M John Harrison, 77, is the author of seven story collections and 12 novels, including Nova Swing, which won the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction in 2007, and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, winner of the Goldsmiths prize in 2020.

Goldsmiths College Department of Art MFA Lectures 2018 - 2019

Series 1.1: Offence is the Best Defence: On the Success of Social Media Toxicity

8 Oct 2018 — Daniel Rourke (Goldsmiths): “We're trying to have the non-weird future get here as fast as possible.” 15 Oct 2018 — Isobelle Clarke (Birmingham): "Poor little snowflake, are you 'grossly' offended?": Quantifying Communicative Styles of Twitter Trolling 22 Oct 2018 — Zeena Feldman (Kings College, London): Beyond Time: On Quitting Social Media 29 Oct 2018 — William Davies (Goldsmiths): War of Words: Embodiment and Rhetoric in Online Combat

Daniel Rourke 8th October 2018 “We're trying to have the non-weird future get here as fast as possible.”

From the Latin ‘aequivocare’, for ‘called by the same name’, to equivocate is to use language ambiguously to conceal a truth or avoid commitment to a single meaning. In this talk Daniel Rourke will consider equivocation in the performative (social media) speech acts of figures such as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

How their speech acts exposit a 'shared' future, or a means of ‘escaping’ our present conditions, has much to tell us about how the very idea of the ‘true’ or the ‘false’ has shifted in the era of algorithmic governance, and social media campaigns such as #MeToo.

Turning to Homi K. Bhabha's theories of postcolonial discourse, as well as introducing the project The 3D Additivist Manifesto – co-created with Morehshin Allahyari – Daniel will end by trying to reaffirm the equivocal act, pointing out a way to generate and move toward non-determinate futures without imperialising them.

BIO: Dr. Daniel Rourke is a writer/artist and co-convener of Digital Media (MA) at Goldsmiths. In his work Daniel creates collaborative frameworks and theoretical toolsets for exploring the intersection of digital materiality, the arts, and posthumanism. These frameworks often hinge on speculative elements taken from science fiction and pop culture: fictional figures and fabulations that might offer a glimpse of a radical ‘outside’ to the human(ities). His writing and artistic profile includes work with AND Festival, The V&A, FACT Liverpool, Arebyte gallery, Centre Pompidou, Transmediale, Tate Modern, Sonic Acts Festival, as well as recent artistic collaborations with a cast of hundreds... web: machinemachine.net.

Presented by the Art Department, Goldsmiths.

Screening of 3D Additivist Manifesto at Speeding and Braking conference, Goldsmiths (13th May)The 3D Additivist Manifesto will be screened on Friday 13th May as part of the Speeding and Braking: navigating Acceleration conference, at Goldsmiths, London.Watch the screening and Q&A online at 18.15 - 21.00 The conference Speeding and Braking: Navigating Acceleration explores the material and phenomenological consequences of both accelerations and decelerations, as well as the aesthetic strategies afforded or precluded by them. It is concerned with the material inscription, practical harnessing and social experience of varying speeds, from the perspective of contrasting temporalities. Particular emphasis is placed on transversal approaches reading across, and drawing into dialogue, seemingly incompossible positions within the fields of sonic and visual arts, cultural and critical theory, and media and communications.

Abstract Algorithms are at the core of the computational logic. Formalism and axiomatics have also determined how the shortest algorithmic set or program deploys the most elegant form. This equivalence between axiomatics and beauty however hides a profound ontological ground based on order, rationality and cognition. However, this paper suggests that the pervasion of ubiquitous media and in particular of software agencies (from page ranking software to software for urban design) point to the formation of a new computational aesthetics defined by prehending algorithms. The paper will argue that this new mode of prehension defies the ontological ground of order and cognition revealing that randomness (or non-compressible data) is at the core of computation. The paper will draw on Alfred N. Whitehead’s notion of actual objects and Gregory Chaitin’s theory of the uncomputable to suggest that algorithms need to be understood in terms of ecology of prehensions. This understanding implies a notion of computational aesthetics defined by the chaotic architecture of data hosted by our programming culture. Luciana Parisi is a Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is author of Abstract Sex. Philosophy, Bio-Technology and the Mutations of Desire (London/New York 2004) and a progressive thinker in the emerging field of mediaecology and technoecology. Her research looks at the asymmetric relationship between science and philosophy, aesthetics and culture, technology and politics to investigate potential conditions for ontological and epistemological change. Her work on cybernetics and information theories, evolutionary theories, genetic coding and viral transmission has informed her analysis of culture and politics, the critique of capitalism, power and control. She has published articles about the relation between cybernetic machines, memory and perception in the context of a non-phenomenological critique of computational media and in relation to emerging strategies of branding and marketing. Her interest in interactive media has also led her research to engage more closely with computation, cognition, and algorithmic aesthetics. She is currently writing on architectural modeling and completing a monograph: Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and the Control of Space (MIT Press, forthcoming).Cast: bkmTags: Media Science, Media, bkm, Bochumer Kolloquium Medienwissen, Computational Aesthetics, Algorithmic Environments, Luciana Parisi, Media Ecology and Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Resolution Disputes: A Conversation Between Rosa Menkman and Daniel Rourke: In the lead-up to her solo show, institutions of Resolution Disputes [iRD], at Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn, Daniel Rourke caught up with Rosa Menkman over two gallons of home-brewed coffee. They talked about what the show might become, discussing a series of alternate resolutions and realities that exist parallel to our daily modes of perception.iRD was exhibited at Transfer Gallery in March & April 2015, and also functioned as host to Daniel Rourke and Morehshin Allahyari’s 3D Additivist Manifesto, on April 16th.Rosa Menkman: If I remember correctly you and Morehshin wrote an open invitation to digital artists to send in their left over 3D objects. So every object in that dark gooey ocean in The 3D Additivist Manifesto actually represents a piece of artistic digital garbage. It’s like a digital emulation of the North Pacific Gyre, which you also talked about in your lecture at Goldsmiths, but then solely consisting of Ready-Made art trash.The actual scale and form of the Gyre is hard to catch, it seems to be unimaginable even to the people devoting their research to it; it’s beyond resolution. Which is why it is still such an under acknowledged topic. We don’t really want to know what the Gyre looks or feels like; it’s just like the clutter inside my desktop folder inside my desktop folder, inside the desktop folder. It represents an amalgamation of histories that moved further away from us over time and we don’t necessarily like to revisit, or realise that we are responsible for. I think The 3D Additivist Manifesto captures that resemblance between the way we handle our digital detritus and our physical garbage in a wonderfully grimm manner.Daniel Rourke: I’m glad you sense the grimness of that image. And yes, as well as sourcing objects from friends and collaborators we also scraped a lot from online 3D object repositories. So the gyre is full of Ready-Mades divorced from their conditions of creation, use, or meaning. Like any discarded plastic bottle floating out in the middle of the pacific ocean.Eventually Additivist technologies could interface all aspects of material reality, from nanoparticles, to proprietary components, all the way through to DNA, bespoke drugs, and forms of life somewhere between the biological and the synthetic. We hope that our call to submit to The 3D Additivist Cookbook will provoke what you term ‘disputes’. Objects, software, texts and blueprints that gesture to the possibility of new political and ontological realities. It sounds far-fetched, but we need that kind of thinking.Alternate possibilities often get lost in a particular moment of resolution. A single moment of reception. But your exhibition points to the things beyond our recognition. Or perhaps more importantly, it points to the things we have refused to recognise. So, from inside the iRD technical ‘literacy’ might be considered as a limit, not a strength.

In the lead-up to her solo show, institutions of Resolution Disputes [iRD], at Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn, I caught up with Rosa Menkman over two gallons of home-brewed coffee. We talked about what the show might become, discussing a series of alternate resolutions and realities that exist parallel to our daily modes of perception. iRD is open to visitors on Saturdays at Transfer Gallery until April 18th, and will also function as host to my and Morehshin Allahyari’s 3D Additivist Manifesto, on Thursday April 16th. Rosa Menkman: The upcoming exhibition at Transfer is an illustration of my practice based PhD research on resolutions. It will be called ‘institutions of Resolution Disputes’, in short iRD and will be about the liminal, alternative modes of data or information representation, that are obfuscated by technological conventions. The title is a bit wonky as I wish for it to reflect that kind of ambiguity that invokes curiosity. In any case, I always feel that every person, at least once in their grown-up life, wants to start an institution. There are a few of those moments in life, like “Now I am tired of the school system, I want to start my own school!”; and “Now I am ready to become an architect!”, so this is my dream after wanting to become an architect. Daniel Rourke: To establish your own institution?

RM: First of all, I am multiplexing the term institution here. ‘institutions’ and the whole setting of iRD does mimic a (white box) institute, however the iRD does not just stand for a formal organization that you can just walk into. The institutions also revisit a slightly more compound framework that hails from late 1970s, formulated by Joseph Goguen and Rod Burstall, who dealt with the growing complexities at stake when connecting different logical systems (such as databases and programming languages) within computer sciences. A main result of these non-logical institutions is that different logical systems can be ‘glued’ together at the ‘substrata levels’, the illogical frameworks through which computation also takes place. Secondly, while the term ’resolution’ generally simply refers to a standard (measurement) embedded in the technological domain, I believe that a resolution indeed functions as a settlement (solution), but at the same time exists as a space of compromise between different actors (languages, objects, materialities) who dispute their stakes (frame rate, number of pixels and colors, etc.), following rules (protocols) within the ever growing digital territories. So to answer your question; maybe in a way the iRD is sort of an anti-protological institute or institute for anti-utopic, obfuscated or dysfunctional resolutions. DR: It makes me think of Donna Haraway’s Manifesto for Cyborgs, and especially a line that has been echoing around my head recently:

“No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language.”

