Manifesto A (2001)

Running Time: 04:24 min

Manifesto A is the first in Cokes non-consecutively produced series of promotional tapes for his conceptual band SWIPE. 3#, subtitled Manifesto A Track #1, introduces Cokes concern with the ideological apparatus that underpins the music industry. The video takes up a song by Seth Price, which is itself the systematic recreation of an early electronic pop song by Kraftwerk. 

What glitch was this? ...  I started to treat the slip as a point, a locale to get to, or a spot from where to start, or a place to rest (or wrest). 

I thought about my experiences as a learner, teacher, artist, worker, and consumer. I thought about missteps that reinforce my position. I thought about my finances. I thought about mal-distribution. I thought about big wealth. I thought about our Gilded Age. I thought about going on strike. I thought about owners. I thought about workers. I thought about taxes. I thought about time spent. I thought about my job. I thought about my students. I thought about what does it look like to look at me in front of you. I thought about primary sources (evidence). I thought about John Brown and his transaction. I thought about how to be an ally. I thought about corrected behavior. I thought about active participants vs. passive consumers. I thought about being mal-adjusted. I thought about free reading. I thought about free listening. I thought about fast, free delivery. I thought about video streaming."

Hand-drawn texts in graphite and erasure marks on the surface of each drawing function as a visual record of the narrator’s indecisive thought process in working to present each anecdote. The texts are paired with abstract shapes and diagrammatic visuals which reference the historically male-dominated movements of modern architecture, color field painting and minimalism."

An analytical scene-by-scene flowchart of the burgeoning love affair between fictional characters Rocky and Adrian from the movie, 'Rocky', turns subjective when the artist maps herself into the piece as an alternate love interest for Rocky.

"Poetry. Art. If real power begins where secrecy begins, then, as we frantically search for dick pics of Justin Bieber or our next door neighbour who we're convinced posted the faceless Craigslist ad seeking an asian bottom, we're seduced into a beautiful distraction in which we are convinced, by virtue of our victorious toppling of the lives of others, that we indeed have nothing to hide.

Much of Mucus in My Pineal Gland uses devices recognisable from “confessional” literature: overtly direct affective statements, recollections of early sexual encounters as if they were the keys to understanding the adult author, general propositions about life filtered through the particulars of personal experience. These are wonderful and familiar devices: they facilitate both empathetic identification (“I can relate to that”) and empathetic alienation (“I can’t quite imagine the inside of that experience”).

Death Mask II: The Scent (2010)

Atkins’ screenplays shrug off narrative development in favour of vivid and dense descriptive passages that escape the fantasy of literature and enter material existence. The screen play Death Mask II offers a ‘partial exegesis’ for some of the images within the film, focusing on descriptions of the durian fruit, infamous for its disgusting and indescribable smell reminiscent of a rotting corpse. The corpse, as articulated through French theorist Maurice Blanchot’s descriptions of cadavers as representations of living beings, is a recurrent theme in Atkins’s films, and one in which he finds affinities with the increasingly ‘realistic’ imagery produced by high definition digital technology.