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.)
the sinister science 