By way of explaining some of the rage that is and will undoubtedly continue to be bubbling out on Fleurmach in the next while: someone very precious to me was ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————- CENSORED ON DEMAND FOR LEGAL REASONS —————————————————————————————————. And THAT is what makes me the angriest of all. It sends a clear message to her that keeping the peace is more important than honouring her truth. And it is emphatically NOT so.
Category Archives: gender
dearest patriarchy
Image: Lily Lithium
bikini kill – feels blind
All the doves that fly past my eyes,
Have a stickiness to their wings,
In the doorway of my demise I stand,
Encased in the whisper you taught me.
HOW DOES IT FEEL? IT FEELS BLIND.
HOW DOES IT FEEL? WELL, IT FEELS FUCKING BLIND.
WHAT HAVE YOU TAUGHT ME? NOTHING.
LOOK WHAT YOU HAVE TAUGHT ME,
YOUR WORLD HAS TAUGHT ME NOTHING.
If you were blind and there was no braille,
There are no boundaries on what I can feel,
If you could see but weren’t taught
That what you saw wasn’t real.
HOW DOES THAT FEEL? IT FEELS BLIND.
HOW DOES THAT FEEL? IT FEELS FUCKIN BLIND.
WHAT HAVE YOU TAUGHT ME? NOTHING.
LOOK AT WHAT YOUR WORLD TEACHES ME, NOTHING.
As a woman I was taught to always be hungry.
Yeah women are well acquainted with thirst.
Yeah, we could eat just about anything.
We’d might even eat your hate up like love.
I EAT YOUR HATE LIKE LOVE, I EAT YOUR HATE LIKE LOVE,
I EAT YOUR HATE LIKE LOVE, I EAT YOUR HATE LIKE LOVE
HOW DOES THAT FEEL? IT FEELS BLIND.
le tigre – get off the internet
“Free your ass and your mind will follow” (with a nod to George Clinton).
What HAS changed since this song came out in 2001 is that you don’t have to go offline to take to the streets anymore. ;)
poly styrene – virtual boyfriend
From the ex-X-Ray-Spex icon’s last album, Generation Indigo, released in March 2011, a month before her death at 53 of breast cancer.
the trashwomen – batteries
marie laforêt – siffle, siffle ma fille
From Album 3 (Disques Festival, 1967).
this wrinkle in time, can’t give it no credit
(Image: http://ad-busting.tumblr.com/)
was salinger too pure for this world?
By JOYCE MAYNARD in the New York Times, September 14, 2013
“As the mother of a daughter myself, I would say that a man who treats those offering up their love and trust as expendable is lesser himself for having done so.”
Image: Eleni Kalorkoti
In the 50 years since J.D. Salinger removed himself from the public eye and stopped publishing, he has been viewed — more accurately, worshiped — as the human embodiment of purity, a welcome antidote to phoniness. To many, he was a kind of god.
Now comes the word — though not really news, to some — that over the years when he was cherishing his privacy, Salinger was also carrying on relationships with young women 15, and in my case, 35 years younger than he.
“Salinger,” a new documentary film touches — though politely — on the story of just five of these young women (most under 20 when he sought them out), but the pattern was wider: letters I’ve received over the 15 years since I broke the unwritten rule and spoke of my own experiences with the man revealed to me that there were more than a dozen. In at least one case, Salinger was corresponding with one teenage girl while sharing his home with another: me.
Like many of the others involved, I was a young person in possession of particular vulnerabilities as well as strengths — a story that began with my family, not Salinger, and inspired me to seek out an Ivy League education with the dream of becoming a writer. Nine months after I arrived at Yale, having published a story that attracted Salinger’s attention, I received a letter from him. Then many more.
I was 18 when he wrote to me in the irresistible voice of Holden Caulfield, though he was 53 at the time. Within months I left school to live with Salinger; gave up my scholarship; severed relationships with friends; disconnected from my family; forswore all books, music, food and ideas not condoned by him. At the time, I believed I’d be with Jerry Salinger forever.
His was a seduction played out with words and ideas, not lovemaking, but to the young girl reading those words — as with a few million other readers — there could have been no more powerful allure.
Salinger wasn’t simply brilliant, funny, wise; he burrowed into one’s brain, seeming to understand things nobody else ever had. His expressions of admiration (“I couldn’t have created a character I love more than you”) were intoxicating. His dismissal and contempt, when they came, were devastating.
