Uma Breakdown's PhD admin dump

research blog for practice based phd student in fine art. post human, horror, queer games, science fiction, art

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proposal, baltic writers residency, The Vampyre

[Still from “The Vampyre” (2017) by Tai Shani]

R Dorey

Proposal for Baltic Shoreside writer’s residency.

2019 Turner Prize co-winner Tai Shani has for a number of years been producing artworks as part of a series called “Dark Continent” (DC), named for Freud’s famous description of the “unknowable” sexuality of adult women. DC concerns women in proximity with overwhelmingly chaotic natural forces and isolation, and constitute a feminist project which seeks to re-examine what “woman” is beyond essentialist categories and structures. 

The stories in DC are about sensation, and attempts to negotiate the indescribable. One artwork from DC that I am very interested in developing a critical text in response to is “The Vampyre”, which tells the story of the “spectral figure of an eternal vampire at the bottom of the ocean, forever caught on the threshold between life and death” (Shani, n.d.).

Two strands of my own research over the last year have been the strategies of “autotheory” and the concept of the “EcoGothic”.

Theorist David Del Principe summarises the EcoGothic as taking a “familiar Gothic subject – nature– taking a nonanthropocentric position to reconsider the role that the environment, species, and nonhumans play in the construction of monstrosity and fear”, positioning this alongside “EcoFeminism” which “seeks to question the mutual oppression of women, animals, and nature” (Del Principe, 2014, p. 1). Artist Lauren Fournier likewise positions autotheory within a “feminist genealogy” and “between academia and the art world” (Fournier, 2018, p. 642). 

For the Baltic residency at Shoreside I would use the unique context of solitude and focus at the periphery of the North Sea, employing autotheory to write about The Vampyre as an EcoGothic text. The studies of autotheory and the EcoGothic are both in their early stages, and likewise Shani has only recently become the subject of a book “Our Fatal Magic” (SHANI, 2019), which reproduces the scripts from DC. The Vampyre, combined with the affective conditions of this residency would allow me to produce a creative and critical piece of writing which illuminates the overlaps in these areas of feminist study, as well as the work of an artist who is only just beginning to receive significant attention. 

As a non-binary, disabled writer, this artwork and theoretical concepts are all of personal relevance, dealing as they do with the permeable borders of the idea of woman. Writers connected to autotheory such as Dodie Bellamy and Johanna Hedva have begun to make a space where disability and sickness can be creatively considered alongside power structures such as gender, race, or class. However I have yet to find writing which extends this into issues of ecology, and believe The Vampyre (which concerns the edges of the human, the ocean, the non-human, and death) offers a site to explore this further. 

I believe I could make great use of this opportunity to produce a critical text from the unique conditions of the residency. The focus on personal experience to autotheory, and affect to The Vampyre, can be met through time in isolation in the proximity with nature at the point between land and sea. 

Bibliography:

Bellamy, D. (2004). The letters of Mina Harker. Terrace Books, University of Wisconsin Press.

Del Principe, D. (2014). Introduction: The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century. Gothic Studies, 16(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.7227/GS.16.1.1

Fournier, L. (2018). Sick Women, Sad Girls, and Selfie Theory: Autotheory as Contemporary Feminist Practice. A/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 33(3), 643–662. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2018.1499495

Hedva, J. (2016). Sick Woman Theory. Mask Magazine. http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory

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

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

Smith, A., & Hughes, W. (Eds.). (2015). Ecogothic. Manchester University Press. http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=4706038

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PROPOSAL: Twyre is pain of the Steppe: death, dying, and the player as writer in Pathologic.

I just sent this to the excellent journal Revenant for their Apocalyptic Waste, Special Issue. I have wanted to write about Pathologic for a while, and now I am at the PhD stage of waiting for vivia/applying in vain for jobs, its good to have something to work on. I’m already doing a paper for sheffield Gothic in may, and will likely pitch a conference paper on Pathologic and Ecriture feminine for Current Research in Speculative Fiction in Liverpool this year. And with that done, here is the proposal.   

Pathologic offers a dying city. [...]. A pustule encrusted town where events carry on regardless of your presence, slowly wasting away despite you. This is a fascinating game. And a very broken one (Walker, 2006).

The 2005 survival horror video game ‘Pathologic’ sees the player take control of one of three characters (‘the Thanatologist’, ‘the Haruspex’, and ‘the Changeling’) attempting to prevent, manage, cure, and explain the outbreak of a plague. The game’s manual describes it as a ‘“simulator of human behavior in the condition of pandemic”: it purports to test the user’s ability to make right decisions in times of crisis’ (Harrist, 2012).

The setting is an unspecified town bordered by a steppe, with an economy based around a huge slaughterhouse, and culture based on complex hierarchies and laws around death. The majority of a typical playthrough sees the player constantly on the verge of dying as they seek to understand the local cultures, navigate the conflicting narratives of the inhabitants, and acquire the knowledge, materials and permissions to stop the plague. Pathologic is offers a survival which is always a choice between ruinous or debasing options, searching waste bins for junk to trade with children or dissecting corpses for organs to sell to the doctor forms the game’s economy which never allows the player to accrue the capital to surpass this struggle. Outside of this, the game itself is a struggle to play, even in its 2015 HD remaster it uses deliberately limited graphics, awkward mechanics and restricted information, deploying the qualities of a broken game to further its exploration of apocalyptic crisis.

From Quintin Smith’s trilogy of articles (Smith, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c) which popularised Pathologic to English speaking audiences, to Harris ‘Hbomberguy’ Brewis’s 2 hour video analysis (Brewis, 2019) the common tension around the game is that it is both a work of art, and ‘agonizing to play’ (Harrist, 2012). I will argue that the latter is a feature of the former.

The developers ‘deliberately refuse to create a comfortable environment for the gamer. The addressee is not the consumer. [They are] the coauthor. Passing the deep game is a creative process’ (Ice-Pick Lodge, 2001). I analyze this player-role through game theorist Mary Flanagan’s concepts of ‘hyperknowledge’ and ‘rendition’, aligning the player’s navigation of game space from multiple irreconcilable points of view from a feminist philosophy of embodiment (Flanagan, 2002). 

The player experience of difficulty, unreliable information, and constant proximity to death is theorised through the feminist writing practices of Hélène Cixous and Kathy Acker. Acker has conceptualised writing as dying ‘while remaining alive’ (Acker, 1990, p. 174) while Cixous approaches writing as ‘learning to die’ (Cixous, 2005, p. 10) and both offer ways of thinking of writing through its points of collapse and divergence. These writers offer a framework to examine the player-as-author while recontextualization the trauma of playing, the game’s collapsing and unreliable narratives, and the meaning of death and survival within such a creative process.

In conclusion, I argue that more than just being a game set within a nightmare space, where the environmental collapsed with the social and economic order, Pathologic demands active and complicit investment in these from the player. Pathologic is ‘hypo-ludic’ (Conway, 2012), as the game restricts conventional enjoyment through its mechanics, graphics, and morally compromising choices. The player of Pathologic is forced to engage in the creative process of roleplay in this apocalyptic waste, and in doing so both engages with feminist writing techniques and uses what game theorist Jesper Juul has identified as the unique capacity of games to make an audience complicit in tragedy (Juul, 2013).

Acker, K. (1990). In memoriam to identity (1st ed). Grove Weidenfeld.

Brewis, H. (2019, November 21). Pathologic is Genius, And Here’s Why. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsNm2YLrk30

Cixous, H. (2005). Three steps on the ladder of writing (S. Cornell & S. Sellers, Trans.). Columbia University Press.

Conway, S. (2012). We Used to Win, We Used to Lose, We Used to Play: Simulacra, Hypo-Ludicity and the Lost Art of Losing. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 9(1), 27. https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.147

Dybovsky, N. (2005). On the Threshold of the Bone House, or as Game Becomes Art. (2005). I C E - P I C K. http://old.ice-pick.com/ore9_eng.htm

Dybowski, N. (2015). Pathologic Classic HD [Microsoft Windows]. G2 Games, Ice-Pick Lodge.

Flanagan, M. (2002). Hyperbodies Hyperknowledge: Women in Games, Women in Cyberpunk and Strategies of Resistance. In M. Flanagan & A. Booth (Eds.), Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture. MIT Press.

