Title/Date: hangmen @ Charon’s Train Station (2021).

Author(s): Sophie Reid-Singer (clunkk).

Place of Publication: “Bad Olive TRUST THE FIRE” at Park Road Abandoned Dome (Brisbane).

Format: Dynamic (3) interactive projection artwork.

Statement:

hangmen @ Charon’s Train Station was a dynamic projection artwork executed with three projectors for another Bad Olive event. To reiterate on Bad Olive:

Bad Olive is the creative figuration of Abbie Olive, a designer who sources local talents to activate spaces with music, art, light, and fashion. Bad Olive platforms emergent and established local artists exploring provocative subject matters and designs, with a particular emphasis on inclusivity, radical self-expression, and celebration.

The centrepiece of hangmen @ Charon’s Train Station was a menacing, flaming portal. Across a wall and between two columns, one projection represented Charon, the ferryman of Greek mythology who transports humans to the underworld.

My depiction of Charon as a sentient, cyborg train carting a wagon with an over-the-top sound system unleashed a version of the disabled woman as ferocious, unrepentant, and powered by drum and bass. My machismo vehicle is a parody-hybrid of the Spirit Train from The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (Nintendo Entertainment, 2009), which is interacted with by blowing the Nintendo DS microphone, and the thinly-veiled homoeroticism of Lord Humongous from Mad Max 2: Road Warrior (Miller 1981), who has a comprehensive energy plan, is open to compromise but strong on defence, and is LGBTQIA+ friendly.

The largest projection, across the back curved wall, featured two ‘hang-men’ either side of a portal. These were disproportionate cyborgs with exposed and curved spines, plugged by corded necks into whirring propellers. The third and final projector displayed a glitched logo for Bad Olive. It marked the stage overlooking the dancefloor, with hangmen @ Charon’s Train Station illuminated from above. The Indigenous hip-hop fusion project of the Djaberadjabera brothers Geoff and Jake Fabila, Tjaka, followed by DJ Boom Bean Selecta, provided ample fuel for my dancing cyborgs.

Findings:

TLDR; The cyborgs in this artwork are a mean drum-and-bass powered train, and two cyborgs which fly and spin-dance using flame-propeller prosthetic in place of their head.

Imagery of cyborgs in this videogame did not emancipate disabled peoples from the strict legal conditions imposed by the Australian Government.

However I did expand on the animation principles I developed for properPell0rB0t (2021). In this earlier work, a 2D illustrated cyborg sharing the artwork’s name made a covert statement about the venue’s lack of accessibility. In both artworks for Bad Olive, the output speed of character animation was scaled by normalising data collected via a Fast Frontier Transform (FFT).

Side Note:

My work, hangmen @ Charon’s Train Station, did not explicitly nor didactically spell this out this level of detail, however it did carry the not so subtle political message : ‘fuck off, there is nothing to be cured.’