The aim of this one-day international research symposium was to investigate how the conception of time condition, or affect, our awareness of metaphorical meaning in still and moving images. We addressed this question through paper presentation and debate by critically engaging with the material, experiential and aesthetic aspects of visual images to understand the exact relation between the specific temporalities of these images and the temporal nature of the metaphorical. Keynote by: Dr DONNA WEST BRETT Associate Professor of Art History (...) and Chair of the Department of Art History at The University of Sydney, Australia "Moholy-Nagy: Photography, Metaphor, Time" Followed with presentations by: CARMEN HANNIBAL PhD Candidate in Animation at School of Communication, Royal College of Art, United Kingdom COLE ROBERTSON PhD Candidate in Photography at School of Arts and Humanities, Royal College of Art, United Kingdom "Times of Metaphor: a contextualising introduction" Dr ALBA TORRENTS and Dr ANDREU BALLÚS Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain "Time after time. Signs and metaphors of process-time and product-time in Neon Genesis Evangelion" Dr CHRISTINA SCHMITT Freie Universität Berlin, Germany "Tykwer’s THE PRINCESS AND THE WARRIOR and the Temporality of Cinematic Metaphorising" Dr ANDREW WARSTAT Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom "Exhausting metaphor – Andrea Fisher and the infinitely deferred image" Dr BURKHARD KRÜGER Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, Germany "American Photobooks as Melancholy Objects, Susan Sontag, Robert Frank and the Metaphorical Space in Photographic Sequences" OLGA AST artist and independent scholar, United States of America "An Artistic Inquiry into the Visual Metaphors of Time" Dr DONG YANG Grinnell College, United States of America "Heliotropic Disnarration: White Mythology, Metaphorical Anexactness, and the Possibility of Essay Film". (shrink)

Questions of trust are increasingly important in relation to data and its use. The authors focus on humanities data and its visualisation, through analysis of their own recent projects with museums, archives and libraries internationally. Their account connects the specifics of hands-on digital humanities work to larger epistemological questions. They discuss the sources of potential mistrust, and examine how different expectations and assumptions emerge depending on the use and user of the data; they offer a simple schema through which the (...) implications may be traced. It is argued that vital issues of trust can be engaged with through design, which, rather than being conceived as a cosmetic finish, is seen as contributing insights and questions that affect the whole process. The article concludes with recommendations intended to be useful in both theory and practice. (shrink)

This was a two year collaborative research project funded by the Austrian Research Science Foundation [FWF-PEEK]. Data Loam was designed as a multi-faceted arts-based approach to one of the more intractable and urgent problems facing our contemporary digital environment today: the massive proliferation of data, and with it, a particularly nuanced set of complexities confronting our national libraries, universities, research labs as well non-academic cultural institutions and industry-oriented environments. The urgency of the problem circled around three areas: archiving, accessibility and (...) experimental. In so doing, Data Loam rejected the entrenched paradigm of indexicality as the only method capable of articulating the ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’ of our contemporary world as the 'internet of things'. This meant rejecting also the entrenched Cold War 'binaric systematizing that tended to promote apocalyptic narratives of technology pitting ‘man’ against ‘machine’, and in so doing, taking as given the end of freedom, rule of law, governance and indeed humanity itself. Instead, Data Loam took as its starting point precisely the unruly materiality of information, with its the massive proliferation, messy logics, oddly cathected derivatives of circulation and exchange, navigational gaming, multi-dimensional visualities, crypto-economies, block-chain equivalences, and complexly sutured arenas of cultural difference. Rather than trying to compartmentalise, frame, cut-down, or force into silos or pockets of information, Data Loam foreground this exponential explosion of Big Data. It did so, first and foremost, by putting art-based research and practice at its core, emphasising the logics of sense, planes of immanence, feedback loops, multi-dimensionality, entanglement, and diffraction. Data Loam was able to reach its main goal: the articulation of how data becomes self-organised and can produce a kind of open self-governance that relies of the mass proliferation of information. On a practical level, this included developing an algorithm that could enable a new lexicographical search and tag organising system. Perhaps most significantly, »Data Loam« answered the question of ‘how’ correlations ‘matter’; that is to say, how correlations generate matter, and in so doing enable heterogeneous and local dimensionalities that ‘in-form’ aesthetic-ethical-political ecosystems. The project was linked with teaching /studio work with the MA students at the University of Applied Arts and the PHD students at the RCA. It was connected with RIAT and was rolled out in various exhibitions in Berlin, Vienna, Singapore, New Zealand and London. National libraries included: The British Library, the Austrian National Library, The German Federal Archive, the Humboldt University, and Tisch School of Arts. (shrink)

