Poseidon, king of the oceans, has awoken from a two-hundred year slumber and has missed the industrial revolution! He finds himself in a marvellous new world teeming with tantalising plastic! But is plastic all that it appears to be? Why has Amphitrite, queen of the oceans, never left her palace all this time? And who is making all this plastic that is choking the oceans and killing the creatures? The Poseidon Adventure is a play exploring the dilemma we face together and the mighty task of cleaning up our oceans.

Image by Amy Brown Photography

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spoken word/poetry/performance for Healing Ground at St Johns Park, New Town, Tasmania

I have lived in the midst of Lies; in my family, the Anglican Church, and as a person of British ancestry in a country invaded and occupied by the British government. I am a white, privileged male, conceived of Empire. Australia, as I have experienced it, only exists within a colonial paradigm. The original inhabitants, the Aboriginal nations, have never ceded their Lands. The British remain as occupiers. Colonialism is not just my history; it is my very presence.

I am a ghost among

the gum trees, an

apparition of imagination,

sent here, born here from

those sent, sentenced, given

a new life in a new Land, Diaspora,

the chosen ones, the forgotten,

the despised, excess of an

Empire; Lost.

 

I did not choose to be

here, my fate was sealed on

distant shores, by desperate folk,

living disparate lives, unknown and

uncertainty befell them, no land to

claim, no home to shelter, sent

sailing to the four winds, many

never to see land again,

buried; At sea.

 

the Land I dwell in is

not my own, never was,

never will be, covered with

names so familiar, with buildings

upon Places, hiding Knowledge I will

never fully comprehend, the fate that

befalls me is that I live out a lie

under the premise of a nation

fabricated; Alone.

St Johns Park, New Town, is situated on Crown land, claimed by the British in the early 19th century. Buildings commissioned by Governor Arthur include the Anglican Church and the boys and girls orphanages. The Anglican Church was complicit in the invasion and colonisation of Tasmania, the forceful removal of Aboriginal children from their families, and the Aboriginal Nations from their lands.

Image by Amy Brown Photography

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Kellys Garden Curated Projects

A performance-based installation around a handcrafted shrine. Referencing the iconography and ritual of religion the performance and shrine will create a metaphorical and literal platform to connect with the quandaries of contemporary living. The shrine is in no way intended to promote existing religions, but rather to investigate the idea of a carbon-based religion. We are a carbon-based life form and the consequence of our existence, in any manner, produces carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming. Rather than trying to neutralise our carbon footprint, this work acknowledges our footprint and responds, by gesture, in a manner that attests to our humanity.

We are in a state. A state of being like never before. The Anthropocene. The geological age where humankind is the most significant agent of change. Change on a global scale. We have taken from the earth that which cannot be replaced. Not in millions of years. Coal. Oil. Gas. Organic matter laid down upon the earth and buried eons ago. And now all but gone. 1000 barrels of oil per second. Our current global consumption. If only we were consuming at this rate because we had no other choice for survival. But no. We waste. We support inefficiency. The global oil industry is subsidised $10 million every minute. But even when we attain efficiency we squander it needlessly.

Economist William Stanley Jevons in his 1865 book, The Coal Question, predicted that when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (thereby reducing the amount necessary for any one use), the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand. Technological advancements has made air travel increasingly efficient, and often more efficient than other forms of transport. But we simply fly more and more and more and more and more. For my grandparents, travelling to the other side of the world was a once in a lifetime experience. For many of that generation it simply never happened. The opening of borders around the world and the proliferation of events have us clambering onto flights at any given opportunity. After all it’s so cheap. Isn’t it? This is the dilemma. It’s cheaper for me to fly to Melbourne than it is to take my car across the Spirit of Tasmania. And why would I want to take my car when Melbourne has such a great public transport system? It’s complex.

There are no silver bullets or bullet trains or shiny machines that will save us.

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A performance based installation exploring the notion of choice in the age of excess.

The three thousand videos present in the installation compile around ten thousand hours of viewing time. Watching just over two and a half hours of videos a day it would take ten years to view them all. Spending eight hours a day, Monday to Friday for a month, will only account for about two percent of the available viewing.

Yet this whole collection could be digitalized and stored on a multi-terabyte hard drive no bigger than just one of these videos. The fact that we can store so much information now on drives, devices and now in the ‘cloud’ means the physical presence of our choices has altered.

Many people are now downloading more music and video each day than they actually view. Sure these files are easy to access, and portable, but we still only have so many hours in the day to watch or listen to them. Does having so much choice actually enhance our lives, or are we creating stress and anxiety for ourselves?

This installation investigates these issues by exploiting the medium of videocassette tapes. They are a format that most people alive today can relate to and understand. You only have to pick one up to know if it is a short, medium or long length of tape, which we know equates to several minutes up to several hours of viewing.

To accentuate the dilemma of choice the videos have all been labeled the same. The viewer can watch whatever they like, though won’t really know what, until the video is played. There is also no remote control, compelling the viewer to make the extra effort, enabling the choice to seem more existent. Perhaps the greater the effort, and the less choice we have, the more we will appreciate what we have.

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