I was 19 when he put two $50 bills in my hand and sent me away. Years after he dismissed me, his voice stayed in my head, offering opinions on everything he loved and all that he condemned. This was true even though, on his list of the condemned, was my own self.
This was not made easier by Salinger’s unwritten edict on secrecy: if Salinger wrote you a letter, you must never say you received it. If he broke your heart you must never mention it happened. To do anything else constituted more than the violation of the privacy of a great writer; it was proof of one’s own reprobate soul, the exploitation (a word with which I’ve grown familiar over the years) of a man so much purer than the false and shallow world around him, an artist who wanted only to be left alone.
To a stunning degree, for a period of over half a century, Salinger managed to convince a significant portion of the reading population that his words and actions should be exempt from scrutiny for the simple reason that he wrote those nine stories, and “The Catcher in the Rye.” And because he said so.
Now the story well known to me is known to the world, though there are voices raised up still, decrying the violation of Salinger’s legendary privacy. But while this recent burst of disclosure might seem to demystify the man (or call his role as sage into question), a troubling phenomenon has surfaced along with the news.
It is the quiet acceptance, apparently alive and well in our culture, of the notion that genius justifies cruel or abusive treatment of those who serve the artist and his art. Richard Schickel, writing of Salinger’s activities, expresses the view that despite the disclosures about Salinger’s pursuit of young women he lived “a ‘normal’ life.”
“He liked pretty young girls. Stop the presses,” writes the film critic (and father of daughters) David Edelstein. The implication being, what’s the fuss?
One of these girls, 14 when Salinger first pursued her long ago, described him in terms usually reserved for deities, and spoke of feeling privileged to have served as inspiration and muse to a great writer — though she also reports that he severed their relationship the day after their one and only sexual encounter.
Some will argue that you can’t have it both ways: how can a woman say she is fully in charge of her body and her destiny, and then call herself a victim when, having given a man her heart of her own volition, he crushes it? How can a consensual relationship, as Salinger’s unquestionably were, constitute a form of abuse?
But we are talking about what happens when people in positions of power — mentors, priests, employers or simply those assigned an elevated status — use their power to lure much younger people into sexual and (in the case of Salinger) emotional relationships. Most typically, those who do this are men. And when they are done with the person they’ve drawn toward them, it can take that person years or decades to recover.
Continue reading this New York Times article HERE.
alela diane – foreign tongues
“Hang my slips out with the words between the lines…”
From The Pirate’s Gospel (Holocene Music, 2006).
hélène cixous – the laugh of the medusa (1976)
Hello, reader :)
It’s Fleurmach’s first birthday! To celebrate, here is a ground-shifting text, a manifesto of sorts, from Hélène Cixous back in 1976 (the year punk broke). If you haven’t ever read Cixous (and even if you have, once upon a time), do yourself a favour and plough through this, SERIOUSLY. I tried to excerpt chunks from it (and may still), but decided that it’s really important and enriching to read the piece in its entirety.
Thank you all for your ongoing support and contributions to the Fleurmach community.
Much love,
Cherry Bomb
I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal.
Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.
The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative.
Since these reflections are taking shape in an area just on the point of being discovered, they necessarily bear the mark of our time-a time during which the new breaks away from the old, and, more precisely, the (feminine) new from the old (la nouvelle de l’ancien). Thus, as there are no grounds for establishing a discourse, but rather an arid millennial ground to break, what I say has at least two sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project.
I write this as a woman, toward women. When I say “woman”, I’m speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history. But first it must be said that in spite of the enormity of the repression that has kept them in the “dark” – that dark which people have been trying to make them accept as their attribute – there is, at this time, no general woman, no one typical woman. What they have in common I will say. But what strikes me is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions: you can’t talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes – any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another.
Women’s imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible.
I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood. A world of searching, the elaboration of a knowledge, on the basis of a systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her erotogeneity. This practice, extraordinarily rich and inventive, in particular as concerns masturbation, is prolonged or accompanied by a production of forms, a veritable aesthetic activity, each stage of rapture inscribing a resonant vision, a composition, something beautiful. Beauty will no longer be forbidden.
I wished that that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst – burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn’t open my mouth, I didn’t repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What’s the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts?
Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naïveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn’t been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a … divine composure), hasn’t accused herself of being a monster?
Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble.
And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written. (And why I didn’t write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great – that is, for “great men”; and it’s “silly.” Besides, you’ve written a little, but in secret. And it wasn’t good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you 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 enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty – so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.
Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself.
kim gordon & ikue mori – la casa encendida
Live performance, 28 July 2012, Madrid.
saskia druyan – miss rosemary and i
This is a page taken from FLEURZINE, a zine curated and illustrated by Julia Mary Grey. You can go and download this beautiful work of art for free on her site, HERE.
The name was inspired by Fleurmach, and six pieces of writing from this blog appear in the publication!
ella jara – phoenix of the sabbathi
This is a page taken from FLEURZINE, a zine curated and illustrated by Julia Mary Grey. You can go and download this beautiful work of art for free on her site, HERE.
The name was inspired by Fleurmach, and six pieces of writing from this blog appear in the publication. This piece is by Fleurmach contributor NoHolyCows.
sylvia plath on being born a woman
“Being born a woman is an awful tragedy… Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars – to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording – all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…”
— Sylvia Plath
in my own skin: self-portrait series #beyondbinaries
in my own skin #beyondbinaries (self-portrait series)
These images will be part of my ‘#beyondbinaries: queer and the reconstruction of identity’ exhibition at Wits during Pride week; 9-13 September. in my own skin. self-portrait series.
i’m sorry i have to post this
TRIGGER WARNINGS: rape; lethal violence; murder.
I have just dreamed again of being Anene Booysen at the moment of her rape and immediately after it, my pooled blood congealing as my insides lie unseamed in the dust outside me, hacked apart from me, the jagged outside slammed inside me, in my last flickers of awareness the spasms of their hate ripping through me, thudding waves of blows, my head a heavy, dull explosion… the swirling, pulsing aftershocks of pain… going cold, knowing I can never be back together again, that I am smeared asunder into the ground like a fly or a cockroach or an ant, irreversibly crushed. It’s that final. I am no longer me, just a slowly drying patch of gore, beyond being gathered up and revived, soothed, cradled, stitched, kissed better, healed. No one can fix this, not my ma, not the hospital, not God. There is no “if” or “but”. I am aware that this is how I have ended.
I have no words strong enough to express the horror of this experience every time it happens to me, this dream. Yet I need to try to write it out of me in the hope that I never dream it again. Shhh, I tell myself, shivering uncontrollably, curled rigid and foetal, it was only a dream.
But it isn’t. This really happened. Really happens. Continues to happen. And that is what is most horrifying of all.
it’s not a competition
… you could dance with me?
always ask a man (1965)
“Millions of dollars, the statisticians tell us, are spent yearly at beauty salons, cosmetics counters, gymnasiums, and dress shops in woman’s quest for beauty. But beauty for whom? The girls in the office? The women at the club? How can the world progress if women don’t consider men… the man… first?”
— Arlene Dahl, from Always Ask A Man: Arlene Dahl’s Key to Femininity (1965). Read more sage advice transcribed from this minor 1950s screen star’s tome HERE.
odalisque
helen moffett on “women’s day” in 2013
“FUCK WOMEN’S DAY. FUCK IT.
Don’t ask me to celebrate Women’s Day. Don’t offer me ten percent off beauty products or a free glass of cheap bubbly. Don’t even ask me to commemorate the historic women’s march on the Union buildings – a milestone event whose noble essence has been sold down the river by leaders who are eager to claim some sort of retrospective credit for it, but don’t even pretend to honour its values.
Last year, I was in an epic rage. This year, I’m in despair.”
Read why Helen Moffett is so upset about this travesty of a public holiday HERE.
After “Pan’s Labyrinth”, 2009
screening tonight: emma goldman – an exceedingly dangerous woman
Tonight at 20h00, Bolo’bolo in Observatory presents a free screening of a documentary about the life and ideas of Emma Goldman: anarchist, feminist and lifelong rabble rouser.
For nearly half a century, Russian emigrant Emma Goldman was the most controversial woman in America, taunting the mainstream with her fervent attacks on government, big business, and war. To the tabloids, she was “Red Emma, queen of the anarchists,” but many admired Goldman for her defense of labour rights, women’s emancipation, birth control, and free speech.
