped into obscurity.

------------------------------------------------
Missing provenance and authorial claim

By divorcing people from their traditions, and separating cultural

artefacts from local knowledge, these objects are held in epistemic
ransom. Severed and detached from their origins, their value becomes

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contingent with european “discovery” and interest4. How can we narrate
provenance to objects that predated the hard borders of colonial
conquest? What of the trade and production of these drums as
technological innovations, of their time? Utilised and forming cultural
relevance and iconographies outside of Vietnam in Southern China,
Thailand, Burma, the Philippines, and across Indonesia, even as far as
Bali?

With the power of hindsight, a secondary issue arises. The post-colonial

national boundaries of the 21st century cannot apply to the past. In the
case of the Đông Sơn Drums, its history belongs to the Bronze Age of
South-East Asia. Perhaps this instrument, now revered as a national
symbol of the innovation and ingenuity of Ancient Vietnam, belongs to a
wider community of tribes and communities that comprised territories
different from the border of modern Vietnam, encompassing the imagination
of the diasporic refugees and colonial expats who fled South-East Asia
through multiple waves of conflicts and dispersals?
------------------------------------------------

A Đông Sơn Drum (2000BC - 1000BCE). This particular drum is the key
artefact of the re:sounding project. Photo: James Nguyen, 2019.

The Đông Sơn Drums that J-P abruptly left behind, spread across
the country and infiltrated the black market. Over the decades,
they again are being rediscovered and continuously traded.
However, what continues to be mystifying is how J-P managed to
“discover” so many whole and intact drums over such a short
period of time? Could his team of primitive villagers even have
the knowledge of their ancestors to invent, cast and age so many

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 replicas in such a short period of time to fill the collections
of these museums?

Perhaps what is kept and retained in these museum cabinets is not

the genius of ancient and lost peoples, but actually our
fictional story of the deep fake, of the skill of local farmers
in recreating ancient artefacts to sell to a rubber-plantation
owner for the global antiques market and museum collections.
Perhaps the difficulty with provenance around these artefacts is
not only due to the rarity of ancient bronzes, but the surviving
legacy of Jean-Phillipe’s forgeries.

------------------------------------------------
Repatriation and its controversies

With the collections of Đông Sơn Drums fragmented and lost to collectors
across the globe, eerily similar to the dispersal of the Vietnamese
people following the fall of Điện Biên Phú and Saìgòn, the complexity
of repatriation emerges. With such significant cultural artefacts,
access is essential to the maintenance of cultural knowledge.

However, with a community divided politically through the lingering

resentments of separation and war8, ultimately, where, and to whom do
these drums actually belong? To repatriate them to the 21st century
Vietnam would for many in the exiled diaspora, be returning these objects
to the stewardship of people they do not trust. Yet, the colonial
institutions that continue to hold these objects in the west are equally
dubious in their stewardship and care. The modern political animosity
that continues to divide and plague these artefacts further complicates
their narrative and the politics of their repatriation. The return of
these objects is profoundly contested.

Can we, by listening and recording these objects from far-flung places,
reclaim the identity of these instruments? Can we democratise the Đông
Sơn Drum by activating its sound, rather than keeping it silent and
rarefied? By sharing these recordings, can we reach across these
imposible separations and estrangements1? As a first step, we aim to
return the sound from these objects to communities and nations who have
profound cultural kinship to these objects. These activities are a
transnational catalyst for producing collective knowledge during times
of continued historical, cultural and physical separation. From these
initial exchanges, we will share new music by these contemporary
musicians, opening up our archive of recordings and extending access to
audiences who are interested in the stories and sonic potential of these
instruments.

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References

1Ahmed, Sara. ‘Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement’. International
Journal of Cultural Studies 2, no. 3 (1999): 329–47. Accessed
doi:10.1177/136787799900200303. Pp.344

2Bonet, Jean. 1899-1900. Dictionnaire annamite-français: (langue officielle et langue

vulgaire). Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, E. Leroux. Image copyright Bibliothèque
Nationale de France.

3Bourke, Paul. 1883. Ha Noi. 2 nd edition (2015), pp. 26-28. 38-39, 45-46: Magellan &
Cie.

4 Coxall, Helen.2000.'WHOSE STORY IS IT ANYWAY?' LANGUAGE AND MUSEUMS, Journal of Museum

Ethnography, No. 12, MEG Conference 1999: Glimpses ofAfrica Museums, scholarship and
popular culture, The Horniman Museum, London (May2000), pp. 87-100: Museum Ethnographers
Group

5 Marrone, James V. ‘Quantifying the Supply Chain for Near Eastern Antiquities in Times
of War and Conflict’. Journal Of Cultural Heritage 33 (2018), pp. 278–84.

6Mouhout, Henri. 1863. “Voyages dans les royaumes de Siam de Cambodge, de Laos et autres
parties générales de l’Info-Chine,” Le Tour du Monde, no. 2, pp. 219-352.

7 Peyrin, C. Archival photos of IndoChina from 1920-1930.

8 Said, Edward.1979. Orientalism. Vol. First Vintage books edition. New York: Vintage.

9 Valverde, Kieu-Linh Caroline. Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and

Politics in the Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013, pp.4

Please note: Jean-Philippe is a fictional character.

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The RE:SOUNDING Project is a collaboration between James Nguyen and
Victoria Pham. It proposes an active platform for engaging with
artefacts, particular musical instruments and sound-producing objects
from the past. RE:SOUNDING Project explores the notion of repatriation
through sound. The multiform story-telling project, including
commissions for new music composed for a Đông Sơn Drum, from Australian
and international South-East Asian musicians, Rắn Cặp Đuôi (Vietnam),
Bagus Mazasupa (Indonesia) and Victoria Pham (Australia), with
interactive, sonic investigations into colonisation and repatriation.
RE:SOUNDING will launch as part of the 2020 BLEED Festival: ArtsHouse
Melbourne and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

[Link]

---------------------------------------

We would like to acknowledge the elders and ancestors of the Nation, the
traditional custodians of this land that was stolen and never ceded. We have
arrived from other places to live and work on this, their land, and to share
this story today. We would also like to extend our acknowledgement to the
First Peoples of Canada, and to First Nation communities throughout Vietnam,
the Indo-Asia pacific, the Americas and the world throughout.

