Category Archives: history

Project Future

fig. 1. ‘Project Future’ (1993).

Project Future was made one night in a share house on Majura Avenue in Ainslie, Canberra, in the third or fourth quarter of 1993. It was made by me and Pete Smale using our housemates video8 camera. I was 25 years old, Pete about the same or a bit younger.

We only had one tape and sadly had gotten into the habit of taping over it again and again. Thus, it became an electronic palimpsest of sorts, though I fear that all that is left is the writing in the margins. For instance, only some of the video of Sex-Pol’s infamous Rage Against Spontaneous Human Combustion telethon gig at the ANU Uni Bar remains intact. Luckily, Project Future survives in its entirety.

Idiot science fiction epic? Stupid movie theatre in space? Project Future is all these things—and so much more!

Prosaically, Project Future was an attempt at a complete film made up on the spot and edited in camera. I have lightly edited it, leaving the original largely intact.

Hopefully I have not deshonkyfied it too much (more on the shonky aesthetics,below).

Poetically, it is the story of Trentan, saviour of the universe, who may also be known as Trentar, from the planet Veblar, who is said to be on the job. Not to be confused with Trentar the Veltronian, a completely other Trentar who is not Trentan, and certainly no Veblarian being from the planet Veltron. “Did someone say Trentar?” To clarify and simplify we have the same actor playing both Trentars. And one of these same Trentars changes accent without any explanation, to help navigate any confusion. Though none of this is to forget the unspeakable machinations of E-Val, nor the heroic indifference of the sometimes-helmeted Captain Discourse, and all of his, Trentar’s, other Trentar’s, and E-Val’s misadventures, deep within the Museum of 20th Century Convenience. To quote E-Val, “Canberra is mine!” “The most exquisite of revenges!”

Such are some of the colours and character masks of the far-off space year, twenty sixteen, the year in which the video is set.

Project Future (1993) has been profoundly influential upon my later oeuvre. One can barely imagine The Return of Jiggity Big Hat (2013), for instance, without Project Future.

I was in two bands in 1993: Sex-Pol and The Piltdown Frauds. I was also one of the founding members and participants in the contemporaneous art group, Aktion Surreal (1991-1994). And I was a militant Marxist in the International Socialist Organisation.

The brand of surrealism I followed was not only heavily in debt to the more distant André Breton, complete with sleeping fits, communism, and automatic poetry. We orbited a more proximate acephalic body in Gerald Keaney, bodgie anti-art artist philosopher punk extraordinaire.

Keaney proclaimed a shonky aesthetic, and we were more and less shocked and shamed by its peculiar manifestations. In time, we too became shonky surrealists.

Some years later, in the late 1990s, I would attempt to formulate a shonky aesthetic. A few years after that, in the early 2000s, I would relate shonky aesthetics to the destructivism that Keaney and I proclaimed both in its manifestoes and in the practice of the Destructivist International, located in Brisbane and Canberra:

the notion ‘shonkey’ derives from the critical combination of the term ‘shoddy’ and the australian colloquialism ‘shonky.’ however the shonkey is not shoddy. whereas the shoddy pretends to a superiority not possessed, the shonkey knows this and proclaims it to the world. the shonkey recognises no superiority or inferiority. the shonkey is a sham and know itself for that. whereas the ‘shonk’ was both a bad deal and the bad jew, shonkey is the overcoming of this antipodean anti-semitism: the whole world is shonkey!

from ‘on shonkey aesthetics’ Destructivist International, no. 1, 2004

In 2004 I misspelt shonky, shonkey, much like Derrida misspelt différence, différance. Then as now, I was no fan of Derrida. In the 1990s and early naughties he was in the inescapable air that also stunk of U.S. capitalism triumphant, that we aspirated to make sense of the play of all signification, shonkely.

What is shonky aesthetics? The original Zurich dadas were purveyors of shonky aesthetics–at once, both the idea that aesthetics are shonky, and the aestheticisation of the shonky—on the perilous edge of modernity, post- and otherwise.

Aesthetics is already and forever shonky–a fiction made real and brought into the world through human praxis. To fictionalise reality is to shonkify it, in part, even and especially if this is done to deny its shonky qualities. There is nothing shonkier than the many and varied ways that the gods and other spirits of the world have been sung into being.

