Author Archives: jes

About jes

Jessica Tyrrell is a Sydney-based new media artist who works at the intersection of installation, audio/visual performance, sound, video, online & locative media. Fusing a cinematic sensibility with a love of poetic text, she creates works that draw out fragmented narratives and often incorporate documentary elements. Jessica is currently engaged in creating physically immersive environments that experiment with the affect of interactivity and space on narrative, poetics and spectatorship. Jessica’s work has been included at various festivals in Australia, such as Liquid Architecture, Real Life on Film (ACMI), & Electrofringe and she has recently exhibited at Carriageworks & Chalkhorse Gallery in Sydney.

shortlist

what happened next

i’d written
ten thousand poems
to an imaginary city

a world of words
writ
against impossible
skies

where silence soared
like high rise buildings
tunneling towards the sun.

we landed
in the capital
at dawn

your fingers
squeezed to your
temples

and the sound
of distant
helicopters

all the simple
parts of our lives
vanished

and at that moment
i gave up on
ever remembering
what happened next…

the space where you were standing

somehow the words
just seemed to stop
before they’d left
your mouth

i could see them falling
like old fruit
into silence

and i tried to guess the colour
of the vowels.

i felt a burst of heat
from the space where you were
standing

there was a distant ringing

and i thought about
poems
that were more like pop songs.

the eye is not a camera

we couldn’t put
it back together
with time
or even with
words

everything you thought
at that moment
was somehow

interrupted

like data flows
or the way frames of film
fit together to make movement.

i think they call it
‘the persistence of vision’,
each moment

blurring

into the last.

pencil on sound

we wrote with pencil
on sound
and i said things
aloud
that i wouldn’t even think

the quickest way to remember
is to try and forget

you had something
stuck in your front teeth –
to me this was a sign

i used a typewriter ribbon
as a blindfold
and pointed myself to the sun.

so much of

so much of

going away

is coming back

again.

we spent hours

tidying our house

until it no longer

felt like home.

we washed away hallways

and let the paint

fall from walls where we
found ourselves,

camped.

dehydrated

your voice &
my eyes open
waiting for the silence to stop.

i left the city early
and watched them roll the clocks back
to the start.

trains collapsed into houses
with the sound of sign language
& you, barely awake.

auto-pilot

coming back

forgetting & remembering

it all started

when i forgot your name.

we survived a room full of people

by ignoring each other

& waited so long

that it began to feel like action,

began to feel like memories eroding.

a simple virus,

leaving only an outline.

tag cloud

a hypodermic needle.
a man sleeping under a tree.
a tag cloud of memories
distributed in the mail.

there were weather patterns,
anatomical diagrams & other
continuations of science.

i held my breath & thought
of all the things
which are not quite photographs,
but always framed.

on adorno

i read the first page
of fifteen different books
& then walked around the block
hoping to run into you.

i had so much
to talk about,
but nothing in particular
on my mind

a woman with a tribal tattoo
and a fedora hat
rode her bike past me
in the street

& all at once i understood
the meaning
of something you said to me
long ago:

only you
can bring
the stars down to earth.

25th

five roadside rest stops
in five hours

the heat like turpentine
bleeding colour across the landscape

we sit and watch the
feeding frenzy

a digital camera melting
in my hand.

curcuit breaker