Chúng tôi trân thành cảm ơn người Wurundjeri và người Boon Wurrung, và các tổ
tiên của đất nước Kulin của người ấy. Trên mẳnh đất này bị người khách lấy
đi, mà không phải nhừơng, chung tôi tại đây đã đến sống, làm việc, và hôm nay
chúng tôi đến từ nơi khác, để chia sẻ những cầu chuyện này.

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ADSR Zine 009.1.3 ATTACK

Unison and Noise in Multi-Disciplinary Art

Liam Mulligan, for ADSR Zine July 2020
[Link]

For the last three years I have developed a strong interest into the relationship between art forms in
multidisciplinary art. Specifically, I have wondered how gestures in one art form can be imitated in
another, and how gestures in multidisciplinary art can work independently as well as together. In
2019, I wrote an Honours Thesis titled ‘Counterpoint Between Different Mediums’ which investi-
gated this multi-art co-existence, using audiovisual art
as my primary example. Most musical concepts such as
pitch and timbre do not exist across the two mediums.
However, a commonality between the two mediums is
rhythm, which proved that there could be a contrapuntal
relationship that existed over time. Through further re-
search into cross sensory correspondences1, I noticed
that another non-teleological form of counterpoint ex-
ists, being the counterpoint being between gestures that
use pitch/brightness. For example, if I had a visual of a
cat sleeping in a low, warm light, a corresponding or
‘unison’ audio accompaniment would be still, droning
strings. However, if the cat awakens and begins to chase
a fly as the musical drone continues, there would be a
sense of independence between the two lines. (Imagine a warm drone under this)

A chapter of my Thesis consisted of composing audiovisual works that explore counterpoint be-
tween the two mediums. One of these works is a five-movement piece named Crossover. The work
uses a self-made scale (N2U scale) between ‘unison’ (being the rhythmic and non-teleological unity
between a medium and its other) and ‘noise’ (where a medium completely ignores its other) and
maps the journeys of the two mediums through each movement. This was so I could map each
medium’s reliance/independence in comparison to the other throughout the work and investigate the
results. This article will showcase my findings in this piece.

1Cross Sensory Correspondences are subconscious assumptions your brain makes to fill in sensory information you
don’t physically have access to. For example, hearing a high pitched sound correlates to a brighter visual, and feeling
sandpaper would correspond to hearing a more harsh timbre.

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The five movements were mapped out below, each movement going for exactly one minute each:

n.b. ‘sync’ is referred to as ‘unison’ in this paper.

Movements 1 and 5 - Parallel but Opposing

These pieces were written to examine what would occur if one line was completely independent on
another line that had complete unpredictability. When composing these works, I created the ‘unison’
line last as it would intentionally synchronise with its other. Naturally, this would mean that the
works were both unison in rhythm and gesture.

Screenshot from mvt 1 , uNOISEon. Screenshot from mvt 5, UNoISeON.

[Link] [Link]

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 Movements 2 and 4 - Opposing to Colliding
The creation of these works was to examine what would occur if one line remained completely uni-
son noisy while the other line started on the opposing side but would gradually shift from one side
of the N2U scale to the other. The most interesting results came from the centre of each work.

In movement 2, the audio line begins and stays on the noise side of the N2U scale, whereas the vis-
ual line begins entirely synchronous and gradually moves to noise. As evident in movements 1 and
5, the art forms being on complete ends of the N2U scale ultimately ends in a unison audiovisual
work. However, in the centre the work, the first instances of counterpoint are noticed. The visuals
begin to shift at different times to the audio and a sense of independence is noticed in both medi-
ums. The visuals play off the audio, sometimes synchronising and sometimes independently shifting
until the end, where the visual begins to entirely ignore the audio. This creates a new type of unison
where both lines are ignoring each other - layering noise on noise ultimately just creates noise.

Screenshot from mvt 2, Colliding.

[Link]

In movement 4, the stationary line, being the visuals, was entirely synchronous to the audio. Similar
to the visual’s role in movement 2, the audio’s line began on the opposite side of the N2U scale and
gradually shifted to match the visuals. The contrasting result to the second movement was that,
throughout the whole work, there was still a rhythmic and gestural unison. Comparing this work to
the first and fifth movements, it can be said that having one art form completely on the unison side
of the N2U scale does not lend to counterpoint, as it will inevitable synchronise with its other, even
if it is on the opposite side of the scale.

Screenshot from mvt 4, Gnidilloc.

[Link]

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 Movement 3 - The Crossover
This movement was made to investigate what would occur if the two lines were to move from one
side of the N2U scale to the other where each line would start on opposing sides. The results from
this is quite similar to what occurred in movement two, where unison occurred in the beginning and
end, but there was a sense audio independence in the centre of the work. However, another notice-
able find was that, even though counterpoint was evident in the middle of the work, the gestures in
both art forms remained unison through the works entirety. This may be due to the contrasting
movement of the two art forms on the N2U scale, or due to the fact that they’re both moving simul-
taneously - it could even be because the source material that had similar gestures initially.

Screenshot from mvt 3, The Crossover

[Link]

Conclusion
When I wrote these miniatures, I expected there to be more instances of counterpoint than the mid-
dle of two movements. However, it does show us a lot about the balance of noise and unison that is
required to create an effective contrapuntal relationship. If one art form is completely on the unison
side of the N2U scale, unison will inevitably occur. Additionally, if both art forms are on the noise
side of the N2U scale, then there will also be a unison of ignorance. Therefore, to have two lines
that are dedicated to creating counterpoint, they cannot be on either extremes of the N2U scale oth-
erwise the dependent and independent traits commonly noticed in the layers of musical counterpoint
do not exist. Ultimately, for there to be counterpoint, there has to be aspects of ‘unison’ and ‘noise’
in both lines.