The making of art comes along with a sense of repetition; instead of a Tabula Rasa there is a confrontation and an endeavour in dealing and being in a dialogue with the past and the spectres that come along with it. The past as both heritage and burden, and a repetition that is inevitable yet impossible as well; the work of art rooted in tradition, yet an ever changing one with a sense of its aura being constantly redefined. Formalism after (...) semiotics, and a sense of materiality that become questioned and explored; expanded forms of painting in an endeavour to trace their relationship and continuity with the past, as well as with the present that hosts and witnesses that and is itself flexible and in a state of flux. The matter here is not a case of medium specificity, it is rather a state of flux of the aesthetic function of the work of art and how the latter is intertwined with the cultural context and the conditions that surround its making; a relationship between the work and its ground, whatever this may be. Authenticity is a charged notion that has often led to misunderstandings due to the different ways it has been addressed and used in the past. It is a notion that has been linked, amongst others, to religion, to spirituality, to the pursuit of a profound truth, and even to totalitarianism. The question of authenticity becomes a challenge regarding what can be the New in relation to the already existing and regarding a form of making which can produce this. When addressed besides simplistic allegations on the handmade nature of the artwork, the question of authenticity opens into the following three components; the author-maker, his/her authority upon their act, and how the act/making can be seen in contemporary art and practice, particularly, in painting. What becomes fundamental in this process is the notion of the Image along with its function and the way it relates to both its maker and beholder. The image seems to take a more active role than plainly having a passive stance as in a mere semiotic function; it moves beyond the role of the signifier and rather than just being looked at, looks back at the viewer gaining its own gaze and agency. It takes, in this way, an emancipated form and becomes animated. Through the autonomy that the image gains the making of it takes the form of an encounter with it, an encounter which decentres the maker from their dominant position rendering thus their authority upon the image threatened. The struggle of the artist to redefine their identity and role within the existence of the language of their medium and to utter an individual logos becomes proliferated through the constraints of the cultural and sociological context that surrounds them. A struggle that has become further intensified in the recent years where a language that stems from a corporate or financial world seems to dominate and become implemented on any endeavour to find a personal language or voice; a multilayered hindrance that demands to be the centre of one’s attention, condemning functions as daydreaming or wandering to be wasted time; functions that are essential for one’s thinking and being, as well as for the making of art. (shrink)

The following thesis is an investigation of the objectile and the clinamen to demonstrate how one is assimilable to the other. If, at the time of writing the thesis, the concept objectile was already lodged on the plane or strata of architectural computing, then it is a supposition of the following that the objectile might be re-mobilised for speculative design research by assimilating it to a pataphysical clinamen. Clinamen, the following research will show, serves as a prototype for the science (...) fictional, philosophical and architectural machines to be claimed as speculative objectiles for interdisciplinary design research cultures: Clinamen exemplifies the paradigmatic pataphysical and bachelor machines of schizoanalysis and the speculative research object or objectile. Which is to say, the concept clinamen possesses an interdisciplinary mobility as philosophical object and as a pataphysical machine, the Clinamen, a painting machine designed by Alfred Jarry’s pataphysician Dr Faustroll, named after the Lucretian atomistic concept resurrected by Jarry for the twentieth century. The following Thesis therefore composes a research plane on which to create an encounter between philosophy, speculative culture and design research, such that pataphysical concepts can be productively put into confluence with discourse on speculative design as a mode of practice-based research in pursuit of its principal claim: that the concept of the technical object objectile, created by philosopher Gilles Deleuze, can be assimilated to a pataphysical Clinamen. (shrink)

Stillman: The Surface of the City and the Depths of the Psyche offers an attempt to grasp not only a way of thinking about city space but also a new way of conceptualizing a subjective vantage point for this process. This practice-led research project aims to question subject-object dualism, in order to explore a third space and the potentiality of a new figure, which is a ghost-like entity called ‘Stillman’. Stillman is a ‘figure-being’ that implies significance both to the process (...) of writing and to art practice. Such a non-indexical character goes beyond the notion of a discreet subject. It is neither fixed by time, visibility or by embodiment along the lines of gender. Within the attributes of such a spectral character, the usual type of procedure whereby knowing and recognition occur is radically displaced. This then is effecting a doubled displacement for we cannot be certain about the designation of objects or places or subjective perception. My impulse has been to introduce both stitching and switching operations that create new space of encounter in which entities might create reconfigured modes of designation. This implies a new mobility of perception on all levels, thus everything is animated and on the move. This might ordinarily imply a theory of the fragment in conjunction with a de-centered notion of the subject, but I wish to make a step beyond this in order to challenge the very process by which we might begin to suppose a constitution of knowability, or at least an order of representation. In my research, the concept of the city is not based solely on the pragmatics of the urban planner or architect’s drawing board, but rather one that is related to the disjointed mode of dwelling to be found in the recesses of imaginative projections of aesthetic becoming. With the alternating rhythm of rupture and suture1, the surface of the city and the depths of 1 Although this term, ‘suture’ draws from a history of the concept of ‘Suture’ by Lacan, Miller, and cinema studies, I am not necessarily drawing upon this entire history of use. However, concepts with such a dense history unfold other trajectories of use particularly when placed into play with another concept such as rupture. They rhyme but they also open out discord. Concepts contain the psyche occur as a folded rhythm within my conception of urban space, which oscillates between fiction and reality or actuality and virtuality. The project focuses on the moment of aesthetic shock or de-familiarization arising in the context of the city of glass. As such, the condition of the unsettling that is embedded in the nature of Stillman and the city of glass is revealed in art practice and writing, which together include fragments and noncasual factors. In attempting to understand the spaces of the in-between, the actual materiality and with it the sign economy of the city starts to recede as a source of representation and in the wake of this dissolution various trace elements of glass, mirrors and spectres hover within the half light of perception. This process of condensation runs parallel to my aesthetic modes of presentation. On a concrete theoretical level I have examined the dynamic of absence and presence, the idea of spectrality, the development of montage, Far Eastern aesthetics and the idea of emptiness, theories of temporality and the image, and the play of the poetic and philosophic. (shrink)

