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?
Sound and image slipping out of synch and into discord, the programme includes (in London at least) a very special version of Hollis Frampton’s masterful (nostalgia) with a live narration by Michael Snow.
Black Boned Angel’s is a rock sound, stripped of all extraneous detail right down to its core, stretched out and nailed to the ceiling.
Sometimes delicate, sometimes harsh and jarring, Yagi’s koto solos are as much inspired by Nancarrow or Cage as they are traditional.
A delicate and detailed walk through the urban and rural landscape around Dundee; a poetic focus on the details found. A performance for 16mm projection and live amplified objects (maybe pine cones, maybe a coke bottle).
Databases carry the same seeds of creativity that early documentary makers saw in film. Both can empower people by helping them to master information, both can be claimed to represent some kind of reality or truth.
By focusing on the things that most people don’t notice or pass by uncaring – Steve Roden crafts gentle, sparse and metaphorically loaded compositions.
A recorded a conversation that grounds the Episode, exploring Ailton Krenak’s thinking and distinct poetics of life; as it work against capitalism and fascism, as a denunciation of political alliances, and maybe even of ‘politics’.
Three iconic figures from the Japanese underground assembled as a trio to stand in for the advertised duo of Junko and Jerome Noetinger who was unable to attend the festival due to illness.
A queer black operatic requiem for piano and voice that asks us to stay in the hold of the slave ship, that tries to understand the connection from the slave ship to the prison.
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.
In rethinking the body, the law, the state, gender, race, violence, care and empathy, how we might give humanness a different future?