In 2015, Lightspeed magazine published a special issue called ‘Queers Destroy Science Fiction!’, a follow-up, of sorts, to their previous celebration of the destructive capacity of others: ‘Women Destroy Science Fiction!’ The titles of these special issues (and the many that have followed them, including ‘Women Destroy Horror!’, ‘Women Destroy Fantasy!’ and so on) are a play on part of a speech that Pat Murphy gave at WisCon15 in 1991, during which she talked about the widespread (mis)understanding in the science fiction reading and writing community that:
women don’t write science fiction. Put a little more rudely, this rumbling says: “Those damn women are ruining science fiction.” (cited in Yant, para. 1)
The speech was Murphy’s Guest of Honour address, during which she announced the founding of the Tiptree Award. The award, now in its 27th year, celebrates works that explore and expand our understanding of gender. Both WisCon and the Tiptree Award are active, exploratory, open-ended and evolving interventions in the world of science fiction. Interventions that, alongside many others, have persistently attempted to destroy, or perhaps de-story, the ongoing socio-cultural, critical, and publishing practices that seek to limit science fiction to a singular set of narratives, images, and aesthetic turns associated strongly with a white hetero-patriarchal way of imagining either the future, or an alternative past or present.
This issue of Writing from Below is another small contribution to the ongoing insistence that queers, and their writing, are not only an essential part of the strange machinery of science fiction, but also an essential part of the ongoing de-storying and re-storying that is part of the broader genre’s fantastic history.
In putting together an issue that engages with the intersections and overlaps between science fiction and queers, I didn’t want to proscribe how the writers who contributed understood the label science fiction, or the label queer, though I might offer that—for now, and for here—what I refer to when I use the term science fiction is the full spectrum of non-realist or anti-realist narrative practices that persistently destroy reality. Perhaps that will do as momentary definition of queerness, too, a definition that identifies queerness not as a state of being or an identity, but as a set of practices that persistently and rudely undo, or destroy, what we think we know about desire, pleasure, bodies, identities, selves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the writers and writings here explore narratives and narrative practices that trouble at the boundaries of genre and gender.
Holly Voigt’s ‘Sad puppies and happy queers: Vibrations along the insterstices in NK Jemisin’s The Broken Earth’ provides a passionate and thoughtful critical engagement with Nora K Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, and in particular the ways in which the works in the trilogy queer the tropes of science fiction. Voigt demonstrates the ways in which Jemisin’s work opens ruptures in genre, defies tradition in her text and her success with The Broken Earth. These ruptures are a site of possibility and, ultimately, pleasure.
Daniel Hourigan’s article ‘Queer, difference, heresy: Salt Lane witches in Rupetta and out’ explores what he describes as “the queer at play” in Rupetta, describing the ways in which the novel’s intertextuality with fairy tales, folk tales, and Shakespearean narratives (among other texts) queers both the novel itself, and the genre of science fiction more broadly.
Ed C Chamberlain’s ‘A constellation of intimacies: parallels between the struggles of today and tomorrow in Cunningham’s Specimen Days’ provides a lucid examination of the themes of desire, feeling, and migration, in Cunningham’s trilogy of science fictional novellas, ultimately providing an illuminating interrogation of the ways in which Cunningham’s work explores and troubles the ways people experience non-normative forms of amative sociality across a range of (historical, social, geographical, and other) contexts.
Tara East’s ‘The queer body as time machine’ is a thoughtful discussion of the ways in which time travel narratives conceive of, and trouble, emerging notions of the gendered body. The essay reads a range of science fiction texts—including Nino Cipri’s ‘The shape of my name’ and Heinlein’s ‘All you zombies’—against, with or perhaps againstDonna Haraway’s theory of cyborg bodies and José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of a queer utopia.
Kelly Gardiner’s review of Krasnotein and Rios’s (eds) anthology of diverse science fiction and fantasy, ‘Of diversity and fairy dust’ provides a critical and contextual evaluation of the risks and benefits of publishing ventures aimed at addressing the lack of diversity.