Goodman, P. (2014, December 1). Pathologic Interview. The Escapist. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/12333-Pathologic-Interview#&gid=gallery_3295&pid=1

Harrist, J. (2012, April 30). Infected Zones. Kill Screen. https://web.archive.org/web/20140815022720/http://killscreendaily.com/articles/essays/infected-zones/

Hiller, B. (2016, December 1). The new Pathologic is still one of the best games it’s no fun to actually play. VG247. https://www.vg247.com/2016/12/01/the-new-pathologic-is-still-one-of-the-best-games-its-no-fun-to-actually-play/

Hitorin, V. (2014, November 3). Pathologic: Saving the virtual world from a Russian plague. https://www.rbth.com/science_and_tech/2014/11/03/pathologic_saving_the_virtual_world_from_a_russian_plague_41037.html

Ice-Pick Lodge. (2001, March 18). Manifesto 2001. Ice-Pick Lodge. https://ice-pick.com/en/manifesto-2001/

Ilukhin, K. (2015, February 13). Pathologic: Interview with game creators. Sci-Fi and Fantasy Network. http://www.scififantasynetwork.com/pathologic-interview-with-game-creators/

Juul, J. (2013). The art of failure: An essay on the pain of playing video games. MIT Press.

Novitz, J. (2017). Scarcity and Survival Horror Trade as an Instrument of Terror in Pathologic. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, 2(1), 63–88.

Smith, Q. (2008a, April 10). Butchering Pathologic – Part 1: The Body. Rock, Paper, Shotgun. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/04/10/butchering-pathologic-part-1-the-body/

Smith, Q. (2008b, April 11). Butchering Pathologic – Part 2: The Mind. Rock, Paper, Shotgun. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/04/11/butchering-pathologic-part-2-the-mind/

Smith, Q. (2008c, April 12). Butchering Pathologic – Part 3: The Soul. Rock, Paper, Shotgun. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/04/12/butchering-pathologic-part-3-the-soul/

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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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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.

[slaaneshfic]

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).

[slaaneshfic]

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/  

[bfoxanimation]

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

[slaaneshfic]

This is the greatest thing I've ever seen

[slaaneshfic]

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.  

[slaaneshfic]

[slaaneshfic]

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.

[slaaneshfic]

“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).

[slaaneshfic]

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

“Dog book”

2017

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

“Dog tears”

2017

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

“Mad What Man with Do for a Buck”

2017

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

“Samus and dog playing CS:GO”

2017

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

“Bowl”

2017

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

“Return Ded 3”

2017

Online video

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv8lwVi2VlU

“good ideas about overwatch mod thats just bananas”

2017

Online video.

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPklF69syMk

“Dark Souls Haiku (Rural Touching #1)”

2017

Online video.

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBD8S-doTWk

[slaaneshfic]

ANNUAL PROGRESSION PHD SUBMISSION ACCEPTEDDDDDD

Ok, so all the summer was spent writing this thing. Because last years AP was such a disaster. basically in my 2017 AP submission, which was to move from 1st to 2nd year, i got totally hammered by the assessor. I had submitted everything i needed to, but Id done it as a Twine game and they hated it. I had to basically write 8k of bullshit afterwards to prove that I was capable of writing in standard thesis form. that 8k is never going anywhere near my actual thesis, and so was a total waste of time, and i dont want to do that again, so I write my AP this time with the assumption that the audience would have zero good will towards the project, even though i have a different assessor this time. So I made sure EVERYTHING was explained and available. its way over the word limit, and I submitted a portfolio as well (next post)

2018 Annual Progression Submission

Title: “Becoming Ahuman: making it desirable to abandon certainty, including certainty of the self, and play in this chaotic situation”

Contents this Annual Progression submission document:

Pages 3-7: Abstract Pages 8-9: Chapter structure Pages 10-19:Thesis Sample 1

Pages 20-29: Thesis Sample 2 Pages 30-46: Report for 2017-2018

A Portfolio of Practice is submitted as a separate document

Abstract:

Title: “Becoming Ahuman: making it desirable to abandon certainty, including certainty of the self, and play in this chaotic situation”

The object of the PhD is to research, develop and analyse an approach to art practice in the contemporary moment, through its resonance with the posthuman feminist philosophy of the “Ahuman” (MacCormack, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018).

This thesis mobilizes the work of philosopher Patricia MacCormack, outlining their concept of Becoming Ahuman as a generalized experience of encounters with art, and positioning this within a context of wider philosophy, art practice, and other modes of cultural production, including my own practice.

The thesis reconfigures the conceptual framework of the Ahuman through theoretical analysis and art practice. In doing so the writing brings Becoming Ahuman into the realm of the art maker, as well as art audiences. Through dialogue with the concept’s influences in philosopher Luce Irigaray’s figure of “mucus” (Irigaray, 1993) and the ecosophy of psychoanalyst Felix Guattari (Guattari, 1984, 1995) the thesis presents an art practice which embraces interconnectivity, the non-human, and the creative collapsing of categories.

This Mucosal Art practice is contextualised within queer online cultures of art making, viewing and appropriating. Encountered within this context, motifs of horror and the non-human to speak to subjectivities other than that of the majoritarian white cishet able male.

This thesis performs the following tasks:

1. It develops a theory of Becoming Ahuman as relates to art practice.

2. It demonstrates how such a practice is positioned beyond a dichotomy of labour and leisure. Using philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari's concept of “Desiring production” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983), and examples of practice from art, video games, fan fiction and tabletop role playing games the thesis proposes how such practices can be understood as a kind of “play”- a position beyond a simple understanding of production and expenditure.

3. It extends MacCormack’s use of horror texts (MacCormack, 2010, 2016) and argues that the play of Becoming Ahuman can already be extracted from the “Political Unconscious” (Jameson, 2007) of horror media.

4. Through research across a broad definition of contemporary art practice which includes online fanfiction communities, and various types of independent games design, as well as the points where such practice crosses into conventional art practice, a theory of Ahuman art practice approaches an understanding of art practice which rejects many tenets of authority and dominant ideology in favour of a desire for a kind of abject that includes the communal sharing of ideas and experiences.

5. It  presents practice-based investigations into how an Ahuman art practice can be grown, and reveals how such a necessarily diverse and plural practice can be articulated. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of the “diagram” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, 1987, 1994; Guattari, 1984) and following writer Susan Sontag’s call for an “erotics of art” (Sontag, 1966) the thesis demonstrates how an oblique and affective approach across different modes of research practice can achieve rigour.

Keywords:

Abjection, Affect, Art, Gilles Deleuze, Cybernetics, Felix Guattari, Horror, Luce Irigaray, Patricia MacCormack, Performance, Play, Queer Theory, Role Playing Games, Waste.

Bibliography for Abstract:

Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, 1972-1990. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press.

Guattari, F. (1984). Molecular revolution: psychiatry and politics. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England ; New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin.

Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Irigaray, L. (1993). An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.

Jameson, F. (2007). The political unconscious: narrative as a socially symbolic act. London: Routledge.

MacCormack, P. (2008). Cinesexuality. Aldershot, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

MacCormack, P. (2010). Mucous, Monsters and Angels: Irigaray and Zulawski’s Possession. Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 1, 95–110.

MacCormack, P. (2012). Posthuman ethics: embodiment and cultural theory. Farnham, Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

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

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

MacCormack, P. (2018). Ahuman, The. In Posthuman Glossary (1st ed., pp. 20–21). London Oxford New York New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury.

Sontag, S. (1966). Against interpretation: And other essays (Vol. 38). Macmillan.

