The paper examines Cosmatos's work to date: the two feature films 'Beyond the Black Rainbow'(2010), and 'Mandy' (2018), and the episode ‘The Viewing’ (2022) from the Netflix series 'Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities'. I argue that Cosmatos's films act as a vernacular critique of popular culture iterations of Nietzsche's Übermensch, and as such addresses the political and psychological anxieties of a mass North American audience. I further argue that Cosmatos is a profoundly psychoanalytical film maker, staging as horror, the (...) subject who has weakened their ego in the name of transcendence, only to find the forces of super-ego and Id causing violent psychotic breakdown. The article takes an interdisciplinary approach to Cosmatos's contextualization (alongside more obvious peers) looking at the work of British artist Dexter Dalwood to help understand the political and philosophical aspects of Cosmatos's output. (shrink)

A new artist’s film by Scottish-Italian artist Sarah Hardie, Winner of the Soho House Art Prize with Bombay Sapphire, 2020/21. “The gardener digs in another time without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk into the garden you pass into this time – the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond (...) the prayer.” Derek Jarman (Journal Entry, 7 March 1989) Spring sometimes rises in me too is a new artist’s film by Scottish-Italian artist Sarah Hardie, commissioned as a result of winning the inaugural Soho House Art Prize with Bombay Sapphire. This symphonic-visual-essay was written throughout lockdown in 2020 and explores a female experience of lockdown, love, desire, care, solitude, our compulsion to (re)produce and inequality, examining the marks we leave on others and the earth around us through either our care or neglect, in particular. The film will be publicly available to watch from Thursday 10 June, via www.sohohouse.com The inaugural Soho House Art Prize was announced in June 2020 as a new global contemporary art prize to discover, recognise and support artistic talent. Created by Soho House and supported by Bombay Sapphire, the prize was judged by a highly respected international judging panel: Kate Bryan, Soho House Head of Collections; Maria Balshaw CBE, Director of Tate and Hebru Brantley, artist and Bombay Sapphire Creator. Spring sometimes rises in me too, inspired by Hardie’s own biography and the events of Summer 2020, explores the "marks" our mothers' love and voice leaves on "us." She interrogates the resonance of mother's voice in the child, its echoes and imprints: what is lost from one generation to another; what remains; and what, when cultivated, grows. Metaphors for motherhood abound, the potential of which a thirty-something year old woman felt slowly slipping away from her over Summer 2020. Spring sometimes rises in me too is, in parts, a duet across time incorporating a practice tape of Hardie’s mother – who trained as a professional opera singer – recorded before the artist was born. This symphonic-video-essay will chart the distance between their songs, the distance of a life in all its dreams and disappointments: a result of their female symbiotic co-creation across generations. The title of the film is taken from a line in Zadie Smith's publication Intimations: Six Essays (also written throughout lockdown 2020), in which the writer discusses the notions of her initial vehement resistance but inevitable submission to nature, and the transformative vision of creators. Within Spring sometimes rises in me too, Hardie considers the garden, the artist's practice, and the human voice all as sites of productive creative delusion and potential. This work continues the artist’s exploration of the voice as the locus for identity, desire and longing. It is pregnant with the hope that, via the transformative power of the human voice – a conduit for our care, creativity and love – people can find common ground in a time of solitude. “...In the wish to be desired. I turn to the other with the voice shaped by this other one: I speak in order to locate myself near you.” Brandon LaBelle (citing Judith Butler in Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary) In the words of the artist, “I make art so others feel less alone when they experience it and I hope that by including both my own personal truth alongside in-depth research across disciplines I cut to the root of some concerns that people experience, and perhaps shine some light on those by looking at them through an artistic lens. These include: issues of declining fertility, loneliness, longing, desire, as well as ideas around making, and wider socio-political issues concerning inequality as a human being witnessing injustice in the world (even as I recognise my own oftentimes privilege).” The Soho House art collection is one of the largest private collections of its kind, with over 5000 art works on permanent display in Soho Houses across the globe. An integral part of Soho House’s identity, the collection plays a key role in engaging with the creative community and features work by museum level artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Lee Kit, Yinka Shonibare CBE, Nan Goldin, Oscar Murillo, Elmgreen and Dragset, Tacita Dean, Rashid Johnson, Jenny Holzer, Lynette Yiadom- Boakye, Deborah Roberts and Ed Ruscha, alongside younger and more emerging talent. Kate Bryan says, “The first Soho House Art Prize was launched with Bombay Sapphire at a moment of great uncertainty across the world. We hoped it might provide a source of inspiration and support to artists at a difficult moment. We were delighted, moved and motivated by the incredible applications we received, especially those of the runners up and our fantastic winner Sarah Hardie. Pursuing creativity at all costs despite charting uncertain territory, Sarah has created something that speaks powerfully of the power of nature and love. Inviting the audience in through sound and movement, Sarah has conjured a personal and elegiac reflection on time and memory.”. (shrink)

This opera, written and devised by Sarah Hardie, explored the "failure of the contemporary lover", or the (im)possibility of intimacy through spoken word, song and movement. Originally written for and performed a cappella at Bold Tendencies’, Peckham, this 30 minute opera references theoretical and psychoanalytical writing on the voice (such as Donald W. Winnicott, Roland Barthes and Friedrich Nietzsche). Through spoken-word, song and movement, it explores the failure of the contemporary lover, friendship as a space of total sonority, and questions (...) whether voicing is a loving act or merely a delusional escape from solitude. Conceived of and written by Sarah Hardie with music composed collaboratively with Jack Sheen and choreography devised collaboratively with Eleesha Drennan. Performed by Sarah Hardie and MUSARC Libretto performed by Angela Hardie and Sarah Hardie. (shrink)

This is a complex textbook addressing key examples of mixed form over the last 500 years in Western European and Anglo-American cultures. With 80 colour illustrations, it is extremely well referenced in historical and contemporary sources, yet of distinctly different parts, including two wholly visual chapters. This is a standard Bloomsbury hardback, with the paperback version published in June 2023 at considerably reduced cost. The economies of aesthetic forms, early publishing circulation, is one facet of the book’s narrative, and the (...) contrast between mixed forms exclusively for the wealthy and popular mixed forms, is central to the book’s dramatic, and hence performative, structure. We are taken to some of the earliest European curatorial and authorial contexts in which mixed forms, whether opulent object collections or folded paper publications, constituted both a material type and a conceptual category for aristocrat and manual worker respectively. The narrative style features a broad vocabulary, inter-related arguments with cross-chapter questioning that is difficult to precis or gloss. Is there some operational logic to this type of a book? If my interpretation is valid that this project’s distinctiveness aligns visual practices with forms of material production and with modes of reading and writing employing multidisciplinary operational concepts, then this might best be understood if represented in a table. The ‘table’ therefore also stands in as a publishing convention, for a detachable, general overview of what any narrative cannot achieve in sufficient detail: a comprehensive summary. The table below (see Table 1) is a formal feature and type of paratext, which here represents a visual and conceptual overview of the book from which the review is drawn. (shrink)

The subject of this thesis is ephemeral art; a phenomenon which has surfaced repeatedly in Western art history since the middle of the last century. The research begins from the premise that in order to understand ephemeral art it must be approached as a philosophical proposition concerning the nature of time rather than simply another movement, style or genre to add to the established art canon. As such, this is a crossdisciplinary enquiry which references both Western and Eastern philosophy as (...) well as art theory and practice with a view to exposing how the concept of impermanence has been constructed within contemporary art and the consequent implications. It is also a practice-led enquiry in which my own creative work provides a concrete point of reference for discussing abstract philosophical concepts. The thesis is structured in two parts. My aim in Part I is to explore how certain sorts of artistic practice have promoted a philosophically dubious and problematical understanding of impermanence based on dualistic principles; an understanding which has come to dominate critical consciousness and define what is thought of as ephemeral art. It also considers how this way of thinking about time paradoxically constrains the ability of ephemeral art to act as an effective critique of the museum and art institutional system. Part II investigates whether ephemeral art is inevitably determined by a dualistic temporal perspective. It introduces a variety of other ephemeral practices which uncharacteristically appear to disrupt this perception of time. By appropriating key features from these examples, I develop a hybrid ephemeral artwork; a performance/installation piece entitled Dust, in order to analyse and evaluate whether an alternative ephemeral practice can successfully negate a dualistic temporality and facilitate a non-dualistic understanding of time. Drawing on thirteenth century Japanese philosophy regarding impermanence and nonduality, this research makes a significant contribution to the field of art theory and practice bringing a new interpretation to bear on ephemeral art. (shrink)

