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slaaneshfic · 4 years

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Conclusions and sorrow

I've nearly finished editing the three books. I'm slightly overdue with submission, but it is what it is.

Underpinning most of my PhD research has been my ongoing relationship with the two elderly Staffordshire bull terriers that my partner and I adopted right at the start of it, around Christmas 2016.

It is with overwhelming heartbeat that yesterday, after I visit from the mobile vet, we discovered that Lea has a late stage inoperable growth. The vets are returning tomorrow and we will be saying goodbye to lea. I don't have the words yet to address the feeling of loss, or the anxiety of this ongoing 48 where I with lea at every moment to make sure she is as comfortable as possible. it's a lot. And I need to keep writing things in order to occupy my mind. So this is a draft (since edited, but that's in InDesign files I can't access from my phone) of the potential lines beyond the PhD, including the thing I worked on for a year regarding dogs, but couldn't emotionally deal with even prior to this last illness.

I could not have done this research without my relationship with Buster and Lea. The concept of care which I've addressed is as much drawn from this relationship as it is from Sedgwick. How to care for someone across the lines of different bodies and senses and desires. The concept of play as emergent collaboration equally comes from learning to play with dogs who had suffered neglect at the hands of their original owners, and then a year recovering in the noisy RSPCA kennels before they were well enough to be rehomed. I love you lea.

Conclusions and exits.

The structure and methodology of this PhD Output consisting of three approaches to a central area of art practice, and within each approach multiple overlapping attempts through the various documents, turns the issue of a conclusion into a challenge.

Rather than attempt to draw books and documents toward a unifying conclusion, erasing the differences between then, I have offered conclusions in the documents individually. Some of these are clearly labeled as such, some are more demonstrative, and some left as provocations.

Throughout the three books are indications of where future paths could proceed. For continuation of creative research and the application of concepts developed, these indications are generally placed at the end of documents. Paths which are more tangential, or areas where the research could be reinforced through engaging with a separate discipline or practitioner appear in endnotes.

In place of some kind of ending for the PhD Output as whole I will raise three of the avenues of future research not already mentioned in individual documents, that will be pursued at its end. All of these examples incorporate work already commenced, that for practical reasons has not been addressed in documents.

The Incomplete Object.

Archeologist Chantal Conneller has produced a large amount of research focused Star Carr, a Mesolithic site in Yorkshire (Conneller, 2004, 2011; Little et al., 2016; Milner, Conneller, & Taylor, 2018a, 2018b). In particular, Conneller has provided a framework for examining some of the objects recovered from the site, and through this reassess the historic inhabitants of the area’s relationship to animals and objects. The objects, twentyone of which were found during the site’s excavation by Professor J.G.D. Clark between 1949 and 1951, consist of the “uppermost part of the skull of a red deer, with the antlers still attached” and are referred to as “antler frontlets” (Conneller, 2004, p. 37). In offering an interpretation for the frontlet’s use, Clark “suggested they could have been used either as hunting aids, to permit hunters to stalk animals at close range without being seen, or as headgear in ritual dances” (Conneller, 2004, p. 37). This interpretation resulted in an impasse between a “‘functional’ and a ‘ritual’ analogy” and has according to Conneller, meant that “in the intervening 50 years they have been ignored” (Conneller, 2004, p. 37).

Conneller’s research breaches the impasse of an animal derived object needing to be either functional or ritual by use of philosopher Gilles Deleze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari’s work in “A Thousand Plateaus” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Firstly, Conneller outlines how in Deleuze and Guattari, “animals come to be seen [...] as an assemblage composed of a number of ways of perceiving and acting in the word” (Conneller, 2004, p. 44). In this view, animals are not singular fixed entities, and the objects derived from them are therefore not limited to being symbolic of the animal whole or else be understood only as practical material. Animals are here understood as collection of “affects” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 253), and the objects derived from them convey those Affects to the user in a manner which outside of the binary of ritual and functional. From this point Conneller proceeds to “examine the specific ways in which different things are seen to modify or extend the capacities of people in particular contexts” (Conneller, 2004, p. 51), bridging Deleuze and Guattari to theorist Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges” which replaces a fixed epistemological view with “webs of differential positioning” (D. Haraway, 1988, p. 590). The use of animal objects becomes simultaneously a process of taking on capacities as well as the ethical/epistemological/affective engagement with the world from another position.

These observations from archeology are useful not because they set some historic precedent for how art should function, but because they articulate processes which are important to art from another perspective. In the documents in this PhD Output which examine artworks I have consciously treated both the processes deployed by the artist and those of her characters in the same manner. In the art I am interested in, things are not easily split between the practical and the ritual but form processes across these lines to perform different things.

Finally, when I contacted Conneller in 2019 she was continuing to examine the frontlets of Star Carr in terms of how they function as “unfinished things”. Conneller has already observed that the frontlets were “broken up as a source of raw material” (Conneller, 2004, p. 46), but is now considering how this occurred concurrently with their uses. A framework for considering art objects which do not reach a fixed state, but are continually re-worked, and drawn from while being used is relevant to a number of documents in this PhD Output. It is relevant to the analysis of artist Tai Shani’s works (SHANI, 2019) which undergo edits between redeployments, or the ongoing work “sidekick” (Price, 2013) by Elizabeth Price. Going forward, I would consider how unfinished things connects to the writing practice of William Burruoghs both through the “cut-up” technique to “cut oneself out of language” (Hassan, 1963, p. 9), and the process whereby his novels were re-edited in subsequent editions. Burroughs is also relevant to the other side of unfinished things whereby these things are not just refined, but are a source of material for future things. I am also interested in the process by which computer software is updated via “patches” (Fisher, 2019) as another model for an unfinished thing.

I’m interested in the political implications of objects which refuse the linear transition from raw material to finished commodity, but is instead part of processes which cross that distinction. To borrow the image from Karl Marx’s Capital Vol. 1 (Marx, 1981), what would it mean for “coat” to remain functioning as “ten yards of linen”, to be always in a process of being woven/unwoven/rewoven into different forms? I feel there is something here to be pursued via the concepts of Incomplete Provocations, and the improvisations and departures which are centred in Tabletop Role Playing Games.

Divination Storytelling

The second exit is far more practical and straightforward. During my research I have used and developed methods for creating parts of narratives based on sortation systems such as card decks and dice rolls. In 2018 I produced an artwork entitled “The Sodden Gates of Vulnerability” which borrowed a mechanic used in multiple games whereby the space in which play takes places is procedurally generated. A hypothetical example of this mechanic would be a game which takes place in a derelict spaceship, the interior rooms and corridors of which is represented with cardboard tiles. When the players reach the exit of one room, a new random room tile is placed at the exit from the first, so the spaceship is configured, and unpredictable, with each subsequent playthrough. In The Sodden Gates of Vulnerability I combined some of the lore from Games Workshop’s derelict spaceship exploration game “Space Hulk” (Games Workshop, 1999) with their subsequently released rules for randomly generated spaceships (Hunt, 2013), to randomly generate prompts for a narrative built from a fictionalised version of my own past.

As a result of the cessation symptoms I was experiencing while coming off antidepressants I found memories returning that medication use had suppressed. In addition, there were physical cessation symptoms which mnemonically triggered some often confused memories of spaces in the town centre of Luton where I spent my teens, frequently from times in the early hours of the morning after leaving a club or a party. I reconstructed these fragmented memories, and the bodily feelings which connected them to the present, and any emergent feelings and noted them down as prompts on index cards. Some memories were so abstract as to not describe a place but just a sensation, or an action. These abstract memories, combined with some other images and thoughts were written up in a list and labeled 1-20.

The Sodden Gates of Vulnerability was produced as a single take spoken performance to microphone. It began with a short reflection on the different ways in which physical geography and brain chemistry are both modulated by chemicals. After this I shuffled and dealt an index card, describing the derelict spaceship/ 4am Luton Town Centre space it represented in the manner of Games Master setting a scene for players of a Role Playing Game. I then rolled a 20 sided dice and used the corresponding entry from the list as a prompt for what the player (the audience to whom the work is addressed) did in traversing this space. A partial transcription of one room follows;

“You stagger out of the thickening fog into the area where escaping heat from the many times kicked in door makes a dim pocket at the edge of the street. Banging on the door that feels like it should have given in by now and it is finally opened by someone inside. You roll in, and so does the fog, and the door opener is already turning the corner ahead into the living room so you guess you will follow them, remembering to shut the door behind you.

The living room is thick with dust and hair and ash over the brown carpet and old sofas. No one has their feet on the floor, all bunched up to keep warm or to manage some symptoms of intake.

You just want to buy, but that isn't how this is going to work out. It never does.

Everything slips. Someone makes you take a music cassette and in lock-eyed intensity tells you why you will like it and when you will die.

A man takes you to one side and rapidly ages while sharing with you a one sided conversation about how he has lived his life. He has little ears like fins and catfish whiskers and it's clear from the way he holds and interacts with the portable stereo he cradles that he has a relationship with Fabio and Grooverider which is both more beastially physical and more vapourusly transcendental than you will ever understand.

You slip out and it's dawn and you have the cassette and you don't think you bought anything but now do not think you need anything so maybe you bought it and weren't paying attention during intake or maybe someone else was in charge of your body.

You roll out with the fog and luckily town is down hill but my god you would never be able to find this place again and my god you would probably never want to because all those people would want to check how closely you been following their advice on how to live.

Oh yeah the plot twist is you're a rabbit”.

Going forward, I would like to explore the mechanics of procedural narrative based on sortation systems, both as an improvised Rendition, and as material which is subsequently cut up and deployed in other ways, possibly as a development of Diagramatics. I’m looking into how I might produce these works for a platform like YouTube, possible using a split screen where half the image shows the face that speaks, and half shows the sortation system such as tarot-style cards.

Dog Mod

Running throughout all three books of this PhD Output are dogs. When I started this PhD in 2016, I soon afterward began living with Lea and Buster, two elderly Staffordshire Bull Terriers. The importance of this relationship to the research is something I have attempted, and failed, to articulate on many occasions in the last three years. As much as the majority of the documents in this PhD Output are underpinned by a desire to understand my own trans* non-binary gender identity, they are also a response to learning about what Deleuze and Guattari would call dog affects, as well as negotiating my emotions towards Lea and Buster particually during the sadly increasing points where they have become unwell.

In mid 2019 I sketched an outline for what I called the “Dog Mod”. In the language of games, a mod is something added to the game which alters part or all of its systems in some way. Mods are often produced by a third party, and can range from something which simply adds some different functionality (such as the campaign generator for Space Hulk referenced in the previous section) or completely reorientate the system, such as the mod “DayZ” that reconfigures military sim “ARMA” into a zombie survival game and spawned an entire genre of video games (Davison, 2014).

The aim of Dog Mod was to produce a document which could provide a means to reconfigure the rest of the PhD Output through its unspoken focus, dogs. Dog Mod is something I decided was both conceptually and emotionally too overwhelming for me to be able to complete in time for submission, but I remains as a point of departure for my future research. It connects the Becoming-Animal of Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Stark & Roffe, 2015), philosopher Patricia MacCormack’s expansion of this into animal rights discourse in the Ahuman (MacCormack, 2014), with other ideas around, animals, play and care (Chen, 2012; D. J. Haraway, 2016; Massumi, 2014; Vint, 2008).

Bibliography

Anckorn, J. E. (2019, October 24). Does The Dog Die?: A Not-At-All Comprehensive Guide to Stephen King’s Canines. Retrieved 26 November 2019, from We Are the Mutants website: https://wearethemutants.com/2019/10/24/does-the-dog-die-a-not-at-all-comprehensive-guide-to-stephen-kings-canines/

Chen, M. (2012). Animacies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Conneller, C. (2004). Becoming Deer: Corporeal Transformations at Star Carr. Archaeological Dialogues, 11(1), 37–56. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203804001357

Conneller, C. (2011). An archaeology of materials: Substantial transformations in early prehistoric Europe. New York: Routledge.

