Colour Study (Top Gun), (2012)

Installation view, ARTSPACE, Sydney.

Archival pigment print on cotton paper, mounted on aluminium, 150 x 326 cm.

Unique work + 1 AP. 

Colour study (Top Gun) is a compression study of the entire film Top Gun (1986). In this work, Baden Pailthorpe has transformed the entire film into a series of frames. These images are then collapsed into a single image, averaged according to the colour value of each frame. The resulting image acts as a condensed visual essence of the entire film.  A reference to the true nature of moving images as illusory series of stills, this image is everything that Top Gun is not; slow, meditative, deeply rich and quietly intense.       

Gap Year: New Sydney Art,

Installation view, ARTSPACE, Sydney 2012.

Airquake, landscape (Libya), (2012)

Installation view, ARTSPACE Sydney.

HD video, 16:9, colour, sound, mirrors, 4 mins 21 sec.

Sound mastered by Jack Prest.

Edition of 5 + 2 AP.

In this video installation, Baden Pailthorpe applies the strategy of remix to re-appropriate what he calls 'militarised landscapes' from pro-military cinema. The film used for this work, Les Chevaliers du Ciel (2005), is known colloquially outside of France as 'French Top Gun'. This landscape and airscape study extrapolates hidden poetic forms from within cultural artefacts produced by the Military-Entertainment Complex. The way foreign and enemy landscapes are composed, commodified, reflected and refracted within these visual cultures is turned back on itself by his intervention.

Very Few Good Men  (2012)

Installation view (two channel)

Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney.

Custom screen (600 cm x 135 cm)

HD video, 16:9, colour, sound. 2 minutes.

Edition of 5 + 2 AP.

Collection of the Australian War Memorial Museum, Canberra and private collections.

Photo:  Alex Reznick.

Very Few Good Men (2012), appropriates footage from a classic military film to the limits of abstraction. In this work, the military becomes the target of its own aesthetic strategies of uniform, camouflage and deception. The traditional Marine Corps drill is subjected to the brutal treatment of contemporary remix culture and its own coded discipline. Here the aesthetics of military ritual are subverted, inverted, perverted and corrupted to the point of absurdity. What remains is a stunning burst of visual and sonic energy that creates its own formations of aesthetic dominance and political rite.

HALO (2012)

Installation view (two channel)

Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney.

Custom screen (600 cm x 135 cm)

HD video, 16:9, colour, sound. 2 mins 40 sec.

Edition of 5 + 2 AP. 

Photo:  Alex Reznick.

In HALO (2012), we are party to a graceful yet helpless moment, as both a US soldier and a Taliban fighter fall from the heavens over Afghanistan. The sky in this work acts as a blind witness to their beautifully doomed flight, levelling the folly of human conflict to the sublime and eternal indifference of nature. This two-channel video work derives its title from the military acronym, High Altitude Low Opening, and describes a specialised kind of military skydive. Pailthorpe plays on the poetic resonances that the word halo conjures, wedged uncomfortably between military jargon and spiritual transcendence.

Formation VII (2012)

Installation view (two channel)

Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney.

Custom screen (600 cm x 135 cm)

HD video, 16:9, colour, sound. 2 mins 40 sec.

Edition of 5 + 2 AP. 

Photo:  Alex Reznick.

The latest work in an ongoing series of 'marching performances', this two-channel video work is set within the US military's simulated version of Afghanistan. Rather than using this machine for violence, Pailthorpe here gives a group of soldiers the simplest of orders: walk. Through this minor gesture of resistance, a striking aesthetic of repetition from the simulator's own code is revealed. The multiple of each individual body creates a kind of corporeal sculpture. As is prevalent in military vocabulary, references to the collective body (such as the Marine Corps) connote the machine-like structure and strength that follows a military formation of disciplined bodies. Perhaps the most universal and often political of human actions, walking is used by Pailthorpe as a device to uncover pockets of resistance from within even the most closed, controlled and constructed environments: military simulations.