This paper reviews some of my work in experience based computational sculpture, using a technique which I call Interactive 3D Printing, an amalgamation of generative art, livecoding, and sculpture. I3DP draws on a rich history of iterative revision and aesthetic refinement in the computational arts. This work foregrounds the time-based experience of digitally fabricating objects by describing them using only terms for time and rhythm (beats, beats-per-minute, duration, musical notes) following Paul Klee’s observation that “space itself is a temporal concept”. (...) It explores the liminal state between finished/unfinished objects inside a manufacturing process by incorporating the sound of the manufacturing process into the experience of its products. I discuss how this work can be understood as both an improvised livecoding performance and a work of generative art where each iteration (or “instantiation”) has the potential to self-actualise and change over time according to the intrinsic nature of both computation al and improvisational works of art. (shrink)

Narrative intelligibility is central to making sense of valuation. Narrative intelligibility is a framing device that combines empirical observation and situated interaction with teleological, purpose-oriented, normative inquiry. Thus understood, narrative intelligibility provides a useful analytical frame to explain how the phenomenon of valuation is practised. At the same time – and on the level of research – it bridges synthetically different traditions of thought, including actor–network theory’s descriptive accounts of valuation practices and humanities-grounded, normative theories of value. As such, narrative (...) intelligibility offers a way of avoiding the alleged weakness of overstating the agency of devices and material actors in actor–network informed approaches, without however seeking to relocate analysis into the ‘ineffable’ realm of purely theoretical constructs, the way some humanities scholars are said to have done. The argument shows that the humanities-derived understanding of values, approached in terms of standards of justification and norms of criticism, can be combined with the vernacular concepts of valuation from actor–network theory in a way that promises a unified research agenda going forward. (shrink)

How might the supernatural be represented in those religious paintings that imply a continuity between the virtual space of painting and the real space of the beholder? Such an implied continuity, dependent upon an engagement where the beholder imaginatively realigns her frame of reference to that of the picture, might be thought to threaten a necessary distance demanded of religious works. This paper examines how a number of painters exploited innovative displacement devices, utilizing inherent ambiguities as to where a painting (...) is relative to its beholder through the withholding of perspectival distance and positional cues for a discrete section of the work. (shrink)

In this thesis, I explore themes and concerns that have arisen in my art practice, namely the relationship between landscape, monstrosity, and subjectivity. The tropes scar and form refer to features analogous in the subject and in the land which take on different specific meanings throughout the project, but in general terms, I relate them to trauma as a defining force. I suggest that monsters can be understood as embodying attitudes to time (a cause of trauma): those being fixity, which (...) is resistant to temporality; and flux, which embraces temporality. Consequently, I define these categories and their opposition, presenting arguments for both monsters of fixity and flux monsters. I examine the construction of false universals of ‘England’ (categories of fixity) in representations of landscape and how they come to dominate the picturing of Britain more generally, alongside a mode I refer to as dynamic-fatalism, which examines the polemics and aesthetics of Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957). In this regard, I look at Lewis’s monstrous Tyro and its role in eliciting dehumanisation as a defining value in conceptions of a stratified society. Emphasis on creative practices and representations related to England serve to dissolve ‘proto-fascistic’ fantasies of a heroic, mono-cultural, and pure base for nation, dependent on categories of fixity. I suggest these values are instead understood as patrician, sexist, class-based, and racially biased. Given that landscape constructions are constitutive of our engagement with landscape, I conclude with a proposal for better ‘analogues’ of nature in the form of virescent space (a category of flux). I argue that virescent space is a phenomenon that sees the monster take on a specific role concerning the subject, one I define in relation to a wilderness destination in the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c.1370). (shrink)

In the light of the Brexit vote, and the recent surge in nationalism and xenophobia in Europe, this article analyses the condition of the immigrant within fashion to pose the question: how can fashion contribute to an understanding of immigration as a constitutive aspect of contemporary society? Considering Brexit as symptomatic of wider political changes that are currently informing other Western countries, the discussion focuses on the reactions of London’s fashion world to the political scenario in Britain. “I am an (...) immigrant” is a statement that has recently appeared in several collections and campaigns, with designers and high street brands publicly airing their pro-immigration messages. The discussion embraces philosophical contributions on the nation-state, sovereignty, and citizenship, and applies the notion of “conviviality,” as outlined by Paul Gilroy, to discuss London’s fashion and its reactions to the anti-immigration stance of the pro-Brexit front. It then unravels the idea of national identity as a romantic construct, and analyses works, within fashion, that challenge current perceptions of immigration as well as assumptions about cultural homogeneity. By deconstructing, through fashion, the very idea of national and cultural identity, we can in fact question binary oppositions associated to the category of the immigrant, such as “citizen”/“alien,” “inside”/”outside.”. (shrink)

This contribution brings in conversation two theoretical perspectives - the position of political theorist Françoise Vergès and the utopian philosophy of Ernst Bloch - to frame a discourse reclaiming the critical potential of cultural studies, research and creative practices. The concepts of the ‘racial Capitalocene’ (Vergès, 2017) and the ‘not yet’ (Bloch 1986[1959]; 2000[1964]) are particularly relevant not only for a critical analysis of fashion, but also, and more broadly, for knowledge, research practices, and pedagogy, which are constantly at risk (...) of becoming the latest cogs in the wheel of cognitive capitalism. In particular, the notion of a ‘racial Capitalocene’, which exposes those ‘naturalised inequalities, alienation, and violence inscribed in modernity’s strategic relations of power and production’ (Moore 2014), is crucial in counteracting oversimplifications offered by green capitalism, and helps re-contextualise current debates surrounding contemporary fashion. From this discourse, the racial Capitalocene emerges as an epistemological tool to reaffirm and reclaim the critical potential of cultural studies and a radical pedagogy based on a decolonisation of knowledge production. At present, when it seems easier to imagine a natural catastrophe, or even a great extinction, rather than the end of capitalism, the very ‘capacity to imagine that things could be different’, invoked by Ernst Bloch in The Principle of Hope (1986[1959]), presents itself as an ethical, cultural and epistemological urgency. The discussion focuses hence on the 'not yet' (Bloch 1986[1959]; 2000[1964]), and the 'politics of the possible' (Vergès 2017) as critical concepts, opening up possibilities to counteract dominant narratives, including the imperatives of cognitive capitalism, and imagine other futures, different than those suggested by the racial Capitalocene. (shrink)

The paper explores the concept of ‘deconstruction’ and its implications in contemporary fashion. Since its early popularisation, in the 1960s, philosophical deconstruction has traversed different soils, from literature to cinema, from architecture to all areas of design. The possibility of a fertile dialogue between deconstruction and diverse domains of human creation is ensured by the a-systematic and transversal character of deconstruction itself, which does not belong to a sole specific discipline, and neither can be conceived as a body of specialistic (...) knowledge. When, in the early 1980s, a new generation of independent thinking designers made its appearance on the fashion scenario, it seemed to incarnate a sort of ‘distress’ in comparison to the fashion of the times. Influenced by the minimalism of their own art and culture, designers Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake and, later in the decade, the Belgian Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten pioneered what can legitimately be considered a fashion revolution. By the practicing of deconstructions, such designers have disinterred the mechanics of the dress structure and, with them, the mechanisms of fascinations that haunt fashion. The disruptive force of their works resided not only in their undoing the structure of a specific garment, in renouncing to finish, in working through subtractions or displacements, but also, and above all, in rethinking the function and the meaning of the garment itself. With this, they inaugurated a fertile reflection questioning the relationship between the body and the garment, as well as the concept of ‘body’ itself. Just like Derrida’s deconstruction, the creation of a piece via deconstruction implicitly raises questions about our assumptions regarding fashion, showing that there is no objective standpoint, outside history, from which ideas, old concepts, as well as their manifestations, can be dismantled, repeated or reinterpreted. This constant dialogue with the past is precisely what allows designers practicing deconstruction to point to new landscapes. Key Words: Deconstruction, Derrida, distress, mode destroy, mechanisms of fascination, body, consumer culture, history. (shrink)

Essay on the condition of the neoliberal subject, on the backdrop of architecturally embodied power structures. The essay is part of the photography book ‘Already but not yet', by Jordi Barreras. The series of photos visualises individual vulnerability and subordination to economical powers. With the aim of exploring the hidden ways of surveillance and labor conditions in the neoliberal society, this series challenges official and conventional representations of the metropolis, transforming it from mundane life into something uncanny.

