The Swear Club

About the work

Michael Buckley was working as an experimental filmmaker and member of ‘Arf Arf’ a Melbourne based sound poetry and performance group when he made ‘The Swear Club’. He had enrolled in Swinburne University’s recently founded Animation and Interactive Media Centre (AIM) to learn the new digital tools of multimedia. The Swear Club’ combines his filmmaking skills and interest in the shape of language with the potential of the then-new digital technologies. It was made on an Apple Macintosh using Macromedia Director. Buckley wrote, filmed, animated and scored the work. Lecturer Jeremy Parker assisted with the programming.

The work was inspired by his young son who had just started primary school where he and his young friends had founded a secret society in the school yard ‘The Swear Club’ where they could be “as naughty as they liked and say rude things” (Tofts, 2005). Chasing his son’s “shadow”, the “viewer” encounters animated silhouettes of Buckley’s friends and voices of friends and family, recalling everyday moments. The Swear Club reflects the ways in which ‘Arf Arf’ “undressed the notions of language” through sound-play and Buckley’s work with disrupted narratives (Leggett & Michael, 2006: 48). Buckley’s concerns with language and memory are similarly evident in the following, written in response to rediscovering a CD-ROM copy of ‘The Swear Club’ so that it could be emulated and accessed once again.

A Big Win

i had a big win yesterday. I discovered a copy of ‘The Swear Club’ (1994) when I fired up on an old computer that I found hidden in a dark corner of our linen cupboard. I opened up Director (the program it was made on) and it started playing.

Wow it worked!

What a joy it was to see and hear my son, Simeon at the age of five, and my Arf Arf mates saying, 'I stammer I stammer.' There was my mum talking about leaving the gas stove on all day. My dad makes an appearance singing 'Throw out the lifeline, someone is sinking today; an old salvation army hymn he liked to sing.

Looking at it after thirty years, I think ‘The Swear Club’ still holds up. My wife Sue thinks so too, as do my neighbours Leonnie and Sandra, who pretended shock horror, when Simmy says in one section of the work 'Shut up you bloody dickhead fuckin asshole.' Ah well, he only says that twice on this CD-ROM and there are many other other more innocent gems to be found (2024).

References