regiment

regiment presents Non Plus Ultra, a 6-day club residency at the Royal College of Art (RCA).

In 'a nod to the College's prestigious history' and in line with its visual identity, Non Plus Ultra's custom-made neon sign uses the original Calvert, which is also the RCA's wayfinding font. The club's posters and wristbands are designed with a combination of the College's Calvert, Benton and Knockout typefaces.

The project weaves all the elements that are central to the artist's practice (sonic, durational, collaborative, participatory, performative) and it evolves on various planes at various times.

Notwithstanding bureaucratic and systemic obstacles in the production process, Non Plus Ultra manages to literally occupy the inner core of the newly built Studio Building, from which the low frequency sound emerges. As for the site, also the sound is an ad-hoc sonic scape made with the building.

'Non plus ultra' (/ˌnɒn plʌs ˈʌltrə/) means 'nothing further beyond'. Since Renaissance times it is believed that the post-classical Latin motto was the inscription placed by Hercules on his Pillars (modern day Straits of Gibraltar) at the so-called 'edges of the known world'. To warn off sailors and explorers to venture 'no further', these words acted as symbols to reinforce the imperial episteme of dominion and control over material and knowledge production. It is commonly in use across several European languages to mean 'the best, the ultimate, the highest point'.

regiment places an exclusive site-specific club within the brick-and-mortar of another exclusive club. Do not miss Non Plus Ultra, ranked World's No1 Club!

Photo credits: Jeremy Chen, JungEun Yang

Special thanks: Heyse Ip, Sarra Grillo-Henry, Scott Eaton

The third and latest episode of the series represents a stylistic shift. While sound features again (and the sonic remains at the core of the practice), regiment envisions a site-specific work that pushes his practice to an apparent paradox. 

To date, Static Unrest (III) is at once the series’ most bodily and most ephemeral instalment. Unauthorised, unannounced and with minimal script this performance/action is a new attempt at ‘preparing a space for some things to happen’. Equally unsettling and ironic, Static Unrest (III) on the one hand addresses the materiality of time, the space of the gallery, the event as a medium, the very presence of the audience’s bodies; it eventually stretches these materials to the limit, quite literally pushing the car against the glass window of the gallery. 

If this larger project continues to ‘stay with the trouble’ by exploring the seemingly endless possibilities of the oxymoron of the title, episode III also openly engages with the politics of the site and sight while reckoning with the specificity of what can take place in or outside a gallery space.

Site-specificity 'emphasises a transitive definition of site, forcing a self-conscious perception in which the viewer confronts her own effort 'to locate, to place' the work and so her own acting out of the gallery's function as the place for viewing'. (Douglas Crimp, On The Museum's Ruins, 1993)

Who and what is in a static state and who is in a state of unrest?

‍

Photo Credits: Heyse Ip, JungEun Yang

Special Thanks: Gaby Jonna, Jeremy Chen

In Things continues regiment's ongoing experimentation with tape loop techniques.

It was broadcast on Montez Press Radio on 24th March 2022, as part of Hybrid Realities Festival.

In 1967 the Royal College of Art is granted a Royal Charter and University status.

In 1967 the Hacker Autocrat is one of the United Kingdom's most ubiquitous transistor radio.

With this site-specific installation, regiment re-imagines his practice across different media and within a small space deploys a wide range of strategies. Emerging from this research into the visibilities and invisibilities of power structures, on display is what seems an invitation to read and listen. If everything is arranged carefully, it is also proving illusory to fully read and listen. Drawing from the artist's interest in laying the conditions for 'some things to happen', Autocrat, 1967 does more than simply challenge the audience's imagination, curiosity, patience and determination: it creates a space where the public and the objects are all on display and all actively creating an ever-evolving performance.

Photo Credits: Heyse Ip, Weining Cai

With Static Unrest (II), regiment takes the sonic element which was at the inception of the project in episode I and tests it with, and against, another medium. If radio is a presence that the artist deploys also in his live sound practice, here its unstable sound is echoed by the analog instability of videotapes. Static, glitchy, disintegrating found footage provides the backbone of the second instalment of the Static Unrest series: the use of automatic speech-to-text captions that attempt to capture this fragmented, incoherent, frequency-altered broadcast is in this sense performing the impossibility of a closure. 

Through exploration of time, repetition and chance the Static Unrest series slowly opens up to concerns around technologies, control, presence and memory. The artist allows us to reckon with the unresting qualities of technologies of documentation and narration but with what is ultimately the inherent performative potential of the medium.