Contemporary art relies on an expansionist, modernist ideal and still progresses through a critique of earlier forms of democratisation. But beneath this democratic drive, lurks a creeping crisis. Under neoliberalism, criticality has become a zone of value production. A self-deprecating irony, exposing and re-enacting this position of impotence, is one of the few gestures left in the arsenal of critical art. Against this irony, this book pits overidentification. This term has been taken to mean a kind of parodic mimicry of (...) institutional power. Using a broad tapestry of sources, from political philosophers to art theorists, from post-Marxist critiques of labour to ethnographic studies, it proposes an interpretation of overidentification that does not collapse into ironic posturing. The authors differentiate this from bad faith flirting with taboo aesthetics by focusing on practices grounded in a genuine identification with power that ushers the kind of excess implied by overidentification. It is these forms of overidentification that destabilise the metastasis of liberal-democracy. Staging forms of critique not so readily absorbed into the structure of the present, these subversive performances herald a future beyond the democratic paradox. (shrink)

The discipline of curating fashion has experienced a cultural turn in the last decades. What were controversial approaches are now recognized as pioneering and significant in having encouraged debates and opened the discipline through rethinking existing paradigms. This contribution analyses the challenges and criticisms surrounding fashion displays, with the aim to address the centrality of interpretation and performativity in relation to key fashion exhibitions. The article explores ‘the power of display’ (Staniszewski 1998; 2000) through mediums and spaces, whether physical, digital (...) or both. Within museum studies, the focus on the visitors’ experience and on the narrative has been identified as a key feature of a ‘new museology’ (Vergo 1989; Hein 2000; Henning 2006), which ultimately leads us to question the purposes of museum and gallery displays. With references to museum studies, fashion curation and philosophy, and drawing from insightful conversations with fashion curators, the article examines the exhibition’s potential to provide a context for visual and material experiences, as well as for a new understanding and articulation of knowledge. The contribution embraces Foucault’s reflection on heterotopia (1986 [1967]; 1992 [1966]), arguing that the content of the museum as a space of difference is the interpretation itself. Reflecting on exhibition design as a medium in its own right (Celant 1996a), the article highlights performativity as a fundamental feature of the exhibits, of the installation and, more broadly, of the museum space. (shrink)

The Magician's Apparatus is an essay for the exhibition catalogue of The Collector's Room Exhibition at JGM Gallery in London, curated by Karen David. The Collector’s Room sees JGM Gallery transformed into a parlour room of a collector with a leaning towards illusion, stage magic and the escapologist Harry Houdini. In this room we encounter artworks such as spirit levels, levitations, gospel magic props, tarot cards, portraits of magicians, antique keys, handcuffs, sword boxes, escape trunks, magic wands, smoke, and mirrors. (...) The essay focuses on an encounter I had with a waxwork double of Paul Daniels at Wookey Hole Caves. It considers the central operation of the magicians’ craft: employing a decoy to misdirect, opening up the space between fact and fiction, the real and the made up. When watching a magic trick, the audience is knowingly placed at the centre of a conceit, an illusion that they are both complicit in but also kept separated from. A magician's audience always knows that the trick is not showing us what is actually happening - showing the spectator the mechanism of the illusion - but it is pretending to do that thing. Like the waxwork double, the magic trick is a simulation of reality that is always slightly distorted, always off-centre, always a theatrical manifestation of the real. (shrink)

Two considerations frame this chapter’s conceptualisation of Yorgos Lanthimos’ so-called ‘weird’ cinema: Walter Benjamin’s assertion that a totalitarian ‘state of emergency’ is now a perennial condition of political-juridical life in the west, and Todd McGowan’s observation that cinema is ‘a form of public dreaming’ shaped by the social imaginary. Comprised of six feature films - Kinetta (1995), Dogtooth (2009), Alps (2011), The Lobster (2015), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), and The Favourite (2018) – Lanthimos’ cinema stages a series (...) of dramas of familial and group conflicts that revolve around violent, often abusive power relations. Psychoanalytically, these films can be understood in terms of the Subject’s submissive attachment to the authority of the super-ego. At the same time, they can be seen as re-enactments of the excesses associated with the violent exercise of totalitarian power, the traumatic effects of which have their roots in Greece’s experience of a series of dictatorships dating back to the period of the Holocaust. Analogous to a sequence of dreams, the films can be seen to oscillate between, on the one hand, the representation of an enduring sense of psychic and ideological repression and, on the other hand, a wish to overcome such repression. The staging of this wish in the films reveals with a dramatic sense of force the co-dependency between the construction of the Subject I and the reproduction of ideology. If, as Lanthimos’ cinema implies, the Subject’s identity is virtual, then it follows that Benjamin’s conception of the ‘state of emergency’ is an historically contingent phenomenon rather than an ontological condition. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic forced therapists to embrace online sessions, creating a sudden shift in the therapeutic environment. However, the integration of technology into therapy was already underway, prompting the need to explore how the online environment impacts clients and the therapeutic process. This article asks what online therapy can teach about therapy. It highlights the author's experience with online therapy and the unsettling incident that occurred during a session. The article reflects on the philosophical and psychological implications of technology and (...) online communication, suggesting that the glitches and breakdowns in online communication may reveal underlying states of the psyche. Drawing upon Heidegger's philosophy of technology and Whitehead’s process philosophy, it argues that our environment and technologies shape our consciousness and subjectivity, and that both the therapist and the client are partly a product of the media in the digital age. The article also references Freud's theory on the psychopathology of everyday life to suggest that unintentional glitches in online communication may be manifestations of unconscious thoughts and impulses. Overall, the article raises some questions about the use of technology in therapy and the implications for understanding the human psyche. It highlights the need to approach online therapy with caution and awareness of the potential limitations and disturbances that may arise. (shrink)

Sylvère Lotringer’s life been celebrated as a ‘total work’ – a lived embodiment of the radical theories he did so much work to disseminate and promote. His commitment to an art of living, his embodiment and dissemination of thought, and his cultural experimentation have been widely affirmed – with the ‘primary text’ of his life often eclipsing his published work; as Gayatri Spivak put it: ‘an example of how this kind of philosophy is also an act of the mind, of (...) life, of how to actually live philosophically rather than simply think in a certain way’.1 Semiotext(e) press is also celebrated as his great life’s work – although the singular approach and sensibility that he instilled in it makes it impossible to understand as an individual creation. Like so much of his work, Semiotext(e) is a shared project, as Sylvère would often insist. This situation also allowed him to perform a kind of disappearing act on himself. The many tributes that have appeared following his death have shown his multiplicity, but his ‘personal’ writings and projects (about which he would no doubt have said that there is nothing ‘personal’) have to some extent disappeared from view. The ‘total’ lifework can obscure the work in which he was energetically engaged throughout his life. (shrink)

This article explores the role of photography in the assassination of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey in 2016. The photography exhibition titled Russia through Turkish Eyes was the background for the assassination. The author argues that photography occupies a paradoxical position of a metalanguage of an event that it simultaneously announces, records, destroys and celebrates while assuming the role of an impartial observer. Photography operates as a counter-factual, exceeding the documentary, and assuming the function not of a witness but of (...) an active participant. The author suggests that in a primitive culture like ours, some objects acquire the status of a portal that facilitates the transformation between symbolic, imaginary and real forms of existence. A camera is one such object. The article concludes that the assassination of the Russian Ambassador cannot be easily separated from the photographic event that preceded it, accompanied it and immortalized it. (shrink)

In his essay Curating’s Technological Unconscious: The History of Cybernetics and the Gaian Transformation of Curation, Adeena Mey examines what he and philosopher Yuk Hui have termed the “cybernetization of the exhibition.” This phrase describes the historical transformation of the exhibition and institution into informational and communicational media. The process is closely tied to the writings and institutional experiments in the 1970s of figures such as curators Peter Althaus, Jorge Glusberg, and Pontus Hultén, and philosophers like Vilém Flusser. Interestingly, the (...) 1970s also marked the emergence of a distinction between “first-order cybernetics”— which views living and technological beings as regulated by “feedback” processes—and “second-order cybernetics”—which sees systems as self-organizing and self-reflective. The former largely inspired these curatorial and theoretical attempts to transform museums and the form of exhibitions. The essay elaborates on the difference between first- and second-order cybernetics. It posits that we can attribute the prevalent curatorial logic to first-order cybernetics, while the recent and evolving changes in the exhibitionary complex might be related to the second order. Second-order cybernetics provides us with the tools necessary to reconsider the role of biennales in the Anthropocene. These tools can aid in addressing what philosopher Isabelle Stengers terms the “Intrusion of Gaia” (the activation of planetary and environmental forces that surpass human control). Mey suggests that, to effectively address the current intersection of environmental, political, and scientific urgencies, we need to rethink institutions and curating through the lens of second-order cybernetics, viewing them as self-organizing systems. (shrink)