The shonk of the universal does not for all that mean the universality of the shonk, nor the necessity of the universal to be shonky. Nor even the necessity of the shonky itself to be shonky.

The most perfect of things is doomed to extinction, no matter the passing fancy of the protectors and conservators of science and culture. And so, the shonky practitioner aspires to be at one with the self-destruction of the shonky.

Shonky aesthetics anticipates the end of itself, and what’s more, slovenly works towards this end both asleep at the wheel and with intent.

The shonky imaginary exceeds its ability to materially render the grandeur of the shonk—thus, it is shonky.

For instance, Project Future.

And thus, “the shonky is what tends to become real” (‘on shonkey aesthetics’, 2004).

(see also, The Destructivist Manifest O.)

fig. 2. Cover of ‘The Destructivist Manifest O’, 2004.

Collage—Possible worlds

fig. 1. ‘Possible worlds’ by antyphayes, 2022 (right click for larger version of collage).

POSSIBLE WORLDS (Epilogue Written Amid the Ruins)

He was a young man, here to cut up a National Geographic,

to come to another destination, maybe the double life of avant-garde earth stations, and shopping

anywhere, any time.

“How can it be solved?”

Now, because this world, this world of electronic satellite communications

is a poor river,

a closed-loop of the monstrous, monotonous, across which

we move incessantly, cheeks with thorny sticks and charged with promise,

at least in part, the world’s greatest

you is crushed for industrial use,

what a way to go,

an ode to a stalk of the urban proletariat.

Born of Kings and Stars.

I made ‘Possible worlds’ in 2022. But my obsession with the image is longer lived, snaking all the way back to a day in the early 1980s when I found the National Geographic from which I stole the base image in a sleepy second hand bookstore in Hurstville, Sydney.

The image is from 1969. It represents the then stunning view of automation and what-not coming in the near future. I recall being somewhat fascinated and disappointed that the 1970s and 80s I grew up in bore only a passing resemblance to such images of a happy, technological future.

Jump forward a few decades and all that remains of that issue is the much cut-up and cut-out remnants. Indeed, this base image, which I had rescued from the bin and stuck together (it was originally a two page spread), was itself showing its age–or at least its wear. The left side is the result of my immaculate archiving.

The base image has been subtly altered. The poem, screed, etc., that accompanies it is composed of choice words and phrases taken from the abundant results of industrial cultural production. It is featured in a recent zine of poems I published in 2022: sexpoem. I will make a pdf available of this in a few days. But in the meantime, check out this review of said zine by Gerald Keaney.

The last two lines, “an ode to a stalk of the urban proletariat. Born of Kings and Stars” is as much about me as it is about you. We all find ourselves the unfortunate denizens of a proletarian age, in which capital, capitalism, the commodity-spectacle, what have you, has either made us over into the proles it needs to produce and consume , or–once ruined or rendered superfluous to capital’s needs–so much human material carelessly thrown onto the scrapheap. Perhaps a more sane future will realize the melancholic truth of this era: it is a proletarian age in which even stupid capitalists are reduced to mere appendages of powers they barely understand.

Perhaps one day we will build a suitably pathetic Statue For A Proletarian Age–not in commemoration, but only to recall the living nightmare that briefly and disastrously took hold before the dawn of a truly human society.

A world that still remains to be built.

This has been another Collage Tuesday post on Wednesday…

ANTIBASHLUCKYSTRIKE—video collage

fig. 1. ANTBASH the vilm by antyphayes, 2001.

Recently, I paid to digitise a bunch of old tapes, both VHS and Video8, though mostly the latter. On these tapes I’ve found a scad of gems from my life between 1993 and 2001 or so. In those days, aged 25 to 33, I rarely had access to a video camera, simply because I was a poor student revolutionary art bum who prided himself that his life of laziness constituted the chief artistic work of his oeuvre. To a large extent I still consider this mostly unrecorded sloth as my greatest achievement. To simply fritter away one’s time in the face of the pointless hymns to production and productivity that have destroyed this planet is itself a rare achievement. Which is not to say I escaped the clutches of mindless wage labour–alas, no. If only I had been lazier.

Despite my discipline of idleness, I still managed to occasionally produce. I’m not sure if I would be silly enough to consider all of what I am responsible for as the true mark of genius, particularly considering my scepticism regarding the latter. After all, we all have our moments amidst the vast desert of regular days.

