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”
Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
A performed lecture concerned with Renaissance occult (musical) thinkers of the cosmic who put forward the notion of the “disharmony of the world”
A voice that can vault from an elegantly whispered insinuation to asphyxiated and murderous barks or squalls in a heartbeat.
Elizabeth’s writing pulls apart toxic settler colonialism and the worldview used to justify it; working towards an alternative distribution of powers, so that ways of being otherwise can endure.
A delicate and detailed walk through the urban and rural landscape around Dundee; a poetic focus on the details found. A performance for 16mm projection and live amplified objects (maybe pine cones, maybe a coke bottle).
60 cycle hums, jagged static cracklings, and clipped electron pinpricks, mutating them into sublime, post-techno grooves
CCI Sound system: a performance in which new material will be mixed and phased between two huge PA’s, one a precise Meyer system, the other a huge wall of Marshall amps
A queer black operatic requiem for piano and voice that asks us to stay in the hold of the slave ship, that tries to understand the connection from the slave ship to the prison.
A performance by Storyboard P – one of the greatest Afrofuturist dancers on the planet.
Ellis’s processional, precessional cessation and continuation of movement and music comes to us via his forthcoming release Aster of Ceremonies (Milkweed Editions, 2023)
A dismantled, performed film, where a narrator pieces together the sounds, images and storytelling of a documentary about Hurricane Katrina before a live audience.
Poems are kisses, fists, and underground rivers. For all these reasons and many more, I am a poet.
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.