My own article ‘His unspoken natural center: James Tiptree Jr as The Other I’ explores the overlap between gender performance and authorial performance in the work and biographical representations of James Tiptree, Jr. The paper explores some of the ways Tip’s identity disrupts the gender-normative structure of the ‘exchange’ between readers and writer, particularly in terms of the assumed correlation between the gender of the Implied Author and that of the ‘real human being’ he is (mis)recognised as being.
Finally, in my long, rambling, indiscrete conversation with Ellen Klages digs around in Klages’s experiences as a writer of science fiction that troubles at the boundaries of science fiction writing. The conversation explores the pleasures (or displeasures) of writing works that passes as strange.
Each of these works, both individually and collectively, provides a valuable, disruptive, destructive observation on or intervention in the project of protecting a monolithic hetero-patriarchal science fiction. Each is offered to you as an expression of reading and writing as practices bound up with queered experiences of pleasure and desire. Pleasure in texts, desire for texts; pleasure in possibilities; desire for destruction. Pleasure in the possibility of strange genres and even stranger genres.
They are offered to you, here, as part of an ongoing conversation about what queer science fiction is, what it has been, what it can become.
Reference
Yant, Christine (2014). Editorial: Women Destroy Science Fiction! Lightspeed Magazine. June 2014 Special Issue. Accessed 1 March 2019, < http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-by-women-destroy-science-fiction-editorial-team/>.
The Birth of the Image (working title), made in collaboration with Hermione Wiltshire, is a series of six photographs that restage iconic Judeo-Christian scenes from classical paintings showing the Nativity, the Annunciation or apostolic teaching. The images take these well-known tropes as starting points and use the contemporary vernacular of the photographic studio to reimagine them, while placing women characters at their centre. Each central character is modelled by a high-profile contemporary practitioner or academic whose work is linked to the subject of the scene.
SermonStudy
The series seeks to rewrite the narrative conventions which relegate women characters in paintings to subservient roles, repositioning them instead as speaking subjects, professionals and teachers. Instead of serving as adjuncts to the conventional male protagonists, the women become central figures in each scene, with their own legacies to behold. They become responsible, for instance, for the transfer of knowledge (aka the word of God), as seen in the figure of St Anne. In the photograph St Anne is modelled by Dr Hilary Robinson, who is Professor of Feminism, Art and Theory at the University of Loughborough. In The Annunciation, the role of Angel Gabriel is played by Dr Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, who researches reproduction, diagnostics and cinema at the University of Strathclyde.
AnnunciationNativity
Clare Bottomley’s practice
is built upon collaboration and research encompassing photography, video,
animation and participatory workshops. It investigates the individual’s
autonomy in the act of looking, as a challenge to the established authority of
visuality, and is set against the current essentialist forms of representation
that prevail in visual culture, advocating for a more subjective and
anti-essentialist viewpoint. Having completed undergraduate studies in Documentary
Photography at the University of Wales, Newport, Bottomley went on to study an
MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art. She is a recipient of the
Deutsche Bank Fine Art Award for her collaborative project, Everybody Says It’s All in Your Head
2016, which went on to be screened in film festivals internationally.
You Could Sunbathe in this Storm (Slight Return) 2018 uses elementary geometric forms and inorganic growth to encapsulate the relationship between humanity and the natural world. Through stop motion animation, three-dimensional plaster objects assemble into toy-like cityscapes before collapsing, while individual cubes, cones and hemispheres interact, taking on a life of their own. Gradually, their smooth surfaces are overtaken by splashes of colour and crystalline formations, resulting in an otherworldly landscape of chroma and texture.
Apart from the
crystals and inks, plaster is the only material used in this piece. In every
frame, the viewed shape changes, but because of the way they move, the eye
accepts them as the same object each time. The continuity of the shape is
believable despite it always being different.
The artist is interested
in the mutability of forms, change as the only constant, the transience of
beauty (and the impossibility of truly capturing it) and, ultimately, the
inevitability of degradation, death and returning to where we came from. The
objects moving on the screen are inconstant but the mind accepts them as one.
