Terminal: a miracle play with popular music from the end of the world

Terminal: A Miracle Play with Popular Music from the End of the World is a film and live performance project exploring the politics of post-apocalyptic fiction. A theatrical staging of a morality play for end times and future folk music, it recasts eschatology, as a foundational myth for a future society. Post-apocalyptic writing and cinema are grounded in an ethos of survivalism. Invoking Rousseau’s state of nature, or time before government, these fictions propose violent scenarios in which nuclear holocaust, environmental catastrophe and other disasters generate an individualistic politics of pure pragmatism, negating the possibility of democratic deliberation. Terminal narrates this familiar scenario, but at the same time questions its validity. The film, shot on black and white VHS at Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbarn in Cumbria, dramatises a series of conversations between future-historical archetypes about the needs and pressures of the situation in which they find themselves at the end of the world. The performers then gather to play worshipful songs about acid rain, radiation sickness and eating the dog, using a mix of conventional, obscure and makeshift instruments In the tradition of books such as Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker and Arthur M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Liebowitz, Terminal imagines artistic expression and new folk traditions for a world to come after the apocalypse. If, as Slavoj Žižek would have it, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to think of the end of capitalism, the project juxtaposes these two endpoints to test out how alternative scenarios might emerge from the collaborative practice of making theatre and music against a setting of social collapse.

File Transfer Protocol

The discourse surrounding the virtual has moved away from the utopian thinking accompanying the rise of the Internet in the 1990s. The Cyber-gurus of the last decades promised a technotopia removed from materiality and the confines of the flesh and the built environment, a liberation from old institutions and power structures. But since then, the virtual has grown into a distinct yet related sphere of cultural and political production that both parallels and occasionally flows over into the old world of material objects. The strict dichotomy of matter and digital purity has been replaced more recently with a more complex model where both the world of stuff and the world of knowledge support, resist and at the same time contain each other. Online social networks amplify and extend existing ones; other cultural interfaces like youtube have not replaced the communal experience of watching moving images in a semi-public space (the cinema) or the semi-private space (the family living room). Rather the experience of viewing is very much about sharing and communicating, offering interpretations and comments. Many of the web’s strongest entities (Amazon, eBay, Gumtree etc.) sit exactly at this juncture of applying tools taken from the knowledge management industry to organize the chaos of the material world along (post-)Fordist rationality. Since the early 1990s there have been many artistic and curatorial attempts to use the Internet as a platform of producing and exhibiting art, but a lot of these were reluctant to let go of the fantasy of digital freedom. Storage Room collapses the binary opposition of real and virtual space by using online data storage as a conduit for IRL art production. The artworks here will not be available for viewing online in a 'screen' environment but only as part of a downloadable package with the intention that the exhibition could be displayed (in a physical space) by any interested party and realised as ambitiously or minimally as the downloader wishes, based on their means. The artists will therefore also supply a set of instructions for the physical installation of the work alongside the digital files. In response to this curatorial initiative, File Transfer Protocol invites seven UK based artists to produce digital art for a physical environment, addressing the intersection between the virtual and the material. The files range from sound, video, digital prints and net art, blueprints for an action to take place, something to be made, a conceptual text piece, etc. About the works and artists: Polly Fibre is the pseudonym of London-based artist Christine Ellison. Ellison creates live music using domestic devices such as sewing machines, irons and slide projectors. Her costumes and stage sets propose a physical manifestation of the virtual space that is created inside software like Photoshop. For this exhibition, Polly Fibre invites the audience to create a musical composition using a pair of amplified scissors and a turntable. http://www.pollyfibre.com John Russell, a founding member of 1990s art group Bank, is an artist, curator and writer who explores in his work the contemporary political conditions of the work of art. In his digital print, Russell collages together visual representations of abstract philosophical ideas and transforms them into a post apocalyptic landscape that is complex and banal at the same time. www.john-russell.org The work of Bristol based artist Jem Nobel opens up a dialogue between the contemporary and the legacy of 20th century conceptual art around questions of collectivism and participation, authorship and individualism. His print SPACE concretizes the representation of the most common piece of Unicode: the vacant space between words. In this way, the gap itself turns from invisible cipher to sign. www.jemnoble.com Annabel Frearson is rewriting Mary Shelley's Frankenstein using all and only the words from the original text. Frankenstein 2, or the Monster of Main Stream, is read in parts by different performers, embodying the psychotic character of the protagonist, a mongrel hybrid of used language. www.annabelfrearson.com Darren Banks uses fragments of effect laden Holywood films to create an impossible space. The fictitious parts don't add up to a convincing material reality, leaving the viewer with a failed amalgamation of simulations of sophisticated technologies. www.darrenbanks.co.uk FIELDCLUB is collaboration between artist Paul Chaney and researcher Kenna Hernly. Chaney and Hernly developed together a project that critically examines various proposals for the management of sustainable ecological systems. Their FIELDMACHINE invites the public to design an ideal agricultural field. By playing with different types of crops that are found in the south west of England, it is possible for the user, for example, to create a balanced, but protein poor, diet or to simply decide to 'get rid' of half the population. The meeting point of the Platonic field and it physical consequences, generates a geometric abstraction that investigates the relationship between modernist utopianism and contemporary actuality. www.fieldclub.co.uk Pil and Galia Kollectiv, who have also curated the exhibition are London-based artists and run the xero, kline & coma gallery. Here they present a dialogue between two computers. The conversation opens with a simple text book problem in business studies. But gradually the language, mimicking the application of game theory in the business sector, becomes more abstract. The two interlocutors become adversaries trapped forever in a competition without winners. www.kollectiv.co.uk

