Jasun Horsley Conversation #3

My third conversation with Jasun Horsley has been uploaded here. In it we discuss getting published, naming the beast, occult bureaucracy, constructed realities, reality break downs, Surrealism, authority figures, Philip K. Dick, critical art, Prisoner of Infinity, Vice of Kings, paranoid critical writing, pareidolia, sexual satanic conspiracy, Braziers Park, the Quakers, mental hospitals, history of therapeutic mental health care, Foucault, Marxist paranoia, the Cultural Marxism meme, Frankfurt School conspiracy theory and the Peterson/Zizek debate.

Atlakim Ceremony in Edinburgh

For anyone in or around Edinburgh this week I highly recommend attending this very special event at St. Cecilia’s Hall on Tuesday 25th February at 6 pm.

My colleague Alan Hunt, a Kwakwaka’wakw chief and carver, who worked with the late Beau Dick, will be performing an Atlakim Ceremony along with 12 members of the Alert Bay and Fort Rupert communities. The ceremony is a dance of the supernatural forest spirits usually performed during potlatches and winter dances. Traditionally, after four performances, the masks are ceremonially burned.

Burning Atlakim mask. Image courtesy of Steve Calvert.

In 2008 Beau Dick was the first artist in 50 years to perform this rite. He did so again in 2012. The set of Atlakim masks currenty on display in the Pine’s Eye exhibition at The Talbot Rice gallery, were intended to be burned at documenta14 in 2017.

Please do encourage your colleagues, friends and students to attend this event.

I wish I could be there too.

Beau Dick carrying the potlatch copper Nunmgala during his Potlatch at ‘Namgis, Alert Bay, 2012. Image courtesy of Steve Calvert.

Mark Pilkington Talk (Stroud)

I will be hosting the fourth Art, Ecology and Science Fiction talk at SVA on Saturday November 23rd from 6 – 9 pm. Our guest will be the writer, publisher and musician Mark Pilkington, founder and editor of Strange Attractor press and the author of Mirage Men (2010). Mark will present an historical overview of psychotronic devices: “the radiant collision point of witchcraft, art and technology”.

Mark’s talk will be followed by a performance by Luminous Foundation, his collaboration with Urthona‘s Niel Mortimer.

 £5 on the door (or £8 for a joint ticket for the talk and performance).

Remote Proximity

I’ll be speaking at the Remote Proximity event at Goldsmiths tomorrow. Places are limited but it’s free. I’ll be speaking about the BC Time-Slip project between 10.00 and 11.00.

 

Review of Fictioning

 

My review of David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivans Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy is now online at Third Text.

 

Vitalism and the Machine

Documentation of Dean Kenning‘s talk ‘Vitalism and the Machine’ at SVA on August 9th 2019, part of the Art, Ecology and Science Fiction series.

In the talk he discusses his kinetic sculpture works, social-body-mind maps, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, Sci-Fi, Horror, the Soviet biochemist Alexander Oparin’s book What is Life?, Francois Jacob’s The Logic of Life, Descartes, animal automata, pain, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the death instinct, repetition compulsion, Jacques Lacan, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and melt movies.

 

Anna Walker Artists Talk at SVA

I’ll be hosting an artists talk by Anna Walker at Stroud Valley Arts this Friday (September 20th). Anna is an artist, writer and researcher working in multi-media. She has been exploring trauma in her art’s practice for many years, researching how the body responds to overwhelming traumatic and stressful situations and how it reorganises itself to cope with or manage it. The experience of trauma creates a tension in the body that ruptures the functioning of ‘normal’ memory schemas, whether in an attempt to forget or an effort to manage the memory.

Through video, text and sound, Anna investigates the interaction between states of knowing and not knowing, acknowledging and the refusal to acknowledge, and the endeavour to illuminate the relationships between previously unrelated events, structures, perceptions and actions, and to explore cultural trauma, social responsibility and political action.

The talk will take place at SVA, 4 John Street, Stroud between 5.30 and 7.30 pm. £5 on the door.

The Occult Conspiracy of the Unconscious: Discussion with Jasun Horsley

I recently had a most enjoyable conversation with Jasun Horsley, author of Seen and Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist and Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse, on his podcast The Liminalist.

In part one we discuss our travels in Mexico, the Narco-Satanicos cult, tabloid press, sensationalism, The Believers, Maximón, Ah Pook, Baron Samedi, Jesus Malverde, Nagualism, Seen and Not Seen, I Spit on Your Grave, video nasties, sexual repression, Georges Bataille, trauma, transgression, psychoanalysis, false screen memories, deviant cultural imprints and mothers.

In part two we discuss secrecy, shame, Philip K. Dick, uncanny zones of literary encounter, Jonathan Lethem, Erik Davis, sleepers in the matrix, Undead Uprising, academic politics, Foucault, Bataille, Neo-Gnostic conspiracy, Anti-Christian Marxism, accelerated coincidence, affinity, George Hodel, The Black Dahlia, Man Ray, Surrealist S&M, crime, Fred Vermorel’s Dead Fashion Girl, Frankfurt School, Cultural Marxism, Room 237, Fabian Society, Walter Benjamin and cannabis.

Maggie Mer Roberts at SVA, June 2019

Documentation of Maggie’s recent talk at Stroud Valley Arts where she spoke about her work with 0rphan Drift  and screened her videos Miasma and If AI Were Cephalopod. This was the second in a series of talks on Art, Ecology and Science-Fiction.  You can view Miasma at https://vimeo.com/260984258  and IF AI Were Cephalopod at: https://vimeo.com/336275408.

Vitalism and the Machine: Dean Kenning Artist’s Talk at Stroud Valley Arts

I’m very happy to announce the third of Invisible College Stroud’s Art, Ecology and Science Fiction talks. The artist, writer and arts educator Dean Kenning will be discussing the concepts of vitalism and machine in relation to his recent exhibitions ‘The Origin of Life’ and ‘Psychobotanical’ at Stroud Valley Arts  and to the genres of science fiction and horror. The talk will take place between 5.30 and 7.30 on Friday 9th August in the SVA bar and will be followed by the opening of the Stroud Summer Show. All welcome. £5 on the door.