Davison, P. (2014, April 30). Bohemia Interactive Tells the Story of Arma and DayZ. Retrieved 30 December 2019, from USgamer website: https://www.usgamer.net/articles/bohemia-interactive-tells-the-story-of-arma-and-dayz

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Fisher, T. (2019, December 17). What Are Software Patches? Retrieved 30 December 2019, from Lifewire website: https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-a-patch-2625960

Games Workshop. (1999). Space Hulk Rule Book (4th Edition). Nottingham: Games Workshop.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hassan, I. (1963). The Subtracting Machine: The Work of William Burroughs. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 6(1), 4–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.1963.10689760

Hunt, C. A. T. (2013). Campaign Generator Geotiles. Games Workshop.

Little, A., Elliott, B., Conneller, C., Pomstra, D., Evans, A. A., Fitton, L. C., … Milner, N. (2016). Technological Analysis of the World’s Earliest Shamanic Costume: A Multi-Scalar, Experimental Study of a Red Deer Headdress from the Early Holocene Site of Star Carr, North Yorkshire, UK. PLOS ONE, 11(4), e0152136. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0152136

MacCormack, P. (2014). The Animal Catalyst: Towards Ahuman Theory. A&C Black.

Marx, K. (1981). Capital: A critique of political economy (B. Fowkes & D. Fernbach, Trans.). London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review.

Massumi, B. (2014). What animals teach us about politics. Durham: Duke University Press.

Milner, N., Conneller, C., & Taylor, B. (Eds.). (2018a). Star Carr Volume I: A Persistent Place in a Changing World. https://doi.org/10.22599/book1

Milner, N., Conneller, C., & Taylor, B. (Eds.). (2018b). Star Carr Volume II: Studies in Technology, Subsistence and Environment. https://doi.org/10.22599/book2

Price, E. (2013). Sidekick. In K. Macleod, Thinking Through Art: Reflections on Art as Research (1st ed., pp. 122–132). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203819869

SHANI, T. (2019). OUR FATAL MAGIC. London: STRANGE ATTRACTOR PRESS.

Stark, H., & Roffe, J. (Eds.). (2015). Deleuze and the non/human. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Vint, S. (2008). ‘The Animals in That Country’: Science Fiction and Animal Studies. Science Fiction Studies, 35(2), 177–188.

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slaaneshfic · 4 years

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Proposal: Gothic Vectors and Gothic Lacuna: Gender, Reparative Love, and Unseen Agency in Tai Shani’s “Phantasmagoregasm”

Figure 1. Phantasmagoregasm Production Print. Reprinted from "Tai Shani", by Shani, T, 2019, Retrieved from https://www.taishani.com/shop/dark-continent-productions-print-set. Copyright 2019 by Tai Shani.

This is a proposal I’ve just sent this morning for the Sheffield Gothic conf. the deadline is the 9ths so still time to submit something. http://sheffieldgothicreadinggroup.blogspot.com/

The artist and 2019 Turner Prize collective winner Tai Shani has since 2014 produced artworks as part of a project called Dark Continent (DC), named for Freud's description of the sexuality of adult women (Freud, 2002, p. 90). DC takes inspiration from texts such as Christine de Pizan’s proto-feminist work “City of Women”, adapting and deviating from them to question “what consitutes the feminine” through a “messier and more agnostic model of gender that moves beyond the binarism of Pizan” (Crone, 2019, p. xi).

One artwork within DC is “Phantasmagoregasm” (Shani, 2018, 2019, n.d.), a narrative delivered by its titular character “an eighteenth-century hermaphrodite writer of gothic fiction” (Shani, 2019) which explicitly references Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of The House of Usher” in its concern for the protean interrelations of bodies, objects, buildings, and affects. Shani however, offers a radical redeployment of the tropes and structures of the gothic, just as she does with those of gender.

Firstly, I draw from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of “reparative reading” (Sedgwick, 2002) with its calls back to Sedwick’s analysis of the gothic forms (Sedgwick, 1986), to consider how Phantasmagoregasm replaces the underpinning gothic presumption of paranoia, with queer care and love, via absense and affect. The reparative gothic position is used as a means to approach one of psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray’s rare direct addresses to art, “The Natal Lacuna” (Irigaray, 1994, 2006), and its related debates (MacCormack & McPhee, 2014; Robinson, 1994, 2006; Whitford, 1994).

Secondly, I identify how, as a reconfiguration of the gothic form of barriers and transgressions, Phantasmagoregasm is concerned with vectors and pathways for energies witnessed only through their effects, particularly the repeated literary description of rapidly moving disembodied points of view, sound waves, wind, and abstract geometry. This “Vectorial Gothic” in Shani’s work is considered through the metaphor of director Sam Raimi’s agentic camera in “The Evil Dead” movies (Campbell, 2002; Raimi, 1981, 1987; Raimi & Spiegel, 1986; Semley, 2019), in order to create another approach to Irigaray’s text, via Sedgwick and theorist Katherine Hayles writing on Poe (Hayles, 1990).

In conclusion, I consider how the queering of Gothic Desire and Gothic Space in Phantasmagoregasm readdresses structures of sexual difference and illuminates a feminist approach to art practice concerned with affect, love, and the negotiation of the unknown, or undescribable.

Bibliography:

Campbell, B. (2002). If chins could kill: Confessions of a B movie actor: an autobiography (1st St. Martin's Griffin ed). New York: LA Weekly Books for Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press.

Crone, B. (2019). Wounds of Un-Becoming. In Our Fatal Magic (pp. vii–xxiii). S.l.: STRANGE ATTRACTOR PRESS.

Freud, S. (2002). Wild Analysis (A. Phillips, Ed.; A. Bance, Trans.). Retrieved from http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/51108791.html

Graves, R. (2018). Tai Shani: Semiramis. Retrieved 27 November 2019, from Corridor8 website: https://corridor8.co.uk/article/tai-shani-semiramis/

Hayles, K. (1990). Chaos bound: Orderly disorder in contemporary literature and science. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.

Irigaray, L. (1994, June). A Natal Lacuna (M. Whitford, Trans.). Women’s Art Magazine, (58), 11–13.

Irigaray, L. (2006). The Natal Lacuna. In S. Lotringer (Ed.), & B. Edwards (Trans.), More & less 3: : Hallucination of Theory (pp. 39–43). Pasadena, CA; Cambridge, MA: Fine Arts Graduate Studies Program and the Theory, Criticism and Curatorial Studies and Practice Graduate Programs, Art Center College of Design ; Distribution, MIT Press.

MacCormack, P., & McPhee, R. (2014). Creative Aproduction: Mucous and the Blank. InterAlia Special Issue: Bodily Fluids, (9), 146–164.

Raimi, S. (1981). The Evil Dead. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083907/

Raimi, S. (1987). Evil Dead II. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092991/

Raimi, S., & Spiegel, S. (1986, May 5). Evil Dead II Shooting Script, Seventh Draft. Retrieved from http://www.bookofthedead.ws/website/evil_dead_2_in-print.html

Robinson, H. (1994, December). Irigaray’s Imaginings. Women’s Art Magazine, (61), 20.

Robinson, H. (2006). Reading art, reading Irigaray: The politics of art by women. London: I. B. Tauris.

Sedgwick, E. K. (1986). The coherence of Gothic conventions. New York: Methuen.

Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham: Duke University Press.

Semley, J. (2019). Naturom Demonto. How The Evil Dead Claims Evil from Both Literature and Cinema. In R. A. Riekki & J. A. Sartain (Eds.), The many lives of The evil dead: Essays on the cult film franchise (pp. 41–50). Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc.

Shani, T. (2018). PhantasmagoregasmFinal.pdf.

Shani, T. (2019). Phantasmagoregasm. In OUR FATAL MAGIC. (pp. 139–153). S.l.: STRANGE ATTRACTOR PRESS.

Shani, T. (n.d.-a). DARK CONTINENT. Retrieved 27 November 2019, from Tai Shani website: https://www.taishani.com/dark-continent

Shani, T. (n.d.-b). DARK CONTINENT: PHANTASMAGOREGASM. Retrieved 27 November 2019, from Tai Shani website: https://www.taishani.com/darkcontinentphantasmagoregasm

Westengard, L. (2019). Gothic queer culture: Marginalized communities and the ghosts of insidious trauma. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Whitford, M. (1994, October). Woman With Attitude. Women’s Art Magazine, (60), 15–17.

#horror #feminism #queer #edgar allan poe #luce irigaray #eve kosofsky sedgwick #reparative reading #art #evil dead #voids #lacuna #vectors #trajectories

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slaaneshfic · 5 years

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There is No Reason for you to Live. Part two: Excess

This is part of chapter I have written in the last two weeks, which uses the game Sticky Zeitgeist: Episode 2 Aperitif by Porpentine and Rook to draw out processes of art practice. I presented the beginning of the first part of this chapter at Beyond The Console: Gender and Narrative Games in London at the start of 2019. This is still very much a work in process, I’ve not even read this section back before posting it here. But I am very interested in the overlaps between Cixous’s figure of “woman”, “Becoming-Woman / Becoming-Girl” in Deleuze and Guattari, Bataille/Kristeva’s “Abjection” and “Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory” in regards art practice and trans* identity.

Part two: Excess “Small salvage is $5. Hear that sis, you’re $5. Nooooo” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018).

Excess is a concept which arises in many areas of George Batailles work which spans art, literature, politics, economics, anthropology and mysticism. The concept, or rather an aspect of it, is particularly near the surface and therefore easy for us to grasp here, in Bataille’s essay “The Notion of Expenditure” (Bataille, 1985). Bataille begins by stating that while “there is nothing that permits on to define what is useful to man” (Bataille, 1985). Classical utility can be understood as follows;

“On the one hand, this material utility is limited to acquisition (in practice, to production) and to the conservation of goods; on the other, it is limited to reproduction and to the conservation of human life” (Bataille, 1985).

In contrast to utility Bataille positions “pleasure”, which he argues society judges to be lesser than utility in the eyes of society and is therefore permissible as a “concession” (Bataille, 1985). However Bataille proposes that just as a young man’s desire to waste and destroy demonstrates that there is a need for this kind of pleasure even while this cannot be given a “utilitarian justification”, “human society can have, just as he does, an interest in considerable losses, in catastrophes” (Bataille, 1985). Bataille sets this up as the tension between the ideological authority and the real needs for “nonproductive expenditure” which are at times not even articulable through the language of that authority. As examples of unproductive expenditure Bataille offers the following list;

“Luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e., deflected from genital finality)” (Bataille, 1985).

A handful of these examples are examined further, but Bataille argues that in each “the accent is placed on a loss that must be as great as possible in order for the activity to take on its true meaning” (Bataille, 1985). Just as Lyotard identified affect as the point of excess which marks art apart from other things, and Cixous defines her figure of woman in terms of an unending outpouring, Bataille has identified “the principle of loss” (Bataille, 1985) as essential to a range of activities including but spreading beyond art and literature. The excess in Lyotard as deployed by O’Sullivan is that which is beyond the system of accounting for art, namely affect. In Cixous the excess is the capacity of the artist-figure woman when enacting ecriture feminine, to operate beyond the system prescribed by power to the production of art. As Allan Stoekl notes in his introduction to the edited volume “George Bataille Visions of Excess Selected Writings, 1927 - 1939”, for Bataille “People create in order to expand, and if they retain things they have produced, it is only to allow themselves to continue living, and thus destroying” (Stoekl, 1985). Bataille’s nonproductive expenditure is what is being freed in Cixous’s process of Ecriture Feminine, and I would therefore further argue, is being deployed in Aperitif, an artwork which deals with excesses both offered and implied (and therefore to be created at the point of interface with audience). More than this though, Bataillian excesses appear within the world of the game which the characters, and by extension us as players occupy. I would like to explore how different kinds of excess appear in Aperitif, and how these fit with Bataille’s observations around class struggle and manner in which those in power retain control of non-productive expenditure, including the expenditure of other beings. Finally I will consider these excess as areas which clarify Aperitif as abstracted horror and Ecriture Feminine.

