#robin mackay

[noumenalroom-deactivated20221021]

“For K-Punk // By the North Sea”, Dir. by Mark Fisher and Robin Mackay - 28 January, 2022

[thingsworthsaving]

"Seen from the future, might the human prove nothing but a pollinator of a machine civilization to come?"

-Robin Mackay & Armen Avanessian from Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader

[sodomyaspraxis]

“Rather than a human liberated to explore the virtual realms of human sexuality, we are closer to William Burroughs’ machine junkies, or Samuel Butler’s vision of humans serving as deterritorialized parts of a machine sexuality, like bees for flowers. An array of browser tabs flushed with pixelated epidermis are foliated tips of an alluring bloom exciting the reproductive instincts of its prosthetic partner, the screen an openmouthed cuckoo feigning hunger for his sex; the dopamine hits of social media implant a compulsion to enact our instinctual social instincts through a machine intent on recording the imprint of its hotheaded prey as it smears its informatic pollen, swipe by swipe, further afield, drawing off a surplus for its own ends. The future, sex × technology, no longer belongs to lone pioneers of virtuality, triumphant aristocrats of perversion, latter-day des Esseinteses achieving self-realization by following the vectors of art and artificialization to their most outrageous conclusions. There has been no Ballardian odyssey from the capillaries of the conventional through the deltas of the phylogenetic unconscious toward the great ocean of the virtual. Instead we have embarked on a collective drift away from behaviors vectored toward the executive function of procreation, out of the territories policed by evolutionary imperatives, toward zones of virtuality defined instead by the polar magnetism of least resistance and maximized financial return, cross-tabulated with ever-increasing efficiency by attention-monitoring systems. Shifting the bounds within which animal affect had been lagooned by its genetic inheritance, hooking up basic procreative and survival instincts to machinic reproductive apparatuses from elsewhere, contemporary supernormal culture rechannels them into a series of disappointingly conservative compulsions and conventional transcendences: clinical skin displays, hyperbolic invocations of nature and purity, hyperactive ecstasies and infantile boutique comforts; an elaborate range of adornments to enhance the status and competitiveness of the individual.”

Hyperplastic-Supernormal by Robin Mackay

[moviemill]

Robo Vampire (1988)

omg where to even start.

Okay so full admission, Robocop is one of my favourite films ever. When I saw the cover art for this I lost it. This is not an authorised use of the Robocop character.

We got about ten minutes into the movie before discord streaming just kinda. Stopped working. Hence this going up a day later.

I gotta say, despite the provided poster making it clear which type of vampires these are, I still expected western vampires. That’s on me though.

The movie is dubbed over and it’s questionable acting but you know what? It’s fun. This is the first badly dubbed movie i’ve seen in a long time and I enjoy that bad, sometimes.

‘the dubbing literally does feel like the foreign film whose line is it anyway game’ - @gwenfrankenstien

The first twenty minutes or so feel like the wrong movie and then some american dude dies and in like five minutes you get bootleg robocop with SUCH a charmingly shitty costume. Child’s homemade halloween costume level. Silver spraypainted fabric. It’s wonderful, in an awful way.

I want to know who’s idea was ‘movie about drug smuggling, but also supernatural chinese threats, and a robot cop’ because it’s such a weird combo of things to put together!

But that kind of makes the best b-movies, doesn’t it?

‘the Avengers Endgame of Asian robo-occult cinema’ - @villainpunk

There’s a lot going on!

uhhhh there’s a scene with implied rape a little over a half hour into the movie but it cuts before anything actually happens, but... its there

The action scenes are fun! I’m not sure they’re very competent, though.

It feels like two films (or more) cut together and it seems that some parts of it were literally pulled out of another movie, so.. further research required!

The robot foley work is DELIGHTFUL.

Nothing brings me more joy that bootleg robocop vs jiangshi (who are all wonderful in costume and makeup and acting!)

‘also also wow they really didn't give him anyways to properly fight [the drug smugglers] apart from bullet’ - Sam NotOnThisSite

‘its a metaphor for the american war on drugs’ - @gwenfrankenstien

they blow up ‘Robo Warrior’ at one point and he turns into literal tinfoil.

‘how is this different than your average marvel movie, I ask you ‘ - @villainpunk

‘budget’ - @gwenfrankenstien

There’s a romance between a ghost (witch? ghost witch?) and her lover that got turned into a jiangshi and they got married close to the start and arent mentioned again for a while and theyn when they come back they go to CONSUMATE THEIR MARRIAGE to put it uh politely I THINK THATS WHAT WAS GOING ON?? the scene is playing sexy music and ghost witch lady isn’t wearing anything under the sheer fabric.