The aim of radical enactivism, according to Hutto and Myin (2013), is to remove the foundation of representationalism entirely from the model of mind developed by traditional cognitive science. However their notion of ‘basic minds without content’ leaves many perplexed as to what relevance the theory has outside of being an anti-representational polemic. In 1972 the artist Mark Boyle declared that ‘nothing is more radical than the facts’ – his aim was to encourage students to develop an artistic practice and (...) a relationship with the environment that was not filtered by personal prejudice or cultural conditioning. This paper focuses on the history and artistic strategies of Mark Boyle and the Boyle Family as a means to bring radical enactivism a broader contextual appeal. Identifying the links between the Boyle Family’s aims to remove, as far as possible, any subjective content from their artworks, with certain theories underpinning earlier minimalist and romanticist practices and with the aims of Hutto and Myin’s philosophy. But beyond any parallels between the Boyle family’s art and the scientific processes of recoding, the Boyle’s objective is to produce imagery that is neither scientific nor artistic but which invites audiences to experience reality for its own sake (Locher, 1978). (shrink)

This article proposes to examine animism through the perspective provided by a notion of immanent matter drawn on process philosophy, and quantum physics. It then deploys this perspective to illuminate how planetary computation - the impact of digital media technologies on a planetary scale - is rewiring the cognitive, affective, perceptual capacities of the human. The article puts forward the notion of hybrid animism, as a speculative and imaginative philosophical fiction to grasp planetary computation as a sensorial pan-affective event, and (...) to account for the hybrid techno-digital ecologies humans already inhabit, characterised by ongoing modulation, sensorial intensification and pervasive distribution of computational matter across a plethora of screens, surfaces and surroundings. The value of this proposition, the article explains, is to eschew dominant techno-deterministic narratives: not only techno-euphoria and techno-dystopia, but also the notion of technology as enchantment, with its in-built mystification. By deploying the philoso-fiction of hybrid animism and the un-mediated intuitive sensorial grasp it fosters, planetary computation can begin to be immediately perceived as the expression of new modes of co-habitation and co-evolution of the human and the nonhuman. Finally, the article brings together the nonhuman mutating surfaces of digital matter with cephalopods' skins to vividly and speculatively illustrate hybrid animism as a thought experiment of sorts. (shrink)

In this talk, we will explore how the relationship is evolving between technology and humanity, other species, the Earth and the universe. Where is the line between “natural” and “artificial”? We will host leading thinkers to give us a wider, long term perspective on the future of technology.

Today’s social, political, and environmental emergencies require specific efforts in terms of thinking/acting in designing practices to produce new kinds of knowledge. The Summer School wants to explore the emerging systemic transition which demands a radical transformation of knowledge models. The uncertainty that characterizes times of crisis forces us to question the strategies, tools, and instruments at our disposal to understand the current context and change it through design. With the pandemic striking our usual way to think the future, this (...) may be the opportunity to better understand the huge potential of future literacies as a methodological tool to convey concepts and information in rethinking knowledge boundaries. Located at the intersection of the material, the cultural, the epistemic, the ontological, the technological, the philosophical, the political, design contains the seeds of the capacity for becoming an agent of radical transformation and generative production. It can do that on the condition that it becomes also a medium of critical inquiry, unleashing its capacity to interrogate the present and build new worlds, beyond the overwhelming deterministic visions pushed by contemporary socio-technical and socio-economic systems. The School will be a theoretical and pragmatic occasion to challenge knowledge systems, based on deterministic blueprints and models, and to reimagine and re-make design as a mode of inquiry and as a practice to interrogate the present. It might lead to an inter-, trans-, post-disciplinary exploration exploring the role, agency, and responsibility of design in showing unexpected possible directions of change. It might be a meta-knowledge inquiry about Research through Design within the perspective of decolonizing knowledge, unfolding the opportunities of knowing, and world-building. It might be an investigation of how speculative and critical approaches can be deployed to rethink futures in light of theories and the practices coming from other disciplines. (shrink)

‘Sonic Sense’, Keynote Chapter for Oxford Handbook of Sound Art, John Matthew, David Prior and Jane Grant eds, Oxford University Press, 2021. This chapter introduces the notion of a sonic sense, of sonic sensing and a sonic sensibility, as an aesthetic, ideological and socio-political engagement with the world staged principally through philosophical contemplation and the consideration of two sound artworks. In this way it explores the particularity of a listened to work as a listened to world and engages in its (...) invisible and mobile meaning and materiality, and it further considers how subjectivity is constituted in this sonic sphere. It does so not to oppose visual signification and identity, but to challenge their singularity and to pluralise their possibility. Therefore, sound and listening are not used to elaborate an essentialist or exclusionary position. Rather, the sonic sense, as it is developed throughout this text, presents the seemingly paradoxical strategy of focusing on sound to reach the multisensory, and to appreciate through the productive uncertainty of listening the co-dependence and interconnectivity of reality as an actuality that demands participation - listening, looking, touching and smelling - to grasp its complex plurality. (shrink)

‘Sonic Materialism: Hearing the Arche-Sonic’ in Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination, Mark Grimshaw, Mads Walther-Hansen and Martin Knakkergaard eds, Oxford University Press, 2019. This chapter tries to make a contribution to current ideas on materiality, reality, objectivity, and subjectivity as they are articulated in the many texts on New Materialism that have emerged recently under the auspices of Speculative Realism, Object-Orientated Ontology, Complexity Theory, and various other current and emerging ‘sub-genres’ that all share a renewed interest in the status (...) and understanding of materiality, material relationships, and the role of the human subject in the context of a contemporary world, whose technological and actual globalization clamors for a new critical engagement and scholarship to grasp the impact and to articulate the significance of its fluid interconnectedness. (shrink)

This essay recounts a visit to Ryoji Ikeda’s inaugural exhibition at the HeK in Basel, Switzerland in November 2014. It aims to bring an inhabited sensibility to works made from information processes whose code is at once their material texture and conceptual legitimacy. Through the particularity of her recounting, the author critically engages with her experience of the works as environment in relation to Ikeda’s own ideas of a mathematical sublime put into contrast with Immanuel Kant’s notion of the sublime; (...) and consider the mathematical purity Ikeda’s work pursues in relation to Quentin Meillassoux’s notion of a mind-independent world. Most particularly, the author engages in the relationship between the visualisation of data and its sonic composition, and recognises their connection as a central tension of the work into which she places Étienne Balibar’s portmanteau term “égaliberté,” the impossible reciprocity between equality and freedom. (shrink)

From its use in literary theory, film criticism and the discourse of games design, Salomé Voegelin expands 'possible world theory' to think the worlding of sound in music, in art and in the everyday. The modal logic of possible worlds, articulated principally via David K. Lewis and developed through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological life-worlds, creates a view on the invisible slices of the world and reflects on how to make them count, politically and aesthetically. How to make them thinkable and accessible (...) as the possibility of the everyday and of art: to reach a new materialist understanding from the invisible and to develop an ear for the as yet inaudible. This revised edition continues Voegelin's exploration of the sonic possibility of the world into the sonic possibility and impossibility of the body. Listening to work by Áine O'Dwyer, Hannah Silva and Jocy de Oliveira, it considers sonic possible worlds' radical power to rethink normative constructions and to fabulate a different body from its sound: Hearing the Continuum Between Plural Bodies ; between humans, humanoid aliens, monsters, vampires, plants, things and anything we have no name for yet but which a sonic philosophy might start to hear and call. (shrink)

One of the fundamental tensions within Marx’s writings arises from the complex relationship between the systematic and historical aspects of his description of capitalist society. A century and a half after the publication of Capital – and in light of the historical adventures of communism that must, for the most part, be considered as an accumulation of catastrophic failures – this tension continues to both energise and attenuate the reception of Marx’s thought, symptomatically expressing the radically distinctive and still elusory (...) practical-theoretical foundations of his project. On the one hand, capital is depicted by Marx as an ensemble of social relations forming an apparently closed totality capable of reproducing itself purely through its own internal dynamism: capital as self-sufficient system. On the other hand, Marx reminds us that the capitalist mode of production does not fall from the sky but grows out of, or violently breaks free from, the economic structures of feudalism, developing within and in antithesis to past relations and technologies: capital as historical in nature and therefore subject to the turbulent play of conflictual energies shaping and propelling human history. For Marx the capitalist system is a whole, a totality of interlocking relations that presuppose and support one another. Yet at the same time, it is not a whole with a timeless, independent, self-moving existence, an essence suspended in the void. Capital does not develop from nothing but is a historical phenomenon subject to temporal emergence and decay amidst a whole host of ‘disturbing influences’. (shrink)