Around May 2001, I got my hands on a video camera. It shot Video8 format. It was a late model tape camera with a bunch of built in digital effects (what I presume would be considered primitive digital effects today). I must have had access to this camera over several weeks, and possibly months. For instance, amongst the videos I recently digitised is a lot of footage shot over different days.

The video linked above (what I sometimes like to refer to as a vilm), was shot and edited in camera one cold late Autumn night in a Canberra loungeroom in May 2001. I know this because not only does the film itself point out the day it was made, 25 May 2001, but I also have a dated notebook from the time with my notes from that night. I did not call the video ‘ANTIBASH’ at that point, not that I can remember. But it’s a reasonable title for this short video as any would be. It comes, after all, from the video itself. Though it is not, by far, the only title that one could draw from this video. If we consider only the written word and not the spoken that appears in the video, we would find the following found poem:

VOLUME PHONES POWER
vehiculart
Common misconception
RESOURCES
they’re out there…
Life
Guard
anti
No 458 25 May 2001
BASH
LUCKY STRIKE

fig. 2. found poem in ANTIBASH

This short video of mine is a collage. It is made up of the sights and sounds I could detour and play with from the live-to-air TV that night in Canberra, along with whatever was lying around the Cowper Street loungeroom I was alone in, apart from a dog (not mine, though its bark does appear in another video I will put up in the near future). The denizens of this house had gone out to a party that night. Normally, I would have accompanied them. But that night I had the chance to play with a video camera at a point in my life when I was obsessed by the cinema. At least more obsessed, perhaps, then I am now. Is that even possible?

In May, 2001, I was 33 years old. I was a part time single dad, wage slave, poet, revolutionary. Or at least I like to think of myself like that even though as I have already made clear my life was mostly dedicated to indolence and lethargy. That year I was involved with the left-wing political scene in Canberra, thorough my involvement in the Canberra s11 group of the year previously, which had morphed into the M1 group of 2001 (M1=May Day). Additionally, I was a member of a “Autonomist” communist group mostly based in Sydney called Love & Rage. I was then, in 2001, the Canberra branch of the latter, though in truth it was less formal than what this sounds. Nonetheless, during a chunk of the middle of 2001, I was Canberra Love & Rage entire. Not that this meant much, either in general or on that cold night in May 2001 when I made this video. Indeed, with Pete J’s return in late 2001 I would push on to a more explicitly ultra-left position, forming the group Treason with him in 2002.

ANTIBASH (ANT-BASH, ANTIBASHLUCKYSTRIKE, etc) was made under the influence of modernist collage, whether of the moving or still picture kind. I would call it a type of détournement, though I am unclear if it serves in any way as a criticism of its content–though perhaps at the very least, minimally in a way, the form of this collage is a type of criticism.

I should say, enjoy! But I’d rather you hate it, which is a type of enjoyment I suppose.

This has been another Collage Tuesday post.

Poetic City?

fig. 1. The elementary degradation of a PROSAIC CITY sticker in Dickson, Canberra, circa 2023.

Back in 2021 when the first Poetic City Festival happened, someone or someones put up a bunch of PROSAIC CITY stickers. No one knew who it was, or most likely nobody cared. Recently, one of the organisers of a Poetic City event asked me if I was responsible for the stickers. I can understand why I was asked such a question. Can it be said, over the last thirty years, that you have even had a fringe arts festival in Canberra if it has not been targeted by Anthony Hayes?

I love things like PROSAIC CITY. I would love to claim all things of this kind as mine. But it would be outrageously megalomaniacal to do so–which is, perhaps, more than enough reason to do it. I recall a few years back a poster I stumbled upon in Lyneham. It had been modified, or so it seemed to me. I loved both the original poster and its modification.

fig. 2. Lyneham shops, Canberra, circa 2010. Who are Bow Down & Zero? Or their anonymous interlocutor? Does it matter?

Could I have made this poster and forgotten about it? What’s not to like? An observation and a response not only in kind, but itself a modification of another original through displacement. A détournement, as it were. We all die. Hard.

In the 2000s someone(s) graffitied a line from Arthur Rimbaud in an alleyway in Downer: ‘Now Is THE TIME OF THE ASSASSINS!–RIMBAUD’.

fig. 3. Rimbaud in Canberra. Or a fan. An alley in Downer, circa the second half of the 2000s.

