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 concrete walkway ending in mid air, a ridiculously tight squeeze between three office buildings and various other sites of Labour politician and council leader T. Dan Smith’s modernist regeneration projects and ‘slum clearances’ of the 1950’s and 60’s.
Post consideration and post rationalisation… How do we think about experimental music and film after the performance?
Inspired by the supernatural horror of H. P. Lovecraft, black metal and a sense of worry as to what constitutes an object, or a world.
HEAVY Japanese super group, featuring the sundown delta blues of Kan Mikami, Toshi Ishizuka’s heavy, time folding drumming and Masayoshi Urabe on sax, harmonica and chains.
A collaborative performance where sound and image are created, performed and mediated by light, water and glass.
Shutter Interface is an expanded cinema piece: a series of machinegun bursts of chromatic relationships and visual harmonics in an overwhelming montage
What would a world and an ethics look like free from the destructive consequences of the Western mind?
5 days of film, music, discussion and study of our collective incompleteness—arrayed against the colonial ordering of how we come to know the world—practicing how we might exist otherwise, right here and now. Can we start to know and practice the world to come?
A conversation between influential figures thinking through Blackness and Indigeneity, asking: what if we took seriously the possibility that this world, as we know it, may be coming to an end? We dread the loss of this world, but have we begun to imagine the one to come?
A chat with Rashad about the communist, conceptual methodology that informs his ground-breaking synthetic music—a form of speculative sonic fiction writing to produce hyperreal non-representational auditive experiences.
Simple maths and stringent scored instructions move precise frequencies and clicks to create a dense, fluctuating environment of standing waves and physical sound.