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ADSR Zine 009.2.1 DECAY-SUSTAIN

Meeting Points: Experimental Series in Perth

By Eduardo Cossio

In this article I discuss a few experimental music series that have become a fixture of
the Perth music scene in recent years. It is by no means an exhaustive document, but
rather a jotting down of names and projects that have brought visibility to the local
scene in and around Western Australia. While the motivations and modus operandi of
series like Outcome Unknown, Tone List, and NoizeMaschin!! are not dissimilar; their
distinct identities augment each other’s work in the Perth music community.
To many people outside Western Australia, however, the state’s exploratory scene is
associated with Tura New Music; an organization that for the last 33 years has
supported new music through concerts, residencies, and workshops. At the end of
2013, musician Josten Myburgh took over Tura New Music’s grassroots program
which included the iMprov Workshop series and their concomitant concerts.
iMprov Workshop featured local and visiting artists sharing aspects of their practice
through participatory activities. A variety of approaches were presented. Perth
composer Lindsay Vickery’s discussion of non-linear performance strategies focused
on Cobra; a game-piece by John Zorn where performers assume belligerent roles to
compete against each other in cutting, fast, at times goofy manner. Cobra’s embrace
of musical quotation and pastiche brought a semblance of familiarity to players then
unaccustomed to so-called non-idiomatic improvisation.
Taiwan-based vocalist Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, by contrast, led a vocal workshop
focused on attentive listening and body awareness. Her workshop culminated in an
ensemble performance at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. In it, participants
walked around the space emitting vocal sounds while following a text score that
prompted a variety of interactions across the gallery.
These are but two examples of how the iMprov program fostered exchange with local
and visiting artists from different backgrounds. The safe environment of the
workshops did much to enable the individual practice of its participants.
The iMprov concert series in a way succeeded Tura New Music’s long-running Club
Zho (1999-2016) in presenting experimental music concerts in a pub environment.
The iMprov concerts were hosted on a monthly basis at the 459 Bar in North Perth
between 2016 and 2018. One interesting aspect of Myburgh’s curation were the one-
off collaborative sets featured at each concert. Among the ad-hoc performances was an
improvising string quartet made up of Tristen Parr, Gabbi Fusco, Joshua Cusack, and
Aaron Wyatt; and the vocal duet of Lana Rothnie with Priscilla Gardner. From an
audience perspective, these sets were a chance of seeing artists from contrasting
musical backgrounds rise-up to the challenge of the live performance.

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 Symczycz/Jacobs at Outcome Unknown #3. Photo by Alexander Turner

With the advent of Tone List, some of the energy present at concerts and workshops
was harnessed into a focused curatorial approach. The record label was established by
Dan O’Connor, Josten Myburgh, Jameson Feakes, and Lenny Jacobs in 2016. Annika
Moses joined ranks three years later. The collective has been proactive in fostering
exchange between Perth’s diverse musical cultures while at the same time tapping into
national and global networks. Tone List’s flagship event, the Audible Edge
International Festival of Exploratory Sound, has further advanced their omnivorous
programming and cogent curatorial vision.
EX by Dan O’Connor was the label’s first release. A solo set of trumpet improvisations
constrained to breath-long phrases. O’Connor’s wispy, dance-like streams of pitched
air are delivered with assurance. Furthermore, his elegant execution of the album’s
concept inspired fellow musicians with a commitment to instrumental practice.
Another conceptual release followed suit in Jameson Feakes’ …Until… a program of
procedural and/or highly abstract guitar pieces that included works by the American
Clarence Barlow, Wandelweiser member Eva-Maria Houben, and two works by local
composers Josten Myburgh, and James Bradbury. Whereas O’Connor’s EX asserts
personal expression, …Until… heralds a more guarded, reticent approach. Feakes
seems almost intent on erasing every trace of the sounds played. His sparse plucking
and faint e-bow lines are etched against the monolithic backdrop of the compositions.

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Although the label has amassed a large catalogue since its inception; these two releases
crystallized some of the concerns present at the iMprov workshops.
NoizeMaschin!! is currently Perth’s longest running night of experimental music.
Established in 2013 by Sam Gilles and SkOt McDonald, it takes place at the Perth
Artifactory; a hacker space host to a community of tinkerers, programmers, and
designers. Under the motto ‘don’t think, make’ NoizeMaschin!! has always
foregrounded immediacy and a DIY aesthetic.i The warehouse space of the Perth
Artifactory adds whimsy to the night’s proceedings. There are retro futuristic
constructions hanging from high shelves or placed in between power tools. The fact
that the Perth Artifactory is located within the industrial suburb of Osbourne Park
allows for the loud volume levels proper to noise music. A typical NoizeMaschin!! night
is a mix of geeky playfulness and excess, as seen in the stacks of amps performers
wheel-in to the crammed stage.
Some of the artists associated with NoizeMaschin!! and The Perth Artifactory in
general include Meg Travers, who has done extensive research on the Trautonium and
built a prototype from scratch; Nathan Thompson, an artist drawing on science and
research methodologies active in the modular synth community; and Jean-Michel
Maujean, a composer researching bird song and alternative tuning systems.