Chapter Structure:

A short extract from the writing in progress for each of the two books Unstable Ahuman Desire and Ahuman Use is included in the next section. Additional evidence of research is provided in the seperate document entitled Portfolio of Practice

Below is a planned chapter list for each, with a predicted word count of 10,000 - 15,000 words per each of the three books. Unstable Ahuman Desire Chapter 1: The Diagram as Mucus Chapter 2: Ecologies of desire and how to work in disorder Chapter 3: Erotics of rot and the loss of self in practice Ahuman Use Chapter 1: The Diagram as Machine Chapter 2: Play as horror reconfigured Chapter 3: Sara Ahmed’s “Queer Use”, Yaoi and fanfic ludics of the future The third book is best understood with reference to material included in the submitted Portfolio of Practice. The most recent work listed, “The woodlands outside the finishing plant”, which consists of a formally constrained work of fiction and an initial diagram drawing which it has been developed from, is an example of material that will be worked through into the Third Book. The drawing and text elements will be included in the Third Book, as well as commentary on their development. These elements also form part of two performance works I am delivering in October 2018. Records of these performances, commentary on their realisation and analysis will therefore also be included in the third book. A question for the realisation of the Third Book will be; “How can scripts, diagrams, transcripts, reports, and commentary sit together equally without any assuming authority over the others?” This question is to be addressed through the practice of making the book, which occurs concurrently with studio and thesis development. The layout of elements within a single page, and their position within the book form part of this making, rather than be relegated to an editing phase at its culmination. Therefore for the purposes of Annual Progression I would suggest that an impression of this Third Book is acquired through a brief look the following items in the Portfolio of Practice: “Farmer 9” 2018 “Axpansion” 2018 “Refu” 2017 “Frolic in Brine” 2018   It should be understood that just as the submitted document Portfolio of Practice contains only low resolution images and hyperlinks to online works, these are just references rather than the things themselves. While it is often apparent that the photographs of a live performance do not account for that performance fully, other elements like drawings and scripts might imply they are the totality of the work. So I think it is wise to clarify that the material linked in the Portfolio of Practice is not finalised work until at least the point where it was been rebuilt into the assembled Third Book.

Thesis Samples:

The following is a draft chapter section from the proposed thesis book on Ahuman Use “Smeared into The Environment: Queer Horror games and The Ahuman” This chapter approaches a contemporary aspect of horror read through contemporary philosophy. This isn’t to say that either the horror or the philosophy did not exist before the contemporary moment, but that something about current trends in the use of “horror” in contemporary art practice will hopefully be made clear. The work being examined is by Porpentine Charity Heartscape, who’s biography lists her as; “a writer, game designer, and dead swamp milf in Oakland. Her work includes xenofemme scifi/fantasy, cursed videogames, and globe-spanning sentient slime molds” (Heartscape, n.d.). The particular work now addressed is one of Heartscape’s collaborations with the artist, game designer and musician Rook. This collaboration takes the form of the first of a series of self produced, episodic video games called “No World Dreamers: Sticky Zeitgeist Episode 1, HYPERSLIME” (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). My analysis of this artwork will be done through the philosophical tools of post-human feminism, and in particular those of philosopher Patricia MacCormack as presented in her book chapter “Lovecraft’s Cosmic Ethics” (MacCormack, 2016). It is in this chapter that MacCormack proposes the “use” of Lovecraft within the post-human feminist project. Lovecraft’s supposed “aversion to the carnal” combined with his stories frequent encounters with overwhelming, fleshy, or cosmic imanense allows them to be brought into the unlikely company of philosopher Luce Irigaray (MacCormack,2016). MacCormack ask’s not for a revision, but a “use” of Lovecraft, queering his writing into an “ethical erotics of alterity” (MacCormack, 2016). I speculate that under this, Lovecraft’s writing remains within the sphere of “horror”, though this sphere becomes more heterogeneous. This reading of Lovecraft has precedent in the work of philosopher Gille Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari who see within his work a “becoming animal”, which is to say breaking open the law of what is a human into a “becomings-elementary, -cellular, -molecular, and even Becomings-imperceptible” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). What Deleuze and Guattari celebrate here is the replacing of a singular, molar self with a “pack”, or in the words of Lovecraft’s Carter “to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings” (Lovecraft, 2014). If becoming animal, merging and re-configuring other forms of being, kinship and sensation are not pushed back in phobic disgust, the question must be asked “horror for who?” (MacCormack, 2016).   The word “horror” itself becomes slippery under these conditions. I use it to refer to the genre, the signifiers, and indeed some of the sensations felt by actors within such narratives as well as our own observing them. However the thing that I bracket out from horror is the assumed ethical position which might privilege order, the majoritarian and the phallogocentric above difference, speculation, affect. It is my proposal that Sticky Zeitgeist represents a similar horror which denies the human, and displays the same difference-celebrating, erotic possibilities which MacCormack pulls from Lovecraft. I argue that Sticky Zeitgeist is horror but horror where the majoritarian subject,the one who should be horrified, is absent. It is not a fan-fiction reversal which pulls a monsters into the foreground, making them sympathetic by conforming to Majoritarian structures of power, value and morality, and anthropomorphising them. Rather, Sticky Zeitgeist abandons those structures, and forges its own.    Firstly we are going to establish some of the key concepts used by MacCormack and then trace them through the world of Sticky Zeitgeist. The first of these is the “Ahuman”, and while this term has many applications I start with a extract from MacCormack’s own recent definition, in Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova’s 2018 “Posthuman Glossary” (Braidotti & Hlavajova, 2018); “Ahuman theory promotes catalysing becoming- other from the majoritarian or all human privilege and renouncing the benefits of the Anthropocene. [Methods for which include] the use of all manifestations of art to form new terrains of apprehension of the world and encourage new ethical relations between entities” (MacCormack, 2018). In this definition, the Ahuman is positioned within a radical animal rights discourse of abolitionism, which seeks to avoid what it maintains is the anthropocentric raising of animal to human equivalence. Rather than bringing the nonhuman into the human ethical sphere, which MacCormack considers both impossible and nessecerally nonconsensual, the abolitionist position bases nonhuman rights upon the fact “that it is” rather than “what it is” (MacCormack, 2018). More importantly for the subject of this chapter; “Abolitionists are activists against all use of animals, acknowledging communication is fatally human, so we can never know modes of nonhuman communication and to do so is both hubris and materially detrimental to nonhumans” (MacCormack, 2018). This is perhaps the most crucial aspect of the Ahuman for our purposes. Difference is to exist on its own terms, and the capturing action of communication is not required to acknowledge this difference. Now it is time to approach “No World Dreamers: Sticky Zeitgeist. Episode 1  HYPERSLIME”, which importantly begins with a flurry of difference, including characters which might point to, but are never captured by the myths of either “animal” or “human”. Following the opening theme song, the episode is epigraphed with a quote; “Make a 150-lb self-contained, 3-D person into a square-mile thin pancake and you’ve got a slimey veneer of organic matter of no use to you or the observer puzzled by the thin, gooey-drip man. Suburbias [sic] and exurbias [sic] are promoters of slime.” This quote is attributed to italian architect Paolo Soleri who’s concept of arcology low-waste, high population density, self sufficient vertical urban structures runs, though mainly as a mutant form, throughout this narrative. Our story’s first protagonist “Ever”, considers the quote and posits that they themselves are are even further dispersed, trapped in a room and glued to a screen they are “Hyperslime”. Ever’s response to this realisation is to get high, masturbate and surf the internet, something which is itself one action as under the glow of her network terminal, Ever pokes the drug “girl chunks” into their arsehole. Ever comments on the impossibility of describing this drug-data-sex experience, “if i wasn’t experiencing this, i couldn’t describe it and i can’t remember when i’m not experiencing it what i’m not experiencing hypersucrose on my frontal lobe like-” before be interrupted by a call from work (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). The impossibility of language, which has already been brought up in the Ahuman’s relation to the nonhuman as posited by abolitionist animal rights activists, surfaces repeatedly in MacCormacks discussion of Ahumanity and Lovecraft’s horror where we are shown “what is possible, while managing to show that it is also unnameable” (MacCormack, 2016). For MacCormack human language is the “great annihilator of the the potentialization of expressivity and affect of entities that are not counted by the majoritarian human” (MacCormack, 2016), but in the world of Lovecraft such language is demonstrably powerless. Encounters are beyond description, are left as such. The ethical turn which is executed upon Lovecraft demonstrates the inadequacy of the word “horror” to account for such experience. “Horror for some, the very opening of the world to others” (MacCormack, 2016). Or as articulated by Lovecraft himself, “Fright became pure awe, and what had seemed blasphemously abnormal now only ineffably majestic” (Lovecraft, 2014).   Returning to Sticky Zeitgeist, the collapsing of self, sex and connection is becomes a state of ecstasy. The message demanding she travels to work is the cue for Ever’s horror. The world outside her room, which she describes as the “Goblin’s pit”, is loaded with signs, both literally in the form of adverts for jobs, bands and lost fast food establishments but in the fixed overlay of time, behaviour, social relations. Ever’s chance to pass invisibly into order relies on her getting her bus to work while in constant fear of the drugs and saliva leaking from her underwear. The bus is late, she is going to be late, and she falls into a panic attack. The panic attack itself is represented as the game descends into a gross, nonsense parody of the call and response rhythm game “PaRappa the Rapper” (Matsuura, 1996). “You snooze, you oooze! Then you lose! Control of your holes!” (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). The abject, what Julia Kristeva describes as “the place where meaning collapses” is not simply the girl chunks leaking from Ever, but also Ever herself (Kristeva, 1984). When she first sets out on this trip to work she narrates “i exit from the back of the house like shit” (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). Ever is the remainder and excess who themselves cannot either hold the outside in or keep it out but is in a constant asignified flow which because impossible and traumatic only within the unaccommodating and regimented parts of the world. As we continue to play the game focused initially on the narrative of Ever, more signs of horror perpetuate. The first of these is the User Interface that frames the game space, cables and visera weave into one another frame a screen and text/hyperlink area bringing to mind the 90s point and click horror adventure “Dark Seed” with graphics by H.R. Geiger (Cranford & Dawson, 1992). At the top, a ribbon cable is plugged in through a smashed secondary screen or logo area, leaving only a few letters of the game’s title readable. In Sticky Zeitgeist, as in much of Heartscape’s other work, trash pervades. Everything is a remainder, including characters. Everything is an improvised hack, survival mixed with abandonment and most importantly not fully namable. This extends to the characters themselves, Ever is only described as a girl, her ears and nose suggest a dog or maybe a goat. It’s implied that she is trans, but none of this is cause of elaboration to the audience. Other characters display equal fluidity, maybe becoming robots, maybe becoming moths. Gender is explicit though, all are referred to with female pronouns. They are “she”, “her” and “sisters”. The remainder, to be in excess of or less than names and categories runs through Lovecraftian horror. The folks of Innsmouth, the mercurial Old Ones themselves or various landscapes and objects and experiences. MacCormack quotes Luce Irigaray, “Already constructed theoretical language does not speak of the mucous. The mucous remains a remainder, producer of delirium, of dereliction, of wounds, sometimes of exhaustion” (Irigaray, 2017). This connectivity, abjection, transgression is the stuff of horror, but it is also the stuff of erotics and kinship. The two robot sisters in Sticky Zeitgeist sit together on a train, one, “Agate” leaning against the other who narrates, “She’s in sleep mode. She spends most of her time there. Our brains make a lot of connections at super fast high frequency. Hard to shut out the bad connections. Everything reminds you of something else. Contaminated with information”  (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). The default state is porosity, leaky bodies. The sister blocks out the connection of thought and meaning but retains that of touch. Later the sleeping sister will visit a 7-11 and watch the rotating “honk dogs”, remarking “how nice to be rotated”, an empathetic encounter with convenience food (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). The characters in Sticky Zeitgeist are nonhuman, but they are not fixed as one kind of nonhuman. Any encounter is a “becoming animal” as everything holds an affective charge, or is a biological contaminant (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). As the player of the game we are often unsure who “we” are. The first person narrative flickers between characters often without indication of who is speaking. We have to assume that we are all of the pack, while acknowledging that this pack is constantly in flux. What stands out is that the four characters are not presented as an isolationist group as with the majority of narratives on post-apocalyptic survival. Their job is to travel out into a lushus swamp and salvage broken parts of downed satellites and one character comments “I like to rub my face on the debris to make sure the radiation is getting the most direct access to my brain” (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). The group is open and loving with one another in their fluidity while also being open to difference in the world around them, to be changed by it through drugs, radioactivity, hormone replacement therapy or the beautiful leaky swamp they eventually head out into. In 2012’s “Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory” MacCormack states that “The art encounter elucidates the new horror and wonder of being in the asignifed world as a new state of constant ecstasy” (MacCormack, 2012). Engaging with art including, or perhaps especially, with horror, is not simply about representing alterity but an affective encounter which breaks open the category of human. This is the argument MacCormack makes for the ecstatic experiences of the characters in Lovecraft’s works, as well as the readers experience of these work of art. As we find ourselves adrift in asignification we are becoming Ahuman. I conclude that Sticky Zeitgeist presents the ethical plurality that arguably the works of Lovecraft must be made to extract. Sticky Zeitgeist represents a kind of horror which is not. Bodily, cognitive and social difference, are not presented as needing hygienic eradication but simply are. Character’s might experience violent trauma and live in a world of unpredictable trash but there is neither a call for order, nor dialectic refusal of order. What is valuable about this kind of horror, is it neither exoticises difference nor pulls it to the ethics of the human. MacCormack states that “The ethics of the art-encounter shows becoming Ahuman is viable and necessary for new ways of thinking alterity in the realities of life for oppressed (sub) human subjects” (MacCormack, 2012). Sticky Zeitgeist does exactly this, a queering of horror to remove the human entirely.

