VLC, TRANSACTION, IMAGE (2016)

VLC, Transaction, Image was performed a number of times including at Blindside Gallery in Melbourne and at the AudibleVisions conference at Goldsmiths College London in 2016. The performance explores generic musical aesthetics at the level of music production, image searches, audiovisual combinations, and everyday digital labour. The work is built around a set of highly generic audio samples that were randomly triggered in the freeware media player software VLC Player, and extends to re-performances of generic post-digital labour such as paying bills and debts, purchasing products and updating websites. VLC, Transaction, Image takes an ethic of standardisation to its logical extreme where only the most predetermined modes of aesthetic production are employed, and only the simplest of aesthetic decisions are made. In the work, the aesthetically constrained, predetermined and automatic nature of software mediated aesthetic innovation is broached via a disinterested re-performance of various post-digital routines.

Thomas Smith, VLC, Transaction, Image (2016), Performance, Duration 19 minutes, Blindside Gallery, Melbourne (full documentation of Melbourne performance available here)

Thomas Smith, VLC, Transaction, Image (2016), Performance Documentation, Blindside Gallery, Melbourne