Eduardo Cossio, Furchick, and Zoe Kilbourn at Outcome Unknown #6. Photo by
Laura Strøbech

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Outcome Unknown started out from a desire to keep the momentum of gigs and
workshops happening around 2016. For the first two years, I hosted the concerts at
Spectrum Project Space, an art gallery located within the Edith Cowan University
campus in Mount Lawley. As a music composition student, I had then the benefit of
booking the space for free. Having a regular slot in the gallery’s program helped to
establish a presence for the series. But if Outcome Unknown was to reach a broader
audience it needed to move away from the academic setting. Since 2018, concerts have
been held in the more centrally located venues of Paper Mountain (an Artist Run
Initiative) and the North Perth Lesser Hall.
Perhaps the most important undertaking of the series has been the regional tours done
in the South-West of Western Australia between 2018 and 2019. Touring experimental
music in regional towns could be regarded as a Quixotic enterprise given the lack of
exposure for it outside the city. Yet, I felt it important to create exchange opportunities
for artists and audiences outside Perth. With a touring party consisting of Dan
O’Connor, Annika Moses, Lenny Jacobs, and I; Outcome Unknown’s regional concerts
focused on local collaborations. Likewise, the free-improvisation workshops were
open to everyone regardless of experience. A lecture on the work of WA composers was
later added to subsequent tours.
Outcome Unknown events were especially well-received in Denmark, a coastal town
416km south of Perth. Denmark has a tight-knit community of artists that includes
electronic musicians Jeremy Von Kobra and David McKenzie; vocalist-improviser
Sara Turvey; programmers Campbell Creswick and Mark Cresp; and choreographer
Narayani Lees.
A wealth of documentation was produced from the tours, including a set of thirteen
interviews with regional artists being aired on Perth’s community radio station
RTRFM 92.1. Although still an emerging project, we found that the collaborative
model pursued by Outcome Unknown in regional towns encouraged a sense of
camaraderie and openness from all involved.
The projects I have described provide platform to a wide array of experimental music
practices. More importantly, the collaborative networks forged have brought visibility
to the Perth experimental scene, both within and outside Western Australia. Exchange
between communities feels like an exciting prospect for a concert series, regardless of
where it sits in the musical spectrum.

i
Gillies, S., & McDonald, S. (2016). Noizemaschin!!: A New Model of Live Performance in Perth, Western
Australia from 2011 to the Present Day. Sound Scripts, 5(1).
Retrieved from [Link]

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ADSR Zine 009.2.2 DECAY-SUSTAIN

Place is always moving, like a sleeping cat

Tristan Louth-Robins

The earliest recollection that I have of sound and its unique presence is at the age of three or four, lying
in bed at night and listening to the sound of waves crashing on the beach. This was in my hometown of
Normanville, a small community situated on the coastline of the Fleurieu Peninsula. Our house was
roughly a ten minute walk from the beach, so this sound of the ocean would arrive muffled, yet it
would still ​sound ​like the ocean: a blend of rumbles and roars pealing through the air.

Thinking back on this memory over thirty years later, I’ve wondered about the passage of those sounds
as they would have made their journey from the beach to my childhood bedroom. From the churning
of the ocean, a periodic thump of waves, rolling over the dunes, becoming tangled and absorbed by
vegetation, reflecting off roads and houses, before eventually penetrating the walls and windows of our
house and reaching my young ears in the night.

Such a memory has remained a potent reminder of the ever-present nature of sound: that regardless of
a perceived quietude, spaces are always suffused with waves and vibration.

From Normanville, some eighty kilometres north to my current home in Adelaide, this recollection of
listening to the ocean at night and thinking about the ever-presence of sound would strike me as
poignant during the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, where an unprecedented atmosphere of
quietude was coming into relief.

During the initial lockdown in South Australia, in the mornings I would go for a brief walk around my
neighbourhood to ready myself for a new daily routine of working from home. Perhaps the most
noticeable difference to my neighbourhood soundscape was how the steady thrum of morning rush
hour traffic had diminished noticeably. Thousands of vehicles, usually producing dense clouds of
coarse tones and resonances had been reduced to thin wisps, at times often blending with other sounds
in the audible vicinity. In many instances, natural sounds would appear to co-mingle with human-made
sounds in a state of dynamic equilibrium, sometimes blurring the distinction of what was natural and
what was not.

Having lived in an urban environment for over twenty years, I struggled at first to apprehend what was
occurring. Prolific science fiction writer JG Ballard’s post-apocalyptic stories frequently depict
environmental cataclysms, where the natural world reasserts itself, filling urban centres and cities with
forbidding environments of flood, drought and dense jungles. Here in 2020, set against proclamations
of doomsday and startling images of deserted cities, it appeared as though the sounds of nature were
filling the spaces left unoccupied by human presence. I never imagined that quiet in the anthropocene
could feel so apocalyptic.

Sound ecologist and scientist, Bernie Krause terms human-produced sounds as ​anthropophonic. ​In a
pejorative sense, this is what could be commonly regarded as noise pollution.​ ​This collective mass of

23
sounds (vehicles, aircraft, machinery, crowds, etc.), consist of such acoustic complexity, intensity and
omnipresence that they can, in turn potentially obscure, mask and cancel out other sounds. Those other
sounds, which Krause regards as ​biophonic ​(non-human organisms, such as birdsong) and ​geophonic ​(the
sound of wind and rain), in this scenario find themselves constantly disrupted or obliterated completely
by the overwhelming presence of human activity. Within this context, I’ve often regarded noise
pollution as an ‘anthropophonic smog’, an audible entity, much like the dirty industrial haze that visibly
envelops urban districts.

So it was remarkable, then to apprehend such an unprecedented spectacle as this, as the ​anthropophony
found itself attenuated and brought into a state of flux with the sounds of the ​biophony ​and ​geophony​.

The sonic smog appeared to be clearing.

Within my immediate neighbourhood, it was as though invisible boundaries comprising sonic territories
had been redrawn or erased altogether, where all sounds had a freedom to propagate, limited only by
their relative wavelength and intensity. From my balcony looking out onto a landscape of ordered
houses, the hush of quiet ambience would occasionally be punctuated: the twitter of birdsong, a dog
barking from afar, the wind coursing through a tree with a rustle, the clatter of crockery, a cry of voices,
a ball bouncing across the street, the slam of a screen door and a distant bell tolling.

Much like my recollection of listening to the ocean in the darkness as a child, I found myself here
pondering this strange new world, with a heightened acuity and renewed sense of reverence for sound
and the act of listening.