Goldman’s life was indelibly marked by two violent acts: the attempted assassination of anti-union industrialist Henry Clay Frick by her comrade and lover Alexander Berkman (he spent 14 years in prison for the crime) and the 1901 slaying of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz, a young anarchist who claimed he had been “set on fire” by Goldman’s exhortations to political assassination and martyrdom. McKinley’s assassination led to widespread condemnation of Goldman and other anarchists. Fearing for her life, Goldman went underground.
In 1906, she reemerged as founder and editor of Mother Earth, an anarchist magazine devoted to politics and literature. Once again a public figure, she returned to the lecture circuit. Her talks on the struggling revolution in Russia, on the rights of workers, on civil liberties — even on anarchism — drew large, sympathetic crowds. For almost a decade, Goldman maintained a grueling schedule, spending nearly half of every year on the road. In one six-month period, she delivered 120 lectures in 37 cities.
An outspoken opponent of America’s entry into World War I, she was arrested and imprisoned for demonstrating against the draft. In 1919 she, Berkman, and 247 others were deported to Russia, just two years after the October revolution replaced the Czarist regime with Bolshevik tyranny. After two dispiriting years, Goldman and Berkman left the Soviet Union and dedicated themselves to revealing the truth about a revolution gone wrong.
“The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.” – Emma Goldman
PS: Non-alcoholic drinks and vegan snacks will be on sale. You may bring your own beer or wine if you’d like. The screenings are free, but donations are welcome.
charles warnke on why you should date a girl who doesn’t read
You should date an illiterate girl.
Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in a film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.
Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale or the evenings too long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.
Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.
Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.
Do those things, damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent of a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, goddamnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.
Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.
Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.
Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so goddamned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life of which I spoke at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being told. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. Or, perhaps, stay and save my life.*
*NOTE: Instead of the brave note on which the last sentence of the above version shared with me by Mavis Vermaak ends, the original text I googled when looking to credit the author correctly has as its ending the following two sentences:
“I hate you. I really, really, really hate you.”
lana del rey – national anthem
the truth about women
Richard Neill to Bodyform (a maxipad manufacturer), 8 October at 21:30 via Mobile
—————————————-—————————————-—–
Hi , as a man I must ask why you have lied to us for all these years . As a child I watched your advertisements with interest as to how at this wonderful time of the month that the female gets to enjoy so many things ,I felt a little jealous. I mean bike riding , rollercoasters, dancing, parachuting, why couldn’t I get to enjoy this time of joy and ‘blue water’ and wings !! Dam my penis!! Then I got a girlfriend, was so happy and couldn’t wait for this joyous adventurous time of the month to happen …..you lied !! There was no joy , no extreme sports , no blue water spilling over wings and no rocking soundtrack oh no no no. Instead I had to fight against every male urge I had to resist screaming wooaaahhhhh bodddyyyyyyfooorrrmmm bodyformed for youuuuuuu as my lady changed from the loving, gentle, normal skin coloured lady to the little girl from the exorcist with added venom and extra 360 degree head spin. Thanks for setting me up for a fall bodyform , you crafty bugger.
Bodyform’s response, via Youtube:
orphan drift this thursday at bolo’bolo
What do you get if you mix equal parts cutting edge continental philosophy, voodoo, psychedelics, underground dance music, cybernetics and multimedia experimentation? The notorious Orphan Drift!
Happening this Thursday, 25 July, from 20h00, Bolo’bolo Anarchist Info Shop and Vegan Cafe are delighted to announce an evening of Orphan Drift, featuring several short films from founding member Mer Roberts as well as a talk by UWC cyberculture theorist Delphi Carstens, followed by an almost certainly lively open discussion.
Here’s a taste of what you can expect on Thursday evening:
BACKGROUND
In the mid-90s, the legendary Cyber Culture Research Unit at the prestigious Warwick University was formed: their university-funded activities included producing collaged texts of Deleuze and Guattari, William Burroughs and binary code, theorising the occult underpinnings of markets, composing abrasive electronic music and, ostensibly, consuming inhuman doses of psychedelics as often as possible, much of this via the ORPHAN DRIFT collaborative artist project. A few years later, the CCRU was no more; founding member Nick Land – a genius philosopher and agent provocateur – had achieved full meltdown / deterritorialization and Sadie Plant, author of the well-known Writing On Drugs, had disappeared from sight.
The legacy of the CCRU is very much alive today though, a subterranean influence for the very latest movements in philosophy.