« Voici le temps des Assassins ». Murderers. The drug addled ones of the original poem. Did I know the people who had painted Rimbaud’s words in translation? Could I have slept walked through the paint job? A stoned Dervish whirling?

For me, this is the sad truth of poetry in Canberra today. It is marginal, appearing in the pores of the city, often anonymous and unacknowledged. It appears in spite of the city; occasional backchat to the monologue of advertising and state propaganda. And it is this truth that seems only to be partially understood by the organisers of the Poetic City festival, in their rush to mainstream poetic rebellion under the tutelage of the ACT government.

The intent of the creator(s) of the PROSAIC CITY sticker is relatively clear, if somewhat needlessly esoteric. It is obviously a declaration, a statement of fact. To the question, is Canberra a poetic city they answer clearly in the negative. Perhaps we can gain some insight into what they mean by PROSAIC CITY if we ask ourselves a related question.

fig. 4. So cold and fresh. Canberra, 2021.

What is a poetic city? It is far from clear. If such a thing exists on present-day planet Earth, these cities are poetic despite the best efforts of their chief managers, whether politician or capitalist. For instance, some towns in France comes to mind–those parts of the country that recently erupted in righteous violence not just against the cops and the state and ruling class they protect, but everything they represent. These rioters are poets whether they say it in words or deeds:

Masters of wealth and commodities, hoarders of fame, fortune, and power, you are on notice. As our world burns you will burn with it.

I would suggest that the person or persons who pasted up PROSAIC CITY stickers around Canberra back in 2021 would agree that Paris in flames is poetry whereas Paris with murderous cops at work is largely prose.

There is no doubt that Canberra is a PROSAIC CITY. Apart from all its many advantages, derived chiefly from its geographical setting, Canberra is demonstrably home to a high concentration of the prose–in the pejorative sense–of everyday Australian life. Here be the bloated federal bureaucracy in all its mundane glory and horror. Canberra, capital of Australia, mate, late of Afghanistan and the Intervention, more recently beating the war drums with China and Russia. Home to not only politicians and most of the federal bureaucracy and their various shitshows, but also home to Canberra’s own infinite regress of politicians and bureaucracy, which is to say the so-called “self-government” of the ACT replete with its very own bevy of politicians and bureaucrats and business associates like Geocon and Molonglo, all of whom suck upon the taxpayer’s tits. Bureaucracies within bureaucracies, consultancy upon consultancy, an infinity of contractors. Canberra begins to appear like something out of a Borges story, or perhaps a Lovecraft one, with all the terror this implies, though with little of the mind melting bizarreries–unless you’re on drugs. Which we Canberrans all are, in any case.

All this, despite the best efforts of its original designer, namesake of a lake: “I have planned a city that is not like any other in the world. I have planned it not in a way that I expected any government authorities in the world would accept. I have planned an ideal city—a city that meets my ideal of the city of the future.”

Walter Burley Griffin’s utopian plans for Canberra almost immediately met the petty bourgeois narrowmindedness and mean spirit of the federal government of Australia of the day. That Griffin believed the Australian government would help him realise his utopian vision speaks as much to his naivety as it does to the times in which he held such fancies. Initially the plans were cut back due to the artificial need for Australia to participate in the slaughter of the First World War. Since then, the development of Canberra has always been subservient to such needs that were never truly the desires of a majority. Wars and interventions and corporate welfare and such like. Such is Canberra’s premier reason for being, to write, organise and dispense the dull and violent prose of the state.

If there is such a thing as a poetic Canberra, it is that other Canberra, the one that exists in the pores of the city. Surrealist Canberra or Underground Canberra or Alternative Canberra or Fringe Canberra or Anti-Canberra or whatever Canberra. Is this the poetic city that the organisers of the present festival in question are trying to conjure? If so, admirably. Now tell me, how does one get urban riots onto the program? We did it once, in 1996.

I feel that the organisers and participants of the Poetic City festival have missed an opportunity. Much like PROSAIC CITY, ‘Poetic City’ is, implicitly, a claim or an argument that Canberra is or could be a poetic city. Unfortunately, the term here mostly plays the role of an advertising brand that distinguishes Poetic City from similar and different events organised under the financial tutelage of the ACT government and business interests. Indeed, with the clearly advertised support of the ACT government, Poetic City embraces the “CBR” brand that local government uses to sell Canberra to itself and the world at large. At best it is one logo among others, at worst an outright lie.

