
Cosmic Pessimism
Eugene Thacker
A chat with Eugene Thacker. Can we rethink the world as unthinkable, and without us?
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 chat with Eugene Thacker. Can we rethink the world as unthinkable, and without us?
Performing with hand built radio transmitters, which react to interference in the atmosphere and the electrical impedance of his hands, his radio art is a form of social practice; a statement in opposition to mass media.
Reading their letters to each other, and chatting about prefigurative politics as the practice of relentlessly building worlds through unspeakable violence and loss; of building worlds and living in them anyway.
An utterly deep introspection told in aching, weeping guitar lines; melodic, simple, always minimal but somehow entirely epic.
The final iteration of Arika’s INSTAL festivals, the 2010 edition was an experimental festival of experimental music – 3 days of events at the Tramway that explored un-average ideas about sound and music.
A performance, a radio show, an installation, an endurance test. A game of chance. Constantly broadcasting live, actor Tam Dean Burn will leave Tramway at the start of INSTAL and walk away from it, in an ever increasing spiral, for a day. Then he’ll walk back.
N30 is a massive, dynamic, immersive multi-channel presentation of front-line field recordings from the protest against the WTO in Seattle
Long Stringed Instrument performance involving up to 100 wires strung in tension over a 40m arch.
How does this practice, that simultaneously resists and honours the distinctions between these genres, materials and senses, determine the inhabitation of another: a convergence of aesthetic and social experimentation?
The pieces in the programme switch between silent film/ imageless sound, but we wanted to have a think about how ideas can take up residency on either side of the sound/ image border, without having to inhabit both at the same time.
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?
Relative patterns of occlusion and exposure occupy two screens. Each exposure fires a stroboscopic flash of colour: yellow for one screen; blue for the other, filling the centre of both screens with colour, haloed with after-images.