Bibliography for Thesis Sample 1:

Braidotti, R., & Hlavajova, M. (Eds.). (2018). Posthuman glossary. Lodon Oxford New York New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury.

Cranford, M., & Dawson, M. (1992). Dark Seed [MS-DOS]. Cyberdreams. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0144157/

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

Destructoid. (n.d.). Sup, Holmes? Ep 84 w/ Porpentine! Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Mw7vWr9wyM

First Person Scholar. (2014, July 16). Interview – Porpentine –. Retrieved 11 September 2018, from http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/interview-porpentine/

Heartscape, P. C. (n.d.-a). CV - Porpentine Charity Heartscape. Retrieved 24 April 2018, from http://slimedaughter.com/cv.html

Heartscape, P. C. (n.d.-b). Himalayan Pink Rock Salt one bwabs tresh is another bwabs tresha [Windows].

Heartscape, P. C., & Rook. (2017). No World Dreamers: Sticky Zeitgeist. english.

Irigaray, L. (1993). An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Cornell University Press.

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

Kopas, M. (2015). Videogames for humans: Twine authors in conversation.

Lovecraft, H. P. (2014). The new annotated H. P. Lovecraft. (L. S. Klinger, Ed.) (First edition). New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.

MacCormack, P. (2012). Posthuman ethics: embodiment and cultural theory. Farnham, Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

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

MacCormack, P. (2018). Ahuman, The. In Posthuman Glossary (1st ed., pp. 20–21). London Oxford New York New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury.

Matsuura, M. (1996). PaRappa the Rapper [Playstation]. NanaOn-Sha. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0371055/

porpentine. (2015, May 11). Hot Allostatic Load. Retrieved 11 September 2018, from https://thenewinquiry.com/hot-allostatic-load/