Further afield, others would remark on the extraordinary situation that had unfolded in cities across the
world. And it wasn’t just cities. Away from terrestrial spaces, skies emptied of the drone of aircraft, the
aquatic clamour of sea traffic ceased, whilst seismologists were startled to observe a procession of
discrete mini-earthquakes radiating below the surface of the Earth’s crust; seismic vibrations which
would have otherwise been acoustically obscured by the pronounced rumble of human activity.
Additionally, within this atmosphere of global quietude, a rare exponent of collective humanity would
also emerge in evenings and punctuate the air, as citizens would pay thanks to health workers by
applauding, cheering, banging pots and pans from the porches and balconies of their homes.

Not withstanding the upheaval, disruption and widespread tragedy brought about by the global
pandemic, this universal reduction in human activity, along with instances of collective goodwill would
lend themselves to a glut of Utopian ideals and blue-sky thinking. For a while there, we all believed the
dolphins were returning to Venice. However, as I took the time to listen to my neighbourhood from
the domestic hermitage of my balcony I would remind myself - and be reminded by others - that the
situation wasn’t this simple and that the quiet probably wouldn’t last long.

During the first week of the lockdown my mum called from her current home, a few kilometres from
my hometown of Normanville. As I enthused to her just how quiet the neighbourhood and city was,

24
she remarked that the situation was a little different down south. With thousands now afforded the
flexibility of working from home, holiday houses across the Fleurieu Peninsula had found themselves
filled in an instant by their city-based owners, as the roads across the region became clogged with
vehicles. Acknowledging this, I corrected some of my earlier observations and concluded that the
‘anthropophonic smog’ hadn’t so much dissipated, as rather relocated somewhere else.

***

A couple of years ago, I came across this quote by Japanese sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda:

‘Place is always moving, like a sleeping cat.’

Tsunoda’s practice specialises in closely observing discrete acoustic phenomena with microphone
technology, often examining vibrative and electro-static phenomena in buildings, objects and dense
mediums. His quote makes reference to the fact that although we perceive some things as empty,
motionless or silent, these things - be they natural or human-made - are ​always​ moving, vibrating and
pressing themselves out into the world.

It’s a striking thought, and it seems especially relevant during this period of pandemic stillness. More
than anything else, this period has presented an opportunity for me to listen, appreciate and reflect on
sound; an opportunity that might not have otherwise occurred during my lifetime. It has been quite
remarkable.

But as I mentioned before, it won’t last for long. As I’m writing this, our cat has been sleeping on the
couch peacefully. From a distance she looks like a lumpy motionless cushion. If I look closer though, I
can see her breathing, as her body discretely rises and falls. Watching a sleeping cat can be quite
calming, but given their preference for short naps, this moment of calm will be short and it’s likely that
before too long she’ll rouse once again.

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ADSR Zine 009.2.3 DECAY-SUSTAIN
On seeing Camouflage, then the Getty challenge –
some thoughts on ‘nearly’
(or: precision, pandemic, playfulness)

Precision

When Chinese performance artist and photographer Liu Bolin visited Victoria for the 2019
Ballarat International Foto Biennale, promotional materials made much of the epithet ‘the
invisible man’. At the Art Gallery of Ballarat the exhibition Camouflage offered a survey of
Bolin’s photo-performances – from 2005 to a new work made in Melbourne, in 2019, for the
Foto Biennale. Yet throughout my experience of the exhibition Bolin was never ‘invisible’:
I remember being struck by the ways in which many works were fragile if not failed acts of
camouflage.

Wasn’t that the point? For children and adults alike there was pleasure in noticing the artist’s
skill in making himself (the standing form of his clothed and painted body, his highly
composed presence-in-veneer) ‘nearly invisible’. The ‘nearly’ in this description is so
important, and not only, of course, for reasons of entertainment. The ‘nearly’ points to the
difference between an image capable of stirring questions about what each of us first sees – and
the possibility of our habits of seeing being unsettled, at least. Reviewing the exhibition for
Overland magazine, Claire Collie’s writing is freely personal where she acknowledges, ‘I can’t
help thinking that [Bolin’s] work is more spectre than camouflage’. From there, she can argue
persuasively that his work concerns ‘the ethics of seeing’ in contemporary Australian
landscapes.

Myriad writers consider adverbs ill-advised. But ‘nearly’ is sometimes necessary for thinking
about art; for understanding the appeal and agency of particular work. In the photos from
Bolin’s ‘Hiding in the City’ series, ‘nearly’ is a matter of precision. Fastidiously painted ‘in’ to
a scene, the artist is then photographed by means that don’t efface the subtle evidence – in light
and shadow, paint textures, brushstrokes, and colour gradations – of his studied attendance and
location.

Pandemic

Since the World Health Organisation declared coronavirus COVID-19 a pandemic (11 March
2020), calamitous weeks have become months of shuttered art museums and galleries around
the globe. As opportunities to take ‘virtual tours’ online have swiftly multiplied, so have
appraisal and disapproval of these ‘museum from home’ programmes. Plenty of Bolin’s works
from ‘Hiding in the City’ can be viewed online (they’ve long been collected there on his studio
website). In that realm, however, dissociated from the viewers’ physical space, the relational
dynamics of scale break down – the photos’ detail and material properties are flattened. They
tend to resemble stock postcards, some seemingly watermarked with a figure of the artist in
outline. My reflections on the value of ‘nearly’ to appreciating Bolin’s achievement predate the
pandemic by six months: I had spent a long afternoon wandering busy galleries during a visit to
Ballarat, at present an adventure impossible to repeat.

Playfulness

In their dark niches and halls currently inaccessible to the public, the unique objects that are the
artworks can’t closely participate, singly or together, in being turned towards, petitioned by a
visitor who passes, sits, stands before them. Even so, fewer than ever, perhaps, remain entirely
hidden in the world’s citadels of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. And lately,
clickable ‘collection highlights’ viewed on smartphone and laptop screens have been energising
imaginations everywhere.

26
 In the same week that the Ballarat Foto Biennale began curating an Instagram archive of the
COVID-19 crisis – the Mass Isolation Australia project – the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los
Angeles summoned people to post photos of themselves recreating a favourite artwork ‘with
objects and people’ in their homes. Within days, ‘thousands and thousands’ of responses had
been uploaded to social media: diptychs showing the item from the museum collection at left,
or above, and the recreation at right, or below.