Perhaps this explains why the organisers of the Poetic City festival have even appropriated the PROSAIC CITY sticker, reducing any and all possible criticism it contains to naught. Now it does able service advertising one of the festival’s sessions. A suitable revenge one might think. You would hope at least some acknowledgment of its provenance or even possible meaning. But no. PROSAIC CITY has been tamed and, what’s more, made productive. Surely branded T-Shirts and posters are in the pipeline.

fig. 5. Détournement ou récupération? You decide.

Given the suffocating reality of capitalism, it is costly to be a poet or an artist or what have you. Most artists don’t live off their art, even if they are encouraged to achieve this apparently lofty height. It is held out as a vague promise to those who most work at their art. But poetry that becomes work ceases to be poetry. This is what it means to let the prose of this world dominate. Whether you want to or not, one is forced to become a brand, become a means of selling oneself. Whether for poetry or the prose of paying the rent.

We must learn again how to bite the hands that feed. Surely our own, most of the time, in slapstick fashion. And no doubt those awfully tasty hands of the state, with all its lovely, lovely moneys, is a tempting snack. The main problem here is that there is usually a catch. For instance, the funding that the Poetic City festival gains from the ACT government translates into the latter using the former for propaganda purposes: come to Canberra CBR and consume our fine cultures and foods

fig. 6. ‘No poetry for the enemies of poetry’, antyphayes & Frank Hampson, 2021.

Today, the vast rift between the obscenely wealthy and all the rest of us who make their wealth has once again become plain to see. This time, though, the world is burning, and we wonder if we have left things too late. What’s more, no one seriously denies that it was capitalism set free across the planet that has brought us to this point.

A poetic city will only be made once we accept that we must take aim at the prose of this world, which is to say capital, capitalism, climate change and all of its other pointlessly destructive avatars. We must refuse the prosaic reality of the city, not daub it with paint and call it poetry. The project of a poetic city is still underway, inscribed in the shadows and byways of the prose of this world. Now is the time to make the implicit, explicit.

The poetic city remains to be built.

Artists, poets, philosophers! One more effort, like a spider spinning in the moon light.

Anthony Paul Hayes
Canberra, 2023

Collage—there is no proper translation

fig. 1. ‘there is no proper translation’, by butterhoarder X (aka Anthony Paul Hayes), 1993

The original of this collage is lost to time. I made it in 1993, and made the colour photocopy of what you see, above, the same year, shortly after making the collage. The Chifley Library at the ANU had only recently installed this novelty machine—a colour photocopier—and what better way to test it out than make a copy of my recently dried collage?

The original copy has aged somewhat. The white is more yellow, though it could be my eyes. Who knows.

Framed, the original original I gave to my mother the same year. A foolish 25-year-old who thought his mum would love an example of her son’s, ahem, “art”. Mum promptly packed it away in one of her bedroom drawers, never to display it. I used to see it here over the years that I visited my mum, hidden away from any harm it would do being on display. Then one year it was gone. Thrown out? Most likely. Given away? Less likely. Stolen? One can only hope.

This collage remains important for me. It was the first time I composed out of found material a landscape image with characters inhabiting this flat perspectival space—most likely from the insert magazines of The Sydney Morning Herald of the day, or something like that. Though looking back, it is the prose poem composed in the corner that is the most striking—and derivative. A loving detournement if you will. I was a fan of Barbara Kruger and Helvetica; my two fonts.

fig. 2. Detail of ‘there is no proper translation.’

I publicised a version of this collage in 1993 in my zine Some Songs to Offend By (or is that Songs to Offend Some By?), first put out in September 1993 under the imprint of ‘Fuck Diverse Culture Press’.

fig. 3. Page 8 of ‘Some Songs To Offend By’ (1993).

Here is the cover of the zine in question.

fig. 4. Back and front cover of ‘Some Songs To Offend By’ (1993).

Note the collage on the left. I used a photo of me taken by my brother Jim, most likely, in 1968. The hand in the background is my mum’s, holding Johnson & Johnson talc baby powder over me. Was it full of asbestos? Maybe.

