
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”
Conceptual writer and practicing lawyer Vanessa Place performs and talks with Mark Sanders, author of the brilliant “Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid”
The mutability of the body and the mobility of identity: queered pop culture, drag, lip-sync and performance.
A prison abolitionist punk video-poetry-music mash up about our fucked-up dystopian society, RoboCop, kids toys and criminality.
Investigate film as language, via the language of film reduced to the basic units of film and language. A film as text in which each frame is a single word.
Conceived of as a dual publication, video cassette and booklet, to be presented as an installation. The content of the videotape is the artist watching television.
Nothing if not repetitive, film is founded on the incremental succession of minute difference. But how does repetition of the same play out, and is it a tool to comment on the standardising repetition of the mass media?
A loud, buzzing stew of electrical light as noise and convulsive electric guitar squall.
Everyday objects and materials (rubber bands, paper, a sink, microphones) disabused of their inertia and made to speak for themselves in a kind of focusing in on the tiny, repetitive, almost unobserved (sonic/ visual) potential of everyday things put into motion.
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.
Repetitive, mesmerizing rhythmic workouts, to pieces of stark and rigorous introspection, where notes picked and slid in isolation, scatter like mercury around the listener.
Usurper luddite twins’ disabled instruments play a game of pick-up-sticks with the deconstructed horn of a young Derby opponent.