Then Robo Warrior crashes the party. There’s so much to say about this movie and I just... am amazed.

The effects for witch lady are great! She does lots of neat stuff.

I know this post is so much longer than most but i have a lot to say! THIS FILM IS A LOT.

‘to be fair this film is SO MUCH. i have no idea what is happening at all times ‘ - @gwenfrankenstien​

I’m not even certain as to what the plot was here. Any of them. There were at least three.

Our bootleg robocop (Robo Warrior) puts on a pretty decent Peter Weller as Robocop voice. It’s not an imitation, imo, but he’s got the right energy. the vibes. thought that was worth acknowledging, as well as how much he is really just an afterthought in this movie, haha. There’s more Vampires than Robo, but neither of them are primary features!

Anyway it ends VERY abruptly and it feels like they lost the last ten minutes of the movie?? So IDK what to make of that. We didn’t even get credits!!

ship of the film: ghost lady and her now-vampire lover. they’re married! we love and support them

emoji of the film: burntmydick.emoji

[Watch it on Youtube!]

[kfromthecastle]

Robin Mackay and Reza Negarestani. Toy Model AGI Playset, produced in an edition of 50 sets including box, vintage Lego® parts, stickers, leaflet, and signed certificate. Urbanomic, 2018.

[maxksx]

And somehow, I guess through Nick, then through Sadie, the SWITCH crew had seen ***collapse and they thought it was cool that these things were going on at Warwick.

[grandpasessions]

Negarestani recognizes the just alignment of Bataille's notion of the Solar Economy with Freud's speculative thesis concerning the nature of organic life: According to 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle,' the preservation of a lifeform in relation to the excessive energy source it draws upon, demands the sacrifice of a part of that lifeform: the creation of a mortified surface or crust — 'a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli' — that protects it from its exorbitant source of energy. Thus, the survival and the individuality of an organic lifeform, biological, psychic, or cultural, is based on the repression of an originary trauma in which it encountered, in all its naked power, the source of energy that would also be its death. Lifeforms are lagoons, repressed pockets of forgetting, temporarily protecting themselves against the outside that created them and will destroy them.

Leper Creativity

'Brief History of Geotrauma'

Robin Mackay

[sodomyaspraxis]

“This forked tongue, the twofold register of supernormal culture (im/material, supernatural-transcendent) is not unrelated to the double-bind of capitalist subjectivation described by Félix Guattari and Maurizio Lazzarato.12 According to these authors, in the capitalist socius, machinic slaving (the immanent harnessing of subpersonal cognitive mechanisms directly to technical machines) is invariably complemented by social subjection (the discursive reinstantiation of traditional models of subjecthood, individuation, and personal transcendence). That is to say, although the contemporary subject is addressed by its technological environment no longer as an individual but as a set of attention mechanisms and stimulus reflexes (a “dividual”), with technical machines and products informed by cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and digitally enabled captology (“attentionology”) selectively targeting reflex neural responses, the language of personal experience and transcendent selfhood remains prevalent, overcoding these molecular intrusions into the brain, reinscribing deterritorialized flows back into traditional and easily managed social forms. In fact it is the maintenance of the complementary functions of these two subjectivation processes that keeps capitalism in stable crisis. The autonomous and aspirational “person” must still be promoted as a figure of faith even while the products to which it aspires proceed to burrow under its skin. “Machinic slaving” proceeds here via the capture and recombination of internalized response patterns (emotions rather than motions) through habitual interactions with technically modulated sensory stimuli; but also through the production of new gestural cultures (in particular those associated with handheld devices) as means to satisfy them. (What is the “swipe” if not a manual servomechanism of capitalism?) The delivery of supernormal stimuli is crucial for the ratcheting of these circuitries into inescapable, socially distributed compulsions that operate below the level of the “subject” yet are continually reinscribed within the discourse of the self, of personal aspiration and satisfaction, and of social adequacy. Just as we are less than ourselves without makeup or stimulants, we no longer feel “connected” to others or even to ourselves unless the candy-colored icons at our fingertips are sprouting red buds to notify us of our existence, and the continual cascade of illuminated images and scanned headlines lifts us into a supernormal state of hyperwakefulness that stokes the pursuit of our goals and dreams.”

Hyperplastic-Supernormal by Robin Mackay