This format is premised on a comparative first-seeing, a looking back-and-forth between an

image of ‘the original’ and the new, homemade photo-performance created during self-
quarantine. Always intended as a likeness, every one of the portrayals can be described as
‘nearly a likeness’. Here, the ‘nearly’ marks an ecstatic thrift that tends to characterise the
recreations. Rather than precision, ‘nearly’ is a matter of declared sufficiency, even outright
playfulness, and wit.

People chose items from the Getty’s prehistoric arts, decorative arts, and manuscripts
collections, as well as mostly figurative paintings. The interplay between the halves of each
diptych is endlessly fascinating, as we register the features of the museum work emphasised by
the household collaborators. How quirky and unexpected! The contours of a sculpted Cycladic
harp are given as the curved hose of a vacuum cleaner; a towel-shrouded woman with her pug
render the intimate gestures of a thirteenth-century Madonna and child; delicate greenery
festooning rocks at the Roman Forum is dramatised as a bonsai tree that dominates the scene’s
lower right corner. The whole history of art might be domesticated by such brisk
reinterpretations, enabled, filtered, multiplied by social media.

‘Nearly’ is required, too, whenever we recognise, in these photos, a literal continuity of

appearances across time. Shawls and eyeglasses; books and potplants; ordinary washing, jugs,
and loaves of bread; the slant of pale light through a closed window ... . There they are where
people are at home, smartphone camera-ready, nearly mirrored: no doubt materially different,
but functionally the same. As the late John Berger wrote for art museums at the beginning of
this century, via News Feed updates ‘we come upon the visible of other periods and it offers us
company. We feel less alone in face of what we ourselves see each day appearing and
disappearing’.† Berger’s examples include ‘teeth, hands’, parts of the human body that bind his
reflections to a mood of existential gravitas. Playfulness and wit aren’t far from this mood.

* * *

Shutdown and containment measures have started to ease. Bolin’s ‘nearly invisible’ ghosting of
city locations can take on freshly nuanced meanings, say, about resistance and resilience (our
seeing of such deliberate, widely-known, ‘fine art’ images will continually change).
Nonetheless, right now, when I recall his practice of imperfect self-camouflage, it relates to
Berger’s observation about the broad solace of art as company. Surely those slivers of Bolin’s
outline or painted disguise expose a desire to ‘feel less alone’ in his preoccupations. So they
share something with the hashtagged photos made for the Getty challenge, something more
urgent than procedures of dressing up for a photo-shoot in situ. Both projects affirm a human
state of belonging to art in a volatile, often inhospitable world – a world that, still, nearly
always affords visible proof of our interdependence.

Cynthia Troup
Lauriston Victoria, 15 June 2020

†John Berger, ‘Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible’, in his collection The Shape of a
Pocket (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001), p. 21.

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ADSR Zine 009.2.4 DECAY-SUSTAIN

Our Imagined Future 1.0

Vincent Giles

Introduction
Artists on strike: government concerned about economic impact.

Brand new creatives superunion to bargain for improved conditions for artists.

These two statements are ​imaginary headlines from the future. It is important, as this essay will show,
to imagine our collective future; to imagine the world we want to live and work in. The advent of
Covid19 in Australia (and worldwide), and the consequent loss of income for many, many
individuals, closure of businesses, and damage to (with potential closure of) established artistic
institutions such as Carriageworks, shines a rather bright light on our present situation in the arts, and
more broadly. This lockdown and restriction of livelihood has shone a light on our collective lack of
imagined future, as is shown through the discourse both at the personal level and the public or
published level.

In response to the outcry by artistic practitioners and members of various institutions to the
Covid19-based economic crisis of 2020, this essay offers a personal response to that outcry. While
there are some sources to more rigorous academic output, this is not that nor will it attempt to be. It is
a response (however privileged) to the Covid19 situation, and it is meant not as a critique, or a
complaint, or a “fuck you” to my comrades in the arts. Rather, it is intended as a musing on what may
be required to genuinely change anything of our current (and previous and future) situation(s) and to
give some context to these ideas as they have been meandering about in my head for at least a couple
of years. It will then propose some radical actions that may be needed to insulate artists and arts
workers in the future, and contends that imagining futures is – in the present moment – of the utmost
importance.

For the publication context of this essay, I will focus on the arts, and specifically music, as much as I
can. I wish to add a number of caveats now, and beg forgiveness from anybody who may feel that I
am being dismissive or not recognising the difficulties of not only this present time, but of working in
the arts in a general sense.

The Echochamber
As things started to go into lockdown with venues closing, livelihoods in question, and slow responses
by governments that considered martyring people to the economy, the discourse around the poor
treatment of, or lack of concern for, the arts and arts workers increased - as one would expect. As
much as social media, it is nonetheless a platform through which people seem to feel heard, at least to

28
their friends, family, and colleagues. There were understandable posts being made, or shared, by
people who were (and still are) rightly scared about the state of the arts, and the aforementioned
government’s seeming lack of interest in supporting artists (or arts institutes). There were articles
written by affected, or concerned artists and arts workers in various publications (including many
large-reach ones), and these were (again rightly) shared by concerned or affected comrades via social
media.

It has been fairly well documented that social media (and particularly Facebook) has a tendency to act
as an echochamber, limiting perspectives and isolating individuals within them1. Rightly so, many
posts and articles point out the incredible contribution the arts make to the Australian economy, as if
to say “but government this is what you want! You love the economy!” which may be true, or it may
not, I’m not sure we’ll ever know. However, it struck me, at least within my echochamber, that much
of these posts and articles were basically directed back into the people about whom they are written:
the artists and arts workers. I saw not a single person share an article in defence of the arts who did
not have a vested interest in the arts, which is not to say that this did not happen, of course. Similarly,
the articles I saw being shared (and came across myself through various online sources, such as
ArtsHub and The Guardian) were written by people invested in the arts. I am certain that this was in
part the echochamber that is my social media, but it got me thinking about the present situation in a
way that I hadn’t before, and which consolidated some other ideas that have been floating in my mind
for a while now, which I will go into in the next section. But to close this off, if the echochamber
effect is happening, and I suspect it is at least to some degree, then a lot of this discourse is flying
around artists and arts organisations and not into the broader public. I appreciate that people that
aren’t in the arts were and are equally affected by Covid19 and likely, and rightly, had other things on
their minds, but before Covid19 there still seems to be a strong echochamber effect in place and I
have to wonder where the vested interest in the arts in the non-arts community is? I don’t have an
answer to this question, as it is generally outside of my experience as an artist.