A point where waste is rendered visible in Aperitif, in The Laugh of The Medusa, and in the work of Bataille, in the act of masturbatation. The character Ever, from whose perspective we begin Aperitif is the sole player character in the episode of the “No World Dreamers: Sticky Zeitgeist” which precedes it, “Hyperslime” (Heartscape & Rook, 2017) [KEYWORD Link to Smeared into the Environment]. Ever’s story in Hyperslime begins with a scene of anal drug use and masturbation which is interupted by the call to attend work. In the following episode, Aperitif, we learn that this work is in fact community service after Ever “whacked off in public” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). This detail of Ever’s life is exposed by Brava but in Ever’s interior monologue we learn that she herself does not fully understand why it occurred. Ever can only speculate on the reason for her doing something she identifies as harmful, and that the experience was like “watching through a window” after which she “blacked out” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). As an aspect of Ever’s character masturbation points to her isolation and desire, and to her struggle with the unbearable tension of shame which she alludes to when considering that “maybe I just wanted what they thought about me to come true” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). This enfolding of personal desire, the projection of being seen by another, the need to resolve an uncertainty, and the potential shame which runs through it is precisely how Cixous describes the struggle to produce Ecriture Feminine;

“[Y]ouv’e written a little, but in secret and it wasn’t good because you punished yourself for writing because it didn't go all the way; or because you wrote irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further but to attenuate the tension a bit, just to take the edge off” (Cixous, 1976).

Ever, who the artists attribute the title/archetype/role “The Loser”, seems perpetually to be trying to manage the tension of her desires, with the only temporary resolution occurring in some kind of overwhelming loss of self. The struggle for a creative process which Cixous describes is not something I can identify in Aperitif because it is very much embedded in the experience of the process of making, which I do not have access to. However, I would argue that Aperitif is open to being played in a manner which is analogous if not in a similar affective register to the tension and collapse cycles of Ever. We begin both Aperitif and its prequel controlling Ever, but prior to the narrative beginning and still within the context of the title menu the game instructs us that we can “hold escape until you black out” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). On one hand this instruction is informing player-audience of the keypress which will allow them to exit the game. On the other hand, the use of the term “black out” echo’s Ever’s use of the same. When playing the game-artwork, I feel that the means of exiting has been embedded with an emotional resonance. Playing the game-artwork now has a resonance with Ever’s narrative, even outside of the points of play where I am controlling her character. The emotional content of the game is foregrounded, and the promise of the opportunity to in a manner, ‘lose consciousness’ as an escape from it invites/dares the audience-player to engage more with that content. We have permission to be a loser, to fail.

The concept of failure here is made complex when it is brought into the parameters of the game itself. It becomes an action. Ever berates herself for failure, but the artwork-game does not pass this judgement, and in aligning us with her and with failure, it invites us to not pass judgement either. Returning to Cixous, the other resonance of the allegory of masturbation to Ecriture Feminine is that the writer is given permission to write for themselves and for the act of writing to be self gratifying rather than requiring it before another. In “The “Onanism of Poetry”: walt whitman, rob halpern and the deconstruction of masturbation” the poet and lecturer Sam Ladkin notes the contradiction in the considered works “between masturbation as the failure of fecundity, spent energy without the returns of an investment” and something which has value in sowing “male seed across the typically female gendered earth” (Ladkin, 2015). In Ladkin’s work, the discourse around Onan, the poets being discussed, and the particular queer theory used tends toward the image and language of male homosexual desire but the author emphasises that beneith this the structure of “failed or suspended address” is not specific to a particualr “gendered identification fo desire” (Ladkin, 2015). In Cixous this contradiction between value and waste is articulated as fight to develop one’s own value system. To engage based upon the subjects desire, rather than exchange within an external economy which ascribes or denies a degree of value based on adherence to preexisting parameters. Ladkin explores the potential to “recuperate the wasteful excess of masturbation via the general economy of Bataille” yet in the author’s focus on the ejaculatory “economy of finitude” and the monetary economy of pornography, this avenue is effectively discounted and not further pursued (Ladkin, 2015). However I think there is a different dialectic at play in the systems of Bataille, and which are played out in the world of Aperitif as the struggle between the individual release of excess of the player characters, and the destructive forms of excess employed by power and authority, which render both landscape and those same player characters, as waste.

Bataille lays out his position that “Man is an effect of the surplus of energy: The extreme richness of his elevated activities must be principally defined as the dazzling liberation of an excess. The energy liberated in man flourishes and makes useless splendor endlessly visible” (Bataille, 2013). In Aperitif, this dazzling liberation of an excess is attempted by characters such as Brava, but it is always curtailed by the tyranny of an outer authority, the call to attend community service, the police. The motif of masturbation in Aperitif points to repeated denial of excess in the following of individual desire. As previously noted, character’s remain in a limbo of struggling survival, to “never perfectly live or die” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). In this state the following of individual desire into the expression of excess is denied to everyone except those who can afford it, as Brava recalls;

“When the internet 3 was invented the economy of really extra fucked, most stores were automated. Except the usual dollhouse experiments ran by rich people who fantasized about running a restaurant or cupcake shack of some shit” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). Bataille argues that “As the class that possesses the wealth -- having received with wealth the obligation of functional expenditure -- the modern bourgeoisie is characterized by the refusal in principle of that obligation” (Bataille, 1985). Bataille maps how earlier structures of social and material power would have led to the possessors of such power and wealth to express this through expenditure such as feasts, sacrifices and the construction of elaborate religious and cultural objects. In contrast to this, the logic of accumulation unders Capitalism leads to a “hatred of expenditure” (Bataille, 1985). In Aperitif this is demonstrated in the quote above from Brava showing that even with full automation, the bourgeois can only either imagine, or allow itself, a useless expenditure which takes the surface form of work by running a “cupcake shack” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018).

There is a second manner in which excess plays out through the agency of the authority in Aperitif and this is concerned with the rendering of subjects as objects, and then waste. Cultural theorist Sylvere Lotringer attempted to reexamine the concept of ‘Abjection’ in the work of Bataille, identifying a different trajectory from that subsequently developed by Kristeva in “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection” (Kristeva, 1984). Lotringer’s short essay “Les Miserables” (Lotringer, 1999) positions Bataille’s fragmentary addresses of abjection written in the early 1930s as specifically in response to the “only truly original political formation to have emerged since the end of WWI [...] fascism” (Lotringer, 1999). Lotringer notes that in “The Notion of Expenditure” Batialle deplores the manner in which the bourgeoisie attenuate the damage done and “ameliorate the lot of the workers” (Bataille, 1985) as “abysmal hypocrisy” (Lotringer, 1999); “The ultimate goal; of industrial masters, he asserted, wasn’t profit or accumulation, but the will to turn workers into pure refuse. Instead of extracting surplus value from the wretched population working in [the] factory, they enjoyed a surplus value of cruetly” (Lotringer, 1999).

The world of Aperitif presents a world in which authority has still not passed through its hypocrisy, but nevertheless continues to render the workers as waste. The company that employers Ever and the others to scavenge is represented by a character called “The Therapist”, which at least suggests a role of care, yet the job remains one of collecting scrap from a toxic environment which degrades and destroys their bodies (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). Lotringer’s published his essay Les Miserables in the edited book “More & Less” along with Bataille’s essay “Abjection and Miserable Forms” and interview with Kristeva titled “Fetishizing the Abject” (Bataille, 1999; Lotringer, 1999; Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). Both Lotringer’s essay, and the line of questioning in the interview are in part concerned with a bifurcation within Bataille’s concept of abjection, which has not been given as much attention in its rearticulation and development by Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection and that works continued influence. Lotringer draws from Bataille a distinction between “The union of miserables reserved for subversion” and “wretched men rejected into negative abjection” (Lotringer, 1999).

The difference between the positive abjection which leads to action, solidarity, and perhaps martyrdom, and the negative abjection which leads simply to inertial, apathy, and alienation. The tension between these two forms of Abjection is something which appears throughout Aperitif, as its protagonists navigate a world of trash, see themselves to degrees become or be made trash, and navigate the threshold between agency and alienation. In his summary, makes the following statement about Abjection without differentiating between the positive or negative form;

“Abjection doesn't result from a dialectical operation- feeling abject when “abjectified” in someone else’s eyes, or reclaiming abjection as an identity feature- but precisely when dialectics breaks down. When it ceases to be experienced as an act of exclusion to become an autonomous condition, it is then, and only then, that abjection sets in” (Lotringer, 1999).

It is unclear in this text whether Lotringer is arguing that what he elsewhere describes as people “becoming things to themselves” (Lotringer, 1999) defines Abjection in both positive and negative forms, or whether he is arguing for the primacy of the negative form. It is possible to read this as Lotringer trying to shift the definition of Abject to the negative, and the interview with Kristeva that will be addressed shortly in some ways supports this view.

Returning to Goard’s text on the trans* body and the cyborg it is worth nothing the importance of the process by which either are rendered Abject is addressed, though with different terminology;

“The dream of a world without surplus, illegitimate bodies is not feasible without a society that relies on surplus” (Goard, 2017).

Goard makes steps toward a politics whereby “bodies-made-surplus” (or trans* people and others) are not redefined, rearticulated and included, but simply allowed to exist (Goard, 2017). The politics not of “defining but defending” (Goard, 2017). Goard’s position seems to cut across Lotringer, proposing the act of oneself making and being made a thing as still containing revolutionary agency. In Lotringer’s reading of Bataille’s Abjection, at least in its negative form, is a place without hope of agency, a kind of living death. However Goard does seem to offer a position which is neither that living death, nor the simple dialectical struggle of being labeled abject and owning this label. Goard’s proposal becomes about a surplus yes, but an undefinable surplus which crosses categories of gender, class, race, ability, and attempts to tactically use such categories whilst aiming to ultimately destroy them. Goard articulates this party with the statement that “we should be deeply skeptical of placing value on the acquisition of formal rights when they are used in the legitimation of a violent border regime” (Goard, 2017). At the same time, Goard refuses the dialectic of power vs resistance by pointing out that the tactic entering into established modes of identity such as the gender binary are important at times for safety and so should not exclude a person from solidarity toward a common project of gender abolition for example.

[Footnote: The acquisition of rights for one group used as a means to justify is articulated by post-colonial theorist Jasbir Puar as “Homonationalism” in the 2007 book “Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer times” and developed further in the text “" I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess": Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory” (Puar, 2007, 2012). In the latter text Puar focuses on expanding upon the form’s negotiation between Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of “intersectionality”, “analyses that foreground the mutually co-constitutive forces of race, class, sex, gender, and nation” and an assembalge model which identifies “ the “retrospective ordering” of identities such as “gender, race, and sexual orientation” which “back-form their reality” (Puar, 2012). Puar sees these too positions not as “oppositional but rather,[...] frictional (Puar, 2012).]

As has been indicated throughout this chapter, Aperitif frequently plays establishing categories, names, structures, or identities, and having things which are surplus to these, which disrupt with either a counter-order, or the refusal of any order. Characters in some places self-define their identity on an axis of the gender binary, whereas the the game leaves other identity markers not only unknown but unacknowledged. The game frames and withholds information through its limited graphics showing animal ears, and text which trails off to convey emotion through lack of definition. An implication through explicit and implied information is that all characters in Aperitif are “girls”. However this category is broken open so wide as to be more in line with Cixous use of woman as catagory abstracted from sex, gender, or identity. “Girl” can be a category if it is deployed in that way, or it can something less stable.

Something about the four protagonists in Aperitif that remains consistent, and is presented unambiguously, is that the society they inhabit does not value their existence. Throughout the narrative, each protagonist struggles with whether or not they themselves value their own own existence. Society is ordered in a way that each of the four girls needs to undertake a job which is extremely damaging to their physical and mental health. A common thread throughout their conversations and many interior monologues is the consideration of whether than can, or should, survive this. In the interview with Lotringer titled “Fetishizing The Abject”, Kristeva describes her development of the concept through researching “borderline” clinical states in psychoanalysis;

“Without going as far as psychotic persecution, without going as far as autistic withdrawal, [the patent] creates a sort of territory between the two, which he often inhabits with a feeling of unworthiness, of even deterioration, a sort of physical abjection if you like” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999).