This article is based on one fact about the author’s biography and one retold memory of the author’s mother. Each relates to the conception of the author. It takes the form of a performative autoethnography employing photofiction.1 The article specifically interrogates the grounded nature of subject identity in bodily experience, as matter, and chronology through speculative inquiry and the intersubjective relation, as themselves “photographic,” mediated through language. However, notions of subject and experience, photograph and academic language are pushed to an (...) extreme position until highly reflexive and to a point beyond literary metafiction. The article thus elaborates and enacts photofiction as autoethnography, replacing “meta” thinking and representational thinking about events and memories, with the nonrepresentational, to write the real [self] as nondualistic: experiential data as nonphotography. The onto-epistemological position of the researcher, author, Subject, in relation to his or her own status is in fact a photofiction. (shrink)

In her video and sound art practice, artist Shona Illingworth has extensively engaged with atmospheric environments as they are experienced physically and affectively. In the a multi-screen and sound installation, Topologies of Air, Illingworth addresses the conditions and discourses that define today’s perception and understandings of airspaces. This article closely examines Topologies of Air and further relates it to Illingworth’s art research practice, outlining key features and methodologies to argue that Illingworth’s decentralised approach to airspaces is rooted in an ethics (...) of air that fosters empathic understanding. This is congruent with the aim of proposing a new human right on the freedom to live without threats from above put forward through the Airspace Tribunal, an integral component of Illingworth’s project that she has developed in collaboration with human right expert, Nick Grief. (shrink)

Conventionally understood as the interface between us and the ‘out there’, this article proposes that there is an urgent need to write philosophy of language from a perspective which can account for the new ontologies of language being promoted by its increasingly non-human, digital, disembodied applications and ‘realities’. The work starts with a question: what is language when it is no longer made by humans, but by a machine? Employing Heinz von Foerster’s distinction between ‘Non-Trivial’ and ‘Trivial’, Machines, which describes (...) machinic processes involving agency and those which do not, this practice and theory based research explores that question. (shrink)

Out of Breath examines the cultural significance of breath and air to a wide array of forces in our midst, including economy, politics, infection, and ecological violence. Through a consideration of recent art practices and projects Albano focuses on breath as both an intuitive process and a conveyer of meanings.Conceived in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and systemic inequalities that it has laid bare, Out of Breath shows the potential of artistic practices to mobilize affect as a form of cultural (...) and political critique. (shrink)

This thesis, titled ‘Across May ’68; Reading friendships in Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination and Glas’, challenges the claims of a ‘political turn’ occurring for only the first time in Jacques Derrida’s writings in the 1980s, with many citing his ordeal in Prague in 1981 as catalysing this turn. While his writings may be thought to become more explicit in the 1980s and 1990s—a turbulent decade that indeed encompassed polemics against and, even within, the coterie of Deconstruction, over the Paul de Man (...) and Martin Heidegger revelations —Politics of Friendship, and Spectres of Marx being examples, this leaves much of his earlier work unconsidered in terms of its impact on Derrida’s later political outlook. The thesis rereads and contextualises two texts, 1972’s Dissemination and 1974’s Glas, in conjunction with a selection of contemporaneous essays, reading these retrospectively through Politics of Friendship and Spectres of Marx, and traces Derrida’s diverging relationships with Philippe Sollers and the journal Tel Quel, against the intense political period in France now known as ‘May 1968’. My thesis reads in chronological order each essay from Dissemination as representing stages of a developing written praxis Derrida will call ‘dissemination’, arguing that, in the context of his relationship with Sollers and Tel Quel, the text Dissemination marks the political hinge in his writings, constitutive of a radical supplementary political praxis that, ultimately, did not finish even with his departure from Tel Quel in early-1972 but continued some years after in his work in providing a vital impetus to the writing of Glas. My thesis provides a socio-historical and political context to Derrida’s philosophy—from the time of his working in tandem with Sollers, through to writing as a supplementary political praxis to Tel Quel following his departure. In ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. My thesis traces, in the Polis, a link between writing and political friendships and ‘phallogocentrism’. The thesis connects ‘Double Session’ and its discussions of Mallarmé’s ‘mimicry without referent’ to Derrida’s interrogation into then-current modes of philosophico-literary writing; especially those of Tel Quel. The thesis then reads ‘Dissemination’ and its review/rereading of Sollers’ 1968 novel Numbers—which is itself a text informed by the intellectual reactions and reflections to the politicised context of 1960s Paris. Derrida ‘opens’ Numbers, dissipating its ideological fervour for a political community that is inherently homogeneous and closed to the ‘other’, by placing key motifs in the text under chiasma, opening up its writing to the infinite ‘otherness’ of metaphysics. My thesis reads ‘Outwork’ as a discussion of writing that unravels demarcations and limits between inside and out. In doing so, I argue, Dissemination anticipates the multi-surfaces and margins of Glas and its discussion of stratified politics limits. My thesis reads Glas as a culmination and perpetuation of the praxis developed in Dissemination that proposes a political encounter of the ‘other’ based upon distance as well as proximity, and dialogue through its paratextual and symbolic typography. Glas is read as antecedent of a deconstructed political community, an ethics, and a responsibility that gestures an openness to dialogue with Sollers and Tel Quel, while also disproving Derrida’s purported political silence around May 1968. My thesis argues Glas is open to futurity, hopeful for a renewed political encounter, even if this involves a betrayal of the very notion of friendship for the sake of an-other friendship not tied by bonds of political solidarity, and ultimately reactionary aspirations for a shared communitarian project that, inevitably, represses difference. The thesis argues that this period initiates the emergence of a deconstructed politics by Derrida based upon a profound understanding of the structures underpinning the popularist riots—particularly as a re-evaluation of the Marxist and Maoist discussions that were prevalent in the intellectual reactions to the period. (shrink)

Born in Ecuador, formed intellectually and politically in West Germany, resident of Mexico until his death, Bolívar Echeverría is a singular figure within the landscape of twentieth-century critical theory. Following his early engagement with leftist politics and the existential philosophies of Unamuno, Heidegger and Sartre in his home country, Echeverría moved to Germany in 1961, initially with the intention of studying under Heidegger in Freiburg. Later that year Echeverría relocated to Berlin, where he would eventually become involved both politically in (...) the German student movement that saw the SDS rise to prominence, and theoretically with the associated revival of critical Marxist thought. In the midst of intense cultural and social upheaval, Echeverría established himself as a revolutionary intellectual and expert in Latin American politics, forming friendships with Rudi Dutschke and Bernd Rabehl. In 1968 Echeverría returned to Latin America, settling in Mexico, where he began university teaching alongside Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez and concentrated his research on Marx and Marxism, specifically focusing on the critique of political economy. He began to publish the results of this work from the 1970s onwards, initially in a series of journal and magazine articles and eventually in a number of book-length essay collections. Echeverría’s essayistic predilection was heavily indebted to Walter Benjamin, in style as well as form. He continued to teach at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City up until his death in 2010. (shrink)

Although largely unknown to anglophone readers, Bolívar Echeverría is one of the most important representatives of Latin American Marxism and critical theory to have emerged in recent decades. He was born in Ecuador, but his main intellectual formation took place in Berlin during the 1960s, where he became involved both politically in the generation of the German student movement that saw the SDS and Rudi Dutschke rise to prominence, and theoretically with the associated revival of critical Marxist thought, drawing on (...) the early texts of Western Marxism by Lukács and Korsch, as well as later currents found in Sartre, Adorno and Marcuse. In 1968 Echeverría returned to Latin America, settling in Mexico, where he undertook a deepened reading of Marx and Marxism, enriching it further through a critical engagement with a wide range of thinkers and traditions including Heidegger, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Hegel, Braudel, Mumford, and, more importantly for the following essay, structural linguistics and semiotic theory, in particular the work of Jakobson and Hjelmslev. (shrink)