Negrestani describes an augmented rationality which inhabits ‘the “area of maximum risk”—not risk to humanity per se, but to commitments which have not yet been updated, because they conform to a portrait of human that has not been revised’. The obvious question we are left with is whether the division between the human and the non-human is sustainable, and in asking this question, do we naturalise an ontology which always foregrounds humanism, even if it is filtered through an anti-humanist lens? (...) For Reza Negaretsani, inhumanism is a constructivist strategy to counter the infinite regress of the humanism-anti-humanism binary, in 2014, he wrote: ‘Inhumanism is exactly the activation of the revisionary program of reason against the self-portrait of humanity.’ But it is imperative to remember that who gets to count as human has always been ideological, likewise the form of logic invoked by rational discourse is also always political, implicated with a colonial continuum and a totalizing vision which masks 'the nature of data science as both metaphysical and machinic'. As its title implies, this paper has been revised in light of the author’s reading of Zuboff and McQuillan, with a deeper consideration of both Surveillance Capitalism and the Neoplatonist ideal of behavioural surplus accumulation, in which we all ‘pay for our own domination’. (shrink)

Who or what gets to be counted as human? This paper is a response to the questions raised by the idea of inhumanism, in particular, two papers in the e-flux Journal, editions #52 and #53, by the philosopher Reza Negaretsani, respectively, The Labor of the Inhuman, Part I and Part II: The Inhuman. In Part I, Negarestani addresses the paradox of orienting ourselves between the cultural tropes of humanism and anti-humanism, of operating via ‘consensus or dissensus’. In Part 2, Negarestani (...) elaborates the commitment to a discursive inhumanism, one which requires rational agency to allow for the emergence of the human, albeit a speculative rationality which has the potential, to undergo a form of assimilation to an artificial, general intelligence, in which we ‘only become rational agents once we acknowledge or develop a certain intervening attitude toward norms that renders them binding’. Negrestani describes an augmented rationality which inhabits ‘the “area of maximum risk”—not risk to humanity per se, but to commitments which have not yet been updated, because they conform to a portrait of human that has not been revised’. The obvious question we are left with is whether the division between the human and the non-human is sustainable, and in asking this question, do we naturalise an ontology which always foregrounds humanism, even if it is filtered through an anti-humanist lens? (shrink)

For the second of our Visual Cultures Lecture Series 2016/17, we are pleased to welcome Johnny Golding & Shumon Basar who will present their recent research and discuss The Post-Human & The Future of Technology. The conversation will be chaired by Tom McCarthy. The lecture is free and open to all - it will also be live broadcast by this is tomorrow.

Nietzsche’s iconic Ecce Homo: maps out the answer by taking the reader on a kind of magical mystery tour ruminating between the paradox. With chapter headings such as ‘Why I am so Wise’ or ‘Why I Write such Good Books’ or ‘Why I am Destiny’, one begins to breathe in the method, the madness, the sheer intelligence of it all. Whatever else may be being said in that text and his others, one thing is certain: a sustained, crucial, well-directed attack (...) on metaphysics – as idealism, dialectical logic, universalism, identity politics, morality and a whole host of other paradigmatic strictures – is necessarily, urgently, launched. Scroll forward more than 100 years since, and, coupled with the profound advances in socio-cultural norms from civil rights to feminism to gender equality, and beyond, as well as the profound advances in physics, from quantum to Higgs Boson; in mathematics from recursive algorithm to fractal imaginaries; in technology and new media from the photography to the digital, from the computer to robotics, from the gun to the stealth bomber – it almost beggars belief that at least in the aesthetic-politico-philosophic arena, one finds a steady crawl, and most recently, more of a electrified sprint, back to metaphysics ‘as a whole’, and more worrying still, to the speculative idealism of Hegel and co. For reasons not entirely clear, there has been a massive group hug toward metaphysics: whether at the level of retrieving it via a return to Hegel or retrieving metaphysics via Heidegger or retrieving it via Hegel or retrieving metaphysics via the newest old version: speculative realism. This chapter sets out to examine critically those approaches and to see how they fare once the erotic, the sensual, and indeed, the networked algorithmic age, is brought to bear. May have to dust off copies of Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy along the way. (shrink)