Through this work
Dunseath explores the idea that all forms are merely an expression of one whole
and that these forms are interconnected, related and communing with each other
constantly. She hopes for the viewer to experience this oneness, to see their
own part in the universe and feel their own connection to all things and
phenomena.
Times Square Midnight Moment July 2018 captured in 360
You Could Sunbathe in this Storm (Slight Return) played on twenty two screens in Times Square, New York, from
23.57 till midnight every night in July 2018, as part of the Times Square Arts Midnight
Moment.
Alice Dunseath is a filmmaker, animator and Lecturer in
Animation and Image Making at Goldsmiths, University of London. She works
across diverse mediums ranging from video art and moving image to animation,
live action and installations. Her work features video, film and moving images,
sometimes displayed as multi-screen projections.
Watershed Maps: Ecological Struggles in the Americas
With Brian Holmes
Amsterdam Alternative invites you to the 5th installment of its talk series which will revolve around questions regarding art and political mobilization in the Anthropocene. We are very excited to have Brian Holmes with us for this AA talk. Brian Holmes is a cultural critic and self-taught cartographer, living in the US for the last decade after some twenty years in France. He’s known for his art criticism and his theoretical work on global capitalism, which he now pursues as an artist, since there’s no concept of “autonomous theorist” in the USA. He’s a greybeard of the mailinglist nettime, collaborates with the Compass Group and Deep Time Chicago in the US, and more recently with Casa Río in Argentina. His current production swings between the magnetic poles of geography, geopolitics, earth science and tactical media, with a strong influence from the Anthropocene Campus program at HKW Berlin. If you’re intrigued, check it out at http://ecotopia.today.
In the new issue of Amsterdam Alternative, Brian has written an article that provides some background info on his talk. Will be posted online in the coming days.
For the discussion, he’ll be joined by local activist groups as well.
AFTER CHIMERICA
ART AND BIOREGIONALISM IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
27 MARCH | 17.00-19.00 incl. AFTERDRINKS | MASTER INSTITUTE OF VISUAL CULTURES
Parallelweg 21, Den Bosch
Free entrance!
For decades, global growth was sustained by an uncanny illusion: underpaid Chinese workers produced the incredibly cheap goods that unemployed Americans consumed, while the Chinese Communist government financed the whole thing by purchasing US Treasury bonds. This unlikely construction, known to economists as “Chimerica,” has clearly reached its limit. What comes after the culture of gadgetry and cheap consumption? How to orient ourselves toward a viable future?
In this first public lecture of the series, Brian Holmes uses on-the-ground research to explain the geopolitical shift caused by the 2008 financial crisis. At a more intimate scale, he shows how the dead end of neoliberal economics led to a transformation in his own practice. Leaving the stance of theorist for that of artist, he opens up ecological inquiries in the Mississippi river watershed, in the Paraná Delta of Argentina, and on the Pacific coast of North America. The aim is to discover a new framework, the bioregional state, where the destinies of non-humans can be taken into account at formal negotiating tables. Such a metamorphosis cannot simply be legislated. First it has to take place at heart of aesthetic experience.
Brian Holmes is a cultural critic and self-taught cartographer, living in the US for the last decade after some twenty years in France. He’s known for his art criticism and his theoretical work on global capitalism, which he now pursues as an artist, since there’s no concept of “autonomous theorist” in the USA. He’s a greybeard of the mailinglist nettime, collaborates with the Compass Group and Deep Time Chicago in the US, and more recently with Casa Río in Argentina. His current production swings between the magnetic poles of geography, geopolitics, earth science and tactical media, with a strong influence from the Anthropocene Campus program at HKW Berlin. For more information, http://ecotopia.today
The Performative Defiance Lecture Series is organised by Prof. Sebastian Olma and Úna Henry, and is an initiative of the Centre for Applied Research in Art, Design & Technology (Caradt, Avans) in collaboration with the Master Institute of Visual Cultures, St.Joost School of Art and Design.
