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”
How do communities practice being one another’s means, addressing their material problems facing them replicating the state’s violent logic of who is disposable.
An open conversation hosted by Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten around ‘fugitivity’ and ‘waywardness’ and what it means to be in flight, excessive or ungovernable.
Individual experience separated by physical boundaries (of space, time or ability) suggested as communities of collective experience by (perhaps voyeuristic) artists.
The struggle for sex workers’ rights and how we can understand it in the continuum of care work and other forms of invisibilised and precarious work.
How do you know what you want? Should freedom be doing what you ought, not doing what you want? How might a philosopher and artist turn this thinking into an enabling condition in the context of noise and improvisation?
Beat poet Ira Cohen’s now infamous and wildly psychedelic film odyssey feeds one’s own seeing apparatus through beautifully warped and distorting mylar mirrors, resulting in a film dense and rich with visual arcana and poetry.
Using violin and cello the duo map out a twilight sonic world that seems to tread the faultlines between improvisation and composition.
“Mackey composes realist-mythic layering of lyrical prose unlike anything being written today.” — New York Times. “Our greatest living epic poet…Mackey’s poetry and criticism have reinvented modernism for our time.”— LitHub
Could they be one of the most ferocious live noise acts around, or a necessary and ludicrous parody of ferocious noise acts? Could they be both?
Watching films and chatting with Karrabing members about those films: as they attend to the memory and practice of the ancestral present and the ancestral catastrophe that Karrabing and their more-than-human world find themselves facing.
This programme takes human subjects as the focus for sound and image construction. And it includes a couple of masterpieces of experimental film: Paul Sharits’ deeply empathetic interpretation of epilepsy and Peter Kubelka’s Webern inspired abstract portrait of Arnulf Rainer.