By using the terms ‘obfuscation’ and ‘dysfunction’ you are invoking a will – perhaps on your part, but also on the part of the resolutions themselves – to be recognised. I love that gesture. I can hear the objects in iRD speaking out; making themselves heard, perhaps for the first time. In The 3D Additivist Manifesto we set out to imagine what the existence of Haraway’s ‘common language’ might mean for the unrealised, “the powerless to be born.” Can I take it that your institute has a similar aim in mind? A place for the ‘otherwise’ to be empowered, or at least to be recognised?

RM: The iRD indeed kind of functions as a stage for non-protocological resolutions, or radical digital materialism. I always feel like I should say here, that generally, I am not against function or efficiency. These are good qualities, they make the world move forward. On the other hand, I do believe that there is a covert, nepotist cartel of protocols that governs the flows and resolutions of data and information just for the sake of functionality and efficiency. The sole aim of this cartel is to uphold the dogma of modern computation, which is about making actors function together (resonate) as efficiently as possible, tweaking out resources to maximum capacity, without bottlenecks, clicks, hicks or cuts, etc. But this dogma also obfuscates a compromise that we never question. And this is where my problem lies: efficiency and functionality are shaping our objects. Any of these actors could also operate under lower, worse or just different resolutions. Yet we have not been taught to see, think or question any of these resolutions. They are obfuscated and we are blind to them. I want to be able to at least entertain the option of round video (strip video from its interface!), to write inside non-quadrilateral, modular text editors (no more linear reading!) or to listen to (sonify) my rainbows (gradients). Right now, the protocols in place simply do not make this possible, or even worse, they have blocked these functionalities. There is this whole alternate universe of computational objects, ways that our data would look or be used like, if the protocols and their resolutions had been tweaked differently. The iRD reflects on this, and searches, if you will, a computation of many dimensions. DR: Meaning that a desktop document could have its corners folded back, and odd, non standard tessellations would be possible, with overlapping and intersecting work spaces?

RM: Yes! Exactly! Right now in the field of imagery, all compressions are quadrilateral, ecology dependent, standard solutions (compromises) following an equation in which data flows are plotted against actors that deal with the efficiency/functionality duality in storage, processing and transmission. I am interested in creating circles, pentagons and other more organic manifolds! If we would do this, the whole machine would work differently. We could create a modular and syphoning relationships between files, and just as in jon Satroms’ 2011 QTzrk installation, video would have multiple timelines and soundtracks, it could even contain some form of layer-space! DR: So the iRD is also a place for some of those alternate ‘solutions’ that are in dispute? RM: Absolutely. However, while I am not a programmer, I also don’t believe that imagining new resolutions means to absolve of all existing resolutions and their inherent artifacts. History and ecology play a big role in the construction of a resolution, which is why I will also host some of my favorite, classic solutions and their inherent (normally obfuscated) artifacts at the iRD, such as scan lines, DCT blocks, and JPEG2000 wavelets.

The iRD could easily function as a Wunderkammer for artifacts that already exist within our current resolutions. But to me this would be a needles move towards the style of the Evil Media Distribution Center, created by YoHa (Matsuko Yokokoji and Graham Harwood) for the 2013 Transmediale. I love to visit Curiosity Cabinets, but at the same time, these places are kind of dead, celebrating objects that are often shielded behind glass (or plastic). I can imagine the man responsible for such a collection. There he sits, in the corner, smoking a pipe, looking over his conquests. But this kind of collection does not activate anything! Its just ones own private boutique collection of evil! For a dispute to take place we need action! Objects need to have – or be given – a voice! DR: …and the alternate possible resolutions can be played out, can be realised, without solidifying them as symbols of something dead and forgotten. RM: Right! It would be easy and pretty to have those objects in a Wunderkammer type of display. Or as Readymades in a Boîte-en-valise but it just feels so sad. That would not be zombie like but dead-dead. A static capture of hopelessness. DR: The Wunderkammer had a resurgence a few years ago. Lots of artists used the form as a curatorial paradigm, allowing them to enact their practice as artist and curator. A response, perhaps, to the web, the internet, and the archive. Aggregated objects, documents and other forms placed together to create essayistic exhibitions. RM: I feel right now, this could be an easy way out. It would be a great way out, however, as I said, I feel the need to do something else, something more active. I will smoke that cigar some other day.

DR: So you wouldn’t want to consider the whole of Transfer Gallery as a Wunderkammer that you were working inside of? RM: It is one possibility. But it is not my favorite. I would rather make works against the established resolutions, works that are built to break out of a pre-existing mediatic flow. Works that were built to go beyond a specific conventional use. For example, I recently did this exhibition in The Netherlands where I got to install a really big wallpaper, which I think gained me a new, alternative perspectives on digital materiality. I glitched a JPEG and zoomed in on its DCT blocks and it was sooo beautiful, but also so scalable and pokable. It became an alternative level of real to me, somehow. DR: Does it tesselate and repeat, like conventional wallpaper? RM: It does repeat in places. I would do it completely differently if I did it again. Actually, for the iRD I am considering to zoom into the JPEG2000 wavelets. I thought it would be interesting to make a psychedelic installation like this. It’s like somebody vomited onto the wall.

DR: [laughs] It does look organic, like bacteria trying to organise. RM: Yeah. It really feels like something that has its own agency somehow.

DR: That’s the thing about JPEG2000 – and the only reason I know about that format, by the way, is because of your Vernacular of File Formats - the idea that they had to come up with a non-regular block shape for the image format that didn’t contradict with the artifacts in the bones and bodies that were being imaged. It feels more organic because of that. It doesn’t look like what you expect an image format to look like, it looks like what I expect life to look like, close up. RM: It looks like ‘Game of Life’. DR: Yes! Like Game of Life. And I assume that now they don’t need to use JPEG2000 because the imaging resolution is high enough on the machines to supersede bone artifacts. I love that. I love the effect caused when you’ve blown it up here. It looks wonderful. What is the original source for this? RM: I would blow this image [the one from A Vernacular of File Formats] up to hell. Blow it up until there is no pixel anymore. It shouldn’t be too cute. These structures are built to be bigger. Have you seen the Glitch Timond (2014)? The work itself is about glitches that have gained a folkloric meaning over time, these artifact now refer to hackers, ghosts or AI. They are hung in the shape of a diamond. The images themselves are not square, and I can install them on top of the wallpaper somehow, at different depths. Maybe I could expand on that piece, by putting broken shaped photos, and shadows flying around. It could be beautiful like that.

DR: It makes me think of the spatiality of the gallery. So that the audience would feel like they were inside a broken codec or something. Inside the actual coding mechanism of the image, rather than the standardised image at the point of its visual resolution. RM: Oh! And I want to have a smoke machine! There should be something that breaks up vision and then reveals something. DR: I like that as a metaphor for how the gallery functions as well. There are heaps of curatorial standards, like placing works at line of sight, or asking the audience to travel through the space in a particular order and mode of viewing. The gallery space itself is already limited and constructed through a huge, long history of standardisations, by external influences of fashion and tradition, and others enforced by the standards of the printing press, or the screen etc. So how do you make it so that when an audience walks into the gallery they feel as though they are not in a normal, euclidean space anymore? Like they have gone outside normal space? RM: That’s what I want! Disintegrate the architecture. But now I am like, “Yo guys, I want to dream, and I want it to be real in three weeks…” DR: “Hey guys, I want to break your reality!” [laughs] RM: One step is in place, Do you remember Ryan Maguire who is responsible for The Ghost in the MP3? His research is about MP3 compressions and basically what sounds are cut away by this compression algorithm, simply put: it puts shows what sounds the MP3 compression normally cuts out as irrelevant – in a way it inverses the compression and puts the ‘irrelevant’ or deleted data on display. I asked him to rework the soundtrack to ‘Beyond Resolution’, one of the two videowork of the iRD that is accompanied by my remix of professional grin by Knalpot and Ryan said yes! And so it was done! Super exciting.   DR: Yes. I thought that was a fantastic project. I love that as a proposition too… What would the equivalent of that form of ghosting be in terms of these alternate, disputed resolutions? What’s the remainder? I don’t understand technical formats as clearly as you do, so abstract things like ‘the ghost’, ‘the remainder’ are my way into understanding them. An abstract way in to a technical concept. So what is the metaphoric equivalent of that remainder in your work? For instance, I think it depends on what this was originally an image of. I think that is important. RM: The previous image of JPEG2000 does not deal with the question of lost information. I think what you are after is an inversed Alvin Lucier ‘Sitting in a Room’ experiment, one that only shows the “generation loss” (instead of the generation left over, which is what we usually get to see or hear in art projects). I think that would be a reasonable equivalent to Ryan Maguires MP3 compression work. Or maybe Supraconductivity. I can struggle with this for… for at least two more days. In any case I want the iRD to have a soundtrack. Actually, it would like there to be a spatial soundtrack; the ghost soundtrack in the room and the original available only on a wifi access point. DR: I’m really excited by that idea of ghostly presence and absence, you know. In terms of spatiality, scan lines, euclidean space… RM: It’s a whole bundle of things! [laughs] “Come on scan lines, come to the institutions, swim with the ghosts!” DR: It makes me think of cheesy things you get in a children’s museum. Those illusion rooms, that look normal through a little window, but when you go into them they are slanted in a certain way, so that a child can look bigger than an adult through the window frame. You know what I mean? They play with perspective in a really simple way, it’s all about the framing mechanism, the way the audience’s view has been controlled, regulated and perverted. RM: I was almost at a point where I was calling people in New York and asked, “Can you produce a huge stained glass window, in 2 weeks?” I think it would be beautiful if the Institute had its own window. I would take a photo of what you could see out of the real window, and then make the resolution of that photo really crappy, and create a real stained glass window, and install that in the gallery at its original place. If I have time one day I would love to do that, working with real craftspeople on that. I think that in the future the iRD might have a window through which we interface the outside. Every group of people that share the same ideas and perspectives on obfuscation need to have a secret handshake. So that is what I am actually working on right now. Ha, You didn’t see that coming? [Laughs] DR: [Laughs] No… that’s a different angle. RM: I want people to have a patch! A secret patch. You remember Trevor Paglen’s book on the symbology of military patches?