This chapter provides a critical overview of main theoretical issues and debates surrounding the Marxist concept of subsumption. It initially sets the context for Marx’s adoption of the term by outlining the significance of subsumption in German philosophy, in particular for Kant and Hegel. It goes on to explore Marx’s use of the term and engagement with the broader problematic of subsumption in two distinct contexts: 1) his early critique of philosophy and the development of a historically critical, ‘materialist’ perspective (...) (where subsumption under concepts is developed into subsumption under social, political and economic relations); 2) his critique of political economy, where, specified as ‘the subsumption of labour under capital’, the concept takes on a far more technical and specific sense as a function of capitalist domination in the production process (in the distinction between ‘formal’, ‘real’ and ‘hybrid’ subsumption). The varied interpretations and debates around subsumption in the Marxist tradition are then explored. Firstly, considering the use of subsumption as a category of historical periodisation and the thesis of a ‘total’ subsumption in the work of Adorno and Negri. Secondly, assessing theorisations of subsumption within labour process theory, Marxological debates and Latin American Marxism. (shrink)

How do we do critique in algorithmic age? As planetary computation is redesigning human modes of existence, altering cognition, perception, and circulation of affects, not only is it changing what counts as human; it is also radically changing how knowledge is produced and what counts as knowledge. During the talk we will examine some of the dominant narratives circulating around digital technologies to question the techno-determinist visions they embody – in particular notions such as ‘solutionism’, ‘techno-enchantment’ and ‘platform design’. We (...) will consider ways in which how our human relationship with machines – in the broader sense of the term - could be rethought as developing meta-stable hybrid ecologies of the human with the nonhumanity of machines, with a focus on how the encounter with artificial intelligence could be re-imagined. We will then use these ideas to illuminate the cognitive and epistemological shift generated by the data-driven logic of computation in the light of theories of algorithmic governance, and conclude with some pointers for designers wishing to mobilize these ideas in their work. (shrink)

The word crisis comes from Ancient Greek κρίσις which can be translated as ‘power of distinguishing’ and is related to modern κρίνω which means "to pick out’. This is apt, because the pandemic of 2020 has exposed the limitation of approaches to social governance premised on calculation. The – some would argue false – choice between either saving lives or the economy, is the highest profile example of the necessity to ‘pick’ between different qualitative options. This has brought into relief (...) something suppressed by the calculation approach, namely the need to adjudicate between multiple and competing value orientations in public life. With this, an alternative way of decision making in the public domain is needed, one that does not revert back to mere politics and subjective decisions. This article turns to the writings of John Dewey to look for alternatives. It shows that the model of deliberative inquiry found in Dewey, even though not without its own challenges, presents a viable option to replace metrics-based valuation approaches, without falling back on the whimsy of political judgement. This suggests that Dewey is not just contemporaneous, but that translating his insights into action could not be more urgent. (shrink)

This essay outlines the philosophical and the psychoanalytic work that makes Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari one of the most important books works of the last 50 years. The main issues are the notion of desire in Marx and Freud, schizoanalysis as an alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis, and the psyche's emergence as a political, rather than psychological concept.

In his own words, Rancière’s method resembles Foucault’s. But, even if only in passing, Rancière has also touched on some of the divergences existing between his own work and Foucault’s. These aspects can be found in La Mésentente, along with two interviews—the first of which was conducted by Eric Alliez and the second with one of his translators, Gabriel Rockhill. Among the major points sketched in these texts—and on which this paper will be based—is Rancière’s brief but frank criticism of (...) the notion of biopolitics. The aim of the present paper is not to produce a systematic commentary on the similarities and differences that can be said to exist between these two thinkers, but rather to discuss Rancière’s criticism on the basis of an empirical case, namely contemporary claims made around autism as a form of subjectivity. The scope of the paper is thus not exegetical. Rather, what it shall seek to discuss is the operativity of Rancière’s critical remarks in fields studying subjectivities such as autism. Yet, as the criticism leveled at Foucault by Rancière is a corollary of a discrepancy present between their respective methods, and, moreover, as such a difference will be addressed through the lens of a central category from the latter’s theoretical repertoire—namely, the “distribution of the sensible”—it will be necessary to start with a brief account of its most fundamental points. (shrink)

By going back to the critical moment of the cybernetisation of the museum and of the exhibition, this essay aims to put forward a thesis considering exhibition as medium. It elaborates on the notion of medium by contrasting it with Canguilhem’s notion of milieu, in order to redefine it, in a non-substantialist way, as modulation in light of Simondon’s and Deleuze’s works. It proposes a genealogy of the exhibition as medium and describes a critical historical trajectory shaped by institutional and (...) informational infrastructures. (shrink)

This paper, written during lockdown while involved in remote teaching, looks at the impact of platform technologies to reflect on how human agency has been machine-reconfigured in the name of efficiency. It posits that a technocratic shift operates by capturing the messy flow of embodied experience, turning it into an operational and constantly upgradable toolkit, and asks for a consideration of the implications of this process of “toolification”, especially in the context of creative studio practice.

An assessment of the potential in contemporary 'glitch art' to recuperate and build on cyberfeminist legacies under conditions of advanced capitalism. Incorporating a critique of Legacy Russel's 'Glitch Feminism', this article draws on biopolitical theory to examine historical leftist conflict between technoaccelerationism and technosceptic accounts of difference, asking whether and how artist-led ‘glitch’ practices in the present might offer new modes of resistance to gendered and racialised forms of control over life.

In a context increasingly defined by post-normal science it is acknowledged that complex world problems cannot be addressed by one discipline in isolation. To face increasingly uncertain futures it is therefore crucial to develop approaches that work with uncertainty. Because of its future-facing nature and current drive to tackle world challenges, design has a leading role to play in this endeavour. The article proposes a research framework informed by the development of hybrid literacies – transversal toolkits across design, technologies and (...) futures studies – that can furnish learners with transdisciplinary skills. These are deemed necessary to address uncertainty and complexity by deploying speculative-pragmatic, imaginative practices that foster modes of working, learning and unlearning together. To illustrate this approach, the article draws on the ongoing collaboration between two academic institutions renowned respectively in the field of Art and Design and Science and Technology to offer a personal reflection and insights around transdisciplinarity and hybrid literacies in action. (shrink)

On the one hand, strategies regarding climate futures are often regarded in terms of either mitigation, amelioration or adaptation. In all cases a level of control is required. On the other, there is a growing literature within innovation and management – especially that from a creative or designerly perspective – that values the creative power of a lack of control. Given a body of scientific research that attests to the certainty of a damaged future due to the impact of the (...) Anthropocene on the climate – which is positioned in the realm of risk and its management – one wonders: what a more creative approach to the complexity of the whole scenario might bring? That is, what might a more out-of-control, complex or aleatory approach bring? Such an attitude would favour a focus upon the creative power of uncertainty, the complex characterisation of resilience ), and on the imaginary aspects of anticipation. This proposition offers a philosophical encounter with these concepts in order to tease out the ontological concerns that energise them. (shrink)

Proposing the notion of the designer’s own ‘mind-full’ body as critical to a costume-practice-led methodology of performance-making, this chapter draws on movement and materials workshops that I have adopted and devised to expand costume practice, research and pedagogy since 2004. Such practices are considered via perception and the Merleau-Pontian philosophy of the body, thus framing costume here as phenomenological. While I have deployed parts of this research into the founding of the MA Costume Design for Performance at London College of (...) Fashion in 2006, other workshops scrutinised here were devised for invited participants who were practitioners, researchers and educators. They form part of a long-term research aim to re-define costume as agent and instigator in making performance. Curriculum development and the research into the agency of costume in performance are intertwined, and are both initially informed by three research projects. Firstly, the AHRB funded Designs for the Performer exhibition questioned the established exclusion zones and hierarchies of traditional design practice. Secondly, the cross-institutional, international and devised production of LES/Forest proposed alternative processes to those of mainstream practice. Thirdly, my participation in the École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq’s Laboratoire d'Étude du Mouvement in 2005 saw a new emphasis upon the engagement of participants’ bodily movement through material interaction. More crucially, these initiated an on-going practice of devising material-movement workshops as a radical departure from traditional designing that is the subject of this chapter. (shrink)

Editorial for the launch of Studies in Costume and Performance in 2016, the only journal to focus on research in this area of scholarship and practice. The editorial's impact, as much as the journal's, were recognised by Intellect's 2021 International Women's Day celebrations, as 'Towards a philosophy of costume' became one of eight of their published articles spotlighted for that event.

