Category Archives: Uncategorized

Hospitality in socially engaged art. To invite somebody in. To permit them to participate. To describe/circumscribe a context for participation. This is, after all, your artwork. You are named. A group of you are named. The group has a name. … Continue reading →

Can murder be aesthetic? My immediate response is no. This is in terms of a conception of aesthetics that is fundamentally concerned with social realisation – for establishing the ethical grounds of society and looking ultimately towards a basis for … Continue reading →

Computational space is an abstraction. There are certainly x and y screen coordinates, but space is ultimately an epiphenomenon. Underlying the sense of space and spatial navigation are abstract structures – the array, the linked list, the tree. If the … Continue reading →

I must collect my thoughts in order to write this, in order to distinguish what properly belongs inside this account and what should properly be left out. Any delimited interior is of course an artifice. This account could have been … Continue reading →

In order to obtain university patronage, art must position itself as research that produces new knowledge. Art as new knowledge? I suppose you could just about argue this when the notion of art is retroactively fitted to various societies that … Continue reading →

Nature: In his Discourse on Inequality (1753), Rousseau describes a history of the degeneration of humanity via increasingly corrupting social forms. Instead of providing a means of improvement and emancipation, society emasculates our natural capacities and leaves us in thrall … Continue reading →

Strands of an argument: There is no horizon to the social. The social does not have its basis in individual experience. There is never any sense of a contract being signed. If there are effects of individuation and rational agreement … Continue reading →

My understanding – although I must read him properly – is that Hobbes broadly distinguishes between the state of nature and the social contract. The state of nature is radically asocial. Individuals appear as Cartesian material bodies, confronting each other … Continue reading →

Ramble: As you know, I’m currently interested in ‘the event’, which is less a reference to Deleuze and Badiou than a nod to Parkrun and all kinds of local sporting festivals that are focused less on competition than on framing … Continue reading →

I am right handed. My left hand is untrained, crude and imprecise. Only very occasionally does it act on its own. Its ordinary role is to follow. Just now, however, and for the next few weeks, I have a cast … Continue reading →

The last week has been very humid. There have been late storms every day. There is some slight cooling when it rains. On Tuesday night I attended a lecture/seminar by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi. Have heard their names mentioned … Continue reading →

How is the event characterised? Difficult but easy: an ordeal (typically physical), but straightforward Necessary and unnecessary: engaging with the real (discovering experience), but imaginary (artificial) Structured, but never obtaining adequate form (elusive) Commitment and withdrawal Hope and hopelessness Manifestation … Continue reading →

My original aim was to complete 13 sets of the 13 exercises that make up the 7 Minute Workout. This neatly square result appealed to me. I imagined a grid with ticks in all 169 boxes (I was determined to … Continue reading →

I have not abandoned the event. I am still in the event, even when unaware. In referring to ‘the event’ I am not referencing relevant currents of philosophy – Badiou, Derrida or Heidegger, etc. – or not referencing them strongly. … Continue reading →

Vaguely thought of attempting the first stage of the event early this morning (3-4am) but lacked sufficient resolve. Spent far too much of the day doing nothing. Another way of saying that I spent far too much of the day … Continue reading →

It seems I have not written anything for close to 6 months. What is it to slip in to silence? Or to recline into silence? Or to find oneself all at once silent? It is to find myself here – … Continue reading →