Emit Snake-Beings


Emit Snake-Beings is a British/New Zealand writer multi-media visual artist and sound artist who has also worked in kinetic art, sacred art, sculpture, noise music, and underground film. He was awarded a PhD, entitled The DiY Ethos: A participatory culture of material engagement in 2016 for his work linking the DIY ethic and Maker culture with contemporary theory of material agency and Material culture. Recent publications have focused on developing an idea of techno-animism and ethnographic studies of technology.

Biography

Early life

Born in the Royal Free hospital in Islington, London Emit and his sister Bella Basura were moved by their parents to the new town of Welwyn Garden City, where he grew up under the combined influences of the cold war and social engineering, which was immanent in the excessive structures of town planning. At the age of 20, after studying art and design at the University of Hertfordshire he moved to London to pursue a career in art, where he Lived and worked in the economically depressed Hackney, London between the years 1987 and 1998. During this time he encountered diverse influences, including underground film, Santaria, Anarchism, squatting, outsider art, art collectives installations using found material, and site-specific installation art. All of which was going on in the relative obscurity of one of the poorest areas of London. In 1998 Emit moved to New Zealand, continuing to work with multi-media projects including street theatre and the organisation of a 13-piece Free improvisation orchestra called The Kaosphere orchestra. In 2006 he founded the Hamilton Underground Film Festival and created Karen Karnak, an invented multiple-use name nom-de-plume under which multiple filmmakers could participate.

Published works

Animism and Artefact: The entangled Agencies of a DIY Maker.
DiY pedagogy: a future-less orientation to education.
Community of difference: the liminal spaces of the Bingodisiac Orchestra.
Maker Culture and DiY technologies: re-functioning as a Techno-Animist practice.
The Do-it-Yourself craft aesthetic of The Trons − Robot garage band
It’s on the tip of my Google: Interactive performance and the non-totalising learning environment.
The DiY Ethos: A participatory culture of material engagement.
Trash aesthetics and the sublime: Strategies for visualising the unrepresentable within a landscape of refuse.
DiY participatory culture: Allowing space for inefficiency, error and noise.
The construction of Karen Karnak: The multi-author function.
The construction of Karen Karnak: The multi-author-function.
Orchid ID:

Films

Alchemical Pilgrimage 2002–2011
Ongoing project based on the documents of a pilgrimage of three monk-like figures to the broadcasting antenna at the summit of Mount Te Aroha.
On arrival the 'pilgrims' perform a chaotic ritual using the three objects they have brought with them.
Filmed in New Zealand Jan–April 2002
re-edited to include older footage filmed between 1990 and 2011.
The Remote Viewers examines the connection between technology, the mass media and magic.
The synopsis from snakebeings website provides a clue into some of the seemingly random imagery of which the film seems comprised:
One of the first films made was The Shrine which began as a documentation of the creation, display and destruction of four Shrines made during a journey through Holland and Spain lasting over 6 months between 1990 and 1991. Three nomadic shrines were eventually made during this time, each dedicated to a different element, with the fourth air shrine being the film itself. The first three shrines were destroyed but the super 8mm film, which documented the process, was preserved and exhibited in a series of underground film festivals including the exploding cinema in
summer 1993. The preservation of The Shrine led to the beginning of a series of coin-operated shrines, which are described below, as well as the beginning of several super 8mm films.
Santa Arson, filmed on super 8mm, was made with Steve Rife, a pyrotechnics artist from Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Filmography

Between the years 1991 and 2001 Emit Snake-Beings created over 30 coin-operated electrical shrines, reflecting a combination of technology and religious deities within a polytheist system. Described as techno-animist machines the shrines were made as a series of free standing works and commissioned pieces and ranged from 4 cm X 4 cm to over 2 Meters in height.
The Shrine to Nikola Tesla, created in 1995 includes the following text:
"Nikola Tesla, the inventor of A.C. Electrickery, and early pioneer of Radio, is placed among the more traditional and pre-electronic saints who like Tesla had experienced a great flash of light.
The selector switch allows the operator to tune the shrine to the most distant transmissions, the origin of which are in constant dispute between scientists, artists and theologists. Available now for the average person in the street to decide for themselves.
Patent # 76399873-150 Made in E8. '95" The piece was displayed in the tattooist shop 'Sacred Art' London N16 for several years-
The shrine: "Tattooist´s Electrical Reliquary Spirit Box" was made in 1998 as a commissioned piece for Temple Tattu in Brighton. The tattooist shop has since moved, and the whereabouts of this shrine is uncertain.