Collapse

Collapse was a visual performance installation presented at the Old Port of Melbourne in 2008. The audience travelled by boat across Port Phillip Bay to witness the performance begins at Sciencework’s Spotswood Jetty, where the audience travelled by ferry across the Port Phillip Bay to a remote location, where society has “collapsed”. The performance then becomes a walking tour around this new location, encountering and experiencing the world that Red Cabbage has created.

“At that point…the collapse of their morale, their will power and their patience was so abrupt that they felt they would never be able to climb back out of their hole…Hence, floundering halfway between the abyss and the peak, they drifted rather than lived, given up to aimless days and sterile memories, wandering shadows who could have only found strength by resigning themselves to taking root in the soil of their distress.”- Albert Camus The Plague

Floundering halfway between the abyss and the peak…exist those that have not yet fallen…in a state of recurring collapse. The girl in the yellow dress, the man in the grey suit, the old man in the brown pants, the woman in the blue shirt and the man in the red hat are suspected carriers of the white sickness. They have been removed from their homes to the edge of the city for standard assessment. Here they meet the others, processed…waiting…isolated. By boat…they travel across the bay to their final destination. Not another Hollywood style apocalyptic melodrama in which our heroes find grace, hope and redemption in the utter destruction of modern civilization…in the collapse of lived time the ruins of humanity are exposed as already existent…the limits of our ability to be graceful were discovered long ago…the trauma of the end of time a given…the plague is now.

It came to pass

Peter Booth`s apocalyptic Burning City and Head stemmed from wartime experiences in Britain. Employing Friedrich`s Wanderer in the Sea of Fog as a portent of Germany`s imperialism, my painting collapses vision into nightmare, drawing in German artists Beuys and Rauch, caught up in a horrendous and inescapable legacy.

Dossier Chris Marker : the suffering image

Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image is a study of a late-modern chiasmus, impersonal-personal agency, as it comes to expression in the works of French artist and filmmaker, Chris Marker, as the dynamic interplay of political and subjective agency. As chiasmus, the complementary halves of this often-apocalyptic dynamis (a semi-catastrophic, temporal or historical force-field) also – arguably – secretly agree to meet, through the work of art, in the futural. Consistent with the classical figure of concordia discors, these irreducible warring aspects of life experience are, in fact, resolved in an atemporal and ahistorical moment that inhabits the work of art from its inception. This redemptive aspect in art is also the ultimate gesture of the artwork as “mask” or “screen” for forces that reside beyond the frame of the image or work, as its proverbial Other, or within the frame, as other to that Other. A topological “knot,” or ontological “problem,” it is this very conflict that animates all of Marker’s extensive works – filmic and otherwise.