It would be out of the remit of this research to follow further into these pathologies. However; the oscillation of internal states, struggle, exploded categories, the question of self worth and being made thing invites another text to placed alongside Aperitif and Abjection. “Sick Woman Theory” by writer and artist Johanna Hedva (Hedva, 2016) is an examination of the politics which intersect in the bodies of disabled people, and offers a figure of protest in the form of the Sick Woman. As Hedva states, “Sick Woman Theory is an insistence that most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering, and no doubt invisible” (Hedva, 2016). Applying Sick Woman Theory to hypothetical borderline case described by Kristeva repositions them as a political agent;

“The Sick Woman is all of the “dysfunctional,” “dangerous” and “in danger,” “badly behaved,” “crazy,” “incurable,” “traumatized,” “disordered,” “diseased,” “chronic,” “uninsurable,” “wretched,” “undesirable” and altogether “dysfunctional” bodies belonging to women, people of color, poor, ill, neuro-atypical, differently abled, queer, trans, and genderfluid people, who have been historically pathologized, hospitalized, institutionalized, brutalized, rendered “unmanageable,” and therefore made culturally illegitimate and politically invisible” (Hedva, 2016).

As the quotation marks around medical terms indicate, Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory is a kind of tactical categorization in order to refute a larger number of categories. Sick Woman Theory reads Abjection not from the position of analyst, but “the person with autism whom the world is trying to “cure”” as well as a multitude of other positions whose comonolity is that they are disenfranchised, suffering, and abused (Hedva, 2016). From the former position, categories become the norm, and things which transgress them a deviation or disruption. From the latter position of the multitude, the transgression across categories is the norm. It is possible to read the category of “girl” in Aperitif as Sick Woman, just as both, like Cixous’s woman’s writing, serve to encapsulate a sea of difference with an act of refusal against categories.

As mentioned previously in this chapter, a focus of Lotringer’s interview with Kristeva is questioning whether Abjection can form an oppositional function to power. Lotringer is particularly concerned with what he sees a broad tendency or movement within art and culture which attempts to reclaim the process of being made Abject and instil it with emancipatory potential. When asked at one point on this Kristeva responds “I feel very ambiguous in relation to this movement [...] I don’t adhere to it, and at the same time I realize that, as a kind of strategy, it is opposed to some kind of intolerable conservatism, so it's hard to adhere to that” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). Kristeva’s concession is based in dialectic of Abjection against what must be imagined as a kind of totalitarian homogenous cultural sterility. Sick Woman Theory, is presented as “an identity and body” not against but in place of one of intolerable conservatism (Hedva, 2016). Hedva at point identifies this conservatism as the privileged existence, or “cruelly optimistic promise” (Hedva, 2016) of this existence, embodied by the;

“white, straight, healthy, neurotypical, upper and middle-class, cis- and able-bodied man who makes his home in a wealthy country, has never not had health insurance, and whose importance to society is everywhere recognized and made explicit by that society; whose importance and care dominates that society, at the expense of everyone else” (Hedva, 2016).

However, Kristeva seems to be describing an oppositional practice in line with what Lotringer describes as “reclaiming abjection as an identifying feature” (Lotringer, 1999). This Abjection is oppositional, it uses the definition given to it by what it opposes, and defines itself through that opposition. Sick Woman Theory instead repositions itself as the exclusion of what it can be seen to be opposing. Hedva argues that capitalism sets up binary between a default position of “wellness” and deviation from this in the form of “sickness”. To simply embody this deviant category of “sick” would be exactly the oppositional process of Abjection described by Lotringer and Kristeva. However, Hedva also argues that under capitalism “wellness” is positioned as a temporal norm, whilst “sickness” and therefore “care” is positioned as temporary. Hedva’s position can be seen as arguing that a broad encapsulation of vulnerabilities, oppressions, and suffering should be considered the norm. Crucially, care for oneself and for others, could and should follow as another norm. It can then be proposed that Sick Woman Theory, is not a struggle with another, but a reconfiguration of the context underneath both which shifts perspective. This reconfiguration is analogous to an operation I have elsewhere discussed as occurring within horror narratives, using the example of the film “Ringu” (Nakata, 2000). [LINK TO “FROLIC IN BRINE” performance SCREENPLAY]

Hedva’s call for the centering of their broad category of sickness, which includes not just sufferers of illness, but also victims of the violent enforcement of acceptable categories of gender, sexuality, class, etc. does find a direct parallel in Kristeva’s thought;

“These states, far from being simply pathological or exceptional, are perhaps endemic. And it is perhaps against this sort of structural uncertainty that inhabits us that religions are set in motion, at once to recognise them and to defend ourselves against them” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999).

I am wary of pursuing an argument regarding the subjectivities included within Hedva’s Sick Woman predating, and perhaps causing the social structures which their existence transgresses. Such an enquiry would move beyond the scope of this project, which is concerned with the practice of art.

In Fetishizing The Abject much of Lotringer’s direction of the interview focuses on ways in which further discourses, including art, have misincorporated Abjection following Kristeva’s popularisation of the term. While a number of art tendencies and specific exhibitions are critiqued, it is the speculation on what Abjection could do in art that is most relevant here. Both Lotringer and Kristeva agree that when something is placed in a gallery, it “becomes a new identity” and thus “fetishised” it joins other “[i]institutional objects” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). Regarding potential to move beyond this, Kristeva proposes that “verbal art, insofar as it eludes fetishization, and constantly raises doubt and questioning [...] lends itself better perhaps to exploring those states that I call states of abjection” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). I am skeptical about the claim that any art form including verbal art might elude fetishization, but the operation of constantly raising doubt and questioning resonates with other observations in this chapter, as well as this PhD project overall. Elsewhere I discussed a concept from my research which I call Incomplete Provocations [LINK TO TEXTS]. Also, the use of unreliable narrators occurs in the majority of what might be called the fiction elements of this project. Something which is important to note regarding at least my use of unreliable narrators is that there is a rarely deliberate deception on the part of the narrator. Deception would necessitate that the narrator knows more than the audience who learns only from that the narrator reveals, at least initially. The application I am more interested in, is the unreliable narrator as point of which by either being cognitively compromised or simply different, has another perspective on events. The ideological position implied through this is that there is no one narrative which could encapsulate the entire event and therefore resolve it. There is always doubt and questions, each of which solicit speculation from the audience. In Deleuze and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) the line that illustrates this non-deceptive unreliable narrator occurs at the start of the chapter “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…”. While beginning an account of a film, the authors offer the disclaimer, “My memory of it is not necessarily accurate” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The author’s uncertainty in their memory would fall within my description of the cognitively compromised unreliable narrator, and before even getting to the recounted film, doubts and questions are ready to be raised. These doubts and questions do not all have to be positioned in the gap between recollection and what was witnessed, though in this case we could look for differences between Deleuze and Guattari’s account, and the film itself. The other doubts and questions that I am interested in project not backwards in time to the witnessing but forwards. What is interesting to me is not what is lacking from the film in the recounting, but how the recounting is a process of addition which grows from the film even while it might leave out parts of that source material. In this way, the unreliable narrator offers a provocation not for a return to the stillness of certainty, but for the movement of more emerging possibilities. Kristeva proposes something similar in her proposal for future Abject art, which involves processes of “anamnesis on the one hand, and gaming on the other” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). In terms of amnesia Kristeva expands this as “a sort of eternal return, repetition, perlaboration, elaboration” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). Within Aperitif the process of amnesia enacted as the player returns to walking a path through the same environment with different characters, as well as through the game form which allows itself to be replayed.

[FOOTNOTE: For a radically different analysis of a comparable creative terrain to Kristeva’s Anamnesis see Mark Fisher’s “Ghosts of my life: writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures”. “This dyschronia, this temporal disjuncture, ought to feel uncanny, yet the predominance of what Reynolds calls ‘retro-mania’ means that it has lost any unheimlich charge: anachronism is now taken for granted” (Fisher, 2014).]

Kristeva follows Anamnesis with Gaming which involves “compositions, decompositions, recompositions” and is presented as a continuation of the “trajectory” as Anamnesis (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). Examples provided for this process involve the process of chance through rolling dice, and the “glossolalia in Artaud, or like Finegan’s Wake” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). This resonates with Aperitif on multiple levels. At the game level Aperitif, despite being fairly linear in form, composes, decomposes,and recomposes itself continually. From the position of the player audience, this is perhaps most clear as the game shifts its genre and method of play at points. At points the player controls characters which walk around an environment and interact with one another in the manner of a role playing game. At other points the game switches to the form of a medical simulator where the player but diagnose and repair a robotic character with a completely different mode of interaction from the role playing game sections. This medical simulation then decomposes further as the performing of a specific repair sakes the form of side scrolling “shoot ‘em up” as a game within a game within a game. What would however be more in keeping with what Kristeva is describing would be evidence that at some level the making of this artwork included a shift to a less consciously direct mode. The reference to dice alongside glossolalia leads me to conclude that Kristeva’s Gaming is about the movement between conscious decision making, and something else which destabilized it, before potentially returning to conscious decision making. This destabilisation could be through the cold probability of a dice roll, the path for the works creation decided by the resulting number. The inclusion of Finegan’s Wake and Artaud’s glossolalia suggests that the destabilisation does not have to be the surrender to chance. Destabilisation could include the shift to using or creating words based on their sound rather than meaning for example. Cultural theorist Michel De Certeau described glossolalia as “vocal vegetation” not an exceptional thing constrained to the devout and artists, but the “bodily noises, quotations of delinquent sounds, and fragments of others' voices [which] punctuate the order of sentences with breaks and surprise” (De Certeau, 1996). The language in Aperitif, particularly where it comes to building its world through this language feels full of moments of shifts to a destabilised mode. Swamp-Dot-Com is populated with things like “bombo cabbage bludbud”, “lichen mommy board” and “whackback” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018).

[FOOTNOTE: A methodological decision has been made not to include research drawn from Heartscape and Rook’s other work, in order to focus on how this can inform methods of art practice, rather than drawing out the tendencies of these specific artists. However, it is worth noting that the processes of Kristeva’s Gaming are evident throughout Heartscape’s individual art practice. Heartscape curated the 2018 exhibition at Apexart in New York, entitled “Dire Jank” (Apexart, 2019). Dire Jank included artist Tabitha Nikolai’s video game “Ineffable Glossolalia” (Nikolai, 2018) and “Divination Jam” which invited the audience to “use divination, randomization, etc to make your game. when you get stuck, instead of feeling like shit, let some arcane system decide for you! rolling a die, i ching, tarot, anything that invokes fate! many ancient systems have been digitized, or you can look for randomness in the world around you…” (Heartscape, 2018). Furthermore, Heartscape’s 2016 novel “Psycho Nymph Exile” both contains the same collapsing worldbuilding language as Aperitif, and features such processes within its plot. “The crystal gives them an allergic reaction to language. Each girl has a unique combination of trigger words. They sit on the floor in rows, mumbling under their breath, reading from dictionaries until they find their combination” (Heartscape, 2016).]

This play in language is subtle, but I believe it a shift away from the direct conveyance of meaning to sounds and the joy of what words written down can do.

An area the gap between Kristeva and Lotringer’s Abject Art, Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory, and Aperitif widens is with the issue of the abject and identity. Lotringer sees Abjection’s relation to Fascism which he stresses is its origin in Batialle’s text “displaced” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). He broadens this further with the claim that “politics has become the politics of the notion of identity” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). This broad position is agreed by Kristeva who replies “everything has been taken up by the “politically correct” which are in fact identity related claims” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). It is this identity that Kristeva and Lotringer see in what they consider the problematic Oppositional Practice already outlined. I would like to argue though that their perceived problem with Abject identity would not apply to the way identity figures in Sick Woman Theory. Hedva sets out their position with clarity;

“The sick woman is an identity and body that can belong to anyone denied the privileged existence, or the cruelly optimistic promise of such an existence- of the white, straight, healthy, neurotypical, upper and middle class, cis and able-bodied man” (Hedva, 2016).