DR: Oh yeah. Where he tries to decode the military patches? Yes, I love that. RM: Yeah, I don’t think the world will ever have enough patches. They are such an icon for secret handshakes. I have been playing around with this DCT image. I want to use it as a key to the institutions, which basically are a manifest to the reasonings behind this whole exhibition, but then encrypted in a macroblock font (I embedded an image of Institution 1 earlier). There was one of Paglen’s patches that really stood out for me; the black on black one. The iRD patch should be inspired by that.

DR: Hito Steyerl’s work How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, centres on the grid used by the military to calibrate their satellites from space. The DCT structure looks a lot like that, but I know the DCT is not about calibration. It contains all the shapes necessary to compose any image? RM: If you look up close at a badly compressed JPEG, you will notice the image consist of macroblocks. A macroblock is a block organizations, usually consisting of 8×8 pixels, that posses color (chrominance) and light (luminance) values embedded via DCT (discrete cosine transform). Basically all JPEGs you have ever seen are build out of this finite set of 64 macroblocks. Considering that JPEGs make up the vast majority of images we encounter on a daily basis, I think it is pretty amazing how simple this part of the JPEG compression really is. But the patch should of course not just be square. Do you know the TV series Battlestar Galactica, where they have the corners cut off all their books? All the paper in that world follows this weird, octagonal shape? Or Borges Library and its crimson hexagon, that holds all knowledge. I love those randomly cryptic geometric forms… DR: It reminds me of a 1987 anime film, Wings of Honneamise, that had a really wonderfully designed world. Everything is different, from paper sizes and shapes, through to their cutlery. Really detailed design from the ground up, all the standards and traditions. RM: Like this Minecraft book too. The Blockpedia. DR: Oh that’s great. I love the Minecraft style and the mythos that has arisen around it. RM: So Minecraft and Borges follow a 6 corner resolution, and Battlestar paper has 8 corners… Discrepancy! I want to reference them all! DR: So these will go into the badges? RM: I want to have a black on black embroidered patch with corners. Don’t you think this would be so pretty? This black on black. I want to drop a reference to 1984, too, Orwell or Apple, the decoder can decide. These kind of secret, underground references, I like those. DR: A crypto exhibition. RM: It’s so hot right now (and with hot I do not mean cool). Since the 90s musicians encrypt or transcode things in their sounds, from Aphex Twin, to Goodiepal and now TCF, who allegedly encrypted an image from the police riots in Athens into one of his songs. However, he is a young Scandinavian musician so that makes me wonder if the crypto design in this case is confusingly non-political. Either way, I want to rebel against this apparent new found hotness of crypto-everything, which is why I made Tacit:Blue.

Tacit:Blue uses a very basic form of encryption. Its archaic, dumb and decommissioned. Every flash shows a next line of my ‘secret message’ encrypted in masonic pigpen. When it flickers it gives a little piece of the message which really is just me ranting about secrecy. So if someone is interested in my opinion, they can decode that.

Actually, the technology behind the video is much more interesting. Do you know The Nova Drone? Its a small AV synthesizer designed by Casper Electronics. The the flickr frequency of this military RGB LED on the top of the board can be altered by turning the RGB oscillators. When I come close to the LED with the lens of my iphone, the frequencies of the LED and the iphone camera do not sync up. What happens is a rolling shutter effect. The camera has to interpret the input and something is gone, lost in translation. In fact, a Resolutional Dispute takes place right there. DR: So the dispute happens because framerate of the camera conflicts with the flicker of the LED? RM: And the sound is the actual sound of the electronics. In Tacit:Blue I do not use the NovaDrone in a ‘clean’ way, I am actually misusing it (if there is such a thing when it comes to a device of dispute). Some of the sounds and disruptions of flow are created in this patch bay, which is where you can patch the LFOs, etc. Anyway, when you disconnect the patch it flickers, but I never take it out fully so it creates this classic, noisy electric effect. What do you think about the text? Do you think this works? I like this masonic pigpen, its a very simple, nostalgic old quiff. DR: It reminds me of the title sequence for Alien. Dave Addey did a close visual, sci-fi etymological, analysis of the typography in Alien. It went viral online recently. Did you see that?

RM: No! DR: It is fantastic. Everything from the title sequence to the buttons on the control panel in the background. Full of amazing insights.

RM: Wow, inspiring!

So with any cypher you also need a key, which is why I named the video Tacit:Blue, a reference to the old Northrop Tacit Blue stealth surveillance aircraft. The aircraft was used to develop techniques against passive radar detection, but has been decommissioned now, just like the masonic pigpen encryption. DR: This reminds me of Eyal Weizman. He has written a lot on the Israeli / Palestinian conflict as a spatial phenomena. So we don’t think about territory merely as a series of lines drawn on a globe anymore, but as a stack, including everything from airspace, all the way down beneath the ground, where waste, gas and water are distributed. The mode by which water is delivered underground often cuts across conflicted territories on the surface. A stacked vision of territory brings into question the very notion of a ‘conflict’ and a ‘resolution’. I recently saw him give a lecture on the Forensic Architecture project, which engages in disputes metered against US Military activities. Military drones are now so advanced that they can target a missile through the roof of a house, and have it plunge several floors before it explodes. It means that individual people can be targeted on a particular floor. The drone strike leaves a mark in the roof which is – and this is Weizman’s terminology - ‘beneath the threshold of detectability’. And that threshold also happens to be the size of a human body: about 1 metre square. Military satellites have a pixel size that effectively translates to 1 metre square at ground level. So to be invisible, or technically undetectable, a strike needs only to fall within a single pixel of a satellite imaging system. These drone strikes are designed to work beneath that threshold. In terms of what you are talking about in Trevor Paglen’s work, and the Northrop Tacit Blue, those technologies were designed to exist beneath, or parallel to, optic thresholds, but now those thresholds are not optic as much as they are about digital standards and resolution densities. So that shares the same space as the codecs and file formats you are interested in. Your patch seems to bring that together, the analogue pixel calibration that Steyerl refers to is also part of that history. So I wonder whether there are images that cannot possibly be resolved out of DCT blocks. You know what I mean? I think your work asks that question. What images, shapes, and objects exist that are not possible to construct out of this grid? What realities are outside of the threshold of these blocks to resolve? It may even be the case that we are not capable of imagining such things, because of course these blocks have been formed in conjunction with the human visual system. The image is always already a compromise between the human perceptual limit and a separately defined technical limit. RM: Yes, well I can imagine vector graphics, or mesh based graphics where the lines are not just a connection between two points, but also a value could be what you are after. But I am not sure. At some point I thought that people entering the iRD could pay a couple of dollars for one of these patches, but if they don’t put the money down, then they would be obliged to go into the exhibition wearing earplugs. DR: [Laughs] So they’d be allowed in, but they’d have one of their senses dampened? RM: Yes, wearing earmuffs, or weird glasses or something like that. [Laughs] DR: Glasses with really fine scan lines on them that conflict with TV images or whatever. RM: [Laughs] And I was thinking, well, there should be a divide between people. To realise that what you see is just one threshold that has been lifted to only a few. There are always thresholds, you know. DR: Ways to invite the audience into the spaces and thresholds that are beneath the zones of resolutional detectability? RM: Or maybe just to show the mechanics behind objects and thresholds. DR: Absolutely. So to go back to your Tacit:Blue video, in regards the font, I like the aesthetic, but I wonder whether you could play with that zone of detectability a little more. You could have the video display at a frequency that is hard for people to concentrate on, for instance, and then put the cryptographic message at a different frequency. Having zones that do not match up, so that different elements of the work cut through different disputed spaces. Much harder to detect. And more subliminal, because video adheres to other sets of standards and processes beyond scan lines, the conflict between those standards opens up another space of possibilities. It makes me think about Takeshi Murata’s Untitled (Pink Dot). I love that work because it uses datamoshing to question more about video codecs than just I and P frames. That’s what sets this work apart, for me, from other datamoshed works. He also plays with layers, and post production in the way the pink dot is realised. As it unfolds you see the pink dot as a layer behind the Rambo footage, and then it gets datamoshed into the footage, and then it is a layer in front of it, and then the datamosh tears into it and the dot become part of the Rambo miasma, and then the dot comes back as a surface again. So all the time he is playing with the layering of the piece, and the framing is not just about one moment to the next, but it also it exposes something about Murata’s super slick production process. He must have datamoshed parts of the video, and then post-produced the dot onto the surface of that, and then exported that and datamoshed that, and then fed it back into the studio again to add more layers. So it is not one video being datamoshed, but a practice unfolding, and the pink dot remains a kind of standard that runs through the whole piece, resonating in the soundtrack, and pushing to all elements of the image. The work is spatialised and temporalised in a really interesting way, because of how Murata uses datamoshing and postproduction to question frames, and layers, by ‘glitching’ between those formal elements. And as a viewer of Pink Dot, your perception is founded by those slips between the spatial surface and the temporal layers. RM: Yeah, wow. I never looked at that work in terms of layers of editing. The vectors of these blocks that smear over the video, the movement of those macroblocks, which is what this video technologically is about, is also about time and editing. So Murata effectively emulates that datamosh technique back into the editing of the work before and after the actual datamosh. That is genius! DR: If it wasn’t for Pink Dot I probably wouldn’t sit here with you now. It’s such an important work for me and my thinking.

