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?
Although Tony had visited Haino in Japan, and they played together in private, this was the first time anyone other that Haino’s cat saw them perform together.
A sound of buzzing and flickering metallic drones, glottal stops and guttural growls, and also an explosiveness and purity of sound that reminds you as much of Bill Dixon as anyone else.
A black hole of dense heaviosity, full of slow motion riffage, tectonic pummel and massive planet destroying rock.
A chorister attempting to sing Vivaldi, with live accompaniment, while trampolining for 20 minutes.
(Cyber)feminist, non-essentialist transgender and queer daily radio shows using the formula of morning radio as an arch way of thinking about the scripted behaviour and controlled empathy of systematic care.
One of the most arresting and unique improvisers in Japan, creating an original and powerful body of free music.
A stroboscopic and intense sensory overload of flashing abstract forms, cut to ribbons by modified projectors.
Instead of the one-way monologue of normal performance, what would be the result of an actual collective dialogue? Where would it go?
Beat poet Ira Cohen’s now infamous and wildly psychedelic film odyssey feeds one’s own seeing apparatus through beautifully warped and distorting mylar mirrors, resulting in a film dense and rich with visual arcana and poetry.
Poems are kisses, fists, and underground rivers. For all these reasons and many more, I am a poet.
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?