Sick Woman Theory is not a politics of sexual identity, but a broad identity which encapsulates sexual identity along with bodily, cognitive, and class differences. This is not the sidestepping of class struggle and opposition to fascism Lotringer in particular is concerned with in his observations about previous attempts at an Abject turn in art. Hedva creates an amorphous, fluid grouping, brings to the centre difference and care under the banner of the Sick Woman. Returning to The Laugh of The Medusa, Hedva’s project has strong resonances with Cixous’s; “If there is a “property of woman,” it is paradoxically her capacity to depreciate unselfishly: body without end, without appendage, without principal “parts.” If she is a whole, it’s a whole composed of parts that are wholes, not simple partial objects but a moving, limitlessly changing ensemble, a cosmos tirelessly traversed by Eros, an immense astral space not organised around any one sun thats any more of a star than the others” (Cixous, 1976).

Cixous frames this “property of woman” within a text which is concerned with the practice of making art, but this practice is part of process which includes woman putting herself “into the world and into history” (Cixous, 1976). Writing, is embedded in a politics of living. For Cixous’s woman to write only in the dominant mode of man’s writing, is to be restricted not only from writing herself (as Cixous would put it) but to enter into the world as a subject, as an agent. If we read Cixous’s woman not in terms of an essentialist category which might be attached to some biological marker, but as a class category, she readily aligns with Hedva’s Sick Woman. Cixoux’s contemporaries Deleuze and Guattari describe the process of “becoming-woman” which can be considered like the former’s woman but now not a class but a process (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). MacCormack gives a succinct explanation of Becoming-Woman, “Woman as minoritarian is defined by lack and failure so an element of woman - gesture, fluid libidinality - taken in or as part of the self will necessarily alter the self” (MacCormack, 2008). In Hedva’s text, the woman is named for the “subject position [that] represents the uncared for, the secondary, [...] the non-, the un-, the less-than” (Hedva, 2016).

Even when addressing cisgendered women, the call Cixous is making entails Becoming, which MacCormack describes as selecting “certain specificities and intensities of a thing and [dissipating] those intensities within our own molecularities to redistribute our selves” (MacCormack, 2008). Cixous calls us to redistribute into ourselves the intensity of fluid libinality which she calls the “unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love” (Cixous, 1976). This pull of desire and connectivity reads like an antithesis of Valerie Solanas’s description of “the male” as an “unresponsive lump, incapable of giving or receiving pleasure or happiness” (Solanas, 1971).

[FOOTNOTE: For a trans* reading of gender in Solanas as creative process see writer Andrea Long Chu’s proposal that “Here, transition, like revolution, was recast in aesthetic terms, as if transsexual women decided to transition, not to “confirm” some kind of innate gender identity, but because being a man is stupid and boring.” (Long Chu, 2018).]

The Woman in Sick Woman Theory is similarly a source of creative desire, which Hedva explains through a description of some of their own symptoms;

“Because of these “disorders,” I have access to incredibly vivid emotions, flights of thought, and dreamscapes, to the feeling that my mind has been obliterated into stars, to the sensation that I have become nothingness, as well as to intense ecstasies, raptures, sorrows, and nightmarish hallucinations” (Hedva, 2016).

These descriptions form part of Hedva’s consideration of political agency of those, who for bodily, social, or other reasons cannot engage in the direct politics of public action. However the language, as with Solanas’s, is as concerned with emotion, affect, aesthetics, and creativity. Solanas’s Male is “incapable of empathizing” (Solanas, 1971) while “Sick Woman Theory asks you to stretch your empathy” (Hedva, 2016). Solanas’s manifesto is explicitly a response to the boredom society provocokes as it is dominated by the “psychically passive” figure of the Male (Solanas, 1971). Without exoticising and objectictifying illness, mental or otherwise, the subject of Sick Woman Theory is undoubtedly a creative force.

I hope that I have demonstrated that the world, characters, and player-audience experience of Aperitif have a resonance with theories of Abjection, and creative difference connected to a broad category of Woman. Aperitif is on one level, a video game about a group of runaway broken robots, and hybrid animal kids trying to improvise through wasteland failures, emergent tactics of living through giving and receiving care.

Throughout Aperitif, many things are left undefined, or only implied. Dialogues are full of the pointed absence of speech in ellipses. Delivery of information gives way to Gaming. Character’s themselves are unsure of what has happened, cannot remember, are too traumatised, or simply offer a conflicting view of events to one another. Finally the game itself, with its limited interface and graphics which hark back to games long before the turn of the millenium, makes clear that details are being withheld. With this in mind, the group of protagonists being self identified as, or implied to be “girls” rather than Women, can be understood through another Becoming proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, and explored further by MacCormack. Within the context of Becoming-Woman Deleuze and Guattari ask “What is a girl? What is a group of girls?” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). They consider Marcel Proust’s protagonist’s search for “fugitive beings” (Proust, 2010) and conclude that the Girl whether singular or in a pack, is “pure haecceity” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

[Mark Fisher defines Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of Haecceity as “non-subjective individuation. [...] the entity as event (and the event as entity)” (Fisher, 2018).]

MacCormack states that the Girl is the “larval woman”, but “It is not the girl who becomes a woman; it is becoming-woman that produces the universal girl [...] the girl is the becoming-woman of each sex, just as the child is the becoming-young of every age” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). For Deleuze and Guattari, Girl is the individuation of Becoming-Woman, not attached to any substance or function, or “age group, sex, order, or kingdom” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Girls in Aperitif are undefined, only self identified in one instance and they move “between orders, acts, ages, sexes; they produce n molecular sexes on the line of flight in relation to the dualism machines they cross right through” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). They speak in irony, silence, thoughts of sex and unspeakable past trauma and modify their bodies with drugs and used parts. They are elusive, arising moment to moment from encounters. MacCormack notes that the “less defined a term is within majoritarian culture the more larval the becoming and thus the move open to unique and unpredictable folding and unfolding the becoming” (MacCormack, 2008). Girls are capable of Abject art practices in the manner argued by Lotringer and Kristeva, slipping between dualisms, rather than in reactive opposition. As Deleuze and Guattari write, Girls “draw their strength neither from the molar status that subdues them nor from the organism and subjectivity they receive; they draw their strength from the becoming-molecular they cause to pass between sexes and ages” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). So it is no wonder that the Girls in Aperitif improvise in the wasteland of Swamp-Dot-Com. They are ungraspable in their identities, and forever on the way to something. They tell as much, even though for them the process might be traumatic, to “never perfectly live or die” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018).

#games #.theory #gender #play #waste #excess #porpentine #Deleuze #Kristeva

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slaaneshfic · 5 years

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Borne By Rats / Dog-Tech 1

There are a great number of stars in the sky and they all smell like burning plastic. Your body is in a great number of pieces and you are borne across the rough concrete of the car park by a far greater number of rats.

People talk about “plague” in a manner which carries emotional and moral weight. A plague is not just a pathogen but an antagonist which comes as a multitude over time. It is wide and deep and has malicious agency.

This might be correct, but only from a foundation of a type of politics which is no more perfect than many others. The roof of the court is still on fire, the server library behind it is just a concrete crucible, sparks drafting above in the smoke.

Borne away by rats you are carried in careful procession up the waiting ply ramp and into the side door of the white transit. The door slides shut and wood clatters to the concrete outside as the engine politely starts and you are driven away.

Now beginning your egress, this particular job complete, we can do two things. The first is we can let go of this formal constraint of writing, no longer fitting each thought into a paragraph a little under three lines.

Secondly, we can debrief on the job done. I, your handler (also, a huge number of rats) and you the agent (also, in a great number of pieces) will decide what happened and write the history of the research event. This research event took place at the start of summer, in 2017 and could be thought of as a point where the project as a whole began its trajectory. Together we sing the code phrase and mnemonic trigger, the same code phrase you sang at the beginning of the research event to a room of people.

“Certainty is not a spell Sweet waste from a well” Roky Erickson, “Two Headed Dog” (Erickson, 2013) .

Mnemonically triggered, you begin the ethnographic report, I take notes, make edits, the van hums along the road. Here’s what I wrote of what you said:

At the event, I presented my research. It began with a two lines of a song, sung as an epigraph. The set the contexts of the unsteadiness of knowledge when making art, and the constant presence of contamination. There were six parts to the presentation, this was part one, and with with part I showed a drawing on the projection behind me.

Part two summed up the early plot of Stephen King’s story “Cujo” and its film adaptation where the titular dog contracts rabies from a bat while chasing a rabbit into a hole (King, 2011; Teague, 1983). I note that King’s alcohol use at the time meant he could not recall writing the book (King, 2010) .

At the close of part two I note that both versions end with the death of Cujo. However in the film adaptation, Cujo is aggravated by the sound of power tools and goes on to kill a number of authoritative and abusive men, and indirectly bring a young boy close to death. This is different from the novel where the young boy dies, and after being shot Cujo’s head is removed.

Part three outlines the plot of William Gibson’s short story “Johnny Mnemonic” and its film adaptation by painter Robert Longo (Gibson, 1995; Longo, 1995). In both versions, the protagonist Johnny is a courier to transports sensitive data uploaded directly to his brain. The use of his brain in this way meants johnny has lost his childhood memories. The story is concerned with Johnny undertaking one last job, in order to be able to leave the profession. He modifies his brain to carry far more data than is safe, risking psychosis.

The data Johnny is carrying is wanted by both a multinational pharmaceutical company, and the Japanese Yakuza, both of whom want to remove Johnny’s head to acquire it. In the short story version, Johnny is accompanied by a bodyguard named Molly Millions who is a protagonists of equal focus, and the centre of action. The film replaces Molly with the character “Jane”, who is visibly human, has little narrative agency, and suffers from a debilitating disease which could be cured by the information in the head of Johnny, who is the focus of action.

I look at the audience, to be sure that they have observed that both pairs of text and film are concerned with something from outside a brain being put within it.

In part four I outline the symptoms of Rabies, as well as the “Milwaukee Protocol” which is the treatment used in the only documented case of an unvaccinated human surviving Rabies infection. The Milwaukee Protocol involves a medically induced coma to allow the immune system to fight the disease. The most well known symptom of Rabies is hydrophobia, which stops the patient from swallowing which it has been hypothesised increases chance of infection through bites.

Part five returns of Johnny Mnemonic, and the character of “Jones”, a dolphin cybernetically enhanced by the CIA. In the film, Jones is part of a resistance movement against a pharmaceutical company who are withholding the cure for “Nerve Attenuation Syndrome” in order to maximise profit. The cure for the disease is what is being transported in Johnny’s head, and Jones helps remove it in order to support the resistance. This disease does not exist in the original story, and Jones removes the data from Johnny’s head in exchange for heroin which his former CIA employers had rendered him dependent on. In the original story, Johnny and Molly use the recovered data from years of courier jobs to live a life through blackmailing former clients.

In both short story and film version, Johnny is assisted by a group called “Lo Tek”. The Lo Tek in the film are the revolutionary cell to which Jones is a member. In the original short story Lo Tek are a group who espise technology, have modified their bodies to be partly dog, and live on the extreme periphery of society. The Lo Tek have doberman teeth grafted into their jaws, which causes them to salivate and both obscures and limits their speech.

In part six I introduce philosopher Patricia MacCormack, critique of horror author H.P. Lovecraft. MacCormack argues that “connectivity to the unlike is that defines Lovecraftian entities” (MacCormack, 2016). MacCormack draws a parallel between Lovecraft’s work and the figure of “mucous” in the writing of feminist psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray and I recount the former’s quotation of the latter; “Already constructed language does not speak of the mucous, the mucous remains a remainder. Producer of delirium, of dereliction, of wounds, sometimes of exhaustion” (Irigaray, 2017). MacCormack sees Irigaray’s “remainder” in the hybrid creatures of lovecraft. The human and the non-human, the assemblages which not only resist being caught with their own name, but damage the very authority of naming at all. MacCormack also observes that in Lovecraft’s stories “his protagonists grapple not with monsters, but with the very way they feel about the relations themselves” (MacCormack, 2016), that they are overwhelmed instability of elements which refuse to conform to order and separation.