Classical metaphysics requires a concept of the ethical that belies or erases certain forms of truth-telling, often pulling the ethical in the direction of more sterilized forms of reason and rationality in order to invoke its universal applicability as a kind of ‘one-size-fits-all’ for any person, place, time, or thing. In so doing, not only does this tend to diminish or expunge the sensuous, carnal encounters of body and spirit, it pre-figures certain forms of courage, care and imagination so that (...) the very core of what it means to make a community alive, responsive, and creative remains stuck in the old classical canons of thought and practice. In this way, the beliefs and ‘truths’ that tend to be reproduced serve only to strengthen the status quo’s status – somewhat of a problem if that status quo’s status is also mired in misogynist, homophobic, ethnic and/or racially divisive traditions. The 9th Technology of Otherness, building upon Foucault’s Courage of Truth, the last lecture series before his untimely death, seeks to show how an ethics drawn along the sensuous modalities of courage and curiosity, creates a certain form of community, a certain kind of self, and with it, a certain kind of debt. It is precisely this debt that Socrates reminds Crito ‘not to forget to remember to pay’ to Asclepius, and to do so with the now quite infamous gift of the bird-cock. (shrink)

The elaboration of a 'post-identity' theory in the context of the birth of Synthia, an artificially generated 'life form'. Not only does it tackle the problem of representational theory, it outlines the way in which complexity, Mandelbrot's invention of fractals and the emergence of 'ana-materialism' is crucial for the 'becoming-x' of new life forms. It ends with a link to the Formant Brother's work on 'roku-gaku'. Earlier version given as Keynote at the Touched: When Philosophy Met Art Conference. This version (...) was given as an invited lecture to the Philosophy Dept, Northwestern University, May 27, 2011. (shrink)

Foucault calls it a limit-experience, or the thought from outside. Lyotard calls it a differend, whilst for Kristeva it is the semiotic, or the abject. Derrida calls it many things: différance, trace, pharmakon, hymen, supplement, and gram. Sue Golding calls it a kind of dirty, bloody poetics, one which insists on, say, bodies and skin and smells and imagination in the face of it all.

Asked as Guest Editor for the penultimate issue of parallax at the close of the century, Golding presented a question to 15 contributors: what holds together the social when the information age takes root? Curiously the answer came back as a kind of Code -- though not just 'any' code, but that of a Code inundated with a kind of ethicality one might call: honour. Taken from the Preface: This prissy little headmaster, this concept ‘honour’: so much the stuffings of (...) soiled reputations or deeply-awaited recognitions. One might think nostalgically of a chivalry long ago past, or of the earnestly given ‘promise’ around the keeping of one’s word, action, deed. Whatever else it seemed to be, it seemed highly unlikely that it was anything less than a moral indictment, plea, command, say, to ‘work hard’, have ‘good manners’, to love, obey and respect, remain neat and tidy, keep the nose clean.. In some respects, the very concept of honour, apart from seeming ‘outdated’ and disowned by all but the most tenaciously reactionary peoples; appeared, unlike it’s more well-received cousin, ‘virtue’, somehow not as interesting, in fact mediocre, and for many: the very mutation of ‘un-freedom’ itself. There was also the sub-problem that ‘honour’, for those worried about not seeming ‘wild’ enough, bespoke a certain tendency towards claustrophobia, ‘getting old’, or most uncharitable: boring. Indeed, many of the authors in this volume, when érst approached to explore with me this hidebound beauty, were slightly horriéed at the very thought that honour was being brought into the picture at all – rather like the resurgence of Nightmare on Elm Street, sequel 125: just when one thinks the bloody thing is dead and gone, chopped, drawn and quartered, it comes back to life, more devilish than ever, wreaking havoc, revenge or just plain mischief. So, part of the question became: could something as entrenched and time stilted as is ‘honour’, be ripped from its enlightenment moorings and be carried into a ‘different age’, the so-called information age, without all the attendant baggage. (shrink)

The Assassination of Time re-thinks the relation of singularity and dimension to the question of the Chronos/TIme. In so doing, it offers a different trajectory to the restaging of method and epistemology to metaphysics as a leap out of Hegelian dialectics and the Heideggarian dwelling via Nietzsche's madman prophetic verses and Einstein's infamous equation. The piece originally was delivered at the Digital Arts Week in Zurich as Invited speaker; it was then reworked and staged with musical composition by S. Kennedy (...) in Berlin, New York, Wisconsin and LA and recorded as an album release. (shrink)

Taking as its referent Foucault's 'Society Must Be Defended', Golding delivers a hard-hitting analysis of the current government policies, protests, and the rise of corporatism. She presents three succinct analyses and one plea.

Incisive and concentrated aphoristic journey from Hegelian dialectics through the Heideggerian turn, via Nietzsche's 'The Madman' and Godel's uncertainty principles, restaging the political and with it, aesthetics, after Einstein's infamous intervention. Further interrupted by Deleuze & Guattari, the question is thus raised: when is something installed as 'fascistic'? and when can it be otherwise? As Golding states, 'it's a delicate game we are playing, after all'.

Bored with the Lacanian version of Excess, Golding takes a little walk on with Excess, on the fetish side of the street. Written in two columns, each playing with and against the other.