The following is a draft chapter section from the proposed thesis book Unstable Ahuman Desire “The Revolutionary Praxis of Urban Tumours” This is an example of the kind of thing I want to talk about, a living, organic growth within a built urban environment. This particular example is the Raleigh Sewer Monster, as shown in the video it was recorded by a sewer cam on 27th April 2009 in Raleigh North Carolina. The Raleigh Sewer Monster was quickly determined to not be a monster, but rather most likely a colony of tubifex worm. As biologist Dr Timothy S Wood suggests “they have apparently entered a pipeline somehow, and in the absence of soil they are coiling around each other. The contractions you see are the result of a single worm contracting and then stimulating all the others to do the same almost simultaneously, so it looks like a single big muscle contracting” (McClain, 2009). I wanted to start with this image from outside of horror cinema and video games, as a way of approaching something within those media that is quite nebulous and slippery to pin down. Throughout my research I’ve thought of them as scabs, tumours, wombs, placenta, cocoons, biofilms, nests, fungus, and most often galls (which is how I will refer to them in this chapter), but none of these real life forms will consistently match the overall motif. This motif should be quite familiar to most with an interest in horror. Our protagonists are travelling an urban environment, looking for something, though rarely that which they end up finding. They will travel to an area which signifies urban decay, or at least neglect and abandonment. It will likely be dirty, and also pointedly underused, “wasted” area. A storage area, ventilation system, a block scheduled for demolition. The environment is explicitly urban, an environment completely designed and theoretically controlled and sealed. Not a place where there should be wildlife, however the lack of human attention has allowed something to happen and the sterility to be lost. Our protagonists walk through concrete and metal in hard lines and almost certainly under the light of a torch they then discover the gall. A biological mass adhered to and penetrating the structure of the built space. The gall might be alive, it might have been alive previously, it might be a means to life, it might alter life, the important point is that in contrast to the built environment, it is vital in some manner. This is their first quality. The second quality of these galls is that they are hidden, whilsts also hiding something else. As already described they are found in neglected areas, abandoned buildings, air shafts, sewers, shanty towns and ghettos. These spaces are obviously not entirely neglected, people work in such areas, often people live in them. However it is not generally the protagonist, and by extension neither the projection of the audience that lives in the inner city slum or works in the utility channels which run through the more respectable accommodation. To the protagonist, these galls are within “their” space, the world of which they have complete freedom of movement, but in a corner they have neglected and by virtue of their lifestyle and status they have not had reason to check on. When they do eventually check, they find something has grown in the interim, and this growth is hiding something. It is a living black spot. In a 2016 book chapter entitled “Lovecraft’s Cosmic Ethics” philosopher Patricia MacCormack argues for the work of horror author H.P. Lovecraft to be used “to imagine becoming the horrors he evokes toward a vitalistic, activist, and wondrous celebration of otherness” (MacCormack, 2016). It is my position that the motif of the urban gall be used in such a way, and that this “living black spot” points towards the emancipation of difference.   To understand the gall, it is first needed that we understand the controlled environment that is performed prior to the gall’s discover. Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish” traces the genealogy of the prison and proposes that, “If it is true that the leper [colony] gave rise to rituals of exclusion, which to a certain extent provided the model for and general form of the great Confinement, then the [quarantine techniques developed in response to the] plague gave rise to disciplinary projects” (Foucault, 1995). The methods by which which the plague was attempted to be controlled in the seventeenth century were not of simple exclusion but of strict regimes of controlled activity, observation and categorization. Subjects, and also architecture, animals and at least in the theory of time, pathogens were controlled as a model state, “The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies - this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city” (Foucault, 1995). That perfect governed city is invoked as an impossible phantom whenever an FBI agent lifts some proteinous gloop with a bic pen from a floor of Baltimore apartment. Despite our best efforts to, “be pure, be vigilant [and] behave” the chaotic cosmos found a blind spot to grow in (Mills, O’Neill, Redondo, Talbot, & Roach, 2006). Foucault again identifies our alignment of the social and biological noting that, “ Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of 'contagions', of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, and die in disorder” (Foucault, 1995). It is in fact no wonder that deviation from moral or state law, from approved expression of subjectivity is often conflated with a lack of sterile surroundings. As noted by the theorist Georges Bataille when it comes to distinguishing upper and lower classes, “the difference [is] in cleanliness” (Bataille et al., 1995). As noted already, gall, the term I am using to describe this motif, is inadequate because the depictions in horror media rarely stay fixed to that or any other biological definition. We have things that penetrate cement like roots, or weep from cracks like plasma, embedded eggs waiting to hatch with other living material adhered to the walls around them. Frequently these forms resist classification as anything other than a chimera. Perhaps they exhibit a sensitivity and speed of growth which implies the animal and yet this combined with a rooting into the architecture and decentralised, plural mass which suggests the vegital. MacCormack states that “connectivity to the unlike is what defines Lovecraftian entities” and this is true of the galls on a number of levels (MacCormack, 2016). As noted, they often sit between categories of animals or plants, they might be using another creature, alive or dead, human or otherwise to provide food or energy, or assist in the birthing or transformation of another. Lastly it is necessary that gall sits on the threshold of architecture. It needs; within the logic of horror story, and politicised dichotomy of order/disorder, a sheer urban surface. That sheer surface marks another contrast which must eventually collapse. The ventilation duct, lift shaft or pensioners apartment is namable and filled with clear signification for us. The thing which I am referring to as a gall, does not, at least at first have such signification. It’s multiple layers of hybridity site it in a “visceral, fleshy, corporeal, teratological, and emphatically material world is also a world where human language [...]is without power” (MacCormack, 2016). You can try and name the thing, but at best you have something that will always fall short of the sensations provoked, the functions it might perform, or the things it might become. MacCormack turns to philosopher Luce Irigaray to address this namelessness and quotes the latter “Nor will I ever see the mucous, that most intimate interior of my flesh, neither the touch of the outside of the skin of my fingers, nor the perception of the inside of these same fingers, but another threshold of the passage from outside to inside, from inside to outside, between inside and outside, between outside and inside” (Irigaray, 1993). Irigaray’s mucous, like the gall, refuses a dichotomy of self and other. The gall appears within our supposedly clean an ordered environment, it was always already here in some form of becoming. The gall is almost always hiding something, it creates a protected environment within the cold world of order. A hidden space within a blind spot. Equally, while it sits in initial contrast to the urban sheen of sterile, man made environ , it collapses this contrast by the sheer fact of its presence. The gall is within that environment, it is part of the architecture and pulls its refusal to be named into the concrete rendering the certainty of the urban a farce. Hidden, unknowable heterogenous life running through the material that we believed was pure order and death. While the gall pulls its vital, unknowable qualities into the wall and in doing so penetrates the bubble of order, it also pulls us, and to various degrees our FBI agent protagonist proxy, toward it. The desire produced in association with such material is not only featured in many horror narratives but within feminist discourse including that of MacCormack and Irigaray, but most notable Julia Kristeva’s theorising of Abject. We can easily imagine our FBI agent, crawling into the cargo hold of a commercial jet, latex glove not worn but simply held in their eagerness to touch as they mutter to themselves, around the maglight they hold between teeth; “Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A "something" that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me” (Kristeva, 1984). The gall seduces characters “within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning” and “draws [them] toward the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva, 1984) Just as it draws our agent, it draws us the audience along as well. We are seduced by its sensually qualities which are outside of language and therefor hidden from annihilation through naming and knowing. There is also often the uncanny familiarity which breaks down the certainty that this is “not me”. It could have been part of me, it could be within me in the future. This gall has already destroyed the sterility of our perceived environment and forced us to realise that it was permeable. The mere sight of the gall reminds us that permeability is essential to our very existence, no matter how much we attempt to expand the buffer zone around us through buildings and their politics. Our bodies are always spilling out over the edges of the orderly frames we insist they conform to, as philosopher Margrit Shildrick tells us “The security of categories – whether of self or non-self – is undone by a radical undecidability” (Shildrick, 2002). This is one of the calls being made by the repeated motif of the gall, it offers the chance to consider our own porosity to things which would breach the category “human”, and in doing so challenge the validity of that category at all. The gall produces desire in combination with us, that desire is not one of lack but is created by our encounter with an unnamable which points towards various functions and various kinds of life and voracious connectivity. This is what is proposed by philosopher Gille Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari as “desiring-production”, an articulation of desire not based on lack, but on creative production, “For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). The encounter with the gall produces new desires, new potential operations, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology we are growing organs, the “we” being us and the galls together. This creativity does not stop at the point of being eaten by, or birthed by, or radically altered by, the gall, but extends beyond just as it extends into the now obviously porus and flexible surrounds. We have to develop the organs to consider our entire reproductive system diffused across oceans if only to recoil in horror. As we fumble for meaning we connects to a multitude of other ways of being, none of which are compatible with our previous ideological category of Human. Finally, there is emancipatory possibility offered by the repeated motif of the gall if use in this manner. The gall is presented as a constant reminder of “urban vulnerability” (Tobin, 2002), and the failures of the society to maintain complete discipline against disorder in its broadest sense. However equally it is a radically resilient call for life. The gall presents possibilities, a “voracious drive for proximity with alterity” (MacCormack, 2016). This unknowable, vital secret thing repeatedly crops up to offer hope against tyrannical order. More than this, it creates such possibilities by producing desire, this is what MacCormack refers to as “becoming Ahuman” (MacCormack, 2012). The becoming Ahuman occurs in our encounter with art, but particularly in out encounter with horror cinema (including the horror cinema which is expressed through other forms including video games). Maccormack says “The art encounter elucidates the new horror and wonder of being in the asignifed world as a new state of constant ecstasy, a functioning expressive entity nonetheless still outside of time” (MacCormack, 2012). While we never arrive at the state of Ahumanity, our affective encounter with this thing beyond produces new desire. Or in the words of Guattari “the expressive a-signifying rupture summons forth a creative repetition that forges incorporeal objects, abstract machines and Universes of value that make their presence felt as though they had been always ' already there' , although they are entirely dependent on the existential event that brings them into play” (Guattari, 2005). The encounter with the gall is not just reaching out mucousal suckers toward us, but us developing our own tentacles and in doing so render ourselves strange. The urban gall is revolutionary not in the sense of a sleeper cell, but as an active agent of alterity, reaching out past the protagonist and meeting the mucous of the viewer.