The final part of presentation is part six, continues the use of Irigaray’s mucosal immanence and transcendence through another fictional encounter between the human and non-human. This part summarises philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s analysis of author Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H” (Lispector, 2012).

The protagonist, G.H. has a series of encounters which result in the threshold limits which define their self, falling away. The most visceral of these is the encounter with a cockroach. The realisation that this creature has “perpetuated in stillness” for “350 million years” collapses G.H.’s sense of time (Braidotti, 1994). She crushes the insect and considers the white substance oozing from its body. “The relentless materiality” of this collapsing not only the border of this named thing, but all borders (Braidotti, 1994). “It simply lives on”. G.H. swallows the cockroach. “She turns into a portion of living matter” (Braidotti, 1994).

Agarwal, A. K. (2017). The ‘Milwaukee protocol’ (MP) hope does not succeeds for rabies victim. Medical Journal of Dr. D.Y. Patil University, 10(2), 184. https://doi.org/10.4103/0975-2870.202098

Braidotti, R. (1994). Of Bugs and Women: Irigaray and Deleuze on the Becoming-Woman. In C. Burke, N. Shor, & M. Whitford (Eds.), Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, New York.

Erickson, R. (2013). The Evil One [CD]. Retrieved from https://www.discogs.com/Roky-Erickson-And-The-Aliens-The-Evil-One/release/2378383

Gibson, W. (1995). Burning chrome: And other stories. London: HarperCollins.

Healey. (2014, May 1). No Rabies Treatment After All: Failure of the Milwaukee Protocol. Retrieved 24 July 2017, from The Pandora Report website: https://pandorareport.org/2014/05/01/no-rabies-treatment-after-all-failure-of-the-milwaukee-protocol/

Irigaray, L. (2017). To Speak is Never Neutral. Retrieved from https://nls.ldls.org.uk/welcome.html?ark:/81055/vdc_100049157992.0x000001

King, S. (2010). On writing: A memoir of the craft. New York: Scribner.

King, S. (2011). Cujo. London: Hodder.

Lispector, C. (2012). The passion according to G.H (I. Novey, Trans.). New York: New Directions.

Longo, R. (1995). Johnny Mnemonic. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113481/

MacCormack, P. (2016). Lovecaft’s Cosmic Ethics. In R. Campbell (Ed.), The Age of Lovecraft (pp. 199–214). Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1b9x1f3.15

Murphy, M., & Wasik, B. (2012, July 26). Undead: The Rabies Virus Remains a Medical Mystery. Retrieved 24 July 2017, from WIRED website: https://www.wired.com/2012/07/ff_rabies/

Teague, L. (1983). Cujo. Warner Bros.

That is the extent of my documentation of your report as given to me. I noted that there is no real conclusion drawn, but you had already fallen into unconsciousness, such is the effort of remembering the past, such is the effort of having a body in a great number of pieces, in the back of unmarked van, borne by rats and leaving a crime scene.

I will dare to speculate that there is no conclusion in your account of the presentation, because you did not offer any conclusion in the presentation itself in 2017. It would be inappropriate I feel for me here in 2019 to write for a you a conclusion for 2017.

Instead, as handler, I can offer a something to your report as a whole.

There are a number of points of value in the presentation which you recount. Firstly there are partially formed ideas about systems being overloaded, or behaving in ways other than their former, more stable states. There are also some partially formed ideas about the motif of the head or brain, which include the the head or brain functioning like a machine, or not functioning at all. These ideas are to degrees developed in your later work in a clearer manner, or at least in a less tentative manner.

There is a one point of particular value here, which is the justification for retaining the account of this presentation, and that is the use of use of textual research in the manner of art practice. Specifically, you placed a number of things which you were unable to fully define, in proximity to each other to see what happened at their points of contact with one another. If we consider the presentation being recounted not as the delivery of research, but as the demonstration of a method, then it shows the beginning of a thread. This thread is the part of this PhD which is is concerned with how firstly objects of research can be selected for conceptual, affective, aesthetic or other reasons, or for combinations of these, without these reasons being fully resolved. Secondarly, this thread is concerned how these groupings of selected things, which in later reports you the agent have articulated as Desire Piles, can be employed through their grouping as a method of creative research. The contents of the Desire Pile are not fully definable, and the very aim of the Desire Pile is to allow undefinable things to be worked with, but for the purposes here the Desire Pile of this presentation could be said to include the following:

The divergences between two works of speculative fiction and their cinematic adaptations.

The idea of the dog, or dogs as a symbol, as a something we recognise but is still “other”, as a particular arrangement of affects, habits, and functions.

The idea of something “other” put inside the brain, whether data, virus, or drug.

The idea of the brain, and/or perception, being affected without being able to articulate this.

In this presentation, the things which the above sentences inadequately describe are put in proximity with one another. They do not resolve into something singular, there and more to the point presentation does not attempt to resolve them, but lets differences as much as similarities resonate. This proximity is articulated by author Adrian Rifkin as the methodological use of “parataxis”. Rifkin’s paratasis as method involves taking ”tiny units of theory” and “allowing of the configurations of these materials to lie alongside materials so that one begins to make unexpected kinds of readings of or listenings to those materials” (Rifkin, 2003). As Rifkin writes, parataxis as method creates “new kinds of objects of attention” (Rifkin, 2003). Agent, the parataxis which you deploy in your presentation is the creation of objects of attention across and between the elements of the Desire Pile. Your presentation was not such much the delivery of research, as the provocation (to the audience, but most usefully, to yourself) for new ways of reading the contents of the desire pile, and therefore an act of research. For further exploration of the potential of parataxis see artist Linda Stupart’s doctorate thesis “Becoming Object: Positioning a Feminist Art Practice” (Stupart, 2017).

Rifkin, A. (2003). Inventing Recollection. In P. Bowman (Ed.), Interrogating cultural studies: Theory, politics, and practice (pp. 101–124). London ; Sterling, Va: Pluto Press.

Stupart, L. (2017). Becoming Object: Positioning a Feminist Art Practice (Doctoral, Goldsmiths, University of London). Retrieved from http://research.gold.ac.uk/20117/

#art practice #Art Research #william gibson #stephen king #cujo #johnny mnemonic #linda stupart #adrian rifkin #parataxis #rabies #dogs #horror #science #patricia maccormack #rosi braidotti

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slaaneshfic · 5 years

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This is the greatest thing I've ever seen

“M’aiq does not like these accusations being thrown at him.”

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slaaneshfic · 5 years

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Dean Kenning, Social Body Mind Map

I just finished reading and making notes on (using the Digestion System I employ to get around my badly limited memory, which is i think detailed in an earlier post) a paper shared with me by the artist and lecturer Dean Kenning. I’ve known Dean’s work for a while, we’ve been on panels and in exhibitions together going back 5 years or so, but this is the first time I’ve been able to got through a text to understand this system which he uses in teaching. I’m going to attempt to summarize it briefly here, and then talk about what happened when I tried the system myself.

Dean sets up the context for the workshop against increasing pressures in the UK on art education. The system of education in this country is primarily based around learning, recalling, and appling pre-existing methods and facts on demand, to satisfy predetermined outcomes. This is a problem because it is both incompatible with learning art, but also therefor discounts art and the definition of “thinking” it embodies. The thinking in art is generative, rather than prescriptive. There are ideological reasons for this which Dean doesn't go into but which should be fairly obvious in relation to school as site of labour discipline and enforcer of pre existing hierarchies of thought and power.

The “Social Body Mind Map” is method of understanding an artwork in particular, and art making in general as not arising from either a pre established set of ideas, or from an inscrutable and unknowable mystical self. It does this through the use of “the diagram” which i will return to, but first the aim of the workshop which this system is delivered to students by is characterised within its name, and the pairings of the four words. The “Social Body” reminds us that this is primarily about understanding self not as an autonomous individual but as the expression of multiple flows through one’s body connecting to things outside of it over time. The “self” (and Dead draws from Deleuze here) is better understood as an area where possibilities and influences converge. I wont go into more detail than that, as explaining this is in part what the workshop does. the second pairing is “Body Mind” and this emphasises that the thinking is something we do with our bodies rather than in some abstracted upper hierarchy. In fact Dean proposes the SBMM is a process of thinking through a diagram. Finally the paring “Mind Map” is a recognisable one to most students and is there to add a recognisable position to begin from. Dean’s mind map is not the same as the spider diagrams we might learn in school though for an important reason. Normally the mind map begins with a clear central position, the subject being “brain stormed”. Dean rightly points out that this standard method generally results in the reinforcement of existing structures, it favours cliches especially at first. Dean’s mind map will change this, by having the central position occupied by a partially unknown quantity. This unknown quantity will be “the art work”, which can be a completed, in progress or future one. Dean’s aim for this is as already stated to allow art works to be understood not as the reflection of some static self but as "generative of a subject”. The aim is also to articulate the “thinking” involved in art which is also generative. Finally, in order to achieve the latter, the workshop uses the former to “alienate the student from their work”, to make the artwork strange and not simply a “reflection” and therefore grant them agency in the process of production of thought.

Workshop stage 1

the workshop begins by prepping the participants to think of where an artwork arises from other than just as a reflection of some unknowable constant self. Dean draws up a series of headings under which as a group they list the things which answer broadly the question “that facilitated this artwork coming to be?” the headings are

Capacities (things like: perception, imagination, strength, emotion etc)

Motivations (things like: Will, pleasure, boredom, instruction, deadlines)

Resources (things like: materials, tools, support from teacher, friends etc)

Organisations (things like: school, galleries, manufacturers, government etc)

So thinking about the production of the artwork moves from “I used my imagination” alone, to a series of statements such as “i used perception of the feeling of clay to see what forms it could hold without collapsing” and “The government set a syllabus which means is followed by my teacher who sets the deadline of two weeks to produce this artwork” and so on.

workshop stage 2

Dean then leads and example mind map, having already primed the students to think about their work in terms of these networks. the mind map begins with a “?” in its centre, and Dean tracks the influences which converge in this central point which is procedurally redrawn as “the artwork”.

Students then do their own, on their own, drawing on large paper this network. of factors which caused this artwork to be. Dean has some good examples of how a student, whos central image the wardrobe grew a giant toe in the drawing. The toe is in fact the act of student stubbing their own toe against the wardrobe in the dark which has identified as a factor in why they were drawn to make an artwork about it.

Dean’s recounting of conversations with students show that this workshop serves to uncover unknown or disregarded factors in the production of artworks. its described as “digging up hidden roots”. I think this is really important, I very much remember the feeling of art production as something “mysterious” in the sense that it was obscure. Following that pop cultural ciche of art just arising from some internal genius, that art was a reflection of the character or soul of the person making it. The process of production of ideas was not something I ever saw discussed in any art school I studied in including at Masters level. I understood in the second year of my MA that emotions where important, specifically that I could not make work when anxious, and I also developed rules around when during its cycle of development/production/reflection I would analyse a work (I’m currently deliberately breaking this rule, having adhered to it for over 10 years, specifically so I can understand it better, but thats another post)

Finally what also of note, is the manner in which the capacities/motivations/resources/organisations are connected to the alienated central artwork in the diagram also become important. As with everything in Dean’s system, there’s no prescribed way to do it, but in drawing out a line as a big toe, or casually decided as in mine to draw “fear” as the contents of a specimen jar this opens up further layers of reflection. This is a process of achieving that art teacher mantra of “letting go”. How you draw the limbs or tentacles becomes important without being anxiety provoking up front.

