TELLDRILL1

TELLDRILL1 is a performance film originally intended for a cinematic environment, being first developed for the public programming of Agent Bodies, an exhibition at RMIT Gallery in Melbourne, Australia which ran from April – August 2022. The raw filmic and auditory material of this work was performed and recorded over several hours by Daniel R Marks, Alexander Cahill, Charlie Kol, Jessica Phippen and Jonathan Vyssaritis in May 2022.
TELLDRILL1 collates the archived actions of performer and documentary crew, a framework of production folded inward toward a symbolically abstracted queer body disseminated across multi-embodied surveillance. This process is directed toward an excision and choreography of the screen as a surface of representation – a cutting and editing of the bounds of image-production in choreographing problematic dynamics of control across performance rehearsal and cinematic construction.
With the rehearsal and post-production performing a score of open-ended procedural-conceptual motions (Tell and Drill, each carrying their own baggage of multiple meanings and informing a latent set of body and screen gestures), an iconographic code emerges in the material re-working of agency dispersed across obscure relations of score, action and capture. Silicone earpiece sculptures serve as parasitic devices of encoded logics and blind spots, while other commons of form are revealed and iconised to self-reflexive extrusions of the encoded score: tongue, screw, curl, loop, hook, puncture, scaffold, pass, carry, leak, bloom, sniffer dog. Parasite auscultation as scene and cut / Sniff my own pit spill cup capture rim.