Ana-materialism & the Pineal Eye provides a landmark interpretation of materialism, representation and the image using the Cartesian conceit of a pineal gland and its voracious sexually embedded appetites. Developing the argument via Georges Bataille’s re-invention of the pineal gland as an allseeing, all devouring, eye, Johnny Golding borrows this move to envision a different analytic approach to digital forms of ‘matter’ and artificial forms of ‘life’. From her critical engagement with Bataille, Giles Deleuze and Judith Butler, Golding shows why (...) the tools provided by these modern, contemporary and postmodern approaches to philosophy, image, the body, indeed representation cannot fully explore, let alone develop these new forms of reality/ies except by retreating into traditional binary divides between male and female, good and evil, mother/child and so forth. Anamaterialism and the Pineal Eye introduces a much needed understanding to oddly cathected sensualities, multiversal realities, digital imaginaries with no weight, no volume, no spatiality, but ‘somehow’ making sense, and with it, creating matter, ethics, art. (shrink)

This piece, translated into many languages, and, the last section of which is being animated into video, chronicles the rage, horror, depression, courage of all those infected and/or affected by the HIV-Aids pandemic. Like many of her generation -- and before anti-virals were discovered -- Golding lost over 50+ beloved wild and beautiful lovers, friends and comrades to this ugly disease, though at the time of writing, the 'number' was recorded at slightly less ; each one precious, real, searing. The (...) curious aspect of the piece was in its immediate aftermath of publication. For many it seemed 'odd' that HIV-Aids might affect anyone who was not 'gay-male'; so that when Golding herself went to seek grief counseling over this mad, traumatic, relentless tsunami of grief, the doctors told her that she should go read this 'really important piece written by a woman!' "But I AM the woman who wrote that piece!!".from the published version: "This is an angry, melancholic piece about death and dying and carrying on. It laces together the rawness of those 'problems' with the vitality and courage that all of us have had to muster in order to begin again, always and forever again, whether this 'us' be packaged as dyke or fag or tranny or queen or bisexual or queer or anything else yet to be invented. The people and their situations recorded are personal and particular; the deaths diverse and painful; yet their lives resonate at the more universal - dare we say 'political' - level. At the risk of saying both too much and too little, what has become clear for all of us who are a part of THIS community, this glorious gay community, is that our 'beginnings' create the very surface of an adult version - not to put too fine a point on it, of childhood itself. But this is an odd, often cruel form of childhood - one that skates upon the carnal knowledge of sex and sweat, encapsulated at the boundaries of our skin. We are the adult-children who refuse to give up our friendships and our loves in the face of this damnable brutality. We are the horror-children, the exiles, the journeyers, with the wrong outfits, the wrong loves, wrong jokes, wrong sicknesses, wrong deaths, carrying on, despite all odds. A bravado etched across always-already-beginning beginnings, making us in one word: pariah.". (shrink)

Classical metaphysics requires a concept of the ethical that belies or erases certain forms of truth-telling, often pulling the ethical in the direction of more sterilized forms of reason and rationality in order to invoke its universal applicability as a kind of ‘one-size-fits-all’ for any person, place, time, or thing. In so doing, not only does this tend to diminish or expunge the sensuous, carnal encounters of body and spirit, it pre-figures certain forms of courage, care and imagination so that (...) the very core of what it means to make a community alive, responsive, and creative remains stuck in the old classical canons of thought and practice. In this way, the beliefs and ‘truths’ that tend to be reproduced serve only to strengthen the status quo’s status – somewhat of a problem if that status quo’s status is also mired in misogynist, homophobic, ethnic and/or racially divisive traditions. The 9th Technology of Otherness, building upon Foucault’s Courage of Truth, the last lecture series before his untimely death, seeks to show how an ethics drawn along the sensuous modalities of courage and curiosity, creates a certain form of community, a certain kind of self, and with it, a certain kind of debt. It is precisely this debt that Socrates reminds Crito ‘not to forget to remember to pay’ to Asclepius, and to do so with the now quite infamous gift of the bird-cock. (shrink)