Final final note, as stated all of the system is adaptable and emergent. The lists of capacities etc as just an example, and they are generated with the group including the potential for entirely new categories. I copied Deans example list into my notebook above, and used both that and further examples as and when i thought of them .

My SBMM for “Ok, Welcome to the black parade”

OWTTBP is an artwork I started, and then deliberately let stall and left incomplete a couple of weeks ago because I wanted to write about the process of making it (even though this breaks a rule I’ve long followed, which is to not take apart works in progress, but to only analyse my works when there is at least one completed work between them and what I am working on now, my “one work buffer” rule). Reading Dean’s model for SBMM seemed like a perfect opportunity to work on this Reanimator corpse that I had left partially assembled, and also understand the process Dean is talking about better through employing it.

[Briefly, the “artwork” as it stands is a short science fiction story, written to an arbitrary formal constraint of 5 line paragraphs for the majority of the text. There are two points where this 5 line pattern deviates. firstly there is a section where the paragraphs all begin “You wake up...” for 7 paragraphs (there are around 50 of the 5 line paragraphs, paras 31-37 begin with “you wake up”. Secondly, after the narrative in the 5 line paras ends, there is an epilogue, which loosely sticks to 2 line paras, and has a different tone of voice. The artwork so far exists as this narrative, and a structure whereby I want something to happen between each of those 5 line parars (excluding the block which begin “you wake up”, which are back to back, in the manner of the scenes of strobing in and out of consciousness we are familiar with in cinema) which pulls the audience out from the narrative into an unstable space. Likewise there will be unstable space between the paras of the epilogue, but where I understand the former unstable space to be disordered but partly intelligible, the space between the epilogue paragraphs should be utterly ahuman.]

Above in pink is a diagram I had already developed (there is another one in the post before this) on my own to try and understand the art work I had made. the Diagram using SBMM is right at the top of this post, drawn by hand in my notebook. What became apparent when drawing is that the diagram was going to be much larger than i had space for. There are threads which I felt dissatisfied with because i knew there was so much more detail which had been left out due to the “resolution” I was working at. For example, the first thread I drew was the “Verbal tic” head at the 12 o’clock position in the diagram. I have verbal tics which occur mostly when I am stressed and/or struggling to manage my intrusive thoughts. It feels like trying to tap alt-f4 with my brain or shake and etch-a-sketch. What I happen to mutter in the form of these tics goes through phases and for whatever reason, I had been muttering “Ok, welcome to the black parade” for a few weeks at the point when I decided to write a new story, and this become the image I began with, a character repeatedly muttering a statement about a My Chemical Romance song (which I must admit, at the time, I hadn’t even knowingly heard, i just knew the name).

My point is, that Verbal tic head could itself have expanded with multiple growths outward which followed the trains of why I came to be muttering that, how I had come into contact with the phrase, how I had experience in my practice of taking an arbitrary starting point to jump start a work, how I like the Becketian aspect of my tics which make language alien, how I like the repetition, how they connect in both directions of causality to anxiety (they are caused by stress, but they also draw attention to me) and so on and so on.

In closing, I think SBMM is a fantastic system, and its refreshing to try someone else’s system of diagrammatics, rather than my own which is utterly organic and chaotic (see pink diagrams, and the monkey-goth drawing at the end of this post which I drew to write the “ok, welcome to the black parade” narrative from). I’m currently prepping material to write the section of my thesis which is about diagrams, and Dean’s system is going to be in there, especially as it serves a very good bridge between the chaotic-code-switch which i employ for practice and the much more structure systems I use for written research such as the Digestion System.

#art #dean kenning #deleuze #diagrams #phd #research #drawing #science fiction #animals #horror #art research #art practice #uma breakdown

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slaaneshfic · 5 years

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#phd #horror #irigaray #kristeva #abject #mucous #art

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slaaneshfic · 5 years

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youtube

I did a talk about divination/diagrams and “making” as a way of opening up rather than resolving a work for a meetup seminar thing on “making” at Newcastle University. There was only 6 mins to do the whole thing, and the ppl before me had basically just done a visual CV so it was a pretty tricky thing. I’m going to work on this more, I see this approach to art practice as aligned with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “Desiring production” from Anti-oedipus. The intent is not to resolve narratives, or resolve relationships between artist/collaborator/audience/outsider/objects/art but to create a space where everyone present is receptive to speculating on potential avenues (which requires consent, desire, confidence, willingness) where things might go, but also *accepting that a single resolution isn’t going to happen*. So desire is a thing which creates more design, rather than the Freudian desire which is a lack which needs to be filled. I dunno man.

#Deleuze #Guattari #art #sculpture #performance #divination #tarot #rpg #dungeons and dragons #dogs #drawings #diagrams

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slaaneshfic · 5 years

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“There is no reason for you to live: gendered trauma and ecstasy in ‘No World Dreamers, Sticky Zeitgeist episode 2: Aperitif (conference notes)

This is my text/notes for my presentation at the "beyond the console" conference at London South Bank university / v&a the other week. I've not edited this into a proper essay format because it's already going to be re-edited into part of a thesis chapter in the next month.

“There is no reason for you to live: gendered trauma and ecstasy in ‘No World Dreamers, Sticky Zeitgeist episode 2: Aperitif’

[introduce self and position as artists, researcher and phd candidate in art practice, working primarily with post-structuralist feminism, horror, and play.]

This paper is built on a structure which I hope reflects and supplements the material it is concerned with.

[Note that it is brutally chopped out from a thesis chapter primarily about Cixous, whos work shadows the whole text but who only appears briefly as a sort of cameo towards the end. As such there is a large section about her relation to queerness, her use of the category “woman” as a post-structural rather than essentialist term, and the relation of these of these to my own identity as genderqueer. I just want to state at the start, to reassure against the obvious horror of a masc presenting person on stage lecturing on such a huge figure of feminist art that I approach this with the utmost love and care for her work.]

First I need to establish the position from which I am writing it, which is that the video game I am about is address is a work of art. There are many other ways to approach video games; as products, as recreational activities, as social of historical objects. However approaching it as a work of art not only only feels most comfortable for me as an artist and researcher of art practice, but it both reflects the increased art context in which the maker’s work is presented and also allows for a ways of looking at the work which is particular to art.

In a 2001 journal chapter entitled “The Aesthetics of Affect, Thinking art beyond representation” the artist and lecturer Simon O’Sullivan calls for a way of thinking about and reading art works which centre’s their aesthetic and affective qualities, that which grants them an “apartness” from other objects (O’Sullivan, 2001). O’Sullivan draws initially from the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, and the journal chapter begins with a quote from the later which ends with the following statement :

“But the work is not merely a cultural object, although it is that too. It harbours within it an excess, a rapture, a potential of associations that overflows all the determinations of its “reception” and “production” (Lyotard, 1991).

This images of “rapture” and “excess” will return throughout my writing here, particularly in regards the feminists and queer philosophers I will be primarily drawing from, and again because such things are in my view central to the game I am going to talk about. However before all of this I wish to make clear my position which echoes O’Sullivan’s call for “Art history as a kind of creative writing” (O’Sullivan, 2001). I will attempt to avoid where possible a hermeneutic analysis of the game where it becomes only a expression of social production to be reduced to an ‘explanation’, instead I want to place this “bundle of affects” (O’Sullivan, 2001) alongside concepts and ideas, with different intents and aims, and see what happens in between. Paraphrasing writer AB Silvera in “Radical Transfeminism Zine”, “Multiplicity of strats guys, you cant carry every team with a Hanzo, sometimes you gotta use D.vas Ult to break a choke point” (Silvera, 2017).

The work of art can now be introduced by its name, which is “No World Dreamers. Sticky Zeitgeist. Episode 2: Aperitif” (Aperitif), the second in a series of collaborative works by coders, artists, musicians, writers Porpentine Charity Heartscape and Rook (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). in the words of one of its makers Aperitif “combines top-down RPG, Shmup, visual novel and medical sim” (Hayes, 2018). In playing the game, the player alternately takes control of and interacts with four principal characters. These characters include “Ever. The Loser”, and “Brava. The Leader” who are broadly humanoid with cat/fox/deeresque features including enlarged ears. There is also “Chalcedony. The Big Sister” and “Agate. The Little Sister” who are both “labor drones” who have been modified and “overclocked” almost beyond capacity in order to have some kind of consciousness. All four of these characters are employed by a large company called “Innocent” to recover salvage from a contaminated and overgrown former city referred to by the characters as “Swamp-Dot-Com”. The area’s contamination is connected to the presence of a mysterious object only referred to by this point in the series narative as “The artefact”. Another character that we see, and occasionally have control over is called “The Therapist” who is presented as a human size, anthropomorphic moth-like person. Finally, we also hear from an interact with “MOM”, the Innocent A.I., and possibly (though not via intelligible words) from the Artefact itself.

The episode prior to Aperitif was titled “No World Dreamers, Sticky Zeitgeist. Episode one: Hyperslime” (Hyperslime) and primarily serves to introduce the setting and characters, principally through the eyes of Ever, detailing her mental health and particularly anxiety (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). Episode one was concerned with our characters getting to work, passing various obstacles to achieve this including panic attacks and mandatory drug tests.

Picking up where Hyperslime ended, Aperitif is concerned with our characters beginning the job they are assigned, and their discussing the material and social relations within that environment, as well as portraying material effects these provoke. I would like to consider this through philosopher Eugene Thacker’s definition of the horror genre as “the space between”, and “passages between”, “I cannot see what I believe”, and “I cannot believe what I see” (Thacker, 2015). For our character’s, this field of uncertainty crops up frequently and extends at times out to include us the player. Early in the narrative, text from an unspecified character or voice sets this tone:

“Jeez how much blood do you have?

The Inside becomes the outside.

The world grasps hungrily at the swamp gate. Two voracious circuitries at war. the fever of skin grafts.

Four salvagers set out in search for debris” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018).

The context for this statement is not revealed until the end of the game, and the “who” that is speaking all of it remains ambiguous even then. Our player character proxies recount their memories and feelings about Swamp-Dot-Com in fragments as you explore it with them in turn.

It is important at this point to note that it is implied to degrees that some or all of Aperitif’s “four scavengers” are not cisgendered. This was first implied in Hyperslime, but I will stress that this is my interpretation of the game. It is never stated within the game’s text that any characters are trans, cis, non-binary, or what if any concept of gender exists in its setting. However in the sequel Aperitif, the characters gender identity contrasting to that one assigned to them by a social power is implied more strongly. This contrast is also expanded as their non-cis status is not just in relation to gender but in terms of crossing further boundaries to arrive at their identity.

Accessible in the game’s folder from the start, and later triggered by an on screen event is a pdf manual for Agate, the younger robot sister. The pdf presents as an official service manual for the original robot model which Agate belongs to, which has been subsequently annotated and edited by Agate herself and her sister after they are both upgraded to consciousness. Agate is implied to be transgender because her manual originally labels her a “[redacted] labor drone” and she herself has altered this to instead assign her the name “Agate, cool girl” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018).

The overlapping of transgender identity discourse and sentience of nonhuman or modified humans is not without precedent. In the article “Making and Getting Made: Towards a Cyborg Transfeminism” in Salvage, writer Solvi Goard argues that the “1995 anime version of Ghost In The Shell [offers] both the dream and the nightmare of trans politics”. Goard makes the case that “Cyborgs [...] are undoubtedly transgender [because] they choose and change their bodies based on what relationship they desire from that body” (Goard, 2017). In Ghost In The Shell, the cyborg cop protagonist Major Motoko Kusanagi begins to express doubts about her own existence through the course of the narrative which centres on hyper augmented bodies and brains and the limits of existence and identity (Oshii, 1995). Goard identifies this doubt, “the visceral confusion that comes about from knowing how you feel and experience your body, but having that experience jar so powerfully with what meaning other people and society give to it” as “one many trans people will recognise” (Goard, 2017).

