
Cosmic Pessimism
Eugene Thacker
A performed lecture concerned with Renaissance occult (musical) thinkers of the cosmic who put forward the notion of the “disharmony of the world”
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A performed lecture concerned with Renaissance occult (musical) thinkers of the cosmic who put forward the notion of the “disharmony of the world”
Three workshops lead up to an open invitation to improvise with the festival as concert. The last four hours of the Sunday 14 at Instal 10 were devoted to presentations devised during the three workshops. The material conditions (time, space, facilities…) were the instruments. From there anything could happen.
Artist Derek Lodge running a specially designed social space, somewhere for conversation, story-telling and interaction.
Bringing together artists working with music, sound, film and the moving image, KYTN 2008 saw performances, improvisations, screenings and installations over three days at DCA.
Dual projections of pulsating shards of film, treated in crystallized salts and dyes merge with the whirring of projectors, distilled into particles of sound.
Mashed up queer fantasy of worker’s revolts, biblical demons and present-day hells, and dubbed out cyborg-electro.
Sound and image slipping out of synch and into discord, the programme includes (in London at least) a very special version of Hollis Frampton’s masterful (nostalgia) with a live narration by Michael Snow.
Imagery, drawn from what seems like hundreds of different films is overlaid and combined in a promissory rainbow of new meanings and impossible scenarios, with the unsettling feel of daylight shadows.
Guitar solo where inscrutable, minute electric sounds are excavated by palms that smother and strangle, that wring sound from the fretboard, from behind the bridge.
What does it mean to resist seeking assimilation or inclusion within, or let our demands be co-opted by the very systems we seek to dismantle?
For musical chameleon Richard Youngs both his creative and family life are focused in the room that many of us consider the centre piece of our lives.
Joe Colley specialises in hotwired sound constructions full of ominous electronic disturbances and caustic, noxious drones. For KYTN, Joe created a situation of controlled chaos with 50 light sensitive oscillators placed in a field of candles.