By the age of six, I could circumscribe my world in song. I was not particularly precocious — my world was just small. Ultimately, it would be fractured by its own rebellious genesis.
Two genres of folk music marked out the poles of my preciously tiny planet. Heaven’s jubilee rang in one ear: a cappella gospel, sturdily founded upon the biblical injunction to make melody in the heart. In the other ear, however, was the music of the devil himself: alcohol-drenched, two-stepping, hell-raising honky-tonk, enticing one to sin not just in the heart, but with the entire body. Together, they formed an eternally reciprocal refrain: Saturday night sin prompted Sunday morning renewal. There was little room for anything else, particularly dissent.
Sunday morning resounded with four-part harmony based on a shape-note system of musical notation, widely referred to as Sacred Harp. We sang again at our Sunday evening and mid-week services. Throughout the year, we also hosted regional “singings,” bringing together folks from other congregations, swelling our own sound by double. It was an easy form of music to learn by design, with its origins in early 19th-century America. Its strongest base was in the American South, and I inherited at least two generations’ worth of experience. It set the tone for my interactions with the world for the first three decades of my life.
Taken at the Sacred Harp Museum by Flickr user Lance McCord, CC BY 2.0
Musicologists have documented and analyzed Sacred Harp thoroughly, with Alan Lomax having had a particular fascination for it. He considered it as not only an extension of four-square Anglo forms but also as the crossroads where the Reformation met the Democratic Experiment. In Lomax’s view—expressed in a 1982 interview at the Sacred Harp Convention at Holly Spring, Georgia—European migration to colonize America broke the established authority of the church, leaving every person to forge a singular relationship with God. This supposition harmonizes perfectly with the views of the congregational church I attended. We had no hierarchy, no choir, no piano. Every man, woman, and child added their voice, as best they knew how, to raise an egalitarian song of praise. Songs such as “This World is Not My Home,” “The Glory Land Way,” and “Blessed Assurance” exemplify the form: simple rhyme schemes; closely-yoked shifts in harmony and rhythm; and southern gospel’s initial shunning of poly-rhythms or syncopation.
For me, Sacred Harp music created an immersive and experiential soundscape; emotionally and spiritually motivating, it was the sound of temporal and eternal life. Like our singing style, our church service presented a model for our lives outside the sanctuary. “Trust and Obey” was a frequently sung hymn—and it summed up our approach to life in all matters. Obedience was expected, deviation discouraged.
Worlds away from my sheltered existence, leaders of the Civil Rights Movement embraced a cappella singing as a powerful means to encourage, motivate, and activate. In the 2009 documentary Soundtrack for a Revolution, U.S. Representative and civil rights icon John Lewis said, “It was the music that created a sense of solidarity.” His a cappella community was connected to the church and the streets, challenging the status quo, and seeking greater brotherhood. Mine was by the book, increasingly authoritarian, very narrow in scope and population.
Sacred Harp Singing, Bloomington, Indiana, Image by Flickr User Jennifer Jamison (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
To us, the New Testament authorized one and only one instrument for offering songs to God: the unaccompanied human voice. The root of this belief was a concise motto coined in the early 1800s by Alexander Campbell, a leader in the Second Great Awakening: “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent.” Applying this principle, then, the apostle Paul, in his epistles to the Ephesians and the Colossians, encouraged Christians to sing. But nowhere did he or another New Testament writer suggest using an instrument. This silence equals prohibition. It sets its own reality, ignoring abundant biblical evidence to the contrary: the Old Testament presents many examples of instruments used in worship, as does the New Testament’s Book of Revelations.
Our a cappella song service was, therefore, more than a sound—it was a belief system, a worldview in which other sounds or ideas were alien. We applied Campbell’s principle across-the-board, backing ourselves into corners: slaves were to obey their masters; wives were to submit to their husbands; children were to be fully subject to their parents. Questioning authority, let alone defying it, was strongly condemned by Paul in his letter to Christians in Rome: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.”