Dreamweavers

Dreamweavers is a touring show Curated by Simon Gregg at the Gippsland Regional Gallery, touring Nationally from 2011 until April 2013.

The exhibition explores the contemporary preoccupation for the Fantastic through a range of national and international art practices, that are united by an enduring fascination with darkness and dark places. Dreamweavers is a multi-sensory experience that is more like entering another world than an art exhibition. It combines sculpture, digital media, photography and painting, in an intoxicating visual feast.

Dreamweavers features the work of six artists. James Gleeson (1915-2008) was Australia’s pre-eminent Surrealist, and one of the country’s most acclaimed twentieth century artists. In his work massive, heaving and largely unidentifiable forms meld with apocalyptic skies and earth in twisted biomorphic shapes.

What is a cinema? Death, closure and the database

This chapter explores the possible ontological questions and epistemological propositions that arise from detailed empirical research into cinema closures. Repeated pronouncements of the ‘Death of Cinema’ in the wake of technological, social and industrial change serve to reinforce the coincidence of ‘death’ with a type of ‘closure’. The evocation of a ‘crisis’ in the cinema is ordinarily articulated within the terms of specific cultural concerns around transience and transformation in the social experience of the cinema. However, rather than adding another chapter to the apocalyptic historiography of the cinema this paper proposes instead the constitutive importance of ‘closure’ as a critical tool for rethinking our defining assumptions about cinema(s). Specifically, the chapter will demonstrate how the conceptual granularity entailed in the development of a detailed database of venue openings and closings (the Cinema and Audiences in Australia Project database) can in turn lead to a fundamental reconsideration of the ontology of the cinema itself.

The War Memoirs: Some origins of the thought of W.R. Bion

The work of W. R. Bion changed the shape of psychoanalytic theory in fundamental ways, one of the most important of which was Bion's insight into the nature of normal projective identification. No other psychoanalytic theorist has Bion's ability to represent the horrors of psychic abandonment and the converse, the absolute necessity of the presence of another mind for psychic survival. Through a discussion of Bion's War Memoirs 1917-1919 (Bion, 1997), Attacks on linking and A theory of thinking (1993), this paper explores the link between war, masculinity, the maternal and Bion's sensitivity to the significance of everyday interpersonal contact. It is argued that Bion's apocalyptic experiences as a teenage tank commander gave him shattering insight into the extent to which mind is inter-mind, self is inter-self. Bion's life writing has the quality of survivor insight: 'And only I am escaped alone to tell thee' (Job 1: 14-19), as he returns repeatedly to the events of the day when he 'died ', 8 August 1918. His insight into the elemental passions nature of love, hate and mindlessness are borne of his experiences on the battlefield, and exquisitely crystallized in his repeated explorations of an encounter with a dying soldier.

