The Kingpins Welcome to the Jingle

In the 1960 horror classic Village of the Damned, scientist Gorgon Zellaby observes the epidemic that has overtaken his village. "What we're dealing with is a mass-mind, an entirely new development, like a colony of ants or bees. These children want to dress alike and what one does, they all do".

Culture becomes concept and concept becomes product as Starbucks' market a 'drag' of the traditional 'European' coffee house. Employing exaggerated costuming, posture and illusion in a masquerade of culture via strategic design, emotive interiors become a marketable masquerade of bohemia's poetics and revolutionary history. Welcome to the Jingle (2003), combines a series of site-specific performative interventions by a track-suited team of male automotons, a crew of Rock n Roll wrestling corporate puppeteers and an original soundtrack remixing the infamous dialogue of Peter Wier's Gallipoli (1981). "How fast can you run?...As fast as a leopard!" The pedestrian terrain of Sydney (elected as a marker for a much wider epidemic) is invaded by the monocultural and gentrified performativity of the multinational franchise Starbucks, but by the Kingpins.

ACTION: Infiltrating six Sydney Starbucks sites in a single night, the Kingpins enact swift three minute dance interruptions to outline a ritualistic navigation of the city, linking these sites in an interventionist dot-to-dot. Starbucks become sites of the colonised, and in turned globalised, the host of a sequence of identical, choreographed actions to reflect the simulacra of experience and atmospheric de-ja-vu at each pit-stop, With this methodology, the Kingpins explore the gentrifying effect on location and the ambush on the individual markings of site and community, as multinationals resurface culture's diversity. The video documentation of these actions is then articulated within the gallery in the format of a 2 channel video installation.

SOUND: As described in the work's title, a Kingpins 'jingle' performs as the soundtrack to the video and provides a channel of communication between teams. Rewriting the traditional audio vehicle to sell a product or service, the lyrics are lifted from the opening dialogue of Peter Weir's Australian classic film, Gallipoli (1981), and the sound a remix of the films title track by Jean-Michael Jarre. The taunts between athlete and trainer, "What are your legs?" and "How fast can you run?" simultaneously confront the cultural 'logos' of Australian cinema that mythologise who we are, the same way Starbucks spins a culture of commodified fables.