Sanctuary is the first published outcome of an AHRC Research Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts. Dillon’s project was entitled Ruins of the Twentieth Century, and was concerned with the reality and representation of modern ruins. Dillon undertook research into specific sites and into the history of ruin aesthetics in architecture, art and literature. The project constitutes both an academic survey and a literary extension of recent cultural attachments to the concept of the modern ruin. Its final outcome will (...) be an exhibition, ‘Ruin Lust’, at Tate Britain in summer 2014. Sanctuary is a novella based on project research into a representative post-war ruin: the remains of St Peter’s Seminary at Cardross, Scotland. The book is based on field research at the site and archival inquiry into the design and subsequent decline of the building. Its originality lies not only in its excavation of a significant landmark in the history of modern architecture in Britain but also in its development of an experimental literary form. The book moves between narrative and a mode of description that expresses the materiality of the site: both strands are informed by architectural and topographical writings of the late modernist period, including the ‘nouveau roman’ and the essays of Robert Smithson. Sanctuary was chosen as one of the books of the year 2011 by Frieze magazine. It was reviewed in various publications including the Irish Times : ‘The novella is an exploration of the way in which our senses of self and others are irrevocably bound up in concrete things and places that act as physical repositories for our memories.’. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s iconic Ecce Homo: maps out the answer by taking the reader on a kind of magical mystery tour ruminating between the paradox. With chapter headings such as ‘Why I am so Wise’ or ‘Why I Write such Good Books’ or ‘Why I am Destiny’, one begins to breathe in the method, the madness, the sheer intelligence of it all. Whatever else may be being said in that text and his others, one thing is certain: a sustained, crucial, well-directed attack (...) on metaphysics – as idealism, dialectical logic, universalism, identity politics, morality and a whole host of other paradigmatic strictures – is necessarily, urgently, launched. Scroll forward more than 100 years since, and, coupled with the profound advances in socio-cultural norms from civil rights to feminism to gender equality, and beyond, as well as the profound advances in physics, from quantum to Higgs Boson; in mathematics from recursive algorithm to fractal imaginaries; in technology and new media from the photography to the digital, from the computer to robotics, from the gun to the stealth bomber – it almost beggars belief that at least in the aesthetic-politico-philosophic arena, one finds a steady crawl, and most recently, more of a electrified sprint, back to metaphysics ‘as a whole’, and more worrying still, to the speculative idealism of Hegel and co. For reasons not entirely clear, there has been a massive group hug toward metaphysics: whether at the level of retrieving it via a return to Hegel or retrieving metaphysics via Heidegger or retrieving it via Hegel or retrieving metaphysics via the newest old version: speculative realism. This chapter sets out to examine critically those approaches and to see how they fare once the erotic, the sensual, and indeed, the networked algorithmic age, is brought to bear. May have to dust off copies of Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy along the way. (shrink)

Not for the first time in the history, theory and practice of art has the influence of science taken on the role of a strong though usually silent partner in the development of arts' material expressions, logics, representations, stylistics and/or practical-political pathways. But today something ground-breaking and certainly compelling in its raw intensity is occurring across and through the discipline, disrupting in its wake the very meaning of materiality, philosophy, aesthetics and indeed contemporary art practice itself. In direct opposition to (...) Newtonian physics and its insistence on a conception of absolute space as inseparable from dialectical development, Diffraction, Entanglement and the 'Sensuous Unnatural’ Act of Art seeks to explore the ephemeral skins of radical matter and its consequent requirement to re-stage aesthetics and contemporary art practices away from simplistic "scientistic 'rationality' v artistic 'irrationality'” binarisms, where either art acts as the handmaiden to science or science is used as the metric for art research. What is proposed, instead, is a walk on the wild side of science and its impact for redressing not only the tedium of a binaric divide, but propelling us toward, post-postmodern Enlightenment: one that not only re-thinks the very ‘matter’ of contemporary art, but also impacts on the question: what does it mean, in the 21st century to be or to become ‘human'. (shrink)

The article centres on a single document, the 1968 doctoral thesis of L. Bruce Archer. It traces Archer’s earlier publications and the sources that informed and inspired his thinking as a way of understanding his influential work at the Royal College of Art from 1962. Analysis suggests that Archer’s ambition for a rigorous ‘science of design’ inspired by linear algorithmic approaches was increasingly threatened with disruption by his experience of large, complex design projects. Reflecting on Archer’s engagement with other models (...) of designing, the article ends with Archer’s retrospective view and an account of his significantly altered opinions. Archer is located as both a theorist and someone fascinated by the commercial and practical aspects of designing. (shrink)

What is rebellion without political purpose? Is the pursuit of pleasure sufficient, an all-you-can-eat orgy of liberated desires? Adopting the socio-cultural movement La Movida of post-Franco Spain as its thematic heart, Dark Habits - an intentional nod to its namesake, the title and content of Pedro Almodovar's third feature film Dark Habits - presents poems, essays, images, autofiction, pop lyrics and short narratives to explore the authors' own boundaries of morality and self-determination.

A ‘scan’ is a close examination, a slow and repeated sweep of the eye and also the hasty glance of a quick skim. These actions are markedly different, but they all perform the same function: an eye is searching for something. The slow careful focus that absorbs every detail, the staccato pan across a horizon and the bounce of an eyeball as it skips across words on a page are all forms of reading the surface of the visible. Slow, sideways (...) or barely there, behind each method of observation is the one purpose: detection. For the scanner who reads the perceptible world, meaning accumulates with each shift of the gaze. Thought and vision are here combined. It is a close-up form of vision that takes us into the realm of haptic aesthetics. But what happens when we try and see surface? The distance between the thing that sees - whether it is an imaging machine or the seeing eye - collapses. There is no space between the look and the thing. It is all there, on the surface. Nothing is hidden, everything is given away. This practice-led presentation focuses on scanning, touch and an attraction to surfaces, from the interface of the screen to the painted gesture, offering a haptic approach to thinking about digital aesthetics. (shrink)

This online exhibition introduces a project to document and evaluate the early history of Design Research in the UK, focusing on the Department of Design Research and its predecessors at the Royal College of Art, London. The exhibits illustrate a number of themes, many of them concerned with the varied roles of the leader of the Department, Professor L Bruce Archer. They are organised around a series of images, highlighting important themes, and not necessarily presented in chronological order. The exhibition (...) has been put together by Stephen Boyd Davis, Professor of Design Research at the RCA, and Dr. Simone Gristwood of Middlesex and Lancaster universities. (shrink)

Research developed as participation in the AHRC Centre CATH ed Bryant.A & Pollock,G, aim at a specialist and more general readership to broaden and extend the reach of cultural analysis. The research into the co-ordination of hand and eye as a signifying and libidinal economy of knowledge through experience is currently being developed through collaborations with Natural Science on the Descent of Man and human origins. The presence of sexual selection in culture, as hypothesised by Darwin and elaborated by Freud, (...) illuminates the primacy of corporeal experience as a precursor of knowledge, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically. (shrink)

An article about violence in relation to the image.