The new wilderness: A practice-led model for arts based enquiry

The New Wilderness is a practice-led, multidisciplinary arts project first piloted by artists, writers, teachers and academics from Geelong, Deakin University and Courthouse ARTS Centre in 2013. In a series of workshops run by artists, and working to specific themes, the project provided a platform for participants to explore and respond creatively to change in the community; it culminated in a large-scale installation at Courthouse ARTS Centre’s main gallery. Our paper positions the project as a able to cut across convention, empowering young artists to respond to ‘big questions’ of relevance to the changing material, spatial and social relations within their communities. In questioning and seeking to transform communities into sustainable media, economic, environmental and social ecologies, this emergent model begins with a localised focus, which is designed to travel across time and place, and pedagogical frameworks. The paper positions Geelong as a community under radical transformation in its economic foundations and demographics. As artists and academics living and working in the region we see it as an experimental ground for investigations into a series of provocations that mirror the shape of the paper we intend to give. The provocations, as outlined in the workshops, might also be envisaged as new relations to:Object – From consumable to unusable to play. In revisiting the first iteration of The New wilderness in 2013 we discuss the ‘superfictional’ (Hill, 2000) enquiry that participants were asked to engage with. Its premise described Geelong as an abandoned, post-apocalyptic site. Participants were asked to imagine themselves as a group of future explorers and excavate objects from the city’s old tip. In unearthing their choices and re-presenting the objects in the gallery the participant was prompted to analyse site, situation, object and process as phenomena for ‘being’ or ‘telling stories’, providing insights into wider realms of cultural experience (Ellis, Adams and Bochner, 2010). Parallel to this ‘autoethnographic’ reflection our paper uses the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of consumer and material culture. He traces the subject’s relation to objects from use-value, to exchange-value and in the era of extreme capitalism, to pure exhibition-value. He searches for ways that the objects produced in our material culture can be ‘profaned’ (Agamben, 2007). Space – From the material to the spatial to the situation. We are interested in how objects and the practices they elicit can be ‘profaned’ by their situation (Agamben, 2007; Wark, 2103). To profane, according to Agamben, is to open up the possibility that the object loses its exhibition-value to ‘a special form of negligence’ (Agamben). He uses the example of the child’s ability to insinuate any object into a new logic of play (Agamben). Like the objects excavated for The New Wilderness they could be from a variety of spheres – business, household, industry, health etc… The child, like the artist, reconstitutes, reorders and assembles new relations between things. In reflecting on the first New Wilderness project the paper correlates the creative response of the participant (student, child, artist) with the occupier. The Occupy Movement, which took up residence in many of the world’s cities’ financial districts in 2011, used a number of strategies commensurate with both Agamben’s notion of profanation and McKenzie Wark’s reading of the Situationist International’s use of détournement - as a strategy that releases objects and subjects back into the field of play (Wark, 2013). The field was taken by the occupy movement to be the space in which they occupied – capitalism, its logic and its practices, were, for a short time, redundant in the occupied field. The New Wilderness conceptualises the city as a localised field, from which its discarded objects can be ‘profaned’ or, repurposed, to reflect on shared histories, responsibilities, pedagogies and future action. Subject: self/other– As much as we propose New Wilderness to be a pedagogical initiative we see it as personal, critical and political. In the themed workshops, designed to elicit personal responses to the object and the site, which culminated in a multi-disciplinary installation, performance and/or text based work, participants were encouraged to think critically, and importantly, collectively. Through the four workshops run in the first iteration of the project participants were asked to re-consider their material value-systems, much as the occupy movement was trying to do, and like the occupiers, participants were empowered to be agents of change. Our paper reflects on the practical outcomes and the conceptual, political and pedagogical strategies embedded in The New Wilderness project. The paper affords us the additional opportunity to imagine a life for it in other geographical, socio-economic and educational situations. Merinda Kelly and Cameron Bishop, 2013Bio: Merinda Kelly is a sculptor and installation artist, educator and PhD student at Deakin University. Her research interests include Visual Culture, Practice Led Research, the Ontology of Art, and Autoethnography. Her most recent work includes the Pop Archaeology' and the Globo-Touro Projects.Bio: Dr Cameron Bishop is an artist and academic working in Visual Arts at Deakin University. He exhibits regularly and has written a number of journal articles and book chapters. His research has focused on the philosophical and postcolonial dimensions of space and subjectivity and more recently has evolved into an active interest in strategic interventions into space and practice.