Public Interest and the Abusive Employer

This discourse seems to be directed internally: artists telling other artists (and arts workers) about the
problems of the arts sector, lack of public support, and government funding cuts. What I never saw,
neither in the posts, nor in the articles, was a call to action: collectivisation and taking control of our
own livelihoods together, not as competitive individuals. For those of us lucky enough to be
self-sustaining without support from the government: great, I hope that this does not ring true for you.
For everybody, in any vocation (and I include my comrades in the sciences and other research areas
here) that is beholden to competitive funding, it should be no surprise that the current Morrison
government do not show any particular concern for artists or the arts as this is hardly new territory for
these policy-makers. Funding cuts to the arts have been happening, on average, for a while now
(although 2017-18 seem to show a blip in this downward trend and there is data missing from when
Abbott cut funds to the Australian Bureau of Statistics), trending down for at least the last decade,
which includes both ALP and LNP governments.2

1
[Link]
2
​[Link]

29
I have been thinking about whether us artists, and the institutions we’re sometimes part of, have begun
to see ourselves as ​employed by the government’s funding processes. When that money does not come
through, we become functionally unemployed. We are not only the proletariat working for the
bourgeoisie, we are the precariat; our employment has no guarantees and can disappear very rapidly if
our elusive employer decides that there is financial scarcity. Different artists have different levels of
precariousness, with people (like me) being in the privileged position of holding academic
employment, while others are independently wealthy (the bourgeois), and all manner of variations
from that to hand-to-mouth existence. With the exception of the independently wealthy, when scarcity
is decided, the abusive employer makes all employees redundant, and makes them re-apply for less
jobs. When actions like this happen in an employer/employee relationship there tends to be at least a
sense of generalised solidarity with the people affected, such as in the Covid19 situation. Of course,
the neoliberal who believes in the free market of capital (labour) would suggest that the affected
simply sell their labour to a better, less abusive employer.

Neoliberalism and the Hauntological Loop

But what good would that achieve? In this market-dominated economic framework, it is not those
whose labour supports the economy who have control of their lives, it is those who accumulate the
capital (labour) and abuse the power imbalance who control the lives of the labour force. This is not a
free market. All people, not only artists, are affected by this type of oppression, and while it is one
layer of oppression in a highly oppressive society, and I do not want to diminish the experiences of
people affected by colonialism, that is not the focus of this essay. Neoliberalism permits the
commodification/marketisation of everything: that includes disruptive efforts. Not everybody has
access to the “market”. We are stuck in a hauntological loop where we can’t imagine a future without
(neoliberal) capitalism, we can’t imagine a future without our abusive employer, and we can’t imagine
a future in which we have collective solidarity. Hauntology can be described as a situation in which
the future disappears, and in an attempt to imagine the future we turn to the past.3 An example that the
YouTube video essayist Cuck Philosophy gives where science fiction narratives have lost their
capacity to imagine a future, and instead turn to past imaginings of the future for ideas. When stuck in
this hauntological loop, imagining something genuinely new becomes impossible, because the only
resources we have to fuel the imagination are the past.4 This becomes mere nostalgia: remembering
“better days”, when the future was imaginable, and this is what we see now with Covid19 as the
catalyst for contemplating the downward trend in public funding: we have nostalgia for former years
when funding was plentiful, conveniently forgetting that lots of people missed out then, just as now,
that it was always precarious, and that the employer was always the power-holder who could abuse
that power. This is a loop without solidarity, where each individual, or even each small collective, is
competitive with everyone else for the scraps of funding (let’s call it wages) from our employer. We
are repeatedly made redundant, repeatedly made to reapply for less jobs, and are repeatedly unable to
imagine a future in which this is not the way. The hauntological loop traps us into thinking we are
imagining a future, when really, we are just bringing the past back to haunt us. We must reclaim our
future.

3
​Fisher, Mark. "What Is Hauntology?" Film Quarterly 66, no. 1 (2012): 16-24. Accessed May 24, 2020. doi:10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16.
4
​[Link]

30
Radical Action
I propose that if we, as artists, really want to improve things for ourselves, we need some genuine
action. We need to make some sacrifices. And we need to do it together, collectively. Not the kind of
“in it together” rhetoric that surrounds Covid19; not the kind of “we’re all doing it tough” and
“everyone needs to make some sacrifice for the common good”, but genuine community solidarity.
We need to, collectively and in solidarity with each other, restrict access for the ​general public to
what we do. We need to do this with the backing of an Australia-wide (possibly Australia and New
Zealand) that can back our actions and provide help for those in need, to those affected by the action.

Imagine this: to get our demands met, we begin striking at the heart of the economic value that the
arts, collectively, bring to the country. We strike at the heart of the v​ alue that the general public
purportedly place upon what we do. We strike.

Stage One

● We strike. Every Friday. We take away ​all public art-based experiences, from the whole
country (hell, at this point I’d be happy if it were localised to one city, but I’d like to imagine
a future that is more collective than that). All galleries are closed. There is no live music (be it
DJs or bands or classical ensembles or whatever). There are no book shops. No libraries.
Nothing. Every Friday for six weeks until our demands are met and the conditions and
precariousness improved ​for all​. When that is not met (and it won’t be), we;
● We strike. Every Friday and every Saturday for six weeks, until our demands are met. At this
point, the economic impact should be starting to be felt, both by us and the institutions, and by
the government, and by the general population who are suddenly deprived of weekend
activities. When our demands are not met, then;
● We strike. Every Friday and every Saturday and every Sunday for six weeks, until are
demands are met ​for all​. And then, we move on to stage two.

