Johannes Klabbers: jklabbers@csu.edu.au

I work with text, images and sound under a number of different pseudonyms. My work addresses themes such as: love (lost unrequited impossible), displacement, language, identity, and mortality.

I am inspired by the early modernists who worked with collage and montage, such as Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Hoch, and I feel that despite (or because of) the radical advances in creating and delivering cultural products afforded by computers these methodologies are more powerful today than ever.

In my text works, as i.j.oog, I have lately been making use of babelfish an internet based computer translator, to produce very imperfect French versions of poems about my experiences as a pay tv subscriber.1 I am amused by the ironic allusion to the romantic and historical connections of the language, whilst I am also addressing my feelings of dislocation, isolation and longing which I experience as a foreigner living and working in this, for me, alien landscape.

In my recent work as dan zero I have further explored, in the medium of digital video/sound, a long held interest in a process which Brian Eno refers to as 'generative music' : When two segments of image/sound, identical but slightly differing in length, are looped and overlaid; the interaction between the two sets of loops running independently produces a continual stream of ever changing images and unique visual/sound relationships.2

In my sound works, produced under the name minus eleven error, I am again interested in language, and ideas of dissonance, discord, resolution and silence. I like to work with sound and music which evoke a strong visual and emotional response simulating a film sound track. Using appropriated sonic elements which are severed from the image/s they originally accompanied, I am interested in the images I imagine they may evoke in the listener.

1. http://babelfish.altavista.com
2. Eno,Brian (1996) A Year - with swollen appendices London: Faber and Faber p.330