“The One and Only Lefty Frizzell” by Flickr user Thomas Hawk, CC BY-NC 2.0
Alternately, classic honky-tonk’s twangy resistance seemed to defy the innovations and complexity of modern life. As I was growing up, the sinful songs of Ray Price, Lefty Frizzell, Webb Pierce, and George Jones flowed like wine from my family’s record collection and radio settings. Songs of murder, drunkenness, alienation, revenge, adultery, and the workingman’s blues are staples of the honky-tonk catalog. Its celebrated ethic of “three chords and the truth” favored a rural do-it-yourself ethic. My church’s music was both challenged and validated by this unlikely and unruly roommate; honky-tonk was a matched bookend for Sacred Harp.
For in the background of many of those honky-tonk sounds, whether they were about larceny, war, or revenge on the boss, I heard the same harmony that filled my church. In the 1950s or so, southern gospel groups such as the Jordanaires, Blackwood Brothers, and the Statler Brothers, began backing country music artists including Johnny Cash, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, and Gary Stewart. Their sonic presence lent an almost holy sanction to the commission of sin, as if Jesus and Satan met after-hours to share a drink and balance the books.
This sonic emulsification of sin and salvation formed my youthful identity and bracketed a very small existence. My world consisted of very gendered personal struggles: man vs. temptation; man vs. alcohol; man vs. boss; woman vs. womanizer. The solution provided for these struggles was always the same: the efficacious grace of God. All failings and victories were personal, not structural or systemic. The fight against personal sin was the only fight.
Southern gospel music and honky-tonk have enjoyed an institutional relationship since the founding of the Grand Ole Opry in 1920s, sanctioning the blending of reprobation and redemption. Though initially politically ambivalent, the Opry listed towards social conservatism during the 1960s—Johnny Cash’s nascent social awareness notwithstanding. In 1970, however, the Opry and the industry it represented found itself an unlikely accessory to Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy.” He declared October 1970 to be Country Music Month, and a few years later blessed the Grand Ole Opry with its first presidential visit.
Screen capture from Billboard’s “Roy Acuff Teaches President Nixon the Yo-Yo at the Grand Ole Opry” (1974)
Politically conservative messages had entered country airwaves during the late 1960s, epitomized, if not pioneered, by Bakersfield stalwart Merle Haggard. His “Okie From Muskogee” ridiculed hippies, dope smokers, draft dodgers, long-hairs, flag burners, and college activists, all within a 3-minute single format. Though ostensibly written as a joke, it struck a chord among conservative, Christian, country music fans. Sensing a market, Haggard followed up with the flag-waving “Fightin’ Side of Me,” wherein he further shames pacifists.
These songs contained the truth as I believed it in grammar school: protestors, adulterers, and dope smokers were all in defiance of God. Haggard’s refrain in “Fightin’ Side”—“if you don’t love it, leave it”—made sense to me, and was safely non-challenging. Conveniently, the religious body of which I was a member had, a generation prior to me, actively opposed pacifism.
A world composed only of personal demons, however, leaves little room for social issues. Being so long accustomed to seeing the sin in man left me unable to recognize the sin in the system. Sam Cooke’s great risk in recording “A Change is Gonna Come,” for example, was lost on me, even though we both shared a battle between religious and secular personas.
I never heard his call to address greater systemic problems such as racism, audibly or socially. Even as I entered my 20s, my white patriarchal religious sonic defense system kept the freedom struggles of people of color at bay. Even if dissenting sounds managed to sneak through–Marvin Gaye’s struggles in “Inner City Blues” for example—I quickly dismissed them as exaggeration or the natural outcome of personal sin. I could not process a sound which conflicted with my God-given world view. I saw only men and women avoiding their duty and surrendering to temptation.
