Artist Research

But in my mind I realise I have turned Metzger into this character of turmoil – one who is desperate for survival. Like the father in The Road, pushing the trolley forwards carrying his past with him into the future, Metzger is there with his bag of possessions. MASS MEDIA: Today and Yesterday (2009) was a piece that gave a sense of a man so preoccupied with this duty to do something, his moral obligation to do something for the world, even if that be through collecting newspapers: to keep a record of now, of the past, of measuring just like the man I used to see on my way to school, collecting newspapers, perhaps it is just a need know about anything and everything – just to be aware.

The essay can be read in full on Academia.

The use of the monolith in Kubrick’s film creates intrigue. The same with the sound mirrors. It is not clear to most people what they are, until they research them further. That is unless you are an expert in aeronautics. The presence of the sound mirrors and the monolith create a distortion in time and space. In a way Denge and Dungeness feel like places far removed from the present, the moment in which I am sitting typing now. But the sound mirrors do not. They look like they have erupted out of the shingle. Both Dean and Kubrick portray the mark of humanity. On Earth – in the case of Dean, and the Universe – in the case of Kubrick. Both show the development of humanity, of how we have progressed through the invention of tools.

The essay can be read in full on Academia.

• flashing text to a beat
• the world as will
• Marx: revolution gets repeated, loop
• violence of the state: creates and dictates its own script
• logic of the media: circular
• what does it mean to be a third generation person?
• ww1 > ww2 > cold war > > >
• how can one act politically?
• unknown persons are figures of resistance
• a closed world where all traditional positions of resistance have fallen away into the abyss
  

Mark Fisher (talk)

• capitalism seen as the armchair at the end of history
• we interact with objects in a virtual way, reduce them to an ornamental status
• we are no longer subjects as spectators but part of a bigger spectacle
• reality t.v. needs a circuit to complete the reality becoming a participant in the reality by: phoning in, txting, tweets, emails
• capitalist realism means that we are all involved and integrated in the system
• critique rarification and subsumption of all life into the role of the aesthetic it becomes demythologised and has no function
• The role of culture is to produce new things and to create a reflection
• the end of history becomes more prone to pastiche, if nothing new happens then we are left with relics that can only be rearranged
• postmodernism has become so dominant that it can no longer be seen
• it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism
• failure of our imagination as we cannot imagine a world with no capitalism
• capitalism has its own subtle propaganda unlike socialism this is why capitalism is more effective
• capitalist realism claims to diminish illusions and myths that have dominated the past – this is part of the structure of capitalism: it de-functions artefacts
• capitalism destroys life worlds and reconstructs them as artefacts – we present life in the world as relics of times previous they are aesthetic and displaced – capitalism does this to itself and to us as subjects
• capitalism has no world of its own it reconstitutes itself in other life worlds
• history has a different reality but that is breaking down – captialism is not seen as underdeveloped
• subject reduced to a spectator with no belief: a cynical, disaffected and disconnected being who has superior awareness
• we live in a post-apocalyptic time therefore to create a new revelation we need an apocalypse
• excessive awareness creates hyper vigilance
• excessive unawareness is created by capitalism – this is why there is nothing new
• we are in nostalgia mode with our unwitting capitulation of forms of the past – the past conditions of the present means things can be repeated without being noticed
• alternative – reactivating lost futures we oppose capitalisms obsoleteness and reposition ourselves

Work photographed by Ed Jansen.