Working with Morehshin Allahyari on The 3D Additivist Manifesto has brought a lot of these processes into play for me. The compressed labour behind a work can often get lost, because a final digital video is just a surface, just a set of I and P frames. The way Murata uses datamoshing calls that into play. It brings back some of the temporal depth. Additivism is also about calling those processes and conflicts to account, in the move between digital and material forms. Oil is a compressed form of time, and that time and matter is extruded into plastic, and that plastic has other modes of labour compressed into it, and the layers of time and space are built on top of one another constantly – like the layers of a 3D print. When we rendered our Manifesto video we did it on computers plugged into aging electricity infrastructures that run on burnt coal and oil. Burning off one form of physical compressed time to compress another set of times and labours into a ‘digital work’. RM: But you can feel that there is more to that video than its surface! If I remember correctly you and Morehshin wrote an open invitation to digital artists to send in their left over 3D objects. So every object in that dark gooey ocean in The 3D Additivist Manifesto actually represents a piece of artistic digital garbage. It’s like a digital emulation of the North Pacific Gyre, which you also talked about in your lecture at Goldsmiths, but then solely consisting of Ready-Made art trash.

The actual scale and form of the Gyre is hard to catch, it seems to be unimaginable even to the people devoting their research to it; it’s beyond resolution. Which is why it is still such an under acknowledged topic. We don’t really want to know what the Gyre looks or feels like; it’s just like the clutter inside my desktop folder inside my desktop folder, inside the desktop folder. It represents an amalgamation of histories that moved further away from us over time and we don’t necessarily like to revisit, or realise that we are responsible for. I think The 3D Additivist Manifesto captures that resemblance between the way we handle our digital detritus and our physical garbage in a wonderfully grimm manner. DR: I’m glad you sense the grimness of that image. And yes, as well as sourcing objects from friends and collaborators we also scraped a lot from online 3D object repositories. So the gyre is full of Ready-Mades divorced from their conditions of creation, use, or meaning. Like any discarded plastic bottle floating out in the middle of the pacific ocean. Eventually Additivist technologies could interface all aspects of material reality, from nanoparticles, to proprietary components, all the way through to DNA, bespoke drugs, and forms of life somewhere between the biological and the synthetic. We hope that our call to submit to The 3D Additivist Cookbook will provoke what you term ‘disputes’. Objects, software, texts and blueprints that gesture to the possibility of new political and ontological realities. It sounds far-fetched, but we need that kind of thinking. Alternate possibilities often get lost in a particular moment of resolution. A single moment of reception. But your exhibition points to the things beyond our recognition. Or perhaps more importantly, it points to the things we have refused to recognise. So, from inside the iRD technical ‘literacy’ might be considered as a limit, not a strength. RM: Often the densities of the works we create, in terms of concept, but also collage, technology and source materials move quite far away or even beyond a fold. I suppose that’s why we make our work pretty. To draw in the people that are not technically literate or have no back knowledge. And then perhaps later they wonder about the technical aspects and the meaning behind the composition of the work and want to learn more. To me, the process of creating, but also seeing an interesting digital art work often feels like swimming inside an abyss of increments. DR: What is that? RM: I made that up. An abyss is something that goes on and on and on. Modern lines used to go on, postmodern lines are broken up as they go on. Thats how I feel we work on our computers, its a metaphor for scanlines. DR: In euclidean space two parallel lines will go on forever and not meet. But on the surface of a globe, and other, non-euclidean spaces, those lines can be made to converge or diverge. * RM: I have been trying to read up on my euclidean geometry. DR: And I am thinking now about Flatland again, A Romance in Many Dimensions. RM: Yeah, it’s funny that in the end, it is all about Flatland. That’s where this all started, so thats where it has to end; Flatland seems like an eternal ouroboros inside of digital art. DR: It makes me think too about holographic theory. You can encode on a 2D surface the information necessary to construct a 3D image. And there are theories that suggest that a black hole has holographic properties. The event horizon of a black hole can be thought of as a flat surface, and contains all the information necessary to construct the black hole. And because a black hole is a singularity, and the universe can be considered as a singularity too – in time and space – some theories suggest that the universe is a hologram encoded on its outer surface. So the future state of the universe encodes all the prior states. Or something like that. RM: I once went to a lecture by Raphael Bousso, a professor at Department of Physics, UC Berkeley. He was talking about black holes, it was super intense. I was sitting on the end of my seat and nearly felt like I was riding a dark star right towards my own event horizon. DR: [laughs] Absolutely. I suppose I came to understand art and theory through things I knew before, which is pop science and science fiction. I tend to read everything through those things. Those are my starting points. But yes, holograms are super interesting. RM: I want to be careful not to go into the wunderkammer, because if there are too many things, then each one of them turns into a fetish object; a gimmick. DR: There was a lot of talk a few years ago about holographic storage, because basically all our storage – CDs, DVDs, hard drive platters, SSD drives – are 2D. All the information spinning on your screen right now, all those rich polygons or whatever, it all begins from data stored on a two dimensional surface. But you could have a holographic storage medium with three dimensions. They have built these things in the laboratory. There goes my pop science knowledge again. RM: When I was at Transmediale last year, the Internet Yami-ichi (Internet Black Market) was on. There I sold some custom videos for self cracked LCD screens. DR: Broken on purpose? RM: Yes, and you’d be allowed to touch it so the screen would go multidimensional. Liquid crystals are such a beautiful technology. DR: Yes. And they are a 3D image medium. But they don’t get used much anymore, right? LEDS are the main image format. RM: People miss LCDS! I saw a beautiful recorded talk from the Torque event, Esther Leslie talking about Walter Benjamin who writes about snow flakes resembling white noise. Liquid crystals and flatness and flatland. I want to thank you Dan, just to talk through this stuff has been really helpful. You have no idea. Thank you so much! DR: Putting ideas in words is always helpful. RM: I never do that, in preparation, to talk about things I am still working on, semi-completed. It’s scary to open up the book of possibilities. When you say things out loud you somehow commit to them. Like, Trevor Paglen, Jon Satrom are huge inspirations, I would like to make work inspired by them, that is a scary thing to say out loud. DR: That’s good. We don’t work in a vacuum. Trevor Paglen’s stuff is often about photography as a mode of non-resolved vision. I think that does fit with your work here, but you have the understanding and wherewithal to transform these concerns into work about the digital media. Maybe you need to build a tiny model of the gallery and create it all in miniature. RM: That’s what Alma Alloro said! DR: I think it would be really helpful. You don’t have to do it in meatspace. You could render a version of the gallery space with software. RM: Haha great idea, but that would take too much time. iRD needs to open to the public in 3 weeks! * DR originally stated here that a globe was a euclidean space. This was corrected, with thanks to Matthew Austin.

shimmeringworldconference:

Vendosculant / Hannah Sawtell 2012 / Image courtesy: the artist and VIlma Gold We can now confirm the following schedule for Shimmering World: —————————————————————————————————————————————- 10.00 – Introduction from conference organisers Paul Clinton & Luke Healey First session (10.10-12.00) Keynote – Dr. Tamara Trodd (University of Edinburgh) Ian Rothwell (PhD candidate, University of Edinburgh) – ‘Bad as in Bad: Collapsing Production Values in Thomas Ruff’s Jpegs’ Harry Sanderson (artist, Arcadia Missa) – ‘In Detail: High-Definition Amplified and Amputated’ Daniel Rourke (PhD candidate, Goldsmiths College)– ‘“I like the glow that flashes red like our Krypton sun. But not this irritating noise. Make way.”’ 12.00 – Break Second session (12.20-14.10) Keynote – David Panos (Hollybush Gardens) Hannah Ellul (PhD candidate, Goldsmiths College) – ‘Picturing Political Agency: Anja Kirschner and David Panos’ Melissa Gronlund (co-editor, Afterall) – ‘Polyphony: The Dialogic and the Digital’ Dr. Cadence Kinsey (postdoctoral fellow, University College London) – ‘Semi-Automatic Images: from HD to materiality’ 14.10 –Lunch (not provided) Third session (15.00-17.10) Keynote – Ed Atkins (Cabinet/Goldsmiths College) Linda Stupart (PhD candidate, Goldsmiths College/associate lecturer, London College of Communication) – ‘Old Objects/New Materialisms’ Sheena Culley (PhD candidate, London Graduate School) – ‘The Photography of David LaChapelle: Reflections on Skin’ Shama Khanna (curator, flatness.eu) – ‘The Resistance of the Immaterial Image’ Kathy Noble (curator, Wysing Arts Centre) – ‘A Material World: The Late Late-Capitalist Body’’ 5.10 – Break 5.30 – Concluding Roundtable with keynote speakers Ed Atkins, David Panos and Dr. Tamara Trodd 6.00 – End of conference —————————————————————————————————————————————-  Hannah Sawtell’s contribution TBA  Event is free but booking is essential: tickets available at Eventbrite  