H(Air) Force One (2012)

HD Video,16:9,  colour, sound, 2 mins 58 sec.

Edition 5 + 2 AP.

Collection of Artbank and Private Collections.

H(Air) Force One, 2012, also mobilises strategies of appropriation, remix and abstraction. A slightly humorous study of form, thrust and innuendo, this work exposes the brooding energy that lurks within some of the best known pro-military films of the late 1980s. The overtly masculine shapes and highly sexualised aesthetics of the US Air Force are paired with the similarly powerful hair styles of their heroic protagonists. At once an ancient symbol of virility and fully charged sexual signifier, hair is a force that links our primordial passions with the perpetual drives of military dominance of popular culture.   

Formation VI (2012)

Production still. HD Video 16:9, colour,  sound.

8 mins 36 seconds.

Edition of 5 + 2 AP. 

Collection of the Australian War Memorial Museum, Canberra, the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk) Amsterdam and private collections.

This video work is set within the US military’s simulated version of Afghanistan. Rather than using this training software to simulate violence or military encounter, instead Pailthorpe gives a group of miniature US soldiers and Taliban fighters the simplest of orders: run. Through this minor gesture of resistance, a striking aesthetic of repetition from the simulator’s own code is revealed. Unable to recognise each other thanks to a hacked setting, the multiple of each enemy body creates a kind of corporeal sculpture. As is prevalent in military vocabulary, reference to the collective body (such as the Marine Corps) connotes the machine-like structure and strength that follows a military formation of disciplined bodies. Perhaps the most universal and often political of human actions, running is used by Pailthorpe as a device to uncover pockets of resistance from within even the most closed, controlled and constructed environments: military simulations.

Formation VI (2012) 

Installation view, Netherlands Media Art Institute

(NIMk), Amsterdam.

HD Video 16:9, colour,  sound.

8 mins 36 seconds.

Edition of 5 + 2 AP. 

Photo: Cassander Eeftinck

Formation II & V (2011),

Installation view Game Change 

Telfair Museum of Art, Georgia, USA, 2012. 

Photo: Telfair Museum

Eighty-Four Doors (2012)

171 pages, 21.8 cm (h) x 15.3 cm (w), cloth bound hard back. Limited edition of 50.

Google Translate remix of Orwell's 1984.

Eighty-Four Doors  is  an  experimental  literary  work  derived  from  George Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both the content and the title of this new book are the result of an extended process of linguistic remixing: hundreds of translations and retranslations using Google’s online statistical translation machine, Google Translate.

Eighty-Four Doors gives the strange poetry of Google’s algorithms a voice. Yet it also signals the complexity and subtlety of language, and the limits of the translation machines that attempt to code, control and standardise them. The political power of language—and in particular translation—is something that Orwell himself strongly referred to in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet rather than opposing Google’s attempt at a global language, Eighty-Four Doors embodies both  the limits of this effort, and the awkward beauty of the misunderstandings and mistakes that it produces.

Lingua Franca (2012)

Installation view

Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney.

Topos (2012) right

Data visualisation of 1984 being translated through each language on Google Translate.

Giclée print on archival paper. 200 cm x 100 cm.

Eighty-Four Doors (2012) left

171 pages, 21.8 cm (h) x 15.3 cm (w)

Cloth bound hard back. Limited edition of 50.

Google Tranlate remix of 1984.

Photo: Douglas Lance Gibson

Rockets (after Roman Signer) (2010)

Installation view  

Monobandes II, Les Territoires, Montréal, Canada, 2011.

HD Video, colour, sound. 6 mins 14 sec.

Photo: Sadie Wiarda.

Twist (2009)

Installation view,

Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney, Australia, 2010.

HD Video, colour, silent. 3 mins 47 sec.

Other v2.0 (2010) 

Installation view

Inflight ARI, Hobart, Australia, 2010.

Lambda prints on metallic paper, glass, aluminium.

118 x 85 cm. Edition of 3 + 1 AP.