The Doldrums

The Doldrums is a suburb. The Doldrums is a geo-temporal portmanteau at once South-east London and East Texas. It exists on the cusp of the digital age, yet out of time. It is essentially a contextual conceit; a raw collage of place; a set for narratives and loosely connected outputs exploring now redundant media, relations, imagery and conceptual paradigms.

• The Doldrums takes its name from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
• The Doldrums is an abandoned digital set – or the idea of one – that acts as a generative framework for a critically engaged nostalgia.
• The Doldrums is not an art work.

Black Velvet (Ten Copies), 2014. Video. Durational video work. Re-cut anime and remixed soundtrack re-copied using linked VHS players to the point of visual and audio breakdown. Original above.

Black Velvet it an ultraviolent, sexually explicit anime VHS that circulates between The Doldrums’ younger denizens. It was rented from Laser Video and never returned. It has since been copied ten times and the only remaining copy is distorted to the point of abstraction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ghostface lives in The Doldrums. He plays basketball and collects Murano glass. He subsides on a narcotic citrus fruit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Behind the Victorian terraces and beyond the warm, sweet breath of the pine thick embankment, a single railway track runs to a cavernous tunnel whose black mouth is frozen in a permanent yawn. If you walk within and push through the dense, disembodying dark, you might begin to discern a faint light ahead; a broken promise of orientation, safety and hope.

Fredric Jameson lives in the Doldrums.