Art as parodic practice

Perhaps because of the pervasive sampling, remixing, rehashing and promiscuous citational blending in postmodernity, where quote marks dissolve, parody has come to be seen as a somewhat archaic concept, pertaining to cultures more stably codified and hierarchically ordered, rather than subject to the fluctuations of global markets and phantasmagoric projections affecting the flow of investment moneys. Given the anxiogenic nature of postmodernity under its various guises, willed as hypermodernityand metamodernity or supermodernity, the ideologeme ‘parody’ might be seen as nostalgic symptom in the wake of the ‘grand narratives’ (Lyotard 1984 [1979]) – a rehearsed post-apocalyptic nostalgia for a world of neo-feudalism and fiefdoms, where the seasonal lifting of prohibition for carnival brought on the ‘allowed fool’ (Shakespeare 2006) for parody’s brief upending of the hierarchical order, when high became low, mouth met anus, and wise became mad, even within the Pater Noster of the Holy Mass. (Bakhtin 1980: 78). How the revisitation of parody might illuminate contemporary cultural politics is a driving question behind this collection, a questionmade more urgent by recent global developments of terror.

The development of the private equity industry since the 2008 financial crisis

The private equity industry was experiencing a phenomenal boom at the turn of the century but collapsed abruptly in 2008 with the onset of the financial crisis. Considered one of the worst crises since the Great Depression of the 1930s, it had sent ripples around the world threatening the collapse of financial institutions and provoking a liquidity crunch followed by a huge downturn in economic activity and recession. Furthermore, the physiognomy of the financial landscape had considerably altered with banks retracting from the lending space, accompanied by a hardening of financial regulation that sought to better contain systemic risk. Given the new set of changes and challenges that had arisen from this period of financial turmoil, private equity found itself having to question current practices and methods of operation in order to adjust to the harsh realities of a new post-apocalyptic world. Consequently, this paper goes on to explore how the private equity business, management and operation model has evolved since the credit crunch with a specific focus on mature markets such as the United States and Europe. More specifically, this paper will aim to gather insights on the development of the industry since the crisis in Western Europe through a case study approach using as a base interviews with professionals working in the industry and those external to the sector but who have/have had considerable interaction with PE players from 2007 to the present.

Heroínas e Vilões: os símbolos na obra Heroes and Villains de Angela Carter

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Salvação e Juízo Final na Alta Idade Média hispânica: o Comentário ao Apocalipse do Beato de Liébana

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Das letras às telas: a tradução intersemiótica de Ensaio sobre a cegueira

Pós-graduação em Letras - FCLAS

I materiali dell'assenza nella poesia della fine secolo portoghese

Il presente studio ha come obiettivo quello di chiarire le dinamiche culturali iscritte nella fine secolo portoghese a partire dall’analisi di alcune opere letterarie -in particolar modo poetiche - tra cui spicca il Só di António Nobre. L’Ultimatum inglese del 1890 mandando in frantumi il progetto imperiale in Africa, scatena un conflitto che si manifesta non solo a livello di un confronto con l’Altro, ma soprattutto, per le sue implicazioni simboliche, nei termini di un confronto interno proprio con l’immaginario nazionale. L’Ultimatum mette in crisi l’iperidentità descritta da Eduardo Lourenço come il frutto di una storia marcata da una deriva atlantica rispetto al resto d’Europa ed elaborata durante secoli di letteratura come il volto più autentico del Portogallo. Contemporaneamente segna inesorabilmente la distanza da quell’immaginario europeo e moderno che in stretto legame con il progetto imperiale ne costituiva le fondamenta. La poesia dell’epoca segue il paradigma apocalittico che associa al pianto e all’invettiva gli elementi di un’aspettativa messianica di riscatto: alla rabbia segue l’invito di riporre l’attenzione nelle glorie di un tempo in modo da rafforzare il Portogallo decaduto. La rivisitazione in chiave rigeneratrice del passato e dello spazio nazionale è una costante della letterautra neoromantica, l’opera di Antonio Nobre tuttavia non può essere affrontata secondo questa lettura: non si tratta qui di nessun recupero dell’età dell’oro, al contrario, la modernità dell’autore sta nel dichiarare l’impraticabilità di un immaginario che più che perduto non è mai esistito e si rivela dunque nella sua natura di feticcio.