My mother frequently said that the lives portrayed in honky-tonk songs were not her life. But in another sense, those desperate lives, and the more hopeful ones portrayed in gospel music, were our lives collectively. We were part of a greater social identity: Southern, white, Fundamentalist, change-averse, full of latent conflicts. Those sounds, rich with heritage and lived-in context, formed us. In other words, our vernacular limited our hearing. Our world was formed within a fixed sonic boundary, and we ignored, resisted and sometimes even combatted discordant sounds.
Within this soundscape, I had never heard of any march from Selma to Montgomery, not from church, family, the radio, or, sadly, even school. The larger movement of which it was a part—perhaps the biggest social movement of the 20th century—was inaudible and therefore irrelevant to me. When I did begin to hear of protests against white racial violence, I could only condemn anyone who defied authority. I did not know what to say about authority which abused the people. Raised to function in a law-and-order world, I could only repeat the Apostle Paul’s instruction that we all must obey authority or incur the wrath of God.
“Selma Protesters Met By Police: 1965” by Flickr user Washington Area Spark, CC BY-NC 2.0
But thankfully, sound travels in subversive ways, such as through the transmitters of listener-supported community radio.
I found Dallas’ KNON completely by chance. Commuting to work through the city’s legendary rush hour, I’d get fidgety. While searching the dial, I heard a familiar song in an unfamiliar arrangement. I don’t recall the song now, but do remember its force: a honky-tonk classic played through a stack of Marshall amps, turned up to the proverbial ’11.’ Perhaps it was Leon Payne’s Lost Highway as rendered by Jason and the Scorchers—anarchistic, upending, challenging, it still carried enough familiarity to keep me listening. I stayed tuned in for the next song, then another. When the DJ, Nancy “Shaggy” Moore, signed off her show, I gave a listen to the next show—at least until they said something a bit too dissonant.
But the next day, I tuned in to Shaggy again. And I listened a bit longer when the next show came on. And even longer the day after that. Dallas at that time was wracked by racial strife, some of it focused on the politicized deaths of two police officers, one white and one black, in separate incidents. I had tuned out the duplicity, but KNON gave me reason to reconsider. City council member Diane Ragsdale, an African-American woman representing one of the city’s most trod-upon districts, refused to let the issue go. KNON provided the venue for her to express her outrage unmitigated, and to explain the inconsistencies in a way that an entitled white male suburbanite, such as I, could understand.
Tim Rice suggests that we are not free agents in the creation of our identities—but given the right stimuli, we will resist, to the point of rebellion, the personhood prepared for us. The latent heretical ethics of Sacred Harp and Honky-tonk finally responded to the sonic stimuli flowing through the breach, triggering an insatiable devil’s advocacy: “Prove yourself to me,” I said to everything I had once believed, religious faith included. St. John wrote in his First Epistle: “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God.” This was to be the last biblical directive I would follow.
My radical shift in musical listening also greatly impacted my political, and cultural beliefs and listening practices, something which continued throughout my life. For example, I ended my professional career as well, having understood the devastating effects that high tech industries have on the environment and workforce. I traded a six-figure salary for minimum wage in foodservice. Not once have I looked back.
“Kitchen Music” by Flickr User David Blaine (CC BY 2.0)
Kitchen work comes with immersive sound: machines hum and sometimes roar; the radio blasts through the static; humans must shout to be heard. Working throughout the western US, in a variety of independent restaurants, I learned to understand and speak Spanish. I participated in defying a language ban placed on my colleagues by an overbearing owner: I noted that she forbade speaking in Spanish, but not singing in Spanish. So sing we did, about needing a potato peeler, taking out the trash, and what we were going to do over the weekend.
As I worked my way up the ranks and crossed the country from California to Manhattan, I listened to the stories told me by immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Dominica, Morocco, South Africa. They shared their music with me, via radio, iPod, cassette, or any object we could plug into an overcooked boom box. Every song and conversation has pulled me into greater participation in their lives and the systemic issues faced by most of the world around me.
