Oberhausen International Short Film Festival 2001, Germany

Preparation for essay 'Seeing the Beat: Retinal Intensities in Electronic Music Videos.' Simon Reynolds. 2000 The Videos. A Response. The effects resemble solarisation, video equivalents of audio production FX like flanging, phasing, ghosting, filtering etc -- where there's source material like stock footage or your own shooting, it's extremely degraded and distorted -- also there's all these abstract, abject-looking pulses and filaments and oozings of color-texture - and there's kaleidoscopic effects combined with abstract symbols and patterns -- also seems to be a lot of flicker and strobe, and an effect that's kind of trembling or wavering of the image. Generally it looks like you're trying to do visually what you did with language in the OD book in the pieces evoking the disorientation and uncanny qualities of techno trance rave etc -- Seeing the Beat: Retinal Intensities in Electronic Music Videos is about how 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 you're trying to close with your video work. EXCERTS FROM "Seeing the Beat: Retinal Intensities in Techno and Electronic Dance Videos" by Simon Reynolds, 2000 Published in Festival Catalogue -Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Mai 200 (Internationale Kurtzfilmtage Oberhausen) (In conjunction with the screening of 'Spiderman' video) "o[rphan]d[rift<], whose video work has featured in promos for songs, as back projected video-decor in clubs, and in multimedia gallery installations, also represent "the spirit of rave" in terms of form-dissolving, ego-melting, boundary-hemorrhaging femininity. They consciously articulate their work as an attempt to close the gap between the visual(traditionally regarded as the masculine sense) and the aural(traditionally regarded as female).....The overall effect simulates a sort of retinal trembling, as though vision itself was wavering, the mindscreen buckling and crinkling. The eye is restored to its materiality as a jelly-like orb, a muscle capable of being stressed, strained,even injured, as opposed to a disincarnate, invulnerable perceptual apparatus." "The ur-technique underlying o[rphan] d[rift<]'s work is the liberation of texture from its environment, of energy-flux from contoured form;the goal is to recreate "the intensity of being kind of lost." "The O[rphan]d[rift<], cyberpositive, book describes the rave experience in terms of masochistic mortification of the flesh ("deep hurting techno", "the violence of the sounds.its like you are being turned inside out,smeared,penetrated"), shamanic possession and voodoo oblivion("white darkness","the fog of absolute proximity") and "beautiful fear".

Carrier 2000 Prosjektrom Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo

Review 'Billedkunst', nr.3, 2000, by Christian Refsum, 'Carrier' by 0rphan drift. THE UNDERWORLD AT KUNSTNERNES HUS. The installation 'Carrier'  is an intimate experiment in space and the sensation of space. One can recognize a lot of effects from the last 20 years of installation art; dark rooms, steel rods  that trigger associations of a decaying industrial society. There are flashing video screens, uncomfortable  sound effects that seem unpleasantly close or as if they come from a different place. All the rooms seem relatively independent but  all block out  light and give a confined feeling. And they all trigger electronic tensions. One can think of separate zones in a coal-mine or underworld, a place where there is no organic life or form, only matt planes, stone, metal, electronic flashing signals and sound fragments, either static or in a mechanic loop. This kind of installation art got shaped in the changes from the industrial to post-industrial society.   Contemporary art  exists as a row of parallel genres and ways of expressions, that in a given period represent something new, but after a while will develop its own codes that have a relatively independent dynamic. 'Carrier' shows  that this is also the case with the 80's a bit more 'rock-n-roll' and more  'technofied'  installation art. 'Carrier' makes this medium of expression readable again, but it works also as aesthetisized contemporary art. It is an immediate experience of the atomspheric and meditative potential of the space.

SYZYGY 2000 Beaconsfield, London

SYZYGY- 26/02/99-28/03/99 at Beaconsfield Arts, London Project developed and curated by 0rphandrift with CCRU ­ŒCybernetic Culture Research unit¹ ­ resulting in an installation animated by audio visual works presented in a series of events over five weeks. Each week was devoted to a different Œfictional numeric character¹ whose principles were embodied in installed static art, video, sound, live performance and discussion. 0rphan drift produced the main installation- (see collage images); the video work (production and live mixing-see clips) ; and directed commissioned collaborators for events; Traxis (performers), Ocosi, Apache 61, Dmitri Nakov (sound). CCRU events also included sound by Kodwo Eshun and Kode9.

Excerpt from Review by Jim Flint, Mute Magazine, issue 13 "While the CCRU was more interested in the theoretical underpinning of the show , the 0rphan¹s side concerned itself with the dynamic reconstruction of various numerically based cultural machines, and to this extent there was a fictional element.- 0D used the notion of the demon in its various forms( though they prefered the term ¹avatar) to code the various elements they were trying to make coherent within the contemporary mediasphere. Thus we were shown the avatar as a unit of sorcery; as a figure historically used to provide an Œinformational outside¹ with physics, a link between logic and noise, as in Maxwell¹s demon; as a software agent, as semi-intelligent and semi-autonomous code-bot; and as a disruptive figure of darkness. For 0D, all of these have in common the casting of the demon as a multiple and individious unit of ontological disintegration, but one that is implicit in any act of communication- something which the angelogies of Michel Serres have already taught us. By recasting each node/operation on the CCRU numagram as an avatar or demon- the art on display- the collages, dancers and audiovisual events- -expressed each avatars realisation as a tendency in cultural production. Thus one avatar, KATAK, grew out of the conflict between electricity and sunlight and linked to belief systems and sacrifice, to the concentrations of power typical of fanatacism, while another, XES, was born of the reality of total surface presented by the camera. One creative conflict, one source of power, for all five of the avatars was the duality that exists between tools and weapons, each able to perform the function of either depending upon the circumstance."