Bibliography for Thesis Sample 2: Bataille, G., Lebel, R., Waldberg, I., Brotchie, A., White, I., & Acéphale (Secret society) (Eds.). (1995). Encyclopaedia Acephalica: comprising the Critical dictionary & related texts. London: Atlas Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (2nd Vintage Books ed). New York: Vintage Books.

Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Guattari, F. (2005). The Three Ecologies. London ; New York: Continuum.

Irigaray, L. (1993). An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Cornell University Press.

Jordan, T. (1995). Collective bodies: raving and the politics of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Body and Society, 1(1), 125–144.

Kristeva, J. (1984). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. SubStance, 13(3/4), 140. https://doi.org/10.2307/3684782

MacCormack, P. (2010). Mucous, Monsters and Angels: Irigaray and Zulawski’s Possession. Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 1, 95–110.

MacCormack, P. (2012). Posthuman ethics: embodiment and cultural theory. Farnham, Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

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

McClain, C. (2009, June 30). Creatures from the Sewer. Retrieved 2 April 2018, from http://www.deepseanews.com/2009/06/creatures-from-the-sewer/

Meat Moss. (n.d.). Retrieved 3 April 2018, from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MeatMoss

Mills, P., O’Neill, K., Redondo, J., Talbot, B., & Roach, D. (2006). The Complete Nemesis the Warlock. Oxford: Rebellion.

Shildrick, M. (2002). Embodying the monster: encounters with the vulnerable self. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE Publications.

Tobin, K. (2002). The Reduction of Urban Vulnerability: Revisiting 1950s American Suburbanization as Civil Defence. Cold War History, 2(2), 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/713999949

2018 Annual Progression Report:

This PhD takes as its starting point philosopher of post-humanism Patricia MacCormack’s concept of “becoming Ahuman”. “Becoming Ahuman” refers to the process by which an individual’s encounter with alterity results in disruption of their subjectivity. Such an encounter can occur in many situations, but importantly it is part of a theorising of the perception of art. Drawing on the work of psychoanalyst Felix Guattari observation of “sense without signifcation” (Guattari, 2011), MacCormack posits that this encounter with art leaves us outside of our understanding, in a place of “asignifying intensities” and where our understanding of ourselves as “human” is no longer applicable (MacCormack, 2008). This brief break is the process of “becoming Ahuman”, and again following from Guattari, MacCormack ascribes to such space revolutionary potential as the social and political codes of privileged category “human” are suspended (MacCormack, 2012). As such, “becoming Ahuman” can be seen in the context of an ethics of difference, allowing for an acknowledgement of different bodies/genders/cognitions/politics/species. Crucially, this acknowledgement is not as derivative of or in opposition to the “human”, which MacCormack maintains not only positions homosapien life above others, but privileges an ideal based on gender, class, race, sexuality, and various other signifiers.

This PhD builds on MacCormack’s art audience concept of “becoming Ahuman” by applying this to a practice of art. This application considers three sites of relevance:

- Processes of making which contains various cycles of Affect, perception, action, revision, correction.

- These same cycles as understood across multiple audience/makers, specifically in internet based creative practices which are based around sharing, appropriating, adapting.

- A consideration of an art practice which actively facilitates “becoming Ahuman”.

This report for Annual Progression at the culmination of the second year of research will now briefly account for some key points of the project’s development and its future trajectory. To do this, three events from the 12 month period will be examined. These events are selected to offer examples of written research, performance, and art making, and to show interlocking of thesis and practice at all stages. A full list of exhibitions, research papers, publishing, training and performance is included within the updated Research Development Plan submitted online.

The final section of this report addresses the form of thesis and integral practice output element, the development and production of which will be the main focus of the upcoming final year.

Event 1: Saturday 17th March 2018

“Frolic in Brine” performance at Whitechapel Gallery London.

I was commissioned to deliver a responding work to part of the film programme event “'Its origins are indeterminate” curated by Erik Martinson. My performance is a ten minute presentation which states its intention to use the film “Ringu” (Nakata, 2000) as a diagram through which to explore the selection of artist films it is responding to. What I wish to highlight from this event is the importance of managing an empathetic, affective tension with the audience, in order to move toward becoming Ahuman. The performance consisted of talking the audience through a diagram on three types of horror I had identified in Ringu, which became an oblique way of addressing the artists’ films when this “horror” was reconsidered as an affective encounter with alterity. In order to facilitate audience engagement, bring about the desire and warmth needed to reconsider, I made steps to subvert my authority as speaker and focus on affective engagement with audience members. Improvisations and deliberately unprofessional forms of presentation were used when I felt audience engagement would survive this uncertainty. The key moment however was the unexpected failure of the tablet I was using to draw my diagram as I talked. This became a point where both mine and the audiences engagement were especially high, and the content of the performance especially uncertain as I spontaneously adapted and began to use gestures to represent the lines of the diagram that I would have drawn.

In my project plan for this year I had included the use of digital sensor arrays to make work which was affected by audience presence, in part to be responsive, and in part to add an unpredictable random number generation (RNG) element to the work. The experience of Frolic in Brine has developed this line of enquiry towards the importance of an empathetic relationship between artwork and audience. This empathy, or more accurately desire, seems far better read and responded to when the artwork is human. The planned line of research through sensor arrays has led to a more specific understanding of the kind of desire and instability which I am looking for in my developing a practice of becoming Ahuman.

Event 2: Thursday 5th April 2018

“TFW: The Formless Wastes 2” video shown at IMT gallery, London.

In Gantt chart written for my 2017 Annual Progression I planned to develop a new game written in the Twine coding language. While developing this game I explored other games design softwares with the aim to avoid Twine’s limitation to primarily text based games. Research using the software “RPG Maker” allowed me to incorporate more complex visuals, as well as video and audio.

Crucially in terms of impact on the PhD, this has led to new methods of developing theory from studio inquiry, and reapplying/reevaluating these in practice. RPG Maker creates games which have a very specific visual language which references popular child friendly games from the mid 1990s. As my game not only incorporates visual material from outside of that language, but also references and deviates from a later and different horror focused class of games, there is a sense of disorientation to the game that was not planned. This disorientation is something I am further exploring as an aspect of becoming Ahuman.

A second realisation made during the making of TFW: The Formless Wastes 2 has also led to refining my trajectory of thesis research. In presenting the game as a video, rather than a audience interactive game, the multiple choice system of interaction allows paths to be pointed to but not followed. The video shows only one play through, but the games mechanics make it clear that there are others. I am using this observation to lead further research into an art practice where multiple directions are implied for audience consideration, and a totalising narrative is absent. This has led to my current studio practice of developing text based works which function as incomplete role playing game systems. This has in turn led my reconsideration of the thesis form and how a practice of becoming Ahuman could be best articulated.

Event 3: Friday 6th April 2018

“The Revolutionary Praxis of Urban Galls” at Open Graves Open Minds: The Supernatural City, University of Hertfordshire.

At the time of submitting my 2017 Annual Progression document I had initiated a reading group called the “Chthonic Research Group”. This group would read Donna J Haraway’s “Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene” (Haraway, 2016) and related texts, and formed part of my research plan for the 2017-2018 year.

While reading groups have often been a method I have used in my research, the material which I have been using for PhD which crosses various strands of philosophy, as well as art, film, and cultural theory suggested that another approach would be preferable. The purpose of the reading group for me has been to draw out a closer reading of a text through discussion, both from hearing others and from articulating to an audience. Towards the end of 2017 I began to submit proposals for research papers at conferences, of which Open Graves Open Minds was the first where my paper was accepted. Writing and delivering academic papers performed the research function of the reading group, but importantly allowed me to present research to different audiences with different specialisms. Secondly, the form itself of the conference presentation has become a site for me to consider within my research. As with the earlier events detailed above, I have been able to explore the affective qualities of delivery, how deviation from protocol, informality, and responsive improvisation can approach becoming Ahuman from different angles.