Stage Two
In this stage we start to strike on all the adjacent activities: teaching, workshops, community service,
while maintaining the strikes on public access over weekends. These actions would have a very severe
impact on the livelihoods of everybody involved, and for it to work, it needs to be in complete
solidarity with support from an institute like a union. People need to have their basic needs met. And,
when the government does not agree to our demands, we need to build the infrastructure ourselves. At
the very least, this might get some public solidarity where Stage One fails to do so. This may seem
counterintuitive, as there is the risk that by withdrawing too far we may indeed disappear, especially if
the demands are not met and these actions yield no change (as is likely).

Rather than disappearing, maybe we focus inwards, on our communities, in solidarity with one
another. We work together, with and for each other. Not for the market, not for the government, and
not for the people who abandon us.

31
Imagining Our Future
I propose these things, but I’m not entirely convinced that we, collectively or individually, know what
we actually want. While it has been gratifying to see artists adapting to the circumstances of social
distancing, these are responses that buy into the current situation, and while certainly some
community is built around these events, this is not a collective imagining of a new future. We’re stuck
in a hauntological loop of neoliberalism, and we can’t imagine a collective future because we can’t
imagine a world without capitalism in its current form. We can’t imagine a world in which we, as
artists, and the institutes that we’re part of, are not beholden to market-driven ideology and are instead
in solidarity with one another, for our community and the larger community, and genuinely working
together in a new framework where we control our own livelihoods. And we can’t imagine a world in
which they, the people that aren’t part of what we do, are in solidarity with us.

[Visionary fiction] reminds us to be utterly unrealistic in our organizing, because it is only

through imagining the so-called impossible that we can begin to concretely build it. When we
free our imaginations, we question everything. We recognize none of this is fixed ... To
paraphrase Arundhati Roy, other worlds are not only possible, but are on their way—and we
can already hear them breathing.
- Walidah Imarisha5

There is no easy way forward, but I am optimistic that through genuine discourse and sharing of
creative work, which Covid19 has made more inclusive somewhat ironically through social
distancing, we may be able to imagine a future. We need to be able to define, first, how we want that
future to be, and then we can start imagining something that is not stuck in a nostalgic feedback loop
with the past. Once we can imagine it, then, as the quote above points out, we can start to build it. One
way of beginning to free our imaginations from the hauntological loop is to imagine news headlines
from the future we want, such as those at the beginning of this essay. If we can imagine short
headlines, then perhaps we can imagine the detail that those headlines relate to.

Last government arts grant given as nation-wide artist supercollective takes on administration of
regular artist salaries.

And relatedly:

Supported by artist supercollective salaries, artists take accessibility to new levels through virtual
galleries and live streaming, providing free access to many.

While this has focused on the arts and artists, I want a future of total liberation ​for all people​. I hope
that perhaps as artists we can collectively work on imagining a future, not just for ourselves, but for
everybody.

5
​[Link]

32
LMH

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33
LMH

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34
LMH

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35
ADSR Zine 009.3.1 RELEASE
TIMES of COVIDITY
Found three minutes apart on early morning self-distancing walk
POSITIVE & NEGATIVE
(…or is it the other way around…)

And now for something more cheerful,

discovered on same self-distancing walk around the block
A recycling-bin taking its pet paper bag for a social-distancing walk

36
Meanwhile the extraordinary Illawarra Flame Tree is minding its own business

37
scribbling away

38
Ooops, a second spike… ?

… and another one

39
ADSR Zine 009.3.2 RELEASE

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41
ADSR Zine 009.3.3 RELEASE
Allan Rand

Title: untitled (sitting)

Materials: Ballpoint pen, felt-tip pen, on paper
Size: 35 x 43,3 cm (framed 58,8 x 66,3 cm)
Year: 2011
Exhibition: Allan Rand - “Serendipitous Sojourns”
02/12/2017—24/02/2018, Galerie Nagel Draxler,
Reisebürogalerie, Cologne, Germany
Collection: Danish Arts Foundation
Photo: Achim Kukulies, Düsseldorf
ADSR Zine 009.3.4 RELEASE

A POLEMICAL 30-PART V-LETTER TO, FROM, & ABOUT

PRE(CARE)IOUSNESS: 1.04.2020 - 20.6.2020
Ongoing correspondence from [me]
[click envelope to open]

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ADSR Zine
[attack, decay, sustain, release]
ADSR Zine is an online platform established in November 2018 by Elia Bosshard, James
Hazel and Sonya Holowell. It is a bi-monthly publication that features writing from
contributors who are, or who work with contemporary practising artists. We value the
process of reflection, translation, interpretation, critical response and active engagement
with Australian art and performance.

We believe that the artist is not only an expert in their field, but offers an important voice
beyond the scope of their primary discipline. Artists are welcomed to move beyond this
scope to embrace naivety, presenting the sweep, the details, or a combination of both.

As a magazine with a strong interdisciplinary focus, the online format allows for the
delivery of written, sonic and visual resources to present, support and facilitate discourse
between practising artists.

WHAT WE DO

ADSR Zine offers a 3-part conceptual scaffold that is designed to evoke experimental and
non-formalist approaches to responsive writing and media within a contemporary arts and
performance context.

OUR POINT OF DEPARTURE

ADSR Zine is a platform for discourse that encourages experimental approaches to

discussing visual, performative and sound art. Functioning from an ‘art begets art’ premise,
we offer contributors significant creative license.
We are influenced by the wave of 70’s and 80’s experimental music and art publications
( NMA, Sounds Australia) which were platforms for creative and innovative solutions to
writing and conceptualising experimental work.

TEAM

Editors = James Hazel, Sonya Holowell, Elia Bosshard

Website = Elia Bosshard
Cover Art = Nadia Odlum