The Photographic Universe II brings together a range of leading practitioners, scientists, theoreticians, historians, and philosophers to consider and reflect on current discussions in photography at a pivotal moment in its history. The unique format of the conference will consist of one-on-one conversations between two individuals from disparate professional and research backgrounds. The conference will conclude with a roundtable focusing on photographic education. Learn more | http://photographicuniverse.parsons.edu/2013

Victoria Hattam (born 1954) is an Australian-born American political scientist, noted for her research on American political economy and political development, and on the role of class, race and ethnicity in American politics. Hattam recived her PhD in political science at MIT in 1987. Her doctoral dissertation on "Unions and Politics: The Courts and American Labor, 1806-1896″ was awarded the E.E. Schattschneider prize by the American Political Science Association in 1989 for the best dissertation on American government and politics. Hattam's revised dissertation was published as her first book, Labor Visions and State Power (1993) and examines why labor has played a more limited role in national politics in the United States than in other advanced industrial societies. Hattam taught at Yale University from 1987 to 1993, and was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation from 1997 to 1999 and a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for 2000-2001. She joined the political science faculty at The New School in New York in 1993 and is presently a professor and chair of the department. Hattam is president of the Politics and History Section of APSA for 2006--2007 and is a member of the editorial board of the journals International Labor and Working-Class Historyand Studies in American Political Development.

Hito Steyerl has produced a variety of work as a filmmaker and author in the field of essayist documentary video. Her principal topics of interest are media and the global circulation of images. In 2004 she participated in Manifesta 5, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art. She also participated in documenta 12, Kassel 2007, Shanghai biennial 2008, and Gwangju and Taipeh biennials 2010 and was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions [1] throughout Europe. In addition, Steyerl holds a PhD in Philosophy, is a professor for media art at the University of Arts Berlin and has taught film and theory at (amongst other institutions) Goldsmiths College and Bard College, Center for Curatorial Studies.

Study Photography at Parsons the New School for Design in New York City. The New School is a university in New York City offering superb training in the art of the image with access to state of the art studios, lectures from visiting professionals, and interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange. | http://www.newschool.edu/parsons/bfa-photography

Hosted by the School of Art, Media and Technology. Learn more | http://www.newschool.edu/parsons/amt

My homage to iTunes 10 has been transcoded and extruded into another iteration! A collaboration with Alex Myers. You can hear, see and 3D print it at your own great expense in the forthcoming Run Computer, Run exhibition, Rua Red, Dublin.

DANIEL ROURKE + ALEX MYERS Daniel Rourke is a writer and artist. His work explores error, noise and kippleisation through words, sounds, performance and whatever ideas are to hand. He is one half of GLTI.CH Karaoke, an experimental performance platform exposing the course of accidents, temporary lyrical disjoints & technical out-of-syncs. Daniel writes regularly forRhizome.org and Furtherfield.org. He is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD in Art and Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. machinemachine.net / twitter @therourke Alex Myers makes artgames to explore how accidental meaning/anomalous discourse emerges by breaking rule-based game spaces to disrupt player expectations and concepts. He is an Assistant Professor and Director of Game Studies at Bellevue University. Alex has exhibited at NP3 in Groningen,Nikolaj Kunsthallen in Copenhagen, Lab for Electronic Art and Performance, Berlin, Interaccess in Toronto, FACT in Liverpool, and LACDA in Los Angeles. www.alexmyers.info / twitter @aandnota

run computer, run : RAWerTUNES10.EXE (3Dude Remix) RAWerTUNES10.EXE is a noise-art album made in homage to the now late, (great?) iTunes 10 release. As iTunes 11 makes its way onto computers across the globe this album will remain as a media-archive of splendid noises transcoded from iTunes 10 executables. Exapted from the same raw code each track is now accompanied by its own ‘Dude’ ready to be 3D printed, at your own (great) expense. DANIEL ROURKE + ALEX MYERS Daniel Rourke is a writer and artist. His work explores error, noise and kippleisation through words, sounds, performance and whatever ideas are to hand. He is one half of GLTI.CH Karaoke, an experimental performance platform exposing the course of accidents, temporary lyrical disjoints & technical out-of-syncs. Daniel writes regularly forRhizome.org and Furtherfield.org. He is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD in Art and Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. machinemachine.net / twitter @therourke

Alex Myers makes artgames to explore how accidental meaning/anomalous discourse emerges by breaking rule-based game spaces to disrupt player expectations and concepts. He is an Assistant Professor and Director of Game Studies at Bellevue University. Alex has exhibited at NP3 in Groningen,Nikolaj Kunsthallen in Copenhagen, Lab for Electronic Art and Performance, Berlin, Interaccess in Toronto, FACT in Liverpool, and LACDA in Los Angeles. www.alexmyers.info / twitter @aandnota

GLTI.CH Karaoke is excited to announce a collaboration with the Art Writing and Fine Art MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London. On Monday 9th July, from 6pm we’ll be breaching the infinite distance between two buildings less than 30 metres apart: The Laurie Grove Baths and the Ben Pimlott Building (enemies; friends; parasitic spatial political peculiarities). Check out the FB invite for the nitty gritty details. During the busy weekend of the Goldsmiths MFA Degree Show, these buildings house a dizzying array of art in forms, words, performance and non-distinct capitulations. GLTI.CH Karaoke will splurge the networks, sending pop songs hurtling through the ether, buzzing around the globe–around the Goldsmiths campus–before meeting in a disassemblage of slippery data streams. Intra-Institutional critique for the Lady Gaga generation: Flyer / Facebook Event For those of you who can’t make it in person, keep an eye on our website, facebook and twitter streams. We hope to suck you in, one way or another… (song requests are obligatory)

This mini-paper was given at the Escapologies symposium, at Goldsmiths University, on the 5th of December Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe centres on the shipwreck and isolation of its protagonist. The life Crusoe knew beyond this shore was fashioned by Ships sent to conquer New Worlds and political wills built on slavery and imperial demands. In writing about his experiences, Crusoe orders his journal, not by the passing of time, but by the objects produced in his labour. A microcosm of the market hierarchies his seclusion removes him from: a tame herd of goats, a musket and gunpowder, sheafs of wheat he fashions into bread, and a shelter carved from rock with all the trappings of a King’s castle. Crusoe structures the tedium of the island by gathering and designing these items that exist solely for their use-value: “In a Word, The Nature and Experience of Things dictated to me upon just Reflection, That all the good Things of this World, are no farther good to us, than they are for our Use…” [1] Although Crusoe’s Kingdom mirrors the imperial British order, its mirroring is more structural than anything else. The objects and social contrivances Crusoe creates have no outside with which to be exchanged. Without an ‘other’ to share your labour there can be no mutual assurance, no exchanges leading to financial agreements, no business partners, no friendships. But most importantly to the mirroring of any Kingdom, without an ‘other’ there can be no disagreements, no coveting of a neighbours ox, no domination, no war: in short, an Empire without an outside might be complete, total, final, but an Empire without an outside has also reached a state of complete inertia. Crusoe’s Empire of one subject, is what I understand as “a closed system”… The 2nd law of thermo dynamics maintains that without an external source of energy, all closed systems will tend towards a condition of inactivity. Eventually, the bacteria in the petri dish will multiply, eating up all the nutrients until a final state of equilibrium is reached, at which point the system will collapse in on itself: entropy cannot be avoided indefinitely. The term ‘negative entropy’ is often applied to living organisms because they seem to be able to ‘beat’ the process of entropy, but this is as much an illusion as the illusion of Crusoe’s Kingdom: negative entropy occurs at small scales, over small periods of time. Entropy is highly probable: the order of living beings is not. Umberto Eco: “Consider, for example, the chaotic effect… of a strong wind on the innumerable grains of sand that compose a beach: amid this confusion, the action of a human foot on the surface of the beach constitutes a complex interaction of events that leads to the statistically very improbable configuration of a footprint.” [2] The footprint in Eco’s example is a negative entropy event: the system of shifting sands is lent a temporary order by the cohesive action of the human foot. In physical terms, the footprint stands as a memory of the foot’s impression. The 2nd law of thermodynamics establishes a relationship between entropy and information: memory remains as long as its mark. Given time, the noisy wind and chaotic waves will cause even the strongest footprint to fade. A footprint is a highly improbable event. Before you read on, watch this scene from Luis Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe (1954):