This edited collection highlights the valuable ontological and creative insights gathered from anticipation studies, which orients itself to the future in order to recreate the present. The gathered essays engage with many writers from speculative metaphysics to poetic philosophy, ancient writing systems to the fringes of pataphysics. The book situates itself as a creative intervention in and with various thinkers, designers, artists, scientists and poets to offer insight into ways of anticipating. It brings together philosophical practices for which creativity is (...) both a fundamental area of consideration and a mode of working, a characterization of recent Continental Philosophy which takes a departure from traditional futures studies thinking. This book will be of interest to scholars and research in futures studies, anticipation, philosophy, creative practice and theories about creative practice, as well as the intersections between philosophy, creativity and business. (shrink)

An overview of the issues and chapters in the book.

This edited collection highlights the valuable ontological and creative insights gathered from anticipation studies, which orients itself to the future in order to recreate the present. The gathered essays engage with many writers from speculative metaphysics to poetic philosophy, ancient writing systems to the fringes of pataphysics. The book situates itself as a creative intervention in and with various thinkers, designers, artists, scientists and poets to offer insight into ways of anticipating. It brings together philosophical practices for which creativity is (...) both a fundamental area of consideration and a mode of working, a characterization of recent Continental Philosophy which takes a departure from traditional futures studies thinking. This book will be of interest to scholars and research in futures studies, anticipation, philosophy, creative practice and theories about creative practice, as well as the intersections between philosophy, creativity and business. (shrink)

Planetary computation. An epochal shift rewires humanity by impacting on our capacity to feel, to perceive, to sense and to think. Far from being a mere matter of speed of communication, this change has to do with the creation of new interlocking ecologies where information is sensed and the cognitive, perceptual and affective spheres mutate. Sensation prevails on signification. Data becomes us. Mediation shifts to immediation. This is the 4th Revolution when the digital-online world spills into and merges with the (...) analogue-offline world. In this onlife experience, data is the new currency, code is synchronized to the human and the infosphere becomes synonymous with reality.1 The proliferation of smartalgorithmic environments evolving in real time, the colonization of daily life by social networks, the tsunami of data, the unstoppable googlification of knowledge together create new ecologies of cohabitation and coevolution of the human with the nonhumanity of planetary computation. Given this scenario, two questions emerge as urgent. What is the impact ofthe ongoing informatization of bodies, artefacts and environments on the whole of human cognition, affectivity and perceptual faculties? What kind of narratives, images and fictions are needed to make sense of the ecologies we now inhabit, populated by agents on a continuum between the human and the nonhuman, a mix of the human with machines, dataflows, codes, algorithms; strange entanglements of silicon and carbon? (shrink)

OB-scene is a performance centred on a live sonification of biological data gathered in real-time with a medical vaginal probe, made by the author. The use of the photoplethysmograph, which takes inspiration from the first medical vaginal probes used for diagnostic purposes by Masters and Johnson introduces a media-archaeological aspect to this work. Data gathered through the probe is processed and transformed into sound and visuals projected in the exhibition space. OB-scene takes inspiration from Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter in which (...) she argues that human agency has echoes in non-human nature and vice versa, shifting away from anthropocentrism towards the concept of ‘vital materiality’ that runs across bodies, both humans and unhuman. Furthermore, OB-scene is affiliated with an emerging movement of women and technology called ‘XenoFeminism’. It introduces the idea of techno-alienation and focuses on the concept of other/diverse desires, new forms of desiring, experiencing something other. In this specific work, this takes the form of a technofeminism incorporating the fluid, the non-human and the diverse. In this performance, the body is fused with the technology, rather than empowered or enhanced by technology itself, body and technology become a unique actant enabling the audience to experience the sensorial assemblage as a space for communal experience with political implications. OB-scene is as an immersive environmental work where the senses, affect and memory were key features of ‘assemblage thinking’. (shrink)

It has been argued that “knowledge is power.” This short essay in two parts will review looking at ideas about power through the lens of Hannah Arendt, we hope to offer some thoughts about how actions and words inform the way power manifests. In particular, about the way that power in reproducing knowledge can be aided by design that shapes intentions in action, choosing either to assist democracy or to erode it --- Building on the revival of interest in Hannah (...) Arendt, and on the increasing turn in design towards the expanded field of the social, this unique book uses insights and quotations drawn from Arendt's major writings to assemble a new kind of lexicon for politics, designing and acting today. Taking 56 terms – from Action, Beginnings and Creativity through Mortality, Natality, and Play to Superfluity, Technology and Violence – and inviting designers and scholars of design world-wide to contribute, Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon, offers up an extraordinary range of short essays that use moments and quotations from Arendt's thought as the starting points for reflection on how these terms can be conceived for contemporary design and political praxis. (shrink)

The book consists of 18 individual chapter sections that discuss primary texts on cinema and film by major European philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through these mediating texts, Kul-Want argues that the conceptual approach of European philosophy to film lies in appreciating the aesthetic theories and legacy of the Enlightenment philosopher Kant. Methodologically the book utilises a diachronic method of inquiry, representing the ways in which Kant’s aesthetics informs subsequent philosophers’ unilateral claim that the experience of cinema and (...) film is primarily affective and irreducible to the diegetic structuring of the film. The book employs an additional synchronic method, demonstrating how the irreducibility of cinema and film claimed by philosophers is thought through their own original developments of Kant’s legacy. Finally, as a consequence of the combination of the foregoing methods, the book provides a comprehensive conceptual map of the relationships and differences between the philosophers and philosophical ideas contained in the book. In summary the book develops a complex understanding of how to think the relationship of the disciplines of philosophy and film, whilst also respecting their ‘difference’; offering a multi-lateral conception of this relationship: philosophy of film, philosophy in film, as well as philosophy as film. (shrink)

This book takes a philosophical approach to the study of dress and offers a cultural analysis of the representation of dress in literature, art and film. Ranging freely through literature, art, film and philosophy, Dressed tracks the hidden power of clothes in our culture and our daily lives. From the depredations of violence and ageing to our longing for freedom, love and privacy, from the objectification of women to the crisis of masculinity, each garment exposes a fresh dilemma. Item by (...) item, the story of ourselves unravels. Evocative, enlightening and dazzlingly original, Dressed is not just about clothes as objects of fashion or as a means of self-expression. This is a book about the deepest philosophical questions of who we are, how we see ourselves and how we dress to face the world. (shrink)

Differences are an inescapable factor in the event of presentation. Rifts manifest themselves one after another between the object of presentation, the appearance of the presentation, the method of presentation, what/who presents it and to what/whom it is presented and so on. In fact it is a course of differentiations, in other words distinguishing each categorical state, which instigates events like perception, embodiment and understanding. But what separates them is transparent and the common attitude to the event of presentation attains (...) the reverse effect i.e. the resonance between what has been differentiated. The event of presentation refills the differences at the simultaneous moment when it declares the margins of what are set apart. In this perspective the differentiation may be seen as an automaton for contextualising the resonance. This is a thesis that concerns a mode of presentation in relation to representation as its modality in contemporary fine art practice. This mode is a methodology in its most technical sense as well as a principle which is prevalent and almost mandatory for an individual practitioner in educational institutions, art criticism, galleries and museums; in short where viewing takes place i.e. the criteria of the viewer. This mode may be proposed as a doctrine that processes visual matter in terms of language, whose tendency reinforces our approach to art with a kind of conceptual value. The application of linguistic exercises in art is acknowledged to provide a conceptual assimilation and the methodical progress which enhances the conceivable quality in a work. Despite this general acknowledgement, it is true that language and the work of art are two disparate modes of presentation as well as two separate occurrences of representation. If a single case of presentation provokes a wheel of differentiations, the exercise between language and work of art to which we are accustomed, may be seen as a course of progressive and multiple differentiations, isolating one matter and concept after another. (shrink)

'And ecstasy is the way out! Harmony! Perhaps, but heart-rending. The way out? It suffices that I look for it: I fall back again, inert, pitiful: the way out from project, from the will for a way out! For project is the prison from which I wish to escape : I formed the project to escape from project!' Georges Bataille Inner Experience, p. 59 The most notable feature of the last ten years of going to Milan to visit design companies, (...) studios, manufacturers and the Salone di Mobili, has been the lack of change in outlook on the part of the Milanese Design community. The focus of any discussion centred around what has made Milanese design so special and always seemed to be focussed on the past. We revisited the 1960s and 1980s mainly—the Pop and the Postmodern, the bright colours and sensual shapes attesting to the stereotype of Milanese Design as energetic and desirous. The 1990s revisiting of a Scandinavian Modernist æsthetic particularly in furniture and kitchen appliance design seemed only to reinforce such a stereotype: “we can engage with this styling,” they seemed to say, “but it will always have our signature elegance and sophistication, that demands display and passion rather than objective appreciation.” Only Studio Mendini seemed to have no truck with the vagaries of fashion. Asked in Spring 2002 whether the studio’s playful style—so reminiscient of Design’s Postmodern turn of the 1980s as well as Pop’s 1960s exuberance—was still relevant in a world experiencing suicide terrorist attacks in many of the world’s cities, our guide told us that Signore Mendini believed that now, as much as ever, was it necessary to have some joy in people’s lives. And that is all.1 This is design as frippery, as an escape from the everyday, from the dirtiness of culture, of society and of politics. This is design which ignores the everyday experiences and concerns of people. This is design which has turned in on itself. This is not good enough. (shrink)