Ariadne's Gone Virtual 1995 Underwood st

Beat Regeneration. Jim McClellan sees echoes of Kerouac in techno subcultists 0rphan drift. The Observer Life Magazine. July 1995. 'Ariadne's Gone Virtual' attempted to investigate the disorientating nature of computer-simulated worlds by trying to construct a video game space in a gallery. Time Out. July 1995. 0rphan drift is a collaborative effort by four nameless artists that draws heavily on cyberpunk vernacular. 'These stories are of the interface-adaptation-danger-circuit that is our lives. This is a nervous network, a schizoid novel visualized' reads the press release. What you get is a subterranean display of video works, flickering ultraviolet sunbed lights and techno tracks.The graffiti on the walls sketches out a bleak scenario of urban alienation and comic book dreams.

Anteomega 1997 Bank Space, London

excerpt from 0D Wave mag interview, Belgium. 1996. Mapping a new species. The entrance to the show was draped in 'an alien's shed skin'. We inherited some snakes. They inspired many aspects of this show. They have a wired stillness. They feel the world around them as vibration. We saw them as a prototype for changing perception because they are tuned in to frequency and vibration'. Beyond the skin, the walls were patterned with different images: video and tv stills, drawings and symbols, diagrammatic clusters, 'making a map on many levels like techno music, with different frequencies- the bassline and so on- and elements repeating like melodies, motifs, themes, beats'. Reminiscent of circuit diagrams, 0(rphan)d(rift>) maps express strange, transformative processes.

Martin 1998 Commercial Gallery, London; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; Maygood Gallery, Newcastle and Galeria Dziekanka, Poland

OD Video work 'YOU IT¹S EYES' produced for MARTIN traveling exhibtion of works inspired by George Romero¹s 1970¹s vampire film 'MARTIN' First Showing at Commercial Gallery and Atlantis, London 12/6-9/7 1997 Excerpts from Review by Pauline Mourik Broekman- Mute Magazine, Issue 9 0rphan Drift¹s installation "You It¹s Eye¹s" is an older piece. Deliberately placed at the end of the exhibition in 'Martin's' planned Heart of Darkness¹, "You It¹s Eye¹s" doesn¹t require the curator¹s meta-discourse to pull you into otherworldliness. - It¹s silent surrounds demand a different kind of attention and reward it amply. The video has been worked and reworked to the point where dissolution is always on the horizon. Viewing it means flitting in and out of a bleeding, congealing televisual world at speeds which come to feel anything but human. Perhaps that¹s the sensation Martin was getting at when he tried to tell his family what he felt like.

Orphan drift 1995 Cabinet Gallery, London

ID Magazine. June 1995. Serotonin Overkill. Art posse 0rphan drift describe themselves as 'insistent signal' and refuse to specify their backgrounds or how many people are in the group. They've written cybersaturated, poetic fiction, are developing a computer game and generate cool images. Their pictures show human figures dissolving into colours alongside hallucinogenic landscapes, handfuls of disco pills, slasher style torture and the evolution of a cyborg. It's future dreaming- but with a violent edge.'

Time Out. March1995. 'When culling images from TV screens, there's a shutter speed that avoids interference lines. I can't remember what it is and neither can 0rphan drift (unless theirs are deliberate). These photographs have a full complement of them; pixelated and camera shaken. Computer circuitry informs their layout over the freshly silvered walls. There's even an ambient, trancy soundtrack. 0rphan drift is a collaborative project, a soon-to-be-published book, and the title of the show. A colour co-ordinated dynamic runs through the gallery's two rooms. Blind ninja and whirring helicopters populate a vampiric desert dawn and a subterranean jungle. Although extremes of aural, visual and technological states are implied, the result is strangely vernacular; grounded between high-brow and sci-fi. Touchstones emerge when the images dissolve into pure heightened colour. According to 0rphan drift, these are after images for ' a generation addicted to extremity in order to feel'.'

Dave Beech @ The Cabinet Gallery. 1995. in The New German Critique. No.25 'Sex, Drugs and Remote Control. 0rphan drift has drawn on the popular genres most associated with the excessive disorder of dreams: horror, science fiction, and their hybrid- the documentary about technology. This is the culture of spectres. Even though the unframed photos are distributed more or less on a grid pattern across the walls, they inhabit the space without any definite sense of purpose or structure. These video stills are the object of contemplation, but more they anticipate a drunken, ecstatic and unhinged response. Filling a gallery with spectral, frozen shards of the longed for and the feared is going to be almost inevitably uncanny. The neurosis will have bite only if the tropes of otherness are allowed to mumble in their sleep, never quite expressing themselves. This much is achieved in these stolen images of lost bodies and drifting landscapes. Quite unaccountably, though, this cyberscape of somatic edginess has a vague utopian yearning. I say 'vague', but I mean something more like 'cryptic', but without the connotations of stealth. For, the mesh of significations which is this tinted room with silver windows and ambient sound combines with the images to produce something not only strange, but quite opposed to normalization. For instance, the representation of desire as android emotionality doesn't quite settle between the thrill of electric surges and the threat of automatic chaos. This imbalance is an opening. Utopia is in there somewhere. Pictures taken from the TV always look diseased, their skin fractured by the grammar of transmission. As the unresolved collision of formats, the diseased image is a sign of difference, non identity. Too often such inscribed difference is employed for the purpose of professional vanity- a sure sign of high-brow intertextuality- but it can also register the violent manufacture of subjectivities. Here, as the uncertain surface of images of floating existencies or of the panic of drowning, mediated photos of the mediafication of bodily intensities read the somatic disruptions of sex and drugs via their remote encoding in fantasy and myth. This isn't a matter of quotation, but contamination- a sort of technological expressionism. . .'