The doubts and confusions over self expressed by the characters in Aperitif are different to those of Major Kusanagi. Chalcedony expresses fear and regret that like her, she sister Agate was “overclocked” and modified to have sentience and that “she would pay for it with every moment of her life” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). For Chalcedony, much of her anxiety is around her and her sister being unable to be safe, to rest, to have energy, to have “a room to hide in” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). While Agate seems exhausted by the demands of her body run beyond its intended capacity, and at the newness of the world after their escape which is both exciting and terrifying in turns. (The pdf robot manual states that the overclocking can lead to violent failure of the unit’s heart, and that these are advised to be bought in bulk. This whole section in the manual has been all but obliterated by Chalcedony with a note to tell her younger sister not to read it [this should be a footnote, but i dont have the ability to insert footnotes on the tablet I’m using]).

Both the robots experiences undoubtably jar with “what meaning other people and society give” them (Goard, 2017) as they are literally on the run from that authority, but this is joined by the jarring of the body itself not functioning as they need it too. The culmination of this will be the medical sim section of the game where we play as Chalcedony attempting to repair her sister’s overworked organs, potentially watching Agate repeatedly die in the process. What seems to most concern Chalcedony at least is this perpetual state of exhausted, unstable, borderline survival. She asks herself “what if it was forever. What if nothing changed, and we kept as we were. Unable to perfectly live or die” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). This same anxiety about not escaping is echoed shortly after by Ever when she states that she “and Brava always said we’d be the ones to make it out. We wouldn’t be the losers stuck in this nowhere shithole” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). Constructing improvised temporary solutions to keep going through trauma and awareness of their imminent potential failure is common to most of the characters in Aperitif, if not the entire universe they inhabit.

Characters within the game might lament the possibility of their being caught in limbo, but our encounter with the work of art called Aperitif is one of approaching something always in flux and always pointing to incomplete or decaying possibilities. Video games broadly of the sort Aperitif belongs to often present the player with avenues which may be explored or ignored. In this instance, there might be dialogue options we do not choose, or we might miss sections of the map, and not trigger every piece of narrative description text. This is one potential way in which we experience this game as never fully resolving, as an altering space. Knowing that you could have told Agate “We are sisters and our fate is bound together” but instead you told her “I’m doing for you what no one did for me” when asked why you as Chalcedony keep looking after her means the game does not quite resolve into a fixed form (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). You might speculate on what would have happened in game if you took the other path, and your emotional response to the game might have been different also. This however could be said of most games of this broad type, and that all but the completist who must replay every possibile forked path experiences such a game as fluid in this way. However there is another instance of alterability in the experience of encountering Aperitif which melds with the former This instance is less common, and I would argue makes Aperitif a richer and more complex experience for its lack of solidifying resolution.

When playing Aperitif we are never given full, authoritative, and non conflicting information on anything we encounter. We experience much of the game as a mediation of a visual landscape which we interact with, and our proxy character’s interior monologues on this landscape, its history, its impacts. Each character has a different response to this space and the first half of the game consists of exploring the same map, with the same triggers for these monologues with each character offering a different association. A clearing with a pool triggers the text for Ever “this is where I hide”, for Brava the description is “I think this is where Ever goes to whack off”, and for Chalcedony it is simply “small water” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). Across these multiple descriptions is presented a world that resists one single interpretation, but beyond this, the specific writing that the game employs is frequently one which is open, personal, multiple and incomplete. We experience the game therefor as a series of fragments, and these fragments feel less like they were crafted to convey one meaning than as they were pulled together and placed somewhere for them to form new associations with whatever text came before them and whatever the audience had already in mind. In a published interview, the writer Kathy Acker who practice involved cut ups and often plagiarized re-edits was asked about control in their work and gave the following response.

“When you write are you controlling a text? When you’re really writing you’re not, you’re fucking with it” (Acker & Lotringer, 1991).

Text in Aperitif feels extremely fucked with, and invites the player to fuck with it further. The ruined signposts which litter Swamp-dot-com contain easy to cite examples of such fucked with text. Approaching these signs with a controlled character triggers an onscreen text. Some sign-triggered-text describes its context in the manner of “The sign says, Feeling depressed? This is the only thing it says” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). Other sign-triggered-text such as “watch out for stuff” lack the initial contextual statement leaving available the possibility that this is something else other than what the sign reads (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). What could be read simply as inconsistency of form becomes yet another way in which the experience of this work of art invites us to embrace uncertainty. The narrative content of these signs re-enforces this. As a player there is real joy to be found in uncertain fragmented warnings and questions, which leave us plugging in whatever context we have to hand to try and make sense of. The fucked with text triggered by bringing a character near to one of these signs (or not, if you happen to miss them) sits very much within that definition of the horror genre from Thacker, as well as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s broad definition of “Queer” as existing in “lapses and excesses of meaning” (Sedgwick, 2004). They elicit both the disbelief that what we read is correct and the absence of that which would fully qualify and resolve them.

It would incorrect to suggest that there isn’t an overall linear narrative to Aperitif, but that narrative is not responsible for the only, or dominant experience of encountering it. That encounter, is one of being hit with a splattering of different affects, each eliciting thoughts and associations and creative possibilities for us as collaborator rather than mere musculature for that narrative skelton. O’Sullivan describes the affective encounter with art as “self overcoming”, to be immersed in our encounter to the point where our self, that certainly of the “I” becomes lost. The splattering of affects in Aperitif as we jump from witnessing character struggle to articulate their trauma and love, to the game on various levels presenting us with an incomplete or decaying experience of an incomplete or decaying world strongly provokes such self overcoming. This isn’t the unrelenting insistence that we forget our human body and commit to the protagonist of a narrative, supporting their every decision and telegraphed emotions backed up with orchestral swells, rather instead the game seduces us into active collaboration with never claims to be certain, and to be fine with this.

Philosopher and writer Helene Cixous in her text “The Laugh of The Medusa” called for women to write “Ecriture Feminine” (Cixous, 1976). Such “women’s writing” presents an alternative of art, language, and being, distinct from the phalogocentric order which supports its power through reason. I believe that Aperitif embodies much of what Cixous called for, through its “intoxicating, unappeasable search for love” (Cixous, 1976).

Of relevance to a game series that began with a character “getting high and whacking off”, the Ectriture Feminine in “The Laugh of The Medusa” is frequently described in terms of masturbation. [Note about queerness and concept of “Woman” in Cixous] Principally this association is about the creation nof desire, of something that is erogenous at different territories and speeds. This is not the monomyth of phallocentricity, the seminal work where writing is built like a tower, but a multiplicity of queer desires that are not just the one dull drive to completion. Cixous elaborates on this with the following;

“Heterogeneous, yes, for her joyous benefit she is erogenous; she is the erotogeneity of the heterogeneous; airborn swimmer, in flight, she does not cling to herself; she is dispersible, prodigious, stunning, delirious and capable of others of the other woman that she will be, of the other woman she isn't, of him of you” (Cixous, 1976).

This is writing that self overcomes. The uncertainty of horror is now joyous delirium, yet the circumstances have not changed only our ethical position to them. Our encounter with Aperitif mirrors the loss of self, overwhelming affects, and improvised collaboration with an unstable world which its characters experience. However for us at least, this is not crashing trauma, but what O’Sullivan identifies in art as an exploration of the “possibilities of being, of becoming in the world” (O’Sullivan, 2001).

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slaaneshfic · 5 years

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PhD portfolio for annual progression, end of year 2

In the interest of completeness, and because it might be useful for others to see what i submitted, here’s my portfolio doc. most of the work in here is already in this tumblr.

Note:

Work is is presented in reverse chronological order starting from most recent work displayed to public.

This document should be understood as comprised of low resolution references to material which will be assembled as part of the final output of this PhD.

“The woodlands outside the finishing plant”

2018

Ahuman horror story using a fixed writing form. One title plus ten paragraphs, each 11 lines long and alternating between two narrators, one singular one plural. This story is used both as text in its own right, and as an element of a performance which will explore its order/disorder relationship.

Link https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-fPxwaAbjFdRfsbhF6A06a4W7aWX5yJLGbTlKmPZmCU/edit?usp=sharing

“Dragon Scene”

drawing 2018

Mixed media drawing on Ahuman relations made for display on social media.

“Mountain Web”

2018

Watercolour drawing on Ahuman relations made for social media.

“Ghost Crew”

2018

Digital drawing on Ahuman relations, made for display on social media.

“Crystal Feeding”

2018

Digital drawing as diagram of Ahuman relations

“Literally what it was like on my MA”

2018

An unstable role playing game / science fiction set in an art school.

Link

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rVOrWhnsUwcyBBJ6vPFg1tGn1tB8Ta1YLDrgOeZ1XRo/edit?usp=sharing

“The horse I made”

2018

Digital drawing made as diagram to structure the game “Literally what it was like on my MA” and then be to displayed on social media.

“Smeared into the Environment”

2018

Conference paper on the practice of Ahuman art.

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdMpaB_SvBY

“Farmer 9”

2018

Rural horror / speculative fiction concerned with the borders of the conventions of each genre. Commissioned for Alembic.

Link

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R0S6kKo6628nlBWQ-JvUVgFuilv2VoKs/view?usp=sharing

“The Revolutionary Praxis of Urban Galls”

2018

Conference paper / performance both making a theoretical argument for an Ahuman reading of the horror trope of organic growths in urban spaces and destabilisation of the authority of academic speaker. Streamed live over social media and then archived with slide show superimposed.

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPvsg0o5kCY

“TFW: The Formless Wastes 2”

2018

Video work made using games design software. An Ahuman horror/detective story built as crossover fanfiction between the established Warhammer and Resident Evil universes.

Link

https://youtu.be/o_5ud6IoVd8

“Frolic in Brine”

2018

A performance explores the “use” of horror to examine philosophy and art through collapse of the lecture form.

Link

https://youtu.be/Q-3MUvhCJfk

“Axpansion”

2018

Drawing / diagram / role playing game rule set / horror fiction.

Link

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1r39XPiaq8-sknjjhtqdD5SBPj33JmWE-Ofhrx8clva8/edit?usp=sharing

“The Keeper’s Diary (radio play version)”

2017

The Keeper’s Diary is a work of Ahuman fanfiction which follows a strict formal structure (all original words must be used in the same order. Original diary entries must be maintained) to expand and subvert a small piece of narrative text from the 1997 survival horror video game, Resident Evil. The Keeper’s Diary has previously been used as part of an improvisational script in the performances “TFW: The Formless Wastes” and “Creature of Havok”. It takes the form as a series of diary entries as an animal handler describes their experience of ceasing to be human. This audio version is performed in my dogs’ bed.

Link

https://www.mixcloud.com/quanticaonline/heretics-12-by-diana-policarpo-guest-mix-by-alison-ballance-alice-rekab-171017/

“The Inhuman Ecstasy of Toxic Waste”

2017

An internet based work consisting of a video and scrolling script for a lecture. Initially made for YouTube using its then about to be removed annotation feature (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXrQ_YJ2444) in May 2017, later shown as a video installation with printed script at “Waste: A Symposium”, Birkbeck College, London in September 2017 (https://www.facebook.com/events/1662364594071610)

And finally adapted again for the online platform Worm in December 2017 (http://www.wormrefuse.org/theinhumanecstacyoftoxicwaste)

“TFW: The Formless Wastes”

2017

Performance and installation using role playing game mechanics and Resident Evil fanfiction to articulate Ahuman desire.

A partial audio recording of the performance is available here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx-SpH-DDdI4bXE5MFdRX3hwbG8/view?usp=sharing

“The Formless Wastes”

2017

Digital drawing used as diagram to develop “TFW: The Formless Wastes” performance and for display on social media.

“Creature of Havok”

2017

Performance and installation using role playing game mechanics and Resident Evil fanfiction to articulate Ahuman desire.

“Refu”

2017

Interactive speculative horror fiction written in the “Twine” coding language and hosted online to accompany “Creature of Havok”

Link

http://philome.la/RetchinBtchFace/refu/play

“Dog-Tech 1”

2017

Performance consisting of a slide show of drawings and lecture on dogs, rabies, horror and science fiction.

Link

https://youtu.be/MwUz8mrigiQ