Can economic value express the ‘total’ value of cultural goods or does cultural value somehow elude economic valuation methods? Some prominent cultural economists – such as Throsby, Hutter and Frey – have questioned whether cultural value can be ‘translated’ into economic values using the methods of contingent valuation. The claim is that cultural value cannot be disaggregated into individual utilities, and by extension, broken down into individual preferences and choices. Rather, it captures something ‘irreducibly social’ that cannot be accounted for (...) using economic valuation techniques. We are left with value pluralism where cultural and economic values are not mutually exchangeable. As the current chapter suggests, this might have consequences for how we think about the value of arts and culture and how we communicate this value to policy makers and the public at large. (shrink)

This paper lays some of the philosophical groundwork for my other writings on the increasingly intimate relations between humans and machines and the impact of this relationship on our sense of self/selves. 'Affecting Bodies' engages with some conceptions of the body in such a way as to welcome this intimacy and the subjective liquifiations it promotes. Dealing with concepts from Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and with practices such as Capoeira, body modification and design, this paper provides an argument that bodies (...) understood not in terms of form and function, but rather in terms of their affective capacities, their speeds and slownesses can lead to forms and practices of liberation. (shrink)

This radical and provocative book outlines a philosophy of photography in the age of the digital: a philosophy of photography that reacts with the increasingly fragmentary, no longer dualistically comprehensible world, the description of which the familiar thought models of representation are no longer suitable. Rubinstein argues that until recently, critical discussions of photography had one thing in common: They all started from the implicit and irrefutable assumption that photographs are media that one has to approach visually; they took it (...) for granted that photographs were meant to be viewed, and they all agreed that it is only through the practices of viewing that the secrets of photography can be unlocked. Whatever interpretations followed, it did not affect the priority of seeing in relation to the image. The triumph of the digital image as a contemporary form of photography, however, forces a reassessment of visibility. Because the digital image makes it clear to everyone that the visible cannot stand for everything that happens to images that begin their life as binary data, then processed algorithmically and sent to various points in a network not as individual images but as data packets. (shrink)

Since Viktor Papanek, at least, the ethics of designing has been organised according to moral imperatives: be authentic not phony, take notice of needs not wants... and so on. The social innovation that drives its creative urge from design practices appears not to have strayed far from Papanek’s path. To rid itself of such reactive ideologies, and so to create other conditions for the possibility of its creativity, design-driven social innovation might do well not merely to pitch itself as a (...) morality articulated by, or in the thrall of, a transcendent authority, but maybe even to be occupied with different account of ethics altogether. This paper will seek to elucidate such a different ethics as an ethology along the lines Spinoza proposed and Deleuze championed. That is, it will therefore call for an affective designing that deals in the creation of modes of existence, from whose assemblages emerge other social and communal apparatuses. This paper is constructed of several sections – looking at assemblages, affects, modes of existence – each of which is its own moment in this call with its own value and agenda, but with points of collision with the others. This paper will conclude by gesturing towards the type of social/collective that might emerge from this discussion. (shrink)

This paper will examine how innovation should respond to intellectual traditions outside of its normal purview, in order to keep the creative engine of its activities vibrant. Drawing mainly from philosophy, but revolving around a single sentence from Arujun Appadurai’s ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’ – in which he asks refugees “not to let their imaginations rest too long” – this paper will argue for a theory and practice of innovation to be ‘restless’. A ‘restless’ innovation will (...) have a number of particular characteristics, and this paper will note especially those that relate to its space. Not simply because the refugee noted by Appadurai is determined as such by its relation to space, but also because innovation will be determined by the spaces it creates and by which it is created. A ‘restless innovation’ will therefore be one that is topologically complex and ontogenic. (shrink)

Archaeoacoustics, since its inception as an academic field in the early 2000s, has sought to integrate long-neglected questions of sound and listening into archaeological method. Caves, architectural formations, buildings, rock-faces, and sound-producing objects, the subject of study of sound archaeologists, are considered forms of sonic media through which knowledges can be produced in this project. In the absence of a greater interrogation of larger ontoepistemological questions in the field of archaeoacoustics, my PhD research draws on feminist epistemologies and decolonial traditions (...) of thought to assess the ramifications of sound and the sensory on Western ocularcentric epistemological traditions. However, rather than relinquishing to the easy alterity of the sonic, as encapsulated by Sterne’s diagnosis of the widespread “audiovisual litany”, the challenge is to remain “situated” in a Harawayan sense when conceptualising sonic pasts. Against an imaginary which implies a depoliticized, ahistorical and unmediated sonic past of “sonic naturalism”, I attempt to carefully posit a theory of sonic knowledge I call “aural gnoseology”. In doing so, I follow Walter Mignolo’s conceptualisations of “gnosis”, inspired by Valentin Mudimbe’s call to think outside Eurocentric modes of knowledge production and transmission as “gnosis” and Gloria Anzaldua’s “thinking of/from the ‘border’” which moves towards a propositional new mestiza consciousness. Aural gnoseology seeks to undertake a grounded, situated mode of speculation which asks what a theory of sonic knowledge – one which acknowledges the historico-epistemological implications of colonality/modernity, patriarchy and capitalism – might embody, effect and enact. (shrink)

This is a peer reviewed chapter in the book The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu, an interdisciplinary analysis of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology. The chapter, ‘The configurational encounter and the problematic of beholding’, is in Part I of the book, entitled ‘Taste and Art’. Engaging the aesthetics of reception as its field of inquiry, the chapter draws upon the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the ‘blank’ as a staged suspension of (...) connectivity, arguing for a reassignment of the aesthetic in terms of a ‘configurational encounter’ that problematizes the work/beholder relation. This constitutes a rare attempt to apply reception aesthetics to contemporary art, a ‘gap’ first highlighted by the art historian Michael Ann Holly in her 2002 article ‘Reciprocity and Reception Theory’, published in A Companion to Art Theory. Utilising concrete examples of practice, the chapter asks whether the shift towards inter- or transmedia art practices, characterising postconceptual art, renders Bourdieu’s characterisation of the ‘autonomous’ artwork superfluous to the contemporary situation, and whether the kinds of judgments of taste associated with the acquisition of cultural capital are no longer relevant. The chapter argues that in revealing material processes, rules, instructions or appropriations – and/or its situated reception and apparatus of display – the configurational encounter problematizes the beholder’s bodily and ideological orientation toward an artwork, revealing our embodied dispositions or ‘habitus’. This counters philosopher Peter Osborne’s suggestion that a change in art’s ‘ontology’ post 1960s renders questions of aesthetics obsolete and reconceives the aesthetic as emerging from the oscillation of spatial and ideational perspective switches resulting from a calculated problematizing of the beholder’s position-taking. (shrink)

This article proposes that feminist epistemologies via Donna Haraway's “Situated Knowledges” can be productively brought to bear upon theories of sonic knowledge production, as “sounding situated knowledges.” Sounding situated knowledges re-reads debates around the “nature of sound” with a Harawayan notion of the “natureculture of sound.” This aims to disrupt a traditional subject-object relation which I argue has perpetuated a pervasive “sonic naturalism” in sound studies. The emerging field of archaeoacoustics, which examines the role of sound in human behaviour in (...) archaeology, is theorized as an opening with potentially profound consequences for sonic knowledge production which are not currently being realized. The echo is conceived as a material-semiotic articulation, which akin to Haraway's infamous cyborg, serves as a feminist figuration which enables this renegotiation. Archaeoacoustics research, read following Haraway both reflectively and diffractively, is understood as a critical juncture for sound studies which exposes the necessity of both embodiedness and situatedness for sonic knowledge production. Given the potential opened up by archaeoacoustics through the figure of echo, a critical renegotiation of the subject-object relation in sound studies is suggested as central in further developing theories of sonic knowledge production. (shrink)