Thesis development:

Across the above three examples of research development a constant has been the consideration of an anticipated structure and how this might be opened up into a creative and fertile plurality. The “Machinic Journal”, the methodology and first entry of which was submitted for annual progression in 2017, has developed as part of the trajectory mapped out above. The original Machinic Journal used philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari’s concept of desiring machines as a methodology whereby concepts were established and “plugged in” to my practice to see how each was changed as a result (Deleuze & Guattari, 2012). My research, which crosses both the studio and the thesis form has led to this being refined. Borrowing the format of Tabletop Role Playing Games (TRPGs) I have developed a thesis form whereby two separate books operate as “player guides”, which are referenced and to be read concurrently with a third book which addresses and enacts the concepts in the first two. The reason for two player guides is that my research has shown that decentralisation, tension, and instability are crucial to the practice of becoming Ahuman. The two guides approach the same research from different trajectories, in a manner comparable to the form of Deleuze and Guattari’s own book “A Thousand Plateaus” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

The two player guide books are, “Ahuman Use” and “Unstable Ahuman Desire”. These books have numerous overlaps in their bibliographies, but approach Ahuman art practice from different angles and with different intents. Both books begin from with MacCormack’s book chapter “Lovecraft’s Cosmic Ethics” (MacCormack, 2016), and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “Diagram” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, 1987, 1994; Guattari, 1984) and proceed in divergent directions.

Ahuman Use is concerned with the diagram as the application of one system to a context it was not intended for, producing an outcome that is radical and unexpected, yet very much belonging to its sources. The diagrams considered in this book are machinic, and their operation is considered in terms of Fredric Jameson’s “Political Unconcious” (Jameson, 2007), Pierre Machery’s “literary production” (Macherey, 2006). These diagrams develop further in conversation with speculative fiction which directly addresses the unconscious structures of, race, class, gender, sexuality and political ideology. Examples of this would include Angela Carter, Samuel Delany, Ursula Le Guin, Anne Leckie, and Rivers Solomon (Carter, 2006; Delany, 2010; Le Guin, 2002; Leckie, 2014; Solomon, 2017). Use is further contextualised through the work of feminist theorists’ utility of art, fiction, and the sciences, notiably that of Sara Ahmed, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Helen Hester, Amy Ireland, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva (Braidotti, 1994; CRASSH Cambridge, 2018; Grosz, 1993; Haraway, 2013; Hester, 2018; Ireland, 2017; Irigaray, 1993; Kristeva, 2012). Ahuman Use considers a practice of art that is ludic, and which follows an internal logic to new results in a manner similar to that of Science Fiction, or Fanfiction. The relationship between play and art that speculates is explored through the work of theorists approaching this overlap (Burrows & O’Sullivan, 2014; Certeau, 2013; Cuboniks, n.d.; Knabb, 2006; Lefebvre, 2014; O’Sullivan, 2016; Plant, 1992; Wark, 2011, 2013; Wolfendale & Franklin, 2012). Ahuman Use is a book about a practice of deviation, and driving dominant systems to produce something alien but undeniably of them.

Unstable Ahuman Desire approaches diagrams as the site of break in language through the event of translation, to articulate an art practice that embraces affect and the collapse of any hope of totalising order. The diagrams this art practice uses are mucosal (Irigaray, 1993), transgressive boundaries, becoming “formless” (Bataille et al., 1995), trading molar precision for speed (Steyerl, 2009).

 The third book demonstrates the practices of becoming Ahuman by use of different writing and diagrammatic forms which are both creative and critical. This book includes Ahuman horror fiction, screenplay scenes and TRPG fragments, drawings and diagrams. As with the other two, this book is informed by the form of TRPG publishing, whereby a book might present various small elements such as fragments of narrative, examples of play, outlines of biology or politics, or historical timelines, in order to create a world in collaboration with the reader within which they will role play.

The two player guides are not presented as dialectic arguments against one another, but present a non exhaustive pair of ways into an Ahuman art practice. These books have different focuses, but deal with very similar terrain. The three books are designed to be read together, with the third currently untitled world building guide referencing the other two directly through the use of keywords presented in bold type, a technique already used for similar purposes in TRPG systems. Whereas a TRPG might consist of multiple volumes where a specific gaming campaign in one book references a rule mechanics in another, and an encyclopedia or technologies or bestary of creatures in another, this thesis form is different. The third book demonstrates an art practice which can be understood further through its referencing to the other two guides. The two guides, while not at strict odds to one another, have a tension between them as they treat similar material in different manners. The three books do not present one unified and total argument, but rigorously research two paths while demonstrating that there are yet more to be found. This form has come out from repeatedly asking a question throughout the course of this PhD: “How can rigorous research be presented in the Academy when its original contribution to knowledge is non-authoritative, multiple and driven by desire?”. Irigaray’s expansion of Jacque Derrida’s concept of “phallogocentrism” with the figure of mucus has offered one line of support for answering this question (Derrida, 1987). TRPGs which rather than laying down strict rules for a game, set out tools and scaffolding for the collaborative play of storytelling offer another line of support.

The third year of this PhD is still one of experimentation and development. The three books are an expression of both thesis and studio research, and develop in a similar manner of speculation, experimentation and analysis. As such, while I feel confident in the outlined form and structure of the work, I am still adapting and tuning it as it is produced. At the time of writing I have just finished planning two performances for different events taking place in different galleries in October 2018. The development of these performances includes parallel processes of translating or testing theoretical aspects of my research through the studio process. This is a mucosal, diagrammatic relationship between concepts, affects and objects that continues through and beyond the performance event. Continued studio practice, which often consists of writing, including writing in an academic form, is bound up with the writing of the three book thesis, and has as much power to alter the latter as that does the former.

Bibliography for 2018 Annual Progression Report:

Bataille, G., Lebel, R., Waldberg, I., Brotchie, A., White, I., & Acéphale (Secret society) (Eds.). (1995). Encyclopaedia Acephalica: comprising the Critical dictionary & related texts. London: Atlas Press.

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.

Buchanan, I., & MacCormack, P. (Eds.). (2008a). Deleuze and the schizoanalysis of cinema. London ; New York: Continuum.

Buchanan, I., & MacCormack, P. (Eds.). (2008b). Deleuze and the schizoanalysis of cinema. London ; New York: Continuum.

Burrows, D., & O’Sullivan, S. (2014). The Sinthome/Z-Point Relation or Art as Non-Schizoanalysis. Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art. London: Bloomsbury, 253–278.

Carter, A. (2006). The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. London: Vintage.

Certeau, M. de. (2013). The Practice of Everyday Life. 1: ... (2. print). Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press.

CRASSH Cambridge. (2018). Sara Ahmed - Uses of Use – Diversity, Utility and the University. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avKJ2w1mhng

Cuboniks, L. (n.d.). Laboria Cuboniks | Xenofeminism. Retrieved 1 October 2018, from http://laboriacuboniks.net/

Delany, S. R. (2010). Dhalgren. London: Gollancz.

Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, 1972-1990. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2012). Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London; New York: Continuum.

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Derrida, J. (2001). Writing and Difference. (A. Bass, Trans.). London: Routledge. Retrieved from http://www.myilibrary.com?id=11318

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Grosz, E. (1993). A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics. Topoi, 12(2), 167–179.

Guattari, F. (1984). Molecular revolution: psychiatry and politics. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England ; New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin.

Guattari, F. (2011). The machinic unconscious: essays in schizoanalysis. Los Angeles, CA : Cambridge, Mass: Semiotext(e) ; Distributed by the MIT Press.

Haraway, D. J. (2013). Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature.

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

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Irigaray, L. (1993). An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.

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Kristeva, J. (2012). The Severed Head: Capital Visions. New York: Columbia University Press.

Le Guin, U. K. (2002). The Dispossessed. London: Gollancz.

Leckie, A. (2014). Ancillary justice. London: Orbit.

Lefebvre, H. (2014). Critique of Everyday Life: the one-volume edition (One-vol. ed). London: Verso.

MacCormack, P. (2005). Necrosexuality. Retrieved 31 October 2017, from http://rhizomes.net/issue11/maccormack/index.html#3

MacCormack, P. (2008). Cinesexuality. Aldershot, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

MacCormack, P. (2010a). Lovecraft through Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates (Vol. 20). https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2010.0008

MacCormack, P. (2010b). Mucous, Monsters and Angels: Irigaray and Zulawski’s Possession. Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 1, 95–110.

MacCormack, P. (2012). Posthuman ethics: embodiment and cultural theory. Farnham, Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

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

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

MacCormack, P. (2017). Cinesexuality, Spectatorship, Schiz-Flux.

MacCormack, P. (2018). Ahuman, The. In Posthuman Glossary (1st ed., pp. 20–21). London Oxford New York New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury.

MacCormack, P., & Gardner, C. (n.d.). Ecosophical Aesthetics: Art, Ethics and Ecology with Guattari, 307.