Dismantling one’s identity, regardless of how deliberately it is done, happens amidst lots of noise: illusions shatter, idols crash to the ground, walls tumble into rubble. Dissent comes in myriad expressions, and for me, it has come via my own three-chords-and-the-truth and through a multimedia socially-progressive dining event which I call Peace Meal Supper Club. Its very raison d’etre is to illuminate dissonance on issues such as the right to sanctuary, our diminishing seed supply, the plight of the rural poor, and other devastating threads of intersectionality. Music is a critical component of each event, as Otis Taylor, Lila Downs, and Caetano Veloso share playlist space with Manecas Costa and Majida El Roumi Baradhy. Old favorites like “Sixteen Tons” get their say, as well—for behind that song’s well-earned swagger is a system of devastating intersectional oppression that demands our action.
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Featured Image: Image of a Stained Glass Crosley Cathedral, Image by Tubular Bob
Kevin Archer is a multi-media artist who left corporate security for a DIY life as a farmer, activist, educator, and chef. He’s planted gardens coast-to-coast, and washed his own sauté pans from Denver to Mendocino, Santa Fe to NYC, and random locations in between. Kevin’s current project is Peace Meal Supper Club, a series of immersive dining events which explore ecojustice, human rights, the capitalistic conquest of the seed and soil, and the power of progressive movements. He has written for Civil Eats, No Depression, Secular Web, and the Museum of Animals & Society. He has spoken on the intersection of food and social issues at numerous conferences within the Eastern US.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
CONTENT: LEARNING ABOUT PLEASURE deals with diverse human relationships to pleasure – and with what it might mean for technology to be learning about these relationships. The images presented come from a work-in progress show installed in a converted church space in South-East London. The show contained four disparate elements that functioned as self-contained experiences. They were intended to be shown together, allowing for new meanings and ideas to arise in the intersections and spaces between the different works.
About Pleasure is a series of large-scale images that look at our relationship to the physical world and to images. The images have been produced robotically, fusing hundreds of individual photographs to create giant highly-detailed prints of landscapes that end up being nonhuman in their viewpoint. They ask questions about experience, specifically, about what it means when the distinction between direct and mediated experience is blurred. The work also deals with alienation from corporeal pleasures that can occur in an image-saturated world and with how strange and intangible our own bodies can sometimes feel.
You’ll Die Laughing is a one-channel video installation that taps into one of our existential fears with regard to Artificial Intelligence: perfection. In comparison to the machine we will always fail, a comparison that reveals our human pride, stupidity and fragility.
Warning: The video works contain strobe effects and explicit content.
Content Learning is a five-channel video installation that looks at how the content we upload and the data about what we consume are enabling technology to learn about human pleasure. Does the lack of a body that feels pose a fundamental obstacle to learning about pleasurable experience, or could it be the key to developing entirely new forms of knowledge – knowledge that is totally unknowable to humans? Algorithms start to produce knowledge about human pleasure, but as Artificial Intelligence has no capacity to experience, what else might be done with that knowledge?
Autoplay is series of unique print works. They address the cultural artefacts that are being automatically created by new types of AI knowledge. They visualise what seems chaotic and offensive to our cognitive faculties but what may feel seductive and rewarding to our preconscious bodily faculties.
Jacob Love lives and works in London. He studied at the University of the West of England and at Goldsmiths, University of London – where he is now a Lecturer in Photography. He has exhibited in solo and group shows, both in the UK and internationally.
Entry Points. Resonating Punk, Performance, and Art Stevphen Shukaitis, Penny Rimbaud, Dharma, and Awk Wah Art-media project exploring resonances between punk and performance in the UK and Southeast Asia During the late 1960s and early 1970s, as members of the performance art group EXIT, Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher turned to creating outside of the gallery system and artistic conventions. … Continue reading →
Among scholars and enthusiasts of romantic literature, Hölderlin is certainly best known for his beautiful lyric poetry. Engaging themes of exile, divinity and the natural world, his poems ingeniously incorporated classical Greek syntax and mythology. He married both Greek and German linguistic traditions to create a language “foreign to, yet complicit in both”.[1] Clearly, this idiosyncrasy makes Hölderlin notoriously difficult to translate into English, and likely contributed to his other writings remaining quite unknown. With his new translation of Hyperion or The Hermit in Greece, available in Open Access, Howard Gaskill hopes to bolster interest in Hölderlin’s prose. A masterpiece of the romantic era, the novel deserves far greater recognition in the Anglophone world.
