 
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?
 
Are artists powerless in the face of technology? These often whimsical and amusing films are minimal technological interventions and appropriations but maybe also rigorous takes on the role of popular media and culture in our hyper-technological world.
 
A fulcrum to the Japanese noise scene, JOJO Hiroshige has been responsible for much of the explosion of free music coming from Japan in the last 30 years.
 
The second of two short film programmes featuring works that blur the boundaries between music and film from artists who cross and redefine those long held divisions. This programme highlights contemporary works.
 
A somehow hyper-modern, ancient and folkloric lip-synced, made-up, fashioned performance.
 
Killer of Sheep is an undisputed masterpiece of African-American filmmaking and one of the most poetic, perceptive dramas ever made about family and community.
 
Long Stringed Instrument performance involving up to 100 wires strung in tension over a 40m arch.
 
Can we find ideas of queer anarchism, failure and low theory in popular culture?
 
Is there a link between the ways we’re caged and exiled by the prison-industrial complex and the ways people’s bodies are violently categorised and segregated by race, class, gender or ability?
 
Imagery, drawn from what seems like hundreds of different films is overlaid and combined in a promissory rainbow of new meanings and impossible scenarios, with the unsettling feel of daylight shadows.
Lo-fidelity sheets of parinirvanic mangled tone get driven into oblivion by two longstanding gurus of the Northern England primitivist noise.
 
Three speakers play back pre-recorded sounds, Marc listens and responds: “What is played is the imperfect witness of what I listen to (or maybe better, how I listen).”