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O’Sullivan, S. (2001). THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: Thinking art beyond representation. Angelaki, 6(3), 125–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250120087987

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Proposal: There is no reason for you to live: assimilation, disintegration, and affect in queer horror games

I feel like its been a long time since writing one of these. it hasn’t, but it was really hard getting my head back into it after writing my annual progression document (which i will post after this. its a monster). I think thats why this is so messy, and has so many footnotes (I even double pasted the bibliography in the doc i submitted. ugh just kill me now)

Title: There is no reason for you to live: assimilation, disintegration, and affect in queer horror games

Abstract: This paper examines the ways in which instability and affect are deployed in queer horror video games, the relationship of these tactics to post-structuralist, feminist, and queer theories of gender, and speculates on how play, horror, and instability can further our idea of gender and kinship.

The relationship between the overwhelming experience of seeing too much, and the restricted tension of not being able to see enough is important to our experience of horror. Philosopher Eugene Thacker goes as far as to propose that the “horror genre is really defined in the space between these two poles, in the passages between them” (Thacker, 2015). Horror can be understood as not just witnessing bodies changing and collapsing, but as witnessing and negotiating our perceptions doing the same. In this paper, I argue that such slippery encounters are pushed further in queer horror games, and that these radically destabilise power structures around gender and sexuality through their potential to prevelige queer desire, different bodies, and different experiences. Queer horror games reconfigure the ethics of the dominant power, transforming the player’s relation to abjection, intimacy, and stability.

Philosopher Patricia MacCormack identifies in this active, emotive, speculative, experience of horror, the becoming “Ahuman” which is the ecstatic encounter with an “asignified world” (MacCormack, 2012). In this paper I pursue the ways in which the Ahuman can be understood within three recent video games which could broadly be labeled as “queer horror”. The video games in question are: “No World Dreamers Sticky Zeitgeist: Episode 2: Aperitif”, “Soma”, and “The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories”, (Heartscape & Rook, 2018; Hedberg, 2015; Suehiro, 2018).

Drawing on the writing of philosophers Rosi Braidotti and Gilles Deleuze, and psychoanalysts Felix Guattari and Luce Irigaray, I examine how collapsing bodies, unstable landscapes, and overwhelming sensation perform at different levels of the audience encounter with these three games (Braidotti, 1994; Deleuze, 1986; Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, 1987, 1994; Guattari, 1995, 2005, 2011; Irigaray, 1993).

This instability of bodies within the games, and the instability of our encounters with the games themselves, are finally extracted from game design to be considered in terms of contemporary queer, post human feminist theory (Adams, 2018; Goard, 2017; Hedva, 2016; Hester, 2018; Ireland, 2017; Kirksey, 2018; Winters, 2016).

Bibliography:

Adams, M. (2018, October 18). ‘What Keeps You Alive’ – an era of hope for queer horror. Retrieved 2 November 2018, from https://genderterror.com/2018/10/18/what-keeps-you-alive-an-era-of-hope-for-queer-horror/

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.

Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press.

Goard, S. (2017, December 8). Making and Getting Made: Towards a Cyborg Transfeminism | Salvage. Retrieved 31 December 2017, from http://salvage.zone/in-print/making-and-getting-made-towards-a-cyborg-transfeminism/?utm_content=buffer05aec&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Grosz, E. (1993). A thousand tiny sexes: Feminism and rhizomatics. Topoi, 12(2), 167–179. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00821854

Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Guattari, F. (2005). The Three Ecologies. London ; New York: Continuum.

Guattari, F. (2011). The machinic unconscious: essays in schizoanalysis. Los Angeles, CA : Cambridge, Mass: Semiotext(e) ; Distributed by the MIT Press.

Heartscape, P. C., & Rook. (2018). No World Dreamers Sticky Zeitgeist: Episode 2: Aperitif [Windows].

Hedberg, M. (2015). Soma. Frictional Games. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3255592/

Hedva, J. (2016). Sick Woman Theory. Retrieved 26 November 2018, from http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory

Hester, H. (2018). Xenofeminism. Cambridge, UK Medford, MA: Polity.

Ireland, A. (2017, March). Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come - Journal #80 March 2017 - e-flux. Retrieved 1 October 2018, from https://www.e-flux.com/journal/80/100016/black-circuit-code-for-the-numbers-to-come/

Irigaray, L. (1993). An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Cornell University Press.

Kirksey, E. (2018). Queer Love, Gender Bending Bacteria, and Life after the Anthropocene. Theory, Culture & Society, 026327641876999. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418769995

MacCormack, P. (2008). Cinesexuality. Aldershot, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

MacCormack, P. (2010a). Lovecraft through Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates (Vol. 20). https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2010.0008

MacCormack, P. (2010b). Mucous, Monsters and Angels: Irigaray and Zulawski’s Possession. Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 1, 95–110.

MacCormack, P. (2012). Posthuman ethics: embodiment and cultural theory. Farnham, Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

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

O’Sullivan, S. (2001). THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: Thinking art beyond representation. Angelaki, 6(3), 125–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250120087987

Thacker, E. (2015). Tentacles longer than night. Charlotte, NC: John Hunt Pub.

Winters, B. (2016, July 11). On The Recuperative Power of Interactive Horror. Retrieved 5 February 2018, from https://deorbital.media/on-the-recuperative-power-of-interactive-horror-eb6fcb9a47dd

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proposal: Ahuman Use and Queer Horror

In her 2018 video “Autogynephilia”, YouTuber Natalie Wynn Parrott discusses an early plan for the channel to be narrated by a fictional character, an “Autogynephile Harry Plinkett”, through the following statement,

"part of that was that I kind of hated myself and I thought I was just disgusting, and part of it was that representing yourself as a scary monster actually does capture something of the horror of gender dysphoria, and part of it is that identifying with the scary monster version of yourself is actually kind of empowering. Like cis feminists, you have your thing about witches" (Parrott, 2018).

This paper will examine the mechanisms by which horror can be queered, though a refusal of the ethics and subjectivity of a white male cishet reader, player, or audience. Drawing from philosopher Patricia MacCormack’s use of H.P. Lovecraft whereby the latter’s works are reread from the position of feminist posthumanism, mechanisms of use are examined to understand how queer use transforms horror.

Using the works of games designer and artist Porpentine Charity Heartscape, and author Caitlín R. Kiernan, it is proposed that queer horror need not be simply horror with a queer protagonist, but can involve an entirely different use of the “elements of horror” when the underlying (cishet) structure is reconfigured (VanderMeer, 2012). This reconfiguration considered through MacCormack’s concept of “Ahumanity” whereby affective encounters “slaughter the signifable” (MacCormack, 2012).

Finally, the transformation undergone by horror made queer is analysed in terms of writer Sara Ahmed’s recent research on “queer use” (CRASSH Cambridge, 2018) and statement that “the gap between the intended function of an object and how an object is used as a gap with a queer potential” (Ahmed, n.d.). As with MacCormack’s, Ahmed’s proposal “requires a world-dismantling effort” (Ahmed, n.d.) and I speculate that “queer horror” is inadequate a term to account for this radical use of “horror”.

Ahmed, S. (n.d.-a). Public Lecture, Queer Use, Sexual Culture Series. Retrieved 30 September 2018, from https://www.saranahmed.com/forthcoming-events/2017/5/17/queer-use

Ahmed, S. (n.d.-b). The Uses of Use. Retrieved 30 September 2018, from https://www.saranahmed.com/the-uses-of-use/

CRASSH Cambridge. (2018). Sara Ahmed - Uses of Use – Diversity, Utility and the University. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avKJ2w1mhng

MacCormack, P. (2012). Posthuman ethics: embodiment and cultural theory. Farnham, Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

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

Parrott, N. W. (2018, February 1). Autogynephilia | ContraPoints. Retrieved 30 September 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNvsIonJdJ5E4EXMa65VYpA

VanderMeer, J. (2012, March 12). Interview: Caitlín R. Kiernan on Weird Fiction. Retrieved 30 September 2018, from http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/03/interview-caitlin-r-kiernan-on-weird-fiction/

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(Serpentine Galleries)

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Ok so I had no idea Sara Ahmed was working on “use”, as I’m structuring one book of my three book thesis on “use”, finding this out today, (Sara’s birthday btw) not only this fact but that there is a forthcoming book on Queer Use due at some point from Duke is pretty inspiring.