But did I really play in a ‘cult band’?

Sexpol—originally The History of Sexuality Volume Four—had formed the previous year in a loungeroom in Ainslie. I was variously bass player, guitarist, singer, songwriter, all round head splitter. In that warm loungeroom, late at night, Chris Hughes and I wrote our first songs together. I can’t remember which one was the very first, but from these sessions, often recorded on my shitty old tape player gifted to me in the mid-1980s, we composed the Sexpol oeuvre.

Here is a poster for our second gig in February 1993.

fig. 5. One of several collage-posters for Sexpol’s second gig.

Apart from a few copies handed out to friends, the zine Some Songs to Offend By was first distributed en masse at what turned out to be Sexpol’s last live gig, in September or October of 1993.

Shortly before, we had been banned from the ANU Uni Bar (R.I.P., 2018) by the management after performing in a heat of the Battle of the Bands. The same Uni Bar and management that Nirvana had led a trashing of only the year before, early 1992.

At the Battle of the Bands, we decided that this battle itself should be combated. Knowing that the Uni Bar stage was equipped with a video projector, we made a music video to accompany a set-list of Sexpol songs recorded during a jam. Thus armed, we recruited friends to join us onstage as the Sexpol Dancers. Dressed in red and black stockinged heads, tops, bottoms and feet, we hit the stage as the band was announced and the video began to play. Above us, on the electronic altar of the projection screen, images of our daily life flashed by as we danced.

We were mostly ignored by the denizens of the Uni Bar—student or otherwise—though apparently “half the Bar wanted to kill” us (Woroni, 1 September 1993, p. 36). However, a group of about ten or so men, all Forestry students, assembled a half circle of chairs on the dance floor. During the entirety of our performance, they drank and verbally abused us. This only encouraged an even more outlandish display on our part, and almost certainly brought on the relatively graphic miming of sex on stage.

During our last song the performance reached a pinnacle of sorts. A striking image appeared on the projection screen: a close-up of a crotch, the zipper on a pair of jeans. Then a hand undoing the zipper, to reveal… a blinding light! To achieve this rare vision I had stuffed a torch down my pants.

Could this be the pornography the management accused us of? Or the sex mime? Or even the foul-mouthed abuse we received from the Forestry boys? Whatever it was, we were shut down in mid-song and dance.

At the time we walked away, glad that it was over. After all, we’d made our point, hadn’t we?

A few days later we staged a protest. Chris, the ever-dashing lead singer and songwriter of Sexpol, gaffer taped his mouth, and then gaffer taped his feet to the floor directly in front of the bar during a busy Friday arvo & evening. Standing next to him, I briefly and loudly denounced the Uni Bar management, bringing our struggle to the attention of the gathered masses. Few seem to care. “Sexpol… who?”

Around the same time a battle ensured in the pages of the student rag, Woroni. Gerald Keaney came to our rescue, demonstrating the censorship, hypocrisy and stupidities of the Uni Bar manager. To no avail, the ban remained.

So, we organised out own gig on the floor above the Uni Bar, rented through the Student Union’s Clubs and Societies organisation. As you would be reminded at the time by other bar goers, the top floor was where the Uni Bar “originally” was. It’s true the Uni Bar was on the top floor in the 1980s, but it was originally elsewhere, even further back in time, as I discovered two years later.

Sexpol was one of the house bands of Aktion Surreal (The Piltdown Frauds, I Am Spartacus and The Luv Sick Fools were others). In 1993, a fellow Aktion Surrealist, tiM (that’s tiM), gave me one of his collages, for the inside back cover of my zine Some Song To Offend By. Foolishly, I did not use this excellent thing. More’s the pity.

Here it is.

fig. 6. ‘*FINAL STAGE NOW’ by tiM McCann, 1993.

tiM’s collage, mine, my zine, and Sexpol were all part of a larger conspiracy (we conspired, which is to say we breathed the same air, and often), sometimes called Aktion Surreal. Speaking of which, which is to say all of the foregoing, here is a video of me from that golden shit year of 1993 in which I perform a poem from my zine Some Songs to Offend By.

fig. 7.

Stay tuned for more Sexpol, Aktion Surreal and Canberra, Australia in the 1990s.

This has been another Collage Tuesday post.