The footprint, when it first appears on the island, terrifies Crusoe as a mark of the outsider, but soon, realising what this outsider might mean for the totality of his Kingdom, Robinson begins the process of pulling the mark inside his conceptions: “Sometimes I fancied it must be the Devil; and reason joined in with me upon this supposition. For how should any other thing in human shape come into the place? Where was the vessel that brought them? What marks were there of any other footsteps? And how was it possible a man should come there?” [3] In the novel, it is only on the third day that Crusoe re-visits the site to compare his own foot with the print. The footprint is still there on the beach after all this time, a footprint Crusoe now admits is definitely not his own. This chain of events affords us several allegorical tools: firstly, that of the Devil, Crusoe believes to be the only rational explanation for the print. This land, which has been Crusoe’s own for almost 2 decades, is solid, unchanging and eternal. Nothing comes in nor goes beyond its shores, yet its abundance of riches have served Crusoe perfectly well: seemingly infinite riches for a Kingdom’s only inhabitant. Even the footprint, left for several days, remains upon Crusoe’s return. Like the novel of which it is a part, the reader of the mark may revisit the site of this unlikely incident again and again, each time drawing more meanings from its appearance. Before Crusoe entertains that the footprint might be that of “savages of the mainland” he eagerly believes it to be Satan’s, placed there deliberately to fool him. Crusoe revisits the footprint, in person and then, as it fades, in his own memory. He ‘reads’ the island, attributing meanings to marks he discovers that go far beyond what is apparent. As Susan Stewart has noted: “In allegory the vision of the reader is larger than the vision of the text; the reader dreams to an excess, to an overabundance.” [4] Simon O’Sullivan, following from Deleuze, takes this further, arguing that in his isolation, a world free from ‘others’, Crusoe has merged with, become the island. The footprint is a mark that must be recuperated if Crusoe’s identity, his “power of will”, is to be maintained. An outsider must have caused the footprint, but Crusoe is only capable of reading in the mark something about himself. The evocation of a Demon, then, is Crusoe’s way of re-totalising his Empire, of removing the ‘other’ from his self-subjective identification with the island. So, how does this relate to thermodynamics? To answer that I will need to tell the tale of a second Demon, more playful even than Crusoe’s. In his 1871 essay, Theory of Heat, James Clerk Maxwell designed a thought experiment to test the 2nd law of Thermodynamics. Maxwell imagines a microscopic being able to sort atoms bouncing around a closed system into two categories: fast and slow. If such a creature did exist, it was argued, no work would be required to decrease the entropy of a closed system. By sorting unlikely footprints from the chaotic arrangement of sand particles Maxwell’s Demon, as it would later become known, appeared to contradict the law Maxwell himself had helped to develop. One method of solving the apparent paradox was devised by Charles H. Bennet, who recognised that the Demon would have to remember where he placed the fast and slow particles. Here, once again, the balance between the order and disorder of a system comes down to the balance between memory and information. As the demon decreases the entropy of its environment, so it must increase the entropy of its memory. The information required by the Demon acts like a noise in the system. The laws of physics had stood up under scrutiny, resulting in a new branch of science we now know as ‘Information Theory’. Maxwell’s Demon comes from an old view of the universe, “fashioned by divine intervention, created for man and responsive to his will” [5]. Information Theory represents a threshold, a revelation that the “inhuman force of increasing entropy, [is] indifferent to man and uncontrollable by human will.” [6] Maxwell’s Demon shows that the law of entropy has only a statistical certainty, that nature orders only on small scales and, that despite any will to control, inertia will eventually be reached. Developed at the peak of the British Empire, thermodynamics was sometimes called “the science of imperialism”, as Katherine Hayles has noted: “…to thermodynamicists, entropy represented the tendency of the universe to run down, despite the best efforts of British rectitude to prevent it from doing so… The rhetoric of imperialism confronts the inevitability of failure. In this context, entropy represents an apparently inescapable limit on the human will to control.” [7] Like Maxwell, Crusoe posits a Demon, with faculties similar in kind to his own, to help him quash his “terror of mind”. Crusoe’s fear is not really about outsiders coming in, the terror he feels comes from the realisation that the outsiders may have been here all along, that in all the 20 years of his isolation those “savages of the mainland” may have visited his island time and again. It is not an outside ‘other’ that disturbs and reorganises Crusoe’s Kingdom. A more perverse logic is at work here, and once again Crusoe will have to restructure his imperial order from the inside out. Before you read on, watch another scene from Luis Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe (1954):

Jacques Rancière prepares for us a parable. A student who is illiterate, after living a fulfilled life without text, one day decides to teach herself to read. Luckily she knows a single poem by heart and procures a copy of that poem, presumably from a trusted source, by which to work. By comparing her memory of the poem, sign by sign, word by word, with the text of the poem she can, Rancière believes, finally piece together a foundational understanding of her written language: “From this ignoramus, spelling out signs, to the scientist who constructs hypotheses, the same intelligence is always at work – an intelligence that translates signs into other signs and proceeds by comparisons and illustrations in order to communicate its intellectual adventures and understand what another intelligence is endeavouring to communicate to it… This poetic labour of translation is at the heart of all learning.” [8] What interests me in Rancière’s example is not so much the act of translation as the possibility of mis-translation. Taken in light of The Ignorant Schoolmaster we can assume that Rancière is aware of the wide gap that exists between knowing something and knowing enough about something for it to be valuable. How does one calculate the value of what is a mistake? The ignoramus has an autonomy, but it is effectively blind to the quality and make-up of the information she parses. If she makes a mistake in her translation of the poem, this mistake can be one of two things: it can be a blind error, or, it can be a mutation. In information theory, the two ways to understand change within a closed system are understood to be the product of ‘noise’. The amount of change contributed by noise is called ‘equivocation’. If noise contributes to the reorganisation of a system in a beneficial way, for instance if a genetic mutation in an organism results in the emergence of an adaptive trait, then the equivocation is said to be ‘autonomy-producing’. Too much noise is equivalent to too much information, a ‘destructive’ equivocation, leading to chaos. This balance is how evolution functions. An ‘autonomy-producing’ mutation will be blindly passed on to an organism’s offspring, catalysing the self-organisation of the larger system (in this case, the species). All complex, what are called ‘autopoietic’ systems, inhabit this fine divide between noise and inertia.  Given just the right balance of noise recuperated by the system, and noise filtered out by the system, a state of productive change can be maintained, and a state of inertia can be avoided, at least, for a limited time. According to Umberto Eco, in ‘The Open Work’: “To be sure, this word information in communication theory relates not so much to what you do say, as to what you could say… In the end… there is no real difference between noise and signal, except in intent.” [9] This rigid delineator of intent is the driving force of our contemporary, communication paradigm. Information networks underpin our economic, political and social interactions: the failure to communicate is to be avoided at all costs. All noise is therefore seen as a problem. These processes, according to W. Daniel Hillis, define, “the essence of digital technology, which restores signal to near perfection at every stage.” [10] To go back to Umberto Eco then, we appear to be living in a world of “do say” rather than “could say”. Maintenance of the network and the routines of error management are our primary economic and political concern: control the networks and the immaterial products will manage themselves. The modern network paradigm acts like a Maxwell Demon, categorising information as either pure signal or pure noise. As Mark Nunes has noted, following the work of Deleuze and Guattari: “This forced binary imposes a kind of violence, one that demands a rationalisation of all singularities of expressions within a totalising system… The violence of information is, then, the violence of silencing or making to speak that which cannot communicate.” [11] To understand the violence of this binary logic, we need go no further than Robinson Crusoe. Friday’s questions are plain spoken, but do not adhere to the “do say” logic of Crusoe’s conception. In the novel, Crusoe’s approach to Friday becomes increasingly one sided, until Friday utters little more than ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers, “reducing his language to a pure function of immediate context and perpetuating a much larger imperialist tradition of levelling the vox populi.”[12] Any chance in what Friday “could say” has been violently obliterated. The logic of Ranciere’s Ignoramous, and of Crusoe’s levelling of Friday’s speech, are logics of imperialism: reducing the possibility of noise and information to an either/or, inside/outside, relationship. Mark Nunes again: “This balance between total flow and total control parallels Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of a regime of signs in which anything that resists systematic incorporation is cast out as an asignifying scapegoat “condemned as that which exceeds the signifying regime’s power of deterritorialisation.” [13] In the system of communication these “asignifying” events are not errors, in the common sense of the word. Mutation names a randomness that redraws the territory of complex systems. The footprint is the mark that reorganised the Empire. In Ranciere’s parable, rather than note her intent to decode the poem, we should hail the moment when the Ignoramus fails, as her autonomous moment. In a world where actants “translate signs into other signs and proceed by comparison and illustration” [14] the figures of information and communication are made distinct not by the caprice of those who control the networks, nor the desires of those who send and receive the messages, but by mutation itself. Michel Foucault, remarking on the work of Georges Canguilhem, drew the conclusion that the very possibility of mutation, rather than existing in opposition to our will, was what human autonomy was predicated upon: “In this sense, life – and this is its radical feature – is that which is capable of error… Further, it must be questioned in regard to that singular but hereditary error which explains the fact that, with man, life has led to a living being that is never completely in the right place, that is destined to ‘err’ and to be ‘wrong’.” [15] In his writings on the history of Heredity, The Logic of Life, Francois Jacob lingers on another Demon in the details, fashioned by Rene Descartes in his infamous meditation on human knowledge. François Jacob positions Descartes’ meditation in a period of explosive critical thought focussed on the very ontology of ‘nature’: “For with the arrival of the 17th Century, the very nature of knowledge was transformed. Until then, knowledge had been grafted on God, the soul and the cosmos… What counted [now] was not so much the code used by God for creating nature as that sought by man for understanding it.” [16] The infinite power of God’s will was no longer able to bend nature to any whim. If man were to decipher nature, to reveal its order, Descartes surmised, it was with the assurance that “the grid will not change in the course of the operation”[17]. For Descartes, the evil Demon, is a metaphor for deception espoused on the understanding that underlying that deception, nature had a certainty. God may well have given the world its original impetus, have designed its original make-up, but that make-up could not be changed. The network economy has today become the grid of operations onto which we map the world. Its binary restrictions predicate a logic of minimal error and maximum performance: a regime of control that drives our economic, political and social interdependencies. Trapped within his imperial logic, Robinson Crusoe’s levelling of inside and outside, his ruthless tidying of Friday’s noisy speech into a binary dialectic, disguises a higher order of reorganisation. As readers navigating the narrative we are keen to recognise the social changes Defoe’s novel embodies in its short-sighted central character. Perhaps, though, the most productive way to read this fiction, is to allegorise it as an outside perspective on our own time? Gathering together the fruits of research, I am often struck by the serendipitous quality of so many discoveries. In writing this mini-paper I have found it useful to engage with these marks, that become like demonic footprints, mutations in my thinking. Comparing each side by side, I hope to find, in the words of Michel Foucault: “…a way from the visible mark to that which is being said by it and which, without that mark, would lie like unspoken speech, dormant within things.” [18]    