ABOUT ORPHAN DRIFT
Mer co-created the collaborative artist and hive mind 0rphan Drift in London in 1994. Although it was predominantly made up of visual artists, it also involved sound designers, concept engineers and media activists.
As an artistic entity, 0rphan Drift is known for immersive and visually complex works which use the sample and the remix extensively, treating information as matter and the image as a unit of contagion. The art produced is science fictional and immersive. It complicates the distinctions between material and immaterial phenomena and dimensions, both in content and media. Much of its work explored mimetic patterns of desire, production and consumption- particularly in relation to the rapid technological changes happening at the time- drawing heavily on cyberpunk fiction, polyrhythmic electronica and the underpinnings of African religious systems. This was the social context in which its shifting layers of frightening, disturbing, abject, schizophrenic, beautiful, deconstructive, poetic and fragmented frequencies were able to take affect.
0rphan Drift is cross-contextual and made extensive contributions from 1994 – 2004 in the social arenas around contemporary art, underground music and cyber-feminism/post-structural philosophy. 0D has participated internationally in over a decade of exhibitions, screenings and performance, exhibiting extensively in the UK, Europe, Canada and the States, including at the Cabinet Gallery and Tate Modern in London; writing the Scifi-theory text ‘Cyberpositive’, and featuring in DJ Spooky’s ‘Sound Unbound’ in the ‘Renegade Academics’ chapter. It contributed cybervisuals to the set of Stephen Speilberg’s ‘AI’ and ‘Minority Report’ features and Leftfield and NIN world tours, worked frequently with Kode 9 and participated in 10 years of international Video art and AV Electronica art events in Norway, Germany, Canada, UK, South Africa and USA.
We now collaborate between Cape Town and San Francisco and continue to make science fictional work which is guided by a neo-futurist sensibility and clearly a progression from our earlier work. Our new video work ‘Wilderness of Elsewheres, Colony 1’, which maps contemporary global concerns with survival, insecurity and the unknown, has been shown in Santiago and San Francisco and we subsequently produced a series of Post Apocalyptic postcards for Shadowshop; Stephanie Syjuco’s parasitic shop at SFMOMA. Recently we made video for Delphi Carsten’s Capetown Tedx Talk, ‘Hyperstition’, and were commissioned make ‘You Its Eyes 94-13’ for screening at CTM13, Berlin.
WHAT WE’LL BE SCREENING / HOSTING THIS THURSDAY EVENING
1: You Its Eyes. 1994-2013, 30 minute video remixing 0D’s earlier work
0D employs different frequencies and overlapping rhythmic patterns to activate submerged regions of the brain and create intimacy and proximity through video-sonic signal. The goal of 0D, writes Simon Reynolds (1996), is “the liberation of texture from its environment, of energy-flux from contoured form with the goal to recreate the intensity of being lost”. 0D describes the individual ‘self’ haunted by a sensory cross-talk of signals from realms beyond the physical. Voices from imagined futures haunt the contemporary technological landscape. Feedback from the machines evolves into an unfamiliarity of speed and complexity, coding the textual body and imagination as tools for change. The invisible, fantastical, and anarchic called upon here are what Deleuze and Guattari define as the essence of virtuality. These intensities carry the sorcerous forces that technology and science unleash as they delve further into the quantum, the chaotic and the abstract.
“Surrounding the human self and its island of experience lies a raging sea of intensities” (D&G). All journeys into this space involve a succession of becomings autistic, mimetic, contagious and machinic.
2: Hyperstition – A talk by Delphi Carstens
Delphi is a lecturer at UWC, as well as half of the duo which makes up Groovy Troopers Productions – creators of temporary autonomous zones in the form of art & trance festivals. Delphi is currently completing a doctorate thesis, and will present on: “hyperstition” — a neologism coined by Nick Land that combines the words ‘superstition’ and ‘hype’ to describe how fictions become fact and how our narratives (stories) shape our world. It also describes, particularly, the narrative of capitalism, which is driven by hype and speculation and, which more importantly, turns fictions into facts. One very important fiction that Delphi will be discussing is the fiction of the apocalypse. Focusing on the current secular meaning of apocalypse as well as how popular culture views our current global crisis and the importance of imagining ourselves differently. Hyperstition also describes the nexus where myth or magic and science meet. Delphi explores the world of hyperstition to describe the manner by which hype and speculation become facts in contemporary society. The future is looking uncertain and how we imagine this future may be more important than we realise. This talk will be both an intellectual and a felt experience.