In this first of a series of lectures, Margarita Gluzberg looks at the structures of consumer desire. The lecture is an archaeology, a transmission and a translation. The Consumystic speaks with the voice of the mystified consumer, the voice of consumption as mystical experience, and the voice of strategic mystification of consumption. The lecture draws on the economic theories of Georges Bataille, Public Information films, Balzac, Mirabeau, as some of its sources. It attempts to construct a territory, and an image (...) of the condition that we are in. (shrink)

Starting with the peculiar existence of the example and the importance of a paradigmatic method for artistic research endeavours, my contribution to this volume on ‘transposition’ introduces an idea of ‘making use’ that is non-utilitarian and immediately brings into existence a relational unity, a profound bond, between that which is used and that or who is using it. Drawing upon my previous research and the current work of Giorgio Agamben, I bring close together the existence of the example and this (...) idea of ‘making use’ to show that with both there is no residue, nothing preceding left behind, and nothing foundational to be found in a separate realm. This has consequences for not only how we understand ‘transposition’ but also for the functioning and control of a power that constitutes itself by separating something from it. (shrink)

The 1st International Symposium "Mutating Ecologies in Contemporary Art" seeks to deepen this notion of expanded ecologies by examining current transdisciplinary artistic, cultural and curatorial practices that provide different ways to understand, contest and interrogate our relation to the earth through discursive, visual and sensual strategies and methodologies, experimenting beyond disciplinary confinements and generating new subjectivities, new posthuman ethics and novel posthuman politics. Cloud Ecologies: Weather, Pollution, Time and Data This paper considers the mutating ecologies of the cloud as it (...) slips between references to the weather, pollution, time and data. Craigie Horsfield’s tapestries Above the Road East toward Taibique, El Hierro, 15 minutes, 2008, and 16 minutes 25 seconds, February 2002, re-present two woven images of clouds taken from film stills. El Hierro is the smallest and most Western of the Canary Islands and sits at what was once known as the “edge of the world” between Europe, Africa and the Americas. Clouds drift. From the old world frontiers of El Hierro to the new frontiers of the technosphere, reaching out into ‘open’ space is shown to be a powerful imaginary that seeks to obscure how “offensives are connected back to the source after a certain processing time”. This “processing time” is now being coded in more explicitly geological terms as a consequence of theories of the Anthropocene. The Earth and the atmosphere have a memory. Behind the informatic clouds accessed at the touch of a screen lies a world of material traces, social and environmental consequences and slow violence, from networks of cables to server farms, orbiting satellites, rare earth mineral mining, factory assembly lines and mountains of toxic e-waste. The cloud’s ecology mutates becoming natural and artificial, located and dispersed, material and immaterial. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s notion of Cannibal Metaphysics and the use of indigenous alter-anthropologies that offer the possibility to think thought otherwise than the dominant frameworks of Western modernity. It traces the use of cannibalism across thinking and making, exploring the work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica and his imaginative spatial and material practices that establish relational ecologies between humans and nonhumans. Ecology is foregrounded as a necessary precondition for thought’s possibility. The concept of ‘Nature’ is (...) contested as a foundational concept to enable modes of imaginative worlding to emerge that significantly challenge Western intellectual frameworks, depriving them of their universality and therefore transforming knowledge. “Cannibal alterity” is mapped as a political act of transgression where values are devoured in order to subvert their meanings, unsettle their cultural dominance and oppressive force, to transform their negative and destructive power into new creative and productive forms. (shrink)

Spoken performance has become a key form for my research and writing practice and for this 45 mins performance, I speak of how ‘figures’ have always appeared in my writing, enabling me to say something I have found difficult to say. Through giving examples of mine and others written images/figures (here the work of Michel Serres is flagged up as key) and drawing upon the writing of my book Pure Means (Oct, 2013), this performance introduces questions as to ‘voice’, divisions (...) between the human and the animal, ‘dividing divisions’ (Agamben and St Paul) and gestures towards a body of new writing that centers upon the figure of ‘as not’ (inoperativity), which can be found in the philosophical and political writings of Giorgio Agamben. This performance also contributes to my longstanding concern to trouble presupposition. (shrink)

A paper that explores the extent to which images remain resistant to their assimilation by the linguistic and technical systems that society has developed. It uses Damisch´s theory of /cloud/ to comment upon and refract Flusser´s notion of the technical image, proposing a productive incompleteness that the image continually feeds into our relationship to the world. With the image, laterality is as significant as linearity. Its form does not presuppose how it should be approached or understood; the provisionality heralded by (...) /cloud/ and by the nature of the image can problematise, confound, or even offer an antidote to a systematising drive in the mediated world we inhabit. (shrink)