References & Bibliography [1] Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Penguin classics (London: Penguin Books, 2001).

[2] Umberto Eco, The open work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, n.d.).

[3] Defoe, Robinson Crusoe.

[4] Susan Stewart, On longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection (Duke University Press, 1993).

[5] N. Katherine Hayles, “Maxwell’s Demon and Shannon’s Choice,” in Chaos bound: orderly disorder in contemporary literature and science (Cornell University Press, 1990).

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Jacques Rancière, The emancipated spectator (London: Verso, 2009).

[9] Umberto Eco, The open work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, n.d.). (My emphasis)

[10] W Hillis, The pattern on the stone?: the simple ideas that make computers work, 1st ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

[11] Mark Nunes, Error: glitch, noise, and jam in new media cultures (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010).

[12] Susan Stewart, On longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection (Duke University Press, 1993).

[13] Nunes, Error.

[14] Rancière, The emancipated spectator.

[15] Michel Foucault, “Life: Experience and Science,” in Aesthetics, method, and epistemology (The New Press, 1999).

[16] François Jacob, The logic of life: a history of heredity?; the possible and the actual (Penguin, 1989).

[17] Ibid.

[18] Michel Foucault, The order of things?: an archaeology of the human sciences., 2003.

My sprawling review of the Goldsmiths Art MFA Degree Show, 2011 Originally published by Groupe d’Etudes Interdisciplinaires en Arts Britanniques The labyrinth. Turning; coiling. An allegory of improbable human journeys. Physical; mental; spiritual. Beyond; behind; within. But underneath the mythos and symbolism labyrinths are simple structures. The maze is corners, mere corners. Unfurl them all and the labyrinth becomes a cul de sac; a doorless hallway; a vanishing point leading nowhere. Browsing an MFA final show can feel like an endless hall. No matter how many artworks you peruse, how many studio spaces you violate, how many £3 lukewarm beers on which you ruminate there’s always another curtain asking you to draw it back. I don’t mean to begin this review on a downer, indeed, given a few more paragraphs I hope to have you cursing yourself for missing this year’s Goldsmiths Postgraduate Degree Show. What I do want to do is move you away from the grand figure, the thread of Ariadne convincing you with its singular lineage that degree shows tell you something about the institutions that house them. Goldsmiths’ reputation, were I to spend 1,000 words bullying and poking at it, might tell us more in fact about the figure of the labyrinth than it does about the artists who have scrawled its name all over their curriculum vitae.

Consonants and vowels featured highly in this year’s degree show; ‘Nada’ carved in giant, pink wooden lettering marked a studio of ‘Nonsensical objects I made with my neighbours’, with no indication as to the identity of the artist (or the neighbours). The admission “I was going to install a video piece here but I fucked up” is scrawled in black ink on the cupboard of an electrical circuit breaker. Located on its own floor this year, the Art Writing MFA showcased words and sounds in ways the Fine Art show could not manage alone. Behind one particularly black curtain the text “This image has nothing to do with the video that shall begin imminently” overlays a freeze-frame of old age pensioners in a work by Liam Rogers. As the image finally ebbs away droll, haunting bass tones punctuate a narrative milieu: two black cats lounging in digital shadow; an extreme close-up of a flea, trapped between strands of human hair; a strutting chicken and the voice of Ayn Rand “I will not die, it’s the world that will die.” In another recess of the Laurie Grove Bath studios Noam Edry’s politically anarchic sketches and suggestive graffiti were being photographed, constantly and throughout the opening event, by two neutral looking observers. Upon entering the room my bag was searched by a mock custodian. To one side, beside a massage therapist actively working on the spine of a fellow ‘member of the public’, an arrow on the wall labeled “Groovy Little War Mix” pointed to a monitor propped-up on chunks of rubble. On its screen the letters G-O-L-D-S and M exploded in successive puffs of computer enhanced tom-foolery. Clutching university issue headphones to my ears I watched a performer dressed as a giant date taunt one of the MFA’s directors into dancing with her. Before I could move on to the next room (an imaginary ICA show on comedian Andy Kauffman, compiled by the Curating MA) a team of volunteers enthused me into having a Turkish coffee. Titles and scrawlings; etchings and subtitles continued to surround me. “Remember Taj Mahal, India” Johann Arens’ video work implored: “Close your eyes.” Caught between two HD flat-screen televisions (two eyes? two halves of the brain?) Arens’ work ‘Effect Rating’ engineers a confusion between the object and its representation. In this case, the object was the human brain, slowly conveyered into the centre of a donut-shaped MRI machine. The film blurs ‘actual’ footage and foam mock-ups of an MRI scan into a meditation on neuroscience and the art-object. Like the corpus callosum separating my cerebral hemispheres, I longed to be scalpelled in two, each half of me finally free to rove the rest of the show unhindered. In the basement, hidden by shadow, I followed my ears to another series of video works, this time by Jill Vanepps. Horrific flesh-puppet-orifices attempted to penetrate one another with elongated, furry tendrils. Two Davids (Cronenberg and Lynch) seemed to fight for recognition in these dark works meditating on the (dis)order of female puberty. A projector restricted with layers of tape and Vaseline punched me with its flickering half-light: “Witchlike” a woman’s voice said, “of low intelligence.” I listened, “Style…” alone, “comes out of conviction…” until other bodies came to linger with me in the dirge. This was an experience I wasn’t willing to share. Before I moved on to the more official looking Ben Pimlott building, I paused to consider the physics of Hirofumi Isoya’s sculptural works. Like computer generated frames, suspended in real space, Isoya’s works ‘After brick slips’ and ‘Test on a mimic facade of an experimental house’ monumentalise the equal-and-opposite-reaction. Made-up of a bed of smashed tiles with a wire mesh extended in a peak above it, each work isolates the physics of destruction in single, free-standing, art objects. Being a child of the freeze-frame, of time-lapse photography and ultra-high-speed video I had little trouble figuring the events that created these fragmented craters of tile and cement. Had I not the technical grammar I might well have seen in these works the splash of a hailstorm on the surface of a lake, or the arching curvature of a daphodil: each inverted wire trumpet spoke of wrecking-balls and flower petals just the same. Making sure the Goldsmiths brand still adorned its roof (they were CGI explosions weren’t they?) I entered the Ben Pimlott building. Winding its concrete staircase to the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th floors the second labyrinth of the evening seemed to offer its secrets more readily than the first. Spaces felt more open, corners more isolated, free-standing structures more free to stand. My beer was icy cold. Jie Hye Yeom’s works were the first to grab my attention. Video pieces projected on or nearby a series of awkward objects: a red ball with a 5-foot circumference; a grey plastic sheet quivering in the projector fan; a giant brain made out of builder’s insulation foam. From inside a long metal cylinder ‘The ffond’ coughed and spluttered from its projector, heating up the surrounding air that was then blasted into my face. A synthetic voice with a strong American accent narrates as the artist’s journey through the ffond, an imaginary engineering marvel connecting two distinct points on the Earth’s surface. The words “Where is here?” flash up, written in both Korean and English. A stooping old woman guides her through foreign wreckage, “Can you help me get to Korea?” In another work, ‘Solmier’, partially blinded by headgear made of baguettes, Jie Hye Yeom is guided through an African village by a giggling group of children. At the edge of the forest the artist stops, her mission accomplished. With glee the children gather around to eat her mask. On the floor above a cartoon tapestry welcomes me into a two-tiered space shared by Soheila Sokhanvari and Hans Diernberger. Parodying the work of Jeff Koons a taxidermied pony rests, snug, in a sculptural figure of a beanbag, or perhaps a balloon. As I nervously turned on my heels to leave a well dressed woman urges her children, in hushed tones, to leave the thing’s backside alone. In the centre of Diernberger’s space a rectangular recess sweeps the floor. Within it, prefigured on a video loop, we can see the head of a trampolinist directly from above. Bouncing carefully (presumably so as not to knock the camera mounted above her) she taunts us with a warm-up, the final elastic bound never arriving. On the top floor of the Ben Pimlott building the tone of the show takes a swerve as I reach the Art Writing MFA Postgraduate Show. A text by Tone Gellein asks me to unfold it in 4-dimensions. Sealed in a pretty glass cabinet are a series of etchings, like some blueprint for machines from other, equally improbable worlds. ‘Catalogue for Detecting Mystery Riders’ the wall exclaims, a work by Emily Whitebread. In another darkened video room (perhaps the 20th of the day) I wait for the loop of Jennifer Jarmen’s work to repeat. A dual-screen conversation ensues between Jennifer and a voiceless friend; between a ventriloquist and his dummy. The unmistakable voice of scientist V.S. Ramachandran ponders the role of the mirror in phantom limb patient therapy. As one video interrupts the other I feel the severed halves of my cerebellum stitch back into place once again. As the crowd began to trickle from the studios the night came closing in. On Tuesday morning the deconstruction will begin. Temporary walls will be torn down. A hundred projectors will be taken back to their dusty cupboards to lie forgotten for another season. Fragile sculptures will be dismantled and lugged home, piece by piece, on the number 21 bus. Perhaps amongst everything I’ve seen, every studio I’ve poked my head into or artist-contact-card I’ve stuffed into my wallet, a few works will make it into private galleries, or be mentioned in articles and essays like this one. In the pub someone asks me which works I think they’ll be. I shrug nonchalantly, “That’s up to the market, not you or me.” As I finish speaking a laugh erupts behind me. From my pocket, and trailing along the pub floor, comes a long reel of string. “Silly me,” I say to no-one in particular, as I begin to follow it back out of the pub, back through the grey South London streets, back to the labyrinth of the Goldsmiths’ Postgraduate Degree Show.

“Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.” - Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

What are artists to gain from taking a PhD? How does the mantle of ‘artistic research’ enable art objects and those invested in them? And where does art’s autonomy reside when its criticality comes from within an academic institution? Over the last 20 years art has eased its way into academia. Past the door of the artist’s studio and up the back stairs it tiptoed until, in a very bold move, it seated itself in the commissioner’s chair. Where once art reacted against academies from the outside, art, and the artists who make it, now work from within the institution. Artists interested in pursuing a doctoral degree will have heard time and again about ‘the critical function of art’. Indeed, many theorists would insist on art being defined from this state of opposition (the ‘avant-garde’). But to understand the potential of art today it becomes impossible to separate it from the academic institutions that use its name to label their distinctive, often daring, new departments. Goldsmith’s Art Writing MFA and the RCA’s Critical Writing in Art & Design being two of the freshest – some might say hippest – examples.

To begin producing ‘new knowledge’, PhD researchers often need to pursue contradictory goals. A strong research question poses not the trajectory to a definitive answer, but a principle by which the researcher may begin to generate knowledge. This becomes especially slippery when that ‘knowledge’ is woven into an artistic practice, or when the art objects created by that practice are assumed to qualify the research. How does one invest research in projects that have yet to be realised? Practice-based PhDs hide another stumbling block, usually one based on the expectations of the artist: the belief that time invested in a research degree should improve the quality of practice, as well as strengthen one’s grasp of theory. The distinction between the practice and theoretical components of a PhD can vary wildly, and although on paper they each glean 50% of the final mark severing them into definite halves can be an unwieldy, often impossible, task. In the RCA’s Department of Communication Art & Design for instance, projects regularly emerge that blur the line between the written and ‘practical’ components of research. A recent edition of critical journal Texte Zur Kunst focused on artistic research declared, “Philosophy and art share the conviction that cognition requires a material form.” A practice-based PhD may have a smaller word count than its non-practical equivalent, but as final exhibitions are documented and literature reviews are spell checked, the boundary between art object and critical reflection will have hopefully elided into a single, successful, conglomeration. As a practice-based researcher myself, with two years of the academy under my belt, I’ve found that the primary method of answering these concerns is to reflect them back at the institution. Research does not take place in isolation. As with any treasured job it is the people that make a PhD worth undertaking. If you are lucky – and let’s admit it, fewer things are harder to predict than luck – the artists and academics that make up your department will be driven by similar desires as you are. Of course, I could spend the rest of this short article on the restrictions of labelling yourself a graduate of the RCA, Goldsmiths or the Slade. But reflecting back the conditions of research at the institutions that produce them comes closer to addressing what really makes academies function: exchange. To paraphrase the words of John F. Kennedy: ‘Ask not what academia can do for you—ask what you can do for your academia.’ Productive exchange begins by giving your all, whilst always expecting those around you to do the same. In terms of the market, artistic practice often inhabits an obscure space, cut off from the concerns of art galleries, of buyers, sellers and the aesthetically motivated public. The main benefit of taking up a practice-based research position is exposing one’s practice to the eyes of others. But this exposure always focuses both ways. Jean-Francois Lyotard writes, in The Postmodern Condition, “Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.” Criticality – the enactment of research – begins in the process of exchange, a goal which, if Lyotard is to be believed, should be held in higher esteem than the art market. Taking a practice-based PhD means investing time and knowledge with other practitioners, often other artists who, having undertaken their research years before, now enact their modes of exchange as tutors, professors and PhD supervisors. Research degrees are not always the best way to fortify the foundations of an artist’s practice. Indeed, many would argue that the very principle of artistic practice within the academy is to rock those foundations, even raze certain principles of practice to the ground. But when PhD researchers are supported to develop and sustain their thought from within their art it can often be the supervisor or established academic artist who has to rethink their assumptions, rather than the other way around. Personal exploration, issuing from practice, becomes valid as PhD research when its significance is a significance shared. A significance exchanged is a significance enhanced.

@ Goldsmiths, University of London - Radio go go at 5pm, listen in at wiredradio.co.uk and I'll buy you some chips

Saturday 21 November, 6pm

Until 11pm

Showcasing UK artists and writers, this parley-based event speculates on the materialisation and dematerialisation of art writing through newly commissioned works, together with readings drawn from open submission. The event is hosted by Maria Fusco with Book Works and structured around issue three of The Happy Hypocrite, themed ‘Volatile Dispersal: Speed and Reading’. A specially produced publication is available on the day, published by Book Works.

New commissions include a lecture, readings, performances and installations by Adam Chodzko, Ruth Ewan, Babak Ghazi, Beatrice Gibson, Nathaniel Mellors, and Gail Pickering, together with The Known Unknowns, a cycle of readings organised by Francesco Pedraglio, including antepress, Jeremy Akerman, Anna Barham, Ruth Beale, Neil Chapman, Clare Gasson, Ruth Höflich, Hilary Koob-Sassen, Stewart Home, Brighid Lowe, Matt&Ross, Sally O'Reilly, Katrina Palmer, Laure Prouvost, Reto Pulfer, Daniel Rourke, Jamie Shovlin, Naoko Takahashi and Nick Thurston.

Download a copy of the festival programme here 

Schedule

Ground Floor – Gallery 2

6.00 – 7.45 pm, 8.05 – 8.45 pm, 9.20 – 10.00 pm
BABAK GHAZI
Lifework: Documents
Installation

7.45 – 8.05 pm
GAIL PICKERING
The Revolutionary Costume For Today
Performers: Catherine Ashton, Gedvile Bunikyte,
Sebastian Truskolaski

8.45 — 9.20 pm
BEATRICE GIBSON
A Vertical Reading of B.S. Johnson’s House Mother Normal
Performers: Josette Chiang, Beatrice Gibson,
Catherine Hawes, Jennifer Higgie, Will Holder,
Jacqueline Holt, Lupe Nunez-Fernandez,
Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sperlinger

Floor 1 A – Foyle Reading Room

7.00 pm, 7.30 pm, 8.00 pm, 8.30 pm, 9.00 pm
RUTH EWAN
A Child’s Catechism
Performers: Jordan Cummins and Mohammadur Rahman
Duration: 5 mins

Floor 1 B – Galleries 5 & 6

6.00 — 11.00 pm
Bar

6.30 — 7.30 pm
The Known Unknowns
Cycle of readings organised by Francesco Pedraglio
Neil Chapman, Jeremy Akerman, Ruth Beale, Katrina Palmer,
Clare Gasson, Hilary Koob-Sassen, Nick Thurston

7.45 — 8.45 pm
The Known Unknowns
Laure Prouvost, Jamie Shovlin, Reto Pulfer,
Ruth Höflich, Daniel Rourke, Sally O’Reilly

9.00 — 10.00 pm
The Known Unknowns
Anna Barham, Matt&Ross, NaoKo TakaHashi,
Brighid Lowe, antepress, Stewart Home

10.00 — 11.00 pm
Launch of The Happy Hypocrite: A Rather Large Weapon
Contributors: Bernadette Buckley, Jeff Derksen,
Candice Hopkins, Anthony Iles, Daniel Kane,
Yve Lomax, Robert Longo, Sean Lynch, Laura Oldfield Ford,
Luke Pendrell, Rachelle Sawatsky, Mark Von Schlegell, Natasha Soobramanien, Nick Thurston

Floor 2 – Study Studio

6.00 – 10.00 pm
NATHANIEL MELLORS
The Preface
Installation

Floor 3 – Clore Creative Studio

6.30 — 7.30 pm
ADAM CHODZKO
Longshore Drift
Lecture / performance

In association with: The Happy Hypocrite, Book Works, supported by Arts Council England, The Elephant Trust and the Department of Art, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Free, no booking required.