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”
Whether drawing their own fractured, abstract narrative, or re-contextualising, chewing up and spitting out someone else’s, each of the films here take a dramatic arc as their starting point and throw it to the wind.
A riot of 60’s psychedelia, magick, ritual and tight black leather, this programme highlights underground innovators who use and subvert pop music for their own experimental ends; and be warned, in Anger, there’s real darkness.
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.
How do communities formed under the duress of violent othering and the joy of solidarity – such as ballroom culture, Black diasporas, Zapatistas – reform bonds of kinship?
Complexly interacting colossal drones by the creator of some of the most legendary yet least heard music of the 70’s.
Veterans of the psych-infused UK free noise scene, the Vibracathedral Orchestra is a hypnotic ur-drone group hailing from Leeds.
Emotional fantasies, towers of cakes, identity troubles, collapsed distance and time and Samuel R. Delany’s rarely seen 1971 film The Orchid.
Renouncing the bind of the written word, Chopin’s sound poetry is a magical evocation of the pure powers of the voices, stripped bare of language.
A panel exploring the radical potential of technologies through fugitivity and opacity: their ability to obscure, to make it impossible for us to be known, to render us untraceable by every arm of the state even under the all-consuming spectre of surveillance capital.
Location: Around and about the old public library in Easterhouse; disinvested in and left to rot by the council but which was shamelessly, hastily and superficially cleaned by them in expectation of our event.
The site of the former Abbeyhill Station on the 1903 Leith branch of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith railway, overgrown and leading to as yet un-regenerated ‘wasteland’; taxi’s for 80 people, each instructed to take different routes between locations and; a slice of land concealed behind corporate business park branding off the Wester Approach Rd, apparently of no conceivable use and named ‘Chateaux de Scum’ by those who use it anyway.