3: A Wilderness Of Elsewheres. 2009, 10 minutes
A two-screen installation in which dark abstract video spaces flow into bright photographic landscapes (the raw desolate tundras of southern Africa), populated and de-populated by animated collages of architecture and fashion, cut and scanned from contemporary print publications. A deliberate rhythmic awkwardness creates an alien time frame. The screens share a soundscape, made from a wide variety of samples including glaciers melting and rocket launches, composed into a sonic ‘event’. The work is imbued with post-apocalyptic sensibility, urges to the neo-romantic and the science fictional blending of first and third world materiality. At once immersive and deconstructive, the work is collision, co-habitation, evolutionary fever-dream.
Join us in mapping the outer edges — and do come earlyish if you want to sit down while doing so ;) !
expose yourself to reality exposed
Written by Sarah Dawson
On July 18, the Film and Publication Board’s refusal to classify the would-be opening film of the Durban International Film Festival, Jahmil XT Qubeka’s Of Good Report, became the flint that sparked the latest South African aesthetic controversy.
Unclassified films are illegal to screen, which means that this is a functional ban on the production. The ruling was imposed on the basis of having interpreted the representation of a sexual encounter of a Grade 9 pupil, Nolitha, (played by the 23-year old actress Petronella Tshuma) as being child pornography.
Tongues have been wagging in creative circles and the media, and given that the film is divorced from any overt perspective on political matters (as in the case ofThe Spear), it is clear that this matter relates to some quite primal conflict over the interpretation of a particular image.
In this case, the battle over meaning is taking place in the awkward, sexually liminal space of the moment of the young female character’s transition from archetypal “virgin” to archetypal “whore”, and what she, the figure of the girl, means.
It probably wouldn’t be completely unfair to assume that the film is objectionable to the classification board because of this very liminality, and the way in which the morality embedded in the process clearly regards anything that isn’t exclusively either “virgin” or “whore” as a kind of abomination.
This act of censorship is fundamentally based on a conflict of representation – meaning it’s as much an aesthetic one as it is an ideological one. This means that we need to be asking not the obvious and common question of whether we should or shouldn’t be allowed to depict female children in an erotic light, but rather what actually is a female child, and what is an erotic light?
South African film and South African audiences remain equally conservative. The idea that representations of people, places, things and events can have a lot of different meanings and aren’t consistently, singularly defined is, surprisingly, not taken for granted by the typical South African viewer, practitioner or institution of film.
We aren’t yet comfortable with the multifarious nature of representation, and expend a lot of hot air trying to settle on the one, all-encompassing, so-called “South African voice”, which it turns out, we’re really struggling to locate.
It’s a self-evidently flawed project, because its ridiculous to think that such a thing could ever actually exist in a finite sense.
Read the rest of this article HERE.
i am my greatest artwork
dear daily mail – sincerely, amanda palmer
When the UK’s Daily Mail tabloid paper covered Amanda Palmer’s recent performance at Glastonbury, they didn’t mention anything about the music that she played, choosing to focus only on a brief moment where her breast “escaped her bra”.
Palmer wasn’t thrilled about the lack of coverage her performance received and the extent of attention that was paid to her so-called wardrobe malfunction, and she decided to respond to the paper live on stage. About halfway through her hilarious and cutting song, she strips almost entirely naked. Astute:
a young woman too often worried about the future
Anonymous Atelier Populaire Poster from May 1968 Student Strike in Paris
1968 was the year when political struggle for freedom culminated in global protests that shaped the future of youth culture. Paris in May 1968, under the conservative constraints of De Gaulle and amid an atmosphere of poverty and unemployment, played host to some of the most widespread and fervent revolts the city had witnessed. Clashes between citizens and state brought Paris to a halt and left its leader clinging on for his dear political life.
After a week of particularly violent clashes, militant posters with strong colours and bold graphic messages started appearing in the streets — plastered on walls, pasted onto barricades, and carried as placards in demonstrations. Produced as “weapons in the service of the struggle” by the Atelier Populaire, the outfit newly set up by students and teachers at the École des Beaux Arts, these anonymous prints combine powerful imagery with impassioned slogans on mistrust of the media, hatred of the reigning political party and solidarity with the workers to provocative effect.
More posters and info HERE.
fleurmach 