'The Academic Year' is a long-term collaboration (2013-) between myself and the philosopher Alexander Garcia Duttmann (Professor of Aesthetics at UdK, University of the Arts, Berlin) evidenced in a publication, talk, public artwork and performance reading. It follows on from our previous research collaboration Liebeslied/My Suicides - an opera. The research investigates the relationship between artist and writer, between photography and philosophy, between image and text, whereby 'text' is not meant as an illustration to images nor do images illustrate the (...) fragments that compose the text. The research explores if a third approach is possible, whereby a parallel world emerges through the encounter. "The chance of an encounter lies in obliqueness".(AGD) 'The Academic Year' was published by Bruno Ceschel as part of SPBH Editions, with a public reading at DRAF Foundation London, January 2015. In May 2015 the research was transformed into a 3-dimensional stage set, The Teaser, for the public square of Somerset House. The work functioned as a public platform that welcomed dialogue and discussion, as well as hosting readings conducted by artists and writers. The Teaser was a Knowledge Exchange project with RCA Fine Art, Photo London, Procurarte Lisbon, supported by the Luma Foundation. The installation was seen by over 20.000 visitors to Photo London 2015 and received considerable press and tv coverage (FT, Photomonitor, Time Out etc). The Teaser was the subject of a public talk between myself and the art historian and director of the Royal Academy Tim Marlow. (shrink)

An essay on masochism and the work of Esther Teichmann.

For many, design is the production of useful artefacts. Designing can however also provide a basis for exploration, speculation or critique. This thesis develops this conception further by providing a theoretical framework for conceiving designing and design objects as a mode of and media for philosophical inquiry. Design is regarded as a material philosophy that explores and reflects philosophical issues by situating them in the concrete and particular reality of human life rather than in a generalised and abstract realm. Design (...) objects are equipment and media that can be understood in terms of their contextual references and consequences as well as the way in which they mediate human action, thinking and existence, and thus in terms of the worlds that they open up. As media for reflection they allow one to gain an experiential understanding of these contexts and worlds. Design thus relates to philosophy in terms of ethics and concepts; that is, in terms of exploring possibilities of existence and new forms of thinking. Since design objects can cre-ate new experiences and interactions they can lead to new values and concepts. These objects can be used to reflect on philosopical issues and to thus see the world from a new perspective. These new perspectives may be brought about through three approaches: First, through fictions that render possible worlds experienceable or show the existing world in a new way. Second, through models that serve as tools for understanding and mediation between the general and abstract and the concrete and particular. Third, through situations, simulations and re-enactments that facilitate a direct and bodily experience of a new per-spective. These approaches can make abstract ideas experienceable, as they materialise these issues in concrete situations and thereby allow one to judge them in a real world context, including possible consequences. The activity of designing is accordingly considered an exploration of philosophical questions that uses design objects both as media for conducting an inquiry and communicating its outcome. (shrink)

Writing_Making: Object as body, language and material A turn away from language and the human mind as the dominant determinants of reality can be identified within many disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy and literature, reflecting a growing acceptance of human and non-human, living and non-living entities as real, complex and partially withdrawn agents in the world. In Object Oriented Ontology the definition of object is extended to include humans, who have no special ontological status. Timothy Morton proposes rhetoric as a means (...) of drawing closer to other objects, of contacting the ‘strange stranger’; objects cannot be known directly, or fully, but can be explored through imaginative speculation. Drawing on Object Oriented Ontology, my project explores making - an intimate engagement between body and material - as a means of thinking the body as a object within a mesh of strange objects. Facture is documented as image and language, prompting a series of shifting, speculative questions: • Can writing be brought to making to generate new new approaches to craft production? • How might writing in response to making, or objects, be reintroduced into a making process as a form of feedback? • Can writing_making methods generate new approaches to writing making and materials? • How might a combination of production, documentation and reflection be displayed as artwork/research? • Can making be seen as a means for contacting the ‘strange stranger’? (shrink)

The paper centres on a single document, the 1968 doctoral thesis of L Bruce Archer. It traces the author’s earlier publications and the sources that informed and inspired his thinking, as a way of understanding the trajectory of his ideas and the motivations for his work at the Royal College of Art from 1962. Analysis of the thesis suggests that Archer’s ambition for a rigorous ‘science of design’ inspired by algorithmic approaches was increasingly threatened with disruption by his experience of (...) large, complex design projects. His attempts to deal with this problem are shown to involve a particular interpretation of cybernetics. The paper ends with Archer’s own retrospective view and a brief account of his dramatically changed opinions. Archer is located as both a theorist and someone intensely interested in the commercial world of industrial design. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the role of art and design in the history and philosophy of computing. It offers insights arising from research into a period in the 1960s and 70s, particularly in the UK, when computing became more available to artists and designers, focusing on John Lansdown and Bruce Archer in London. Models of computing interacted with conceptualisations of art, design and related creative activities in important ways.