Hyperion consists of a one-way
correspondence addressed to a friend of whom we know virtually nothing. In this
sense it is similar to Goethe’s Werther,
another romantic classic. Yet, Hölderlin’s
novel is a personal narration of events deep in the protagonist’s past, rather
than a telling of present happenings. It is also set apart by its use of critical
reflection, in which the character of Hyperion evaluates the experiences that
have shaped his life. Returning to Greece after German exile, he takes up a
hermitic existence that is peppered with remarkable relationships and
encounters. Confronting and commenting on his past, Hyperion undergoes an
evolution in consciousness that culminates in the realisation of his poetic
vocation. Notice the characteristic theme running through Hölderlin works – in
some way or other, linguistically or in the plot, he links the two countries of
Greece and Germany. This ‘trademark’ unites the author’s poetry and prose, and
fully appreciating his writing requires attention to the latter, too. Gaskill’s
elegant translation is bound to encourage this, as it transports English-speaking
readers directly into Hyperion’s mind.
With these
many aspects to bear in mind, the translator is much like a juggler, performing
a complex routine of mental gymnastics with each successive sentence. Gaskill
does not shy away from this task. His meticulous rendition of Hyperion dares to replicate the
contractions, colloquialisms and Swabianisms of Hölderlin, staying true to the
rhythm of the original German. A concession to the modern reader, Gaskill
introduces inverted commas to clarify which character is speaking. Hölderlin’s
punctuation style is otherwise retained, leaving intact a unique characteristic
of his writing. An accessible text with the charm of its native German, this
translation is bound to appeal to those unfamiliar with Hyperion’s story.
Gaskill’s efforts
to popularise Hyperion deeply
resonate with me. Reading more foreign literature, I believe, is valuable to
everyone. Not only does it expose us to a wealth of exciting stories, but it
sheds light on the circumstances and perspectives of people in other countries.
I have myself considered translating – and converting into plays – the works of
renowned yet globally-overlooked Hungarian authors and poets, like Petőfi
Sándor, József Attila, or Karinthy Frigyes. Addressing topics as universal as
family, these writers also illuminate specific historical incidents, like
Hungary’s revolt against the Habsburgs and its condition after the World Wars.
Much like Hölderlin’s German, however, the complexities and intricacies of
Hungarian are a great barrier to effective translation. This is the eternal
vice of translation, and it can never be fully solved. Ultimately, it appears
that all texts are destined to retain some degree of mystery for all but their
native speakers.
[1] Guevara, F., Words Without Borders, August 2009, https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/friedrich-holderlins-selected-poems-and-odes-and-elegies
Among scholars and enthusiasts of romantic literature, Hölderlin is certainly best known for his beautiful lyric poetry. Engaging themes of exile, divinity and the natural world, his poems ingeniously incorporated classical Greek syntax and mythology. He married both Greek and German linguistic traditions to create a language “foreign to, yet complicit in both”.[1] Clearly, this idiosyncrasy makes Hölderlin notoriously difficult to translate into English, and likely contributed to his other writings remaining quite unknown. With his new translation of Hyperion or The Hermit in Greece, available in Open Access, Howard Gaskill hopes to bolster interest in Hölderlin’s prose. A masterpiece of the romantic era, the novel deserves far greater recognition in the Anglophone world. Continue reading →
But the next day, I tuned in to Shaggy again. And I listened a bit longer when the next show came on. And even longer the day after that. Dallas at that time was wracked by racial strife, some of it focused on the politicized deaths of two police officers, one white and one black, in separate incidents. I had tuned out the duplicity, but KNON gave me reason to reconsider. City council member 
